and if you go, i want to go with you
Later, he will look on this scene with romanticism.
He will wonder at the sunlight through the trees, filtering shards of buttery yellow across the soft, moist dirt below him. The smell of loam, fresh and clean. Birds—he’ll recall their song, their early morning flight and the sound of their fluttering wings in the sky. Everything will be greener when he imagines it; saturated the way only a memory can be, tangled around itself beautifully. Later, it will still hurt, but he will tell others how much that hurt was worth it in the end. How much it saved his life, this sacrifice, pain in this sunlit grove.
“Can’t you hurry it the fuck up?”
And it is painful; not a physical wound, not like the ring of old and new marks around wrists, ankles, throat. Skin rubbed raw and weeping to nasty near permanent scabs. Not like the burn in his lungs from running, or the cramping in tired muscles. His malnourished body, desperate for relief. What it would feel like to lay down on this soil and not get up, the alluring notion of everything ending and it being his choice.
“Fuck off, Ciar,” Sai seethes, blood in his veins racing so hard his hands twitch. Dirt crusts them to his elbows. The grave he’s dug is deep. He doesn’t want an animal snuffling it’s way along and finding his sacrifice. The young man feels the pinprick of tears again, his face already wet with them—and the dirt. He rubs the back of one hand across a cheek, smearing more into his dark brown skin. The tears are good. He worries fingers into the once blue fabric of his mother’s scarf. The tears make it worse. Hurts more, this way.
The scarf is the last thing he has of her, what little tatters of it remain. Sometimes, when he’d been curled around himself, falling asleep on one of the dozens of mats squashed inside the low ceilinged building they’d shoved the prisoners into nightly, Sai swore he could remember the smell of her. The jamun scent, dark purple behind his eyes mingling with her laugh, now the color of bruises to him, once the color of a jam spread across thin bread. Her laugh, her hands, holding his. Her hair, dark and curly and windswept.
Sai pushes the scarf deep into the hole he’d dug with his own hands. Then he touches them to his forehead, trembling. On his knees, bowed over the hole, he touches fingertips to his heart, whispering a prayer. Tears gather on his chin, fat and ripe with misery. They only waver a bit before sliding down the hollow of his throat, the grave for his mother and the last connection to her, denied that.
“Gettup,” Ciar hisses, the sound of his anxious feet on underbrush interrupting Sai’s fevered prayer. He keeps his eyes closed, touching fingers to forehead, mouth, heart and ground. “There’s no Gods out here.”
“For you,” Sai mumbles, pulling himself up. He stumbles, a hand outstretched and caught by Ciar’s. It’s big. Blocky and rough from years in the penal colony; scarred across knuckles and all the way up to his elbows. Scraper scars, they called them, because Ciar was put to work scooping out precious ore from crevices in the mines, blown open by explosives. Sai was almost chosen for that work—slender and long limbed, he would have been a good digger. But he could also read many languages—and write them just as well—and so between back breaking labor pushing the carts, Sai helped sort records for the colony Warden.
It only let him see how much each of their meager lives cost. Profit, that’s all they were.
"Aye,” Ciar says, with a gnashed together snarl of a grin. “If you were sacrificing to my Gods, you’d need blood.”
“He doesn’t ask for that,” Sai mutters, pulling his hand back to wipe the dirt along the shabby rough spun cloth that serves for clothes. He’d left soil on Ciar’s pale hand, but the other prisoner makes no move to clean it off. “Just something that hurts.”
“Huh. Godly enough if you ask me.”
“Oh, I know.” Ciar starts into the forest around them, battering away hanging branches with thick, pale arms. Sai watches. For a moment, watching is all he can do. Stand there, exhausted and dirty and marvel that there is no longer a stretch of chain that connects them. For the first time in years, either man moves without the sound of clinking metal, without the stretch of a chain leash that connects wounds at any given moment.
A glance into the sky, burned out yellow and white, Sai doesn’t feel that freedom yet. The ghost of it lingers around his wrists, as though the farther Ciar gets, the yank will come at last.
Their journey is that of shared silence and misery. The sun above them does little for actual warmth; both prisoners are reduced to trembling shivers, their flea bitten cloth tunics thin and worn, retaining not even the idea of heat. Malnourished. Underfed. Weak despite years of labor. Barefoot, both of them have bloodied heels and cracked toes. The pain is a dull throb of an ache through Sai’s legs, but he says nothing for it—neither does Ciar and it becomes a point of personal pride, to not complain when the Northerner isn’t.
Especially as Ciar moves like a machine, trudging forward wordlessly. Part of that frightens Sai; his ability to keep moving, as though a force of nature. A creature merely following instincts. It doesn’t matter. His back becomes Sai’s north star, leading him forward through the forest.
When the man pulls up short, lifting an arm to stop Sai from continuing, everything tilts inside. His entire existence has boiled down to simply that—walking. Through the pain, over grass and rocks and twigs. Walking with his tired, dehydrated eyes pinned between Ciar’s shoulder blades, watching the way the muscles moved beneath his tunic. His blood drying between his toes, the wind rustling his unwashed hair. He’d grown so used to moving forward that suddenly stumbling to a stop dizzies him. Spins the world around him. Nearly collides him with the Ciar and his raised arm, who grunts and glances over his shoulder.
“What?” Sai asks, his voice a dry rasp. He can’t remember the last time he had water.
Ciar doesn’t answer immediately. The absence of it creates a swell of fear in Sai’s stomach. He isn’t sure how much of a well there is left for that. Endless though it seems, as some point, maybe Sai just won’t be afraid anymore. It feels far off, wishful thinking. Ciar’s shoulders are a rigid line, every muscle taut and coiled, tight underneath wan skin. Sweat has beaded along his pale hair line, little gems sliding down his throat, disappearing beneath the dull white tunic. Sai finds it hard to take a step forward, not just because of the pain, but because it feels easy to keep staring at that. Simple, easy, the world far too large, too colorful outside the penal colony.
