Carnassia

I should have seen it.

Even in those heady days after we passed our trials, your eyes were set on something further, something I couldn't see.
But you had always shone with brilliance and ambition. Surely that was it - a drive to learn, to excel.

I always knew we were bound for different paths. While I trained to be a Holy Knight, you flitted from subject to subject, burying yourself in study of one thing or another until you decided it didn't hold what you were looking for, and you sought out your next obsession. But I didn't see it then.

Even as our friendship became something more, I never felt I wholly knew you. But we were young. Surely there was time to learn.

We spent more time apart, as I began to be sent out on missions. Ever further from home and more dangerous. And when I returned, each time you were a little farther from me.

I think maybe I did start to see it then, though unwilling to admit it.

I left, and you were studying the neutralization of Ghouls. I came back, and you had joined the Blessed. Professing that Ghouls were the key to understanding...everything, to hear you tell it.

We argued. To me, Ghouls meant the horrors I had seen on my missions, the viciousness of creatures driven mad and almost mindless.

I don't think I really listened to what you were trying to tell me. I thought surely by the time I came back from my next mission you would have moved on to something new.

Instead, I returned to chaos. People hurt, plagues spread, captured Ghouls set free. They didn't know where you had gone.

But I could hunt. And I knew you.

As much as anyone did.

When I finally found you - or you let me find you - it was everything I feared. That was when I finally saw it.

But you were beautiful.

The brilliant shades of red shimmering across you skin. The fevered brightness in your eyes. When you spoke, you voice was mesmerizing.

I don't remember a word of what you said. Or what I screamed in return. Or how it turned to violence.

I still have your claw marks on my shoulder. They didn't heal well.

What I do remember is the world burning, and you at the center. Raising arm after arm after arm to the sky, fever-fire swarming around you. Some bright-winged thing settling hot in my heart before...I don't know. Dreams, I suppose. Or visions. Like everything else that night.

You were long gone when I woke up. They said my fever was hard to treat. It still lingers in me now, no matter how I try to drive it out.

I don't try very hard. It lets me see you sometimes, when I dream.

I hear word of you from time to time, meet those you've met. I hear stories of lives pushed onto new paths, towards some end I can't see. Like always.

I would come if you called for me. If you let me find you. I've looked.

You are my greatest regret. Sometimes I like to imagine that I am yours.