It's funny how things develop, how life experience influences who you are and what you become. The thing is you can always look back and see so clearly the path that brought you to where you are even though the markers may not have let you know where you were going. The frustrating thing is, even with the path behind you being so clear, you usually can't get much of a good hint where you are going. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off sleeping through the quiet times by the campfire, the late night watches that leave little room for anything, but self reflection and a sharpening of blades.
You see, where I grew up, a man took pride in his ability to do more with less. Not an unusual way of thinking in a place where most had little or not enough. To show skill with simple tools was more greatly admired than to be the fellow with a new tool or convenience to get things done. A carpenter skilled in the old ways with a keen eye, axe and hammer earned more respect than a new age craftsman with his fancy blades, drills and planes. The same rules applied to one of the most renowned of trades in The Well, the Enforcer.
It was common knowledge that you could cover a man with a small fortune in armor, give him a great huge blade worth a month of working man's wages and turn him into a war machine to enforce your will upon whomever you wished. Now a man worthy of respect, a man of cunning and guile to be admired and feared could enforce his will with deadly efficiency in a much more modest fashion. He could use something light and common, cheaply gained, easily transported and concealed, a man of true grit and dangerous demeanor could turn his will on the blade of a simple knife. Jorlax the White was such a man in my City.
Known high and low as a man to be feared, I personally saw him dispatch opponents with a knife on three different occasions as a boy, two business and one personal. All in public, all became a part of his legend. I studied those moves, I learned how to move like him, how to hold a stick in the same way, how to make that blade a part of me. I wanted to be like him, I wanted to be a knife fighter and a man to be feared. I made it my life's obsession. Funny thing the determination of youth is after a while you just fade into being. In the years since I've known the blade, I started looking to prove I had what it took. To count every fight as a notch on my belt and another trophy for my own personal abattoir. I've survived on the razors edge for quite some time now, killed great warriors, and unspeakable things, enemies of which I had not even dreamed existed. I've seen magic and revolution and been held in audience by the dead Emperor of old and somewhere along the way I forgot about trying to be a killer. That's the thing I see know when I look back in my minds eye. I remember now the images of Jorlax I saw as a child and I realize that he is clumsy to me. I see what he was and know that as I am now, I could take him as he was then. I have reached that place of manhood where I have forgotten to try and become what I desire and it is in fact because I have become it. Now with my kingdom in shambles I am what I had wanted to be, but still I have no direction, there are no signs to this path, and I can not help but wonder where it is that I go...
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