actual not so private training sessions

A sinner's shadow looms over my back.

It twists and stretches with every movement I take as my bones creak with the threat of cannon fire and splinters. A pulse, my pulse, so hard to cherish yet so easy to steal. With ichor bleeding from the splinters in my feeble mind and hope spilling from my hollow veins, bravery blooming from the pores in my skin. The sunlights hits me from from above, yet when I reach to my back I don't feel the ruffle of white wings or the rusted metal of shackles across my torso. I'm Ansel; never a religious man, but a sinner through and through.

I rise to the sound of my own name and pause to the connotations behind it. Lust, greed and envy, only forming a fraction for the army I carry upon my frail shoulders. Doctor Khiev was always a sinner disguised as a saint, I just never dared to pull the label of deceit from my eyes and sober from the high he left embedded in these hollow veins. Now, I'm left as being nothing more than a vessel and I swear, I still carry the sins he left behind before he was condemned to that hangman's noose and he'll ever take them back from beyond the grave. Not while he can't feel my hair in his hands and share the air he shared with a wife and a husband.

So I breathe for him when I step through the doors and almost fall when the pressuized gaze of their judgement steals the air from my lungs and I'm left wishing for a blue moon. One glance upon the weapons rack, one glance upon the rope and instead of wishing for a blue moon and a red sun I'm wishing for answers. Seven sins rode in his lifetime, when I look into a broken mirror and see those seven horsemen I wonder which one led to his fall. If I opened his coffin and examined the gears that turned in the mind of a man who cast aside his humainty and became something despicable in the eyes of the ones he left behind.

("He betrayed us.")

Wroth; I let the my thumb brush the corner of that picture and a cold fury only felt on the opening of that trap door and the gentle swing of his corpse attached to that rope overcomes me. Was it a fit of rage followed by a moment of madness? Did the men and women he reduced to a butcher's meet slight him in ways that touched whatever shred of honour he held?

Did he feel the way I feel?

It doesn't matter, the first horseman ride and I follow, taking slow steps towards the weapons rack without even a word of introduction; they know the connotations that come to the name Ansel Khiev better than me I suppose. My fingers coil around the axe and a chill from a self-fullfilling prophecy comes to fruition, I suppose the rotton apple never fall far from the seed after all. Yet I've never been one to flourish in order, only the chaos that came with theory, so I find the first mechnical construct given by the Capitol and strike at the embodiment of greed swallowed by the ravine of corruption. Burying the axe so deep within it's shoulder it almost comes clean off.

Envy; and in the second between my first strike and my second the dummy morphs into Four. One who embodies power with a gaze and fear with their prescence. I would presume they hold a forbidden garden on their fingertips, a wealth of power at their disposal. The possibility to slit a throat and the privallege of a god. On the second clumsy strike, the arm hits the ground with a thud and I stumble back.

The second horsemen tightens his reigns and I wonder if he held the same hold over my father when opened the flesh of the innocence with a weapon such as this. Did they come from such a privallege that he held the same hatred I hold? Internally sneer the way I did at the sight of them and cringe at the thought of the library of power at their fingertips?

Was it enough for him to sink his blade into their remaining arm?

Did he leave them armless because that that?

Pride; I ride in unison with the third horseman and don't hesitate to smile at the rhythm of my heartbeat. Stripping of the power abused by those who would play with the lives of those lost to the game of luck or the game of madness. I don't know Four, I don't know them by anything other than their number and their presumed definitions of power held at their fingertips so I smile before letting another cry and hacking at the first of their remaining limbs.

I wonder if he would've been proud if the rotten apple falls from the same rotten tree. If he would be proud of the son who rides with the entity's he rode with in the name of loving him. I never saw the cogs that drive his thought process but I saw the certificates on our wall, the way his eyes glinted at the sight of them and the way he smiled when I promised him I'd be a brave son, not a broken one.

Is a wounded pride worth killing for?

They called him butcher when he hung, not the title he took pride in but a title that left the ones he cared about repulsed. Everyone but me, leaving me to wonder if I could trace his outlines in the constellations at midnight and be something he could smile at. I think he would smile if I could do this, if I could strip the power from the powerful and become the rotten apple worthy from his seed.

Lust; I lost sight of the fourth horseman when Serena left me with my head buried in the pillow and my eyes full of stardust. I decided I would die alone, drowning in darkness with with name stolen from my lips. I wonder if they have someone who would cry at the stipping of their power, if I could look in their eyes and see a library full of all the ways a person could break. Solitary tears and dried bloodstains -- they become one in the same when I remove their final limb with a two strokes. I'm left looming over the head and torso like an executioner, a power I never lusted for.

I wonder if he lusted for power that repulsed me or a woman that wasn't my mother. If one of those murdered people was a woman who spurned a married man or simply another piece to satisfy a lust for power I never saw in his eyes.

Gluttony; I spot the fifth horseman in the corner of my eye when I bring the axe down on their neck and my hands are coated in the ichor of power and their head is rolling at my feet. Not a gluttonous man but a selfish boy, I stop over the red pool forming around the ground and bending over it. Taking a finger and drawing the number four in the stained ground before me and letting the axe fall. Stepping back away from my handiwork with shaking hands and a shaken morality.

A selfish boy, over indulgence of the simple memory of a dead man until the luxury became a need. I wonder if staining our paper white kingdom in red turned him into a glutton, something despicable yet completely out of his control. The clicking of the cogs turning thoughts in his mind was silent to the outside but thunder in his, I will never know if he became a glutton for the luxury of bloodshed in his final moments.

All I know is that he hung.

Sloth; I step away from the mark of four and find the eyes of one. The gallop of that sixth horsemen in rhythm with my racing heart, I move find rope tying it into the best noose I can find as I feel time tick and the pressurized judgement begin to pass on the fallen. I can't quite find the parts that fuelled me before, the ambition would've grown into a garden wilted on the first vine when he swung. He became a catalyst for laziness that day, for I was left without a clue of what to do other than wander vagabond through the maze of my introverted mind. A mindsweeper, following the laws set by my own arbritrary state of silent despair but outward indifference.

They called him a lazy killer, a clumsy axe leaving bodies dismembered from limbs to torso to head -- they wondered of the rotten apple would fall from the rotten tree. Looking back at the lazy four left on the ground and the mess next to it, I find myself wondering if it has. The imprecise cuts of the underprivalleged and the messy strokes fuelled by the sounds and sights of five horsemen.

Greed; my noose loops around the neck of one and the end of the rope is flung over their artificial tree branch. The final horseman and rides into the sunset and I my fists tighten around the end the red stained rope and I heave, pulling the dummy up with the number two tatooed across my eyes, flailing legs and a stiff corpse. I grit my teeth tying the rope around the bar so they just stay and hang.

I've clung onto everything I had of him that wasn't ripped away from my calloused hands and drawn from my hissing teeth. Hoarding his possessions from the moment his body went stiff and swung to my mother turning him from the hope of ressurection to a charred graveyard in our backgarden. The smell of our burning paper kingdom more prominant than any memories I have of him in that moment. An ignition of the madness that drove me to abandon the ashes of the inheritance I was promised and carve out something new by sacrificing pieces of my heartbeat.

He was the shelter in the storms I never knew how to weather and I cannot say I've found the cause of the downfall of such a man just staring into bitter reflection of myself. As the seven horsemen fade into the shadows I'm left to scrawl the number one on the hanging dummy's chest just so I have a chance of distinguishing memory from reality and they can see what I see before stepping out of that room.

I wonder which of these seven will bury me while I stand with one foot already in the grave.