Master Snape posed the notion: a matter of discerning what one man did so hateful that not even hell would take him off the hands of the world.

In a solitary moment, seeing to it that his tower is precisely as he would have it - he catches himself modelling it somewhat after dim memories of the Preceptor's study and moves the desk a third time - it catches him and he laughs, leaning his hands on the windowsill. It's something that should weigh on him - something that should worry him. Keep him up nights. Distract him.

It comes in passing, and it'd weigh if it weren't so damned obvious. If it weren't such a simple question. Martel, better than anyone, knows the full extent of what he did. Even those left behind cursing his name and gladdened by his death can't know the whole and plain truth - there are days he acknowledges that nobody can, not any more. Perhaps not even him. It doesn't matter; he doesn't debate with himself or with anyone else what it was that sealed his fate.

When asked for a good reason not to strike him down again, he doesn't have one and in a way - in a strange and likely unhealthy way - in a way it's freeing. This freedom of knowledge; this freedom of acknowledgement. Now there are no chains left, none not of his own making. (Lord Martel of Valdis; lord, master, teacher, would be husband and father; he has never found tying himself to something a challenge.) From the tower window he can survey much of the castle, the grounds spreading out that soon he'll have thoroughly hidden from prying eyes and enemies (an enemy; a brother) that like as not will never come.

There is one thing, though.

Some days he wakes up wishing it were Kurik given this in his place.

"My Lord?"

The title grates (and does not grate) the same way it has every other time he's been addressed this way in recent months; he turns away from the window and his introspection.


prompt: I wake up some mornings hating me too. Rahm Emanuel quote [5:2]
word count: 350

It's an old story.

An old tale that Martel wants no part of; the archetype of the fallen at peace only in death, at least, remains at peace. The tragic villains of legend don't have to face irrefutable proof that truly, truthfully, after their passing the world does go on, perhaps a little better than it was before. Names out of stories don't swear at having to budget for a household they never anticipated having. Figures out of history don't think about consecrations and weddings and the possibility of fatherhood, of finding again the faith they'd convinced a world and themselves they didn't want, didn't need, didn't have.

They're unhelpful bastards, that lot.

Redemption isn't what Martel wants. It is not something he can have; therefore, he does not want it. Life would be more annoying than it already is if he went about wanting things he can't have - because there are no things like that, only things he didn't want enough. (His own logic twists knots inside him and he's lived this way for so long now that he hardly recognizes what he left behind in himself, that he forgets simply by not wholly comprehending what it is he's striving for.) What he wants is to find a waypoint between the man he became and the man he could've become, in another life.

The life he lived is over. There are no second chances there; what there could've been he'd spurned, and the end of it was the best he could have hoped for. Better than he'd thought to hope for. It was, though, an end and for reasons he doesn't pretend to understand (we are cursed and he couldn't tell her no) he is not over. He's memories in one world and rumors in another, but he isn't over.

The runner from Koleika's clan is shown up to his study by Afangor, with a message for Martel and a mildly perturbed look for the seemingly glass torches lighting Martel's work.

Nothing is ever really over.


prompt: when a woman loves a man excerpt [3:3]
word count: 338

What about your character drew you in as a writer; what is it that you want to explore with them?
( will obviously contain spoilers for his canon. )

The few people that have seen the scar left behind by Sparhawk's sword have all known better than to gape and stare at it. They've known better than to draw attention to it, to comment on it, to react to the physical evidence that not a full year ago he died. Not a full year ago, by his reckoning, he lay on the floor of a temple now gone as well, breathed what he'd thought would be his last under Sephrenia's blessing and expired.

It's not polite. It's not done. It's not fair.

He measures his memory in inches and an ache that pain-relief hasn't helped. He measures it in how clear the feeling of blood seeping out of his body and breath failing him is when he speaks with Sephrenia or with Sparhawk. He measures it in absolute silence; in the understanding that grief is a right of the wronged and redemption of the penitent. He fills his time with plans and productivity, gestures, with life after death that is, he finds with some irony, so much the better than what he'd led beforehand.

His reflection never changes. Eventually, he knows, other people will realize too that it likely never will. He doesn't need to wait that long for it to start to grate; it isn't that he's ungrateful--God forbid--and yet.

So he examines himself. It's almost funny to see a face from ten years or so prior; he looks younger than he knows he is, puts it down to some quirk of resurrection. Most if not all of the scars he knows should be there are; he finds himself wondering idly if he'll ever gain new ones.

It's an easy shift from impassive silence to sudden motion and with almost whole disconnection he doesn't truly feel it when his expertly thrown fist impacts, cracking and smashing the mirror in front of him. His shirt hangs loose, open, and he holds his hands against the wood of the table below and remains very, very still.