Portfolio: Short story - Midnight Harvest
Eventually, I think it will belong to a series of stories as a sort of prologue or opening sequence. For now it can stand well enough on its own.
Ekun spotted the Reaper the moment she crossed the threshold of the lounge. Her black robes were spotless, her hands clean and empty, and yet he could practically smell the sharp, iron tang of blood wafting inside in her wake. Had he been a shepherd dog, his hackles would have risen, his ears flattened, his chest resonated with a bone-deep growl as he showed his teeth at the preying lioness. But Ekun was no shepherd, no dog, and he kept quiet and motionless as she prowled through the lounge, waving between frozen patrons and waiters.
They’d all fallen silent within moments of her entry, tense and immobile, shaking in their seats or trying to fade in the shadows, looking at her from the corners of their eyes when they didn’t divert their gaze entirely. It was an illogical and useless instinct; refusing to look at the lion never made it go away.
Had he dared to make a sound, Ekun would have snorted at the ludicrousness of his own metaphor. Reapers were to lions what cobras were to common earthworms: not related in the slightest, and all the more dangerous for it. And contrary to the big wild cats of his birth land, Ekun knew that Reapers never went after cattle.
When she turned her dark gold eyes on him, his breath froze in his lungs, threatening to choke him.
Reapers rarely spoke to their preys except to list their crimes, and Ekun forced himself to breath. It came out in a wheeze and he clenched his teeth against it, humiliated and furious and scared shitless.
“Greetings, Lady.” Miraculously enough, his voice didn’t waver.
She walked to the counter, her gait loose and unhurried, her hands still empty, nowhere near any of her visible weapons. Of course, she probably had a hundred knives and needles hidden in her sleeves, so this didn’t mean much.
He thought again of the lioness stalking her frozen prey, circling it, patient and confident, knowing it couldn’t get away.
Looking at her face, however, he doubted the accuracy of his analogy. Her blood didn’t hail from Eurenica like his own; under her tattoos, she had the naturally tanned skin and sharp cheekbones common across most of the Altarian North, and her golden eyes and long, pointed ears spoke of even stranger origins. He’d never met one of the forest spirits made flesh who prowled the great northern woodlands, as they rarely came this far south, but he knew of them.
There wasn’t any lion so far north. Ekun had heard of nebulous panthers hunting in the morning fog, of black matagots crying at sundown, but most naturalists agreed that wolves were the true carnivorous kings of the northern lands. Wouldn’t it be more correct, then, more appropriate, to compare this particular Reaper to a predator she would be more familiar with?
Strange, the useless things that came to your mind when you were about to die.
She stopped at the edge of the counter and looked at him for a short moment that seemed to stretch for much longer. She was slightly taller than him, which was no small feat, and he entertained no illusion regarding her ability to kill him with her bare hands. It was curiously freeing, to know that your chances of escaping alive were slim to none. That there was no point in fighting the inevitable. It was almost… relaxing.
Ekun felt light-headed, oddly serene. He’d been so tired for such a long time.
“Do you have Levensaft?” She asked, finally taking her eyes off him to look at the shelves he was standing in front of. “Word is on the street that you are the only one who carries it this side of the Dawn.”
It took him a while to process the question. He blinked, then blinked again. “Wh -- what?”
She raised an eyebrow and he blinked again, off-kilter and disoriented. “Levensaft,” she repeated slowly. “Sap of Life. Sylvan Water. Boreal Spirit. Wat...”
Annoyance shook him from his confused daze, and he snapped, “Yes, I do have Levensaft. Svarthundberg, Castelle de la Sorgine or Silverzauver?”
This time, both eyebrows shoot up toward her hairline and… Ekun almost recoiled, because that expression, right then, gone in a spark, had looked disturbingly like a pleased smile.
He’d never seen a Reaper smile before. It was terrifying.
“Four fingers of Castelle,” she said, pushing a silvery coin toward him with a long tattooed finger.
This… really wasn’t going like he’d thought it would when she’d turned her attention on him. For one, he was still standing, still breathing, still alive. But however disconcerted he felt over his continued state of existence, he’d been a barkeep long enough for his work ethic to win over his bewilderment. “Four, seven or fifteen years of age?”
Again with the impressed eyebrows, but a sudden scraping sound interrupted her reply and Ekun barely had time to shift his eyes to the left that she was already across the room. He didn’t flinch when he heard Hadriella Severina cried out, angry and scared, before she was thrown to the ground like a rag doll. He didn’t flinch when her knife was kicked from her hand with a sickening crack, and neither did he when the Reaper knelt on her back and pulled on her elaborate bun to expose her face.
