by Sean Rodden
and other things make you wish they never happened –
but this… this thing made me wish I was never born.”
Captain Whiskey Kisses, Ithramian Heavy Infantry
“Leave me, Shield. Let me bleed.
For this world is not a good place,
and good folk do not belong here.”
Kor ben Dor, Prince of the Bloodspawn
The night pressed down upon the hills and woodlands and waters of Eryn Ruil like the plated belly of an iron dragon, heavy and hard and cold. The air was algid, oil in the lungs, black and viscous. The moon and the stars had fled the heavens, surrendering the sky to swarms of bh’ritsi and the bats hunting them. All was deathly dark. Chill and still. The only light in the land was that shed high upon Sentinel Ridge by the roaring Fires of the Fallen.
The Master of the House of Eccuron stood just beyond the deep red glow of the flames. He watched in stiff silence as the Fires claimed the stripped cadavers of his kith and kin. Of the twenty-one hundred and seven Fiannar who had been slain during the Angar ban Erynna Ruill, two hundred and fifty-two would burn that night. Another Pyre would be lit and a further two hundred and fifty-two bodies would burn in the blackness of each of the following six nights. Upon the eighth evening, Alvarion’s own flesh would be fired. The Lord of the Fiannar would become dust, ash, another tale to be told. And then, for a time, the Fires themselves would die.
Tulnarron felt a shadow slink icily along his spine.
“Is that you, Ghost?” The Master’s voice was quiet, his words slow, measured, as though he was conserving the very last of his strength. “As ever, you come like death in the night.”
“Oh, what dramatic irony,” Gostullian wheezed from behind a near toothless twisting of the lips. “And as lost on you as ever, I see.”
Tulnarron scowled, motioned with one hand.
“Step closer, Watcher, that I might see you.”
“Oh, I think I’m fine right where I am, thanks,” replied the withered warder of the Grey Watch. “My last encounter with you and fire in the same place at the same time was a little… distressing. Once burned, and all that.”
The Master scowled, peered over his left shoulder.
With one crooked and bony finger, Gostullian indicated his raised yet hairless brows, then the half-healed blisters on his pate. His grisly grin was made bloody by an abrupt flaring of the Fires.
Tulnarron turned back to the Pyre.
“Each time I see you, you look a little rougher, Ghost.”
“Again with the irony.” The old Watcher made an odd choking sound that served as a laugh. “You do realize you’re dead, right?”
“Painfully so.”
Both warriors fell silent, the Fires of the Fallen reflecting in their eyes as they watched the flames consume their comrades. Gostullian shifted from one foot to the next, and back again. Tulnarron stood like a statue.
At some length –
“You have heard, Tuln?”
The Master nodded. Said nothing.
“They walk in darkness now,” rasped the old Watcher. “All of them. More dead than you in some ways. More lost than I in others. They suffer. Oh, how they suffer. And they know no respite – though I am sure they would refuse it, were it offered. But they… we are Fiannar… we will recover.”
Tulnarron shook his head.
“We do not need to recover, Ghost. We need to grasp this horror with both hands and hold on with all our might. We need to remember. We need to feel this, to live this grief. And we need to prepare.”
“Prepare?”
“Yes. For what is coming. I can say with certainty that the next war will be the Deathward’s last.”
Beneath the hot thunder of the Pyre, unfeeling unliving flesh hissed and sizzled.
“Then we will need more than memory and grief, Tuln. We will need you.”
But the Master shook his head again.
“It is the House of Eccuron that will be needed, Ghost. And a better and abler Master than you or I have ever been. A Warden of the East who will strike such unholy terror in the hearts of his enemies that they will not dare to come within a hundred leagues of the Rock. One who is worthy of that fear, of such a true and ultimate expression of respect.”
“Oh, yes. Arumarron. Of course.” The Watcher scratched his wispy chin. “He is well, though his mother is… your wife is…”
“I am aware, Ghost.”
Gostullian lowered his hand, wheezed a sigh.
“The lad returns with the Shield Maiden and the heroes of Allaura. He will be here in six, maybe seven days.”
