Was inspired by @bayleaf-art to try to sort my Enderal fics into something resembling chronological order. This isn’t quite everything, but it’s most of it, going back to 2017 in a few cases. I’ve broken it up with backstory/pre-game fics under Ostian and game timeline fics under Enderal. I’ll keep this as a pinned post and update it as I post new fics.
Ostian
- Enchanted
- Bedtime Story
- (untitled prompt - young Sirius gets left behind)
- Haunted
- Night Watches
- A Watched Pot
- Ratcatcher
- The Storyteller
- Joli Et Maquillé
- Witness
- Near Miss
- Guilty Conscience
- Keepsake
- Famine
- Ink
- Keeping Up Appearances
- The House Always Wins
- Stowaways
*************
Enderal
- Under The Sun And Moon
- Irrelevant (pt 1)
- Ghosts (pt 1)
- Irrelevant (pt 2)
- Irrelevant (pt 3)
- Irrelevant (pt 4)
- First Impressions
- Fever Dream
- Treasure Hunting
- Paranoia
- Les Cachots
- Exhaltation
- (untitled prompt - post exhaltation)
- The Dog Star
- Re-acquaintance
- Shelf Life
- Difference of Opinion
- Ghosts (pt 2)
- Debrief
- Libations
- Exit Pursued By Myrad
- Normal
- Chance Encounters
- Old Wounds
- Gossip
- Liminal
- The Arrangement
- (untitled prompt -- from A Song In Silence)
- Layover
- Witches’ Brew
- Honey Trap
- (untitled prompt -- Eska and Tharael’s actual first meeting)
- Elevator Pitch
- (untitled prompt -- last conversation with Sirius before Dark Chambers)
- Denial
- Push
- Palimpsest
- Doubt
- The Conversation
- Night Terrors
- But A Walking Shadow
- Semantics
- Breakfast
- Poison
- Unresolved
- First Aid
- Impasse
- Lessons
In the months after his best friend and partner leaves the band, Tristan struggles to cope.
*************
The beer had been a mistake. It’s a miserable, hopeless little thought as he stares down at the mess at his feet. Flickering neon reflects in the puddle of vomit, the cloying reek of partially digested alcohol crawling up his nose and making him gag until he throws up again.
Just one beer. He thought it might calm him down, take the edge off, but he can’t stop shivering and his heart feels like it’s going to explode.
Inside the bar the band is taking a breather and prepping for the next set. Tristan should be in there with them. He should be with his friends, not hiding out back behind the dumpsters, heaving his guts onto the asphalt, praying that no one comes looking for him.
His body convulses, bile burning his throat. He coughs and spits, bracing his hands against the cinder block wall in front of him. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until his throat closes around a sob. Nonononono. Fuck. Not now. They’ll notice if he goes back inside and his eye are red. Fucking get it together.
He tries to drag in a breath, but it’s like breathing through a straw. It feel like there’s a bag of cement on his chest. Can’t breath. Can’t breath. Can’t –
Stop it. He knows how this works. It’s not the first time. Hell, it happens so often now he’s lost count. Every performance since – since….
He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, pressing a hand to his lips to feel the airflow. Can breath. Is breathing. But it doesn’t stop the panicked, air-starved feeling building beneath his skin. Not enough. Not enough. Breathing too fast. Frantic, dizzy gasps. He needs to slow down. But slowing down feels like dying.
Singing feels like dying.
Every time he gets on stage it feels like dying.
The absence at his side warps everything around it like a black hole. His movements feel off balance, out of sync in a way he can’t articulate. His voice doesn’t sound like his. His performance feels jarring and unnatural. There is a wrongness to everything that feels so unbearably loud. And he keeps expecting someone to notice, to react. But the audience cheers and dances, and band plays like it’s just another gig. It feels like being trapped in a stress dream. He feels like he’s losing his mind.
Another sob catches in his throat, a strangled, animal sound more like choking than crying. He doesn’t remember sitting, but he’s slumped against the wall now with his head between his knees, shaking so badly his teeth chatter.
Breathe in. Hold. Count. Breathe out. He knows the drill by heart now. He’s not dying. He knows he’s not.
That’s not as reassuring as it probably should be. It would be so much easier if he was. He imagines his racing heart finally giving out. Imagines closing his eyes and not waking up. Such fantasies takes up more and more space in his head these days. He knows he shouldn’t let them, knows it’s not healthy, but he’s simply too tired to fight it.
He can’t do this. He can’t. Not without – without –
He digs his fingers into his hair and pulls until it pain sparks across his scalp. Keeps pulling. Momentarily fantasizes about pulling until his hair rips out bloody. The pressure in his chest pushes up into his throat and he wants to scream so badly it hurts.
Fuck! Don’t make a scene. Don’t make a scene. He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until he sees stars.
He can’t do this.
He can’t. But in the darkness behind his eyelids, he knows it doesn’t matter. He can’t let the band down again. He can’t lose anyone else. And however much he hates performing, he needs it. It’s like trying to breathe with broken ribs. Every breath is agony but he needs air. If he stops…. Music is all he has, it’s all he is. And it’s empty and exhausting and it hurts. And every time he remembers what it used to be like, he feels so fucking broken.
He’s just so….tired. The marrow-deep tiredness that sucks all the color and sensation out of the world. Or is that grief? He’s not sure he can tell the difference anymore.
What if it never gets better? What if this is all there is forever?
He tries to push the thought away. Maybe if everything could just stop. Just for a little while. Maybe if he could take a break –
His phone buzzes in his jeans and he flinches. He fishes it out, but his hands are shaking so badly that it slips from his fingers. Screen down on the asphalt. He picks it up, staring at the new crack spidering across the image of Rowan’s face on the screen. Keeps staring until it stops ringing.
They’re waiting for him. The knowledge should spur him to action, but he just sits there.
Get up. Just get up. Just move. Just fucking – just do something. They’re waiting. Everyone is waiting. He’s letting them down. Again. It’s happening again. He’s fucking it up, he’s fucking everything up and it’s all going to happen again if he can’t –
Just -
Move -
Just fucking move! Just – just –
He wants to die. The thought is there, sharp and sudden, the eye of the hurricane howling inside his head. The momentary stillness of absolute certainty. He wants to die. He wants to walk into traffic and let a bus smear him across the road. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. He wants to stop. He wants to stop. He wants to stop.
A sob chokes in his throat and he bites down hard on his lip until he tastes copper and salt, but it’s not enough. He drives his fist into the asphalt, once, twice, the shock of pain and adrenaline momentarily obliterating all other thought. It’s a strange sort of relief.
He draws in a shaky breath. Get up. Move. His body obeys him this time.
He pushes to his feet. His hand is bleeding; he tries to wipe it on his jeans and only succeeds in making a bigger mess.
The moment he steps into the bar, he’s hit with a wall of noise and smells and smothering dark, his raw nerves dialing every sensation up to eleven, leaving him flinching at every clatter of glasses or burst of laughter. Mumbling apologies, he tries to ignore the way his friends look at him. Forces a smile, but can’t get it to sit right.
Mic stands and instruments crowd the small stage; he picks his way between them to stand at the front. The low light does little to obscure the crowd. Their attention never used to feel this heavy. It pins him in place. Whatever calm he’d managed to claw back outside is gone.
Just get through tonight. Just one more set. He can manage that, right? Just a few songs. A hysterical laugh bubbles up in his throat and he chokes it back. Yeah. Right. Just a few songs. Duets cannibalized into solos, open wounds where a second voice used to be. His fingers tighten around the mic stand, split knuckles turning white beneath the crust of red. It takes everything in him not to run.
He feels his mouth stretch in what he hopes is a smile, but feels like a grimace. His chest tightens, the room spins, the roaring in his ears is so loud he can barely hear Jazzy’s beat drop. He sings, fighting for his life to stay on tempo with his heart hammering in his chest, belting out the lyrics, pushing his voice to the limit to cover the way it shakes.
Everything blurs together and when the world finally snaps back into focus he’s pushing through the back door of the bar, the cold air like a slap against sweat-soaked skin. His friends are chattering happily, helping to carry Jazzy’s drum kit to her car. The performance is…over? The performance is over.
An arm falls across his shoulders making him flinch before he registers Rowan’s presence at his side. “You alright?” his friend asks, shaking him playfully, “You seem a little out of it.” His tone is light, but there’s an edge of uncertainty to it. The same uncertainty that’s there every time the band asks him that question. As if they’re not quite sure they want to know the answer.
“Yeah, just tired.” He tries for a smile to make the lie go down easier.
Rowan chuckles. “Tell me about it. That second set was intense! Good intense, though,” he adds, pulling Tristan into a side hug.
Tristan lets him. He feels wrung out and empty, but there’s comfort in the physical contact, and he finds himself relaxing ever so slightly. It’s hard to be present when he feels like he’s coming untethered from his body, but he tries. Tries to keep himself in the moment. Tries to forget that they have to do this all over again tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that. Tries not to fantasize about a carbon monoxide leak and a faulty alarm in his apartment tonight. Fuck, he needs help.
“I think The Runway is still open,” Devyn remarks as they squeeze the last amp into the back seat of their car. “We should get wings!”
The suggestion is met with enthusiasm by the others – the Runway is practically tradition at this point, whenever they've played this neighborhood – and Tristan feels his stomach sink. He’s exhausted. Too exhausted to spend another couple hours fighting to keep it together. Too exhausted to deal with the memories that haunt that particular place.
“I think I’m gonna head home early,” he interjects. “I’m wiped out.”
He tries to sound casual, but the looks in their eyes makes him want to sink into the ground and disappear. Pity mixed with nervousness, that same uncertainty as before. Like his feelings are some third rail they’re afraid to touch.
He’s saved by Rowan who breaks the tension with a dramatic “awww!”.
“Ok. If you’re sure?” Jazzy hesitates and Tristan gives her his very best attempt at a smile.
“You guys have fun,” he adds, forcing some enthusiasm into his voice. “Eat some wings for me.”
“Aye aye, captain,” Rowan mock salutes, earning a snort from Iris.
“Yeah, really throw yourself on that grenade.”
“If the grenade is made of wings, you can bet our ass I am!” Rowan retorts.
Jazzy flashes Tristan a rueful smile, shaking her head. “See you tomorrow!” she calls as he turns to head to his car, the weight of the words pressing into his shoulders like an unwanted touch. Something tightens in his chest. His pace quickens.
The door of his car slams shut. He's gasping for breath as if he just outran a predator. His hands feel detached from his body; numb, clumsy muppet mitts fumbling for his keys, stabbing the steering column until they find the ignition, finally hitting play and cranking the music volume like a drowning man seeking air until he can feel the bass buzzing in his chest. It doesn’t help.
Trapped at Rangers HQ between Retribution and Revelations, processing that post-crash argument in the worst possible way.
CW: self-harm, medical trauma
-----------------
The dream is uncharacteristically gentle. The kitchen still smells of cooking food, the sound of running water blurring with the quiet static of Ortega’s thoughts as you stand at the sink, washing the dishes – at least that’s what you’re trying to do. Ortega’s attempts at helping only slow you down and you secretly suspect he’s doing it on purpose. You don’t mind.
He is standing behind you, warm weight pressed against your back, hands brushing yours in the soapy water. You should feel trapped, cornered, but you don’t. You feel safe. He feels safe.
And that’s stupid and dangerous because you’re not and he’s not, but you don’t care because he’s mumbling nonsense into your hair and you’re trying desperately not to smile like some kind of sap. When did you become this soft?
“Where is he?” he murmurs again.
(And you smile, because you’re an idiot who deserves what is about to happen.)
“What?”
You feel his weight shift, arms wrapping round yours – and then they tighten. Not gently. Full body weight pinning you against the edge of the sink.
No! The word is just a panicked little yelp. But he doesn’t listen, doesn’t pull away. That had been a lie and you were a fool for believing it. When did you start to imagine your body belonged to you. When did you become so hopelessly naive?
“Where is he?” A snarl as he grabs a fistful of your hair, forcing your your head down over the sink. You can’t see his face from his angle, but it’s a dream, so you see it anyway.
You see the look you’d been so afraid of for so long. No recognition. Only anger and hurt. Disgust – as though just touching you makes his skin crawl.
“It’s me–” You try to plead as he slams your head forward, dishes breaking against your skin like window shards, your face submerged in the soapy water. You struggle, but he has your arms and body pinned. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. You’ve been here before.
He drags you back up, gasping and choking, and you need to explain, you need him to understand, but you just keep sobbing the same two words again and again like a broken toy.
“Even if I believed that, which I don’t — if you're not an imposter, everything is ten times worse!”
Worse? Your thoughts tangle on that word. Does he mean that? Worse if you’re real. Worse if you’re you. Better if you’d died seven years ago.
Ten times better.
(Look at that – you’ve still got something in common after all.)
He shoves you forward again, but there’s no kitchen counter to stop you. Just four stories of empty air and the ground coming up fast.
You’ve dreamed this so many times. The fall. The obliterating shock of impact. The pain taking you apart like a vivisection, like a car window shattering in slow motion. Not a body anymore. Not a whole. Just pieces.
Broken. Lying on your back. Blood soaking into the pavement. Staring up at the sky. The sun is a many-eyed surgical light, the pavement is a stainless steel slab.
There are hands touching you. Ungentle, but precise. They hold you down as a needle is shoved into your arm and you can’t stop it. You fight against the hands, against the restraints, but the drugs take hold anyway. Your body betrays you. Like it always does. Your limbs turning slack and compliant, unresponsive.
A piece of metal is forced between your lips, but your jaw is still working and you clench your teeth.
No.
A hand on your forehead, forcing your head back, another hand gripping your jaw. Fingers trying to crawl inside your mouth. The nails-on-blackboard sensation of the Macintosh blade against your teeth, probing for an opening.
You can’t turn your head, but you still see him. Ortega. He’s still there. Standing in the doorway and the doorway looks like the open back of an ambulance. Did he call them? Is that how they found you?
Ricardo-–
The name is barely a croak as the paralytic overtakes your lungs and throat, but your eyes are screaming.
It’s me!
It doesn’t matter. His name on your lips is all they need to force the blade between your teeth, thrusting the plastic tube down your throat while he watches. And the expression on his face hurts worse than what they are going to do to you. He’s looking at you like – no, he’s not looking at you, not looking at a person; he’s watching a defective piece of equipment being serviced.
You slam your mind against the dampeners, against his stupid, impossible, static brain – too, too similar to the unreadable minds hovering over you.
It’s me it’s me it’s me
But he doesn’t see you.
Your eyes keep begging as he takes a step back.
Please.
Please don’t leave.
He promised.
(But he’s a liar. And so are you.)
-
You wake up choking on a sob, the slam of the ambulance door ringing in your ears.
Awake, but the nightmare still coats your consciousness like an oil slick, congealing around the visceral sense memory of dampeners, disinfectants and pain; your body jerks, struggling against imagined restraints and puppeteer hands, violation and terror crawling over your skin.
It’s the pain that saves you. White hot agony, lancing through your legs, bursting like fireworks in your chest. Real in the sharp, pitiless way that turns the world hard-edged and solid. It anchors you in your body, in the moment. Not then, now. Not there, here.
Here.
Fuck.
Your breathing shatters into quiet, shuddering sobs, each gasp aching like a kife in your chest. Stop. Try to slow down. Small, shallow breaths. You press your fingers to the inside of your wrist and feel the pulse. Racing. Too fast. Fuck. Probably triggered an alarm somewhere.
Pull yourself together. Can’t let them see you like this. Tears on your face, shaking uncontrollably.
You dig your nails into your wrist. But you know better than to mark yourself there. Those sorts of marks get you restrained – chemically or physically. You know the drill. Can’t risk you offing yourself before they dig everything they want out of your skull. Bleed you dry and then discard what’s left.
Spare parts for the scrap heap.
A broken weapon. Jammed. Better check the barrel just in case.
Their mistake.
You’re not crying. You’re not. Bite down on the inside of your cheek until you taste blood.
Pain. Control. Good.
Your breathing is still shaky, but your pulse is starting to slow. Ball your hands into fists to hide the trembling. You can do this. You’ve done it before. Come back from worse.
Have you? Did you?
Are you –?
You flinch, turning the words on yourself before Ortega’s voice in your head can do it for you
Fake.
Imposter.
Self-inflicted pain was always easier to bear. The words are rusty razors and the words are wounds, and you cut and you cut and it hurts. But they’re not true. They’re not. They’re not. You wish it felt less like begging.
The truth is that you can’t be sure, the truth is that you haven’t felt real since Heartbreak and it scares you to death. And you can’t stop hurting yourself. Because the second truth is that pain is all you have right now. Maybe you can’t make it better, but you can make it worse. That’s something you can control. That’s a choice. Something to focus on. Alone with nothing but the pain and your terrified thoughts. Not even a clock to let you get your bearings. Time is as broken and unreal as you are here. They’ve left you to rot.
Blink until your eyes stop burning. Breathe. You can do this. You’ve done it before. Didn’t learn your lesson though and you’re paying for it now. Was it stupidity or hubris? Making the same mistakes all over again. Knowing they were mistakes, but doing it anyway. Or maybe it was neither. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Your laugh is anything but sane. Pain like glass shards in your chest. In hindsight it’s all so pathetic, so naive. You’d wanted it to be real so badly – your lies, his promises. Little regene playing house – the words you’d thrown in his face coming back to taunt you.
Blood-stained teeth bared in a grimace – are you smiling or snarling? Why is it so hard to remember the difference? Why does it feel wrong? Skin stretching like plastic wrap. Muted sensations. Not you. Not your face.
Not yours. Never was.
Theirs.
No!
Breath hissing between clenched teeth, nails cutting into palms. Not again. Never again.
And fuck, anger feels good right now. Better than drugs. Feels like air in your battered lungs. The first deep breath you’ve been able to take.
Fake.
Monster.
His words are the scalpel you need. Kill what’s left of the person he remembers. Cut them out of you like a cancer and cauterize the hole. No more doubts. No more idiotic hopes. All the stupid little bits of humanity you’ve collected over the years. No more Cyrus.
No more mistakes.
Monster? Your mouth twitches and now it’s a smile – though ‘smile’ is too kind a word for the hungry way your lips curl back from your teeth. Oh, you’re so much worse than that. You are what you’ve always been. What they made you to be. A weapon.
In which Heinrix attempts to address a problem and makes everything worse.
---------------------------
The officers’ wing of the med bay was quiet. Mago sat in a small, private berth, head nodding over a dataslate. In the bed beside him, hooked up to an array of monitors and tubes, was the kid they’d found on the prison planet. The rise and fall of his chest was shallow and slow, but steady.
Mago scrubbed a hand across his face and tried for the dozenth time to decipher the paragraph of text in front of him. Reading was less of a struggle now that he’d managed to pair his aural implant with the dataslate, but the bland, even tones of the artificial voice did nothing to discourage sleep.
The dull echo of approaching footsteps tugged briefly at his awareness, but he dismissed it. Orderlies came and went in the officers’ wing with a frequency and attention that was utterly alien to him. Had he been less exhausted, he might have recognized the clipped, military cadence of the step – no orderly moved like that – but it blurred together with the other unfamiliar sounds of the infirmary, and he did not register the threat until it stood looming over the threshold.
A flash of imperial scarlet, the glint of a rosette, and for a moment Mago’s mind turned to static. He lurched to his feet, knocking over the chair and nearly dropping the dataslate before the rational part of his brain caught up.
Interrogator Van Calox stood in the doorway, his expression impassive as the Rogue Trader straightened up with all the stilted grace of a cat trying to pretend that it hadn’t just fallen off the table.
Prying his hand off the grip of his revolver, Mago flashed a grin, more snarl than smile, all sharp edges and bravado.
“Something I can help you with, Van Calox?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “If you're here to see the doc about that stick up your ass, the surgery is that way.”
The interrogator ignored the barb. With a pointed glance towards the bed where, by some miracle, the boy was still asleep, he stepped back from the door, beckoning with a tilt of his head. May I have a word?
He didn’t wait for an answer, but Mago was in no position to argue: the moment the doorway was clear, he felt as though a vice had unclamped from around his chest. He did not allow himself any outward signs of relief while he was in the interrogator’s line of sight. A single controlled breath, in and out. Then he followed him outside.
They moved a short distance down the hallway where they could speak without fear of being overheard. Mago noticed that the interrogator didn’t bother to check the other nearby berths. Which meant he’d checked before he arrived.
Which meant he’d made sure they were alone.
Alarm prickled across Mago’s skin. He couldn’t quite suppress the flinch as the interrogator stopped and turned to him.
“How is he?” Beneath the careful decorum there was a glint of the same genuine concern he’d shown earlier that day on Rykad Philia. It caught Mago off guard – the sudden uncertainty of who was speaking from one moment to the next, the person or the rank. It was so much fucking simpler when people were shooting at them.
“Docs gave him something to knock him out, but they say he’ll mend.” He hesitated, then added grudgingly. “He has you to thank for that.”
“You give me too much credit,” the interrogator demured. “I merely stabilized him.”
Mago snorted. “A whole bay of chirurgeons aren’t worth shit if the patient shows up dead.”
There was an awkward pause. Maybe it was alright. Maybe he really did just want to check in on the kid. Maybe –
“You have taken quite a…. personal interest in the young Winterscale,” the interrogator ventured.
Mago released an exasperated sigh. “Spare me the veiled accusations, Van Calox. If you have a question, spit it out.”
“It was merely an observation, nothing more. Though I must confess to having wondered at the reason behind it.”
“Is that personal or professional curiosity?”
The question seemed to surprise the interrogator, and he paused, head tilted at a slight angle, considering. “I’m not sure there’s a difference.”
Mago hesitated a moment longer, than shrugged. “He’s alone,” he said with practiced carelessness. “Figured someone should be there when he wakes up, that’s all.”
Something like interest sparked in the interrogator’s gaze and Mago felt his hackles raise.
“Do you speak from experience?”
That was too damn close to the truth and Mago favored him with a long, hard stare. When he spoke his voice was tight and clipped. “Something like that. But you didn’t come all the way down here to make small talk.”
The interrogator blinked, then inclined his head. “Very well. Since you ask, I will be direct. It has not escaped my notice that my presence is a source of…. discomfort for you.”
‘Discomfort’. The understatement might have been funny if his heart wasn’t beating so damn fast. Mago forced a laugh.
“That rosette isn’t exactly known for putting people at ease.”
“True. Agents of the Inquisition are rarely welcome guests.” The interrogator hesitated, choosing his words with care. “But your reaction is…. heightened.”
“Heightened?” He repeated, still stubbornly trying to play it off.
Again the interrogator hesitated, brows raised ever so slightly as though questioning whether Mago was really going to make him spell it out. Then, with an almost imperceptible shrug, he continued.
“You are…. confrontational, to include reaching for your weapon any time I approach you alone. If I am between you and an exit, you immediately reposition yourself. Other behaviors consistent with hyperarousal: accelerated heart rate; excessive startle response; hyperventilation – your breath control is quite remarkable, but still noticeable when one knows what to look for…..Should I continue?”
The verbal vivisection was brief but methodical, pinning his vulnerabilities one by one as though he were an insect under glass. Echoes of pain shot through his fingers and flared behind his implant. The tremors started in his hands and he balled them into fists, his face burning.
“And how should I behave, Interrogator?” Mago fired back. He took a step towards him, a taunting edge creeping into his voice. “Should I get on my knees?”
“I – What?” The interrogator broke off, staring at him in consternation.
Without breaking eye-contact, Mago stepped into his space, leaning uncomfortably close. “Would you like that?”
For the briefest instant, the interrogator seemed to freeze. Then he tore his gaze away. “Throne damn you, be serious!” He glared at Mago, a faint flush creeping up from his collar.
“My point,” he pressed on, trying furiously to regain his composure. “Is that you exhibit a highly unusual degree of hostility and alarm for someone of your status.”
“And?” Anger felt like a stim injection. “Are your accusations going somewhere? Or did you really come all the way down here just to call me a prick and a coward?”
“That’s not –” Again the mask seemed to falter, frustration creeping in. “I am not accusing you, I am simply making–.”
“An observation. I’m not your fucking data slate, Van Calox. What do you want?”
The interrogator stared at him, and for a moment it seemed as though his temper would get the better of him again. But the moment passed and with a short, deliberate breath his features settled back into the familiar officious mask.
“On Rykad Philia,” he continued, coldly deliberate now, “When the young Winterscale asked if you had ever ever suffered a similar injury – having one’s eye burned out, to be specific, you replied that – I believe the exact words were, ‘the Inquisition isn’t that creative’.”
“Heard that, did you?” Mago bit the words out, struggling to keep his breathing even.
“It’s my job.”
That place had been a death trap. His thoughts had been racing in a dozen different directions, retracing the map in his head as they moved, anticipating ambush sites, choke points, fallback points, which sections were mined and which were clear; he’d been trying to keep the boy conscious, keep him talking, he’d said the first thing that came into his head. Stupid. Stupid mistake.
“I suppose there’s no point in lying.” The words came out slow and over-controlled. It barely sounded like his own voice. “You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t already know the answer.”
The interrogator eyes narrowed for a moment, as though trying to parse this sudden concession. Then he nodded. “The record of your arrest in the official operation report was sparse, but…. illuminating. With one particularly striking error. According to the report, Mago Vanth is dead.”
The words dropped like a stone into the silence between them.
Mago went very still. His vision narrowed and for a moment everything was drowned out by the sounds of his own ragged breathing and the blood rushing in his ears. Slowly, deliberately, he unclenched his fists. He’d never been the fastest draw, though speed scarcely mattered when his opponent could stop his heart with a thought.
His mouth twisted bitterly. “And you plan on ‘correcting’ that error, is that it?”
“No. That’s not –” The interrogator’s brow furrowed suddenly and for the second time that night he was rendered briefly speechless as the full implications of Mago’s words struck him. “No. Saints’ blood – That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”
He paused to collect himself. “I’m not interested in your past, Mago. I am here to help you in the fight against foes you may not even be aware of. Whatever you may think of me, I am not your enemy. The Inquisition has more pressing concerns than the fate of an informant from – ”
Mago flinched at the word ‘informant’ and the interrogator stopped. For a moment he seemed about to say something more, but Mago cut him off. “Are we done?” He felt brittle and sharp. A broken window. Reach inside me again and I’ll cut you to pieces.
There was a flicker of something that might almost have been disappointment on the interrogator’s face; then he nodded. “I have taken up enough of your time. I’ll leave you to your duties.”
Mago stared at his retreating back. But the fear didn’t stop. There was no relief. Just miserable, helpless rage boiling over into bad impulses and worse decisions.
He knew he should let it go. A moment ago he’d wanted nothing more than for this to be over. He’d wanted him gone and now he was going. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut.
“Hang on,” he heard his own voice call out, “Fair’s fair. If you’re going to dredge up my past, at least let me return the favor.”
The interrogator slowed, but didn’t stop. “I’m afraid I will have to decline the offer.” The coldly courteous tone left no room for argument.
“How’d you lose your eye?” It had been a guess, but the sharpness with which the interrogator turned to face him was all the confirmation he needed.
“You will tell me precisely where you heard such a thing.” He did not raise his voice; he did not need to, the implied threat was there like a blade resting against bare skin, and for the first time in their conversation, Mago saw not annoyance or frustration, but anger in his face.
“Or what?” The words came out in a wounded animal snarl, terrified, but too angry to stop.
He felt he blood drain from his face as the interrogator took a deliberate step towards him, and for all his bravado his nerve failed him. His whole body flinched instinctively, shrinking back.
The interrogator seemed to hesitate then, but it was too late.
A hysterical laugh burst from Mago. “There you are,” he choked the words out, his voice raw and unsteady, “I knew you were full of shit. All those pretty words, but you’re really only good for one thing, aren’t you? When you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, right? So either take a swing or get the fuck away from me!”
The interrogator regarded him icily for a long moment, then without another word, he turned and left.
Gradually the sounds of his footsteps faded, and the officer’s wing was quiet once more. A sharp, sudden chill made Mago shiver and he realized that his shirt was soaked through with sweat. A laugh bubbled up in his throat and he choked it back.
Moving half in a daze, he returned to the small room where the kid was still asleep. He carefully righted the fallen chair and sank down onto it. He lowered his head into his hands and began to shake uncontrollably. He didn’t try to fight it this time; he curled forward over his knees and let the panic wash over him in waves.
The interrogator had been wrong about one thing. It hadn’t been an error. Mago Vanth was dead. He’d bled out in a corpse pit after betraying everything that had ever mattered to him. The thing that had picked itself up and crawled away might have worn his face and used his name, but there was no coming back from that. Some things were too broken to mend.
When one of his oldest friends is killed during the events in the Whitemarch, Adaryc must travel back to the village where they grew up to bury his remains, and in the process is forced to confront the realities of loss, identity and his own complicated relationship with his roots and his faith.
Content Advisory: religious trauma, attempted suicide, references to self-harm
Those first days after they returned from the Whitemarch were a blur of exhaustion. They dug graves, conducted services, redistributed belongings, held collections, Adaryc wrote letters – too many letters – to families. And even in the midst of death, the living could not be forgotten, Marwyd needed medical supplies urgently, the duty roster needed to be reorganized to account for their casualties, supply lines needed to be reopened in the surrounding area, new jobs lined up. Adaryc didn’t sleep for two days and there still weren’t enough hours.
There wasn’t time to grieve. Not even for Devet. It still hadn’t sunk in that he was gone. Even as they prepared his body for transport, it wasn’t him, it was was simply another task that needed to be done.
Most of their dead were laid to rest in the hills outside Little Bend where the Iron Flail had a small, unofficial burial ground. But Adaryc had promised Devet, years ago, when they were both much younger, that he would take his body home to his family if it came to that.
Hel, scrape together some campfire ashes and tell them I got smoked by a spell-slinger. I don’t care. Just – promise me you’ll give them something to bury. Maybe that will give them some peace. Gods know I never did.
He remembered the crooked smile on his face when he’d said it.
Kae, one of his sergeants and closest friends, a mountain of a man who was closing in on fifty winters, volunteered to go with him. Only seemed right, he’d said. They’d grown up in the same parish, Adaryc and Devet and Kae. Enlisted together, fought together, made it home together. It had been the three of them there at the beginning, and there had never been a version of events where they were all still standing at the end, not in their line of work, but –
But. The words he couldn’t find ached like a hole in his chest.
They had been on the road since before sunrise, taking it in turns to pull the small two-wheeled cart which held Devet’s coffin. It was Adaryc’s shift; the late morning sun was warm on his shoulders, but the air still had the bite of winter in it. The cart bumped over the ruts left by the spring runoff, loudly jostling the coffin.