And then Ciar steps aside for him, turning to look at Sai, with wide eyes. And a smile. Sai’s never seen Ciar smile before. It seems out of place—almost scary.
Somehow, he manages to tear himself away. He steps around Ciar and looks into a small clearing, made wider by the natural decay of trees. One split open, perhaps by lightening—maybe an animal, striving to deshed antlers. It would almost be a horrifying thought to imagine an animal so large, if it weren’t for the beauty the prisoners have stepped into.
Every surface of that clearing is covered—impossibly—in butterflies. Soft, delicate insects, their wings fluttering lazily. The smell of them is oddly sweet, as though the butterflies are covered in flower pollen. The air about them is hazy, the sunlight nearly a physical thing. The butterflies are every single color Sai hasn’t seen in years; blues and purples and yellows and greens. Iridescent, glittering. A patch of them lift from a fallen tree and scatter into the wind, tumbling around the way only small, pitiful creatures can. Sai stares at them, at the blanket of them all over everything. His throat bobs, his hand touching a spot in the middle of his chest.
And before he can say anything, the entire swarm of them rise, up into the air. They disperse, like a cloudy rainbow, disappearing into the sky and into the forest. Like they were never there to begin with. Only, without them, the forest doesn’t look ugly anymore. Just a remnant of the butterfly swarms resting space. Capable of being strangely beautiful now.
“Bugs,” Ciar says, cutting through the peacefulness. His voice is near, making Sai stumble, arms interlocking around his slim midsection. The other man has an oddly bashful look about him, glancing sideways and then away—then back again. It makes Sai smille back.
“Bugs,” he replies, in wearily happy agreement.
It’s the first time either of them have spoken since the swarm. Sai had almost forgotten either of them could even make noise, his existence once again reduced to shambling along behind the other big, snowy prisoner.
Ciar’s arm twists, a finger jabbing toward a tree with a near invisible mark made upon it. A carved symbol, no bigger than a palm and nearly worn away by time. Letter or glyph. Sai approaches, limping slightly with a hand raised to touch it.
“Just because I’m from Aerland doesn’t mean I don’t know what a property line is. You just think all my people run around like barbarians, don’t you? Don’t even keep track of who lives where.”
Sai’s hand drops. He twists to stare at Ciar with a flat expression, only to be met with a savage gleeful one. He stands there, hands on his hips, crooked teeth in a slanted sneering smile. How he has the energy even for that, Sai doesn’t know. It exhausts him.
“I don’t think about you at all, Ciar. Or Aerland.”
“That mark was on another tree, little while back.” Twigs, dirt and dry grass crunch beneath Ciar’s feet as he steps closer. His eyes dart around the forest behind them, a nervous twitch, his humor depleting. The sun has diminished, turning the sky cool and purpling. Sai closes his eyes to it, a fluttering behind his lids, like the butterflies. He presses the heels of his hands into them, his anxieties darting fish in his empty, cramping stomach.
“We risk it,” Sai finally says, not daring to pull his hands away.
There’s silence. As much silence as the forest has to offer, with wind in the trees, scattering the leaves that had made up their trail. Then—Ciar’s foot steps. His north star, moving once more.
The woods slowly turn into a field not too unlike the clearing, which slowly becomes a dirt path that blooms into stone path and finally, a lords home. Or the bones of one, the remains of something that once must have been grand and was now only a graveyard. The barns are scavenged through, one collapsed in on itself, the other missing a roof entirely. No clucking hens or braying beasts. The absolute absence of sounds, in stark contrast with the emptiness as well, makes their flesh dimple with nerves.
“Think they had a wine cellar?” Sai asks. Ciar barks a surprised laugh.
“We’ll find something for you.”
Which proves mostly an empty promise, as Ciar breaks them in through the side; a kitchen’s entrance, where servants most likely entered and exited. The kitchens themselves relatively bare, scraped clean by looters long before the prisoners. It isn’t nearly as run down as Sai had been expecting—the walls are standing, the ornate runners rug through the hallway they tepidly walk down isn’t nearly as stained as it should be. It’s empty, however, of most things and certainly anything alive. It creaks along with them, but the sound is so subtle, it’s like the manors lost its voice.
Sai runs a hand over a wall as they walk in search now for just clothes and comfort and a place to simply rest.
“In my country, all homes are one story. A long, flat building that connects through a middle room.” He pauses outside of a cracked door, the mahogany dull, the rusted nail hinges coming loose. Ciar grunts behind him, acknowledging. “And you add rooms as the family gets bigger. So everyone can stay together.”
Using his broad shoulder, Ciar shoves against the door and watches it fall flat onto the ground with a startling thump. Dust rains from the ceiling, like snow in Ciar’s hair. He pauses, unnaturally so, with his face screwed up—then bursts into a sneeze. Then another, then a fit of them that shakes the poor mans entire body until Sai is exploding as well, only into belly aching laughter. Holding himself up against the door frame, wiping a dirty hand underneath his eye to catch tears as Ciar swears in Aer, over and over.
"Get over yourself,” he finally snaps, gesturing around the bedroom they’ve found themselves in. “Something ought fit either of us. Need boots more than anything. You need a coat. More than one coat.”
