Bullets From the Heart – Part 5

I realized that the only chance that I had to really and truly make authoring my job was during my periods of unemployment.  I was hampered unimaginably by my lack of dollars during that period.  Now, I have a modest amount of funds to my name which shall continue to slowly grow, yet I lack anything remotely like the time necessary to make a true push at publishing anything which shall make money.  

I have no consistent source of editing, and no true means to obtain it.  Editing is by far the biggest factor hindering any professional push.  While I have modest funds to my name, it will never be enough to allow me the in-depth, side-by-side push I need to make something truly worth reading.  I have several projects that are at a stage where I can do little else to them.  Each pass brings me no closer to presenting a wholesome picture of a story.  Instead, each pass makes me realize that even if I work as hard as I can, I am forever limited by my own ability or lack there-of.

I am doing my best, and my best is insufficient to the task at hand.  Being forced to realize that every day, day in and day out, is starting to wear me down.

I don’t want to quit.  I don’t want to abandon everything I have worked so hard to build.  I want my life to have a meaning and a purpose beyond going to some random stupid job at an office five days a week until I die.  I just don’t know that I’ll ever amount to anything more.  

Most of success is just showing up though, so I’m going to keep trying to show up.  I just wish I felt hope for the whole affair, instead of a weary sense of resigned fortitude.

It was the cold which woke me.  I woke slowly, groggily. I was shivering so hard that I was nearly convulsing in the mud. The rain hadn’t bothered to slacken, and the parts of me not soaked or coated in mud amounted to zero.  I had a headache the size of a small moon, my korin was destroyed, and I felt a little hollowed out from slicing away part of my own soul.

Yet I was wonderfully, blissfully alive.

I shove shaking hands underneath me, willing myself upright more than I pushed myself, and laughed as hard as my wheezing breaths would allow.  I had been sabotaged, ambushed, and trapped.  And I had come out the other end.  Someone had put me through the wood chipper, and I had come through whole.

I saw the remains of the person my korin had shot then, and my laughter faltered slowly dying away.  He was a wreck, the man I had shot.  Korin’s didn’t shoot bullets; they shot hardened soul energy.  They might look like a six shooter with an overlarge chamber, but they didn’t do physical damage the way bullets did.  They tore at your soul.  They were damned hard to stop.  Only thick amounts of metal or stone could save you.  Even a solid inch of steel wouldn’t do the trick, and no armor Necromancy had ever managed to create was proof against them.

Korin’s didn’t destroy a human body like that.  A clean hole had been burned through the man, as cleanly and neatly round as a cookie cutter pushed through dough.  I had killed thousands over my long life.  Death was nothing new to me.  Yet I recoiled from the sight, horrified that a weapon which killed with elegance could be capable of such barbarism.

I shivered again, sucking in a breath against the chill.  I stilled then, the only movements the involuntary ones of a body pushed to cold beyond handling.

I was shivering.  I was breathing.  I.  Felt.  Cold.

The enormity of those thoughts hit home with the force of a howitzer.  Numb fingers fought against the chill to feel at my neck.  A pulse beat there, treacherous in it’s steady rhythm.  

The full implication of what that meant was almost beyond understanding.  I cried, another impossibility, and sat rocking back and forth as I tried to make reality flow backwards in time. 

I was alive again.  After almost six centuries of the stillness and calm of being powered only by the energies of captive souls instead of the unreliable processes of a body, I was alive again.  I was alone, without food or water, in an irradiated wasteland almost a hundred miles from habitation.  Such things hadn’t been an issue when I had set out a week ago.  Now, however…

I had only begun living again, yet here I sat in the rain, crying even harder thinking that I might die for the second time.  I had a feeling this time around my demise would be far more permanent.