015-Taking a life
Walking on the street, Nonoth's heart was sullen and low like the cloudy sky over her head.
Might be raining soon. Nonoth thought to herself. Worrying was a new thing for her. She had never had a companion like Mal before who traveled together with her. Not only was he helping her looking for her mom, but he also shared a similar quest.
She had been worrying about Mal ever since that night, but the gloom she was feeling now was not the same. Her worries for Mal was not deep or dark at all. She worries for his safety and whereabouts, but was always with hope and positive wishes.
Not now.
The memory Jack just shared was pure dark. She couldn't even begin to imagine having someone you cared about die in such a dreadful manner, and having to live with the fact that you somehow worsened their pain in the end for a petty tantrum. This sullen had no warmth or caring whatsoever, and worst of all, there was no room for any hope to turn it around. No wonder Jack cared nothing else but his revenge, not lying to others, tricking people, or even killing, because revenge and anger are the only things he got to grab on now.
How else could one even try to ease this horrible pain?
Everything should be perfect, even when a problem occurs sometime, there will always be a perfect solution.
This was what Nonoth had been taught when she was on the cloud. How naive and ignorant.
Nonoth knew they were wrong, but she didn't know they were SO wrong. She thought she knew pain, the pain of watching all the kids sharing the eyes and hair of Adam and Ava playing together, drowning in the gentle, spoiling smiles blessed by their parents, and living a life with absolutely no worries, while Nonoth was always cast out of their circle, well, after she lived long enough to realize that they circling around her and laughing at her were not friendly gestures, that is.
Nonoth thought these painful memories of bullying from a home that she doesn't belong to, of missing her mom her whole life, and of being an outcast right from the first second of her life taught her to grow up and be strong, but she was wrong.
She didn't know real pain, not until now.
She hadn't seen the real evil, not until now.
She didn't know there can be such cruelty that fills you not even with anger but only with confusion: why? Why is happening? How could someone even be capable of something like this? How could God, the father of the world, let this happen without any consequences? Does God even exist? What now? What should I do now? How could I even move on to tomorrow?
These were the last things Jack yelled at Nonoth when she turned and left. Most of them Nonoth cannot answer, but one thing. There IS a God, living in his garden, watching over the world from high on a cloud. You can barely make out anything down here on earth, let alone one small human's suffering.
She couldn't answer Jack's question, but she began to feel a little bit of Jack's confusion. That was an upgrade from anger, because it was an anger towards a problem with no possible solution. It was an anger, that takes away all hope.
BUT.
But then she recalled Jack's request. Kill the man. Kill the beast who brutally tortured a woman to death only because she was trying to do the right thing for her home.
Take a life.
Is that right?
To Nonoth, it was absolutely fair and fine that the man who did such a horrible thing should pay for his action, and Nonoth definitely understands Jack's desire on killing him, but when thinking about making that decision, somehow it just didn't feel right, for her to take a life, as both a judge and an executioner.
But what if it was Mal that was murdered by him? And he was probably doing exactly that at this moment! She heard what he was doing to those mummies, he peels them! It got much easier for Nonoth to think about killing him when this horrible idea popped into her head about Mal.
Wait.
Is it still justice when she hesitates on killing the man only to change her mind when it involves someone close to her? It would be a decision no longer about the atrocity but just another personal vendetta. And she would be killing him only because she could, not because that's how thing should be.
Stopping at the ruins of the old cabin Nonoth burned down stopped her thoughts. She sighed and surrounded a bird with Azurite. Feeling the danger the blue thing reeked, the bird tried really hard to maintain herself in the middle of the air without touching the flame. Nonoth flew up to her level with Azurite under her feet and took her out of the sphere of fire.
"I'm sorry. I need your help." Nonoth said to the bird after she dispelled Azurite and got a feather off the bird. She needed the feather for relivio spell.
The bird, a bit shocked but otherwise unharmed, flew away as soon as her freedom was once granted again without much of an expression on neither of relief nor anger, but Nonoth couldn't move for a second, realizing what she just did was no different than the Death Merchant-- harming another creature for his own purpose, like peeling the mummies, like hurting the Bounty Hunters, just because he can.
Just because Nonoth can, so she stopped the bird and got a feather off of her, when it was not the bird's choice to help on looking for Mal. How could it be fair? What's fair? Does fair even exist?
Nonoth never felt so horrible using magic before, but even with a pretty good reason, somehow she felt like she committed a sin.
"Ha. It finally got to me." Nonoth murmured to herself. A sin. It was the word used most on her back on the cloud.
It was a sin to not say "I love you" to each other when you greet people; it was a sin to not show grateful to the heavenly father at every meal. She never paid any attention to those meaningless rules when no one even mean it anymore. They still fight with each other, and still waste away most what's given to them. They don't even look at each other with much attention when they greet each other. Those are all fine, but not doing them was not fine. No, not at all. Nonoth got punished so many times for these formalities just because she wanted to actually mean them when you conduct them.
But there was this one special sin of her that she could not look over, or by anyone for that matter, and that was her birth.
She was told she was a disgrace because her parents' union was unholy, therefore they were to be punished and she, Nonoth, was to be the stigma of their crime. She was born a sin.
She never minded the word "sin" because she was so used to it and she finds no wrong in her doing, so somehow she even felt like it was her special honor, instead of something she should be ashamed of, until today.
When she thought about what she did, a brand-new feeling came over her. It was not pleasant at all. It made her feel like she was burning inside, as if her face was boiling hot, and her throat so dry she could barely say any word. She didn't want to either. She only wanted to find a place to hide at that moment, so that no one would judge her for what she did. She had been judged before for a lot of actions, but unlike this one, she used to believe what she did was right.
She felt like hiding from her own action, but even no one else saw, or was judging her at that point, it was the feeling that she was judging herself, and there was no escape from that that made that feeling, shame, so unbearable.
She sighed again and sat on the ground, started missing Mal again because she so needs a friend to say some kind words to her, but there she was, all alone, with her own sin and shame.
"I should carry on with this, at least not make the bird hurt in vain..." Nonoth dropped her hand right after she started to prepare for the magic.
"No. I cannot do this. This is wrong. And keep going with this because I 'already did something horrible' is just a bad, ridiculous excuse." She put the feather carefully into her pocket, decided to treasure it as a reminder of her wrong use of power.
But doing the right thing often means harder to get what you want, not the other way around, and that's why it's less chosen by people, but maybe it means, what you want SHOULD be hard to get in the first place, and that's not something others should be paying a price for.
Nonoth put up a ward around the ruins so to catch feathers before they could fall on the ground. If by luck she could get some feather in this way she would be able to finish her magic.
With the ward set, Nonoth left there and started once again to try talk to everyone she can find for any information about the old cabin.
While some people were hiding from her because they wanted nothing to do with the Death Merchant, there was a shadow, hiding a corner behind Nonoth, watching her closely, for a very different reason.
If Nonoth had used the feather of the bird, she would have seen this figure behind the old cabin when Nonoth burned it down, it was the woman Lili, from Ravenhead.