Weekly Writing – March 2 2024

When his brother swung wide and the opening was there, the throat bared, he had to take his chance. He had come into that fight, that sacred circle, weaker but quicker, and he couldn’t miss the one opportunity he might have to kill rather than die.
To drive his dagger into the side of his brother’s neck. Eyes as dark as his own snapped wide, lips stretched, struggling to take in a breath that the dagger would interrupt. A steel dam across breath and blood – then he pulled the blade free, and his brother fell.
Choking on breath and blood both. It wasn’t forbidden to offer comfort. He could have knelt at his brother’s side, but they had each come there prepared to kill the other. They had trained all their lives for it. A tender hand there, at the end, would have been a lie.
And that circle was a place for truth. All the priceless knowledge a king would need to rule, granted only to one victor. Paid for by the blood of the defeated, his brother slumping to the earth.
He turned his gaze to the starry, portentous sky under which they had fought, and the knowledge came. The size of the stars and the size of a life, cosmic furnaces that could swallow millions of such broken human shells without so much as flickering brighter. But without him standing there to see them, what would that have meant? Would the code of their flickering, translated through an unwitnessed sky, have had the slightest significance to anything?
His brother’s blood dripped from his dagger, drop after drop of payment to the hungry earth, and everything he saw only had significance in any way that was significant to him because he saw it. The stars would flicker and the earth would drink without him, but his presence animated them with meaning.
The presence of any person would have. Any witness made the world grand and portentous and precious. Any death destroyed one priceless translation of the world forever.
Humanity was a library burning forever, and he had just fed his brother to the flames. That was the knowledge of a king, the prize of a conqueror. Every life he ended for conquest or justice would diminish the world. He could be a caretaker or a vandal of that library – his station afforded him no other options.
He fell to his knees beside his brother.