vinnie ramshackle

“Once again, that half-pint bastard is a thorn in my side. Years spent tiptoeing around him, trying to keep my plans hidden. Soon, we’ll deal with him. As for Veres, I have plans for him. He’s going to pay for what his bitch daughter did. Her little tantrum against marrying Galvin was an annoying setback, but she and that little brothel will pay. To think that the monster that killed Leonard was a whore from the Knight’s Sheath! Saved me all the trouble of doing it myself and framing the Profane! Fate smiles upon me! Cyrilo and Noah ruined my life, and I swear, I’ll get my vengeance on them if it’s the last thing I do! It’s only a matter of proper timing.”

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

Roc had the advantage of experience against this style, but his missing arm proved a debilitating handicap. In one regard, it made dodging easier, as he had less mass to move out of the way of Ingram’s attacks, and he couldn’t be slowed down with painful flesh wounds to the missing limb, but it also left his offense and defense on his right side almost nonexistent. Depending on who he was fighting and what type of combatant they were, the severity of such a handicap was variable, but against such a similar warrior, his disadvantage was increasingly evident with each passing second. Back and forth, over and over, they hurled attacks at each other and then pulled back, using their wings to move in and out of each other’s reach.