07-11-2009, 05:29 AM
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mall-caps;">In Character The ashen hybrid did not tend to think about completely abstract concepts such as the afterlife, but this conversation threw the topic into a harsh light, and Kaena found herself wondering what waited on the other side for her. Surely, Salvaged would be there. Would they continue their epic war until the end of time itself, trapped in the mists of purgatory, bleeding forever but unable to die? The thought sent a chill up the sable-dusted spine of the coyote, and she quickly pushed those thoughts away, listening to Jael. There was disbelief and shock in her features—if he weren't her grandson, she might have mocked him for suggesting she was a good person. Coming from anyone else, such a statement simply seemed sarcastic. But there was an honesty lurking in Jael's tone that had struck the elder coyote off-guard. She mulled over this suggestion for a long moment, taking it seriously. The one-eyed canine sorely wished she had a window and a mirror into her own soul, some test of purity which might grant her the answer. Anymore, she didn't know herself—the old desires to roam wild and entertain brutal fights were still there, but Kaena had not felt that urge to mindlessly destroy for a long, long time. Inferni had given her purpose—prior to its inception, Kaena was a short-circuited machine, set to kill and turned loose on the world. Anything and everything was fair game, and she was just as disrespectful of borderland as the wolves she railed so hard against. Certainly, that part of her still lived, but the burning love she felt for her family was far stronger than any competing urges in her head and her heart. There was no conflict or question—faced with the choice of family versus anything else, Kaena would invariably choose the former. Did that make her a better person? She did not know, and she did not want to ask Jael. The canine had simply failed to realize that the mere presence of such an inner debate, and the fact that Jael's suggested had aroused curiosity and thought rather than immediate derision did indeed mean she was a different creature entirely from the coyote she had been in her young, wild days—perhaps that in and of itself wasn't evidence enough to hang a halo over her head, but it was at least a start. His question stirred something in her, and her grizzled head looked away for a moment before she answered. Her words were slow and she was clearly speaking very thoughtfully, considering each word before it left her mouth. "There is... something else, something that controls parts of life," she said, careful to make her own distinction. Omnipotence and omnipresence were ideas she outright rejected; if Kaena were to openly acknowledge any specific God or gods, he would have been limited in power and without his fingers in daily life. "Whether that's fate or God, I can't say," she added, though she did not know if even "fate" was the accurate term—she had never believed that life was any sort of set path, that the line one walked from day one was the line written in stone from the beginning of time. "Either way, there's always someone to answer to," she said, more quickly than before. There was some bitterness in her golden eye—she had never been offered any option or choice, as she saw it. "Kill someone, rob someone, rape someone—there's somebody who's ready to hand it right back," she said. Kaena had not been able to roam this place without looking over her shoulder for a long, long time—though she hardly feared retribution. She welcomed it; it was their right to vengeance and her right to defend herself, and in the end the two were completely incompatible and required being settled by blood. Or—the alternative; living with the darkness of a particular deed forever. There were some things which could never be squared, some things that were simply unexplainable as anything other than acts of sheer evil or cruelty—(like maeryn), a voice in her head added. Kaena would never have anyone other than herself to answer for her daughter, and she had long given up trying to rationalize or justify the action in any way. |
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