Lying there, in the dirt, the blood on his gut warm and sticky on his hands, Sheppard Book almost felt like laughing, if it wouldn’t hurt so damn much. The irony of it all, to live the life he had led only to die like this… A cough wracked his body, pulling at the dried viscera in the wound. His only regret was that when his past finally came hurtling to claim him, it had taken the good people around him with him.

When the dark wood fell before me

And all the paths were overgrown

When the priests of pride say there is no other way

I tilled the sorrows of stone

He had been a true believer, raised deep in the Core, the son of a colonel in the Alliance Army. His aptitude for…death had been noted early, when he had achieved black-belt status in three martial arts by the age of nine. His father had been honored when the government came to him and asked for his son in service to a higher good, a better world. And through all his training, he had never questioned that, never doubted that his sacrifice, his willingness to be darkness was in the making of a better world. Never until the early years of the war.

I did not believe because I could not see

Though you came to me in the night

When the dawn seemed forever lost

You showed me your love in the light of the stars

He lost his faith on Shadow. The intelligence the Alliance had gathered was that this was one of the hotbeds of rebellion, the yeast leavening the bread of resistance. And so their orders were to wipe it out. He had done worse things, really, in the name of a better world. But this time…the people left on the planet weren’t running the Independent army. They were the old, the women, the children. Their deaths weren’t going to make things better, safer…if anything, he knew it would only make things worse. And so in the eleventh hour, he balked.

Cast your eyes on the ocean

Cast your soul to the sea

When the dark night seems endless

Please remember me

He should have been killed instantly. It was what protocol demanded.