He stood in the empty, desolate bathroom, water running cold over his hands in the sink. He refused to look at himself in the mirror. He kept his gaze down, fixed on the water, on his hands, on the stubborn dark stains that clung to the creases of his knuckles and gathered beneath his fingernails like something living. He scrubbed. He scrubbed until the skin beneath the blood grew raw and pink, until the water running off his fingers had long since turned clear again, and still he scrubbed, because the feeling remained. Because it always remained.
He would never be able to wash the blood from his hands.
Tears joined the water, slipping from the corners of his eyes and falling into the basin where they meant nothing, where they dissolved into everything else and were carried away.
Emotions aren't real. Not in the way stone is real, or hunger, or the cold edge of a blade. They are not matter. They carry no weight a scale could measure. And yet… and yet. They are the thing that makes us real. They are the architecture of being human, the invisible framework upon which everything else is hung. We give them power freely, recklessly, the way children give their trust, and in return, they give us something back: the power to live. To love. To hate. To grieve over the dead and still rise the next morning and grieve again. To be something more than meat and instinct.
Rowan cried for a while longer in the cold, quiet dark of the bathroom. No one heard. No one came.
But eventually, as it always does, the crying stopped. He reached out and turned off the faucet. The sound of running water died, and the silence that replaced it was total. He dried his face with the back of his wrist. He straightened. And finally — slowly — he raised his eyes to the mirror.
The man who looked back at him was young by any fair accounting, but his hair told a different story. More grey now than there had been a season ago, threading through the dark at his temples and crown, spreading by the day like frost across open ground. His eyes were sunken with exhaustion, shadowed beneath, the eyes of someone who had not slept deeply in a long time and had quietly stopped expecting to. But even now, in this moment, at the bottom of whatever this was, he looked, and he saw it. There, beneath all the damage and the grey and the weariness: life. True and stubborn life. A will that had not broken, that showed no intention of breaking.
He stared at himself for a long moment.
Then something in his face began to change. The weeping man, the one full of sorrow and regret, mourning the faces he could not quite remember and the ones he wished he could forget, slowly receded, like a tide pulling back. His jaw set. His brow smoothed. His eyes stopped glistening.
I will cover these hands again and again.
I do not enjoy it.
I hate it.
But I do not regret it.
He held his own gaze a moment longer.
I am a sinner.
Not for killing.
…For loving.
Rowan the soldier walked out of the bathroom. Rowan the weapon.
***
"AHHH!"
The screams were enormous, but they reached him distantly, muffled behind the high, relentless ringing that had taken over his ears, the layered, nauseating song of explosions, of debris cracking and shrieking through the air, of his own pulse hammering inside his skull. He was kneeling. He did not remember going to his knees. He closed his eyes and focused on his breath, the way he had been taught. One breath. Then another.
He opened his eyes.
For just one stolen second, the world arranged itself into something he could read. Horses thundered past, their riders already dead and slumped sideways, hanging from the saddle by a boot caught in a stirrup, dragged limp through the mud and the ruin. Swords met swords every few feet, ringing with a sound like bells struck too hard. Arrows descended without preference, finding enemy and ally with identical indifference.
Rowan turned.
A boy, barely seventeen, someone he had spoken with the evening before the march, whose name he had learned and then forgotten, took a spear through the midsection. The mounted soldier who drove it barely slowed, riding on with the boy still skewered, body swinging from the shaft, hands scrambling instinctively at the wood as his insides began to fall free of him. He was screaming. He was trying to hold himself together with both hands, mouth open and eyes too wide and too young, and still he was screaming.
The horseman flung him off.
Immediately after, the horse lost a leg at the knee to a single swing and crumpled, sending its rider rolling hard across the churned earth. The man came up fast, sword already raised… before an arrow took him between the eyes and decided the matter.
The boy was still dying. Slowly. Trying to scoop his own guts back inside of him as he cried in pain.
Rowan felt it before he heard it and wrenched his head aside. A blast of aeth scorched past his cheek and detonated behind him. The shockwave took people off their feet. He did not turn to look.
He responded. Fast. Faster than the man who had fired. His own working was sharper, denser. It connected. It did not leave much behind.
His hand floated up into his field of vision.
Chunks of flesh. Blood, already darkening. A stray tooth lodged into the knuckle of his right hand, white against the red. He looked at his other hand. The same. He looked down.
The person beneath him had no face anymore. Nothing legible remained, no age, no color, no expression, no indication of whether they had been cruel or gentle, beloved or alone, a father, a son, someone's reason to come home. They had been a person and now they were not, and Rowan had not paused for even a single moment to see them before he unmade them. He had not afforded them the small dignity of being witnessed.
The silence between one heartbeat and the next stretched wide.
"Tor Haroh," he whispered, words he still said, a phrase that was supposed to mean something.
He said them. He rose to his feet. He re-entered the battle.
He was no longer certain how much he believed them anymore.