[prompt] egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
It's easy to start to lose track of time when a thousand differing timelines are colliding outside of your door; when the man who killed you a matter of weeks ago stands before you, ten years on. It's easy to forget, and of course, Martel has never done anything the easy way if he could humanly avoid it. And why would he? Why should he? With his vaunted intellect, his tactical skill; too clever by half, too easily bored. Why make anything less of a challenge?
Why back down?
It had been pride that killed him in the end. Pride, heavy armor, and a touch of dulling madness. (Perhaps the sword and undoubtedly the skill of the man at the other end of it had a little something to do with it as well.)
He'd made a choice and he'd seen it through. (Made his bed and lay in it.) It was cold comfort then (with Annias' narrow-minded idiocy and that vicious strumpet Arissa to contend with, and it'd not have killed Adus to bathe once in a blue moon--though no one would've mourned much if it had), and now it's just sort of amusing, provided one doesn't object to a bit of black gallows humor. (He doesn't; some of the company he's kept lately is less impressed with his idea of 'conversationally appropriate'.)
Redemption is not a word he uses readily, nor willingly. 'Reformation' is more acceptable, but redemption--atonement--no.
No, they don't seem fair.
(It's still pride and semantics. Then, he has nothing but time any more.)
prompt: "Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity." frank leahy.
word count: 260