The Master of the House of Eccuron stared into the blazing Pyre. The leaping light of the flames infrequently dappled his face, yet never left his eyes.
“My son will require guidance, Gostullian. He will have supervision and direction from Sandarre, and from many other fine Fiannar of our House. And from Valerre, if she will give it. And he will have counsel from the Masters and Mistresses of the other Houses. But he will require… more.” Tulnarron lowered his head. “My son will need that which I did not have, and so could not properly give.”
In the darkness behind the Master’s left shoulder, the aged warrior averted his milky grey eyes.
“He shall have it, Tuln.”
Tulnarron stood with his chin at his chest for a moment longer, then raised his head and shrugged free of the greatsword and harness lashed to his back. Whatever eldritch powers had possessed Yll Sabar were become dormant, entirely inert. The sword was stolid and leaden in its leather straps, cold, black, seemingly no more potent than any standard brand struck from the steel of that World. Without turning, the Master extended his left arm, gripping the weapon midway along the adumbrant blade.
“And he shall need this.”
Gostullian hesitated, shifted feet once more, then moved forward a stride. He tentatively took Yll Sabar in his knobble-knuckled grasp. He stepped back into the black.
Both Deathward warriors were silent for a time, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Each alone within himself. Staring into the Fires.
That which Gostullian spoke next, in the night beyond the glow of the Pyre, was a thing that had waited neither minutes nor hours to be voiced. Nor even years. But decades. Indeed, nigh upon a century.
“I regret that I was never the father that you deserved, Tulnarron.”
The Master did not immediately respond. He did not so much as move. Indeed, no outward sign suggested that he had heard the ancient Watcher whatsoever. And then –
“I am sorry I was not a better son.”
A single tear, then two, trickled down Gostullian’s deeply creased face, gleaming in the glow of the Fires, streams of molten gold mined deep within the soul.
“Oh, no… not that. Don’t you dare, Tulnarron. You have always been my greatest pride. You have ever been my sole and only joy.”
The Master peered upward, far beyond the fringe of firelight, into the eternal everything and nothing of the unstarred heavens. He could feel the end, the very end, beckoning him. The slithering in his gut had subsided. The pain in his knees was gone. And the burden from his shoulders, that great weight of names and Houses and ages, was at long last lifted.
He lowered his eyes, closed them, opened them again. And the only thing within them was darkness.
“Even so.”
And then, with neither hesitation nor reservation, the Master of the House of Eccuron strode straight into the raging heart of the Pyre.
Dawn came. A semblance thereof, at least. Even had there been no shroud of cloud marring the morning, there would still have been darkness. The kind of darkness that does not flee the light. The kind of darkness that cannot be dispersed by torches or lamps or lanterns. The kind that defies even the brightest rays of the sun.
The darkness within.
The Marshal of the Grey Watch peered up through that gloom, through the shadows of soul and self, into the stone face of long dead Defurien. The grey features of the Fir
st Lord were almost indistinguishable from the desolate dawn sky. Shale on slate, smoke in the mist, dust over ash. A pail of water thrown into the sea. Varonin stared, concentrating intently, his neck craned at an awkward angle, his back aching with the effort. His gaze moved from the face of the Colossus to the rillagh carved across the massive chest, then to the upthrust sword. Hoping, imploring, even pleading in silent soliloquy that the word he had heard was wrong, that the Watcher who had delivered it had been mistaken. But as the gloam gradually became less absolute, the Marshal realized that the word had not been erroneous, that sadness shall always compound sorrow, that darkness will ever outshine the light.
The gold was gone.
From the sword. From the sash. The gleaming gold that had adorned the Colossus of Defurien was gone. Given to granite. Turned to stone.
Grimroth, the Blade of the First Lord, was no longer in or near the hand of a scion of the House of Defurien.
Eldurion was dead.
Varonin lowered his head, closed his eyes. He was aware of the small crowd of Fiannar that was beginning to gather about him. Silent in their sorrow, voiceless in their grief. He may have wondered how much more the Deathward could shoulder, the measure of the misery they could endure, to what extreme they might suffer – perhaps he pondered these things, but if he did so, they did not register. They did not register because they did not matter. They did not matter because the Fiannar did not mourn.
