6th of Summer, 511 A.V.----
Hate is an odd emotion. For most people, it was a heated experience, filled with white hot fury which burned and boiled underneath the skin. For most people, it scorched the soul, screaming for release and lashing out at the slightest provocation. For most people, hate was a fire unquenchable: an inferno which consumed all thought, all reason, and all sense as it burned through it host with reckless abandon.
Fortunately, Desmond Adan was not like most people.
The flame which roared within him was an icy hatred, one far and removed from the scathing heat which consumed the normal man. Desmond’s hate was of another kind, a colder kind, though one no less potent than the regular fare. The youth’s rage ignited from deeper place, beyond the frailty of his mortal body and human mind; both of which were weak from the hunger and exhaustion seeped deep into his bones. No, the tinder for this freezing flame sprouted from his spirit, from the memory of seeing the charred and scorched faces of his loved ones frozen in anguish as the flames consumed their home.
However, it wasn’t the flames that Desmond had grown to despise in such a short time. It wasn’t even the men who set the fire. Desmond hated the man who orchestrated the attack, the head of the serpent as it were. The man who planned not only his downfall, but also the death of everything he had worked to achieve and everyone he had ever dared to love. This was the man Desmond reserved his hate for, and the man he strove to find before the decease of the day.
Only four days had passed since the death of his family and Danni, and Desmond realized that his time was already short. The pandemonium which had ensued from the Day of Discord, as citizens were now calling it, was being put down quickly and with prejudice. The Lhavit he had grown up was changing and changing fast, and the old ways of doing things, namely the illegal and immoral way of doing things, were now being declared defunct. Even as he leaned idly against an alley wall, Desmond could spot arrests erupting in the streets; lawfulness finally returning to a corrupt and bereaved city. A small part of the youth realized that this was probably best for Lhavit and its people, but a louder voice shouted that the return of the Shinya would only obstruct his current goal, as the acts he was planning on committing were decidedly less than lawful. And with the guards’ interference, they would also become impossible.
Desmond rose a trembling hand to his forehead, trying to soothe his worries. The last few days had been the most trying of the aspiring herbalist’s life, and the natural calm of his personality had been near shattered from the stress of it all. Four days of constant running and hiding. Four days of barely controlled rage. Four days of fear he hadn’t felt since his family had first entered poverty. It had all taken a heavy toll on the youth, the weight of his misfortune near crushing him in its cruel embrace, and under normal circumstances, Desmond had no doubt he would have crumbled under the unrelenting pressure. The only reason he kept moving, the only reason he did not let his walls fracture and break down sobbing in grief, proved the brief window he had to enact his revenge.
A single, heavy sigh signaled the return of Desmond’s control, and the brief sorrow that had misted across his eyes was replaced by a cold resolve. Any trace of vulnerability, of weakness, of natural, common goodness that peered through the cracks in his steely mask was smothered in layer of detachment. Grieving could come later, as because now, Desmond had a mission to accomplish. And nothing, neither god nor man, would stop him.
