[ WP ] If you stay alive for no other reason , do it for spite .

Aleksander sat on his cot in the swaying belly of the ship, turning the burnt ring over and over in his hand. It was a simple thing, cracked and banded with iridescent color and blackened edges where cheap silver had once shone. 
 
 He remembered so little. His wife's face was gone, as was that of the child they had taken in. Their names were ashes on his tongue, dissolving away like all the others he had known. He was n't even sure if he'd had parents. Well, true parents at least. 
 
 But, though he could not recall his childhood or a single member of his family, he remembered the pain as he dragged himself through the snow. Shiny, cracked skin tearing and letting blood steam against the gossamer frost with every move. Hands seeping and aching as he lifted himself after each fall. He remembered that all too well. 
 
 The dread as well, he remembered. He had tried so hard to save his village when they came. His neighbors and loved ones hid as he had wanted and he took to the street when the torch lights were seen on the horizon, echoing their arrival against the pitch night sky. He waited in the dark square of his village, fat flakes of snow catching in his hair and melting down his face and throat. He felt fear churning in his stomach. 
 
 They came and they screamed and raged against him. For a while he was afraid that his neighbors might break their promise to stay hidden and help him, but they did not. They knew what the crusaders did. 
 
 But these were n't the crusaders that they knew and feared, these were a splinter of men full of hate greater than even their predecessors. A splinter galvanized from the shattered remains of the human rebellion. A splinter that Aleksander had not heard about out in his small village in the Siberian wilderness because any who knew of them was dead. These crusaders did not take kindly to those who consorted with the devils of the night. 
 
 Five men lashed him to a post they erected and the rest went from house to house, dragging his neighbors out into the street. They shrieked and writhed against them, and a few even fought the crusaders, but no matter how they struggled it was for naught. 
 
 Aleksander begged and pleaded for them to stop. He saw them, a group of them, approach his home. Tears joined melting snow as he beseeched them. They broke the door with an axe and entered, one at a time. The metal chains holding him to the post cut and bruised his wrists as he tore against them, his captors striking him relentlessly to keep him still. He heard her scream, their child cry. He felt his slow and steadily beating heart fall out of his chest. 
 
 He could not remember what happened after that. It was a haze in his head. Anguish and despair handing him over to death with ease, though death had not taken him. He wonders if it had rejected him and his burnt form. If it had seen into his heart and knew that he had not tried as hard as he could've. Or perhaps they had just lit a poor fire. He could n't care less. 
 
 He drank what he could from his neighbors and wept as he did, knowing that he had failed them. He could not remember them, the flames had taken so much that it was all his body could to to keep him alive, much less to retain the centuries he had lived. But he kissed each of them on their forehead after he drank and begged forgiveness. 
 
 He remembered laying with his wife and child for a long, long time, curling against their disfigured and broken corpses as though they still held warmth. Cold air filled their home through the broken aperture and he gripped them more tightly. They were all that he had had. They were human, as he had been. They loved him. He loved them. They were no more. Only a feeling. 
 
 He turned the ring over again in his hand, cold metal against new skin, and listened to the waves crash against the wooden hull around him. The new world held promise for him. He hoped to find purpose there. And if any man, woman, or beast tried to take that purpose from him as they had before, they would feel the flame that burnt where his heart had been.