He did flinch when Severina’s husband tried to lunge out for her with a battle cry, but he was quickly restrained by the other patrons. Felicios was an old gladiator, massive and strong and arrogant, but a nerve-pinch dispensed by quick fingers did the job. Severina started to sob and plead when he crumbled on the ground, her beautiful face distorted and wet with tears.
The Reaper hadn’t even looked at Felicios. Maybe she’d trusted in her audience to keep him from interfering with a Reaper’s harvest; more than likely, she’d felt confident that she could neutralize him if he’d reached her.
Luckily for him, he hadn’t.
“Hadriella Karenisa Severina,” the Reaper called in a toneless voice, “You have been convicted of many crimes, by many courts on both side of the Dawn, but none more foul, more monstrous, more inexpiable, than the abaitting, kidnapping, enslavement and trade of children. On your orders, many of those children were starved, beaten, tortured and raped, and then sold like cattle, amongst other atrocities that were carried on your order or by your own hands.”
Ekun had never seen a Reaper lose their shit quite this thoroughly before. Her voice was still toneless, even, her macabre recitation audible by all in the complete silence who’d fallen over the room; her hands didn’t shake, nor did the rest of her, and yet violence was coming off her in waves, barely leashed and about to slip its collar.
“You should have been quartered and tortured accordingly to your crimes,” the Reaper reminded Severina, “But I was the one to find you, and I always carry my executions quickly and cleanly… however tempted I may be to make an exception for you.”
Without further comment, she moved her hands on each sides of Severina’s jaw and twisted. The sound of her neck snapping made several persons cringe and whimper, but Ekun wasn’t one of them.
He’d known that Severina and Felicios had their hands in several illicit trades, but he’d never suspected anything quite this wrong, this depraved, this evil. When had he become this blind and deaf, too mired in his own misery to spot the signs?
Surely, there must have been signs.
Ekun looked at Felicios’ still crumpled form through narrowed eyes, then at the rest of the lounge’s patrons. Amongst them, who had known? Who had said nothing? Who had participated?
He didn’t realize he was speaking aloud until several patrons tried to bolt at the same time. Most of them attempted to rush past the Reaper and toward the door, but another opted to try and go directly through the bay window―the stupid cretin crashed against the checkered iron reinforcements and fell back down, bleeding and concussed. One down.
Trusting the Reaper to take care of the thugs running for the door, Ekun lunged to the right and intercepted Severina’s and Felicios' children as they tried to run in direction of the kitchen. If Ekun hadn’t been there, maybe they would have managed to escape the distracted Reaper… for a time. But he was there, between them and the kitchen, and they didn’t go further than the counter.
Felicia was crying and screaming hysterically, throwing herself on the ground when her brother let go of her wrist to better fight against Ekun. But Felicianos was young and slow, unused to defend himself with his own fists, and was quickly knocked out. Shaking his hand, Ekun eyed the hysteric pile of skirts crumbled at his feet and decided to simply keep an eye on her. The girl was only thirteen, and he sincerely hoped she’d had nothing to do with her parents’ sordid dealings.
Meanwhile, the Reaper had managed to subdue the other potential fugitives and gave Ekun a sharp, grateful nod. He swallowed, feeling exposed and nauseous, and nodded back.
Then he looked on, grim and cold, as the Reaper slowly went through her fallen harvest. She lifted their heads, one after the other, to take a look at their faces and their soul. Most of them, she killed after reciting their crimes and announcing their sentence, snapping their neck with practiced ease. Felicia wasn’t the only patron who’d broken down and started crying by then, and a disconnected part of Ekun wondered if any of them would ever come back to the lounge. His boss was going to be furious, and this, more than anything else, made him irrationally angry.
He’d never pretended to be a particularly good or selfless man. Not in a long time.
By the time the Reaper broke Felicios’ neck and sent his soul to join his wife’s in Hell, only three of his thugs had been left alive, kept frozen by glowing runes traced upon their chest. Maybe their crimes weren’t worth a Reaper’s time; maybe they hadn’t been convicted by a court yet. In any case, they wouldn’t die today.
After she finished her business with their father, the Reaper rose gracefully to her feet and walked toward Ekun and the teenagers he’d kept from fleeing. She looked at Felicianos, unconscious, and Felica, still crying in a heap on the floor, and sighed. “That’s the worst part of my job.”
Ekun blinked. He’d never known a Reaper to sound quite this tired.
Then the night patrol finally arrived, trooping through the door, and he had other things to worry about.
Later, much later, after he’d talked himself hoarse several times, with the guards, with his patrons, with his neighbours, he finally managed to close the door on a rapidly emptying street. It was long past curfew, and once they’d gotten over their shock, the guards had started herding curious passersby home.
