Tainted

—-Your father, he feared your anger. Feared you.—- Because he knew what I could become. He knew what burdens flowed through my veins. He too felt them, lived them. (I am a boy. My father skewers three Stalkers in front of me. His eyes are crimson, his sharpened teeth bared as he moves to bite their heads off.) For a time, my father embodied what I felt inside. I looked up to him, believed I could confide in him. He felt a bloodlust and he despised The Regime. But as they did with me, the others began to see him as a liability. So he softened and softened until, in my opinion, he degraded to the Lubraean equivalent of fetid rot. —-And so you treated him as such.—- (I stare into the face of my father, his severed, shattered head held in my hand, dripping with what once stayed within.) A consequence of weakness. His own. (In search of my father, I reach the final hiding place of my clan. Devoid of active life, as were the rest. But filled with tokens, trinkets, heirlooms. They left in a hurry, all who remained. And I know where desperation takes them.) The same place it took me. The Abyss.