Redux

With numerous places to go but with no reasonable ways to get to them, the old mercenary brought the old ways from the old worlds to him and studied. Within the pages written by those who came before him he realised that he needed a bright star to illuminate his way. So he searched for faces among the millions until he reached the number 12. The beautiful, the talented, the intellectuals, the gifted and those who embraced life in all of its glory. Beacons of light for his nights in solitude and reasons to not let darkness invade every part of his psyche.

For the outside world they would be the masks to shield the few soft parts left in him and a definition of the feminine. Memory fragments of what he would have longed to have touched before the battles and the scars.