Rime-Heart

We travel.

That is all anyone ever needed to know about us really. We just travelled everywhere and only stayed long enough for rest, healing, trading stories and maybe helping someone out if they were worth the time before moving on again. It was a busy life, a lonely one as well, yet we had no choice but to carry on.

Finding a companion for the trip is a blessing they say, someone to share of troubles and laughter with. to help you shoulder the pressing weight of a war you never signed for but had forced upon you at birth. A fellow fighter that understands how painful it truly is, to share comradery and hope. They will be your brother and sister in arms, nothing could be closer or more understanding of everything that plagues ones heart.

But its a lie.

They don't want you to be close, to ever get closer. They want uniform loyalty and they want impenetrable ranks, soldiers to fight and die together until the very end. To be closer, to share that story, that heart and love, is a sin in their eyes that must be purged. That is someone saved for the non-combatants, the ones left at home alone and unprepared if you ever return. That closeness is for those you have to leave again and again, either by curse or by duty to a soulless regime parading as a  holy legion.

If you do find love among your own, if you are found, then there is no true escape, no mercy that can be fit under the binding laws that be. They will decide your fate, no trial, only sentence and execution. Yet, if the one you fall for isn't part of your tribe, is not a traveller but a settler of a Sept you are drawn too more and more, the trial is strange. How can they punish that can't stay still, how can they tie down one cursed to roam?

They will look at the sinners before them and pick which will feel the worst pain. They will let few things decide, yet when it comes down to a duty for the nation, they will forsake the seed for the field. They chose myself to suffer the worst pain, one that carries me on the winds and soil, cutting deeper than the snow at my bones.

I return to a Sept and found him dead, redeemed of his sins by dying in battle on a mission far bigger than his shoulders. They sent him to die and celebrate his death as if it purified his soul. They murdered him in cold blood before praising his cold flesh.

They will do away with anyone they deem tainted of moral and heart. Weak to love and weaker to never find someone to tie down with a thankless duty left behind by the traveller. They think us tainted.

So I will show them how deep that rabbit hole goes.

I am no longer the Traveller and speaker of your spirits. I am now the thing you fear and speak to greater beings that can tear your cold hearts out.

I am now a Dancer to your nightmares.