Adaryc caught himself grimacing at each impact. He had the absurd impulse to apologize, as though Devet’s corpse was still sensible to pain. His thoughts kept flashing back to the journey down from the mountains. To the wagon full of dead friends stacked like cordwood. To Devet huddled under blankets with the other wounded, with a ghost pale face and sweat beading on his brow, cracking jokes and stubbornly insisting that everything was fine.
Another banging rattle as the cart bumped over a rough patch of road and Adaryc’s jaw tightened. The weight was all wrong. It should have been heavier. There should have been more of him to bury.
He’d been getting better.
His thoughts kept tangling on that part.
It was a childish thought; he had seen enough of war to know that things did not happen because they were supposed to, because they were fair, or because they were deserved; they merely happened. It was one of life’s simplest cruelties.
But the knowledge did nothing to ease the guilt that twisted around his insides like garrotte wire: that he had walked away from Cayron’s Scar with naught but a broken arm and an aching head and Devet had–
He flinched away from the memory of those last hours.
The wagon shuddered over another rut, jarring him back to the present. Haligford was their destination, the small farming village in the South Dales where they had grown up. A two and a half day journey, he thought, if they kept a steady pace.
He shifted his grip on the harness strap. He hadn’t been — hadn’t been back — in almost fifteen years.
There is a surreal quality to the months leading up to the war. News trickles out to the rural parishes in piecemeal, often conflicting reports – days, even weeks, after the events have occurred. They are insulated from what is happening in the wider world, but there is no comfort in that insulation, no safety. It is the difference between cover and concealment.
In a matter of months, the entire shape of the world has changed. Their god has taken a human avatar and chosen Readceras as his divine seat, he has expelled the Aedyran governor and declared the colony’s independence. And yet they still wake every morning to the same barren fields and empty bellies, the same crushing poverty, the same boot on their necks. Everything has changed and nothing has changed, and that dissonance hangs like a sword above their heads. The priests praise Eothas for his deliverance and no one dares ask what they are being delivered from.
When the blow finally comes, it is a perverse kind of relief. Waidwen’s gaze turns upon the Church, to root out corruption, or so it is said, but the watchword cried in every temple, is not ‘corruption’, but ‘heresy’. A small, but deft shift in rhetoric that removes the target from the backs of those in power and lays the blame and responsibility at the feet of the people.
The vorlas crop is rotting in the fields, and the trade agreements Readceras has depended upon so heavily for grain and other supplies are void now that they are no longer an Aedyran colony. People are starving. And their leaders, the voices they trust, tell them that all they have to do to make it stop is to rid themselves of the rot in their midst.
The purges hit the Waelites and Berathians first, the followers of Galawain and Ondra, the small sects dedicated to the other gods. Stories come from the cities of full scale proscriptions; in a village up river a family of Ondrites is burned alive in their house; in Haligford a crowd gathers outside the charcoal burner’s hut in the middle of the night, drags him into the street and chases him to the parish border. Adaryc remembers shouts in the the night and torchlight from the road. Wagons carrying frightened, hollow-eyed families pass through day after day fleeing south to the border.
And when they have driven out all those who follow other gods and their crops are still failing and their bellies still empty, they begin to look closer to home. To those at the edges of their communities, the outsiders, the misfits, anyone does not fit the shape that was prescribed for them.
Adaryc knows it is only a matter of time. His family’s status in the parish is liminal at best. He has no friends. He has always been viewed as ‘troubled’, but ever since the incident with the brewer’s boy the villagers look at him like a gul in their midst. Each night he wakes from nightmares of torches outside their windows. He knows that he is running out of time, and he knows that when they come for him, his father will not be spared; guilty by association.
But a holy crusade – no one could accuse him of faithlessness or heresy if he takes part in that, if he is willing to die for his god. Readcerans revere their martyrs. The dead and the unborn are far easier to love than the living. For all that he cares deeply for his country, that is one of the qualities that he hates the most.
He remembers sitting at the table with his father as the light fades. The hearth is cold; there is no food to cook and they can’t afford to waste fuel on warmth. As has been the case more and more since his brother Eadwyn’s death, talking only lead to arguments, and so they sit in silence, the only sounds the faint click and scrape of his father’s wooden needles.
Adaryc stares at his hands, balled into fists on the table before him. “Osbeorn said there was a messenger at the temple today,” be blurts out at last.
There is a tired sigh from his father. A stop at the temple meant an official proclamation.
“Waidwen is calling for volunteers for a divine crusade.”
The sound of the needles stop.
Adaryc takes a breath and pulls himself up a little straighter. “I’ve decided. I’m going to join.” His attempt at confidence comes out stilted and awkward and it is all he can do not to cringe as his adolescent voice cracks.
He waits, bracing himself. There is silence for several long moments, and then the soft clicking of the needes begins again.
“I’ll have to notify the reeve.” The words are slow, but wearily matter-of-fact. “They were counting on all hands for the second sowing. But I suppose it can’t be helped.”
Adaryc stares at him. Waiting for him to say something – anything – else, but he never even looks up from his work. He has been dreading this confrontation, expecting his father to be angry, to argue, to forbid it; so why does this concession feel so much worse?
He finds himself wishing that he would argue, that he would push back, call him an idiot, gods – ANY reaction at all would be better than this.
Adaryc opens his mouth to protest, to make him react. He is supposed to be furious, he is supposed to argue, to question him, or tell him what he ought to do instead, or – or —
All the words he wants to say tighten into a hard, painful lump in his throat.
He is supposed to care.
Adaryc does not wait for morning; he leaves in the middle of the night without a word to anyone.
“Hey–” Kae’s hand smacked against his shoulder, pulling him back go the present. He looked at Adaryc sidelong, a concerned scowl knotting his brow, “Come up for air once in a while, yeah?”
(When it was just the two of them, the sergeant tended to dispense with the formalities of rank. )
Adaryc cast him a look of rueful gratitude. “Sorry.”
They were approaching a crossroads, coming up from the south and turning west deeper into the South Dales. A post stood at the center, marking the distance in leagues to various waypoints. One of the names caught Adaryc’s eye.
“Ashwyck,” he said aloud.
Kae looked up as though he had heard the name of an old friend. After a pause he said, half joking, “Could always make a detour. See if that old tavern is still standing.”
It would have been fitting, but they both knew that they could ill afford the delay. The Flail couldn’t spare them any longer than was necessary, and Devet’s body had already begun to fester.
“He wanted to head west to the Bremen depot, you know?” Kae added suddenly, "When we enlisted, I mean. It being closer and all. At least until I pointed out our chances of getting ordered around by someone from home.”
“You’re right. That would be terrible,” Adaryc deadpanned.
Kae chuckled. “Present company excepted.”
“Do you remember that first night in Ashwyck?”
“I remember Dev going up to the bar to get us drinks and coming back with a prickly, half-starved teenager instead.”
The tips of Adaryc’s ears turned pink, recalling that first meeting. “I owe you an apology for that.”
Kae made a dismissive sound. “You were a bit riled up, is all. Devet used to joke that you were the only person he’d ever met with a stick up his ass and a chip on his shoulder at the same time.”
Adaryc snorted. “So, more or less the same as now?”
He was rewarded with a bark of laughter from Kae. “Nah. You don’t get your hackles up near as easy now. As long as we’re not dealing with slavers or landlords.”
“Or delegates from Stalwart,” Adaryc added bitterly.
Kae looked at him sharply. “You still whipping yourself over that?” He gave Adaryc’s shoulder a gentle swat.
“What was that place called?” Kae continued, his thoughts turning back to the tavern in Ashwyck, “The Ploughman’s – no, Pilgrim’s Rest. That’s what it was. I remember because they tossed us out when we couldn’t afford to keep drinking.” He shook his head, “Feels like a lifetime ago.”
Devet’s voice booms over the clamor around them as he propels Adaryc towards a table at the back of the tavern where another man is seated.
“Another refugee!”
The choice of words sends alarm bells shrilling through him and Adaryc pulls away sharply.
“I’m no such thing! I came here to join the Divine Legion! To serve Eothas!”
The vehemence of his response startles a laugh from Devet who holds up his hands. “Take it easy, kid.”
“Take it easy?” Adaryc hurls the words back at him, the tension which has been building over the past weeks and months finally boiling over. “Tell that to the charcoal burner’s family! You think you can call me a heretic and just– “
“Hey!” The other man who has not spoken until now cuts Adaryc off sharply. “Sit down.”
Adaryc falters, blinking at him in surprise. The steady, even gaze holds his until he flinches away. And after a moment of sullen hesitation, he lowers himself onto the bench.
“Alright, first off –” There is a weary authority in his voice. “No one is calling anyone a heretic. This isn’t a fucking inquisition.
“Second – Bremen depot is a full day’s journey closer to Haligford. Only reason for you to be here in Ashwyck is if you’re trying to get away from something. Same as us.”
Adaryc’s hands ball into fists at his sides, eyes locked on the surface of the table. Shame at his outburst and at being caught out so easily colors his cheeks and fear twists in his stomach. This had been a mistake.
“Point is –” Devet interjects, dropping down next to Adaryc on the bench and giving him a playful nudge in the ribs. “You can relax. You’re among friends.”
Adaryc freezes in surprise at the words. No one has spoken to him like that since his brother died, and to his horror he finds himself on the verge of bursting into tears. His eyes sting and his vision blurs. He hugs his arms across his chest not daring to look up again, afraid that a kind look might shatter him.
“It’s Cendamyr, isn’t it?” asked the older of the two, who looked to be somewhere in his early thirties.
Adaryc instinctively straightened up at the use of his surname, the fact that the other man was addressing him as a peer and not a child. He nodded, sniffing and swiping at his eyes.
“I’m Kae. And this – well, guessing you already know Devet.”
Everyone knew the parish troublemaker.
Devet grinned, leaning forward in a mock bow. “My reputation precedes me.”
They talk for a little while before Devet slides a half-finished plate of food in front of Adaryc. A thin potage of beans and corn, heavily watered down to make it stretch farther, but it looks more substantial than anything he’s had in weeks.
Adaryc’s mouth waters and his head feels uncomfortably light – he hasn’t eaten since before he left home – but still he bristles, the offer touching the raw nerve of internalized shame that is his only inheritance from his father.
“I don’t need your handouts.”
Devet’s brows arch, his expression more amused than annoyed. “Is everything a fight with you?” he laughs, “Come on, you look like you’d blow away in a stiff breeze.”
Adary’s face flushes scarlet. “I – I thought –” he stammers miserably, wishing that he could sink straight through the floor. As indentured servants they had no income, subsisting on the meager rations provided by the estate. The temple’s charity always came with strings of guilt and shame attached and he had assumed this was no different. He is not used to people being kind for its own sake.
“I’m sorry.”
Devet waives off the apology. “Can’t have you fainting in front of the enlistment officer, can we? Besides,” he adds, “I meant what I said before. You’re among friends.”
They stopped at sunset for evening prayer. Adaryc knelt in the pale, dead grass at the side of the road. Beneath his knees he could feel that the ground was starting to soften; in Haligford they would be tilling the winter cover crops into the soil to prepare for spring planting.
He recited the familiar words, a prayer for protection and guidance, an affirmation of faith in the coming dawn; it was spoken twice, once for the living and once for the lost.
Too late he realized that kneeling had been a mistake; his limbs were stiff with exhaustion and unfolded only with spiteful reluctance.
“See what you have to look forward to?” Kae joked, offering him a hand up – at more than fifteen years his senior, the older soldier had had the sense to remain standing.
Kae looked as tired as Adaryc felt, the skin under his eyes was smudged dark like an bruise, and there was a hitch in his gait that hadn’t been there when they set out that morning; old wounds making themselves known.
The sensible thing to do would be to camp for the night and start fresh tomorrow morning, but —
He felt a stab of guilt at his own hesitation.
“We should stop while there’s still some daylight left,” he said at last, with more conviction than he felt.
There was a heavy sigh from Kae. “If it’s all the same, I’d rather push on through. Get this over with.”
“Your leg – “
“Will be fine. I’m old, not dead.” There was an edge to his voice, pain, weariness and tension all coming to a head, but his tone softened as he glanced sidelong at Adaryc’s bandaged arm. “If you need to rest–?”
Adaryc shook his head. He didn’t want to prolong this anymore than Kae did. They trundled the cart back onto the road and continued westward into the growing twilight. In the shallows of a nearby stream the frogs had begun to sing, their high-pitched chorus filling the air.
“Never did understand why he was so set on this,” Kae said suddenly after they had walked in silence for a short while. “I remember his family. He didn’t owe them a damn thing after the way they treated him. Don’t seem right, leaving him like this.”
It was an odd relief to hear someone say the words out loud; Adaryc knew it was selfish to begrudge Devet his last wish, but he couldn’t find a way to make peace with it.
“I gave him my word.”
“I know.” Kae was thoughtful for a little while, then he looked up, a fond smirk tugging at his mouth. “Were you there for — nah, you’d’ve been too young. The whole debacle with the honeyjack…. Gods, that must be what? Twenty-five years ago now?”
Adaryc shook his head. Devet had been in his mid teens at the time, so Adaryc wouldn’t have been more than six or seven. “It’s funny though – he told the story so many times, it feels like a memory. I can picture it clear as day.”
It had been a prank several months in the making. Devet and a friend had taken a small keg of wyrthoneg, the weak mead that was the only legal form of alcohol in Readceras, and over the course of a long winter cold snap, turned it into an ungodly strong honeyjack, which they had then used to spike the punch at the close of the midwinter holy days. They’d been caught, of course; Devet had spent a week in the stocks, nearly froze to death and was still considered lucky to avoid anything more serious, but even two and a half decades later, his eyes still lit up with mischief at each retelling. It was one of his proudest moments.
“It’s how we became friends.”
Adaryc looked up curiously. He hadn’t heard this part before.
“His family refused to bring him food while he was in the stocks. Too damn busy trying to distance themselves from the scandal, I reckon. So I started doing it. He was just a kid for fuck’s sake. Bit of an ass, sure, but who isn’t at that age. He was….” Kae was quiet for a moment. “He was alright. Haligford was just about bearable with him around.”
There was anther long pause and Kae added softly. “It ain’t right.”
<>
It was a few hours after dark when he heard the cries. It started with a single voice, calling out from the trees and Adaryc’s head snapped up, instinctively reaching for his sword.
The sound came again, urgent but indistinct. His eyes searched the darkness of the treeline, but by long habit, a portion of his attention lingered on Kae, measuring the sergeant’s reaction – the slight delay before he stopped and turned, the feel of his gaze shifting back to Adaryc rather than remaining fixed on the direction of the sound.
Adaryc let his hand drop to his side, but none of the tension left his body. The sound had been in his head: a spirit. In the early years this had caused no shortage of confusion and false alarms, but here, fifteen years later there was no need even for words. They read everything they needed from each other’s body language.
Over time Adaryc had grown better at compartmentalizing these encounters, of assessing and moving on, but that night his consciousness snagged on the voices like a cloak on a nail, wrenching him off balance.
Shame and self-loathing washed over him. To Readcerans, meddling with another’s soul was the ultimate act of blasphemy and hubris, and the ability to read souls was seen as a form of violation, on par with the more sinister abilities of cyphers. Such ‘gifts’ were considered a sign of a sick soul.
“Can you still see him?” The blunt urgency of the question startled Adaryc out of his own thoughts and he stiffened.
“What?”
“Devet,” Kae said simply. “Is he still… You know?”
“No.” It was more of a flinch than an answer, snapping out terse and defensive before he could stop himself.
He tried again, dragging in a breath and letting it out. The topic was less of a boundary and more of an open wound, a sin to be confessed. He spoke carefully, moving from word to word like someone treading on too thin ice.
“There were a few. On the way down from the mountains. But the burials put them to rest.” It wasn’t like after the war when the souls had clung to him for months, facing down specters of his dead friends every waking moment.
“But Devet —” He’d felt him go; felt him slip through his fingers even as he held his hand. He swallowed past the painful catch in his throat and thrust the memory away.
“He didn’t stay.”
Kae nodded solemnly. “He never was one for keeping still.” Adaryc couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.
“I wouldn’t keep that from you. If he was still —”
“I know. Just kept…. hoping, is all. He used to joke about it, remember? Coming back and haunting the parish.”
Adaryc cracked a weak smile, momentarily imagining Devet rustling pages and blowing out candles in the middle of a sermon.
“Now he’s got us doing it for him, the bastard,” Kai grumbled.
His tone was mild, joking even, but there was an edge of bitterness to the words as well.
The person Kae had lived as for thirty-five years was dead. He had buried them when he joined the war, and when he returned home with his head shaved and his breasts bound up, his family had thrown him out. As far as they — and much of the rest of Haligford — was concerned, Kae too was dead.
Adaryc’s own katabasis had been shorter by comparison, but more gradual. A slow immurement, burying himself alive brick by brick. A corpse walled up inside an effigy of what he was expected to be; in that way, they were similar. And there was a small, painful sort of catharsis in Kae’s offhand acknowledgement of it.
What was a haunting after all if not the dead returning?
They lapsed into silence for a time, following the road as it turned to run parallel with the river. The voices in his head had grown — not louder exactly, but sharper, harder to shut out. There were more of them now — it was always worse near bodies of water, worse too when he hadn’t slept — whispers pressing in from the periphery of his awareness.
Adaryc grit his teeth, striving to focus his whole attention on the sounds of the physical world around him, the creak of the wheels, the soughing of the wind in the trees overhead, the scuff of their footsteps.
The sound of running water.
All at once he was back amidst the desperate scramble to escape the flooding caverns of Ionni Brathr, the roar of the water all around them, the deadly slick of stone and ice underfoot, the crash of falling rock as the caves began to collapse on top of them. And then staggering out onto the ice floes of Cayron’s Scar and seeing it — all that red. Blood on the snow.
Beside him in the darkness, Kae began to hum and the memory drew back before the soft, offkey melody like shadows from candlelight. Adaryc recognized the tune, an old hymn that had been a marching song during the war. The memories it carried were bittersweet, but there was warmth and fellowship in them and the promise of morning no matter how long the night.
It was a small, quietly intimate act of care and Adaryc felt his throat tighten. He did not deserve Kae’s kindness.
Kae finds him huddled amid the crates and barrels and oil cloth tarps behind the supply tent. He is still shaky with adrenaline. His thoughts keep replaying the same scene over and over again. The physical examination. Standing naked together with the other recruits, the tight grip of the medic’s hands on his wrists, twisting them palms-up to reveal the criss-crossing lines of scar tissue, some not yet fully healed. The disdain in the priest’s voice as he calls into doubt his mental fitness, his commitment, his faith. He had wanted to die of shame. He had wanted to die. He wants to —
Kae sinks down on the packed earth beside him and Adaryc stiffens. His hands tug compulsively at his sleeves and his cheeks burn. He waits for the inevitable questions, the lecture, the platitudes, hot angry tears welling up in his eyes. But Kae doesn’t say anything. And for the first time it occurs to Adaryc that he is not the only one for whom the physical examination had been a forced confession.
For several long minutes they simply sit. Then, with a soft, deliberate exhale, Kae begins unlacing the cuff of his sleeve.
At first Adaryc doesn’t understand; he watches in confusion as Kae rolls up his sleeve to reveal the bare, brown skin of his forearm.
And then he sees them. Thin lines of slightly darker scar tissue, crosshatching the skin from his wrist almost to his elbow. The scars are old enough that they have begun to fade. They say, I understand. They say, it gets better.
They reached Haligford at dusk on the following day. Adaryc had sent a message ahead before they set out, though it could not have been much faster than they were. Still, some warning was better than none.
“Thought it would look different after all this time,” Kae remarked, the tension in his shoulders belying the evenness of his tone.
He was right. The buildings lining the road through the village were just as Adaryc remembered them. As if he’d been gone a few months rather than fifteen years. It filled him with disoriented unease, the same sort of dissonance he’d felt returning home after the war; the sense that he’d never left, that the war – everything he’d experienced – had never happened. Those who returned were expected to simply pick up where they’d left off.
Their somber procession drew no shortage of stares. But for the moment folk saw the weapons on their belts and steered clear.
“Never thought I’d feel skylined in a valley,” Kae muttered under his breath. It was a joke, but Adaryc felt it too. It wasn’t just the sense of being watched, he felt exposed.
It wasn’t until he heard the faint chuckle behind him that he realized he had instinctively quickened his stride to walk a few paces ahead of Kae.
“Taking point, Cendamyr?”
He let out a short exhale of a laugh at the kneejerk absurdity of it, but he didn’t drop back.
The forge was quiet when they reached Devet’s family home, but smoke was rising from the kitchen chimney. Devet’s sister, Deorhtric, answered the door, still in her leather smith’s apron, smudges of soot on her face. She regarded Adaryc’s travel stained gambeson and the sword at his side with open suspicion and then her gaze moved past him to the cart and her eyes hardened.
Without giving him a chance to speak, she turned and called two names into the house behind her and a moment later two men, whom Adaryc half recognized as husband and brother, joined them in front of the house. Behind them several younger, adolescent faces were just visible in the entryway.
“How did it happen?” Deorhtric managed to make the question sound like an accusation.
What could he tell her? They wouldn’t believe the truth — gods, he scarcely did and he’d been there. “A mercenary company from the Whitemarch was making trouble for villages along the border. We—”
“So my brother died so that you could have a dick measuring contest with another group of brigands,” she cut him off icily.
Adaryc went rigid. He could accept the blame — he was the commander, it was his responsibility — but not the way she dismissed Devet’s death as meaningless.
“He died protecting Readceras—”
She slapped him. The force of the blow snapping his head to the side. “Don’t you dare try to sell me that horseshit. In my own house. Over my own brother’s body. Your lies may have fooled Jora, but I know exactly what you are.”
It took every ounce of self control he had to simply take it. He straightened up, glaring, but she wasn’t finished. Kae had taken a step forward and her gaze fixed on him with sudden recognition.
“You’re that Haglund —”
“Leave him out of this!” Adaryc bristled. She ignored him.
“To think we took you in when you were turned out. And this is how you repay us? Though I don’t know what else I expected from someone who abandoned their family to play lackey for this —”
Adaryc took a sharp step forward, eyes blazing. “Kae is my right hand and one of the best men I’ve ever had the privilege of serving with!” he declared fervently.
“I think,” Kae interjected, calmly but with the finality of the Void, “Deorhrtic. You’ve forgotten who did the abandoning.”
And Deorhtric, to Adaryc’s surprise, stiffened, her face flushing at the quiet rebuke. But before any of them could say another word, another figure emerged from the doorway.
He had only ever known Devet’s mother from the occasional glimpse at the temple on holy days. She had always seemed stern and imposing. From the stories Devet told, she had been the very image of sober propriety; Devet had been her youngest and a perennial disappointment.
It was difficult to reconcile that image with the old woman before him. She was smaller, frailer, and there was a softness to her that was entirely alien to the person she had once been. It was generally accepted that Berath granted kith the mercy of forgetting their past lives at each new turn of the Wheel, but some folk were cursed to begin before that.
The son-in-law turned to her with a mixture of annoyance and concern, urging her to go back into the warmth of the house, but she was insistent.
“Who’s that?” she demanded peering at Adaryc and Kae before spotting the coffin and shrinking back a step, “What do they want?”
“They’ve brought Jora home, Mother.”
For a moment the old woman’s expression brightened, the thought of the coffin displaced by the familiar name. “He’s coming home?”
The husband made another attempt to coax her away, but the sister shook her head. “He’s dead, Mother. Jora is dead.”
Adaryc saw the horrible, frightened confusion on her face as the words slowly sank in. And then she began to weep, a quiet, shattered wailing as she sagged against her daughter.
Deorhtric fumed, keenly aware of the faces that had begun to appear in the doorways and windows of their neighbors’ homes. “Didn’t even have he decency to bring him ‘round the back. Had to drag him through the street like a common criminal – Oh for gods’ sakes!” she rounded on the husband and brother who had begun to argue over where to put the coffin. “Put him in the foundry. It’ll keep until sunrise.”
The brother together with one of the adolescents loped off to prepare space, leaving them with nothing to do but wait.
The sister stood, still supporting her mother, her glare now fixed on the coffin itself. “You see children, this is what comes of foolishness. Folk who think only of themselves come to a bad end.”
A small crowd had begun to gather by this point and Adaryc could only stand there, anger choking in his throat. He planted himself in front of Kae — though his slight frame made for pitiful cover. Most of those gathered spared them only wary, disapproving glances, but one man kept looking at Kae, brow creased as though trying to place him. Adaryc turned toward him, meeting his surprised stare with such aggressive directness that the man turned away in discomfort. Behind him he heard a soft snort from Kae.
In the midst of it all, the old woman withdrew from her daughter and approached the cart. She pressed her trembling hands to the coffin, smoothing or wiping away something only she could see. Did he suffer? she wanted to know. And he did his best to answer. But she could not hold onto the words. She would go back to fingering the coffin and a few moments later the same question again. How did it happen? Did he suffer? Was it painful? Each repetition felt like a knife twisting in his chest.
After what felt like hours, the brother and apprentice returned, ready now to take charge of the body, and Adaryc and Kae were free to go.
Adaryc had had days on the road to brace himself for this, but it still hadn’t prepared him for how much it would hurt. The panicked sense of rage and desperation as the finality of the loss began to sink in.
Grief snapped and snarled like a wounded animal inside his chest. He’s not yours! He had the irrational impulse to grab hold of the cart, to drag Devet away, away from these people and this place that had never wanted any of them. But what he wanted didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him, it was about Devet, and he’d promised Devet he would return him to Haligford.
They left the wagon with the family — the body still needed to be transported to the temple — and headed back the way they had come. The silence was so much emptier; it felt absurd to miss the rattle and jarring of the cart, but it had been almost like a third presence on the road. Now it was just the two of them.
The quiet grew more strained with each step they took. The road seemed narrower, the buildings closer.
Kae scrubbed a hand across his face, breathing out a long sigh once they passed the last house. “Well. That was shit.”
Adaryc exploded, “They had no right! They talked like he deserved it for fuck’s sake! He changed and left and now he’s dead because ‘that’s what happens’. As though this somehow puts things right! Puts everything back to ‘the way it should be’!”
It felt painfully familiar. He remembered the way some villagers had looked at them after the war, at their difficulty re-adjusting to life in the village, as though they were nothing but walking reminders of Readceras’ failure, as though it would have been more convenient – more comfortable – for everyone if they’d died with their god.
“All he’ll ever be to them, all they’ll allow him to be remembered for is a cautionary fucking tale about how you should never change and never leave and never question and just keep fucking pretending that everything around you isn’t on godsdamn fire —” He broke off breathless, so angry he was shaking.
“They don’t matter,” Kae retorted with sudden vehemence. “They aren’t the only ones who will remember him. They got a body. That’s it. They got meat and bones. We got fifteen fucking years. We got him. We got first blood and last breath and everything in between. They don’t fucking matter.”
Adaryc let out an unsteady breath. Kae was right, though in the moment it was small comfort. They walked in silence for a few heartbeats before Kae added. “And if you let my family anywhere near my remains, I will haunt you from Hel to breakfast.”
The remark startled a small, mirthless laugh from Adaryc, but he quickly sobered. “Your family – did you see them?”
“Not yet.”
“Is that better or worse?”
Kae sighed. “Bit of both? There’s a piece of me that gets to wondering sometimes if maybe they’ve changed. I know the answer, but I don’t know, you know?”
“Yeah,” Adaryc admitted quietly. He did.
<>
The burial was set for sunrise the following morning, as was traditional for Eothasian rites.
Adaryc and Kae camped at the edge of town. Darkness had begun to fall by then, softening the unsettling familiarity of their surroundings. In the dark, Haligford and its environs could have been almost any other farming village in Readceras.
There was some comfort in the routine, in the physical acts of gathering water and wood, of scouting the perimeter, in preparing food, in pestering Kae into using the salve Marwyd had given him for his knee, and being nagged in return about his arm. A connection to their life outside of Haligford, to the Flail.
It unnerved him how far away that life felt here and how little he felt like the person he had fought tooth and nail to become. It had been fifteen years; he was a grown man, the commander of a collective of soldiers; he’d survived a war, dozens of skirmishes with mercenaries and bandits, the Eyeless, he’d negotiated with Glanfathans, defied wealthy landowners, stood before the damned Morning Council…. And all it took was a name — mentioned offhand by Devet’s brother arguing with Deorhtric over the funeral arrangements, and all the fear and anger and helplessness came flooding back as if he were a child again.
Homecoming was meant to be a consummation, a joining that made one whole again. But it wasn’t. The person who returned was never the same as the one who left, and there was no reconciling the two. There was just the struggle of one over the other and the slow annihilation of self.
They ate in silence — journey cakes Kae had made with a mix of cornmeal, salt and water, cooked on a stone over the fire. The news that Brother Haemon would be presiding over the burial had them both on edge; Kae smoked and Adaryc fidgeted; nerves turned the food to ashes in his mouth and it was all he could do just to keep it down.
When it came time to bed down, Adaryc took the first watch, staring into the shadows beyond the fire until the restless, skin-crawling sense of waiting grew too much to bear and he got up to walk the perimeter.
“Seen you less on edge before a battle,” Kae remarked when Adaryc returned to stand by the fire for the dozenth time.
Adaryc’s brows quirked upwards, glancing over at where Kai lounged, propped against a tree. “You’re one to talk. How many pipes has that been now?”
There was a low chuckle from Kae. He’d been smoking like a chimney since they’d made camp.
“If I’m honest, a battle would be preferable,” Adaryc admitted, tugging compulsively at his sleeve with his good hand.
“Rymrgand’s frozen ass crack would be preferable.”
Adaryc choked on a laugh, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Despite the warmth of the fire, he couldn’t stop shivering.
“Suppose it was too much to hope that old Haemon would have passed on,” Kae sighed. “Bastards like that are always the last to go. They’re like cockroaches. Kick over enough rubble in an abandoned temple and one of the fuckers would probably come skittering out.”
They had both been Haemon’s ‘favorites’ at different times. Though ‘projects’ might have been more accurate. The ones he took a special interest in. The troubled children who needed to be broken in order to ‘heal’ properly, like a mis-set fracture.
“Your father tells me that you have been shirking your chores.”
The priest smells of tallow and incense. He towers over Adaryc’s eight year old frame where he stands in the flickering light of the altar candles with his hands clasped in front of him, his face hot with shame.
It sounds so much worse, so deliberate when Brother Haemon says it. Adaryc wants to deny it, to explain — He’s not lazy, it’s just…..he’s just….. but there’s no word for the emptiness that has displaced the person he used to be. He feels numb. He feels hollow. His brother has to drag him out of bed every morning. All he wants is to sleep. Tasks that he used to complete quickly now take him ages, if he remembers to do them at all. What is that if not laziness?