And because the Deathward did not mourn, Marshal Varonin simply turned away.
Kor ben Dor did not turn away. He gazed upon the killing fields before the Seven Hills with cool white eyes, determined to bear witness, as though in beholding he might bring some meaning to it all. There, in various stages of decay, the residue of systematic slaughter was spread haphazardly across vast beds of dried mud and swaths of trampled grass. The army of the Blood King had been annihilated, thoroughly and utterly. More than one hundred thousand slain. Not a single survivor. So much pain, so much terror, so much absurd and senseless death – verily, true horror knows no darlings. The thin yet weighty reeks of war lingered in the dusk like a foul and fetid fog, clawing in the Halflord’s nostrils, cloying in his bosom. He barely noticed. And even though his sight stung, he still refused to look away.
“Who are they, Prince Kor?”
Thousands of men and women moved amidst murmurations of bh’ritsi and the remains of the slain, separating metal from meat, loading some carts with rotting corpses, others with salvageable items of iron and copper and crudely forged bronze. The bodies that were too large to be lifted were dragged by draft horses and oxen to the place where the charred remnants of thousands blackened the earth beneath the sooty evening sky. Those that could not be dragged were portioned into manageable pieces by burly axemen. Wagonload after wagonload of wasted mortality. The refuse of lost and futile lives. And over several of the wagons there fluttered a foreign ensign: Three white lions rampant on a golden field, one of them large, the other two noticeably smaller and of a size.
“Ithramen, Ev,” replied the Prince of the Bloodspawn. He looked away from the plain of the slain then, peering upon the attractive Black Shield by his side, marking the gleam in her gaze and the perilous press of her lips. “And Ithrawomen. The folk of Ithramis. Friends to the Fiannar.”
In the distance, perhaps a mile away, one of the labouring Ithramen paused in his efforts, straightening, staring across the tainted land to where the three Bloodspawn warriors had assembled on a gentle rise of the Plains. The man was tall and generously muscled, black of beard and hair, and his eyes were a startling and glittering silver. He watched for a while, listening, appraising, pondering the peculiarly fractured fraternity of the Fiannar. He then raised a rippling forearm to wipe perspiration from his brow, and bent his shirtless back to his travails once more.
“They must be fine friends indeed to toil so.” Gren del Mor frowned, an expression that lent his saurian tattoo an irritable aspect. Wrinkling his nose, he watched but did not truly see a sweaty soldier toss the scorched husk of a dead human baby onto one of the rising mounds of festering flesh. “That looks like difficult and dirty work.”
“How would you know, Gren?” interjected Ev lin Dar. “You have avoided anything remotely resembling hard labour since the time before the pain.”
Gren del Mor hissed, licked his sharpened teeth.
“Oh really, Ev. You can recall the time before the pain?”
Ev lin Dar sniffed.
“A few things, mayhap. Not everything. But I will be able to do so soon enough. As will you. As shall we all.”
A pause, a twitching of painted tigress whiskers, a shivering a smooth skin, followed by the audible swallowing of sour air. She turned to face the Halflord.
“Have I said something… have I done something wrong, Prince Kor?”
Belatedly realizing that he was still gazing upon the Black Shield – totally transfixed, completely immersed in her beauty, as though he had never truly seen her before that moment – Kor ben Dor slowly rolled one hard-muscled shoulder and looked back to the killing fields and their growing mountains of the dead.
“No.”
Ev lin Dar stared for a moment, bemused, then blinked as she comprehended that a thing long awaited yet still unexpected had just transpired. Something warm glimmered within her. She repressed the smile menacing her stern exterior, but only barely. Then she, too, looked back to the battlefield. But she no longer noticed the gloom.
Oblivious to the momentous occasion that had taken place in his presence, Gren del Mor lifted one long arm and pointed to distant shadows in the dusk.
“And who are they?”
Kor ben Dor narrowed his ivory eyes, concentrating, then nodded.
“They are warders of the Grey Watch. Consider them the Black Shields of the Fiannar. They have been with us since we departed Doomfall.”
