Ren of Atikala Page 53

MANY SPECIES CONSIDER KOBOLDS A pest, weak and cowardly vermin to be exterminated en masse, barely sentient and their fates bearing little consideration. All over the world of Drathari, heroes of the land sleep easy in their beds, troubled not by the deaths of my kind at their hands. We are gleefully cut down by the score, killed without mercy.

  Yet if that hero kills even a single human, this is often a cause for grief and internal turmoil. For restless nights and worry and doubt and atonement, even if the human was wicked to the core and completely deserving of the act.

  This strikes me as odd. I postulate that few have ever paused to consider that perhaps kobolds regard humans with the same indifference. That man, tall and powerful, should be the ones considered vermin to be exterminated. To us humans are the other, the outsider. They are what does not look like us, think like us, speak like us, and its destruction does not weigh on the conscience heavily, if at all.

  I certainly thought this way in my youth. Humans were a distant threat, enemies whose influence was almost never felt, aside from occasional inept raids into our territory. I wore leather made from human beings, never considering that what I was wearing was once a sentient creature with thoughts and feelings and desires.

  When I saw Khavi’s head separated from his shoulders, when I lost the one who struggled and fought beside me through so much, I remember the visage of the woman who had killed him. I saw in her eyes not the rage of a victim basking in revenge, nor the triumph of the righteous. Instead I saw nothing. I saw a human who was pressing her heel to a bug and crushing it. I saw boredom and a strong desire to avoid getting kobold blood on her boots.

  I saw myself as I burned No-Kill’s companions with my flame, as Khavi and I cut down what I now know to be a peaceful trade party completely unrelated to the destruction of Atikala. I saw a perfect mirror of my own mind in his, our thoughts completely alike as we butchered those we considered the other.

  The lesson I’d recited in my mind before that fateful first patrol flashed through my mind, the words suddenly ringing truer than anything I’d ever heard before.

  No mercy for monsters.

  — Ren of Atikala

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