“He also tells me that you have not been eating.”
Adaryc’s shoulders hunch a little more. Laziness and ingratitude.
“Is something troubling you, child?”
And because he trusts him — because he has been taught to trust him — he tells him. Or tries to. Feeling clumsily for the words like someone groping for a path in the dark.
Brother Haemon listens patiently. “You are unhappy,” he says at last and Adaryc feels a rush of relief, imagining in that brief moment that he understands.
“Unhappiness is selfish, Adaryc.” The words hit him like a physical blow.
“Just like doubt. The more you indulge it, the more you give in to those feelings, the more you invite misfortune. Do you understand?”
He doesn’t understand. An apology, like a flinch, rises to his lips. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t – And then his mind processes the rest of what the priest has said and he goes very still.
“What – what kind of misfortune?”
“Do you think that is the question you should be asking?” The priest’s tone is indulgent, a threat concealed in an invitation, and Adaryc shrinks into himself a little more.
“No, but —” he stammers, pressing forward desperately, “But I mean – it wouldn’t be things like – like the vorlas? Would it? I mean, other people wouldn’t be — they wouldn’t be punished for something I did. Would they?”
Fear clamps around his chest. The words he doesn’t dare confess lodge in his throat until he feels like he might choke. The vorlas in the south fields is failing. They found the first sick plants shortly after his own troubles began.
The priest places a hand on his shoulder, and for an instant the panic subsides. He looks up anxiously, seeking reassurance. And Haemon crushes him like a moth. “Misery begets misery,” he intones. “If a well is polluted, do not all who drink from it become ill? Do not the plants watered by it wither?”
Guilt floods Adaryc. The crops are dying, because of him. His father won’t be able to pay off his debts, because of him.
He feels hot and cold and dizzy at the same time. He feels like he’s going to be sick. If his father and brother find out…. If they knew it was his fault…. If they knew how wicked and lazy and ungrateful he has been…
“What cause do you have to be unhappy?” Haemon adds in the same honey-coated tone. “You have a roof over your head, a father who puts food on your table, you are healthy in body, as are your father and brother. You have much to be grateful for, child. Take joy in those things, repent your ingratitude, and all will be well.”
All will be well. Adaryc cleaves to those words with the desperation of someone drowning. There’s still a chance. He can still fix this. He can make it better.
When he returns home he greets his father with a smile; he completes his chores without prompting, and he eats his dinner with apparent enthusiasm. His brother, Eadwyn watches him, his face an open question, but Adaric doesn’t meet his eyes.
<>
He tries so hard to be happy. He performs normalcy like a prayer — as if conviction alone can make it real. And when that only makes it worse, when the isolation and the fear are more than he can take, he turns his lies in on himself. The numbness, the exhausting heaviness, that is all normal, he tells himself. Everyone feels like this. He just needs to get used to it. He needs to be stronger. Doubtful thoughts clamor in his head and he tries to drown them out with other thoughts, better thoughts. He prays every night.
But the harvest still fails, and guilt and fear take root in his soul like bittersweet vine.
During the winter season, the children of the parish who can be spared from work attend lessons at the temple. One day he asks why Eothas doesn’t answer prayers. That is the wrong question. Brother Haemon makes him spend the rest of the lesson kneeling on the stone floor in view of the other children as punishment.
After the lesson, the priest pulls him aside, interrogating him on the reason why he would believe such a thing.
Adaryc learns that this, too, is his fault. A lack of faith. A lack of sincerity. If he had faith, if he truly believed without any doubt that his prayers would be answered, then they would be. It is as simple as that.
His prayers grow obsessive, lying awake at night repeating the same request over and over. There is always some imperfection. Nothing feels sincere enough, the smallest flicker of distraction or doubt poisons the whole attempt and he must begin again.
It feels like praying to a wall. But he keeps trying. Again and again. And again.
He barely sleeps. His emotions begin to swing violently, often over the smallest things, and he feels less and less in control.
Thoughts that seem to belong to someone else begin to thrust their way to the front of his consciousness; frightening and obscene, and the harder he tries to shut them out the louder and more persistent they become. They are there in every prayer, every sermon, every quiet moment.
He begins to believe that his soul must be stained somehow. That he must have been a truly horrible person in a past life. And it is that person’s thoughts and impulses bleeding through into him. It explains everything – the terrible thoughts, the violent outbursts, the periods of emptiness.
It explains too why his god never answers. Why he never seems to be there in the ways that the sermons and prayers promise. If thou art broken, he shall make thee whole, they say. If thou art in darkness, he shall bring thee to the light. If thou art sinful, thou shalt be reborn. If thou art cold, his warmth shall bolster thee.
But they also say: If thine heart be black, if thine intention be impure, thy life is forfeit. For he hath seen, he can see, he will see. Nothing is hidden from his glory.
Eothas had seen his soul and what he saw there was so monstrous, so unforgivable, that even the god of redemption had turned away. It is the only explanation that makes sense.
It was still dark when they broke camp. Neither of them had gotten any sleep, but propped against each other back to back by the fire they had managed something resembling rest.
Adaryc splashed water on his face, combed his fingers through his tangled mess of hair; he’d forgotten his razer and Kae didn’t own one. He turned instinctively to ask Devet — only to stand there, paralyzed for several heartbeats, staring at the empty space across the firepit.
He hadn’t learned how to use a razer from his father. When his first beard started to come in during the war, it had been Devet who took pity on him and showed him how to shave without cutting up his face. He remembered his own clumsy embarrassment, Devet’s easy manner soothing his ruffled feathers, he remembered the intimacy of allowing another person to hold a blade to his skin, he remembered feeling safe.
He tugged his rumpled clothes straight with his good hand – his left still hung useless in its dirty, makeshift sling – and straightened up, schooling his features into something he hoped to the gods passed for composure as he turned to Kae and nodded.
They didn’t speak on the walk into the village, their breath forming clouds in the cold morning air. The fields on either side of the road were grown over with vetch and winter rye; a few had been freshly tilled. The spring planting would begin soon and he felt a familiar anxiety tighten in his chest.
Let it be a good year, let it be enough. He murmured the prayer out of habit, and guilt came back like an echo; the fight he’d had with his father on the night that he left for good – if he’d truly cared, then he would have stayed. Your brother would never have turned his back on us. Tired shadows skittered at the edges of his vision and he scrubbed his hand over his eyes, feeling angry and slightly sick.
To the north, the silhouettes of large outbuildings began to rise out of the rolling hills and Adaryc’s jaw tightened.
The Dal’geys estate was a large manor farm that grew larger with every bad harvest and increase in taxes, purchasing the land from the parish when the families that owned it could not pay their taxes, and then allowing them to continue working the land as tenants. The practice had been active under the Aedyran government, but had become increasingly common since the war.
Dal’geys was, by all accounts, a deeply pious man. This meant that he gave generously to the temple with the gold he made off the backs of his slaves and tenants, and precious little else.
In the early years of his marriage, Adaryc’s father had borrowed money from Dal’geys to save his farm, and indentured himself to pay it back. He still lost the farm, and in order to pay for rent and food, he’d had to borrow more. When the four year contract ended, he was more in debt than when he’d started, and the cycle began again.
His father had never recovered from the loss, nor from the sense of failure and shame that accompanied it. In the social hierarchy, indentured laborers were only slightly higher than slaves; he had lost not just his land and independence, he had lost his place in the community.
It ate away at him, but even in the days before Adaryc left, his father still never fully accepted it. The priests taught that patience and hard work would be rewarded, he simply had to have faith.
Have faith.
An old, bitter anger welled up in Adaryc, painful like a wound left to fester. It was convenient – the way poverty and bondage were framed as moral failings. His father had worked himself to death and died alone without a copper to his name, not because he had been conditioned and exploited all his life by those with more wealth and power, but because his faith was insufficient.
What did they know of faith? To them it was nothing but a shell game to keep folk in their place. To blame the slave for his chains and the pauper for being poor.
But Dal’geyss was a pious man.
It was enough to drive a man to arson.
Out of habit Adaryc turned to look south across the fields on the other side of the road, his gaze finding the small smudge of a building more by memory than by sight. There was a light in one window. And for just a heartbeat his father was alive again.
Adaryc froze, reeling from the whiplash of hope and loss. There was a new tenant. Of course there was. It was idiotic to think that —
He swiped a sleeve across his face, furious with himself for the homesick grief strangling in his chest. That place had never been home. His father had been dead for three years and out of Adaryc’s life for even longer. They hadn’t spoken since he’d left Haligford. Adaryc had tried to write him, whenever he saved up enough to send home, but his father had never replied, and eventually the letters had become nothing more than receipts listing the amount of money contained within. Twelve years of silence. Twelve years.
There is no warning, just a road weary messenger appearing like a bolt from the blue with the news that his father has died.
Adaryc is with a squad of his men, helping the villagers of Brightwell clear land for new fields, when the messenger arrives. He hears Devet’s bark of laughter and glances up to see him approaching with another man.
“Messenger for you. Called me ‘Commander’,” Devet grins. “Better watch your back, Cendamyr, I might start getting ‘ambitions’.”
Adaryc’s mouth crooks. They’ve been serving together for twelve years and Devet has steadfastly refused every single promotion Adaryc has tried to offer him.
He turns his attention to the messenger.
“You are Adaryc Cendamyr?” he asks, eyeing Adaryc’s muddy, sweat-stained appearance with undisguised misgivings.
“I am.”
Adaryc takes the letter that the man hands to him and cracks the seal, his hands leaving smudges of dirt on the crisp, white paper.
He stares at the two sparse sentences for a long time.
‘It is with deep regret that I must inform you that your father, Meryc Cendamyr, after long struggle, has succumbed to his illness. May his soul return soon from the Wheel.’
He looks up, his shoulders straightening with a small jerk as he addresses the messenger; he tries to keep his voice neutral, but it comes out stiff and officious instead. “Was there anything else?”
The messenger shifts awkwardly. “The priest said you would cover the fee. That you were good for it, on account of some highborn patrons.”
Adaryc stares at him. Standing there, covered in sweat and mud, in his plain, much-mended clothes and travel worn boots, he feels the absurd, horrifying urge to laugh. The messenger, at least, has the good grace to look uncomfortable.
It is true that they have a few supporters in high places, it is also true that that support is what allows them to continue working in a region where most folk are too poor to pay them. But of course the old priest assumes he’s lining his pockets with it.
It is a moment before he trusts himself to speak.
“How much?” Moving mechanically, he pulls his purse from his belt and upends it into his hand. It is painfully obvious that the small handful of coppers isn’t enough.
In the end he has to borrow the difference from Devet.
“Bad news?” Devet has been watching him closely, but waits until the messenger is gone before speaking.
Adaryc hands him the letter.
The paper crackles as he unfolds it, then – “Effigy’s eyes…” Devet looks up, his normally merry face suddenly serious.
“I didn’t even know he was sick.” It feels like such a small, useless thing to say.
“Adaryc–”
He almost never uses his given name. Always his surname or his rank. And somehow the small act of intimacy affects him more than the letter itself.
“If you need to – “
“No.” It comes out harsher than Adaryc intended and he grimaces. “He’s beyond anyone’s help. This place isn’t.”
Devet looks as though he wants to protest, but instead he places a hand on Adaryc’s shoulder and turns to address the rest of their squad who have been staring curiously ever since the messenger arrived.
“Alright, back to work. Ondra’s tits, I swear y’all are nosier than a village priest.”
The roof of the parish temple rose into view above the trees, a great, dark shape crouched atop the nearby hill. Adaryc’s hand brushed his belt, feeling reflexively for Steadfast, but there was no comfort in the unfamiliar hilt that hung there now.
As they neared the top of the hill, they skirted the perimeter, entering instead through the gate at the back of the cemetery. Little had changed in fifteen years, save for the new stones which always stood out with such stark nakedness from their lichen encrusted elders. Bright green growth was beginning to peak through the dead winter grass and thick beds of moss cushioned their steps.
They were early. The family wouldn’t be there for a little while yet. Enough time to pay his respects.
He left Kae smoking his pipe in the lee of the transept and made his way into the churchyard. An uncomfortable resonance surrounded him the deeper he went, like a bass string so low and heavy that it no longer registered as sound; whispers tugged at the corners of his mind, echoes of souls still lingering.
His family plot was small, tucked away beneath a whitethorn tree in the northwest corner. The stones were unmarked. Just small fieldstone cairns. Engraving had been far beyond the means of an indentured laborer.
He knew them by memory. The long, low cairn now grown up with weeds was his mother’s, and the two smaller, but higher piles beside it, crusted with lichen and moss belonged to his brothers, little Inri and Eadwyn the eldest. There was a a fourth cairn now as well. Almost pristine in comparison to the others.
He was not sure what he had hoped for, standing before his father’s grave. Some kind of closure, a place to set down the guilt he had carried for so long, for leaving, for not having been there. But the stones were as stubbornly silent as his father had been in life, and he found only questions with no hope of answer and the gnawing, helpless anger of old wounds.
There had been a time before despair and loss and exhaustion had hollowed his father into the bitter, passive shell of a man that he became. In some ways that made it harder. The knowledge that none of it was set, that it might have turned out differently. After everyone he had buried over the past weeks, it felt absurd to grieve for that, for a version of events that had been just a little easier, a little kinder, when there were bodies in the ground, but —
But.
He just wished —
Adaryc scrubbed a hand over his face. He did not doubt that his father had, in his own way, harbored some degree of attachment, perhaps even affection for him. But in the end, Kae was right: love was not a feeling, it was an act.
He let out a long, slow breath. It wasn’t relief, or closure, he was not even sure it was acceptance, but it was an end, of sorts. An acknowledgement, however painful. He knelt on the cold ground, the morning dew soaking through his leggings, and with the little time he had left, he began to remove the worst of the dead grass and weeds from his mother and brothers’ cairns.
He had few memories of his mother. She had died of the same fever that took Inri when Adaryc was only two winters. Her name was Sigge. Eadwyn had sometimes shared stories about her when they were young, but his father scarcely spoke of her at all, except in censure, until Adaryc could no longer separate his memories of her from the sting of his father’s disappointment.
Thank the gods your mother didn’t live to see this.
What would your mother say?
Taking out his knife, he began to scrape some of the lichen from Eadwyn’s cairn, murmuring a prayer that the gods might bless him in his next life. There wasn’t enough time to do it properly, but there was a ritual of care to the act which felt right. A reversal of sorts. Eadwyn had always been the one looking after him.
He is two winters, clinging tightly to Eadwyn’s hand as they stand in the small crowd gathered round an open grave. Something terrible has happened, he can absorb that much from the tearful adults around him, and it frightens him. He wants his mother, but his father gets upset when he asks for her now; he says that Mother and Inri are gone. Adaryc knows they are gone; he saw the man in the dark robes come and take them away. But he wants them to come back.
He starts to cry and Eadwyn scoops him up and holds him against his chest. His brother is trying desperately not to cry, but his cheeks are wet when he pulls Adaryc close. Adaryc huddles into him, burying his face in the crook of his neck. His brother is warm and familiar, an island of safety amidst all the strangeness.
<>
He is six winters, sitting at the table on a snowy night, the warmth of the hearth nearby and the chill of the draft at his back. He can just make out Eadwyn’s face in the glow of the reed light, twisting into silly expressions as they make a game out of trying to make the other laugh while their father’s head is bowed in prayer over their meal. He always catches them of course, that is part of the game, a faint glint of amusement in his eyes softening his censure.
<>
He is ten winters and his world is falling apart. Two years of guilt and fear and secrets, two years of watching bad things happen to the people he loves and knowing that he is to blame. And now Eadwyn speaks of nothing but leaving, of apprenticeships, of jobs in the city, of far away places. Their father will hear none of it, so he confides in Adaryc when they are alone together, his eyes bright with eager determination.
But Adaryc is too absorbed in his own troubles to see how unhappy his brother is, how heavily the burden of their father’s hope weighs on him, the pressure of being the eldest son and second parent, the ‘good child’. All he can see is that his brother wants to leave him.
“But you’re coming back, right?” he asks him after Eadwyn has rambled excitedly about how much more money he thinks he could make from just one season of work in the city.
Eadwyn shrugs a noncommittal affirmative. “You could always come with me!” he grins.
And for an instant Adaryc believes it. But his mind is so deeply mired in old patterns of self-loathing and rejection, that hope just feels like another kind of fear and he shrinks from it, a knee-jerk objection springing to his lips.
“What about the farm? And Father?”
He regrets it immediately, but it is too late. Eadwyn’s face closes off and with a frustrated sigh the conversation is over.
In the end, Eadwyn doesn’t go. A new section of land needs clearing and all hands are needed if they’re to have it ready for planting in the spring. Next year, he swears, he’ll go next year, but there is always another catch, another disaster or delay that forces him to hold off for just one more season, just one more year.
<>
He is twelve and he can’t do this anymore. One winter’s night, letting the bucket fall from his hands as he steps into the ice cold waters of the stream behind their cottage. The water is so dark that he imagines he could fall into it and disappear completely. Wiped from existence like ink spilled over a page.
The cold hurts at first. The shock of it against his chest makes his breath come in violent, spasming gasps. And then, gradually, the pain begins to fade, and his breathing slows. He isn’t shivering anymore. He isn’t even cold. His thoughts are sluggish and indistinct. He tries to imagine falling forward, it would be so easy to just slip beneath the surface.
Vaguely, as from a great distance, he is aware of someone shouting, the sounds of splashing water, and then there are arms around him, and the last thing he is aware of before he loses consciousness is warmth.
Warmth is how he remembers Eadwyn. Not the bright, sunny warmth of a summer’s day, but deep and quiet like a sun-warmed stone at evening.
“I told Father it was an accident,” Eadwyn confesses the following night, whispering as they lay huddled under threadbare woolen blankets on a shared pallet, “That you were fetching water and fell in.”
Adaryc’s shoulders hunch guiltily and he murmurs a half-hearted thanks. In the dark, he can feel his brother’s eyes on him, the painful, searching question in them as the silence between them pulls taught.
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me? We used to – we used to talk. And now…. I don’t know what happened, you’re so far away. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”
In that moment Adaryc wants to tell him. He wants to believe that even after all the harm he has caused, all the poor harvests, the sick crops, the debt, the fights, Eadwyn’s own crushed dreams of escape, that his brother would forgive him.
He wants to believe. But he can’t. Tears roll down his cheeks and with a soft sigh, Eadwyn pulls him close. They stay like that until morning.
<>
He is fourteen winters, staring at the empty seat across the table. His father says the evening prayer as though nothing has changed, as though nothing is wrong, and he feels like he is drowning. Because Eadwyn is dead and it is his fault.
“Effigy’s eyes —” he blurts out angrily, interrupting the prayer. “He’s not listening! He doesn’t care!”
His father looks up, for a moment too startled by his outburst to even be angry. “Of course he does. But sometimes…..” He falters for a moment, his gaze not quite meeting Adaryc’s. “Sometimes Eothas sends us trials to temper our faith. To strengthen it.”
Adaryc stares at him in disbelief, angry tears welling in his eyes. “You don’t believe that – you don’t believe that Eadwyn died just so god could prove a fucking point!”
“Adaryc–”
“Everything is so hard all the time and you keep saying it makes us better but it doesn’t! It doesn’t! Look at you – all you’ve ever done is bowed your head and rolled over! To god, to the temple, to Dal’Geyss. That’s not faith, that’s – that’s — “
“Adaryc!”
“What is the point? To see how far he can push us before we break? Eothas sounds more like a landlord than a g–”
It is the first time his father has ever struck him in anger.
He remembers the look of shock and regret on his father’s face, the struck-match, incandescent outrage in his own chest. In time, he might have forgiven him for that. But not for what came after.
“Enough!” his father barks, retreating once more to his seat at the table. His voice is rough and fraying at the edges and he does not meet Adaryc’s eyes. “That’s enough. Now sit down and finish your dinner.”
Sit down and finish your dinner. Sit down and pretend that this never happened. Pretend that your grief isn’t eating you alive. Pretend that you accept it – Eadwyn’s death, the blight, the sickness, the hunger and exhaustion, the landlords and slaveholders with their soft hands and big houses. Pretend that you believe all that suffering makes people better. Pretend that the temple sermons fill you with certainty, and the hymns kindle your faith. Pretend that you believe your god answers prayers. Pretend that you aren’t a monster. Pretend that you aren’t hemorrhaging rage and doubt and pain and all the ugly, selfish emotions you’ve tried to pretend for years that you don’t feel. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.
Adaryc heard a step behind him and looked up to see Kae approaching. The rite would be starting any moment.
He pushed slowly to his feet, his gaze lingering on Eadwyn’s grave. He found himself wishing suddenly, painfully, that he could have told him. That night after Eadwyn pulled him from the stream, he wished he could have explained, could have trusted him. He thought —
He thought that he might have understood.
<>
The family were already gathered at the east side of the temple yard, a small crowd, maybe a dozen sober-faced scelterfolc, and a few children too young to have ever met Devet, looking bored or curious by turns. And slightly apart, standing over Devet’s coffin —
It didn’t matter that he’d been bracing for it. Adaryc’s gait hitched as Brother Haemon looked up at their approach, and it was only Kae’s presence at his back that kept him from freezing up like an unblooded recruit.
He steeled himself as the priest broke away from the family and began to approach the two newcomers. “Adaryc–” The use of his given name felt like a belt across his back and he hated himself for the reflexive obedience with which he responded, shoulders snapping straight as if he were still the same troubled child, being pulled aside after lessons for the hundredth time.
“This is a surprise. I thought you’d become too grand for Haligford.” Adaryc’s face reddened at the familiar barb, but he bit his tongue, acknowledging Haemon with a stiff nod.
“Brother.”
“It’s good of you make the journey, this time.” Unlike when your father died, the implied censure was plain in his face and tone of voice, and Adaryc stiffened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kae shift, his hands in loose fists resting just below his breastbone. A simple change in posture, but he recognized the veiled aggression behind it and felt desperately grateful for the brief moment of catharsis.
Haemon must have caught his glance because he turned to Kae, and Adaryc saw him pause, struggling to place him just like the man the day before.
Adaryc opened his mouth to interject, but even Brother Haemon wasn’t immune to Kae’s ‘go ahead and try me’ stare; he turned away with a disdainful sniff and, taking his leave, returned to the graveside.
They waited there, in the cold shadow of the temple, restless and silent save for the occasional murmur of the younger children. At last the first rays of sunlight could be spotted cresting the horizon and the priest began to recite the Eothasian blessing for the dead. A censer swung from his hand, burning incense to mask the smell of decay. It smelled like guilt and fear and Adaryc found himself caught in a visceral sense memory of kneeling before an altar bright with candles, whispering the same prayer over and over and over again, stumbling each time as a sliver of doubt or distraction found its way in, never quite right, never quite enough, like a nightmare where he keeps trying to run and his legs won’t work.
He dragged his eyes away from the censer, focusing instead on the coffin where Devet lay.
He had told Devet’s mother that he had died in battle, that it had happened so fast it would have been over before he knew what hit him. He hadn’t suffered. He’d assured her of that.
Lying was a terrible sin. But what possible peace could there be in knowing the truth? That her son had died of his wounds on the return journey, that it had been slow and lingering, that the first amputation hadn’t been enough, that the infection had come back, that by the time he died he was out of his skull with fever and sobbing like a child, begging someone to make the pain stop.
Adaryc had held his hand until he grew still, and he’d kept holding it long after that.
He blinked, swallowing past the tightness in his throat. As the blessing ended, Devet's sister guided her mother to the grave to lay a spray of bloodroot and anemone atop the coffin. That seemed to be the sign for the sexton and her assistant to lower the body into the grave, and Haemon began to recite the prayer of mourning.
Adaryc closed his eyes. He’d said the same prayer over so many graves in the past days that he knew it by rote. He tried to take refuge in the familiarity of the devotion, but the words felt cold and distant, and for the first time in a long time, prayer felt like standing on the wrong side of a locked door.
“Is there anyone who would speak for Jora before he is laid to rest?”
Adaryc’s mouth felt suddenly dry. He should have been prepared for this. “Adaryc?” It was the same tone he had used when calling on wayward children during lessons, catching them out for not paying attention.
It took all his nerve just to pry himself away from Kae’s reassuring proximity. He had the sudden, irrational impulse to ask the sergeant to come with him, like a child afraid of the dark.
He drew himself up, standing parade-ground straight, painfully aware of how he must look with his travel stained clothes and cheeks rough with several days’ stubble.
Brother Haemon took a step back, beckoning Adaryc to stand beside him, not allowing him to keep his distance. His face a cooly benevolent mask as he reached out to rest a hand on Adaryc’s shoulder.
Adaryc flinched, shoulders involuntarily twitching away from the touch, and his face went scarlet. Everyone had seen that. He could feel the familiar, disapproving weight of the priest’s gaze, and as he looked down at Devet’s coffin, he felt suddenly absurd, a toy soldier, as if the Iron Flail was nothing more than a story he’d made up about himself.
“Devet was –” His mouth opened and shut; each word that he reached for felt more hollow than the last; a performance of respectability, of expectation. Devet wasn’t in those words.
Devet wasn’t here.
There hadn’t been time for mourning. There hadn’t been time, and now it was too late, Devet was in a box at the bottom of a hole; he would never see him again, never say goodbye. There hadn’t been time for mourning and now it hit him all at once. His throat tightened and tears spilled over, and all he could think of was those first few days after the amputation, how he’d seemed to recover. He had been getting better, he was supposed to get better, and then –
Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Brother Haemon step forward as though to usher him away, the words of the final benediction already on his lips, “Eothas, light of spring — “
“I wasn’t finished.” The words came out in a snarl, bristling like a wounded animal, old wounds torn open, flooding him with long festering anger.
There was a reason that the only way Devet could come home was in a box. That was the only version of him, of any of them, that this place would accept.
“I know you think Devet was wrong,” he choked the words out, his voice still rough with emotion. “That he strayed from the path – or was led astray. You think that the life he chose was a sin, a mistake. That he was selfish for choosing to leave.
“Which is pretty fucking rich coming from folk who expect their own children to break themselves into pieces just so the rest of you can feel comfortable!
“There’s folk – a lot of folk – in this world who still have breath in their lungs and roofs over their heads because of Devet, because of what he did. Gods know I’m one of them, must have saved my skin a dozen times at least —
“He mattered. What he did – what he chose to do – mattered.”
For a moment he stood there defiantly, blazing like a torch, before the fire in his eyes guttered and he turned away. His heart was beating wild and erratically and all he could hear was the sound of blood rushing in his ears as his field of vision contracted to a narrow, distant sphere. His legs kept moving but they seemed to belong to someone else.
He walked until Kae’s arm caught him across the chest, gently but firmly corralling him.
“Slow down. You’re alright.” Kae’s hand shifted from his shoulder to the back of his neck, pulling him in. “You kicked a hornets’ nest there, boy,” he chuckled.
Adaryc couldn’t stop shaking, but he let himself be held, leaning his head against Kae, breathing in the familiar scent of pipe tobacco, feeling the even rise and fall of his friend’s chest as his own ragged breathing began to slow.
There is a joke among some of the old soldiers – that no combat-ready company ever passed inspection, and no inspection-ready company ever survived combat. And it seems that a holy war is no exception. The closer they get to the front line, the less pretense and appearance seem to matter; no one in his company cares how he feels about standing watch or fighting or tending injuries, they only care that he does it, and does it competently. They care that he works hard and learns fast. No one asks him to pretend.
Bit by bit his defenses lower and his shoulders come down from around his ears. He learns to stop looking for mockery and rejection in every face around him and, to his bewildered surprise, discovers that some of them actually like him, and he likes them. He has friends.
At home, everything they did had an inherent futility and hopelessness to it, no matter how hard they worked, no matter what choices they made, every day was just another step deeper into debt. It was paralyzing. But here his actions matter. He has value. He can help.
He throws himself into it with a conviction and energy he has never felt before. And it is in the slaughter and horror of his first battle that he first glimpses the face of his god.
All his life he has looked for Eothas in the places he had been taught to seek him, and not finding him there believed himself abandoned. But the priests were wrong. God is not in the high walls of the temple, in the candle bright altar, in the stations of the sun; he is in the faith that came with standing shoulder to shoulder in a shield wall, the mutual trust and reliance of each on the other, he is in the friend that stands astride him when he falls, in the hands that pull him to his feet, he is in the bloodstained compassion and defiance of the healers after a battle, and in the communion of sitting watch all night at the bedside of a dying friend.
He sees the face of god in the people around him, in all the many acts of fellowship and love and sacrifice; and he is seen in return, with all his soul’s ugliness and doubt, and Eothas does not turn away.
Acceptance feels like an embrace; after a lifetime starved for connection, it is intoxicating. For the first time in his life, he belongs.
He felt Kae tense and instinctively pulled away, turning to see Haemon storming towards them.
“How dare you profane this holy place! Abusing a grieving family, taking advantage of a man’s death to spread your lies. As if you were not the one who enticed Jora onto the path of violence. You always were a little thug. Thank the gods your father didn’t live to see —”
Kae took a small, purposeful step forward, straightening to his full height, and it was like a mountain sitting up and taking notice.
“Don’t you have a grieving family to take advantage — excuse me – to console, Brother?” Adaryc choked, but Haemon recoiled as if from a physical threat, the haughty anger of a moment ago blanching in alarm.
The sergeant’s voice was calm and quiet and sharp as steel. “Might should see to that.”
Haemon drew himself up in a huff, clutching his remaining dignity like a string of pearls. “You are not welcome here!” he spat, loud enough for the others to hear, before turning and retreating to the remaining mourners.
“You hear that, Cendamyr?” Kae drawled, “He finally said the quiet part out loud.”
The laugh that bubbled up in Adaryc’s throat was dangerously close to hysterics and he choked it back. When he could trust his voice again he said, quietly earnest, “Thanks for that.”
Kae shrugged it off with a soft snort. “Couldn’t go letting you have all the fun, now could I?”
<>
Slowly the graveyard emptied until it was just Adaryc and Kae. They stood over Devet’s grave and Adaryc repeated the prayer of mourning. It felt important that they said it, that the final prayer that sent him on his way should come from his chosen family and not someone like Haemon.
As the prayer finished and silence fell over their small corner of the cemetery, Adaryc found his thoughts drifting back to the months after the war. Readceras had been on the brink of collapse, destabilized by the power vacuum created by the destruction of Eothas and his avatar, their economy devastated by the abrupt severance from Aedyr. Old taxes went up, new taxes appeared, rents went up, as did the price of basic necessities. The vorlas cough, the purges and then the war had hemorrhaged the country’s working population, there was more work and fewer bodies to do it, and still not enough food to go around.
