Glimpse

The man's eyes quivered, his face dull with realization. "You'll never stop, will you? If I ignore you, you'll continue. If I kill you, others will come. There's no escape."

I started started to smirk. It was rare when I had such a self-aware quarry. Usually they fought back pointlessly, refusing to accept their fate. Today would be easy, simple. Unexpected, but not unwelcome. "As long as you are who you are, as long as you know what you know, it will never stop. You can either can continue suffering, or end it all here."

But what I didn't expect was his reaction. His face, contorted with fear, slowly started to change. And he laughed. The most disturbing laugh of my life, as if he had realized his entire life was one giant joke, and this was the punchline. Not knowing how to react, having no training to react to madness such as this, I simply stared at him, this insane, maladjusted person.

As the laughter finished, he finally spoke these words. "I've run away all my life. Everything I've done, I've tried to hide. You killed everyone I knew; you killed my teacher, the one who taught me magic, and left me with nothing. So I took that nothing, and lived with it. I carved out a normal life, a boring, meaningless life, but a life. But you wouldn't stand for that. You wanted to oppress me. Crush my spirit. Make me your slave. Breaking me is merely the expected endpoint."

He looked up, and his eyes glistened, the spirit of life strong within him. "As long as I live, as long as there is breath within me, I shall make you and all your kinds very existence hell. I will fight you no matter the odds, the risks, or the danger. You try to break me because I know too much, a liability to your precious kingdom of dust. But that's all it is. A kingdom that shall go back to dust. And I...I shall be the executioner."