What should have been a normal night

[DoS Archive]

From: sartanz@aol.com (Sartan Z)
Date: 24 Jan 2000 01:08:56 EST

A broken bottle of rum on the floor. A corpse lying next to it.

He'd been drinking every evening without failure since Dalamar's death. Outwardly, Sartan remained who he always was but the inner turmoil had never ceased. Over and over, he'd play the image in his mind, Dalamar collapsing as the last blow struck. After a while, his mind began to play tricks on him, and he's see himself as the one holding the blade that struck the final blow. If he'd only been more prepared, if he could only have beaten Seamus,
if only he'd anticipated. But he didn't. And it didn't cost a person he looked up to, a person he considered his best friend, a title. It had cost him his life. The abuse of the alcohol started innocently enough, simple experimentation really. Some of his friends had even mocked him a bit, said they'd known he was drinking. If only they'd realized how close to the truth they actually were.

Over the course of the many nights since Dalamar's demise, Sartan's tolerance for alcohol had grown higher and higher, so, relatively speaking, he hadn't anticipated this bottle of rum to do more than perhaps make him belch a bit louder than usual. But alcohol poisoning is something out of the hands of an alcoholic or his ridiculous logic.

Without so much as a final groan, a young man, in what should have been the prime of his life, passed; a young man whose fatal flaw was that he knew not how to deal with the loss of his best friend.