On the surface life in Haligford limped along much as it always had, but at the turn of every week, the temple was packed as though it were a holy day. He remembered standing in the packed throng of the sanctuary, seeing the fear in peoples’ eyes, in the way they stood and moved; he could hear it in their voices, in the timbre of their prayers. In the priest’s feeble attempts at reassurance. ‘Community’ was the watchword now. The importance of community. And standing at the back, in the section reserved for strangers, slaves and bonded laborers, Adaryc couldn’t help wondering where ‘community’ had been when the charcoal burner had been driven out.
And all the while rumors of civil war, of retaliation from the Dyrwood spread like wildfire. Every other day there was some new tale of violence and disaster, attacks on the road, bandits overrunning a village, estates hiring mercenaries for security and extorting protection money from the surrounding parishes, or else attempting to forcibly carve out their own private fiefdoms.
And there was nothing he could do.
After months of action, he felt paralyzed once more. Food supplies dwindled, outbreaks of illness and violence seemed to grow closer every day. His own mind betrayed him with visions and voices that weren’t there. It felt like standing in a flood with the water slowly rising, just…. waiting to drown.
And then, just as the water threatened to close over, there was a glimpse of hope. A neighbor of theirs was behind on his taxes; he needed to sell some livestock in the city to make up the shortfall, but the roads weren’t safe and he couldn’t afford an escort.
The cracks in their broken country were so much bigger than them; hunger and poverty could not be killed with a sword, one could not point to economic collapse on a map, nor skirmish with generations of Aedyran exploitation and their own passive complicity. But this — this one person in this one moment — this was something they could do. They could help.
Adaryc had asked him for twenty-four hours, and that night he pitched the idea to Kae and Devet. They’d been just as eager as he was, and a few days later, for the price of a meal, they escorted the neighbor to Bremen and back without incident.
Their first contract, and more soon followed. They almost never took jobs for coin in those early days; even if someone in Little Bend could have afforded it, that wasn’t the point. They patrolled the roads, escorted merchants and travelers, guarded tinkers and knife-sharpeners who had been forced to remain in the cities, enabling them to return to their circuits. They lived hand to mouth and frequently went hungry, they scrapped with bandits and profiteering mercenaries, they fought tooth and nail and bit by bit they carved out a space for themselves, a way of existing where they could belong again.
<>
A rustle of movement drew Adaryc back to the present and he looked up to see Kae pull a flask from inside the breast of his gambeson. For several moments the sergeant simply regarded it, a sad, crooked smile on his face. Then, with a half-hearted ‘cheers’ gesture, he raised the flask to his lips.
He took a long pull and then passed the flask to Adaryc. There was a sense of ritual about it. A wordless communion.
A last round.
Adaryc took a drink, expecting the weak, familiar taste of wyrthoneg, and started in surprise, coughing – half choking – on the fiery burn and concentrated sweetness of —
The tears he had been fighting back spilled over all at once.
Honeyjack.
He looked up at Kae in disbelief. “How — Where did you —”
“Devet,” Kae admitted, his own voice starting to fray at the edges. “He distilled a batch while we were in the Whitemarch, said something good had to come from such shit weather. The company polished off most of it after Cayron’s Scar, but….”
He took the flask back from Adaryc with gentle reverence, “I kept a little in reserve.”
His cheeks were wet as he held it over the fresh turned earth of the grave and poured out the last of it to Devet. And in the quiet that followed, Adaryc stooped to touch the mounded earth, murmuring a last goodbye to the cold soil. Kae offered him a hand up and he took it, finding comfort in the gesture and the simple physical contact. Their eyes met and Adaryc felt a little of the weight slip from his shoulders. “Let’s go home.”
The newest conscript to the Court was not settling in. (Locking people up tended to have that effect.) On the contrary, he was, at that moment, slinking through the darkened corridors of the Adjudicator’s complex, dressed in the ill-fitting livery of the servant whose misfortune it had been to bring him his evening meal.
It wasn’t the worst escape attempt he’d ever seen, Bleden Mark reflected; the boy had overpowered the servant handily enough, and he’d had the sense to avoid the lower quarters where the other staff would have recognized him instantly as an imposter, and – absurd as it looked on his gangly frame – the livery lent him a certain degree of invisibility in the upper halls. But that was where this little caper fell apart.
Sure, watching him scuttle around like an insect under glass had been entertaining for the first dozen wrong turns, but Mark was rapidly losing interest. He decided to speed things up: the scuff of footsteps here, the glimpse of a shadowy silhouette there, driving the boy through the network of unfamiliar corridors until he finally stumbled out into the wide open chamber of the courtroom itself, now darkened and empty. It was a cavernous room, all cold stone and vaulted ceilings, and the slap of the boy’s sandals against the marble sounded like a series of thunderclaps in the silence.
The boy slowed to a halt near the center of the chamber. The same spot where he’d stood – knelt – the day before when he’d first been dragged before Tunon, bloody and battered and trussed up so tightly his hands were starting to turn purple.
The ‘champion’ of the Proving Grounds had not been much to look at, Mark recalled. A boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen winters, rail thin with a shaved head, ruined face and awkwardly long limbs that in all likelihood he would not survive long enough to grow into. The patchwork of cuts and bruises covering his face suggested he’d had to be subdued multiple times on the journey from Caleva.
When Tunon had asked him his name, he’d spat a mouthful of blood onto the white marble at his feet. And when Nunoval had cut him free, the boy had lunged for the blade on the fatebinder’s belt; an ill-advised gamble — Nunoval had cheerfully knocked him flat and stood on his neck until he stopped struggling – but he was a gutsy little shit, Mark had to give him that. Gutsy and stupid.
The Archon of Shadows peeled himself away from the darkness with a bored sigh. This was only going to end one way. “You’re making this too easy, kid.”
The gangly silhouette flinched and spun towards him, staggering back several steps as Mark advanced.
“Word of advice?” he added, phasing through the shadows to appear directly behind the boy. “Don’t run. There is no ‘cover of darkness’ when I’m hunting you.”
He heard the startled intake of breath as the boy whirled around, lamplight from the doorway glinting dully off the blade of a small dinner knife.
Mark smirked. “Cute.”
He lunged, vanishing into shadow as the darkness around the boy came alive. An unseen blade sliced at the boy’s exposed back, another grazed his cheek as he swung to face it. Mark moved faster than his eyes could follow, darting effortlessly from blindspot to blindspot, punctuating each movement with the edge of his dagger. The boy took several more wounds before he caught himself. The realization that this was not a fight finally sinking in. Mark watched him go rigid, watched him force his arms down to his sides.
He stopped in front of him, his smirk broadening to show his teeth. “You learn quickly. That’s good. You might even survive your first year.”
Mark rested the edge of his dagger against the boy’s throat. Less of a threat and more of an experiment; he wanted to see what he did.
The boy glared back at him, trembling with the effort to keep still. Despair and anger and – there it was: fear. He was afraid. But not of him; after 300 years, he’d learned to tell the difference. But it wasn’t ignorance or bravado – Mark could snuff him out with a thought and the boy knew it. He cocked his head. Something else then.
He felt the slight rise and fall of the blade as the boy swallowed. And – there – he almost missed it, a dangerous flicker of hope in the eyes as the edge dug into his throat the barest bit.
He knew that look – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he knew the impulse that lay behind it – and his dagger dissolved into shadow as the next instant the boy slashed his neck across it, stumbling off balance when he met no resistance.
“What’s your hurry, kid?” Mark’s hand shot out, seizing the boy’s wrist as he tried again with his own knife, disarming him with a single deft motion. A sound, somewhere between a scream and a sob tore from the boy’s throat as he thrashed wildly, the defiance and self-control of a moment ago were gone, and in his eyes there was only the panicked desperation of an animal trying to chew off its own limb to escape a trap.
He lunged for one of the knives in Mark’s belt -- Rude -- and Mark drove his forehead into the boy’s face, knocking him sprawling.
He landed painfully, bones cracking against marble, but he was on his feet again in an instant, staggering and swaying as he tried to back away.
“I won’t go back in there!” the boy choked through the blood streaming down his face. “I won’t be his pegboy or dancing bear or whatever the fuck that jumped up porcelain doll wants me for!”
“Porcelain doll?” Mark’s teeth flashed white in the darkness. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
He crossed his arms, allowing the boy whatever illusion of security he seemed to find in putting those few steps of distance between them. “I can’t fault your suspicion, kid. You’re going to need it. But that’s not what he wants you for. He’s offering –” His caught himself, lip curling at the choice of words. “No. ‘Offer’ implies you have a choice. You don’t. But that being said, he’s conscripted you to serve the Court, not his personal pleasure.”
The boy stared at him, fear giving way to a sort of frantic consternation. “What the fuck does that mean? That doesn’t – No. No. You’re just fucking me! That’s not – this isn’t – ”
Mark rolled his eyes. “Kid, I don’t need to trick you to get you back into that cell. Not when it would be a hell of a lot more fun to choke you out and drag you there. And believe me, you are making that option more tempting by the second.”
“I’m a pit fighter, the fuck am I going to do in a court?”
“You think you’re the first illiterate thug Tunon’s plucked off the street? You’re not. You’re here because he thinks you could be useful and if you want to keep breathing, I suggest you prove him right.”
He could see the flicker of hesitation in his face, but the boy still held himself poised to bolt, eyes darting towards the far end of the room. He had to know by now that there was no point in running; no point in fighting; but they say when you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The kid didn’t know how to do anything else. And until now he’d never had a choice.
“Let’s say you did manage to escape,” Mark added, prodding at that uncertainty. “What do you think happens then? You have any money? No? Any skills outside of staged combat? No. When was the last time you were on the outside? A few years? Longer? How exactly do you plan to eat?” he jabbed with his questions much as he had with his blades. “You don’t have the streetsmarts to make it in a gang, you’ve got the wrong experience for mercenary work, and you’re too ugly for a brothel. You got lost trying to leave the building, kid. You wouldn’t survive a week.”
He could see the glint of tears in in the boy’s eyes, and he could see the desperate, threadbare defiance, the set of his shoulders, the way he planted his feet. It was the acceptance that caught him off guard. Though perhaps it shouldn’t have.
Familiarity. That’s what he’d seen in his face before, what he hadn’t been able to parse – the lack of fear when he had pressed his knife to the his throat. Death was familiar. The boy was a pitfighter, and recent successes notwithstanding, he was expected to die. It’s what he was for. Mark had been using the wrong argument – the wrong pressure point. They boy wasn’t afraid of the hunter, he was afraid of the trap.
“Let’s say you get lucky,” he offered, trying a different tack, “You make it through the first week and by some miracle, a mercenary company picks you up. Where are you then? Your impossible, best case scenario is you’re still killing people for someone else. Sound familiar?”
The boy recoiled. He’d hit a nerve this time. “I’d have a choice.”
“You had a choice in the arena,” Mark snapped. “You just didn’t like it. You think your company will tolerate you getting squeamish about a mark? You think your employer will tolerate a breach of contract? ‘No’ is a fucking expensive word. You couldn’t afford it in the arena and you can’t afford it out there.”
For a moment the boy just stared at him, denial vying with despair, and then all at once his shoulders slumped. The desperation was gone and he just looked exhausted and in pain and strangely small in the middle of all that emptiness.
Mark let out a short, bitter exhale. “The bars never go away, kid. If you’re lucky, you just get a bigger cage.”
Summary: A conversation between Adaryc and the Watcher in the aftermath of the events at Cayron’s Scar.
Note: In this timeline the White March (both parts) takes place after the events of the main quest, so the Watcher is on his own and the Iron Flail plays a much larger role. Also, for context, Elan technically has cipher abilities, but has been suppressing them for a long time, so he only gets involuntary reads on people when the thoughts/emotions are very loud.
Content Advisory: swearing, brief description of drowning
**************************************
Elan sat on his bedroll in the infirmary tent taking stock. He wasn’t dead; that was a surprise. Not a particularly pleasant one given how damn much it hurt just to breathe. He had already made the mistake of coughing and nearly passed out. Broken ribs, then. And whatever the fuck two lungs full of icewater had done to his insides. His clothes and armor were gone. But someone had mercifully left his weapons beside his bedroll. He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious; the last thing he remembered there had been daylight, and now it was full night.
He shut his eyes, and he was back under the ice, in the dark and the cold, as the pressure crushed his insides and water filled his lungs. In his head he was still drowning. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d never made it out.
His eyes flinched open. Someone was standing before him, an Orlan, their bloodstained apron and harried expression marking them as the medic. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.” Elan’s voice came out in a hoarse croak. “Where’s the commander?”
“How the Hel should I know?” they snapped, ears slanting backwards in irritation. “He’s supposed to be here, but does he listen to me? No!” They fixed Elan with a glare as though all of this was somehow his doing. He supposed, in a sense, it was. Breaking into the Battery was what had started this mess after all. “There’s not much I can do for cracked ribs, I’m afraid,” they added, relenting at last with a small huff. “Seida – our priest – might be able to speed things along, but that will have to wait.” They cracked a rueful smile. “Triage is a bitch.”
Elan nodded; he didn’t care about any of that. Adaryc had made it. He hadn’t just hallucinated that part. “Any chance of getting my clothes back?”
The medic’s eyes narrowed. “Why? You planning on wandering off too?”
“No, just cold.” It was only half a lie.
They looked unconvinced but nonetheless waved him towards the far end of the tent where washed bandages and items of clothing hung drying over a brazier.
Dressing with cracked ribs was an ordeal, but it was hardly his first time. The clothes were mostly dry at least, save for his boots, but there was nothing he could do about that. He pulled the blanket around his shoulders as an extra layer against the cold and, when no one was looking, slipped out of the tent.
He found Adaryc on the wall, spelling one of the sentries who had gone to join their fellows around the fires. The commander half stood, half slumped against the paling, exhaustion written in every line of his body, but at the crunch of snow underfoot he straightened sharply.
“Elan –” He sounded surprised, but any trace of it was quickly replaced with earnest concern. “It’s good to see you back on your feet.”
“Just barely,” Elan admitted with a weary smile.
“Does Marwyd know you’re out here?”
One of Elan’s brows twitched upwards and he cast a pointed glance at Adaryc’s bandaged head and the sling cradling his arm. “I could ask you the same question,”
The corner of Adaryc’s mouth quirked. “I won’t tell them, if you don’t.”
They stood there for a moment in companionable silence, the low rumbling of a storm rolling up from the valley below. Behind them in the camp, the surviving members of the company not confined to the infirmary were celebrating their victory, the boisterous clamor muddling together in a comforting buzz, until a sudden outcry startled Elan back to alertness. He turned – they both did – hands reaching for weapons, the cold specter of the Eyeless – of that first night – brutally fresh in both their minds. But there was no threat, no looming shadow. The uproar crested and broke in a cascade of laughter. All was still well.
He heard the quiet exhale of relief from Adaryc and smiled, “Sounds like they’re enjoying themselves.”
Adaryc’s gaze lingered on the chaotic scene, his face in that moment unguarded, watching the revelers with fierce affection. “They’ve earned it.”
“You’re not taking part?”
“I did, briefly. But I try to keep it short, give them their space.” He nodded towards the commotion, smile going crooked. “Particularly when non-regulation alcohol is involved. Not that I’d know anything about that, officially.” He shook his head. “You should join them. They’d welcome it.”
Elan considered this briefly; he couldn’t deny the appeal of drinking himself numb after everything that had happened, but instead he found himself shrugging a little deeper into his makeshift cloak. “I think I’ll stay out here a little longer, if that’s alright.”
Adaryc looked at him in surprise, but quickly recovered. “Of course.”
The conversation trailed off, but after a short while quietly watching the treeline, he asked, “What will you do now? Now that it’s over, I mean.”
Elan blinked. Over. It was over. He hadn’t realized how much he needed to hear someone else say it out loud. He breathed out a curse, his voice soft with amazement. “Hadn’t really thought this far ahead, if I’m honest. Wasn’t expecting to walk away from this one.” His brows knit as he considered the question. “Back to the Dyrwood, I suppose? See if Caed Nua’s still standing.”
“Your keep?”
Elan winced. “I, ah… It’s not really a keep. And it’s not mine. Just a ruin. And that’s not me being modest, it truly is a falling down pile of old stones. A very tall one, I’ll admit, but a ruin all the same. After…. after the whole mess with the Leaden Key, everyone went their separate ways. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so…. I started camping in one of the abandoned outbuildings. Some refugees from Defiance Bay turned up one day and decided to camp there too. Then a few more. Pretty soon they were patching up a couple of the outbuildings into proper shelters. Now they’re talking about tearing up the old overgrown hedge maze and planting, ah… something? Potatoes? Fuck knows. We’re all city folk down to our bones, so it’s bound to end in disaster.” He glanced at Adaryc, “What about you?”
Adaryc drew himself up a little straighter, a small, unconscious movement as if he were bracing himself. “Once the wounded are well enough to travel, we’ll return to Readceras. We’ll give the dead a proper burial. And – and their families need to be notified. And – ” He faltered, and for a moment he was not the Iron Flail Commander, he was just a man, exhausted beyond endurance, marking time in the bodies of friends whose deaths he had not yet had time to process let alone grieve. “And the Council will want a report,” he finished heavily, ramrod posture going slack. “Gods only know what they’ll make of all this. They think I’m half mad already.” There was a short, mirthless laugh and he shook his head. “I keep thinking that if I can just put it into words, that it will make sense, that the words will, I don’t know…..contain it somehow? But – ”
“But it just makes it worse?” Adaryc looked up sharply, his hollow eyes fixing Elan with a sudden intensity. It was the same despair, the same fractured sense of reality Elan had felt after Sun In Shadow and the realization felt like being kicked in the chest. The knowledge that someone else understood jarring against the knowledge that no one else should have to.
“I don’t know,” Adaryc shook his head, dropping his gaze once more to his hands. “Is that blasphemy? Trying to confine the divine to mortal terms?”
Fatigue made every emotion feel like a struck match. There was no slow build, no moderation, just a dizzy binary of all or nothing. Elan’s face felt hot, anger flaring, not at Adaryc, but at the blinkered acceptance that was now expected of them after everything they had just been through. “Fuck the divine!”
Shock and hurt flashed across Adaryc’s face. “Elan – “
“It wasn’t the divine bleeding out on the ice today! How many people died just because Ondra didn’t want the world to see the giant damn skeleton in her closet? What kind of god is motivated by fear? They’re supposed to be better than us! Or else what’s the fucking point?”
“That’s not –” Adaryc broke off, his expression strained as if he were being pulled in a dozen directions at once. “I can’t pretend that I’m not – that what happened isn’t…. difficult … to come to terms with, but this can’t be – It’s a single example out of –”
“How many examples do you need?”
“How can you act like it’s so simple?” Adaryc fired back. “Our lives are a narrow window, a razor thin slit through which we glimpse infinity. How can you possibly believe that there is nothing beyond your own experience?
“Are you calling me arrogant?”
“Is there another word for it?”
Elan bristled, voice rising in consternation, “How can you just accept it? How does it not make you angry?”
“Do not presume to tell me my own mind!” Adaryc snarled, raw emotions splashing across Elan like splatter from a wound. Shame, hurt, anger, confusion, the sense of smothering, the impression of a door slamming shut and a body braced against it, the partitioning of self. It left him reeling like a sharp backhand.
Silence fell between them, the sudden contrast dousing both of them like a bucket of cold water, leaving them flustered and shamefaced, and neither could quite meet the other’s eyes.
Elan shifted uncomfortably; he opened his mouth to say something, but it was Adaryc who spoke first. “I’m sorry. That was -”
“No. Don’t apologize.” Elan sighed, scrubbing a hand across his face. “You were right. That wasn’t fair to you.”
“It wasn’t fair to you either. I – I don’t think you’re arrogant.”
“Well, let’s not be hasty.”
The little huff of breath could almost have been a laugh.
“Differences aside, I –” Adaryc hesitated, all his prickly awkwardness receding for a moment. He seemed strangely naked without it. “I envy your certainty.”
The painful earnestness with which he said it caught Elan off guard. It felt like a confession, an admission of guilt, and he frowned, concern and confusion creasing his brow.
“Certainty has its flaws.” He had meant it as reassurance, but something in the words struck a nerve and Adaryc bristled, all sharp edges once more.
“The lack of it is hardly a virtue!” he snapped, “Doubt is a sickness! A rot that must be cut out before it infects everything around us!”
“And certainty leads to assumptions,” Elan retorted, feeling is own temper flare again. “You know damn well how dangerous that can be in a fight!”
Adaryc flinched, his face flushing crimson. There were several heartbeats of uncomfortable silence and then, all at once, the fight seemed to go out of him. “I was certain about this mission,” he conceded bitterly. “Or at least… I performed certainty.” His hand twitched towards his belt where his sword hung – a different weapon from the one he’d carried that first night – his expression pained. “I think the doubt was always there. But my men believed me. And I lead them into a fight we were utterly unprepared for. I imprisoned civilians – I risked starting the war I was supposed to be protecting us from!”
“Only because that Ondrite cultist escalated the – “
“Don’t!” Adaryc cut him off. “You do me no kindness by excusing my mistakes. I acted out of fear. There is no excuse for that.”
“But you were right!” Elan spluttered, “Alright, sure – you fucked up with Stalwart, you made a mistake. But you were right about the vision, you were right about the attack, you were right about where it would happen. You were where you needed to be when you needed to be there, and you held the fucking line. Stalwart is still standing because you were here! You just got the details wrong because, shock of shocks, the goddess of secrets is a a cryptic fucking asshole!”
Adaryc stared at him wide-eyed, for once too startled to argue, and then, to Elan’s surprise, he laughed – not a real laugh, there was no mirth in it, just overtaxed nerves and tension spilling over, but the rigid set of his shoulders relaxed the barest bit.
There was another rumble from the storm in the valley, closer this time and Adaryc glanced at him, the tired shadow of a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“I think she heard you.”
Elan’s face split into a grin. “You worried she’ll smite the wrong Watcher?”
“That’s not–”
But Elan was already taking a step back, face tilted skyward. Gods, he felt strange. He felt drunk, with exhaustion and pain and relief and the dizzy sense of connection to another person. “Ondra! Hey!” He shouted up at the night sky, ignoring the sharp stab of pain, and spread his good arm wide. “Take your best shot! I know we probably all look alike to you, so remember to aim for the mouthy Aedyran heretic, yeah?”
“What in Hel is wrong with you?” Adaryc yanked his arm down in alarm, pulling him off balance, and Elan stumbled into him laughing.
The laughter hurt like hel, but he could handle the pain until the coughing set in. His body hunched, one arm curling around his ribs trying desperately to brace as each spasm sent agony knifing through his chest. Dark spots flickered in front of his eyes, and then his vision blacked out. His knees buckled, but he didn’t fall.
“Fuck.” The word hissed between his teeth as the fit passed. He leaned into whatever it was that was keeping him from falling, drawing in shaky, shallow breaths.
After a moment, his support shifted – carefully – and Adaryc’s face swam into focus, his brow furrowed with concern. “Elan?”
“M’fine.” Effigy’s eyes, everything hurt.
Adaryc’s eyes flicked upwards in exasperation. “You’re not one of my men, I can’t order you to go to the infirmary tent.”
“Probably for the best,” Elan croaked with a smile that was still half grimace, “Never been much good at taking orders.”
“Why does that not surprise me?”
Adaryc released his arm, but neither of them made any attempt to move apart, only shifting to face outward towards the perimeter again, close enough to brush shoulders. They were quiet for a time after that, watching the dark silhouette of the tree line and listening to the offkey singing and laughter from the fort behind them.
The minutes crept by and after a while Adaryc asked, “If not the gods, what do you have faith in?”
Elan’s shoulders tensed and he looked up, but there was no challenge in Adaryc’s face, only genuine and slightly puzzled curiosity.
He didn’t answer right away. He had to fight down the urge to simply brush the question off; sincerity was vulnerability and vulnerability would get you killed, at the bare minimum it was an invitation for abuse. But…..
But.
“I don’t know.” He paused, frowning down at his hands. “I don’t say that to mean I’m above it, only that….. Well….” His mouth opened and shut several times. His hand brushed the sword at his side, nervously fingering its hilt like a talisman. “You saw enough of my soul to know that I’m no saint. I’ve made mistakes. A lot of them. Sometimes because I couldn’t see any right choices, and sometimes because I was running headlong towards the wrong ones. Faith and – and belief…. they can be a lot of things, I think. You could probably give me some real nice examples. And I’m not saying you’d be wrong. But they can be bad things too. A blindfold, a leash….puppet strings. In the wrong hands. And the choices I’ve made….Let’s just say there weren’t many kind hands around.”
Elan drew in a shallow breath, shrugging – half-shrugging – uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Fire’s real pretty, but you can only get burned so many times, you know? Suppose there’s always this.” He glanced down at his hand still fidgeting with the hilt of his sword. “Always been able to count on a sharp piece of steel in my hand. Maybe that’s faith of a sort.” He hesitated, but the silence was worse than two back-to-back coughing fits. “Do you think that’s pathetic?”
“No. I don’t,” Adaryc answered, his manner so earnestly serious it might have been comical under any other circumstance, but when Elan gathered the nerve to look up, he saw an echo of his own uncertainty in his face. “Do you think I’m naive?”
“No.” Elan shook his head. “I know we don’t exactly see eye to eye on the gods, but… I don’t think that makes you naive. I just think you deserve better. And –” He broke off, fumbling awkwardly for the right words. “And your faith in your men, in what you’re doing, protecting your people…. I think I could believe in that.”
There were several beats of thoughtful silence.
“I don’t suppose you’re looking to get back into mercenary work?” Adaryc ventured.
Elan looked up in surprise. “You really want to recruit the foreign heretic with authority issues?” he teased, “I’d be a thorn in your side and you know it. That’s not to say I take it lightly,” he added, smile faltering, “I – I don’t. No one’s, ah …. No one’s ever asked me to stay before.”
Adaryc was quiet for a moment, his hollow, fever bright eyes searching Elan’s face. “During the war, my first company…” he began, his gaze shifting to trace patterns in the snow at his feet. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “That was the first time in my life that I felt like I had a place anywhere. It’s part of why we formed the Iron Flail; when we got back home – the few of us who made it back – we didn’t…. didn’t fit anymore. Except together.” He looked up then, meeting Elan’s eyes. “Consider it a standing offer.”
Jespar sat on the edge of Yero’s porch, idly whittling a bit of driftwood. Every so often his eyes strayed towards the road. He’d been at the house for several hours and there was still no sign of the boy.
His blade scraped against the wood, peeling it away in strips. The conversation with Alfrid had been interesting -- the old man was the first person he’d spoken with who hadn’t appeared surprised by Yero’s actions -- but offered little insight into what he’d found here at the house. Cracking that particular nut was going to require a second pair of hands.
He glanced again towards the empty road and sighed. He’d been clear about where to find him, hadn’t he? He’d given the boy the map with the location marked on it.
It would be sunset in a few hours and he had to face the very real possibility that his mysterious stranger had simply run off. Disappointing, but, in hindsight, perhaps not surprising. He was beginning to debate the merits of spending the night at the Drunken Bee and trying again in the morning. Shouldn’t be too hard to find someone willing to do a couple hours work for a few coins. Maybe--
Back towards the road a pair of jays were raising an alarm and he looked up to see a small, familiar figure picking its way towards him across the yard. Jespar grinned and raised a hand to wave him over.
“You made it!” he called as the boy drew closer. “Any luck?”
Wordlessly the boy relaxed his grip on the bundle of green cloth clutched to the his chest, unfolding it to reveal a small, rusty metal casket. He offered it to Jespar who took it eagerly, curiosity pricking. “Splendid!”
He fished out his lockpicks. The chest appeared to have been sealed with wax, which meant there was a chance the tumblers hadn’t all rusted to hell, but after several minutes of probing it was clear that the wax-gummed mechanism wasn’t much of an improvement.
Brute force it was, then.
He flashed an absent half-smile as the boy crouched beside him, watching him wedge his knife into the seam where the lid met the case, twisting the blade to force the lid up and jamming the flat against the latch. It took several tries; wedge and twist, wedge and twist, but the latch finally yielded.
Inside were three letters and a key. He pocketed the key and skimmed the letters, but they more or less confirmed what Alfrid had said.
“Are -- are they what you were looking for?”
Jespar looked up from stuffing the letters into his pack. There was an odd anxiety in the boy’s face that he could not parse. “Oh, ah.. yes. The chest belonged to Yero alright. Don’t know what to make of it, mind, but that’s not what I’m being payed for.”
He snatched up the small pile of driftwood sticks and got to his feet. “Come on, let’s go inside. I want to show you something.”
The trap door to the cellar was open as he’d left it, his makeshift torch lying nearby. It kindled easily, though from above its light didn’t reach beyond the rungs of the ladder.
“What’s down there?” Jespar glanced up in surprise at the sudden edge in the boy’s voice. He had drawn back -- only a step or two, but his whole body looked primed to bolt.
“It’s just the old cellar. Why? What’s wrong?” He half turned, casting about for something that would explain the boy’s reaction, before it occurred to him that climbing into a dark hole at the behest of an armed stranger in a remote location did lend itself to less innocent interpretations.
Oh.
He laughed, holding up his hands. “Blazes. Sorry. I suppose this does look like the set-up for a horror story, doesn’t it? But I give you my word, it’s nothing nefarious.”
The boy stopped, heavy brows still furrowed uncertainly. “What’s that mean?”
“....I’m not sure I follow?”
“Neh--fay--ris.”
“Oh! Ah... Bad. Or having bad intentions. Though if I’m being completely honest, I don’t know for certain what’s down there. Only got as far as the door Yero had installed, but I need a second pair of hands to work the lock. And that, my friend, is where you come in.”
The boy did not look reassured; he looked scared and exhausted, and Jespar hesitated, impatience vying with his better instincts. “Though if you’d rather not….”
The door would still be there in th morning. He could survive one night of unsatisfied curiosity. “You know what, it can wait. I can hire someone from the village tomorrow and --“
“I’ll do it!”
The abrupt change caught him off guard. It was like a flinch, but what he was flinching from, Jespar hadn’t the first idea. “If you’re sure...?”
The boy nodded, all frantic determination now. Jespar couldn’t make him out. But he wasn’t about to turn the offer down; he wasn’t saint.
The air in the cellar was clammy; the moisture pricking cold against his skin, the smell of mould was so strong he could taste it. Above their heads the sagging joists and floorboards were white with mildew.
