Defection - (ON HOLD)

2. Fighting Destiny

 || Dedicated to AuRevoirSimone: Thank you for the awesome cover!  ||

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2. Fighting Destiny

If there was one thing that Hale Caradoc absolutely hated, it was the encumbrance of death. Not that he was actually dying — it was just a tedious process.

One second of distraction and he had been attacked from behind. He sighed and stared up at the blazing sun, waiting for his essence to leech unhurriedly from his shell, forming a cloud of dark energy above his lifeless body.

Battle sounds — sounds of shots and the clank of metallic shields — rang out around his still form; the war, continuing on without him.

His ‘death’ took hours due to the nature of his wound. The injury would have killed a human slowly, causing agonizing pain throughout the ordeal, but all he felt was the disintegration of his inner self as it rose from his shell.

By the time the process was complete, the position of the sun indicated it was around mid-evening.

He looked down at the body he had used for more than a thousand years. He had been rather attached to it.

Well the wounds could be repaired, he thought as he examined the damage. All he had to do was find Rhett, his second-in-command, among the masses still engaged in pointless battle, and look through the lists for a witch bound by contract to repair the shell.

He looked back down at the body, unwilling to leave it exposed in the midst of battle, but there was no way he would find Rhett if he stayed up. He sighed and turned to make his way into the thick of battle, but it was like walking headfirst into an invisible wall. Something was holding him back.

What the fuck was this? Nothing of the sort had occurred before. He tried again …. Again … and again without success. He glanced around for a hex or any sign that could explain his immobility, but he came up empty. Fuck! Had the weapon been bewitched?

Confusion and anger churned in his thoughts, his essence turning a darker shade with each passing second.

Damn Asmodeus!

Time passed at an agonizingly slow pace and with the war halted until daybreak to gauge losses, there was nothing for him to do.

All this waiting around is wrath inducing, he thought irritably as he shaped his essence into a human façade of his true self. Despite being an incubus — a demon — for eons, the one thing he had not cared to develop was patience. Why was there a need to be patient when all he wanted was accessible to him with a simple click of his fingers?

The setting sun cast long shadows around the bloody battlefield and he watched as countless ‘died’ before being resurrected again.

All the free time had him thinking, his mind whirling back through the past few months when he had been undecided about joining the war. It had been Devony who had helped him make up his mind. He had approached her after Asmodeus had issued his orders. She had not said it openly, but he had gleaned enough information from her prophecy to know that the war and his participation were inevitable. In reminisce; he should have sought a more detailed prediction from Devony, because the presage she had offered him could not have been vaguer.

“The future holds an impending misfortune, a lifetime of war. However, the choices are your own to make and the mistakes your own to pay for. If you tread wisely, the future could be life altering. Either way, it is unavoidable — like fighting destiny.”