This is my recent story, The Light Binds Dust. It's pretty shit. Have fun reading it. Have you ever wanted to forget so badly that you’d be willing to get rid of everything you’d ever seen, heard, or thought? Needed to be freed from something you did so terribly that you’d forfeit your life up to that point just to get rid of it? I found it under a rusty old tanker in the Plaguelands. A tiny slip too soft to be heard by the dreg to the right but not sneaky enough to get past me. It was a little human kid. No parents, no name. It didn’t even talk. Just stared at me with eyes that said “You gonna -blam!-in’ kill me or what?” Figured I had to be the hero and take her back to the city with me. That’s what guardians do, isn’t it? My Ghost called her Shade, after where we found her. Thinks he’s such a clever little piece of junk. Kid was a damn sneaky -blam!-er. Had been getting around the fallen all this time without any help, I suppose. She looked about ten or eleven in solar years. Real young. She didn’t have any problem keeping up, though. Transmat was too risky for something that ain’t light touched, so we had to get back to my junker on foot. Picked our way through a few fallen patrols and shit like that. It had been a quiet day so far. Lucky us. Sometimes the -blam!-ers were too spread out to drag her through ‘em without getting ourselves caught, so I had to pick ‘em off with a rifle. She loved the sound of it, the shooting. She’d cover her little ears and stare down the sights as best she could while I lined it up and smiled real big every time she saw a head pop. We were almost to the little cave where I hide my beacons when we ended up watching a huge firefight between a fallen drop party and some asshole hive. I pulled Shade up onto an overhang where I knew the -blam!-ers couldn’t see us and we got to watch the whole thing go down. I’m pretty sure she was enjoying it more than I was. I looked down to smile at the little shit and there was a shock blade through her stomach. She didn’t seem to mind, really. Just looked up at me with those eyes and then died. I turned my head and stared at the culprit. Bastard dreg had the ugliest mother-blam!-ing grin on his face. I jumped on him and tore his -blam!-ing arm off like it was nothing. I beat his face into a goddamned bloody stain, screaming into my helmet the entire time. The whole congregation had heard what was going on by that point, but I didn’t give a shit. I drew my hunting knife and killed every last one of the leftover fallen as slowly and satisfyingly as I could before moving onto the next. One of them refused to go down, so I dropped the knife and tackled it to the dirt. I slid the ugly bastard’s shock knife out of his hip and stabbed him through the face for hours. It felt like hours, at least. I guess I thought it’d make me feel better, but it didn’t. After I was done I climbed back up the rocks and stared at her for awhile. I didn’t dare move her little body, for fear of seeing any more of what the dreg did to her insides. “Ghost, bring her back.” He said he couldn’t do that, that there were important reasons why I’ve only got one Ghost, told me that there are limits to what light can do for someone. “Ghost. Bring the -blam!-ing girl back, now.” He argued with me for hours. I killed myself a few times, just to piss him off. A fall off a cliff without armor, a cannon shot to the head while he wasn’t looking. Stupid shit like that. Eventually I cracked him by saying I’d crush him before I tried again. He floated over, shaking like he was about to see a ghost. He released his servos and started spinning, giving off a soft, wet light. The body disappeared and Ghost kept working. The brightness got harsher around him and I waited. I knew it took awhile without any help. Days passed while he worked. Sometimes I had to keep a couple of dregs off of us when they passed through. I didn’t bother trying to smash ‘em like I did the first ones. There wasn’t any point to that. The third day after he started, Ghost floated over to me and said he was done. He transmatted it in from wherever he had been hiding it. Whatever the -blam!- he had made, it wasn’t Shade. It wasn’t even human. It sat there staring at me. It’s eyes were blank. They weren’t her eyes. It wasn’t her. “What the -blam!- is she Ghost. What did you do?” He told me he did the only thing he knew how to do, that it was the best he could manage, that he “warned me about this days ago!” I didn’t -blam!-ing care. That dead thing, whatever it was, it wasn’t human. Neither was I. I guess it took this long to realize that. I was staring into my own eyes. The eyes of a dead thing, heralded by a dead god, made only to bring death. I drew my cannon and fired three times. I watched it turn to dust. That’s all I can remember now. Those are the only memories I’ve got. Forty four damned times I’ve had them try and I still can’t -blam!-ing forget.