Sai leaves him to his rambling exploration of the molding wardrobe he’s ripped open. Hearing Ciar talk the first time had been shocking—not just that he spoke common, a language that had colonized both their people. But that when he started, sometimes Ciar simply didn’t stop and mostly it was to himself. Sai had been fascinated by that unending torrent when they’d cleared the rusted, sharp fences of the penal colony. It had been raining, water collecting in the deep pockets of their eyes, both of them hollowed and exhausted. Ciar had talked until he was spitting water from his mouth, like a rain trap overflowing.
Sai finds a window, just enough of a sill to sit on, looking out cracked glass at the sky as it slowly bleeds to death. The wind has begun howling at the manor, at it’s broken body. It rattles that window, so he lays a hand flat on it and feels the vibrations. Reminds him of the mines, the bombs going off, so his hand twitches away.
“Gah!” He sputters when clothing hits him, pooling across him, smelling old and unused. It’s finer material than he’s ever worn before, but he’d liked his clothes before the prison. Simple tunics, easy draping, thin and made to cover skin but breathable for the heat this country absolutely never has.
“Think that’ll fit, but you’ll be showing ankles. Make them tall where you’re from.”
“Or Aerlanders are short.”
“Ah,” Ciar tugs at the prisoners tunic, roughly yanking it from himself. “You don’t think of us, though?”
He has nasty, white scars across his back that Sai does not have to ask about. A common occurrence to be whipped nearly to bone; only months ago it was likely Ciar had been tied to the post for something he’d done. Minor or not. Sai looks down at the clothing in his hands, a rich velvet black. His scars are around his wrists, his ankle. A worn pale line around his throat, from the iron collar that they’d managed to pry open.
Sai stands swiftly and begins pulling at his own scratchy, dirty tunic. Feels wrong to put the clothes on when he’s still so dirty, but he has no illusions they’ll find water to clean themselves just yet. Once the leggings are up and the shirt—an equally lavish, if not thin with age material, only this time in a mossy green. He looks up to Ciar and both men blink at each other.
Smiling, Ciar says, “Look different without your scrawny legs out.”
“You’re shoved into that material like it was made for a man ten years younger,” Sai replies, stepping swiftly over the broken down door and out into the hallway.
Crumbling stairs descend below the estate, the cellar earthy and the air moist. It’s unfinished, more a carving of a space than anything else, not in disrepair from neglect, but a project that had never seen completion. Not for the first time, Sai wonders who lived here. A family, likely? A mother, father, children. Arms tucked around his middle, he’s forced also to confront that he doesn’t know where here is. He doesn’t know what region he’s in; months ago, that miserable train of wagons—cells, really—had been uncovered only at night to allow prisoners brief respite of clean air. Sometimes, when it rained, they’d be pulled from those wagons and allowed to stand under the downpour. The only way they’d get clean.
Sai further wonders what memory that’s replaced of his. What of his childhood can’t he remember now, in place of standing under rain, unblinking as water fills his eyes. Staring at the muted night sky colors, wondering if it wouldn’t be easier to run and die. His sisters voice, his brothers poor cooking, his father, his aunt. Their mouser cats. The lemon tree that had been planted when his grandparents were wed. Where were those memories?
“So much for wine,” Ciar comments, peering through the space with slitted, suspicious eyes. There’s clothed walls dividing some areas, hanging like phantoms. “I used to like drinking on an empty stomach.”
“What? Why?” Sai uses knuckles to brush cloth aside, finding crates, lids slid off to reveal nothing but straw. His skin crawls at the idea of searching through them.
“Never done that, aye? It’s fun. Take to the drink faster, don’t remember a thing the day after.”
“Well,” Ciar’s rumbling voice comes from the corner somewhere. Sai continues pushing cloth aside, coughing at the filmy dust and residue. “You know—find someone to drink with, then a barn. Go from there.” Brown hand fisted in moldy white cloth, Sai yanks until it comes free, upsetting even more dirt as it falls from a mostly unfinished ceiling. He coughs, clears his throat, throws the fabric aside.
Though he swore that Ciar was across the cellar, he’s suddenly there, brushing against his shoulder. The entire line of him that Sai can feel, pressed from bicep to the lightest brush of knuckles, is taut, a fist of muscles clenched. He doesn’t step away, though that sudden closeness makes something flip over inside his empty stomach.
“What is that?” Sai asks, quietly.
Ciar doesn’t answer. The air is stale around them, sucked clean of warmth. The skin on Sai’s scalp tightens, fingers curling into shaky fists. Their footsteps are muffled on the dirt flooring as they both step closer, into this forgotten corner. The only light is from slashes of what would be windows at the tops of the wall, dawn light pouring in to illuminate—a marble statue.
Massive, standing atop a small pedestal, it brushes the top of the unfinished ceiling. Motes of dust dance around it. Beautifully done, muscles rendered to exact likeness—a soldier, holding a great war hammer in a restful pose. The chain mail beneath plate armor so detailed, Sai can imagine the texture beneath his fingertips, though he’s never armor before. And moreover, it’s clean. No dirt at all to mar the perfect marble carving, it’s pristine white—and they are like moths drawn toward it.
Cloth drapes over the face of the statue, obscuring it and draping down it’s shoulders like a cloak. The statue is so perfect, the model even has fingernails. Short, bitten, realistic. A vein in his forearm, a ripple in fabric bunched under plate. A perfectly white, indented scuff mark on a boot.
"This,” Ciar whispers, lifting a hand, but never connecting a touch. Though tall, Sai doesn’t even reach to the chest of the soldier. He scoots closer behind Ciar as he approaches, who stares with reverent eyes. “This—how did this get here?”
That pulls Sai to a stop. He glances around the small space, looking for tools, indicating a master craftsman’s abandoned work. There is nothing but the worn out remains of candles, burned nearly wickless, puddles of wax the only audience for the statue.
“Well. Clearly they owned it.”
