Vindex
by Alicia McKenzie
DISCLAIMER: Only one Marvel character in this, used without permission for entertainment purposes only.
Vindex: Latin for avenger.
I remember that night, when word came that the war was over. I remember not knowing what to feel, as if my heart had been lost with all of those from our settlement who had gone to fight and never returned, the innocents who had been swallowed by the madness that had ripped southern Eurasia apart for so many years. Perhaps it was safer not to feel.
But in the end, I let myself hope. So did we all. We remembered our dead, but we went on with our lives. We tended the hydroponics, repaired acid storm damage, expanded our cisterns. . .all the tasks that made up each day. Life went on, just as it had during the years when a sevenday had rarely passed without some raiding party arriving at our walls.
Were we happier? Things were quieter. The sadness never went away, but we learned to cope. Perhaps, one day, things would have been better. Our children would have smiled again.
But we had barely begun to harvest our crops at the end of that season when they came. In dreams, I still hear the proximity warnings wailing their terrible song as we ran for the shelter of the walls. As it was, we were barely in time. Not that it mattered.
There were too many of them. So many. Men and women both, grim-faced soldiers all, under that banner we had learned to fear.
They surrounded the settlement, and waited.
Night fell, and our magistrate went out to speak to them. He was an old man, in poor health, but brave enough to risk himself in the hope that he could save us. A good, brave man.
And they killed him. I was watching from the walls. . .most of us were. . .and I saw it. Saw the towering figure in armor step out from the line of troops and kill the magistrate with a single blow.
We knew then that there wasn’t any hope. Oh, we had our militia, experienced from years of defending us against raiders, but they were no match for these soldiers. We knew it, the enemy knew it. . .
We knew then there was no hope. Our militia could fight scavengers, but not battle-hardened soldiers like these. We knew it, and the enemy knew it. . .
The enemy. You know, I don’t remember a single face, a single individual, except for him? The leader. The one in the armor. A symbol, as much as a man. An icon. . .he was the will behind them, of course. The others were just shadows, doing what he told them, destroying what he told them to destroy.
Him. . .he hated us. He almost glowed with it.
Our militia fought. The dark soldiers killed them. Then they killed anyone who raised a hand against them. Blood ran in the streets. The screaming. . .I’ll never forget the screaming.
They spared the non-combatants. How kind of them. We were herded into a single terrified group and forced outside the walls. There, we watched as the soldiers burned out settlement to the ground. I think I cried, watching it burn. Our settlement may not have had a name, but it was home.
The children were crying. Most of us were. We stood there and watched as the man who had destroyed our home and killed so many of us stepped forward and removed his helmet.
I will never, until the day I die, forget that face. It might have been carved from stone itself, it was so cold. Barren of all emotion, hard and unforgiving as the face of death itself. His hair was silvering, but he was not old. And his eyes. . .
His eyes were both the most human and the least human thing about him. One glowed gold, with a light of its own. The other was gray and filled with hatred and rage. There was no trace of compassion for us, there, none at all.
He was good enough to tell us why, in a voice as cold as the desert night. For what we believed, he said. For who we had followed, for the choice we had made. All decisions had a cost, he told us. All crimes came with a penalty, and now, we would pay ours.
Then he told us we were free to go, and turned to leave, shouting orders to his troops.
Our magistrate’s wife, as brave as her husband, screamed after him, demanding to know how he expected us to live, without our home. He turned and stared at her, his eyes gone as cold as his expression, but she continued to curse him. She named him the murderer he was, and pointed at the children, asking him what he expected our children to drink in the empty desert.
He smiled a smile that froze my heart
Drink the sand, he said in that awful voice, and left us to die.
Some of us survived the trek to the next settlement. Many did not. It has been so many years, now, but I still remember. I remember that day, and I remember him.
And I will curse Nathan Dayspring’s name until the end of my days.
fin