“Mind your step,” Jespar called back as the boy dropped down behind him. “The old man left a few surprises to welcome any would-be intruders. Stick behind me and you should be alright.”
They picked their way through the cellar until the packed earth and fieldstone of its walls changed to unworked stone and it opened into a small cavern, sunlight creeping faintly through a gap high in its wall.
At the far end a large, metal grate blocked the way forward. Jespar gestured towards it with the torch as they drew closer, the firelight glinting dull, but darkly opalescent on the bars.
“Shadowsteel,” he announced, excitement bleeding into his voice. “A thief could spend weeks trying to cut through these bars and have nothing for their pains but a pile of broken tools. But here, look at this -- this is what I wanted to show you. A Starling lock! You almost never see them outside of banks or the vaults of the nobility. Whatever Yero was hiding, he was willing to spend a fortune to protect it.”
He continued eagerly, indicating a solid panel in the grating and the odd, round hole at its center.
“It’s really quite fascinating. It’s designed to function as an arcane circuit. Normally this would have a key, a custom-shaped, metal rod that fits it exactly; once inserted, the rod completes the circuit, which powers the rest of the mechanism. If you were to stick something in there other than the key -- a probe or a pick, for instance -- you’d get one hell of a shock instead. Makes them pretty damn near impossible to pick.”
He grinned.
“That is unless you’re Jespar, who knows a little trick.”
He motioned the boy closer.
“See, this--” He tapped the metal plate surrounding the hole, “--isn’t actually the lock. It’s a switch. And switches can be bypassed. At least theoretically.”
Theoretically. According to a very, very drunk Starling tinker who had, so he claimed, once had to break a noble out of his own vault. It was an attractive theory, though. And Jespar had done enough reading to know that the principles behind it were sound.
He dropped to his knees beside the hole in the floor which had, until a few hours earlier, been neatly covered by a stone-like pressure plate. Coils of heavy, copper wires and crystal diodes surrounded the deceptively small mechanism in the center.
“See this? That’s the energy source, and these two wires here power the pressure plate -- here -- which, when pressed, completes another circuit which powers the latch, and --” He caught himself with a laugh at the half glazed, half panicked look on the boy’s face, ”Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. All we need to worry about is this wire that runs to the switch and then loops back -- here -- to the pressure plate. If we can create a shortcut….Here, hang on. It’ll make more sense if I show you.”
Setting the torch upright in a nearby bucket-turned-floor-sconce, he paused to rummage in his pack, withdrawing a handful of copper coins and two of the whittled, driftwood sticks. The boy perked up instantly; he crouched beside Jespar, watching his hands with rapt attention. Jespar smiled; he wasn’t accustomed to having someone to share his excitement with. There was an energy to it, like the buzz of a lively inn. He’d forgotten how good it felt.
With a little flourish, the sticks held between his thumb and two fingers like pincers, he began to place coins, overlapping them to form a bridge between the two wires.
“There. Now -- in theory -- all we need to do is trigger the power source. Which is where you come in.” He fished a nail out of his pocket and held it out to the boy together with one of the sticks.
“Nail goes into the keyhole first. Only part way, mind, or that switch will light you up like Qyranian fireworks. When I give the signal, use the stick to push it the rest of the way. The wood is bone dry, so the energy should have a hard time moving through it, but still -- try not to hold onto it, just shove it in there and let go.”
He passed him a piece of the stone-like material that had broken off the pressure plate earlier -- he’d seen it before, in Starling constructs, and protective cases that claimed to be ‘magic proof’, a type of insulation. “It’s got a bit of a kick to it though, once it gets going, so use this to hold it all in place. If the nail gets pushed back even a little we’ll lose power.”
The boy fingered the objects, brows hunched together in look of almost comical concentration, and then nodded.
Jespar couldn’t help the grin spreading across his face. He felt faintly giddy. He’d always wanted to try something like this.
“Alright. Whenever you’re ready....”
Gingerly the boy slid the nail halfway into the keyhole, then nudged the stick after it with the stone. There was a crackle of energy -- out of the corner of his eye he saw the boy flinch -- and the web of circuitry in the floor came to life.
The power supply’s crystal diode glowed bright and steady. In contrast the diode feeding the pressure mechanism only flickered, sometimes flaring for a full second or two before guttering again. But a second was all they needed.
“It worked! I think. Keep holding it there, I just need to--” He pressed down on the plate as the diode blinked then held steady for a moment.
Nothing happened.
Jespar swore. The smell of burning wood wafted from the keyhole.
Perhaps he needed to time it correctly? He tried again. And again. On the third attempt he noticed that the diode in the secondary circuit -- the one connecting the pressure plate to the latch -- was dark. The current wasn’t reaching it . He leaned closer to inspect it, then drew back with a noise muddled somewhere between triumph and irritation.
“Here, leave that for a moment. Come look at this,” he waved the boy over, “See that copper node that those wires feed out of? The pressure plate has this metal tongue -- right there -- which presses down against it. It sort of…makes a bridge that the energy can pass over. Like we did with the coins. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But look, see how it doesn’t go down all the way when I press it? Must have damaged it when I removed the stone plate.”
He frowned. He released the mechanism, then pushed it down again, eyeing the gap. He fished several more pennies out of his purse and, very carefully, placed them in a small stack on the copper node.
“Go ahead, let’s see if that works.” He watched the boy withdraw the charred stick from the keyhole and relace it with an undamaged one, using the stone to hold it in place. Once more the first two diodes flickered to life, and once more Jespar leaned on the pressure plate, and this time he felt the awkward jar of the tongue hitting the coins. The secondary circuit diode began to blink weakly, in and out, in and out, flaring for the briefest moment ---
There was a soft, metallic click. And the door creaked open.
“Well I’ll be a son of a bitch.” Jespar stared in disbelief, a grin lighting up his whole face.
It had worked! It had actually worked.
“We just cracked a Starling lock, my friend!” he laughed, “Not bad for a few hours work.” He gave the boy a clap on the shoulder and pushed eagerly to his feet.
“Come on, let’s see what it was Yero wanted so badly to keep hidden.”
Beyond the shadowsteel grate, the space narrowed into a channel, partially lit by sunlight filtering through gaps in the stone above their heads. Jespar took the lead, alert for anything out of place, any hint of the contrived amidst the natural that would signify a trap. They boy followed close behind him, quiet as a shadow.
He slowed his pace as he reached a curve in the tunnel. There were no tripwires, no pressure plates, no sensors that he could see. He took a step forward.
With a strangled cry the boy lunged at him, seizing his arm, fingers digging in like the the teeth of a steel trap, jerking him off balance. Jespar stumbled into him with a startled curse, his weight and momentum carrying them several steps back.
“What the hell---!”
Fire filled the passageway just a head of them, the force of the blast knocking them both to the ground.
Son of a ---
Jespar was on his feet, daggers in his hands. He heard the creature an instant before he saw it, the hiss and sputter of a fire elemental. It surged towards them, but his dagger was faster, flying from his hand to bury itself in the twisting core of the creature. The elemental reared back in a convulsive spasm, its color flaring to a superheated white.
Shit.
Jespar tackled the boy to the ground as the elemental exploded, fire rushing like a flash flood in the narrow space. The heat stung the back of his neck and ears and singed his hair, but the worst of it passed over them.
Quiet settled over the tunnel, the smell of smoke and sulfur hanging in the air.
‘Blazes…” Jespar breathed out the curse, gingerly pushing himself up until he was sitting. “You alright?”
The boy didn’t respond, he just sat there, shivering, his eyes locked on the smouldering remains.
“Hey. Look at me,” Jespar coaxed, “Come on.”
With an effort the boy dragged his eyes away, but he did not look at Jespar. He kept his gaze down, one hand nervously picking at the bandage on his arm. “What -- what was it?”
“Fire elemental. And a damned strong one.” Jespar shook his head. “Damned illegal too. That kind of magic has been outlawed for ages. And Yero wasn’t just dabbling with it.” The Order would be thrilled to learn that they’d been harboring a powerful entropist in their ranks for heck knows how long. Bushybeard on the other hand….
Despite his frayed nerves, Jespar’s mouth quirked at the thought of the old mage’s reaction. The man had an academic degree in gloating.
A little stiffly, new bruises making themselves known, he got to his feet and retrieved his dagger from the ashy remains. The metal was still warm to the touch.
“Thanks, by the way,” he said, turning back to the boy, “We’d have been kindling if you hadn’t grabbed me when you did.” He eyed him curiously. “How did you know something was there? I didn’t hear a thing.”
The boy’s eyes flinched away from his and he shook his head, “I don’t know.”
Jespar raised an eyebrow. “Uh huh.”
There it was, that same flash of defiance and fear he’d seen at the campsite. “I don’t know,” the boy repeated doggedly. “I just -- I had a -- a bad feeling.”
He was hiding something, that much was clear. But this was neither the place nor the time to pry it out of him. Jespar regarded him for another moment, then shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Daggers in hand, he took the lead once more. “You just let me know if you get another of these ‘bad feelings’.”
Their voices had not drawn any further attention which was a good sign, but he still motioned for the boy to hang back while he scouted ahead. He reached the bend in the tunnel and peered around it.
To his surprise, it was a dead end, perhaps thirty paces of empty tunnel and then -- Huh.
Less dead end and more alcove. And in it, so unearthly still he’d almost missed it, stood a figure.
Jespar’s hackles rose, hands tightening on his daggers. It was a corpse, still upright, framed by its coffin. Only its arms and head were visible outside of the burial shroud. Shriveled and shrunken and discolored. The face was something out of an old nightmare and for a moment he felt the same familiar rush of horror. Like a shock of cold water. He fought it down, dragging in a slow, deliberate breath.
It was just a corpse.
He approached warily, half expecting the damn thing to jump out at them, but it remained blessedly still. Dust dry remains of dead flowers littered the stone at the corpse’s feet, and pools of wax from candles long since burned down circled outward from it, like some sort of macabre fairy ring.
A shrine. Of sorts. He shook his head. “You know, with all the trouble Yero went through to protect it, I was expecting something a little more dramatic than an illegal burial.” He couldn’t help feeling a little cheated.
A book lay in the middle of the circle. He picked it up, quickly thumbing through it. It was the same handwriting as the other letters, the same style, it was clearly Yero’s, but there was something -- ‘familiar’ was the wrong word, ‘reminiscent’ was better -- about this one that made him bristle with another kind of recognition.
“What is it?” The boy was looking at the book in his hands.
Jespar snorted. “It’s a final letter to his companion. About how the world has ‘chosen the Void’. Of course, blowing up a room full of kids who’d had their whole lives dictated to them by men just like him and never got the chance to choose a damn thing is a funny way to make his point. But what do I know? I’m just doing this for the money. I don’t have principles like our friend here.”
He realized belatedly that his voice had begun to rise and he broke off, flustered. The damned corpse was getting under his skin, that’s what it was. He needed to get out of this place. “I’ve got what I came for,” he said shortly, stuffing the journal into his pack and withdrawing two scrolls. He thrust one into the boy’s hands and opened the other. “I have to pick up some supplies before the market closes; I’ll meet you at the tavern after.”
The symbols on the page glowed like coals as he traced a glyph in the air. “You remember the Drunken Bee, right?”
And he was gone.
*************
Several hours and a cup of spiced mead went a long way toward soothing his rattled nerves. He had just finished his first round when the door to the taproom opened and the boy entered.
“I see you went for the scenic route,” Jespar grinned as he collapsed next to him at the bar. There was something limp and bedraggled about him that reminded Jespar of a wet cat.
“Here,” he slid a drink over to him. “This’ll warm you up. Cora here makes the finest mulled mead you’ll ever taste.”
The woman behind the bar shook her head, a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. “Flatterer.”
“I dunno, I think our friend here agrees with me. He -- Woah, slow down... “ He reached over to thump the boy on the back as he doubled over choking from the speed at which he had inhaled the drink. “You alright?”
He nodded weakly, a kneejerk apology springing to his lips, but Jespar waved it away. He retrieved a small bundle from the floor beside his pack. “Here, I almost forgot,” he began, holding it out. “I picked these up while I was at the market.”
There was a heavy, woolen blanket -- well-used but still serviceable -- which could double for a cloak in a pinch and a pair of old boots, and tucked in among them, a book.
The boy’s hands twitched towards the items, but he hesitated, eyeing Jespar warily. “What are they for?”
Jespar blinked. “They’re for you. If you want them.”
“But I can’t --” He started to protest, but broke off, his face going very still. “You want something in return.” It wasn’t a question.
“What? No. They’re a gift.” Jespar held up his hands. “No strings. I swear.”
For once the boy did not snatch at the offering, moving instead with a hesitant sort of care. He pulled the bundle into his lap, his fingers gently caressing the battered leather and wool as if they were expensive finery.
Jespar watched him as he picked up the book, opening it with such awkward reverence, it might have been endearing, except -- Jespar’s eyes narrowed, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
No, he wasn’t imagining it; the book was upside down.
“You, ah… you do know how to read? Don’t you?”
They boy’s eyes snapped up and Jespar could see the painful mixture of embarrassment and defiance in them.
Oh.
He put a hand to his brow with a soft curse. “That’s why you didn’t use the teleport scroll. By the wise hermit…. “ He sighed. “You must think I’m an ass.”
He laughed at the little, emphatic shake of the boy’s head. “Well, that’s generous of you. I suppose it’s not a total loss. You can still pawn it for a few coins when we get to Ark.”
The boy’s arms twitched, reflexively hugging the items closer. “No, I – I like it,” he stammered. And then, after another hesitation. “What is – what is it about?”
“Landscapes of Enderal: A Guide by the Golden Sickle for Travelers and Traders,” Jespar quoted dramatically. “It’s at least half propaganda, but it’s written with outsiders in mind, so it covers basic terms and cultural practices, that sort of thing. Thought it might be of some use, this being your first time here.”
One of the servers hurried past with two steaming bowls of food and the boy’s eyes trailed after them.
“Speaking of travelers -- Riverville’s myrad is sick, so we’ll have to take the road through the mountains on foot. It’ll be dark soon and we can head out then. Less chance of --” Jespar broke off, following the boy’s gaze. “You, ah…. you haven’t heard a single word I’ve said, have you?”
The boy tore his eyes away from the steaming plates of stew. “What?”
Jespar chuckled, shaking his head. “You want something to eat? Come on, it’s the least I can do after abandoning you at that crypt.”
He waved the tavernkeep over. “Some bread and stew for my friend here.”
Cora rested a hand on her hip, regarding the boy appraisingly. “When’s the last time you ate, pet?”
“I….”
“And the last time you had fresh meat?”
The boy stared at her as if she’d asked him the last time he’d seen a star ship.
Jespar observed the exchange with mounting incredulity. “What’s with all the questions?”
Cora crossed her arms. “Look at him! Lost Ones got more flesh on their bones. If I give him a plate of stew, he’ll be sick as dog.”
“You must have something he can eat.”
Cora pursed her lips, her expression softening. “Let me see what I can find.”
A few moments later she returned with a bowl of broth and a small piece of bread. The boy watched her set them down with round, hungry eyes; they had scarcely touched the bar when he pounced on the bread, tearing into it like a feral creature, his body hunching around it possessively.
The bread was gone in two mouthfuls, nearly choking him as he swallowed and grabbed for the bowl.
“You might want to –” Jespar began, but the broth was already half gone as well. “…slow down.”
The boy set down the empty bowl, his hands retreating immediately to the bundle in his lap as he looked at Jespar. “What?”
The question was so dazed and earnest, Jespar couldn’t help smiling. “Nevermind,” he laughed, clapping him gently on the shoulder. “I’ll settle up and we can head out.”
He fished a few coins out of his purse and slid them across the bar.
“Leaving us already?” Cora tsked.
“Afraid so. Much as I’ve enjoyed your hospitality.”
Cora raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that, pet?”
Jespar blinked. “What do you mean?”
She inclined her head towards the space beside him, and when Jespar turned to look, the boy was face down on the bar asleep, still hugging the little bundle of goods.
He shook his head, meeting the innkeeper’s I-told-you-so glance with a rueful smile. He glanced at the windows, the dusk shadows gathering outside, and then back at the boy, before settling once more against the bar and ordering another drink. The evening was still young. Their journey could wait a little longer.
νόστος (nostos) - Ancient Greek term for ‘homecoming’
An illustrated post Enderal AU fic about tattoos, bodily autonomy, identity and self-acceptance. (at least I hope so). Special thanks to @jhara-ivez and @little-bayleaf for reference resources! <3
Eska sat in the sand at the water’s edge, watching the waves roll in through a feverish, unfocused haze. In his arms he held a bundle of green cloth. He’d had to cross someone’s farm to get to the beach. A woman there set her dog on him and in the panicked dash through the outbuildings, he’d torn the dress off a drying line. He hugged it tightly against himself.
“Sirius?” he spoke the name softly this time, as if that would make the following silence easier to bear.
“I made it out of the ruins. I followed the signs that you left…” On some level, he was aware that this had been a delusion. But it was a comforting fiction, one that he was not ready to let go of yet. It meant that Sirius wanted him to keep going.
“I looked for you. On the beach. But….you’re not here.”
He should have felt something. Something besides cold.
“I met someone. A mercenary. He says he can help. He’ll take me to the city and then….”
And then.
He trailed off, shying away from the thought.
“I have to help him with a job first,” he tried again, “Something dumped in the water just off the shore here. I -- I tried to get it. I tried, but --”
The cold water makes his heart race. The push and pull of the tide feel like rough, shoving hands. He tries to push the fear down. Down and down and down. He forces his head beneath the waves. And he is drowning. His limbs spasm, his lungs burn, there is weight on top of him pressing him down. He is barely chest deep and he flails backwards to the safety of the beach, gulping air and shaking, trying to cough water that doesn’t exist out of his aching lungs.
“...I can’t.”
A trickle of salt water ran down his face and he curled a little tighter around the bundle of clothes. If he couldn’t find the box, the mercenary wouldn’t help him, wouldn’t take him to the city. If he couldn’t find the box, then….then….
Nothing. There was Nothing.
He couldn’t face it. The unending emptiness that existed just beyond the immediate, the hollow-eyed ruins of ‘and then’, of ‘after’, of ‘someday’. Like the razed villages back home that only existed as names on old maps.
“I don’t know what to do.”
***
It was no easy thing to hold onto one’s Self after death. Eternity was neither gentle nor kind. It ground down souls with all the mindless force of the sea turning stones into sand. To have a hope of withstanding it, an achor was needed.
Pentas was her anchor. No. Pentas’ death was her anchor. And so her grief and her fury survived. All consumed and all consuming. She devoured herself as she was devoured, remaking her self again and again until she became something else. More than grief, more than anger, more than loneliness -- she was the hole at the center of all of them. Aching and burning and hollow.
Hunger. That was what she became. The endless agony of absence.
No one came to her beach any longer, not after the first few disappearances, taken in the throws of rage and pain, lashing out against the complicity of a community which had betrayed and discarded her.
So when she sensed a disturbance at her edges -- fear splashing in the shallows, sending ripples across her surface -- it felt like lightening touching water. She reached out, a wave splashing up the beach, probing past the tide line. There was a presence there, sure enough. But this trespasser was no fisherman or stray village child, nor anything else living; whoever or whatever it was, was already dead.
And beneath the fear and frantic searching was something else, heavy and cold. She scented it like blood in the water. So familiar that for an instant she perceived it as a reflection, her own grief echoed back at her. Reflections and echoes were all she knew in this void. But no. This wound had a different shape. It was new. So new and brutal that they were still in shock. The pain would come later.
It drew her in, like the tug of the pole on a compass needle. To be perceived, to be understood, to be -- if only for an instant -- known, with all her wounds laid bare. Connection. This was another kind of hunger. The need to pour herself into someone until they were drowning. Consumed and consuming. She wanted and she wanted and she wanted. She had been starving for so long.
To be apart from the water required power. She stretched out her senses, drawing the movement from the waves and the warmth from the water and air until the sea was smooth and still and the air held the bite of frost.
Anger had a long memory. It remembered something like the form she had once held; Pain had no memory, it was now and now and now, rendering itself into the shape that Anger remembered. A black dress, its pockets bulging with stones over skin the mottled brown and grey of the shallows. Dark, wet, almost seaweed like hair hung in her face, framing two blank white eyes.
She emerged from the water, crawling, clawing her way through the shallows, bleeding rage, bleeding grief. All the voiceless wounds she could not scream.
She felt him freeze. Felt his fear. But he did not run. He did not move at all. And within the fear she felt a hunger like her own, faltering and new, reaching towards her. Loss mixing with loss in the space between souls.
He was a strange little ghost. She could sense the wrongness of him. A soul caught like a fly in a web, held together by the snarled rats’ nest of some other force.
But she needed more from him than this.
She moved past him -- crawling, standing, walking, shifting -- up the beach towards the house. She could feel the weight of the water pulling at her, dragging behind her like a train, heavier with each step. It took all her strength to reach the door.
The house was empty, long since looted, its door hanging ajar. But it had been a home once, if all too briefly, and those echoes remained.
She beckoned him to follow, standing with her finger extended towards the door. There was a starved, suffocating urgency in her movements, in the way she held herself. A word struggled to the surface of her consciousness, a word for the source and focus of this hunger, a word for what was missing. She could not speak; her voice was among the least of what she had lost -- but every fiber of her screamed in resonance with it. Both a command and a name.
WITNESS.
***
She was everything he was not. Rage and sorrow overflowing where he was numb and hollow. She felt like a furnace, like a city ablaze. And he wanted to burn. Wanted to help. Wanted help. Wanted -- Wanted --
Please don’t leave me alone.
He followed her. Standing on the threshold of the abandoned house, dazed and a little unsteady.
Inside was dark and empty. Stripped bare some time ago. The silence was thick and heavy as a wet woolen cloak. It made his heart race.
He moved deeper into the gloom, prodded by the force of the presence at his back. He did not understand what she wanted him to do; he only understood the want.
Another step and smaller details begin to take shape as his eyes adjust to the dark. Scattered pieces of a redware bowl covered the floor just below him. He stared -- every thought, every movement felt strangely heavy -- and then sank to his knees. He reached for one of the pieces --
Warmth surrounds you. Safety. Affection. The smell of cooking food and the glow of the hearth. A name: Pentas. You are laughing, gently teasing him as you ladle soup into bowls. Two bowls. Soon there will be three.
Reality reasserted itself with the shock of a sharp backhand. The momentary warmth and fullness of the memory replaced with an emptiness that surpassed the physical and the vacuum of it dragged the breath from his lungs.
He huddled gasping on the floor, tears welling up as the shock began to fade.
It hurt. This forced perspective, forced loss. He’d felt it. Everything their life had been, everything they had imagined it might be. Gone. As though it had never mattered. As though they had never mattered.
Just like Sirius.
Gently, so gently, he returned the piece of earthware to its place on the floor and got shakily to his feet.
Above his head strings trailed between the rafters, once used for drying herbs, now scaffolding for cobwebs. A few skeletal stems still hung from them. He reached up, his fingers half flinching as he brushed a loose hanging strand. For a moment the room felt just slightly warmer, and the air brightened with the scent of herbs. Mint, thyme, rosemary... And then only the staleness of dust and damp.
Something crunched and prickled under his bare foot and he drew back. A bundled stalk of sage lay on the floor, its brittle leaves crushed to dust beneath his step. He wasn’t thinking as he stooped to pick it up, it was an impulse, a need to put something back together when everything else felt broken. Looking up once more, he found a loose hanging string and wound it around the stalk. His fingers felt thick and clumsy as he pulled it tight.
And reality shifted again.
Concern. An uneasy knot in your stomach. Another name: Meldor. Meldor with his brother’s wife. Pentas has seen them together. What would a man like that do to keep his secret? But you can keep secrets too. As long as you both say nothing, you’ll be safe.
The knot in his stomach remained even as the room lurched back into focus. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to remember what happened next. His own loss was still raw and new, he could not bear another. But neither could he turn away. He felt her isolation, her loneliness, her need for understanding, in his bones. An echo of himself. He needed to understand because he needed to be understood. He needed to do this, because -- because it was all he could do. There was nothing else. Nothing left.
The vision -- memory? -- left him dizzy and breathless, and the throbbing in his head felt like a war drum. It seemed to get worse each time he ‘remembered’.
The sense of dread became heavier as he approached the stairs and he had to fight down the urge to be sick. He was sweating. He felt as though he were walking towards a cliff.
He was nearly to the top when he stumbled, catching himself on the worn, blunted edge of the landing.
And panic flooded through him.
You are running for your life. The guard who is not a guard a hair’s breadth behind you. You know what he is. You know why he is here. But if you can just reach the door... Your mind is already racing ahead -- past the bolted bedroom door to the window and the drop to the ground beneath -- when your foot catches on one of the steps and it is over before you can even cry out.
You look down at the crimson tip bursting from your chest and--
Cold crushing darkness surrounds you, forcing its way into you nose, into your throat. The weight of it presses against the insides of your ears until your head feels like it’s in a vice. You can no longer feel Sirius. Your body gasps for air, but there is no air, only more water, heavy as a stone in your lungs. And it hurts. It hurts. It hurts.
He came to curled into a ball on the stairs, choking on the memory of seawater and the taste of blood. He could still feel the cold of the blade in his chest. Or was it the water in his lungs?
He couldn’t breathe, or he was breathing too much; rapid, hysterical gasps until the room began to spin.
He couldn’t stop crying.
She stood on the landing above him, water dripping from her dress, running in cold rivulets down the steps. He stared up at her. He should have been afraid. But all he felt was a desperate sense of connection.
“Nira?”
***
The name gave her pause. She had not been Nira in a long time. The unsettling vagueness of her face, only half-remembered, shifted ever so slightly, as though coming into focus, and for a moment there was the hint of an iris in the milk white eyes. A glimpse of warmth before it was swallowed again by hunger.
They had taken her whole world, begrudging her even the scraps she had tried to hold onto. Her home was no longer a home, no longer safe, no longer full; it was a tomb, it was a trap, it was empty. They had been so eager to believe the worst of Pentas, so eager to justify what had happened.They reduced the life she had built with him, the memories she still clung to, to sordid village gossip. Did they think she did not hear the whispers? How the ‘Kilean temptress’ had corrupted their ‘good Endralean boy’? How none of this would have happened if he’d married an ‘honest local girl’? They even took her name, her voice, her Self -- she was no longer Nira, she was ‘Hysterical’, she was ‘Distraught’. She was ‘Irrational’. Neither seen, nor heard. She was a ghost long before she walked into the sea.
He was crumpled on the stairs. Where she had found Pentas. Where she had held him for the last time. And he knew.
He knew.
After so long, the words felt like a lancet. Pain and rage poured from her like poison from a wound. A voiceless, keening agony that demanded: MORE.
Tears mixed with the seawater that ran down her face as she extended her arm, finger pointed in the direction of the village. Pleading. Demanding. Compelling.
And somewhere in Riverville, on a sickbed in a well-appointed room, a woman began to scream.
***
Meldor pondered the bottom of his empty glass for a long moment before sliding it across the bar with his coin and getting to his feet. He couldn’t bear to be in the house during Mathilda’s fits anymore. He had taken to visiting the tavern just to get away. His brother doubtless disapproved, but his brother was a sanctimonious bloody martyr. Anyone would think he was the one dying. While Meldor could not even grieve. Not fully.
Out of habit he cut across the green behind the tavern, so sunk in his own thoughts that he did not notice the small figure trailing behind him. A narrow lane between two houses made a shortcut to the market; it was shady and ill kept and quiet, he was nearly to the other side when he heard someone call out behind him.
“Pentas.”
The name sent a shock of alarm through him and he turned round. A dark figure stood silhouetted at the other end of the lane and Meldor felt his heart stop.
“You killed him,” there was something eerily flat, almost lifeless about the voice. “He saw you together so you killed him.”
“What in blazes is this?” he found his voice in time to stammer, covering his fear with outrage. “Who are you?” It was not the fisherman or his wife, he could see that now, the creature before him appeared to be nothing more than a vagrant, but there was no relief in the knowledge, only a different kind of horror.
“He was afraid of you,” it continued, agitation creeping into its voice. “He wasn’t going to tell anyone. You had no reason to kill him.”
Meldor’s mind raced. Who else had known? Even the mercenary hadn’t known the details!
“Who are you?”
“They just wanted a chance. A -- a life. Together. And you--”
“That’s enough!” Panic had made him careless and he was nearly shouting. He took a step towards the vagrant, desperate to regain control. “I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, but you will answer me, and tell me where you heard these lies, or I will call the guards and--”
“Like you did for Pentas?”
Meldor froze. He knew that he couldn’t afford to show weakness, that he needed to turn this into a threat. But he couldn’t. It was never supposed to happen like that. He’d told the mercenary to frighten the fisherman, not kill him, damnit! No one was supposed to die. It wasn’t his fault!
“Nira. She’s still there. Where it happened. She’s waiting.”
Waiting? She was dead! She was --
“Meldor!” The cry came from behind him and Meldor started violently. He whirled around, panic coursing through him to find Eltan the miller waving jovially at him as he approached.
“By the Path, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!” the other man exclaimed. “Everything alright?”
“Fine!” He answered a little too abruptly, struggling to school his features into something resembling calm. “Fine. I, ah -- ” He cast a glance over his shoulder, but the alley was empty. The stranger was gone.
Damnit. Damnit.
“Mathilda’s gotten worse” he added quickly. It was a good excuse. No one would question it. It wasn’t even a lie. “We’re all worried sick.”
Eltan’s face creased with concern as he opened his mouth to offer the same tired sympathies that they’d all heard a thousand times over, but Meldor wasn’t listening. His eyes kept shifting to the open market just beyond and the people milling there. Had anyone overheard? How many of them knew? One of them had to have told the vagrant, there was no other explanation.
He excused himself from the conversation and hurried across the square. He could feel their eyes on him. The quack, LeClerc, he was certain was watching him with suspicion.
The house offered no security. He felt every bit as exposed inside its walls as he had in the market. He tried to calm himself, to think rationally, but there was nothing rational about any of this. No one else had known! He had made sure of it. So how in blazes ---
He scrubbed a hand over his face. No. The more important question was ‘what did he want?”.
Money, presumably. Or why else seek him out?
There was no telling who else the vagrant might speak to. His only hope was to contain this and to do it quickly. Opening his desk, he filled a purse with coins. He took a dagger as well -- for protection, he told himself, no one needed to get hurt, it had been a mistake involving the mercenary last time, he should have dealt with the problem himself from the beginning -- and headed for the beach.
***
She could sense when the little ghost returned. His approach felt like rain on the surface of the water, at once distinct, but difficult to distinguish from herself.