“How did they get it down here, you mean?” Sai steps further around Ciar to look closer at the hammer. It’s a simple thing, not ornate at all, the shafts wood grain detailed. Truly just a soldiers weapon, though. Almost easy to imagine it bloodied. Altogether, he can’t fathom how much the thing weighs—how much it values at.
“Careful,” Ciar says, a hand landing gently on Sai’s shoulder. Gone and there, as quick as the butterflies back in the forest earlier. “I know this statue.”
“Know who it’s depicting.” Ciar answers with a grunt. Then grins his sneering, awful smile once he has Sai’s full attention. One of his canines sits wrong, protruding a bit, dimpling his lower lip. There is a scar there, something clean and white straight down to the curve of his chin. “You were praying earlier. To who?”
Sai sits on that for a moment, unsure how to express religion to this Northern stranger. Not so much a stranger, some strange voice inside of him whispers. Matching scars around his throat, after all. Shared misery. Shared fear. Freedom. Finally, cautiously, he answers, “Sacrifice.”
Ciar blinks away shock, shrugging a massive shoulder. “This is the Dog Soldier.”
“One of mine.” He straightens proudly, gesturing a savage thumb to himself, mouth spread in an even wider grin. “A God of my people. The Hound of Righteous Rage. God of Vengeance, God of Soldiers. Xavier—the Killer of Betrayers.”
“Ah,” Sai mumbles, turning back to the marble rendition of what he thinks is but a young man. Something about the statue seems lonely. Shoved in a corner in derelict, abandoned home. Beautiful and forgotten, left to obscurity and darkness. He reaches up to yank away the cloth draped over him and then Ciar really does take him by the shoulder. Pulls him backward, not roughly, but quickly. Sai stumbles, twisting and shoving himself backward.
“You’re not supposed to look at him,” Ciar explains, all boastful pride gone. Replaced by the serious twist of an anxious expression, a feathering twitch in his jaw. He seems paler, somehow—slightly blue from the barely there midnight light coming through the slashes of windows. “We don’t have anything this fancy back home—but the wooden carvings of Xavier, they’re all blindfolded after they’re made. You’re not meant to look ‘im in the eye, y’see. If you do, he can possess you.” The spidery feeling of anxiety crawling down his back, Sai flicks eyes back to the clothed statue. Again, the intensity of it’s loneliness makes him feel small.
“He takes young soldiers on the battle field sometimes, turns them into machines, naught for killing.” Ciar’s lips spread into a smile once more. “Only your enemies, surely.”
“Stop trying to frighten me, Ciar,” Sai snaps, shoving the other prisoner once more. Made of nothing but solid flesh, the other man doesn’t even budge. But it feels satisfying regardless, so Sai pushes his way past him, as far from the haunting Dog Soldier as he can.
“Look as though you’re going to cry.”
“Could, if you really wanted to. I’d turn around, if y’d’like.”
“How generous,” Sai replies flatly. “Didn’t even do that when I was changing.”
Ciar laughs as he shreds another book between his broad hands. There’s a strange pink to his cheeks all the way to his ears. A reflection of the meager fire they’ve cobbled together, dancing over his the pallor of his skin. Ciar had been pragmatic when he’d suggested the books, but Sai couldn’t bring himself to the task. Instead he’d held a few of them—cherished the tomes in his hands, the feel of their supple leather covers, the smell of their pages. Not rotted and damp like the cellar, nor musty like the clothes they’d been forced to scavenge.
Now, there was just the stinging smell of smoke in the library they’d found themselves in. It collects toward the ceiling, pillowing there. Ciar had opened the large bay windows, to let out some of the smoke, but it had made both of them nervous.
After adding a few more books to the fire, Ciar settles down the opposite side. And then remarkably, he relaxes. For the first time—not even since they’d escaped, but before even that—the man seems to come…uncoiled. He lays flat on his back, hands on his stomach. His eyes closed, legs kicked wide and lazy. The nervous thrum of energy that had kept them going through the forest, had kept them going through everything, seems to dissolve into the air with the smoke from burned books.
Oddly, it makes Sai nervous. He sits there, knees to his chest, arms wrapped around shins, staring at Ciar and thinks that it can’t be this easy. They hadn’t found food, but they had found a well outside—and skins to fill with cool, clean water. And they’d both drank enough of it to throw it back up and then drink more, like it was the wine Sai had hoped for. They’re warm—and it’s quiet. Feels terrifying to close his eyes, the way Ciar has. To rest any muscle that might be needed next for running, fighting, freedom.
“Our homes were the same way,” Ciar suddenly says, his words slurring together. His chest rises and falls so steadily, so slowly.
“The same way?” Sai watches him through the meager fire. The shadows grow large against the walls, their shelves.
“’Fore, you were talking about where you’re from. Said the houses were one floor—everyone together. Big family. I…” Ciar’s eye lids flicker as he trails off. The veins along them are spidery and soft.
“Did you have a big family?” Sai asks. The heat of the fire makes his eyes burn watery.
They’re silent then, for so long that Sai wonders if Ciar has finally fallen asleep. Only when he looks away from the fire, the northerners pale eyes are staring at him, glossy with the reflection of flame. Then they’re closed once more, so quick—it’s almost easy to mistake whether they were ever really looking at him at all.
Sai doesn’t dream, but he wakes up without a shred of lucidity. His mind jumbles together, thinking of purple jam, his mother’s smile, grass underneath his feet in a way that doesn’t hurt—a white statue and stained cloth, the flutter of insect wings, water filling his empty belly until it hurts. Fire—and Ciar.
Ciar, shaking him. Ciar, holding his shoulders, his face close.
