Re-released: 5.Nov.08

Runner up for Most Thought-Provoking '03

By: Varyn

They would never have guessed this, not of Darya. She was a competent, loyal, soldier. A ruthless Predacon. Ever since she had landed, quite by accident, lost on this unknown planet, they had thought her an angel of death fallen somehow into the right design. Her comrades admired her. Megatron respected her, giving her the most difficult assignments with full confidence. She knew, and they knew, that with her nature and its hunger for extremes, she was full of potential.

And that was just the problem.

Through some cruel game of fate she was smart enough to know, almost inherently, that there was more and better in this universe than the life she'd chosen would show her, and this very personality that ensured her respect, power, even fame-- made her choices inescapable. Her mind was her prison of fortune. It sealed her, as a deal with Unicron, a contract with the very pit itself, into a life of torment. Her own, and the joy of causing it in others. All her life she had found some sick pleasure in not only the murder of other beings, but in pushing away those who cared for her. Watching their hearts break amused her, even as it broke her own, and she had no idea why. She always became lost in the whims of her mind, the failings of her spirit. Her lack of guilt over it all made her somehow strong though she felt crippled, and trapped. Even in her brief moments of renunciation she knew that she was renouncing her inner disobedience only to lend it charm, to make it fresh and new once more when she invariably returned to it. She could not help herself nor restrain herself, corruption was her one fatal attraction and she nestled in its arms. Besides, everything and everyone had always disappointed her anyway-- or was that merely a justification? Certainly she had betrayed many, but she could well remember being betrayed herself, though mostly in her youth before she owned the keys to betrayal's secrets, its passages. Once she had learned of its ways, her initial pain had turned to fascination, then practice, perfection, and obsession. The lives that were fool enough to become intertwined with her own simply fell apart, and in the subtlety of this art her own wounds were forgotten.

Darya paused, then, for a moment, breathing in the delicate morning air. The solitude of the glade in which she sat echoed around her, and she turned, just slightly, to catch a glimpse of herself in the little pool that rippled by her side. Fed by a continuous spring, the water cascaded over the nearby cliff, moving always and yet adding to the sense of stillness that enclosed the little vale around it. This strange world was so beautiful that sometimes, if only she could have killed thought, Darya believed that it would have carried her away from herself at first contact. She might have lived then, untroubled and without ambition, akin to the leaves that are kissed by sunlight in the day, and shed dewy tears under the midnight moon in silent and stunning harmony. She would never feel the mad need for extremes, higher peaks and lower lows, in a cycle that had neither. She would be at peace.

However, even this thought, this new idea, was tinted with something, some longing for hate, that refused to die until she herself did. The mania would NOT leave her alone-- would not, at any rate, leave her until she left herself.

And that was why she was here, now, falling to pieces somewhere within herself. She turned back upon her reflection with sudden fury, her mind reeling, "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you..."

Darya rose to her feet, looking out over the mountainous vista as she drew forth her favorite blade of cold, lithe steel. A pulsing sensation she dimly recognized as rage pounded at the back of her mind as she pressed the blade to her lower arm, not far above her wrist, and in a fluid motion of release, she cut a smooth deep gash. As she did so the voices in her head kept up a commentary:

That was for all the times you murdered love for your own pleasure, if only because love is unselfish and pleasure is not.

Darya raised the knife again, the mutilation was pointless given what she planned to do, but in this lack of meaning her feelings of liberation were intensified. Her thoughts ran on, uninterrupted:

This is for all the times you were not worthy of that which you killed.

Another welt was opened, and her life’s fluid was falling in time with the water now, over the edge of the cliff.

This is your punishment, here and now, for all the times you should have suffered over your own folly but instead were granted a reprieve you did not deserve, but that you took without even giving thanks.

This third gash was deepest of all, exposing wires, and circuits, and delicate inner workings.

With a sudden surge of feeling, the first pure impulse Darya had ever felt told her that she was finally and fully taking control of herself, her life, her ravaging inner fire. She strode two steps further and said, as if in reply to her own conscience, "And this one is for me."

Her voice trailed off slightly, bitter yet triumphant, just before her feet left that ledge forever...

"Yes, for me.

For all that I am, and shall never again be..."