He silently laid the old doctor in the crude shack at the edge of the village. Imitating what he had seen the doctor do, he clumsily tended to the man who had saved his life, now deeply unconscious from pushing himself far beyond his limits. He gave him water, cooled him with cold cloths, and even tried to identify the bottles and jars in his medicine pouch, though he recognized none of them.
The village survivors would quietly leave clean water and roasted fungi at the shack's door, then slip away. In this simplest of ways, they expressed their gratitude to the "pale giant god who saved the entire village" and the "old doctor who risked his life to save others."
Mortarion paid them no attention.
Most of the time, he would walk alone to a hillside near the village and sit on a huge rock, looking down at the settlement flickering in and out of view through the sickly green poison fog.
He began to think.
For the first time in his life, he truly thought. Not about how to fight, how to take revenge, or how to endure pain. Instead, he considered questions that were more fundamental, that reached deeper into the soul.
The old doctor's words echoed in his mind day and night like ghostly whispers.
"What makes you any different from that tyrant on the mountaintop?"
Different...
Was there any difference?
Nakare used poison gas and sorcery, treating mortals as playthings and experimental subjects, reveling in the power to decide who lived and who died.
And me? He had tried to use hatred and the threat of death to force mortals onto the battlefield, treating them as expendable tools for his grand revenge.
Their methods differed. One used evil sorcery; the other used "noble" hatred. But