“What?” The word comes out as a hoarse whisper and no more follow as a hand clamps over his face. Then Sai really is awake, startling upright, but not fully able to shove Ciar away. The other man crouches over him, a strangle tangle of their bodies. His hand still plastered to Sai’s mouth, his other held up in a curious signal that must be pure muscle memory from a life before imprisonment.
Dread, cold and black and familiar, fills Sai’s belly with ice. Footsteps. The creak of wood. Voices. So soft and barely there.
Unconsciously, Sai begins shaking his head, eyes pinned open with the feral terror only a prey animal understands. His hands tremble, clasping around Ciar’s arm. He is the most sturdy thing there is. Slowly, he’s pulled to his feet by the other man, gently maneuvered closer to the windows. Everything feels so incredibly distant, as though Sai has joined the smoke stains on the ceiling and he is watching this, like an amusing puppet show. Two prisoners, who didn’t run far enough; the shorter of the two slowly pushing open a window—and further pushing the taller to it.
“No,” Sai hisses, grasping weak hands into Ciar’s tunic. He gets no answer. Staring, he realizes that Ciar has the oddest ring of dark blue around his iris, when the rest of it is like storm cloud gray. Sai shakes his head again, a pressure building up in his skull, pushing and pushing and pushing. “No, no, no. Ciar. No.”
Again, he’s met with resolute silence. Ciar, saying nothing more, pushes the windows open. He throws a terrified glance over his shoulder—another creak of footsteps. Another voice. Sai watches his throat bob and the sudden impossibilities fill him to the brim. The knowledge that so much could be different and that all roads were now gone. Lost. Burned right before him. His chest tightens on the realization that Ciar is going to die.
Everything else seems so small.
“I won’t make it easy for ‘em,” Ciar promises, in a harsh whisper. His knuckles are bone white as his hand curls around the edge of the window. Sai touches his forearm, slides a hand around his wrist, finds the rough texture of scars. Fat tears spill down his cheeks to his chin. Ciar smiles and it’s soft and sad. Strange, on his features.
A bump from somewhere distant makes both of them startle, fear a pulse between them, inside them. And then, there is no more time for soft touches, for crying, for shared looks or the shared intimate awareness that something else could have happened, something more. Instead, Sai is tumbling from the window, his hands skidding across crumbling roofing. Slender legs kicking to catch himself better—blessedly finding the lips edge and pausing.
Sai runs for the long dead field behind the lord’s home. He sprints. Stumbles. A sob catching in his chest that he silences with hands slapped across his mouth. A burning reminder of another mans hand having just been there. Boots Ciar had found, one size too small, catching on the uneven ground. The night sky, so dark and everything around him so unrecognizable. Unbidden, unwanted, the memories of the penal colony; those buildings they were shoved into like animals, the mines and dirt and the never ending sounds of pain and misery. The tasteless gruel for food, the coppery unfiltered rain water they rationed. The collar, the chains, the books he helped balanced that put an exact price on Hell. The whipping post.
Uneven ground catches him by surprise and he tilts forward—momentum bringing him straight to his hands and knees, pain a sudden shock through his bones. Help, Sai thinks. Someone, please. Please, help us.
The wind shifts, battering him as he scrambles up. It howls around him and the lone, dead field of wasted crops. Tears make everything blurry, the moon fat and high in the sky and her moonlight causing the world around him to go pale, for shadows in the field to elongate and twist. Sai breathes in panicky, short bursts.
And in front of him, only a span of a distance, a figure. Pearlescent under the moon, a dirty white cloth rippling in the wind. A whisper in the air. A voice, low and humming, full of sorrow and fury. The world around Sai shrinks, rippling as though it’s breathing, pulsing and bringing him toward the statue of the soldier. One terrible step after the other.
There it stands, no longer on it’s pedestal. Hands, holding its hammer outstretched before him like a gift. The voice—a haunting, terrible murmur—grows louder as he stumbles toward it. The moon rises, just as white, just as untouched, behind the statues clothed head, like a halo. With every brush of wind, Sai can just faintly see the curve of a jaw, as perfectly sculpted as the rest of the statue.
He reaches a hand out, fingers curling around the proffered hammer. It’s cold like winter; almost so cold that it burns, sears his palm as he steps closer. Some reasonable part of him, small and denied, screams that taking that hammer means he will never let it go. It’s scalding to his skin, fusing. The terrified animal inside him ignores this, reaching with another hand to grasp cloth covering the face of the God of Vengeance.
Swiftly, but dreamily, as though none of this is real, he pulls it away.
And Sai is looking up, into the face of a beautiful young man, smiling ear to ear with a violent, inhuman rage. Eyes, green like it’s alive, with pin pricks for pupils, staring directly into his own. There’s time enough for a gasp—and then there’s no time left at all.
For a moment, a soldiers hands reach out. Chain mailed, but gentle. Searching. Desperate. Looking for someone and finding nothing.
There is one memory they could never take from Ciar.
He realized quickly that’s what the colony was really for. Not mining. Not working ore and gem—it wasn’t even really about punishment, though they loved to punish. It was a game for the Inquisition. It was a test—scholarly pursuit, even. A way to discover how to remake a man. To take everything from him—every thought or feeling he’d ever expressed outside those fenced in walls—and fill him with something new. Something horrid. To see how much of a push could be made, until a man died a completely different soul.
And they’d never won with Ciar.
In the memory, his mother is braiding his hair. Once past his shoulders, his first night they’d shorn it to his scalp. There was still a scar around the curve of his skull where the inquisitor set to the task had done so roughly and without care. Ciar never grew it out further after that, but he could remember the feel of his mothers fingers gently putting beads into the strands, braiding one side slowly and deftly.
