Caul Caul Groon

[Cptn Corizon 0]

Lay me doon in the caul caul groon

Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun

Lay me doon in the caul caul groon

Whaur afore monie mair huv gaun

 

The sun rose gently over the bridge of the USS Excalibur. Standing on the foreword observation deck in silence, Corizon let the rays wash against his face. The room was still in the quite morning. The last three weeks had seen him turn from rational Starfleet Captain, to obsessive whale hunter.

 

Had the Dominion War so deeply affected him that he could no longer function rationally with out letting it murk his judgment?

The Good of the Federation. The reasoning sounded as empty as the room. How many atrocities had been committed in the name of protecting the government; how many atrocities had been committed by a small powerful minority ruling in proxy, capriciously making choices for the whole.

 

Clawed fists clenched tight on the thoughts. He was becoming the very thing he despised. And the damnedest part of it was that no matter how much he wanted to blame the Dominion, no matter how much he hated them for turning the pristine worlds of the Alpha Quadrant into a war zone and forever altering that world—he had only himself to blame.

 

Something urged to him to transfer the reason behind his actions to the Scorpiads, but deep inside, he knew it wasn’t their fault. They hadn’t compromised the very moral fabric of everything he stood for; no, only one person could be held on trial for that charge. Corizon.

 

Merlin was just the beginning. The compromise of morality hadn’t been a quick, overnight process; one by one, slowly he’d succumb to the darker urges of the world. He’d done what had to be done to protect the Federation. He’d killed, lied, and broken more laws than he cared to remember. But no punishment had been handed down to him, not one demerit, not one reprimand existed on his file. At some level, he’d begin to realize that the torment of living with his actions was punishment itself.

 

Slowly you became numb. Slowly, you started to be able to live with it. Slowly, you became comfortable with it. Once and a while, after you’d lived with it long enough though, it all came rushing back to you in a torrent of guilt.

 

It was a burden that no one should ever have to carry. But it was burden that he’d accepted long ago. There was little he do could about the past, it was sketched into the sands of time, but the future lay before him. Sorehl had given him a reminder, a reminder than the values of the Federation were important than the survival of the Federation.

 

A wise man had once said that it far more noble to die with your values intact, than to live forever with compromised morals. Indeed, with out the founding principals of the Federation intact, all of his sacrifices would be in vain.

 

And the trial continued…