He sat in the sand at the edge of the tide line and she drank in the exhausted dregs of memory and emotion that leeched from him like blood soaking into the sand as he spoke.
He had found Meldor. Confronted him.
Now it was simply a matter of time.
Did he know that he was bait, this little ghost? Would it matter to him if he did?
She had used him. Thrust a hand into his open wound and puppetted him with pain, with the string of their shared experience. Once she might have felt regret for that, but hunger had no use for shame.
They did not have long to wait.
Another presence pushed at the periphery of her awareness. A knot of fear and guilt barbed with anger. .
Meldor made straight for the small figure at the tideline. He was not what she had expected. Pain had warped her memory of him into something brutish and monstrous, but the man standing on the beach now was utterly mundane.
Disappointing, but irrelevant. He would die just the same.
Patches of mist condensed along the shore as the temperature began to drop. Meldor noticed nothing. He railed at the little ghost, interrogating, demanding, bargaining. He pulled a purse from his belt - that was the worth he placed on Pentas’ life, on their life: a handful of coins -- and she screamed in the only tongue she had, lashing and churning the shallows with her breakers.
****
The purse was in his hand and it was not even a conscious thought. It was instinctual, compulsive, in the same way that snatching the apple from the mercenary had been. Eska stared at it in feverish incomprehension. The weight of it felt unreal. More money than he’d ever seen before let alone held.
Enough for a new start. Enough for a chance.
Enough for a life.
He let the purse fall to the ground. He couldn’t feel his hands, he couldn’t feel anything. He started to laugh, thin and high pitched, dissolving into tears.
“Now? What good is it now? Why are you giving it to me? Why didn’t you give it to them? They’d still be alive! He’d still be alive. He’d still --
“I told you, it was an accident!” Meldor’s voice rose in helpless consternation, “It wasn’t supposed to happen!”
“Is this what you think he’s worth?” He choked out the words. “I mean… fuck, what’s another dead peasant, right?”
“What are you talking about? I’m paying you to go away, to keep quiet! There’s 70 pennies there! Enough for a fresh start somewhere. No one else needs to get hurt, just -- just take it! Please.”
A fresh start…..
Eska slowly shook his head.
“They’re gone. There’s nothing after this.”
There were only endings now.
***
Nira stepped from the water as Meldor reached for his knife, moving up the beach like a cresting wave, the boom of surf in each step. She saw Meldor’s face turn corpse white, saw it twist in horror. He pulled away from the little ghost, stumbling in the sand as he tried to retreat.
Now it was Meldor who was afraid. Meldor who was helpless. And his fear felt like air in her lungs, the first breath after an eternity of drowning. Behind her she could feel the sea gathering itself, a hungry, predatory pressure at her back. His knife trembled in his hand even as he clung to it, holding it before him more like a ward than a weapon. As if he could possibly hurt her more than he already had.
The tide came in all at once. Its waters cloaking her in sea green violence as she melted into the rush of surf, knocking Meldor off his feet and dragging him under.
He did not even have time to scream before he was gone. Devoured as the sea devours. And it was over.
It was over.
That was its own kind of emptiness. The sudden lack of hunger, of want. But more than anything it was relief.
The sea was quiet as she stepped from it for the last time. More herself than she had been when she first walked into the waves.
The little ghost was waiting. Soaked from head to toe and shivering in the unnaturally cold air. It was not over for him, it was only just beginning, and it was going to get so much worse.
She could not help him. She could not give, only take. Only consume.
But perhaps...
She reached out a hand, illusory fingers brushing illusory cheek. He froze, his eyes going wide like a startled animal, tears welling up. Poor little ghost. He was on fire, burning up with energy; it was the work of a thought to syphon some of it away as she might have drawn heat from the water or air, and she felt the relief flood through him.
She drew back, her form already beginning to fade like mist in the sun.
“Wait! Please --”
She could feel the tug of his desperation, his despair.
Please don’t leave. Please don’t leave me alone.
But it could not hold her. And for the first time in a very long time, she was sorry.
With a last backwards look, she stepped into the surf and was gone. And as she went, the sea drew back, sliding down the beach lower even than the lowest tide. The retreating waters dragged at the sand and stones, uncovering a small metal box.
Jespar perched on the low fence post, regarding his mystery guest through a soft haze of pipe smoke. Last night he’d only spared enough light to be sure they weren’t seriously injured, he hadn’t dared risk more than that, but in the cold grey of just before dawn, he was able to get his first real look at them. Which, to be fair, wasn’t all that much as the only thing currently visible beneath the tattered blanket was a mess of stringy, matted brown hair.
As he watched, the unconscious figured stirred, and Jespar straightened, lowering his pipe expectantly.
And then the screaming started.
Jespar shot upright, dropping the pipe in his scramble to reach the stranger before they alerted every bandit in the Sun Mountains.
“Woah woah woah, easy!” They were floundering on his bedroll, struggling to rise. “Hey. Hey!” He caught hold of their shoulder. “You’re alr--” The words ended in a yelp as the slight figure erupted under his touch like an over-tightened spring, snarling and clawing at his face.
He fell backwards into the dirt. “What the hell? I was trying to--!”
“Who the fuck are you? Where am I? What happened? Where’s Siri--”
He -- for it appeared to be a ‘he’ -- faltered at the last question, like a guttering candle; the wildness in his face flickered and went out, and for a moment he just looked lost.
Warily Jespar sat up, touching a ginger hand to his face; he could feel raised welts beginning to form where the stranger had scratched him and when he pulled his hand away drops of blood stained his finger tips.
He grimaced. No good deed and all that….
But at least the screaming had stopped.
The stranger stood tense and quivering on the opposite side of the campsite, regarding him with round, terrified eyes. He was younger than Jespar had first guessed, absolutely filthy, and covered with so many cuts and bruises it looked as though he’d lost a fight with a bramble patch.
“Look, ah…. Maybe we should start over. Name’s Jespar. And this is my campsite. As for what happened.... Bandits attacked the Apothecarii’s camp. You only survived because the explosion threw you into the bushes. The other two weren’t so lucky.”
The boy stared down at the bandage on his arm, taking this in, then he looked up again and there was the glint of something sharp beneath the fear, like the flash of light on a blade. “How do you know what happened?”
He’d been expecting this question, but the veiled accusation still rankled. “I was nearby,” he admitted, a faint edge creeping into his voice. “And before you ask, no, I didn’t help. For one thing, I was outnumbered. And for another, I’m in a happy relationship with my entrails. Wish I had a more heroic answer for you, but I--”
“What do you want?” The boy cut him off. The sharpness of a moment ago was no longer confined to his face, his whole body bristled with it. “Why am I here?”
Blazes. He was a suspicious little bastard, wasn’t he? “Well, you’re here because I pulled out of a thicket and carried you here. As for what I want…. Tell you what. Right now? I’ll settle for a name. You have the advantage of me there, after all.”
The boy wavered, his expression a volatile mix of confusion and aggression, and Jespar braced himself for another barrage of questions. But after a moment the boy lowered his eyes and murmured, “Eska.”
It was a small victory, but Jespar found himself smiling despite himself. “Well, then. You hungry, Eska?”
He thought that might get his attention -- the boy was skin and bones and probably weighed less than Jespar’s kit -- and he was not wrong, though the sudden intensity in those wide, dark eyes was a little unnerving. But at least it wasn’t open hostility.
“Alright. How about a trade?” Jespar pulled an apple out of his pack. “You tell me how you wound up out here in the back of beyond, and it’s all yours. Food in exchange for a story. Sound fair?”
Tentatively -- his face still smarting from the encounter moments ago -- he held out the apple, resisting the impulse to roll it towards the boy as one might to a particularly snappish stray, only to flinch as the boy lunged at him, snatching the fruit from his hands before he’d even fully extended his arm, and retreating back to edge of camp, his whole body curled protectively around the apple as he tore at it with his teeth. Jespar half expected him to growl.
“I’ll, uh... take that as a yes.”
He was eating so fast he was starting to choke. But when Jespar took a step closer, the boy’s head snapped up, bristling with such desperate ferocity it stopped him in his tracks. It was only then that he saw the tears streaming down his face. He wasn’t choking at all.
Jespar didn’t know what to do with that. He felt like an intruder, as though he’d just walked in on him naked. And in the end he did nothing; he retrieved his pipe from where he had dropped it earlier, and retreated to the fence post to let the boy eat in, if not peace exactly, at least the closest he could offer to it.
He didn’t have long to wait. The apple was gone, core and all, in seconds, and the boy scrubbed a dirty arm across his face, wiping away the moment of vulnerability together with the tears and snot. He regarded Jespar with the same wariness as before, but the panic, at least, seemed to have passed.
“.....What do you want to know?”
Jespar hesitated. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“You said food for a story. That was the deal.”
“So I did. Alright, how about…... where are you from? That accent, that’s Nehrim -- Southrealm, right?”
He hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. “Ostian.”
There was another pause. The boy hugged his arms around his chest as though bracing himself.
“We stowed away on a ship. The civil war... Coarek’s winning, and -- and -- Everyone knows what happens to cities that don’t surrender! I just thought -- I thought --”
“You needed a way out. I understand that.”
He regretted saying it almost immediately. The way the boy looked at him. It wasn’t the relief or gratitude that unsettled him, but what lay just beneath. The desperation of someone drowning. He’d seen it before, and it was the last thing he wanted to be reminded of.
“We were so close...”
Jespar listened to his sparse, halting account of the voyage, the fight with the two sailors, their discovery by the strange woman, the death of his friend, and finally the encounter with the two apothecarii.
It was a strange tale; one that left him with more questions than he’d started with. There was silence for several heartbeats after it finished, and then Jespar breathed out a soft curse. “For what it’s worth... I’m sorry about your friend.”
The boy only shivered and hugged himself closer. “Sorry about your face,” he mumbled.
“Huh? Oh. Blazes...” He shook off the apology. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had worse, believe me. Here.” On impulse, Jespar picked up the blanket from where it had fallen in the struggle earlier, and held it out. “You were tangled up in it when I pulled you out of that thicket.”
The boy just stared at him at first, still half fearful as if he were expecting some sort of trap, but after a moment he reached out a tentative hand and took it, pulling it across his shoulders and burying his face in the tattered wool.
“I ah… I can show you where we are, if you’d like?” he offered, pulling his map from its oiled leather satchel, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of something like curiosity in the boy’s eyes. Jespar brightened instantly, dropping to his knees and beginning to spread the map out on the ground.
“Here, look --” He turned the map to give him an easier vantage point, and after a bit of coaxing the boy crept closer. “We’re just here, on the other side of the dam. You must have come out of the ruins somewhere on the slopes north of the reservoir here. Which means….” He studied the outline of the coast for a moment. “One of these inlets must have been where you washed up.”
He let out a low whistle. “I had no idea the ruins in those mountains were that extensive. Surprised smugglers haven’t turned the place into a highway.”
He traced his finger south and then east along the road. “This is Riverville, a little farming village not too far from here. Do you know what port you were headed for? Probably Ark, right? That’s the capital, here. Couple days journey on foot -- less if you push through the night.”
He watched the boy’s face as he followed the movement of his finger along the road between Riverville and Ark. He wasn’t imagining things; there was definitely something off about the boy’s eyes: an odd, but familiar brightness. He’d had his suspicions during the brief examination the night before, but seeing him up close by daylight confirmed it. “How long have you had that fever?”
The look of blank incomprehension was answer enough.
“Let me guess. You’ve been feeling… strange? Weaker and clearer at the same time? Maybe you’ve noticed things freezing or catching fire around you?”
He saw the flicker of recognition in his face, and then fear like a landslide, burying everything else.
“No. That’s just - that’s just….. You mean this?” He held out his bandaged arm. Pleading with his eyes. “You mean the wolf bite, right? But…but healer gave me something for it. It -- it’s fine. It’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure you’re right, about the arm. But that’s no ordinary fever. In fact, I’m surprised the old apothecarius didn’t recognize it. You have Arcanist’s Fever. Simply put, your ‘magical talent’ has broken free inside you and your body can’t cope with it.”
“Magical tal--? No. No. I don’t have -- I’m not a mage! I don’t have magic! It’s just…….The woman on the ship! She did something to us with magic. When she knocked us out. That’s all it is. But -- but -- it’ll wear off, won’t it? It’ll get better?”
Blazes, he wasn’t making this easy. The look in his eyes, begging him to say ‘yes’, to make it stop, to make it alright, with a single syllable. Jespar shifted uncomfortably. “It can be treated. But…. no, it won’t just go away.”
He hesitated; he’d only ever intended to point the boy towards Riverville and let the priest there sort him out. He would be the Temple’s problem then. And they ought to at least make sure he didn’t turn into an Oorbaya.
He didn’t have time to play nursemaid; he was in the middle of a contract for heck’s sake. And being back in Enderal was already complicated enough, the last thing he needed was someone who looked at him like -- well, like that. But….
But.
He had to admit he was curious.
And he would have to head back to Riverville eventually. It wouldn’t be the end of the world to make sure the boy made it there in one piece. It would mean backtracking a bit to get to Yero’s house, but the delay wouldn’t cost him too much. Besides, if he didn’t give Firespark something to complain about, the old man would only find something himself. Bespoke flaws were all part of the service.
“That town that I mentioned, Riverville. Might be someone there who can help you. I’m headed there myself.”
The boy looked at Jespar as though he’d suggested a trip on a star ship. “I can’t…pay them.”
“Well, considering that if you aren’t treated, you’re likely to wind up running naked through the countryside throwing fireballs at everything that moves, I’d say it’s in their interest to help, payment or no.”
It was an ill considered attempt at levity. The boy recoiled from him, all sharp-edged wariness and fear once more and Jespar wanted to kick himself.
“Help?” There was something bitter and angry and tired and bottomless beneath the squeaky incredulity of his voice. “I’ve got no money. I’m a foreigner. And -- and you’re saying I’m dangerous now? I know what kind of ‘help’ that gets you!”
The assumption caught Jespar off guard. “No one is going to hurt you! Heck’s sake, this isn’t Ostian! It’s alright. And … Look, just forget what I said about fireballs, it was a stupid thing to say. But you do need help. And I wouldn’t be offering to take you to Riverville if I didn’t think someone there would at least be willing to try.”
He knew damned well that it wasn’t that simple. The boy would still have to go to Ark and take the Journey to the Water and heck knows what else. But he told himself there was no point overwhelming him with that. Riverville was a starting point, and that was the best he could offer him.
The boy looked on the verge of tears. Caught between one fear and another, like a cornered animal. Jespar was his only real choice, and that was the same as no choice at all.
He tried to be as gentle as he could. “So, what d’you say? You feel up to walking?”
The boy huddled deeper into the blanket, and for a moment Jespar thought he might baulk. But after a tense, uncomfortable silence, he nodded.
“Splendid!” Jespar smiled with relief and pushed to his feet. “Like I said, it’s not far. Under half a day’s journey by road. Less if you cut cross-country, though I wouldn’t recommend that at the moment.”
Before they could leave, the boy insisted on seeing the remains of the two apothecarii. Exactly why, Jespar could not fathom; it was not a pretty sight and he told him so, but the boy was strangely adamant and Jespar was not about to push it. He finished packing up and muddled any lingering traces of their presence, and when the boy returned a few minutes later, they set out.
He set a brisk pace at first. The attack last night was still fresh in his mind and Jespar wanted to put some distance between them and the bandits’ territory. But once they left the cool, early morning shadow of the mountains and began to head east along the river, he let himself relax a little.
The boy had been eerily silent the entire time. His bare feet scarcely made a sound on the hard packed dirt of the road. It was like having a second shadow. Still, he kept up and he didn’t do anything to draw unwanted attention, so Jespar couldn’t complain.
At a sunny patch of riverbank he stopped them; giving the boy a chance to rest while Jespar refilled his waterskin. The boy stuck his face in the river and gulped water like a dog, as starved for water as he had been for food.
“So. Ostian, huh?” Jespar remarked when they were back on the road. “I was with a mercenary company there. Briefly. Oh, must be a dozen or more years ago now. Is the Blue Siren still standing?”
The boy stared at him in surprise, then nodded. “It burned down. Twice. But… it’s still there. ”
“Sounds about right,” Jespar laughed. “That place was, ah…. an education, shall we say. Best music in the city, though. There was a bard there. Tall fellow. Always wore a huge hat -- “
“Moussa.”
“You know him?”
“Everyone in the Shallows knew Moussa.”
Knew.
“Past tense, huh?”
“‘Purified’. A few years ago.”
Jespar let out a slow exhale. “Shit.” He’d never been in the city for one of the festivals -- his captain, for all her other flaws, had had better sense than that -- but he’d heard stories.
So much for lightening the mood.
But the mention of familiar things, or perhaps simply shared points of reference, even somber ones, seemed to have put the boy a little more at ease, and after some hesitation he broke the silence.
“You’re a mercenary?”
“Something like that. I guess you could say my speciality is recovering things that have been lost -- treasures, tomes, memories…. That sort of thing.”
“Like… a treasure hunter?”
Jespar’s brows quirked upwards. “Treasure hunter….” he repeated, trying on the words. “That has a nice ring to it. But ah, well… Let’s just say I help people fulfill certain…. ‘materialistic desires’. Just like --”
He broke off. Was that an actual smile? Just the ghost of one, but he was certain he hadn’t imagined it. He gave the boy a look of rueful amusement. “Well, you get the idea.”
“How do you steal -- find -- a memory?”
The corners of Jespar’s mouth twitched at the correction. “Well, aren’t you curious. I suppose it’s less ‘memories’ and more… pieces of the past? Clues as to how or why something happened. Take this job, for example. Three days ago, a magister with the Holy Order killed himself and fifteen novices in a magical explosion. And the Order hired me to find out why.”
Before he knew it, he was explaining about Order and the Red Madness and the other mysterious troubles that had beset the country of late. And the boy listened, or at least made a good show of appearing to; every time Jespar happened to glance over he found a pair of large, dark eyes regarding him, and truth be told, he didn’t need much more encouragement than that. There were things he suspected neither of them much wanted to think about just then, and talking was a welcome distraction.
Still, as pragmatically as he might frame it, he found himself enjoying the company, strange and quiet as it was, and it was with mixed feelings that he glimpsed the roofs of Riverville rising out of the landscape in the distance.
He cast another glance at his travelling companion. Perhaps…..
No. He’d already gotten far more involved that he should have. Better for both of them to leave this to the experts.
Experts. Like a backwater priest who probably knew almost as little about the condition as the apothecarius had.
Jespar knew experts. Arguably the best in the field. But….
But this wasn’t his problem. And it certainly wasn’t his responsibility. Besides, when had getting involved ever actually helped? It was just another kind of selfishness masquerading as virtue.
They picked their way up the narrow street towards the square. It was late morning and people were rushing about their business. But despite the bustle, something felt off about the town. He could sense it, the way one might feel a change in air temperature from one room to another, people they passed seemed unusually tense or wary, and some of the looks they received were none too friendly. The boy seemed to sense it too, shifting closer until he was all but glued to Jespar’s side. Jespar was beginning to wonder if something had happened in the village since he’d passed through the day before, until he caught one of the guards trailing them and he suddenly remembered what the boy had said back at the campsite.
I know what kind of ‘help’ that gets you!
Well, shit.
That settled it.
Jespar stopped and rounded on the guard. “Can I help you, soldier?” he demanded, shifting dialects into his most silverplated Sublime register.
“Uh --- Ah, no. Mysir.” He didn’t seem to know how to respond. Jespar’s appearance said ‘pathless mercenary’, but his accent said ‘I could end your life over afternoon tea with a strongly worded letter’. “Just -- ah, making sure all is well.”
“I see. Then perhaps you should be focusing your attention on the bandits who attacked my friend on the road instead of harassing innocent civilians. Or do I need to bring this up with your superiors?”
He didn’t like making use of his birth, but he couldn’t deny that the particular shade of magenta the man’s face turned was deeply satisfying. Jespar let him flail for a moment, stammering excuses, then sent him packing and turned back to where the boy -- Eska -- was still rooted to the spot.
“C’mon.” He offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile and led him towards the inn at the end of the street. There were several small tables outside and, pulling his map from his pack once more, he began to spread it out on the surface.
“Alright. Slight change of plans,” he began, flashing him a grin. “I have a proposition for you.”
There was a chill in the air now that the sun had gone down, a raw, lingering damp from the rain earlier that afternoon. The apothecarius stooped over an earthen workbench, tending to a small brazier atop which a ceramic still bubbled and dripped. If nothing else, the cold would speed the condensation process, and judging from the quantity of distillate collected, the water level in the alembic must already be quite low. He would need to remove it from the heat soon.
But not yet. Finn eased himself down beside the fire, grimacing as his knees protested. Time on the road was taking its tole and they were beginning to ache with each new genuflexion. Nothing that a liniment of wolfsbane wouldn’t put right, but all the same he would be glad when they were back in Ark.
Carbos would say he was getting old.
And he would be right, he thought with a wry smile, giving the pot on the fire a final stir before moving it from the coals to a flat stone nestled at the edge of the embers. A stew of sorts; dried meat from their supplies and fresh mushrooms they had found earlier that day, simmered in water and thickened with dried arrowroot. Not his best work, perhaps, but they would not go hungry.
He settled back onto the packed ground, allowing himself a moment to breathe for what felt like the first time that day. They would be heading down to Riverville tomorrow, and from there to Ark; everything they had gathered needed to be carefully prepared and stored and packed. The distillate would be the last of it, unless Carbos return with a few stragglers.
The quiet was broken by a the crunch and rustle of leaves, too loud and slow to be anything small.
The apothecarius raised his head, peering into the dark.
“Carbos? Is that you?”
Something moved in the darkness beyond the circle of firelight. “Sirius…” A voice warbled, thin and eery, and the apothecarius felt a chill go through him. He got to his feet, fingering the talisman around his neck.
“Who’s there?”
The ghostly sound came again. Closer this time. Surely if it were bandits they would have attacked by now?
“Carbos, if this is your idea of a joke--” He broke off as a shadow separated from the darkness of the trees and staggered into the circle of firelight.
“By the righteous path….” The apothecarius recoiled in alarm. The creature was ragged and bloody, its round, wild eyes goggling at him from beneath matted strands of hair.
“Please --” The figure took an unsteady step towards him, and fell forward onto its face.
---
Eska feels hands lifting him, but he has little awareness of the other man. His eyes dart hungrily around the small campsite, words falling from his lips in a desperate, half-conscious babble.
“Please. M-my friend -- Have you seen my friend? Have you seen anyone?”
The firelight flashes crimson and gold over the robes of the figure kneeling in front of him. Eska pulls away, craning his neck to see past him. “Sirius?”
“Sirius?” a voice repeats and for the first time the man before him snaps into focus. Warm, weathered face, heavy brows knit in concern. And for a moment hope floods through him like a drug.
“You’ve seen him? Have you seen my friend? I’m looking for my friend. I need to find him. I need to -- I need -- I --
---
The boy -- for he was little more than a boy -- had worked himself up into a state. Finn tried to steady him.
“Slow down, child. Here, sit down here by the fire. What happened to you? Your arm, is that--”
The boy stared blankly down at his arm, his gaze passing uncomprehending over the blood and torn flesh and back to the apothecarius’ face. “No,” he pulled away sharply. “No, that’s not -- I’m looking for my friend. Please! Have you seen him? He wasn’t on the beach and -- and -- and I can’t -- I need to find him. He was hurt. He was hurt and -- and….Please.”
“I’m sorry, lad. I haven’t seen anyone.”
“He’s -- he’s tall. L-light hair,” he pressed on doggedly, “Sirius. His name’s Sirius.”
The apothecarius shook his head. But their was a dangerous fragility in the boy’s expression that made him add,“But my companion will be back soon. Perhaps he’ll have seen something. Why don’t you wait here and you can ask him yourself?”
A faint hope at best, but it seemed to mollify him, enough at least that Finn was able to coax him over to a seat by the fire. He was soaked to the skin and shivering uncontrollably. Finn placed a blanket over his shoulders and the boy instantly huddled into it. “How did you come by this wound in your arm?” he asked, steering him away from the subject as he gathered water and linen and salve together.
---
The memory is blurred and out of joint. A flash of yellow eyes and sharp teeth. The brute force of jaws clamping around his arm and pulling his body to the ground. Sharp rocks, cold water. Nails digging into his chest, the deep bass chorus of snarls, echoing in his bones. He sees his hand in front of his face. In front of his throat.
He doesn’t remember the fire. He remembers the pitiful, yelping shrieks. He remembers the smell of burning fur and flesh. Remembers the one creature too injured to flee, its horrible, drunken stagger before it collapses in the shallows. Burning and drowning both at once.
He remembers the stillness, the silence when it finally stops. Remembers the taste of bile. Remembers sobbing until he is sick.
---
“I didn’t mean to.” His voice, forcefully insistent only a moment ago, had grown very small, a strange mixture of fear and bewilderment clouding his face. “The wolves….. They were hungry. I think? It wasn’t their fault.”
Finn shook his head. “I’m not surprised. The animals in these parts have been growing bolder. You’re lucky to have made it out with only the bite on your arm.”
Taking a closer look at the wound, he suppressed a grimace. Bite wounds were a nasty business. But it looked recent, perhaps -- No, there was already a feverish brightness to the boy’s eyes. Infection had likely already set in, but a clean dressing and a dose of gruntroot ought to buy him enough time to find a proper healer.
“I have some water here; I’d like to clean your wound. Is that alright?”
The boy did not respond this time; he only sat there, numb and unresisting as Finn began his work.
“You gave me quite the fright back there, you know?” Finn continued, keeping his voice gentle and even. “Thought you were a Lost One come out of the ruins.”
As it was the boy was little more than bones himself.
Once the wound was clean, he applied an ointment of calendula and honey, talking softly all the while as he wrapped the injury in strips of clean linen.
When he finished, he sat back with a relieved smile. “I don’t believe I introduced myself properly. I am Finn Dalires, apothecarius by my path. My companion, Carbos --”
“What the hell?” a familiar voice exclaimed, and glancing up, Finn caught sight of the other apothecarius approaching down the path.
A corner of his mouth quirked. “Speak of him and he appears…..”
“Blazes, Finn, you were supposed to be watching the camp!”
“And as you can see, everything is still in one piece.”
“And who the fuck is that?”
“He’s a traveller.” Finn’s tone was calmly matter-of-fact. “Attacked by wolves on the road.”
“And how do you know that? Damnit, Finn, he could be one of the bandits!”
“And am I supposed to believe he chewed those marks in his arm himself?” Finn waved a hand at Carbos’ drawn weapon. “Put that away.”
Carbos glared at him. “Next time, you call me when you see someone.”
He sheathed his sword and tossed his satchel down beside the drying tent on the opposite side of the fire, never once taking his eyes off the stranger. The boy wasn’t armed, at least, and there was little chance of him concealing a weapon beneath those scant rags. But there was something off about him that made Carbos’ hackles prick.
“He’s looking for a friend,” Finn explained, with that same infuriating calm. “I told him I hadn’t seen anyone else today. Have you?”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
“Did it occur to you that this might be another Red Madness victim? Look at him! He could have killed this ‘friend’ for all we--”
“No!” Carbos grabbed for his sword as the boy lurched wild-eyed out of Finn’s grasp, frantic and stammering, “I didn’t! I wouldn’t. The captain, she -- she -- “
---
She killed him.
The memory comes back all at once, the pieces his mind had been unable to hold, stained glass shards of sunlight and steel and blood, soldered together into something monstrous, and he crumples beneath the weight of it.
He is on his knees, palms clamped against his mouth. He sees it happen, like a reflection in a broken mirror, its image echoed in a dozen disparate shards of sense and memory. The flash of light on a blade. Sirius’ voice. The airless, gurgling whimper as he collapsed on the deck. Blood running over his lips, grey eyes turning empty. He remembers screaming. He remembers the bite of ropes and the shock of the cold water.
And there is suddenly so much less.
So much nothing.
---
Finn rounded on Carbos. “Was that really necessary?”
“It was a fair question!” Carbos snapped back, “One of us has to be cautious, since you’re clearly incapable.”
“Caution is not a stick for you to beat everything you don’t understand!”
“This isn’t the Ark bathing house, damnit! You were alone. You could have been killed!”
Finn opened his mouth to reply, then sighed and Carbos felt the warm pressure of a hand on his arm.
“And lo and behold, we are still alive.” The words themselves were taunting, but the tone was gentle.
Carbos let out a low growl, but relented, withdrawing once again to his spot by the fire.
“Did you find any sheer cap?”
Carbos gave his satchel a nudge with his boot. “Some. Not much pine this side of the -- What the hell are you doing?”
“Sheer cap, gruntroot, willow bark….” Finn muttered, ignoring the question as he plucked a mushroom out of Carbos’ bag and began to rummage through his own pack. “I could have sworn there was some -- Ah!”
“Oh, so we’re brewing potions for strangers now?”
“If the stranger is about to die of fever, then aye. We did swear an oath if you haven’t forgotten.”
Carbos retrieved his lute from their tent with a disgusted grumble and began to tune it with all the petty aggression the instrument would tolerate. “There wasn’t anything in my oath about taking in strays. You’ll be inviting him to dinner, next.”
“That’s a fine idea, Carbos. Very generous.”
“You know that’s not what I meant!”
“The stew should be nearly cool enough. Why don’t you give him a bowl.”
“Get it yourself, I’m busy.”
“Clearly.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who --” He broke off sharply, catching the scent of something charred and acrid. “Finn, the still!”
The other man’s eyes widened and he turned back to the bench with a frantic curse. He snatched up a cloth from the bench, folding it deftly before using it to lift the overheated ceramic vessel off of the coals and onto a flat stone. There was the quiet, but unmistakable sound of pottery cracking.
“Damnit, do I have to watch you every second?”
“I’m sorry, alright? We can pick up a new one in Ark.”
“Yeah, and you’re paying for it.”
The look of weary exasperation that Finn gave him spoke volumes, and despite his irritation, Carbos could not suppress a faint smirk. His path-abiding companion might rarely use obscenities, but it was entirely transparent when he meant them. That look said ‘bullshit’ clear as day.
Before he could reply, a strangled cry interrupted them. The stray, all but forgotten in the brief commotion, lay sprawled on his back in the dirt, wide-eyed and gasping for breath.
“What the hell is wrong with him now?”
Finn was already dropping to his knees beside him and Carbos stepped in closer, clutching his sword hilt. “Blazes, be careful, will you? They say their eyes don’t go red until the very end.”
“Carbos.” And that look said ‘shut the fuck up.’