She’d sing to him, old warrior songs. But in her voice they had only ever been lovely. He conjures the image of her, in that dusty ruin of abandoned opulence. He kneels in the hallway where he’d been caught, a crossbow bolt deep in his bicep. His mother, brave and tall and fierce and just as lovely as her song. He had promised Sai he wouldn’t make it easy—he didn’t intend to.
And alongside her, he lets himself one last vision of him as well. Slender like a blade with eyes just as sharp; dark and intelligent and judgmental. A narrow face, a pointed chin. Eyelashes flickering against sweat as it pours down his face, Ciar thinks, this is worth it then. Sai likely won’t live much longer, but any hour he can give. A day, even. Outside of the colony with sun. That makes Ciar smile, his horrible, snarling grin. Yes, let Sai die in the sun at least. He can do that. It’s what his mother would have wanted too.
“Something amusing, prisoner?”
There are three inquisitors—one dog. It stands near to its master, black lips rippled as it growls. Foamy spit drips from it’s canines, smearing on the dusty rug beneath it. The inquisitors are swathed in their expensive black cloaks. Mimics of each other, yet one stands in front of them all. A wide brimmed hat sits slightly tilted, nearly obscuring one eye. Even his hair is black, lanky and greasy as it spools over his shoulders.
Ciar grins wider, exposing more of his crooked teeth. He responds in Aer, an insult to all four, the dog and their mothers. Being as none of them speak Aer, they don’t flinch or respond, but the head inquisitor tilts his head curiously.
“You have much vitality for an escaped convict,” he drawls, examining a leather clad hand, as though Ciar is not worth addressing directly. The dog barks once, in response to its masters voice. Then dissolves into more frothy snarls. “Perhaps we did not give you enough to do, back home.”
“Home,” Ciar hisses, nausea welling in his stomach. He slips a hand over his punctured arm, feeling it dead and useless at his side. The hot blood gives him strength. “Fuck you—and your prison.”
A crossbow bolt sticks into the ground in front of him, the distinct twang of the device loud in the hallway. Ciar doesn’t flinch from it, which makes the man wielding it look…annoyed.
“Where is the other one?” The inquisitor closest to the manors excessive entrance asks. The doors are slightly bent inward, a breeze coming from outside soft and sweet smelling. Ciar had made his way opposite of the library, intending to be caught quickly and dealt with slowly. The squirming fear of torture in his belly is hard to ignore,, but he thinks again of those dark eyes. The slenderness of Sai’s wrists, and the delicate circle of scars on his dark skin. Ciar’s hand, resting on his thigh turns to a fist. Surely, he can kill one of them. Just one.
“Fucked off when we got past the fences.”
“Yes,” Ciar seethes, eyes narrowing on the inquisitor before him and his ridiculous hat. “Didn’t want that Indaran fuck anywhere near me. Had to take him when I went—you keep us chained like that on purpose, don’t you? Should have used him for food, maybe.” Ciar shrugs his unwounded shoulder, nonchalant. But these are inquisitors, men of the Realm. Men who rape and torture and sleep easy after; men who are responsible for the crisscrossing scars on his back, who delighted in it every time. Men responsible for worse.
They merely stare, their beady eyes unimpressed by Ciar’s lies.
“But you aren’t, are you?”
“But we could be,” the lead inquisitor says softly, petting a gloved hand between his beasts pinned, black ears. The dog’s snarling only seems to get louder in response. Ciar thinks of it savaging him, tearing at a limb, while he struggles. Dogs. He never really liked dogs. “If you tell us where the other one went, we’ll make your death quick. No pain.”
“No pain?” Ciar asks sarcastically, squeezing his bicep, a fresh flow of blood relenting down his arm, pooling in his hand. “You wouldn’t deny yourself it. Probably all fuck each other stupid after, don’t you?” Again, they stare. Until one of them smiles, his large, square teeth blackened at the edges. And then the fear really begins, a slow creep that kills Ciar’s smile. A horror, both for what he is going to endure for it is sure to be agony, and knowing that when they find Sai, they have no plans to kill him. Too valuable.
He rips the bolt from his arm, intending somehow to use it.
And then the inquisitor looses the dog.
But as quickly as it jolts forward—it suddenly stops. The great big beast goes prone, it’s ears flattening. It releases a piteous whine, it’s entire body shuddering. All of them stare at the creature, reduced from snarling, vicious weapon, to pathetic pup. A smell of urine and a dark, wet circle beneath it and then the dog is up. Sprinting wildly down the hall, directly past Ciar. It makes terrified, yipping yowls as it goes that slowly disappear.
No one says anything. There is nothing but Ciar’s ragged breathing. Maybe the slow drip of his blood from his fingers, if one listens close enough.
And then, the doors burst open.
In the dark, with nothing but moonlight behind from the outside, Sai looks like a shadow. Something white, nearly luminous is clutched in his thin hands. Ciar’s heart rises, treacherous in it’s misguided, uninformed delight at the mans appearance. Unharmed, with black hair dancing in the wind pouring through the now broken doors. Just like the dog; his heart rises and then plummets just as quickly.
“No,” starts as a whisper. And then, yelling, “No! Sai, I told you to—” His words become a strangled sound as moonlight illuminates the mans face. A smile, twisted wide and terrifying. Curving his cheeks to narrow his eyes, which are no longer dark and pretty. But poisonous green, glossy—and brimming with hate. Not Sai, then. Couldn’t be Sai.
“There you are,” the dog master purrs, slowly removing his wide brimmed hat. He doesn’t know something is wrong. That it isn’t Sai standing there, feet spread in a violent stance, his hands gripping a white hammer of all things.
“You.” The word is loud, like a thunder clap, echoing down the long length of the old manors entrance hallway. Ciar rises to his feet, his stomach made of water. His eyes on the hammer as brown hands curl and uncurl around it, in anticipation of violence. “You.”
