Role

Chapter 1

By the time Hamashor was near the middle of his life, his bones were
beginning to creak. His strength and speed weren't what they used to
be, but he could still swing his axes well enough. He woke up
coughing in the middle of the night sometimes, shrugging it off as a
mere annoyance... but somewhere in his tiny mind he began to wonder
about his fading health, sitting in the cold and wet. His losses were
taking their toll. What could he do? Nothing. Get back up, keep the
axes swinging, and wait for the next great battle. Nothing else
mattered.

And yet even the brawls he continually threw himself into began to
lose their allure. A good, even fight... even a thrashing at the
hands of a better warrior... had become a rare event to be treasured.
His goal, to prove that a well-honed and highly-trained body could
match one enhanced by magical means, to rage and spit and howl in fury
and send his opponents fleeing in terror, had somehow become secondary
to his unspoken desire to rediscover the joy of combat for himself.
Hamashor had become numb. Was it old age, creeping in and forcing him
to think against his will?

No matter. Hold your weapons firmly, hurl them at your foe. Skin him
and wear him as a trophy, or suffer a defeat. All that mattered was
the fighting. Hamashor would find joy in it once more, he knew.

Then the unthinkable: his own commander, the leader of his village,
calling his desire to stand and fight into question. Hamashor had
been set upon by many enemies. He'd been knocked into submission,
bound and gagged, blindfolded and made deaf by the almost-mystical
workings of a bard. When he was awoken and attacked, completely
insensible but able to keep his feet, he gritted his teeth and stood
his ground. Flight never entered his mind.

Later on, when both had been shamefully defeated, his commander told
him that it had in fact been HE who had awoken Hamashor, and that he
was angry Hamashor had not fled. "I would have hoped, against so
many, your first instinct would have been to get away." The berserker
was humbled, belittled, bewildered, and horrified. The mighty warrior
Jinroh was sitting next to him, at a shrine to the gods of battle,
telling him in no uncertain terms that he was wrong to fight, that he
was wrong NOT to think, to flee.

This left Hamashor badly shaken, affecting him more deeply than any
defeat ever had. Was thought itself truly a sickness, as he'd
suspected? Had the commander been afflicted? Or was Hamashor a fool
to live the life of a truly unyielding berserker?