No small part of you wants to drive a sword through her throat as you did with your new recruits. To watch the light fade from her eyes as her sclera melt into a midnight black, to see the corruption that swells within your blade seep into her veins, to render her existence into a tarnished half-life of mindless servitude to your every want and whim. She lays there upon the hay sprawled out, vulnerable, and defenseless as your heart pounds in your ears with the desire to defile her. It would be so easy, so simple, so delightful to ram your blade straight through her and take from her all the things that she was and will be.

Your chest heaves, your breath becomes hot and heavy, your murderous and carnal impulses blend together until they become indistinguishable from one another. The woman lying among the hay is no great beauty, her features plain and cute at best. Yet her raw unguarded vulnerability drives you to an insatiable hunger that sets your eyes to devour her sleeping body. Past the dopey smile upon her drooling lips, beyond the pillow-soft valley that lay betwixt her freckled mountains, they find even more tempting targets that set your bloodlust aflame.

Her precious carotid is right there in the open, all but enticing you to give it a squeeze.

She best not think you can't see what's hidden beneath the grease-stained overalls that conceal her bosom, no. Her aorta and inferior vena cava are just hanging out there, without a single plate of armor to protect them, begging for you to drive your blade in straight to the hilt.

And with one of her arms flopping lackadaisically high above her head, she can't have done this accidentally. The way she shows off her armpit - and more importantly, the axillary vein beneath it - is far too lewd. Those are the things that dreams are made of, dreams of crawling through the mud of a rain soaked battlefield and climbing atop the broken body of a heavily armored foe who has fallen and cannot get up. The weary acceptance of their fate, the intimacy as you stare lovingly into their eyes as your blade slowly slides through the gaps in their defenses left by the joints in their harness.

The gasp of their final breath.

The embrace of the little death.

It takes every ounce of your discipline to hold yourself back. If you were the sort of woman who gave into her impulses, you would have already had this deliciously vulnerable woman pinned beneath your arms and begun stabbing her. With your blade or with your lance, it doesn't matter. Both are raring and ready to go, one rippling into your hands as the other stirs within your codpiece. When you see such delectable vulnerability, your heart's first desire is to destroy it.

But you hold yourself back.