Unnamed

A light breeze blew through Caius’s hair as he looked back at the ground he had covered. Endless fields blanketed the landscape, but he knew that a town lay beyond the farthest hill. He had lived there the past two months, the longest he had been able to stay in one place. It had been a year since he was run out of his village, and while he had spent time in two other towns, most of that year had been spent wandering in the unknown. It was safer that way. Animals can injure and kill, but people leave wounds that can’t be seen, and they bleed far more than any physical wound could.

Hitching his pack onto his shoulders, he turned toward the forest in front of him. The sun would go down soon, and he needed to prepare camp. Putting the town out of his mind, he made his way into the trees, found an empty clearing, gathered wood for a fire, lit it with some difficulty, then sat down for a long night.

Caius pulled his pack towards him, the fabric worn beneath his fingers. The state of his pack he could worry about later. Right now, he needed to take inventory. His needing to leave happened so fast that he had thrown whatever he found on his way out into it. Reaching into the pack, he slowly pulled out the contents: half a loaf of bread, some cheese he would need to eat as soon as possible, a flask of oil, a change of clothes, a tinderbox, a waterskin, and at the bottom of the bag, a sack doll.

His heart caught in his throat as he lifted the doll out of the bag. The button eyes that had once comforted him now looked at him with detestation. All the disgust the villagers had felt, all the fear and anger, were reflected back at him through those eyes. It wasn’t his fault. What had happened wasn’t his fault! They didn’t even give him a chance to defend himself. All it took was one finger pointed at him to make the rest believe. All because he was different. They drove him out because he was no longer like them. They hated him.

Baring his fangs, face contorting in anger, pain, and confusion, he grabbed the head of the doll and pulled until he heard it rip then tear away from the body. Why did it have to be this way?! Why?!

Standing up with the pieces of the doll in both hands, he threw the body into the fire. The head he placed on a dead branch that stuck out of the ground. Moving back to where he had originally been sitting, he sat down and stared across the fire at the decapitated head. His chest rose and fell in a heavy rhythm as he tried to get his emotions under control. They hated him, and nothing he could say would change that. And it wasn’t just them; the rest of the world felt the same. There wasn’t room in this world for a half-blooded abomination.

Drawing his knees to his chest, he sat like that for hours. He stared into those eyes until he no longer felt like himself but as the monster they believed him to be.