“Kill the other one,” the head inquisitor says flippantly, tossing a look over his shoulder. That look proves to be his last, as the hammer smashes into the side of his skull, caving it in like it was overripe melon. The body slams to the floor loudly, head cracking further and bursting bloodily.
And then it all dissolves to chaos.
A crossbow bolt flies, sticking in the wall beside Sai, who moves so deftly it seems preternatural. The creature that has become Sai smiles on, thundering toward the inquisitor with a single minded, blood thirsty purpose. He struggles with the crossbow and for the first time, Ciar sees true fear in the inquisitors eyes. It should be glorious; it should satiate every vengeful desire Ciar’s ever had against these brutal beasts, but it doesn’t.
Instead, Ciar has to scramble forward to catch the third inquisitor around the throat before he can descend into the fray. And as he does, they both get to bear witness to Sai’s slaughter.
He lashes out with the hammer. It connects to a black clad chest with a sickening crunch of a sound. Dark, frothy blood—much like the dogs spit—bubbles from the inquisitors mouth as he stumbles backward. Regaining maybe only a few senses, or pure muscle memory, the big fisted man tumbles forward to catch at Sai. To grapple with him. Only the hammer descends once more, cracking across the collarbone this time, snapping the bones like mere twigs. The inquisitor makes a high pitched, squealing sound.
The one in Ciar’s arm struggles and frees himself easily. Every muscle in Ciar’s body has slackened, watching spurts of blood hit Sai across the chest and face. As the hammer hits blow after blow on the twitching inquisitor and his slow dying body. The last one pulls a dagger. As though sensing the blade’s appearance, Sai swivels on swift feet. His body is so beautiful, all elegant lines and shapes, twisted in a soldiers dance.
“Betrayer,” Sai whispers, gripping bloody hands on the marble hammer. The word…flexes the air around him. Rippling the mere air around them. Ciar’s eyes flicker with a barely held on consciousness.
And then, Sai kills the last of their abusers. He dodges every thrust of the blade as though he’s studied them all his life. He parries easily, spirals sideways and thrusts out the hammer—it connects with the inquisitors face, breaking nose, splitting lips. Teeth spurt free, scattering on the ground. He moans, hands raised in a strange plea like so many who had once been before him. Sai, merciless and smiling all the while, brings the hammer down. Twice, with vicious, terrifying justice.
The wind howls through the broken doors. There’s no other sound than that. Ciar falls to his knees, one hand cradling his wounded arm as he stares. Sai—or the creature that has taken possession of Sai—stills and looks to him. The thing behind those once dark eyes is smiling still, but Ciar can see the truth in that smile. Can see that it is a scream. Can see the tears welling up in eyes as green as the forest.
Then he raises the hammer, one last time.
—
Sai isn’t sure if it can be called waking up, what he does just then. Maybe it’s like being born, once again. He is there suddenly, conscious, and laying on soft soil. His eyes flicker into a light that seems to be coming from nowhere. A wide circle of it, in an otherwise dark expanse. Foggy, the air around him is dense and wet. He hums a sound, swallowing, rising to his knees. His hands brush across his face, back over his hair, resting on his shoulders. His eyes, which feel weak and unused, like he truly is some new born calf, swim around.
This isn’t a cave. Yet there is no sky. He can tell there is no…end. That there is no ceiling, but there is a darkness above him. Almost like a presence.
There’s a sound as well. A clinking. Chains. The sound sends a ripple of fear through him, propelling him to stand and turn.
He shares this space with an animal. It’s shaggy fur the color of fresh blood, its flank rising and falling in quick, fervent breathes. A hammer, taller than any tree he’s ever stood under, is beside it. And around the wooden shaft, are the chains. Barbed and sinister, glistening wet. They loop around the creature, fastened to a hind leg. Sai, staring for an uncomprehending amount of time, only realizes that it’s a dog when he it turns it’s massive head toward him.
As big as a cart horse, the animal shakes itself all over, a rolling of flesh and fur. It pants, its maw parted, hot breaths rustling the dirt around them. It’s eyes are glistening with pain, wide and green, as large as Sai’s palm.
The creature shifts and makes a terrible agonized whine. Its nose brushes against it’s hind leg. Sai starts forward, hands raised.
“I’ll help,” he says, his voice feeling muffled and underwater. He reaches forward but the dog snarls, it’s lips rippling back over glistening teeth. It snaps its jaws and then cries out, shaking all over. It’s paws scramble in the dirt. Blood, both old and new, all over the poor beast. In puddles around it, sticky on the earth. Sai watches, horrified, as the massive dog savages it’s own leg. Massive teeth snapping around the ankle bone, shaking furiously in a desperate attempt to free itself. Flecks of blood and saliva, eyes white with a rolling madness, more whining from between it’s clamped jaws.
“Stop,” Sai pleads. He feels tears gathering in his eyes. “Stop, please.” But the dog cries as well, its pitiful sounds muffled by the way it devours at it’s own chain bound leg. Tears, impossible for an animal, well in it’s somber green eyes and carve tracks in its fur. Sai’s shoulders tremble. The dog unwinds itself, snapping jaws, snarling, shaking, howling and all he can do is stumble back. Fall upon the ground, hands covering his face, to hide from the poor beasts agony.
“Up now,” a gruff voice says behind him. Before he has a chance to look, hands slip under his arms and haul him standing once more. The surrealistic landscape totters, as does Sai, but warm hands hold him steady. Sai blinks down at a much shorter man. He is broad and shaped similarly; the curve of his nose familiar, the deep set darkness of his eyes and the curls of black hair pinned messily from his face. He wears simple clothes but one fine, gold necklace that disappears into thin cloth.
