The Alchemical Bonds

REICH: THE DOMINANCE, Discord Chat Log

Remi: Steffan, where the fuck are you? We’re ready to start the raid. Steffan?

Steffan: Do the first mob without me? I think I found an Easter Egg. A hot chick I’m supposed to protect or something. She looks sick.

Remi: For the sake of... do it after.

Steffan: Nah, it’s time-limited and I want it.

Remi: You know her titties are pixels, right?

Steffan: Fuck off, Remi.

Remi: Fine, but I’ll kick you from the guild, if you don’t show up by the first boss.

Steffan: Whatever.

Remi: Fuuuuck. Why me? Why today? Steffan!

Steffan: Remi, I’m sick of it. Get Drew to tank on his Soldier or something.

Remi: Drew’s a shit tank. Steffan, stop fucking around and get your ass here.

Steffan:Logged off Discord chat

Remi: Screw you! Drew? Drew?! Just relog on your Soldier already. It’s like herding cats, I swear.

A hill rose behind Steffan, crowned by a church with a spire thinning out into the moonless sky.

The lights had gone out one by one beyond the city wall. The early stars twinkled too far, too faint and too busy with their own planets’ affairs to be of use to him down here. Damp air armed itself with the needles of frost, prickling his cheeks.

Dead leaves of the gone summer gave out a musty aroma. It mixed with the smell of freshly turned earth for the grave on the crossroads just outside the city gates. Black poppies still clung to bloom by the roadside. The insipid flowers trapped his boots, adding their sickly-sweet fragrance to the mix, the stench of oblivion.

In short, this was precisely the kind of night when Death in Their thousand guises would be afoot, so Steffan was not at all surprised when They advanced on him. In fact, he expected Them. He even expected that They would be a hooded figure of a greater than human height, cloaked in a shroud, its folds floating about in a ghostly wind. Yes, this was Death.

Steffan didn’t lose any time staring Them down. He elbowed Death in the face.

A skilled soldier, he maintained his kit meticulously, but when it came to this opponent, he was down to fisticuffs. Typical... His saber and rifle rested on the ground where he’d tossed them out of reach. They were useless, utterly useless. Only living flesh hurts Death.

The blow threw Death back from the shallow grave, away from Steffan’s love.

She lay buried to the chin in deceptively fluffy clay. The executioners piled it up upon her marble-white chest, nailed her hands and feet to the ground with spikes. Earth and iron held her down, strung up for the killing blow. It would take a lion’s strength to break out of this trap, tearing one’s own flesh. She’d never had the strength of a sparrow, let alone that of a lion... He would have to fight till the rooster croons at the first light of dawn to save her.

He should have dug her out during his vigil, before Death came for her—but he did not. Why, oh why didn’t he dig her up? A sideways glance at her face, just a tiny one, barely a flicker of the eyelid, earned Steffan a blow on the forearm.

Death was no fairer than Life. Against the unarmed mortal, Theywielded a metal stake, using it as Steffan would a rapier. The last foot of steel glowed red-hot. If Steffan gave up and stopped fighting the inevitable, Death would drive that searing tip through the woman’s chest, burn out her heart, and there would be nothing left for Steffan to live for. So he had to fight, till the first rooster... the first rooster... while her heart beat.

Steffan jumped between her beating heart and Death. Put his own heart between them, offering up his chest in a desperate trade. At the last moment his arm came up on an instinct, shielding him. Hot iron bit into his flesh. The stench of burning cloth, hair and meat hit his nostrils, making him gag. He snapped his teeth, his eyes squeezed against the tears of agony.

Go figure, the useless move did the job. The stake could have plunged through his arm and through him, like he was made of butter, and it didn’t. It didn’t. After searing the skin, the tip withdrew. Death onlybrandedhim and retreated a step.

The buried woman screamed, breaking the eerie silence. Her keening cry poured ice over Steffan’s burn, a numbing patch, almost as cruel as the metal’s assault had been.

Don’t take any more hits, my love,her thoughts rattled inside Steffan’s skull,I’m weakening.

Tell him something he didn’t know! He spat out vomit, then clenched his jaw. Elbow up again, his second hand wrapped around the fist to push that elbow forward, doubling the momentum, he squeezed his eyes shut and leaped at his opponent. The elbow connected on Death’s midsection with a satisfying thud. His newly-branded arm flared up, but they both staggered away from the grave. One step. Two. Those steps, no matter how small, were what counted.