Carbos crossed his arms, glaring sullenly at them both. The boy was gibbering. He couldn’t make out half of what he said, but he appeared to be calming at least. Finn had a knack for that.
“Explosion?” he heard Finn repeat, “No, the still just overheated, that’s all. No harm done.”
Carbos gave a bark of laugher. “That would have been something, wouldn’t it? Finn Dalires, died 8234. Cause of death: exploding still.”
Finn ignored him, helping the boy back to a sitting position and returning to their makeshift workbench. He was working more slowly than he had been a moment ago, Carbos noted, favoring his right hand.
“What’s wrong?”
“Delirious, I expect. Though the onset seems rather sudden for--” Finn reached for an empty cup and nearly dropped it, snatching his hand back with a stifled hiss of pain.
“With your hand, you idiot!” Carbos caught his wrist before he could turn away, turning it palm upward. In the light cast by the fire it was possible to see the discoloration of burns on the fingers. Not serious, not even enough to blister, but certainly painful.
“It’s fine. A foolish mistake. The cloth was still wet from the rain when I used it to move the still.”
Carbos’ hold on his hand lingered for several heartbeats before releasing. “It’s a bloody miracle you’re still alive, you know that?”
“How could I forget? With you here to constantly remind me.” Finn turned back to the bench with a show of mild exasperation. He added just enough water to the mixture in the mortar to make a paste, and then more to dilute it further, pouring the draught into a cup for the stranger.
Carbos snorted as he bent to rummage through his satchel and quickly withdrew a small, stoppered pot of salve which he set down on the bench. “Stop fussing over the stray and see to your hand. I’ll get the food ready.”
But as he began to turn back to the fire, something flickered at the edge of his vision and he stopped, peering into the dark. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
“I thought I saw a light. Just for a moment. On the other side of the river.” He moved to the edge of the firelight, willing his eyes to adjust to the dark. Nothing moved on the far bank. The only sound was the rush of water and the distant roar of the dam.
He must have imagined--
The first arrow struck him in the chest. He fell to his knees, fingers clutching uncomprehendingly at the wooden shaft protruding from his breast.
“Finn?” The word sounded wet and tasted like copper. “Finn, I --” He was choking on the words. Each breath was agony. Hands caught him before he could topple forward, holding him. Someone was shouting. Finn. But his voice was strange.
Across the river there was another flicker of light. He never felt the blast.
A series of short pieces set during the few months between the end of Dark Chambers and the (first) Nehrimese attack.
-----------------------------
The pain is worse at night. And in the rain. And the cold. Any time the weather changes. Entropy wounds are slow to heal, they tell him. Be patient, they tell him. But patience and pain are like oil and water. Eska shifts uncomfortably on the floor, biting back a groan as the ache in his chest and shoulder flares. He had picked a hell of a time to stop drinking; he’d have given just about anything for a bottle of bitter brandy.
Needles shoot down his arm and he stifles a curse. But worse than the pain is the sudden numbness which follows, creeping up from his fingers.
Shit.
He gives up on trying to sleep. Uncurling, he sits up, digging the knuckles of his good hand into his forearm to work some feeling back into it. Sometimes that is enough, other times it spreads all the way to his shoulder until his whole arm is cold and dead.
In the darkness an arm’s length away he hears Tharaêl stir, still asleep but he can just make out the stifled, involuntary twitches of his hands, and the too fast rise and fall of his chest. He does not scream or cry out; the only sounds are the ragged sharpness of his breathing, and a whimper that strangles so far back in his throat it is barely a sound.
“Tharaêl?” Eska reaches for his shoulder. “Tha--”
It’s like touching a tripwire. The blow snaps his head back, knocking him onto the floor. Tharaêl is on top of him before he hits the ground, his dagger pressing into Eska’s throat.
“Tharaêl! It’s me, it’s alright, it--”
Light flares from one of Tharaêl’s hands, stripping the shadows from their faces, and Eska sees him freeze. For a single, unguarded instant his face is naked, the memory of another too similar scene reflected raw and bloody in his eyes.
Tharaêl drops him as though he’d burned his hands. The look on his face retreating behind a snarl. “What the fuck were you doing?”
“You were --” Eska rocks forward, gagging and coughing as blood runs down his throat, “Fuck.” The groan comes out muffled between his hands as he cradles his face. “You were having a nightmare.”
“And you thought, what? Climbing on top of me in the dark would fucking help?” He is on his feet, wiping his dagger on his shirt and jamming it into its sheath. The light has gone out, taking Eska’s dark vision with it, and all he can make out is an angry shadow and the scrape and rattle of the deadbolt.
“I’m --” The latch clicks as the door swings closed and Eska sags, breathing out a sigh.
“--sorry.”
A moment later he hears the hinges to the balcony door creak and then nothing. He sits with his head between his knees, staunching the blood from his nose with a sleeve. At some point he must have slept.
*
He wakes with a start to an open door and a figure standing over him.
“You didn’t bolt the door,” a familiar voice snaps and Eska relaxes, lowering his head back onto his arms with a vague, non-committal grunt.
“If it had been another rh-- If it had been one of them, you’d be dead.”
“Then for once they’d have done both of us a favor.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
He’s too tired to argue. “Nothing. Forget it.”
The blue light is back and he raises his head, squinting painfully, but before he can make him out, it is gone again, the shadows pressing against his eyes like a blindfold.
The silence stretches into minutes; Tharaêl sits, but doesn’t settle. With his head on his arms, Eska can hear the rustle of each restless, shifting movement. And then, gruffly, a stiff and awkward afterthought, “Are you hurt?”
Eska’s laugh is muffled by his sleeve. “With my thick skull? It’ll take more than that. Even if you do got battering rams for paws.”
There is a snort, but the restive fidgeting stills and the quiet that settles over the room is less tense than before.
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Tharaêl wakes unable to breathe, his throat closing tight around a sound he hasn’t allowed himself to make since he was a child. The air feels sharp and cold against his cheeks and when his breath comes again it hurts.
The nightmare lingers, clinging like cobwebs. He can’t move. It feels like someone’s breath on the back of his neck, the half-remembered paralysis beneath an unwanted touch. And it feels like a weight in his arms, slack-limbed and sodden and still warm.
His hands feel strange: heavy and slick, disconnected from the rest of him; he holds them awkwardly and apart.
There is movement in the dark, a sound -- a voice that doesn’t belong in a tone he cannot parse, and something brushes his hand. The touch feels like skin against skin and not the memory that stains them warm and wet. But still he flinches, his muscles answer him this time, snatching his hand away, a snarl rising in his throat. Pain and revulsion bleeding into two knife sharp syllables.
He moves with the violent urgency of someone who is suffocating. Thrashing to his feet, fumbling with the latch and deadbolt. Each time he opens the door he expects to be met with the heavy, fetid air of the undercity, but there is only the darkened landing of the inn. He moves silently across to the walkway door; he has already memorized the patterns of the nails in the floor that mark where the joists run, he knows where to step so the boards don’t creak.
There is no mistaking the darkness of the walkway for anything but the upper city. There is a particular kind of dark that night brings here, so different from the undercity’s chthonic gloom or the perpetual twilight of the Rhalata compound. It is a temporary state, its transience a palpable texture like the grain in a weave. It is the difference between closing one’s eyes and going blind.
He climbs the scaffolding out onto the roof and there is the sky gaping above him and he can breathe. It is a strange kind of comfort; it makes him feel small and exposed, but it does not make him feel trapped. And there is a vastness to it that defies an imagination moulded by walls and tunnels and closed spaces; he could not have dreamed this and so it must be real. It anchors him, and the world feels a little more solid, the nightmare a little more distant. A little. Like a wave, rolling over him and then receding, he is still soaked with it.
Later on, almost like clockwork, the mercenary joins him, tossing a blanket at his head before settling on the roof a short distance away. There are no questions, no attempts at conversation and eventually Tharaêl stops bracing for them, grudgingly pulling the heavy wool blanket around his shoulders. They pass the night that way, sharing the space and the silence, slipping back to the room only when the first curls of smoke from the chimney signal that the Nomad is beginning to stir.
The screaming is a new and unpleasant surprise. The first time it happens, Tharaêl comes near to skewering him. Lurching out of a fitful half-sleep, weapon in hand before he’s fully conscious, primed to lunge at the first thing that moves. But there is no one in the room save the small, tightly curled figure lying on the floor a few feet away. The screams have stopped, the mercenary whimpers and twitches.
His heart is hammering. He wants to kick him. The way one might kick a piece of furniture stumbled over in the dark. Because it is there. Because it shouldn’t have been. Because it should have been something else. Because it’s exactly where and what it’s always been and every time he jars against it is a reminder that the only thing out of place is himself.
He hates him for that.
He crouches beside the mercenary and shakes him roughly, leaning back as he starts awake. He’s expecting a swipe from a fist, some reflexive violence; he is not expecting the hands which catch hold of his arms, clinging with unearned intimacy, and a voice he’s never heard before.
“Sirius?”
He recoils, jerking himself free and shoving him back. He hears the crack of his head against the floor.
“Who the fuck is Sirius?”
There isn’t an answer, only a soft curse and the scuffling of cloth against wood as the mercenary pushes himself up. He’s glad of the dark, glad he can’t see his face. But he can hear how his breathing changes, strained and tight as though forcing itself past a constriction. There’s no escaping it in the small room.
He cannot shake the nightmare. He sits in the dark with his back against the bed, but he cannot bring himself to trust it. This little parody of a life. The clean, quiet normalcy of it feels wildly absurd.
It doesn’t feel like waking. It feels tenuous and fragile, like a reflection on the surface of a soap bubble. As though by opening his eyes he has done nothing more than draw a curtain across reality. Like a child hiding under a blanket. But the monsters are still there, the reality which he belongs to, pressed against the walls, against the cracks in the door; until he half expects the boards to groan beneath the pressure, the way they do when storm winds blow in off the bay.
The touch is soft, softer even than the voice, piercing the surface tension of the nightmare, and Tharaêl starts violently, flinching away from it in disoriented anger. The alien gentleness of the contact making his skin crawl.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
He rubs his arm as though he can scrub it out, but the warmth lingers on his skin like a stain and he feels hollow and hungry in a way he cannot articulate.
Neither of them can sleep or settle after.
Do you want to spar? It’s a relief when Eska finally breaks the silence.
They’ve had to abandon the empty house in the market after a close call with the guards, but the old myrad loft near the Harbor gate serves just a well, even with the brief detour through the sewers to avoid the gate sentries.
Their lantern hangs on a nail, its light demarcating a faint circle on the dusty floor of the loft. Neither of them has the patience for dancing tonight; it’s messy and aggressive, more grappling than sparring.
Tharaêl throws himself into each bout. He wants without knowing what he wants, only that he is starving. He drives his shoulder into Eska’s chest and slams him into a wall, the impact jarring through him as he pins him with his bodyweight. They break apart and collide again. Eska returns the favor, dropping his shoulder to ram him in the sternum. He feels the force of contact, pain spasming behind his ribs as they both crash onto the boards in a scuffling tangle. There is weight on top of him, knees digging into his chest, pressing him into the floor, and hands grip his arms. There is no softness, no gentleness to them now. Each touch is an act of violence, pain blooming dark on his skin. It makes it easy to imagine that this is what he wants -- the pain, and not what comes just before. He deserves pain and so he is allowed to want it. There is no guilt, no betrayal in wanting that.
It is not quite morning when they return to the inn. Sweat-soaked and shivering in the predawn chill. It is a different cold from the kind Tharaêl is used to. Sharp and fresh. It feels clean. He doesn’t think he will ever get used to that.
On the walkway he hangs back, slipping up to the roof as Eska heads inside to dump the wasters, craving a moment of space between the rough intimacy of sparring and the closeness of the small room. He perches on the wooden shingles, soaking in the cold and the wide open solitude of the sky. The odd, aching hunger is still there, but dull and distant now, no longer eating him from the inside.
In the dream it isn’t Nessah’s face. Not at the end. The blindfold slips and familiar grey eyes gaze back at Eska in reproach and in their reflection he sees himself as Sirius must see him, ghoulish and bloody, the butchered organ warm and heavy in his hands. And he realizes too late -- always too late -- what he has done, just as the light in the cavern goes out and darkness buries him alive.
He wakes choking and gasping, the shadows of their small room pressing themselves over his face like a smothering cloth. In a blind panic he lurches to his knees, fumbling for the piece of flint in his belt. The darkness is the same. The same as the nightmare, the same as the windows of the burned out house in the hills above Ostian, the same as the Nothing. He feels like he is drowning. He feels like he is being swallowed.
“What is it?” Tharaêl is already sitting up.
Eska hears him but he cannot answer. His hands find the lamp and then a blade and there is the crack of flint on steel as sparks spray across the oil-soaked wick. It doesn’t catch. He tries again, frantic and clumsy. Clack, clack, clack. Like the dry rattling of a Lost One. His hands are shaking so badly he can scarcely hold the flint. Scarcely feel it. Other sensations linger in the skin and muscles of his hands like an echo, the stickiness of blood turning cold, the drag of flesh against a blade, the crack of ribs, the weight of a heart.
A faint, blue glow nudges the shadows back as Tharaêl conjures a light, but it isn’t enough, it isn’t real. Eska is fixated on the lamp.
The sparks catch and the wick sputters into flame, its warm, yellow light licking outward over his hands and Eska huddles over it, shuddering with great, gulping breaths as though he were trying to breathe the light rather than air. He curls around it, his face so close that he can feel the brush of heat against his skin. He stays like that for several long moments, the convulsive, heaving gasps gradually calming.
Tharaêl is watching him with an awkward, uncertain intensity. He does not ask about the nightmare, and for once Eska is grateful. He does not want him to know how much that ‘test’ still troubles him.
“Can we -- can we leave it burning?” It is a disgustingly extravagant waste and he hates himself for it, but he can’t bear to go back to the dark. “Just for a little while?”
Tharaêl regards him for a moment, before shrugging and reaching for one of his books. Little chance of either of them getting back to sleep now, and there is no sense in wasting light.
Eska pulls his blanket around his shoulders and curls up once more on the floor beside the lamp, watching the little flame shiver and dance in the draft. Tharaêl sits cross-legged, his back against the chest of drawers, a tight little furrow between his brows. The lamplight makes the tired hollows around his eyes look even deeper.
Eska tries to be still, to be silent, but the question bubbles out of him all the same. Curiosity and need getting the better of him. Tharaêl’s eyes flick upwards and there is a beat of appraising silence before he answers, the words stiff and cautious. “It’s a history of animancy.” His tone can’t seem to settle, jumping between indifference and earnestness. “Talking about a man who tried to measure the weight of souls.”
Eska’s brows quirk together. “How?”
That look again. And the squirming sensation of being read like words on a page. But the gaze shifts, trailing off like a faltering question and there is a sudden awkwardness to the set of his shoulders.
Tharaêl hesitates. “Do -- do you want to know what it says?”
Eska stares at him as though he had offered to reach up and pluck the moon from the sky. “Is that -- is it hard?”
“No.”
His voice sounds different when he is reading. Almost soft. It’s easier when the words belong to someone else.
The quiet drone pushes back the silence like the lamp pushes back the shadows. It is comforting. Like a handclasp in the dark. The reassurance, if only for a moment, that someone else is there.
He had been walking for hours, and he had been walking for only moments. The echoing slap of bare feet on wet stone whispering after him like a weak, erratic heartbeat. Luminous, otherworldly mushrooms softened the darkness of the passage, their strange glow leaving trails at the edges of his vision.
He reached out a hand, letting his fingers drag along the moist, mossy wall. As much to steady himself as to reassure himself that it was solid, that he was solid. The cold grit of stone met his touch, but the sensations were distant somehow, as though he were reaching across a vast gulf to something far away. He felt like he was sleepwalking.
“Can you believe this place?” His voice sounded strange and small in his ears, but anything was better than the silence. He could imagine the anxious grumble of a reply, and a giggle escaped him, quiet and hysterical, rising like bubbles in his throat until he choked them back. “What -- what do you think it is? Or was? Some kind of old temple?”
It felt like a temple. Though not in any way he could articulate.
“D’you remember Artus?” he continued, as though he could fill up the absence, the empty place at his shoulder, with words. “I know you didn’t like him much, but he was a decent fence. And he had some amazing stories. About the ruins in the desert and -- D’you know he even had one piece someone had sold him claimed they got it out of Treomar? And -- No, I know. I haven’t forgotten about those. But who puts traps in a temple anyways? And…. I mean, the monsters were probably made up, right? And besides -- “
He trailed off as the tunnel opened onto an intersection with another shaft whose center was a dark, slow running stream. He stood at the edge of the water, panic tightening into a cold, hard knot in his chest as he peered into the fungal half-light of the other three passages.
“Sirius?” he called, and flinched at the silence.
He dropped to his hands and knees, scrabbling frantically in the moss and mud for some sign that someone had passed that way, but there was nothing, not a mark on either bank save for those he made himself, and the stream made it impossible to tell if anyone had passed to the left or right.
“Which way? Which way which way which--” He murmured the words over and over to himself until they were just an incoherent jumble of sounds, his breath coming in shallow, rapid gasps until it strangled around a sob.
Sirius?
He straightened suddenly, sinking back on his heels. “You’re right.” He said it quietly at first, then again, louder, with a desperate kind of brightness. “You’re right. Upstream it’s - it’s lighter that way, isn’t it? That must be it. It must be.”
He was dizzy from breathing too fast and stumbled as he tried to rise. His head felt as though it were floating several feet above his body.
Slowly, unsteadily he began to make his way down the passage to the left. The light grew brighter as he went. It was the wrong color for daylight, but still, it hadn’t to be a good sign, didn’t it?
After only a few minutes of walking, the tunnel opened onto a large, low room and Eska gave a small gasp. Huge crystals grew from the floor and walls, blue and bright like the hottest part of a fire.
He breathed out a soft, wondering curse, his dark-adjusted eyes squinting painfully in the light, but unable to look away. “What d’you think they are?”
He stepped farther into the room, reaching out a tentative hand towards the nearest formation of crystal. He half expected it to burn, like the light in the dream, but there was no heat coming from it. His hand hovered recklessly close. It wasn’t heat, but…. it felt strange. He could sense --
Pain burst behind his eyes and he recoiled, stumbling and falling to his knees as his vision flickered and blurred. He must have dragged himself back to the shelter of the tunnel because the next thing he was aware of was the cold mud of the stream bed against his face as he lay curling into the fetal position, clutching at his head as wave after wave of nausea washed over him.
“Gods…. fucking…..” He let out a whimper as the pain flared again. His head felt as though it were on fire. “I’m fine. I’m alright.” He forced the words out between grit teeth. “What the fuck was that?” He could feel sweat soaking through his already damp tunic and he couldn’t stop shivering. “I was being careful!” he tried to protest. “I just -- it must have been the light, right? With the fever and -- and the blow to the head, it was just…it was just bright. That’s all.” He gave a weak laugh. “Like the worst hangover of all time. That’s all it is.”
He tried to rise an fell back again. “Shit. Sorry. I’m alright, I just… need a minute. That’s all. I’m alright. You always…. worry too damn much.”
He lay there for several minutes in the cold, squelching mud, feeling the chill seep into him as the pain faded to an insistent throbbing behind his eyes. Slowly, gingerly, he started to rise. “See? Good as --”
He toppled backwards, landing on his backside in the shallow water with an undignified splash. “Shit. Alright. Maybe not quite.”
It was not far back to the place where the tunnels intersected and he found himself standing once more in the middle fo the flowing water, faced with the same choice. But there was something different this time. The mud on both banks was covered in marks, smeared and distorted, but human nonetheless. In a less desperate state he might have recognized them as his own; instead he felt a delirious rush of hope.
Sirius!
He stepped out of the stream onto the dry packed earth and stone of the passage, forcing his unsteady limbs to move faster.
“You scared the shit out of me, you know that? I thought -- I thought -- Why didn’t you wait? You should have waited. You’re hurt for fuck’s sake! Why can’t -- I know. I know. I know you were trying to find help.Or -- Or something. I know that. But -- damnit, you always do this! You have to carry everything on your shoulders like I’m not right fucking there! You should have stayed! You should have --”
The skeleton lying in the middle of the small chamber was old. So old even its clothing had rotted away. But the sight still cut the air from his lungs -- fragments of memory, those last shattered moments on the deck of the ship which his mind refused to grasp, momentarily coalescing around that huddled tangle of bones. The afterimage of a truth he could neither accept nor process.
“You should have stayed.” The words came out in a sob. He was crying without knowing why he was crying, only that it hurt. Crying and then laughing, helpless, reedy giggles filling his throat.
“Look at this poor bastard?” He nudged the bones with his toe. To prove he didn’t care, to prove it didn’t matter. “I think this place is trying to tell us something.”
He could sense the disappointment. The flicker of hurt in warm, grey eyes. And the laughter died in his throat, his voice so small it was little more than a whisper.
“I’m sorry.”
He turned away, swiping at his eyes. He needed to keep moving. He needed to find Sirius.
The passage continued on the other end of the small room, turning a sharp corner and ending in what remained of a pair or large, metal doors. One door lay on the ground, half in the passage, half in the room beyond, while the other hung drunkenly ajar. The walls and pillars of the room beyond were ornamented with enormous stone faces, their gazes falling upon him at every step like a gauntlet of judgement. His own eyes flinched away from them, darting and shifting and finally seeking refuge in the floor. But he could not shake the alien sense of familiarity, of having seen this place --
Before.
The sensation was one of hitting the end of a leash at a full run, the whiplash of his head snapping back as inertia carried his body forward. His vision went white, and when it cleared he was standing in his own half-drowned nightmare as blackened, twisted bodies writhed across the floor and from the door in front of him a cold, colorless light broke over him in a wave and he began to burn.
He woke screaming. He was on his knees, gasping and heaving, and the room was empty once again.
“Shit…” the word came out somewhere between a whisper and a sob. He was shaking uncontrollably, the memory -- hallucination -- still clinging to his senses. What was happening to him?
“This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.” He pinched the skin of his arm, digging the nails in as deep as his trembling fingers could manage. “Come on.” This wasn’t real. He was dreaming. He was curled up in the hold of the ship, having another nightmare and any moment Sirius was going to shake him awake.
He clawed at the skin until it bled. “Come on. Wake up!”
The stone faces watched impassively; the weight of their hard, empty gazes like a heavy hand on the back of his neck.
“You’re not real,” he choked the words out, tears making his voice crack high, defiant, but still unable to meet their eyes, afraid that it would bring the memories -- the hallucinations rushing back.
He forced himself to his feet, fixating on the doorway ahead. That was where the light had come from. If he could just reach it, maybe this would all stop. If he could reach it, maybe he would wake up. But moving felt strange, disconnected, as though the violence of the hallucination had severed something, as though he were standing apart watching himself take slow, swaying steps across the room, watching himself sag against the frame of the doorway for several labored breaths, watching himself brace against it and try to straighten, watching himself step across the threshold.
But there was no awakening, no epiphany, no answer on the other side. He stood on a raised platform, blinking in the weak sunlight that filtered through the shadows above him, and the space that opened before him was not a room but a vast cavern.
A spire of twisted metal rose from its center. The wear of time and weather had softened the other ruins that surrounded it, but their was something hard and untouched about the lines of the spire and the sight of it made him want to weep. He felt… grief. Not for himself, not for anything he could recognize or name. He felt despair and anger. Filling his chest like a sob, like a scream, until he could have burst. And then they were gone, like a wave breaking and receding again, and he could feel nothing at all.
He was standing at the edge of the platform and the cavern seemed to gape before him. Darker and wider and deeper than it had been a moment ago. It was a long way down, nothing but stone and metal and darkness below.
“This is a dream….” he murmured. He could wake up. All he had to do was fall.
This is a dream.
He edged closer, swaying slightly out over the open air. This is a dream.
He pulled back suddenly, almost involuntarily, gasping and trembling, his body recognizing the truth even if his mind could not. Words fell from his lips in a tearful babble. “Sorry -- I’m sorry -- I know -- I know. I -- No! Fuck you! This is all your fucking fault! You left! Why did you leave? Why didn’t you wait? None of this would be happening if you’d just fucking -- if you’d just -- I don’t understand!”
His last words echoed off the walls of the cavern, cold and mocking and empty. And just behind them, the silence, like wax filling his ears, like a gag stuffed into his mouth until he felt like he was choking on it. He wanted to scream. He wanted to laugh until he was sick. He was so very close to breaking.
But not here. Not here. He was not going to die in this fucking place. He was going to find Sirius. He was going to wake up.
He had begun to move again, dazed and half conscious, but moving all the same. You had to keep moving. Stillness let the emptiness in.
“M’sorry,” he murmured, one hand pawing clumsily at the wall for support, only vaguely aware of his own motion by the way his head throbbed with the jarring of each unsteady step. “‘Bout what I said before. It’s not -- it’s not your fault. You told me. You told me this was a bad idea. I thought -- I just thought we could have a chance, you know? You told me --- you told me -- I should have listened. I should have stayed. I’m sorry….”
The shock of cold water against his skin pulled the world briefly into focus. He was standing in an ice cold stream at the bottom of the cavern with no memory of how he’d gotten there. The cavern floor was thick with starved, lanky vegetation that climbed and craned towards the crumbs of daylight that fell from the gaps in the stone above, and rising out of them, the spire. It towered over him, lifeless and still, and he shivered.
The stream led away from the ruins, through a passage in the cavern wall, but he was aware of it only as a direction in which to move. He was aware of the sound of rushing water, filling his ears, filling his head. He was aware of the cold, the ache of it in his feet and ankles, and then the lack of any feeling at all. He was aware of slipping, of falling, of pain as his limbs cracked against wet stones. But not of moving. Just endless dark and noise and cold.
And then light. So bright it hurt to look at. Daylight! And he struggled forward, forcing his numb, unsteady limbs to move with a sudden, frantic urgency.
He stumbled into a small chamber; old, rotten timbers of two enormous water wheels filled its mouth, light filtering between the paddles.
Eska thrashed through the knee high water, scrambling desperately to squeeze between the gaps int he boards, and landed gracelessly in the shallow water on the other side.
“Sirius?” The light felt like a nail being driven between his eyes, but he kept blinking, forcing himself to look. He called his name again, his voice cracking and reedy. He tried to rise and fell back, tried again and took several staggering steps. “Sirius!” He had to be here. He had to answer. He had to.
And then he saw it. Movement on the bank a short distance away. The sound that escaped him wasn’t recognizable as a name, caught somewhere between a sob and a cry. Tears streamed down his face. Joy and relief and the cumulative weight of terror and loneliness after so long in the dark.
But what rose up from the mud of waterside was not Sirius. He had no word for what it was. In his fevered state his mind translated it as some kind of bear, but horribly deformed and far larger than any natural creature had any right to be.
It lumbered towards him with the slurp of mud and the rasp of stones grinding together. And Eska could only stand there, frozen, his mind and body shutting down, too saturated with fear to react to this as a distinct threat.
It filled his vision until all he could see were its cracked and mangled limbs, and all he could hear was the roar like gravel spun against the inside of a drum. Claws like warped stalactites stretched towards him and time went slack, each heartbeat stretching out in slow, excruciating detail while he could do nothing but watch.
Perhaps it was the size of the creature, making him feel like a small, terrified child again. Or perhaps it was the heavy certainty of the hand that reached towards him and the chill of the stream around his legs, reminding him of why he’d once feared the water. But at the last instant, some hindbrain impulse caused him to flinch.
He lurched off balance, falling on his back in the water as the creature’s paw passed harmlessly through the air above him. He felt it then, the exhausted flash of adrenaline, like a manic puppeteer, jerking his limbs in clumsy, convulsive violence as it dragged him to his feet.
He was running, trying to run, the water dragging at his limbs as he flailed towards the shallows at the other end. Behind him he could hear the wet, sucking slurp of mud and the deep, brutal bass of cracking stone.
There was a passage at the far end and he dove into it, crashing against the far wall of the tunnel as he tried to turn the corner. Light shone at the far end and he bolted for it, the walls around him reverberating with the impact of the creature’s steps.
It was the golden light of evening and the setting sun shone directly into his eyes as he burst from the passage into the open. Pain splintered through his skull as he flung up an arm to shield his eyes. The ground had begun to slope and he leaned into it blindly, letting the momentum carry his failing limbs forward.
From behind him came a growling hiss like the tide sucking at a rocky beach and Eska turned just in time to see the creature emerge from the tunnel, lumbering on all fours. He was turning back again, still half blind, he could feel the warmth of grass and stone beneath his feet --- for an instant -- and then he was falling.
(set shortly after Dark Chambers and shortly before Push)
The knife is sharp: an undeserved mercy, but a necessary one. He needs this to work, even more desperately than he needs it to hurt. He peers into the small circle of polished metal that he has propped against a cup on the dresser, the warped surface distorting his reflection. Violet eyes glare back at him over telltale scars, but he feels no recognition, no sense of self. It is the face of a stranger. A puppet.
He tightens his fingers around the hilt of the knife, just to feel the muscles contract. Puppet or no, he can still pull his own damn strings. Between his brows the spidering red lines of the Rhalâta brand look almost black in the poor light. He remembers when he received it. Kneeling mute and blank-faced as they’d forced that piece of themselves into his skin, into his body.
He raises the knife to his face, to the skin just outside the the curling lines of ink. This at least he has control over. He breaths out through his nose, trapping the empty pressure in his chest, feeling the beat of his heart the way he does when he looses an arrow, and makes the first cut.
It pricks like a needle and he stares for a moment at the beading line of crimson welling behind it. Part of him wonders if it’s really blood. But it’s little more than a scratch. He cuts deeper. Again and again, gritting his teeth as the pain sharpens.
It hurts. But there is no relief in the pain, no catharsis. It isn’t enough.
He works in from the edges; the skin does not come away cleanly as he imagined, but in ragged pieces. Adrenaline make his movements messy and imprecise, and blood turns his fingers slippery. Pain grates like steel against glass, burrowing into his nerves like an itch he can’t scratch, but it still isn’t enough.
Blood runs into his eyes, burning and blurring his vision, and his lips taste like salt and iron as the last flap of skin is cut away. Air hisses through his nostrils in shallow, shaky breaths. It is finished. But for all that, he feels no more himself, no less ‘Brother Wrath’. And he hates himself for thinking ever for a moment that there was a difference, that it would matter. There is blood on his hands that stains far deeper than ink, that marks him as theirs, as His, surer than any brand.
He is scraping off a blemish, as though it isn’t already too late, as though the rot doesn’t go all the way to the core. As though he isn’t the source of it.
He is what he has done, not why he has done it. Three inches in the right place is the only atonement he can hope to make.
