The Choice is Yours: Part 3

  Enaj nodded apprehensively, feeling the sharpened chicken bone hidden behind his shirt.  He then told Tsruhelkcorb the sad story of his life at the orphanage.  Tsruhelkcorb wept as he listened, shocking Enaj, who certainly did not expect such feelings in a hardened brute.  Together, they trudged to Tsruhelkcorb’s hut through the thick layer of snow.  When they finally arrived, Enaj warmed up at the hearth and was offered a mouthwatering meal of roast horse chestnuts with honey and rabbit.   While Enaj was eating, Tsruhelkcorb, with surprising speed and agility, built a bunk out of some spare twigs from a pile behind his hut.  Afterwards, his stomach pleasantly full for the first time he could remember in his life, Enaj was so tired and blissful that he fell fast asleep.

In the morning, Enaj woke up to find Tsruhelkcorb staring at him from a distance, silently muttering something to himself, while sharpening a knife.  

“Good Morning,” said Enaj.  

Tsruhelkcorb silently nodded and pointed the knife at the table.  Enaj saw that a meal of boiled bear was waiting for him.  He lunged at the bear and devoured most of its chewy flesh, while Tsruhelkcorb watched, unmoved.  

“Wow, they must have really starved you at the orphanage,” he finally said.  After Enaj finished eating, Tsruhelkcorb went up to him, still casually gripping the knife, and asked, “what is it that you plan to do with your life now?”  

Enaj answered that he would be honored to be mentored by the assassin, and that what he desired most deeply was revenge against the orphanage masters and the tyrant who set it up.  Tsruhelkcorb smiled slightly out of the corner of his mouth and cracked his knuckles.  

“I think that would be useful for both of us,” he said.  "It gets lonely living here alone, eating alone, drinking alone, killing alone, and it would be great to have someone to practice with.”  And thus, Enaj’s transformation into an assassin began.

For more than four years, Enaj and Tsruhelkcorb trained daily in both the physical, mental, and spiritual techniques necessary for a successful assassination.  They practiced fighting with fists and powerful kicks.  They practiced using daggers and long elongated blades, of which Tsruhelkcorb had plenty, forged in the furnace he had built right in the hut, using metal ore he dug up in the wilderness and the roaring fire.  They practiced meditating and staying calm and alert in the face of danger, and drank a special mind-focusing tea, made from a secret root, each day.  They practiced coming up with unique strategies based on schematics of buildings, rooms, and guard patrol paths.  They practiced camouflaging themselves to get into places undetected.  They practiced quick thinking to get out of challenging situations.  Yet rather than getting tired of all this practice, Enaj was invigorated, channeling his rage at the masters into every kick he made.  Yet one summer, it all ended.