Steffan forced his eyes open, looked through the shower of dark and light spots in his vision. Yes, he had won a few inches of poppy-overgrown dirt. He won one tick of the woman’s heart. But it wasn’t the time to throw a party yet.

The metal stake hit so close to his eyes that his beard smoldered. He tasted acrid smoke, the flavor of the burning villages and misery. He had done that as a soldier, set the crops alight, torched the houses, never questioning if there was anyone inside them. Probably there were. Most likely... but to Hell with that. It had happened before he had something to live for apart from the spirits and orders, before this woman, their love, before everything good—

I’m weakening, my love,she wept again in his mind.

Steffan squared his shoulders, dug the heels of his boots in. He didn’t look up. He knew what was up there, the blackness. The Heavens wouldn’t help him. The only light in the world filtered from the woman’s face. It wasn’t of the natural world, paler than even the moonlight, but it was all he had to see by. To live by. To live for. He had to hold his own until the first crooning of a rooster.

Death lifted Their hand to undo a brooch at Their throat.

Steffan didn’t mind that Their trailing sleeve moved through the air in a painstakingly slow motion—he had time to kill. The grave shroud slipped to the beaten dirt of the crossroads, revealing Death to Steffan.

He didn’t expect jagged yellow bones underneath that hood, because his blows had connected on muscled flesh. He had heard the crunch of dislodged joints. Gauntlets of steel scales protected Their stake-wielding hands. Everything about the way Death moved suggested a man-like entity, not a rigid skeleton, but who could anticipate anything about Death?

This time Death was a cloud of bones—human, fish, deer, and more, unrecognizable—suspended in a bloody spray, covered with slithering patches of flesh. The sharpest point of each bone aimed at Steffan like an arrowhead.

Death crooked a metal-cased finger of Their gauntlet at him, grinning with snake’s and shark’s teeth. If Steffan could wipe that grin off, he’d die a happy man.

My love...the whisper trailed like smoke through his mind, so gentle... so commanding.Don’t die.

That’s right. He could not die until the first crowing of a rooster.

Steffan charged.

Without the shroud, Death smelled like the black poppies crushed by Steffan’s boots. They breathed the drowsy aroma in and out, magnifying it twofold. Threefold. Tenfold. Hundredfold maybe. Steffan’s head swam. Why was he moving as if through water, then—if through honey, barely able to lift his feet an inch from the ground? His charge slowed to a crawl.

Death side-stepped his clumsy attack, recovering the distance Steffan had won in his last desperate charge.

Steffan plunged to his knees, coiled himself around Death’s ankles, throwing all of his bulk into keeping Death away from his woman. It was all the world let him do, and the world owed him a great deal, so curse the world! He hung on, gritting his teeth. Curse the world!

Death stumbled, dragged him along for one long step, then lost Their patience. They stopped, loomed a yellow skeletal menace over him, likehmm, what a peculiar bedbug.

Keep staring,Steffan thought grimly.Just keep staring. Where is that fucking rooster?He sobbed out a laugh at the same time as Death cackled. Of course it was hours away from the dawn! Of course!

Unhurriedly, Death brought up Their right hand with the stake. Why hurry indeed? Steffan attempted to roll out of the way, went a degree or two, his body more sluggish than a snail caught in amber. He no longer grinded his teeth. He bared them in a snarl. About all he could do.

The stake glowed a vicious scarlet and plunged through his ribcage. There was nothing slow about that movement. Nothing slow at all.

Steffan unfolded like the caterpillars he had impaled with a straw in his mother’s vegetable patch when he was a boy. Then he folded again around the piercing pain, the searing, the screaming of the dying flesh—those caterpillars would have laughed their squishy heads off now. His knees hit the chest uselessly, unable to seal the sucking wound. He was dying. Dying. He almost laughed again, because it was such a pathetic way to go. His spine snapped straight again, bent over backward in convulsions.

In his thrashing his head flung so far back that he could see her... more tears poured through the tear ducts calcified for disuse. At least he got the last glimpse of the woman he had loved and doomed. One last parting glance. He’d take it. The world owed him that much.

“Thirty-third payment is accepted, Margot,” Death rasped far, far above him and out of sight. “One death for one life.”

