This is the third story in the Perpetuality series!
“Why do you kill?” asked the Guillotined Man, his voice barely audible, shaking with fear.
“To think. To live,” replied the Camel Rider, his tone devoid of feeling, as he stood by the guillotine.
The Guillotined Man stared in horror. Was survival meant to demand bloodshed? Of course not, right?
The Camel Rider did not flinch. He was a man carved out of sun. His skin, baked and cracked by the desert’s ceaseless breath, looked like parchment that had once carried words—holy, profane, perhaps even loving—but now lay illegible. His eyes held no light. Or perhaps the perpetual light of a dead man’s gait. But there had been light once.
There had been a time, though the Camel Rider did not remember, when he had felt. Felt joy as golden as the dawn’s first light spilling across the dunes. Grief that poured into him like a flash flood, fast and unstoppable. Love that curled around his heart like a silken rope, gentle in pressure, lethal in pull. There were different emotion is different irises, he remembered, though of the same kind. Dichotomic Emotions, he remembered calling them when what he really meant was conflicting feelings. The left eye was of hazel color, while the right eye was of a purple-pink. The left eye was perpetually consumed with love, and the right with hatred; the left eye was perpetually consumed with joy, and the right with sorrow; the left eye was perpetually consumed with desire, and the right with fear; the left eye was perpetually consumed with freedom, and the right with responsibility and loneliness. Life, as he remembered, was perfect.
But that was before the snake.
It had slithered onto his camel, winding itself around saddle and rein and muzzle like a crown of thorns. A serpent not just of the body, but of the mind. It struck without fear, and the venom it left behind was not death, but disillusion. He could still remember the moment its teeth broke skin of the camel. And when the camel died, the man he had been began to recede, like an oasis retreating into mirage.
He turned then, in desperation, to the only soul he trusted: the Snake Charmer. The Charmer had promised safety. Promised understanding. Promised to coax the poison into sleep. But all promises wilt in the sun. For when the Camel Rider returned from a fevered delirium, his poisoned camel was gone, and with it the last breath of his innocence. It was the death of Dichotomic Emotions, and the Snake Charmer caused it. Only hoofprints was what he remembered of the last moments of presence of joy. From that moment, the Camel Rider understood a truth he had not wished to know: the world was not a place of salvation, but of Contempt. And both of his eyes were filled with contempt the moment on; no longer a person with Dichotomic Emotions, he was.
He killed not to survive, but to preserve the contempt in him. To kill was to prevent feeling. Feeling was the true venom. It kept the fluids in his eyes alive. Each life he took was not a triumph, nor a conquest; it was nothing more than contempt. His camel, stolen long ago, still haunted him in dreams. Amazing, he wondered, he dreamt of camels and deceit and not of harvest and rain, two opposite sides of the coin, they were.
The Guillotined Man looked at him with eyes too soft, too human. He could not yet understand. “Do you mourn them?” he asked.
“I mourn the man who asked that question,” the Camel Rider said. “But I do not mourn those who fall. They are not mine to mourn. They are yours.”
The dunes around them sighed, rising and falling like breath too old to carry hope. The sun cast their shadows in long, fractured streaks—as if the world itself could not decide where one man ended and the other began.
The Camel Rider turned himself and his hazel and purple-pink eyes towards the full moon, and he rode into it on his dead camel as the Guillotined Man kept his gaze on him, perpetually and forever.