When Death Looks Back
August DWC 2025
Day 3: Twitterpated/Primal
The world always narrows to the circle of glass.
Through the scope, there are no kingdoms, no factions, no words. Just the pulse of prey moving against the weight of silence. The sniper’s eye finds it, drinks it in, studies the rhythm. Every gesture, every careless breath, every twitch of a hand is recorded, measured, anticipated.
His own body obeys a different law in these moments. The breath slows. The heartbeat grows heavy in his chest, each thud echoing like a drum in a cave. The finger rests against cold steel, not yet commanded, but ready. Muscles coil, honed by years, as steady as stone yet alive with the tension of the strike.
The predator lives here, just behind the calm. Waiting. Patient.
Then comes the stillness. The breath halts, held between ribs as if the whole world is asked to stop with it. For that single suspended instant, the distance between hunter and hunted is gone. Two lives, one eye behind the glass and one oblivious within its circle, tied together by nothing more than the weight of a fingertip.
And then the choice to end it. The surrender. The shot.
The world exhales with the rifle, and the silence shatters like glass.
Sometimes, I catch myself thinking about it... what if the contract had ever fallen on him? What if Lukel’s name had been scrawled in black ink on thin parchment, laid at my feet as so many others have been? I can see it so clearly. The glass rising to my eye, the crosshairs settling against that starlit skin, my breath drawing down to stillness. His figure caught perfect in the circle. The way it always is. The way it has to be.
But him… no. Him, I know it would have been different. I can almost see the moment Mizereem’s pale eyes would have turned, unhurried and unflinching, meeting mine through the scope as though he’d known I was there all along. That gaze white as bone, stripped of all warmth would have cut through the calm I’ve trained into every sinew of myself. I would have felt the tremor, the slip, the hesitation that no hunter can afford. He would have pierced me before the bullet ever left the chamber.
And gods, the worst of it is I know I’d have felt the same thing then that I feel now. The way my chest stutters, the way my blood rushes sharp and hot, the way something ancient inside me bows its head in recognition. Even if I’d never touched him, never heard his voice, never known his name, that heartbeat would still have betrayed me. That inevitability. That pull. Even the Butcher, especially the Butcher, would have undone me and I’d never have understood why until it was far too late.
@daily-writing-challenge @lukel-sunshadow