“Three days after our victory over the Blood King’s army at Doomfall, and these Fiannar still do not trust us? They forget our service so swiftly? We pitch our tents a deferential distance from them, and they watch over us as would wards around a prison camp. How very ungrateful of them.”
“Were the roles reversed, would you leave the Fiannar to their own devices and unsurveilled? Particularly after all that has happened, all that has been… suffered?”
Gren del Mor grumbled, but did not reply.
The Halflord rolled a crick from his other shoulder.
“It is not a matter of trust, Shield, but one of surety. Few are the friends of the Fiannar who are not met with such vigilance. Even the warmest of welcomes should have strong walls and wary wards.”
“And drawn swords?”
“Yes. Always.”
“There is vigilance, my Prince – and then there is paranoia.”
“Paranoia is not insanity, Gren del Mor. It is simply misplaced fear. That being so, we are all a little paranoid, because like the Fiannar, seldom do we know the true face and nature of the enemy.” Even now they do not know. But they will. “For this reason and others – drawn swords.”
“And where are our drawn swords, Prince Kor?”
The Halflord nodded to a pocket of twilight where stood a solitary ’Spawn warrior. She was long-limbed and lithe, yet robust, shapely, exuding an accipitrine strength and grace that prophesied peril for any who might provoke her. The curves of her musculature were captured exquisitely in clinging black leather. Standing in profile with one hip cocked to the side, it was obvious that she was both the consummation and the ultimate expression of the callipygian ideal.
Gren del Mor ran his tongue across his tapered teeth.
“Ah. The Screamer.”
Aida dan Char turned at the words, though she could not possibly have heard them for the distance. Her features were painfully beautiful beneath her raptor tattoo: Eyes wide and round and large; cheeks and chin supremely soft; reddened lips full and slightly parted, revealing perfect rows of bright white teeth. Her limpid gaze focused briefly upon Gren d
en Mor, lingering a little longer than was necessary. She blinked languidly, languorously, then looked away once more.
“I will take that as an implicit invitation to intercourse,” grinned Gren del Mor, sucking air into his chest. “As in conversation, Ev – your mind overflows the gutter again. With your permission, Prince Kor?”
The Halflord nodded, and managed not to smile as the Black Shield approached the Screamer, slender hands fluttering fastidiously over his cone.
“He does know, Shield, that the Screamer does not speak.” Kor ben Dor scowled slightly, his raven’s talons tattoo gripping his face. “Does he not?”
Ev lin Dar pursed her lips, shrugged. “Even if she did speak, she would not get a word in thin side first, not even with pulleys and a lever.”
The Halflord smiled then, small and slow. The effort made his cheeks feel strange.
“I have never seen a lizard so eager for the clutches of a hawk,” he mused.
“Nor a blackbird for the claws of a tigress, Prince Kor.”
Kor ben Dor started slightly, but visibly, then turned and peered into the eyes of the Black Shield at his side. Shocked by her own boldness, Ev lin Dar met and held her Prince’s warm white stare. Neither of them spoke, but only beheld one another. Sharing a whole world where the only sound was the quickened beating of their hearts. And then the Prince of the Bloodspawn held out his hand.
“Will you walk with me, Ev lin Dar?”
The beautiful Black Shield smiled, brave and bright. She felt lighter than a feather in the wind. And she took her Prince’s hand.
“I will.”
The fourth dawn following the Angar ban Erynna Ruill was bleak and drear. Bloated grey cumuli blotted the rising sun, vast fleshy palms pushing down on the soul of the world. The skies over Lindannan were void, empty. Even the buzzards and bh’ritsi had winged away and vanished. The winds were withdrawn, weary and breathless, their whips reddened and worn thin. The air left behind was viscid and tasted of ash.
“Another grey dawn,” the Rhelman murmured stoically.
The Commander of the North March Mounted Reserve nodded, his visage unusually severe and grave. Beside him, the Iron Captain’s own countenance was carved of stone. The three soldiers stood at the edge of the White Manor’s tiled eastern terrace, peering at the horizon, where the sun’s aching ascent was marked only by a lighter line of grey.