Ekun didn’t jump when he turned around, but it was a close call. He’d thought the Reaper long gone, maybe to the casern with the guards, but there she was. Sitting at the bar, she was still surrounded by an aura of anger and sadness, like a grey cloud hanging over her head. It was a disconcerting scene, but Ekun was too tired and heartsick to be surprised by much of anything right then.
He dragged his feet behind the bar, where his fingers instinctively reached for a bottle of Castelle de la Sorgine and his favorite flask of rum. He handed the whole bottle of Sap-of-Life to the Reaper, who looked at it blankly for a moment before accepting it. She twisted the cap off with her sharp-nailed fingers and closed her eyes, inhaling its strong woodsy, sweet smell as it escaped the bottle.
“That’s the fifteen years old bottle, isn’t it?”
He hummed an affirmation, too busy taking a long sip from his flask to answer more clearly. The rum was dark, deep and spicy, just the right amount of sweet, and its heat gradually seeped into his veins and started warming him up. It wasn’t a cold night, but he felt tired and old, down to his bones―and ridiculous, because he knew perfectly that twenty-five years of age wasn’t old.
“I am too tired to appreciate that properly,” the Reaper grumbled, which didn’t stop her from taking a long swallow from her bottle. “It is such a waste.”
Ekun wasn’t sure she was only talking about the liquor any longer, but he couldn’t mobilize the will to care, nor the energy to fetch her a cheaper drink.
“I thought you were coming for me,” he confessed several minutes later, a good portion of his flask already gone. The Reaper was already halfway through her bottle, which was all kinds of terrifying, and only just starting to get calmer, less vibrantly furious.
“I was,” she answered after a while. “But not to kill you.”
He raised an eyebrow, now sufficiently warmed up to feel intrigued.
“I was not there for them,” she said, not exactly answering his question, but since he’d also wanted to know about that… “This is not my harvesting field. I am not from around here.”
“Never would have suspected,” Ekun drawled.
She waved a hand, not even irritated by the interruption. “I did not know they would be there; I did not even see them until the bitch bolted. I wasn’t there for them,” she repeated, in a lower voice.
But she’d found them nonetheless, and did what needed to be done.
She hummed. “Indeed.” Then she looked at him, her eyes sharpening a bit despite liquor and weariness. “I can come back tomorrow, when you will have had time to sleep.”
Ekun snorted. “If you think I’m going to sleep anywhere near peacefully after tonight, you’re delusional. Out with it, Lady Reaper.”
She didn’t protest the ridiculous appellation, even seemed dispassionately amused by it. “I need your help. With a hunt.”
She sipped again from her bottle, rolling the liquor in her mouth with a thoughtful expression. Ekun had never exchanged more than three words with a Reaper before; he wondered if they were all like this, surprisingly human under their grim, stoic, merciless masks. Somehow, he doubted it.
Some bar keepers were terrible gossips, it was true, but the Reaper was out of luck with Ekun. He was there to serve alcohol, not to chat.
She looked amused. “Not exactly the kind of information I’m searching for, Your Highness.”
He was very careful not to freeze or drop his flask, however pointless the deception. She already knew: there was no speculation in her eyes, only a calm, curious insight.
“Whatever you want,” he told her, voice as flat and cold as he could make it, “you won’t get it if you call me by that title again.”
The Reaper stared at him for half a minute, blank-faced, before inclining her head. “My apologies. What form of address would you prefer, in that case?”
He took a deep breath to calm himself, letting it out slowly and evenly. “Ekun. Because that is my name,” he added, daring her to contradict him.
She only nodded. “That is fair, Ekun. In light of your reaction, however, I fear that my questions may… distress you.”
He glowered over his flask. “I’m not fragile.” He took a sip before gesturing in her direction with his free hand. “Go ahead.”
“Very well.” She straightened up, finally getting down to business. “What do you know about the man who stole your mother’s shield?”
Talk about getting straight to the point. Ekun swallowed his mouthful of rum, resisting the impulse to slam the flask on the counter. To his dismay, his hands were shaking.
“Both more and less than I wish I did,” he said, before looking at the Reaper: her narrow, tattooed face, her scarred hands.
His own long hunt for revenge, years ago, had yielded next to no results. He’d finally abandoned his quest in the city of Callestane, two hours of camelops riding away from the medium-sized village he now lived in. He couldn’t stand to go home, or even to another Eurenican country where people looked or spoke like him. The disgrace was easier to bear while surrounded by a foreign culture.
But Ekun wasn’t a Reaper.
“What do you want to know, exactly?”
She smiled, but there was no humour, no joy in the expression. Only white, sharp teeth. “Everything.”
He nodded, drank again, then started talking.
Please tell me what you thought about it in the comments =D
