Too Late

Another short little piece playing with a character, this time a side character and a rather unpleasant and morbid situation.

Too Late
They were too late, too slow, had been too confident. Alan approached the site of the tiny massacre slowly, knuckles white on the grip of his bow. They'd thought killing the men on guard would be enough. It should have been enough.
Trying to ignore the shouts of "Death above all!" that still echoed in his memory, he knelt beside a particularly small body.
The boy couldn't have been more than three. His mouth hung open in an eternal scream, his chest nearly consumed by the gaping sword wound that had cut short his life.
Fingers shaking, Alan leaned down and closed the child's eyes. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "This never should have happened."
"Alan!"
He straightened, looking around.
Erik walked around the bodies toward him. "We have to join the others. They may need our help."
As these dead had needed it. One deep breath, and Alan nodded and stood. He gave the dead boy one last look, turned, and followed Erik. This was why he fought. So that his wife and unborn child would be spared this fate: murder by fanatics who only honored death.


So...yeah. Morbid and dark, and not really edited much beyond the initial writing. Any thoughts?

Blind

I wrote this up in a matter of minutes. It's precisely 100 words, and the "he" is one of my characters, generally known as the Ark. Hopefully it'll be interesting even without knowing the backstory and what exactly is being spoken about. I may do other little snippets similar to this; little fragments focusing on character and description as a way for me to develop them more...and do more writing in short amounts of time. So here it is.

Blind

He hadn't truly seen, not for thousands of years. Most of the time, he never thought about it. He was sightless, after all, not blind.

Once a year, on the anniversary of that day, he locked himself into his house and took off his blindfold, the shield of a coward too ashamed to admit his failings and too afraid of what would happen if he told the truth.

Alone, unveiled, he closed off his other senses and walked through his house, truly blind. It was his reminder, his punishment, of his other blindness, the one that had cost him everything.