Sins of the Past

The smell of her village burning was all around, even reaching beneath the floorboards where Tia hid curled and shaking. Boots stomped overhead, motes of dust sifting down around her.

The reaver known as the Red Boar laughed, and his words were guttural and condescending as he shoved her father to the floor. Through a tiny knothole in the pinewood, she met the gaze of the only member of her family she had left, one last time. She bit her lip to keep from crying out, and watched her father’s eyes go wide, then still and glassy as the reaver’s blade plunged through his back. He sucked in a breath of agony, then loosed a final exhale as his blood pooled and dripped through the cracks, onto her chest.

She memorized the face of the reaver, the man who had butchered her village and her father. And that man’s death became the focus of her existence from that day forward.

Over the next twenty-five years, she trained relentlessly, forging her body into a weapon, a dark and violent predator shaped and driven by grief, pain, and anger.

When at last she found the Red Boar, he was no longer the mountain of muscle and cruel dominance from that black day in her memory. He was an old man. Gaunt and frail, asleep in his bed. Tia crept through the shadows of his chamber, pulled the dagger made from her father’s femur loose from her belt, covered the man’s mouth with one hand, then drove the dagger in, twisting and pressing slowly, letting the fucker feel every inch of his past sins sliding into his flesh to pierce his heart and make him pay for his brutal deeds.

The old man’s wide eyes looked into hers in bewildered fear.

Good, she thought. Let his death be painful and his journey to hell a path of confusion.