The bitterness of his voice betrayed an ulterior message. Behind his eyes wasn’t the fire of anger, they shone with cold melancholy, his snarling face stiff and locked-up. Alcerys wasn’t sure how she knew - whether by the Eye’s power or her own familiarity with that headspace - but she knew exactly how Sodan felt, and she knew that he was lying about his motivations. Whether he himself knew that he was lying, that was a whole other question.

Silence fell over the camp, the eerily-quiet forest pressing down on them as they ate, until Sodan looked up at her with those blue eyes of his which gleamed in the firelight like those of an actual dog.

“What about you? Even with all my accolades, there’s at least a dozen more deserters just like me roaming free. But you, you’re what? The third-ever Renegade? What sort of atrocity would suffice to break all that conditioning?”

“I don’t think there is an atrocity great enough,” she smiled sadly. “I would’ve just buried it among all the others, just more compost atop the pile of justified guilt for the “greater good”. It took an entirely selfish reason to make me choose renegacy.”

She raised her left hand, grasping the eye-like jewel that hung from her wrist by a thorned chain. It stared at him even now, when only a tiny fraction of its surface was visible, even as its owner gazed into its surface like a mirror.

“I’ve been an Inquisitor longer than I had been anything else. Much as my colleagues would love to tell themselves that the old church is dead, I saw different in my early years. Families and entire villages consigned by veteran inquisitors to the torch for fear of one corruption or another, the old unable to let go of their methods, and the new indoctrinated by the old against the Order’s wishes. It was always them that were suspicious of me, always going on about how our work was some grim duty for the greater good. We get filthy so they stay clean, they always said. And some, I think, truly did believe what they said…”

She fell silent, prodding the fire as she thought, then continuing with a bitter sigh.

“Some. Perhaps two in five. Two more still recited those platitudes to silence the voices of their innocent victims, hoping that they were truthful. The fifth, they drew those words out with grins on their faces, with such sick mocking glee as they had me watch another glorified witch trial that I had to fight the urge to vomit where I stood, reveling in their own irreproachability.”

There were no words sufficient to describe the utter, seething hatred which burned from the hazel eyes of that woman, which enveloped every word and upturned her mouth into a grimace. If one were to etch the word hate onto every muscle, every organ, every fibre and every cell of her body ten-hundred times over, it would not amount to a hundredth of the hate which Sodan felt radiating from her for the people she spoke of.

Hate.

Hate.

HATE.

“There are people like that in all places, in all positions of power, no matter how menial or grand… And in choosing to become what I am now, I’ve learned that my true purpose in life is to exact judgment upon these stains on humanity.”

Sodan nodded grimly, “A renegade.”

“One to judge those who think themselves beyond judgment. To exact retribution upon those beyond reproach,” she answered. A short while later they slept, the Renegade drifting off leaning against a tree while Sodan somehow locked his suit stiff after putting the helmet back on.

Alcerys woke to cold morning air, stretching her stiffened neck and looking up before she even deigned to open her eyes. A clouded sky was just about visible through the dense canopy, the cold morning air cut through by the warmth of a newly-reignited fire.

She instinctively clutched for her sword, finding it still reassuringly within her grasp and the Eye’s chain still taut around her wrist. Lowering her gaze to Sodan she saw that he was awake, squatting in a seemingly random spot further from the fire, fiddling with a small metal box. He opened it and pulled out a cigarette, nestling it in the corner of his mouth, then closing the box.

A moment later, rain began pouring down. Sodan looked up to the sky, and with an apathetic chuckle he reached for his gun. Raising the rifle’s sparklock to his face he cocked the hammer and let it fall - once, twice, thrice - to light the cigarette, putting the gun’s butt to the ground and leaning his chin on the muzzle as he smoked. The rain drenched his hair and ran down his face, but the soldier seemed at peace.

He smoked his cigarette, apathetically stubbed it out, put his helmet back on, got up and just carried on as if nothing had happened. Alcerys didn’t bring it up, and they continued on their journey soon after.

Dozens of kilometers more and one more half-hour break at a secluded river to wash off the filth and eat. Though he knew better than to pry in a situation like this, Strake couldn’t help noticing the strange appearance of his partner’s - or perhaps, retainer’s - skin. The remnants of sacred tattoos could be seen everywhere in the form of utterly pale outlines, the specifics somehow distorted just enough to be illegible, but he knew it wasn’t scarring. This didn’t look like scarring, not burns, not blades, no needles, not some other arcane method of removing ink from the skin. It was as if some divine power had reached in and pulled it out, purposely defacing the iconography in the process. Was this part of becoming a renegade?

He smoked another cigarette, truly grateful for the gift. Besides its value as a memento of a home long gone, it was split into two sections - one held a single cigarette at a time, with a gimmick Fog Storage glyph that spat out another cigarette out of a limited storage space whenever the box was closed while the slot was empty. Sodan didn’t know how many it held, and didn’t care.