The Night Watch | The Nocturnal Chronicles {Book One}

Chapter 32 - The Hillside

"We sit on the hillside, letting all our thoughts come to light. Sitting, thinking, watching. The world around us is pure and true, but it also dark and unclear."

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The Night.
It was all that separated her from knowing whether or not Edwin would live. Erudessa just couldn't find herself lasting the night. She couldn't sleep with all the activity going on in her mind. All she knew was, she had resorted to making wishes on shooting stars. The cold, wet snow was seeping through both her cloak and her shirt. Her back was growing cold and wet. She knew if she stayed out like this for much longer there was a strong chance she could get pneumonia. But that didn't bother her. She couldn't feel it.

Edwin had given her her humanity back. Something she hadn't really had for nine years. Maybe people would see it as inhumane for a child of eight years to lose their humanity, but that was how she was. She had no kind of emotion really. It was all locked away in the back of her mind. Stored away until the day she was able to move on from killing. It seemed that now that Edwin was gone from her life, everything was returning to the way it was. She was losing herself, slipping into her old way of life. Losing what made her human.

It made her realize something. One of the things, possibly the biggest, that make you human was love. Without love, so many emotions are untouchable and useless. Like compassion, joy, even sadness. When you take away love, you take away a person's drive. You take away who they are. In doing that, you take away their humanity. That was how they turned her into what she was. They took away her will to love. Her relationship with Rowe had always been a game until the past years when the thought of marriage became all to real. Then, she starting seeing things differently.

Her will to live a different life hadn't started really until she met Edwin. She knew she didn't want to be the same person she was when she left the palace, but it wasn't until she met Edwin that she knew she wanted to be someone good. She wanted it for him as much as for herself. It was the life she lived and it was something she struggle with. She couldn't stay the person she was becoming unless she was with him, and that made things difficult now. When you take away a person's love, what are you left with?

Maybe this was the time, the time for her to kill Rowe. It seemed like the perfect time to kill him without feeling the pain of it. Without realizing what she was really doing. She would have to do it at some point. Everyone was in agreement. Adan, Grimm, and King Eben. They all wanted her to kill Rowe. It was her duty. Her destiny as they so claimed. She had to kill him. She was the only one who could kill the man she once loved. Now was the time to kill him. A time when her heart was not in agreement with her mind. When it wouldn't weigh her. When she wouldn't have a second thought.

Erudessa stood up, gazing at the castle. She gazed upon it with unclear sight. Could she just kill without second thought? Is that who she was? It wasn't who she used to be. She would kill to live, and she gave them a spot on her back. When she took that away, when she killed without giving it thought, she would become someone else. That was someone she could never be proud of. Someone she didn't want to be if Edwin survived. Her mind was a battlefield with all the emotion she had running through her.

She paced back and forth on the hill in the darkness. Everything was a struggle. She didn't know what she was going to do. This wasn't how she expected her week to go. None of the things that had happened for the past few months were things she had expected. Originally, she had expected to be endlessly killing people for the king. It was how things would have normally went. It wasn't that bad that she wasn't doing that, but her life was a lot less complicated then. There weren't really as many people in her life, and nobody was ever trying to kill her.