Darin looked back up towards the sky as Ridahne mentioned that the Eija would come during the night. It wouldn’t be this nice. At least she didn’t think it would be. The rain was due to continue though the night and late into the next afternoon. It would start to slow down in the morning, so she might be able to make it to the stables in the afternoon without being completely soaked. Of course, that all hinged on whether or not Darin got enough rest tonight in order to regain some of the energy she had lost today. She wasn’t going anywhere as long as she still felt as weak as a newborn kitten.

It also depended on if the weather actually did what Darin thought it should do. She wasn’t sure why she was so sure that the downpour would last until midmorning and the drizzle would continue until almost evening. She wasn’t the best at predicting the weather back home, and there she knew something about the weather patterns. The Seed-Bearer didn’t know anything about the weather patterns here, yet she had thought about what the rain would do with barely a second thought. It was almost like she knew what was happening in the skies of Astra. Though that did make sense. She was The Seed-Bearer. She had held the rain back for just a few minutes. It made sense that she knew how the sky would move.

Darin’s attention was recaptured as Ridahne brough up the man who’s arm she had cut off. Darin didn’t want to talk about that. She didn’t even what to think about that. She had killed a man and didn’t even have the courage to do it directly. She forced him to bleed to death and called it a mercy. Ridahne seemed to think that she was some sort of saint, but Darin just felt like a fraud. She was supposed to be preventing evil; not causing slow and torturous deaths. Why couldn’t she have just killed in in a single moment? Instead she had pretended that he had had a chance of escaping and finding help. It made Darin nauseous. It was a good thing she hadn’t eaten all day, or it might have made a reappearance.

Darin had no intention of talking about it, but she found her herself speaking, “Backup I raise my chickens from the time they hatch until the time they are dinner. They grow to trust me for food and water. I cannot count the number of times I nursed them to health and though sickness. I did the same for the pig. I raise them. I convince them to trust me. I love them and they love me.” She took a deep shuddering breath, “Then I kill them; slaughter them so I can eat their meat for energy, use their bones to make tools, use their feathers to stuff my mattress and pillows. It tore me up each and every single time, yet I did it without a second thought.” She clung tighter to Mitaja, “This though, this was different. He wanted me dead. I don’t know why, but he and his friends wanted me dead. He was a stranger; not a friend I’ve known since birth. IT should have been easy to just take off his head or stab his heart. But I couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage to kill a man flat out so instead I tortured him first.” Darin slowly turned her head to look Ridahne in the eyes, “That man is dead because of me and I know it. I had no choice but to kill him and I know it. I did have a choice in how to do it and I deluded myself into thinking I was showing him a mercy when I didn’t just kill him out right.” The Seed-Bearer was sure, “There was no mercy in what I did. He suffered because I couldn’t do what needed to be done. I can’t afford to make that mistake again.”

Was in wrong of her to feel no guilt for the killing part? Darin wasn’t sure. She just knew that it really was either him or her. She was just glad that it was her. She felt guilt like she had never before for making his death last longer than it needed to. She should have just killed him while she had still been there. Maybe her logic was faulty. She wasn’t sure about that one. Still, she had killed innocent things that had done nothing to her with barely a second thought. Why had it been so much harder to kill a man that was trying to kill her? Then again it didn’t seem right to just kill a man that was tied up. Still, if Darin had left him, he may have actually managed to escape and then gone back to deliver a report. Maybe she should have given him a less severe injury; one he might of survived but left him unable to escape. The problems with that was that she wasn’t sure what that might be and the Eija might have just killed him when they found him anyways. Darin wasn’t sure, and if she couldn’t figure out the answer to this dilemma how was she supposed to figure out the difference between good and evil? She wasn’t sure and that disheartened her.