“Agreed,” Steffan’s woman replied coldly.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

She surged upward in a shower of dirt, straight as a board, coming to her feet. She still glowed with that indifferent light that wasn’t moonlight. Maybe the light of the will-o’-wisps and other fairy creatures of the bogs. Her wrists tore into two meat ribbons with dangling fingers, but she paid no more heed to it than she would have a glove. She stepped out of the grave the citizens had dug for her and pranced on the railroad spikes driven through her feet in the manner of a damsel in high-heeled shoes.

Steffan’s heart pumped in triumph. He saved her, he saved her—savedwho?

The woman was nobody he knew, let alone cared for. He had never cared for anyone, or at least for a damn long time. Since the faded warmth of his mother’s arms washing him in a dented zinc tub in a cramped room somewhere. Since... yes, since then.

Who are you?he wanted to ask the woman, but his lips had already stiffened in death. A hollow in his chest was suckling now, frothing with blood. Along with it leached his passion and the overwhelming desire to save her. He would have given anything to stem that flow. Not because he grew cold on the frozen ground without his lifeblood. A soldier had to die sometime, even if this wasn’t the death he had dreamed of. He just wished he could feel those stupid things till the end. It would have been warmer to die that way.

The woman leaned over Steffan, rolling his head this way and that, pulling his lips back as if to show Death his teeth. “This one should be worth two regular mortals. Just look at the size of him. A wonderful specimen.”

Death howled with laughter. “One death for one life, Margot, as always.”

She shook herself, spilling lumps of dirt on Steffan’s face. Her ruined wrists knitted together into flesh, but that wasn’t the end of it. From the fingertips, the gray coating spread up to her shoulder, then split into streams, flooding her face, her chest, all of her, with a cruel shine of a familiar metal. Steel. They forged sabers and guns out of it.

“I’ll throw in everyone in this miserable town,” the woman cast in steel said. Her metal lips moved and bright eyes peered from the polished visage. “Every man, woman or child who dares step between me and the dawn.”

“That’s your prerogative. Until next time, Margot.” Death’s latest burst of merriment fainted in the distance.

Margot floated up into the black sky. The ugly shift they had given her in prison to cover her nakedness billowed white and useless around the metal of her body. A three-tailed lightning whip appeared in her hand. Storm clouds are darker than the sky, but not Margot. Her glow intensified until she was brighter than the moon would have been as she flew, lashing about her with the whip, ready to rain lightning on the doomed city below.

The city... Wittenberg.

Yes, Wittenberg, he knew it once. It was gray and busy. It had sturdy brick buildings, tile roofs, and a paved square. Wittenberg’s citizens were a matching lot of solid, gray and busy mold. Their stories were as dull as their bread was excellent.

Wittenberg seemed the last place to have a curse hanging over their citizen’s collective head, so go figure. Their past did hide a tale not altogether dull, judging by the fearful shine in their eyes, the frowns and the astronomical increase in alcohol consumption when the police had caught this woman.

A witch,they whispered among themselves, cowering.No, not just a witch,thewitch.

Without delay or deliberation, the magistrates had ordered an extraordinary sentence, found in the hastily dusted tomes from the church’s basement. Bury her alive at the crossroad overgrown by the black poppies, bury her once and for all!

By golly, they had even petitioned Prince von Schillingsfürst for the strongest soldier, an outsider with no ties to Wittenberg, who would not be swayed like a citizen surely would be swayed.

“Why not burn her?” the Prince had quipped, “isn’t the pyre a sure remedy for the witches?”

The dark stares responded to his question, while the delegates shuffled from foot to foot. Whispers washed over them.It would work.

It had to work! Just give them a soldier who could stand as a sentry all night long, chasing away any citizens should they be possessed by witchcraft. Then Death would finally take the witch. She would die... It had to work. They had to believe that she would die, while he stood watch.

And now he, their steadfast champion, a man who’d never loved, a soldier of unquestionable loyalty, with neither relative, nor friend in Wittenberg sprawled among the black poppies. Their obnoxious scent poured through his nostrils unobstructed, went straight into his deflating lungs and slacking blood flow. His dimming eyes reflected nothing but tongues of flame dancing from one tiled roof of Wittenberg to another.

As Steffan spiraled into oblivion, a rooster flew to the crumbling Starvation Tower of the old town wall. The bird dipped back and forth, shaking its feathers and crooned madly, mistaking the growing fires for the light of dawn.

Finally,was Steffan’s last thought,finally I’m free.