The weather had succumbed to snow.

  A cold front started to bombard the school.

  The room was filled with an arctic breeze.

  That beat-up novel Celeste gave me, whose dialect holds the same as that cult………

  Looking out from the frozen panes that the windows held, I reach into my pocket, taking out a 148-grain metal ball.

  I’m so sick of killing.

  “What is man?

  What is death?

  One cannot be without the other.

  Man can never stop thinking of death; it is too ingrained into his conscience.

  Being drags upon the glass-shard-covered dirt road that life, that life is. The blood and dirt and dust that cakes man drives him mad if he doesn’t find a way to……… if he doesn’t find a way to hush the pains, the pains of madness.”

  The blackboard that stood to my left as well as behind me. The white letters that stood tall, facing the students down.

  The taste of blood soaks into the flesh that collects the spit.

  Ripping my thumbnail clean off with my left back teeth.

  Drawing blood.

  I pilled the carton of cigarettes Konrad had given me and took the wrapping off.

  “I’m opening the window and having a smoke. Warm yourselves with your magic or something.”

  Creek.

  The icy wind slapped me across the face. The sky blocked out by the cloud, creating an almost night-like atmosphere. This everlasting, forever-expanding void had taken hold upon this world. Nights In White Satin filled my mind, while the past took up the remaining spots.

  The snow bled red.

  The smoke from my cig seeped into the outside, closing ever closer to a memory.

  Conrad, blood soaked through my coat from his pistol and watch.

  “Why…”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  My arms were placed on top of the other laying on this black metal bar an inch or two out.

  “What?” Rayden yelled over.

  I turned around to face some of the students, taking the cig out of my mouth.

  “May as well try to answer the final question, or maybe it was a statement.

  Why.

  Why are we here, why are we alive, why why why.

  In simple terms, two people did it. Now, everyone who sat here won a battle with millions of other possible people to impregnate an egg. Then survive nine months in the womb and then survive about sixteen or seventeen years, or however old you people are, to make it here. But we wouldn’t be talking about it if it were so simple.”

  The cold blows wind howls behind me, whacking at my back, the gusts filling my ears replacing the faint sound of ringing, and the smoke from the tip filled my nose with its sickening odor that whirled within my damned mind. Filled my mind with imagery torn from my own history and man’s owns… there’s probably this tumor growing inside my lungs.

  Those crackling of flames.

  Cig turning to ash

  “Nights in white satin,

  Never reaching the end.

  Letters I've written.

  Never meaning to send.” by The Moody Blues

  I miss my eye… “So why are we here? Just to suffer through the slings and arrows of life… Mmmmm, I try my best oh, every day I try not to sink into the nihilism that life has forced upon me. But my wretched mind always sneaks the fool's ideals into its subconscious thoughts, wrecking me with every growing insanity. Oh, god, what have I done in this land with my hands now marked in men’s blood? Could I not have taught or changed those I have killed? No evil is absolute… do I speak the truth? I dare not defend slavery, for any man who does is an enemy to I. For being who steals another's freedom shall have my blade cut in thou chest soaking the ground with their gore. Existence was the question, one with no true answer. We search for the meaning of a life where, in reality, every man holds the answer within himself that there is no such thing. We pass on our genes and then sleep with death. While we wait, we wait, wait for anything that dares to stand…”

  A drag of my cigarette and a swig of my flask pulled me closer to killing myself through substance abuse than the blade or the gun. I slam my palm upon the tip of the cane, skin being cut apart from a piece of splinter sticking out of the wood. Leg growing in pain and my eyehole replying back all brought together from a dehydration headache that has never left me since day one. And the wind cutting through my back as if my coat were made from silk. Taking a seat on the floor of the class using the frozen bars as back support… “The horror, the horror… No tears have dared to escape my gasps since the age of five; whether I want them to or not, nothing fights against the marchen. I bombed out the roads that enter from the town, and the city never poured new concrete for the road going nowhere necessary to the people. What is necessary in a man but his base argues to kill and fuck. No other animal needs to dress up its life to be so complex, but man must agonize over itself until it kills itselfs. I have age into an awful man, into a being that call theirself the Devil… to it could embrace the evil or embrace the worst to try and make something better from the burnt ashes of the past. For soil is best when fire has ravaged it. The statement seems to graceful for the action that I have commented… For the things I’ve done to the bodies of men…”

  I place the cig between my index and middle fingers and peer into infinity. The one person my mind keeps turning back to is the person whose words are stuck within the gaps of my mind. “What a small man, a man who needs to hide behind a myth. For what, V? FOR WHAT!” Joan repeats over and over again, and my only reply is. “Bang!”

  A favor I’ve gained, but more blood stains my hand. Does a stain matter when there no longer a surface to stain; merely staining the stain is what happens when I deemed myself the Reaper. Have I become Michael instead of Lucifer?

  I flicked the butt of a cigarette out the open window, then closed it. My cane carries its sound across the silent room. Making it to the center of the room where my desk stood, I sat down with the incline my desk lay upon to my back lining on the incline.

  I down another drink.

  “In the end there only one reality that I hold as a fact. The why of life doesn’t matter because it’s all made up by that of man. Plato's once said something that goes, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." The only thing I know is that I know everything… that I know nothing. The only thing I could give is that, both in battle and life, trust is meaningless.”