There is a scuffing step outside the door and he freezes. Then a quiet knock and a half-familiar voice. “It’s me.”
He sits in paralyzed silence. There is a kind of death in being known. An attrition. Pieces of oneself, given freely or taken by force, but either way, never wholly yours again. The mercenary has seen him broken, but this is different. A particular kind of vulnerability. His own naked longing carved into his skin. And he cannot bear to lose it. He has so few pieces of himself left.
There is the rasp of metal as he tries the latch. “Tharaêl?”
Tension coils in his shoulders, worming beneath his skin, tightening around his chest until it aches and his breath comes too fast and shallow. He curls forward around the pain, shutting his eyes as though he can shut out the whole world. Blood drips from his lips and his chin. Blood on his hands, blood on his face. At least this time it is his own. There is some justice in that.
“Tharaêl?” The voice comes again, an edge of uncertainty creeping in. “You alright?”
“Fuck off!” he blurts the words out, savage and snarling like a wounded animal.
There is a pause. The door gives a quiet creak as something leans against it. “Alright.” Another heartbeat of silence. “Can I grab some things first?”
He hates him, in that moment. Not just for this, but for every breath he has drawn into lungs that are not his own since that day in the Temple. If it weren’t for the mercenary, it would all be over. No more pain, no more nothingness, no more memories. No more Brother Wrath.
But there is comfort in anger, in enmity. It is more familiar to him than his own face. It kindles in his chest like a fire in a cold and empty room and he welcomes it. The gutting flames will leave him emptier than before, but he does not care so long as they fill him now.
He crosses to the door, slamming back the bolt and pulling it open. The abruptness of it takes the mercenary by surprise and there is some small satisfaction in seeing the half-formed greeting die on his lips. He sees his eyes widen in alarm, and something that might have been concern if he’d believed for a second that he gave a shit.
Tharaêl glares at him, his body coiled and bracing for confrontation. But there is only a soft curse.
“What do you need?”
His mask of defiance falters for an instant. He was not prepared for that. He doesn’t know how to parse it. He was primed for ridicule, for disgust, for intrusion, all his weight bracing to meet an attack that never came. It sets him off balance and he covers it with derision.
“Nothing.” He spits the word out. There is a small sense of control in the rejection and he brandishes it like a weapon.
The mercenary glances past him into the room. “Clean water and bandages, then?”
Tharaêl bridles, but it isn’t really a question; he isn’t asking permission. The mercenary turns back towards the stairs and Tharaêl is too relieved by the absence to protest.
Alone again in the room, he collapses on the edge of the bed. The anger is no longer a pyre, lighting him up, it is something small and hungry, gnawing at his insides, chasing his thoughts in circles. He feels wrung out and shaky, too exhausted to do more than glare when the mercenary returns with a pitcher of warm water and several ragged strips of linen.
“D’you want help?” he asks and Tharaêl feels every particle of himself recoil, a snarl rising in his throat as his fingers twitch around the blade in his hands. Don’t you fucking dare, his eyes flash.
The mercenary opens his mouth, then shuts it again, raising his hands slightly as he withdraws a step. There is a small, earthenware pot in his hand and he sets it on the chest of drawers with the other items.
Tharaêl eyes it suspiciously. “What is it?”
“Salve. Begged it off the tavernkeep.” The mercenary takes it back for a moment, unstoppering it and sniffing, his nose wrinkling at the smell. “Gruntroot, I think. The wound won’t scar as badly if it heals clean.”
The remark strikes a nerve -- the suggestion that he should preserve what was done to him -- and he bristles. He inhabits his own violation; its scars are the only part of it that are truly his. There is a part of him that would have gladly kept cutting until his face was no longer the one he had been given, but one he had made. Perhaps then he would recognize it.
Contempt tastes like knives in his mouth. “Do I look like I give a shit?”
For the first time he sees something recognizable in the mercenary’s face, a flash of frustration. “No, you look like an idiot who’s going to have a scar the exact size and place of a Rhalâta brand between his eyes!”
There is a tense, stubborn silence. He has a point. And Tharaêl is not sure which is worse, the fact that he is right, or the feigned concern with which he says it.
The mercenary shifts uneasily, as though bracing himself for something.
“Do you want me to go?” he asks at last.
He has shown him his throat and Tharaêl doesn’t hesitate. “What the fuck do you think?”
He sees him flinch, the stifled flash of hurt, and there is a momentary sense of satisfaction, of agency in drawing blood that is not his own, a moment before it becomes just another stain on his hands.
“Fair enough.” He still wavers, as though he wants to say something else, and the way he looks at him makes Tharaêl’s skin crawl and his hackles rise, every line of his body a snarled warning. Don’t.
It feels like an eternity before he finally turns away, stooping to grab one of the blankets from his own pile on the floor. “I’ll be out on the walkway if you need anything.”
Tharaêl bolts the door after him. Alone once more, with no one watching, he feels the weight fall from his shoulders as his armor comes away in pieces. And for perhaps the first time he is aware of how dependent he is on it to hold him together, to hold him up, to give him shape. An exoskeleton of rage and aggression, and beneath it….
He’s afraid of the answer. Afraid that it’s empty. Nothing empty should hurt this much; but he knows that is a lie. A missing limb can still ache. What he feels is absence, the dead space where something used to be. He is what he has done, not why he has done it.
The tacky feel of drying blood on his hands is suddenly intolerable. There is still water in the basin from that morning; he uses that first, scrubbing his hands and the lower parts of his face until the cold water turns cloudy and red. He feels no cleaner for it; as though the water has simply covered something up, rather than washed it away.
The small jug of water the mercenary brought is still warm. He is not used to that and the novelty grates against his nerves, but it is cleaner than the water in the basin and he still needs to tend to the wound on his face.
He soaks one of the bandages in the water and uses it to wash the wound. He is not gentle, he does not allow himself that, but he is thorough, and there is something in the familiar, almost ritual nature of dressing his own injuries that is calming despite the pain. Grounding him in the moment, however temporary.
It is an awkward spot for a bandage, but he manages, and when it is finished the sharp scent of the salve no longer makes his eyes water.
He cleans his hands once more with what remains in the jug, going through the motions mechanically. He feels hollow and numb, and tired beyond words. He hasn’t slept since before --
Since before.
The light is fading and he is grateful for that, for the familiarity of the dark. He sinks to the ground with his back pressed to the door. Even with the bolt in place there is an absurd, childish sense of security in the action. He rests his head in his hands and feels the prickling fuzz of overgrown stubble on his scalp. It feels strange, unnatural after all this time, and he cannot stop the small, nagging sense of shame that does not belong to him.
Even the thoughts in his head are not wholly his.
He shuts his eyes and feels the needle sharp pain between them as his brows knit. It gives him something to focus on. The feel of muscles tugging at broken skin, the way the pain flares with each slight movement, the pressure of the bandage against his head and the sticky sensation of the salve. And when the pain starts to dull, he focuses on the solidness of the door at his back and the rhythm of each breath. Like dressing his wounds, there is something anchoring in it. A rope, a handhold, something to grasp onto. It can’t stop him drowning, but for a moment at least, he’s not adrift.
He is not sure how long he sits like that, but the tavern is dark and quiet when he finally stirs. The basin of bloody water still needs emptying, and at least now there is no one awake to see him. It is only a few steps to the walkway, but he still reflexively locks the door behind him.
He pads silently across the landing, slipping through the door onto the covered walkway. A small shadow stands a dozen paces away and Tharaêl freezes, free hand dropping to the dagger on his belt before he recognizes the voice.
“Alright?” the mercenary is bundled in a blanket and leaning out over the rail.
Tharaêl ignores the question, alarm rapidly giving way to suspicion. He empties the basin over the side and turns to face him. “What are you doing here?”
The shadow straightens slightly. “I said I’d be out here.”
He’d forgotten that. At the time he’d just wanted him gone, he hadn’t believed for a moment that he’d meant it.
The awareness rankles, though he cannot articulate why, and he bristles against it. “It’s your fucking room. You don’t have to stay out here.”
There is an uncertain pause, “You sure?”
Tharaêl gives a disgusted growl and turns back to the door -- whatever this game is, he’s not playing -- and after a heartbeat’s hesitation the mercenary follows.
Finally finished that first meeting fic I had promised a while back! Takes place a few days before Night Watches, but references a couple things that were addressed in slightly more detail in that fic. Sirius is about 8 here and has been on the streets for maybe six months. Eska is 7 and has only been on his own in the city for maybe a month.
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“Go on, quit stalling!”
Two hands pressed against Sirius’ shoulders, nudging him forward.
He pulled away, shaking them off in irritation. “I’m not!”
He absolutely was.
Everyone knew the abandoned workhouse at the edge of the Shallows was haunted. The burned out shell towered over the three children, its empty windows gaping at Sirius like so many toothless mouths.
“I heard old Tamris say she heard screams coming from it for the past fortnight!” The girl behind him had dark skin and curling hair that had been unevenly cropped to stay out of her face. Her eyes were bright with delighted apprehension. “She said a demon lives in there.”
“A boy I know was working corners one street over,” added the other child, a pale, spindly limbed boy slightly older than the other two, “And he heard crying coming from inside it the other night.”
Sirius shivered.
An old hand on his father’s boat used to tell stories about a creature that had a cry like a child weeping. It lured its victims to the water’s edge and drowned them.
A blow caught Sirius on the back of his shoulder, propelling him roughly forward. He stumbled; lack of sleep had made him clumsy and he hit his knees, skinning the heels of his hands on the hard packed dirt. He scrambled up, face burning.
The older boy smirked, arms crossed smugly across his chest.
“Scared?” he taunted and Sirius stiffened.
“No.”
He straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin. He couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel afraid. But he couldn’t let them see that.
That was the test: spend the night in the ruins of the workhouse and Kiru would let him join the comparative safety of their gang. Let his nerve fail and he was on his own again.
“And don’t even think about trying cheat,” crowed the choppy haired girl,. “We’ll be watching, we’ll know if you try to sneak out before morning.”
Sirius turned back to the ruin, shoulders hunching slightly despite his efforts to hold himself straight. Fallen debris kept the door wedged shut, but the boards that had once covered the windows had almost all been scavenged for fuel over the years, leaving them open, and he began to move towards the nearest one. It’s opening seemed larger than it had a moment ago, likes lips drawn back in a snarl, and the darkness inside it seemed to go on forever. Sirius felt his stomach knot.
“Half my ration says he doesn’t make it three hours,” said the girl.
There was a snort from the other child. “He’ll never last three hours.”
He hated this. Hated them. Hated his own weakness and exhaustion that made this a necessity. He shouldn’t have needed them. He shouldn’t have needed anyone. He was old enough to take care of himself. Everyone had said so. He wasn’t a child. He should have been enough.
But he wasn’t. Not all those times he had begged to be taken along on the ship. Not when his father was sick. Not when Kato’s men came for the house. Not when Zaya and Kastor disappeared. And not now.
Squaring his shoulders he took a final step closer, forcing his flinching hands to touch the splintered, weather-worn sill. It was just a window, he told himself. Just an old house.
He rocked forward on his toes, rested his elbows on the frame and hauled himself up, squirming his way over sill.
He landed clumsily, tumbling onto the dusty, debris strewn floor and the clatter sent a shiver running through the building. Sirius froze, still sprawled on the ground, staring wide-eyed into the dark. But nothing happened. The floor did not open and swallow him, the walls did not come alive; the house did not react to the intrusion; even the shadows themselves were still.
With painstaking, careful movements he got to his feet. The darkness inside was not as impenetrable as it had seemed when standing in the fading light of the alley, but there was a heaviness to it, as if he was moving through water. From the gloom overhead broken joists and floorboards bent at precarious angles, like splintered, rotting teeth. It was a humid summer evening and each draft of air felt like hot, damp breath against his face. He shuddered, trying to push the thought away, but sensation lingered like oil on his skin.
Outside he could hear the voices of the two other children, but they seemed strangely muffled and distant and he had the horrifying thought that if he looked back through the window he would not see the alley at all.
Part of him wanted to crouch where he was, pressed against the wall below the window where he could still hear voices and catch glimpses of the outside through the gaps in the boards. But the idea of spending an entire night beneath that gaping mouth full of teeth was more than he could bear.
It would be full dark soon, if he was going to find another hiding place to spend the night, he needed to do it now. He recalled having seen the house from the opposite side where a large section of the roof had fallen in. It would still be dark, but it would be the darkness of the night sky, not the sightless suffocation of a closed space. Boards creaked underfoot as he took a hesitant step deeper into the room and he cringed.
There was a door in the opposite wall, half filled with collapsed debris, but there was space enough for him to squeeze through if he crawled on his hands and knees. This was foolish, a rational part of his mind protested, it was dangerous, the house was falling in on itself, it wasn’t safe to go deeper. But he wasn’t thinking rationally. He was scared and exhausted and there were things that he saw -- he swore he saw them -- out of the corners of his eyes that vanished the moment he turned to look. He wasn’t afraid of physical harm, of being crushed or trapped -- he should have been, he knew he should have been, but he wasn’t. He was afraid of something he couldn’t name, of the dark, of being swallowed into nothingness like Zaya and Kastor.
He squirmed between the fallen joists that blocked the doorway. Dim, evening light filtered through gaps in the low ceiling above. Sirius peered cautiously around the room as he rose. Twisted, half fallen timbers and piles of rubble turned monstrous and distorted in the gloom, their shadows creeping and shifting in his periphery, belying the evidence of his eyes.
It took all his courage to step out onto the open floor, moving in a low crouch, head snapping around as his eyes darted from one tangled mass of shadow to the other and back and back again, as though a direct gaze might freeze them in place. He reached the staircase that sagged against the leftmost wall, the fading light from the collapsed roof above dusting the treads. Panic prickled down the back of his neck as he started to climb, darting a glance behind him to be sure nothing had moved.
Several of the steps had broken or been eaten through with fire and he had to climb awkwardly to reach the second floor. Overhead a few skeletal rafters sagged in the empty air, but beyond them he could see the sky, patchy with clouds and darkening towards indigo.
It felt like surfacing out of deep, dark water. The sky filled his vision as he stepped from the stairs onto the floor, his instinctual caution momentarily forgotten so fixated was he on the imagined safety of the open air above.
An inhuman shriek erupted from the darkness behind him and Sirius whirled round, terror flooding his body as a shadow peeled itself away from the wall and lunged towards him. He screamed and scrambled backwards, stumbling over a fallen beam and then, with a crash of timbers, he was falling.
He landed in a heap on the floor below, pain bursting across his shoulder and down his arm as something hard edged and heavy landed on top of him. Dust filled his mouth and throat, choking off his scream in a fit of coughing as he struggled out from under the fallen boards. Panic felt like acid in his veins. He lurched to his feet, stumbling and half blind in the cloudy air. He found the doorway, all but collapsed, too late remembering how he had had to squirm and squeeze his way through on hand and knees. He spun back around to face the creature---
But the room was empty.
No. Not empty. Light fell through the hole in the floor above, faintly illuminating the pile of rubble where he had fallen. At the sight of the figure sprawled there, his heart lurched into his throat, but what lay there amidst the fallen debris was not the writhing, faceless shadow which had pursued him, it was too small, smaller even than him, not a demon anymore but a boy.
Still shaky with adrenaline, Sirius took a step towards him, a very different kind of fear catching in his throat.
In the gloom the small shape looked horribly still, but another step closer and his eyes caught the faint rise and fall of his back, and Sirius felt his own breath leave him in a rush of relief.
But there was something he didn’t understand. This wasn’t one of Kiru’s gang; they were all kids from the dockyard and the Shallows and he knew them by sight if not by name; this boy he’d never seen before. But if he wasn’t part of the test, then what was he doing there? Even the most desperate squatters avoided it this place.
The boy stirred as he drew closer, letting out a low growl and then a screech that made Sirius flinch. He was trying to rise, but a piece of wood had pinned one of his legs.
Sirius moved to lift the broken joist, but the boy twisted violently, swiping at him, bearing his teeth in a hiss. Sirius fell backwards with a cry, landing on his bottom in the dust.
“I was trying to help!”
He stared at him in consternation and for the first time he realized that , for all his wildness, the other boy was terrified, his eyes round and black with the same fear that Sirius had felt moments ago. He had begun to struggle desperately, thrashing beneath the weight of the wooden support, careless of the injury he was doing to himself, like an animal trying to chew off its own limb to escape a trap.
“Wait--” Sirius pushed to his feet again and the boy froze. “Please just --” He broke off helplessly. It was an explosive kind of stillness and he didn’t know how to approach it. Every line of the other boy’s body seemed ready to erupt in violence at the slightest provocation. Hesitantly he held out his hands, palms up and empty. “Let me help?”
He took a small, diffident step towards him. “There’s a piece of wood on your leg. I think I can lift it. Alright? I’m not going to hurt you.” He moved more carefully this time, as though approaching a skittish animal, his motions slow and ginger, halting -- almost asking a question, asking permission with each one. Two large, round eyes were fixed on his very move, but this time the boy did not try to attack him as he made to reach for the piece of wood.
There was a soft intake of breath and a stifled whimper as he touched the broken joist. “It’s alright. Hang on.”
The wooden support was heavy and awkward, weighed down as it was by other pieces of debris, but he managed to lever it up just enough for the other boy to slither free. He scuttled backwards, shrinking away from Sirius against the frame of the stairs. There was a dark streak on the torn leg of his trousers, too dark to be dirt.
“You’re hurt?” He could feel the boy’s eyes on him like a physical weight, but there was no response, “Your leg,” he tried again. “You’re bleeding.” He motioned towards the stained pant leg and felt a sting of guilt as the boy flinched away from him.
Sirius drew his hand back quickly. “Sorry.” He hesitated, awkward and uncertain beneath that strange, unwavering gaze. Then, slowly, he sank to his knees. He nodded towards the injury this time. “Can I see?”
Confusion mixed with fear on the boy’s face and Sirius wondered suddenly if perhaps he did not speak the language. “Ah…. can -- can you understand what I’m saying?”
The pause was uncomfortably long, but then a very slight nod and Sirius smiled with relief. “Can I see?” he asked again, but when he carefully shifted closer, the boy cringed, breath hissing between his teeth in a sharp gasp, and Sirius withdrew, crestfallen.
He looked helplessly down at his empty hands and then suddenly brightened. He reached into his pocket, momentarily forgetting to move slowly, and withdrew a small, colorless lump. Stale, with sweat-damp lint clinging to it, it was barely recognizable as bread. He had been saving it since yesterday.
He was aware of a change in the intensity fo the other boys’ gaze. Saucer-round eyes now fixed on his hand. His head had crane forward from between his shoulders and there was a poised, quivering tension running through his whole body.
Sirius felt a sudden, sharp stab of reluctance and his fingers tightened reflexively around the piece of bread, an unwelcome, unfamiliar ferocity rising in his throat like a snarl. Mine.
He balked at the feeling, shame making his face burn. Hunger stretched him out from the inside, displacing him, until there were moments when it felt as though there was barely anything of him left. He hated it, the compulsion of it, almost more than he hated the hunger.
After an agonizing hesitation, he held the dry, little lump out towards the boy.
He reacted with such desperate suddenness it made Sirius flinch, snatching the offering from his hand and cramming it into his mouth before retreating once more. He was staring at Sirius with something close to awe.
“Can -- can I see?” Sirius hazarded again, as gently as he could, and this time the boy did not pull away when he moved closer. He could sense the sudden spike in tension, and hear the sharp intake of breath as he touched his torn pant leg. “It’s alright.” Gods, he was shaking like a leaf; he could feel it through the thin fabric of his trousers. “It’s alright”, he repeated stupidly. “You -- you don’t want it to dry like this. It’ll stick. And then it’ll hurt even worse to peel it off.” He was rambling, saying anything he could think of. “I’m just -- I’m just going to role it up a little, alright? Just to look.”
There was a stifled whimper as he tried to move the fabric away from wound and he froze. “Did that hurt?”
A jerky, barely perceptible shake of the head.
Carefully he peeled the damp, clinging fabric away to reveal a shallow gash across his shin. It looked clean enough, as though he’d caught it on something sharp as he was falling. He gave the boy what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “It’s not deep, just a bad scratch. Still need to clean it, though. Do you know how to do that?”
Silence. Sirius bit his lip. “I don’t…. have anything for that. But maybe one of the others --” He recalled suddenly the small pack that the older boy had been carrying. “They might have something that’ll help. I’ll go and check, alright?”
At the mention of the others he felt the boy recoil, head shaking vigorously.
“It’s alright. They’re just other kids. They -- they think this place is haunted.” He neglected to mention that so did he. “They wanted me to spend the night in here to prove….” Sirius trailed off with a defeated sigh. “I don’t know. It was stupid. But they might have bandages or rags or something. I’m just going to go and ask, alright? I promise.”
He pulled away, still careful to make no sudden movements, and turned back to the collapsed doorway, crawling on his hands and knees and wriggling through, hurrying across the creaking floor to the window, the upper floor and it’s toothy maw all but forgotten in his urgency.
His arrival in the alley was greeted by a startled shriek from one of the children -- who having heard the crashing and screams from the house must have assumed the worst -- and a triumphant crow from the other. “Told you he’d never make it!”
Sirius glared at them. “The house isn’t haunted,” he said in his most grown-up voice, “There’s just a kid in there. And he’s hurt.”
It was growing too dark to see their faces, but there was no mistaking the smugness in the boy’s voice. “Pfft. Just admit it -- “ He had stepped up close, finger jabbing into Sirius’ chest to punctuate each word, “You - didn’t - have - the -guts.”
Sirius swatted his hand away and the boy shoved him back.
“There’s someone in there and they’re hurt. We need bandages or rags or --”
“What’s that?” The other child made a grab for his collar and Sirius pulled away, confusion and anger flashing across his face.
“You’re not listening! We need--”
“He’s got shine!” the boy cried as his more reluctant comrade edged closer and Sirius’ hand snatched at his throat, feeling to his horror that the small charm, normally hidden safely beneath his shirt, had slipped out and was hanging openly around his neck.
He scrambled backwards, but collided with the smaller child who grabbed him round the waist and they both landed sprawling in the dirt.
“Get off! Lemme go!” They were both on top of him now, snatching and pummeling, nails dug into his hand, trying to pry open his fingers. “NO!”
A horrible, keening scream split the night air and the weight on his chest suddenly shifted as both children abruptly leapt to their feet. Between their legs Sirius glimpsed a shadow come sailing out of one of the windows, land in a tangle of limbs, and begin skittering towards them on all fours, shrieking and hissing.
The two children screamed and bolted for the mouth of the alley, leaving Sirius on his back in the dirt, alone with the shadow.
Gingerly he sat up, swiping at his bleeding nose with an arm as he struggled to his feet, his other hand still clutching his pendant.
The shadow edged backwards at the movement, slowly standing and he was struck again by how small he seemed once the terrifying wildness had fallen away. He crept back to the open window, limping slightly, and Sirius realized suddenly that he was trying to leave.
“Wait!” The cry slipped from him with the same starving compulsion which had made his fingers flex closed around the piece of bread. Please stay.
He thought he saw a brief hesitation in the shadow’s movement, and in the dark he felt rather than saw the strange weight of those eyes staring at him. “Please don’t--” Leave, is what he meant to say, but he was too late, the street was already empty..
Sirius’ shoulders crumpled as he stood there, very small and still, little more than a shadow himself in the darkened alley. He couldn’t go back to Kiru. He hadn’t passed the test. He was alone.
Helpless, exhausted tears welled up in his eyes and he angrily dashed them away, lifting his chin and pulling his shoulders back. He bit down hard on his lip.
He didn’t need them.
He turned away from the old workhouse and began to move back down the street in the direction of the docks. He always visited the abandoned rigging loft, every night without fail. This would have been the first night that he missed since Zaya and Kastor disappeared. Perhaps what had happened was punishment for that.
The second rush of adrenaline was beginning to wear off and his movements had become slow and stiff and tender, as every bruise and scrape he had acquired that night made itself known.
He hadn’t gone far when he heard the the faint scuffing of feet behind him. He turned, heart thudding in his chest, but instead of Kiru’s two little thugs, he was just in time to see a small figure melt back into the shadows.
Sirius opened his mouth to call out, but the words died in his throat, afraid that no one would answer, afraid that no one would come. He started to walk again, and after a short while he heard the steps, closer this time, and then closer still. He stopped abruptly and turned -- the shadow, only a half dozen paces from him, flinched and he heard a soft gasp, the figure was quivering as if it was taking every ounce of his nerve not to run.
“Hey….” The timid greeting trailed off into unanswered silence and Sirius swallowed. He didn’t want to trust this. The shadow was only going to run away again. He’d probably only followed him hoping for more food.. He held out his empty hands. “I don’t have anything else to eat, if that’s what you wanted. I’m sorry.”
The shadow shrank back half a step at the movement, but when it became clear that no blow was forthcoming, he crept forward again, moving with the mincing hesitancy of a cat interacting with an unfamiliar object.
“I told you, I don’t have anything,” Sirius repeated. He tried to speak gently, but he could not keep his own bitter disappointment from creeping in. The shadow paused at the sound of his voice, and Sirius braced himself, expecting to be left alone for the second time that night. But then, to his surprise, the shadow continued to inch closer.
Sirius blinked in confusion. “You…...want to stay?”
Another hesitation, another creeping step.
Sirius looked down at his empty palms, and then up at the shadow, and then, with a flinching sort of hopefulness, he held out one hand, and the shadow took it.
Shorter fic I did as my half of a challenge with a friend! Not the “First Meeting” fic I still need to write, but taking place not long after.
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Sirius couldn’t sleep. His eyes were heavy and his mind was static and every inch of him felt aching and heavy. But he couldn’t sleep. If he slept it would happen again.
Nothing would happen. Nothing -- it was not a passive descriptor, but an active force. Nothing would happen. It was one of the many unkind realities of Ostian. It unmade people. The city was like a moth-eaten tapestry, full of holes where faces should have been. No one talked about it; in the lower city fear and hunger gnawed at the memories of those absent faces until all that was left of them was the sense that something was gone.
Zaya and Kastor were gone. They had had taken Sirius in after he’d been on the streets only a few months. They were older than him by a few years, nearly adolescents, and they’d needed someone smaller for the sort of foraging they made their living on. He’d been useful to them. But they’d been kind to him in their own pragmatic way. And if there was a difference between being useful and being cared for, Sirius would not have recognized it.
Often at night they took it in turns to sleep and keep watch, but sometimes, if they were lucky, they found a secure enough shelter that they could all get a full night’s sleep. On that last night they’d made camp in the abandoned rigging loft behind the Trading Company’s warehouse. Zaya had said it was safe and he’d believed her.
Sirius had woken in the middle of the night and crept away to relieve himself. He’d only been away a minute or two. When he returned they were gone. No message, no sound, no sign of a struggle. Nothing. He looked for them all night and for several days after, but there was no trace of them, and no one he asked wanted to hear about a couple of missing urchins.
Every encounter, every interaction after that became fraught with a terrifying sense of impermanence; nothing was sure, nothing was anchored. His father’s death had cut him adrift, but until now he had been able navigate by the fixed stars of familiar faces, of connections, however small. Now everything was drifting, his few remaining constants turned as volatile and unpredictable as the sea.
He began to visit the docks every day, even when there was no work, circling through his old neighborhood, past the streetcorners where Afra and several of the other beggars he knew set up, ducking through the market, past the stalls and merchants where he had once bought supplies. Searching frantically for each familiar face to reassure himself that it was still there.
He still went back to the rigging loft every night, and every night it was just as empty.
He remembered in the stories Hassan, one of the old hands on the Safina, used to tell, old stories, that names were important. That if you knew something’s true name, it couldn’t hurt you. But he couldn’t name what had happened to Zaya and Kastor. And that made it so much bigger and more powerful than anything with a name could have been.
The rounds became a ritual that he performed, strictly, obsessively, until it felt as though it were the only thing keeping the nameless nothing at bay. A constant created from his own behavior; compulsive and desperate, but it was all he had.
He had stopped sleeping. A few minutes snatched here and there, a few hours if he was lucky, and only ever when the sun was high overhead. Never at night. Never when it was dark. Surviving on strung out adrenaline.
After a week he started to lose things: time, thoughts, coordination. After two the shadows began to move whenever he wasn’t looking directly at them. Shapes appeared in his peripheral vision and vanished the moment he turned to look. He couldn’t trust his eyes anymore. Just because he was looking at someone didn’t mean they were really there. He’d never had a panic attack before. The first couple times he thought he was dying.
In the end, it was why he’d tried to join Kiru’s gang, desperate for the comparative security of a group. At least that had been the plan...
He glanced down at the unruly mop of hair resting on his chest as though still faintly bemused by its presence. Things hadn’t worked out quite how he’d expected.
It was a hot, sticky summer night and the warmth of the body nestling against him was oppressive, but he didn’t want to move. Like the way something might be too hot to eat, but you were so hungry you ate it anyway. Discomfort stopped mattering if you were hungry enough, and he was starving, had been starving since long before the sickness had turned his world upside down.
There was comfort in the weight, the physical contact, and the small fist that had a handful of his shirt in a near death-grip made him feel…anchored.
His eyes had begun to droop and he blinked them wide again, shifting as he tried to sit up straighter. The figure beside him stirred and he glanced down to see two large eyes staring up at him. The thick brows knit together in a puzzled frown.
“Sleep?”
It was one of only a handful of words the boy had spoken since they’d met a few days ago. Sirius didn’t even know his name. He shook his head. “No. Have to keep watch.”
The frown turned thoughtful for a moment and then the boy pulled away slightly, wriggling upright to sit shoulder to shoulder with Sirius and peering pointedly out into the darkness before looking back up at him. “Sleep,” he repeated seriously, not a question this time, but a command.
Sirius wavered, fear of giving up this last sliver of control vying with his own exhaustion. Giving in felt like failure. He was old enough to be on his own. He should have been able to handle it.
So why was it so hard? Tears welled up in his eyes and he dashed them away. He wasn’t supposed to cry. He was too old to cry. He wasn’t a child.
But the tears kept spilling over. He should have been able to handle it. None of this would have happened if he’d done everything right, if he’d kept everything under control, if he’d just -- just --
Arms wrapped around his shoulders, warm and fierce, and Sirius started to sob. He leaned into the other boy’s bony shoulder and cried until he was sick. His companion shifted to give him space, but never let go. Eventually his empty body stopped convulsing, and he felt warm breath and the scratch of straw-like hair as the other boy’s head nudged against his, the gesture wordless, but warm and close and sure, and Sirius pressed his face into his chest and slept.
