Chapter 76: The Knight’s Goal
REAGAN POV
The sun shone high in the sky, beating down my bare skinned shoulders as I leaned against the rocky wall facing the training area. I watched the guards fight using their swords below the arena as each strike produced a well-timed rhythm. The repetitive noise of steel colliding with steel carried through the air as a permanent reminder to my chosen path plus the shared our shared connections with each other.
The king had ordered for us to go into the border and round up the rebellion. He was starting to get really restless these days. His demands had become more savage, more frantic. It didn’t matter to him now who stood in his way — men, women, children. To him, lives were tools, mere afterthoughts to be crushed under the barrel of his authority.
I should know that very well because I have served under the man for twenty one years before he finally deemed me worthy of a knight title. But even with the honor and the title, I was not free like I had envisioned I would be.
I became King Sigurd’s tool. I transformed according to his needs to become a soldier and enforcer and shadow who hid in dark empty spaces of his authority. A proper knight exists to defend honor while safeguarding justice and safeguarding innocent people. That is the wisdom taught about knights. What I carried out did not maintain any honorable quality.
Through my sword I have ended the lives of so many innocent people that I cannot count and their dying cries torment my slumber. The faces of innocent people who perished from the battle have started to visit me during my nightly dreams while these victims include mothers guarding their kids and farmers attempting to fight back with pitchforks and helpless elderly who lacked the strength to run. I even reduced great kings to be nothing more than cowardly helpless mumbling fool. Dragged them in chains as I presented them to the king just so he could be happy.
It’s one of the reason no one wanted to dare to challenge us or are stupid enough to go to war with us, well me in particular. No one wanted to mess with King Sigurd’s hellhound! That was what they called me, the town’s people whispered about it in fear filled taverns, King Sigurd’s hellhound and it wasn’t only for my loyalty but because wherever I go, destruction follows.
But I didn’t care about any of that, they can call me whatever it is they wanted to call me! They could think whatever and Sigurd that evil son of a bitch can continue to use to carry out his evil whims, I do not care because every act of violence, every blood I shed, the destruction I unleashed wasn’t for him.
No, it was for me. Every drop of blood shed brought me closer to my own goal, revenge.
The king’s evil schemed had cost me everything, cost me everything I ever owned and cherished and he wasn’t even aware of it. Underneath my deceptive loyalty existed intense hatred that I had hidden from the king. I remained under his misconceptions about control because he failed to see my brewing plans I had in store for him. Biding my time.
And it wasn’t just him that I was bidding my time for, it was him and his entire family, they would feel my wrath!
My gaze roamed to where the house she was staying on the manor was. It looked just the same, silent and still as if nothing had changed at changed at all.