The stranger smiles, a sardonic thing, with an arched dark brow.
Sai collapses, hands touching his forehead. His heart beats thunderously in his throat, as he realizes that there is a God standing in front of him. The very one he had been praying to, not that long ago though it feels like another life. More dream than this inky, strange reality he’s in now.
“Ah,” the Sacrifice says, his voice abashed and awkward, not a thing expected of such a creature. “Don’t do that. Up. Alright, yeah? Up.”
Teary eyed still, Sai pulls himself up. He realizes the sound of savagery has disappeared—and when he glances to the captured animal, Sai sees it laying still. Great, bloodied snout between forepaws, eyes wide and still crying. It doesn’t seem to see Sai at all. A pitiful soft breathy sound exits it’s blood crusted nose. A feeling fills Sai’s insides; a longing, yearning, horrible feeling, a painful emotion that can’t have a name at all.
“I know,” the other God says softly.
“What is it?” Sai asks, his voice quiet amidst the sound of deities.
“It?” Sacrifice asks, his handsome, tired face creasing. His eyes stray to the side, softening, though no less exhausted. When Sai glances there as well, it isn’t the dog anymore. But a man. The painful roil of sadness and yearning remains, heavy in the air with the fog, but no longer an animal; the soldier, the marble soldier made flesh. Sweat slicked red hair plastered to his pale, freckled skin. Blood dripping from his nose and onto the ground, as he kneels there. Head tilted just enough to look from under his lashes. Still hauntingly beautiful, like something untouchable and frightening.
“He,” Sai’s sentence starts. Green eyes never sway from Sai’s God, though. “He was a statue.”
The God of Sacrifice snorts, rolls his eyes derisively, waves a hand in the air. “Fancy shit, yeah? They get his nose wrong. Or—so I’ve heard anyway. Right.” He clears his throat into a fist. “Have things handled here. I’ll—I can take care of ‘im. You need back in your body.” Sai isn’t sure how to answer. Every thought feels more jumbled than the last, syrupy and slow and hard to hold onto. He can still hear the steady, awful drip of blood off the soldier.
“Thank you,” Sai mumbles, unsure what else to say. The urge and desire to supplicant himself again, yet the God looks at him with eyes that so similarly remind him of…family. His older brother or an uncle. Even that soft, near awkward smile, and the tired shadows on his face make him more human than God. But there is a singular sense of power as well; something solid and comforting and otherworldy. Sacrifice slowly pulls a blue scarf from his pockets. Unraveling it between his hands.
Sai whimpers at the sight of it, his dirtied hands reaching out but never touching.
“It was a worthy thing,” the God says softly. Chains rustle beside them. The sound of them drawing taut is a memory that Sai can’t forget. He closes his eye to the sound, but that overpowering emotion of fear and pain and craving feels physically present. The darkness seems to swirl, even behind his lids. His body goes light, as if suspended in water. The upside down feeling of sinking. And overhearing;
Again, whispered once more, I know.
The sound of rustling—clothes and limbs, embracing, a warm burst of something colorful. Then;
It’s the sound of birds, first. Sai hears them, even with his eyes, gummy and exhausted, still sealed shut. Birds. Calling to one another, beautiful spring time songs. Then, the rocking motion. Back and forth, and wheels along a hard packed dirt road. Terrified, Sai sits up, gasping in a heavy lungful of clear, sweet air.
He’s not in the closed in space of a cell wagon; dirt and urine and blood and sweat and jam packed bodies on all sides of him. Hot, fetid air, thinking only of the next time there would be rain and he would be allowed to stand under it. No—he isn’t there. Instead, the back of the wagon has a clothed tarp, parted slightly at the front and back to allow air and the sight of the sky. Blue and pure. The crates he’s laid across even have quilted blankets, scratchy from old age, but more luxurious than anything he’s touched in years.
Sai looks beside him, where Ciar sits. A knife glints in his hand as he slowly pars slices of apple.
“Hit your head on the way out the window,” Ciar says, snorting his vicious laugh. He takes a slice of the apple, spearing it and holding it out. Sai’s trembling, weak hand reaches forward and takes the slice of fruit.
“Carried you,” the northerner explains, biting into a slice of apple. It crunches crisply between his crooked teeth. A little rivulet of juice runs down his chin and it is so distracting a sight that Sai has to look down to his own, pale bit of fruit. “Made it to a road. Found some of your people, of all things.”
“My people?” Sai looks to the wagons front, where a couple sit. Dark brown like him. The woman turns, her creased face lined softly with age and warmth. She smiles; her hair is tucked away neatly with a blue scarf. Trembling hands slowly bring the slice of apple to his lips. Sai catches the briefest glimpse of his own fingers—and the dried blood underneath his nails.
“Probably should sleep more,” Ciar rambles, crunching further into the apple. He tosses the core out the back, lounging back on the crates like a predator cat freshly satisfied. Sai’s heart beats an unsteady rhythm in his throat as he eats the slice of apple. “Hit your head hard.”
He’s lying, Sai realizes. Ciar gazes out the back of the wagon, his pale throat trembling. His jaw clenched. No, Sai thinks, the fruit sweet on his tongue. Sweeter than anything he’s ever tasted. Big idiot. The voice in his head turns fond. Thinks he’s protecting me.
But he does as Ciar suggests. He lays himself, curved to fit his height, along on the crates, hands tucked up underneath his cheek. His eyes closed just enough that he can still see Ciar, the fluttery image of him shadowy behind Sai’s dark lashes. He finally relaxes, head lolling back, a smile on his face that looks—even to Sai’s barely opened eyes—finally happy.
