THE COLOR

Another time…

…another place.

I: HOPE IN THE DARKEST OF DAYS

Cyrus the Raven

The Raven pushed his barrel deep into a cleric’s cheek. He whispered his words, deep and low, and squeezed the trigger. No quarter. The hammer fell to flaring powder at mouth and muzzle, and the bishop’s head lurched, his lifeless body careening back into the blackest corner of a broken carriage. The splat of brains and muck on the far window echoed across wintered trees as the man in white robes slumped to the buggy’s floor. Delicate lines of smoke piped out in the cold, rising in cloudy strands from the priest’s cheek and mouth, as well as the Raven’s revolver. The bishop’s hands—once cowering and raised—fell to his lap and rested together, as if praying.

He caught a glimpse of the face in fading moonlight, now propped against the carriage door beneath a reddened window, tinting the beams a rosy red like cathedral stained glass. The Raven eyed the shilling-sized hole that sullied the man’s cheek just under the eye, odious like the barrel of Cyrus’s smoldering revolver, now snug again in its holster.

“What’d ye say to him?” Deimos asked, making his way to one of the horses—the last of the living.

“Something I need not repeat,” he said.

Deimos’s horse looked an ominous ebony, tinted scarlet after the crossfire. It brayed and kicked in the shallowing snow, pulling and bucking under the ties at the terret and hame, stuck in the drive and weighed down by a line of dead nags. Deimos stepped through drift and debris—broken barrels, strewn luggage, and a few corpses resting in meager pools of soggy red.

The smoke from Cyrus’s revolver emanated behind him as he moved along. The fog of his tempered breaths thickened with the black powder that stung his nose and hung in the air. “Gather supplies and make haste,” he said. “We’ve a long way back. What are you—”

“You’d leave this beautiful beast to the wolves?” Deimos interrupted. “Shh, thatta girl.” He gripped the bridle and stroked the mare’s head as her stamping waned. “A proper horse, she is.”

“A noisy one,” Cyrus said, “and half the fuckin’ country will ’ave heard us already.”

“Let them hear, brother. Mere sheep they are…. You worry like a woman.” Deimos unhooked the horse from the pole straps and bearing buckles and led her out of the drive by bit and mane, clucking and ticking at her as he trudged. “There’s a beauty. That’s it, good girl.”

“You’d sooner fuck the horse, it would seem.”

“Ha! To be sure, brother. I like them shapely.”

Cyrus knelt, reaching for the jacket of a dead man face down in the snow. He loosened the man’s belt and snatched a box of rounds and a powder horn. A steel gorget rested over a clean collar, inlaid with gold and silver acanthus leaves etched delicately into the metal. Captain of the guard, by his looks. His coat was navy on gold with ornate blue-brass buttons and seam-lined pockets, and a crinkled sash lay draped from shoulder to hip over a mess of hempen fourragère cord anchored at one shoulder and looping down under the arm. The gloves were a pristine white but blackened by reins and errant sinew after the poor devil’s last long ride.

He snatched a handful of the man’s jacket and rolled him to his back. With numbing fingertips, the Raven sluggishly unhitched the raiment, ripping it from the neck and raising it high to the luminous moonlight, better for Cyrus’s scrupulous eye. This’ll sell, he thought. The poor captain’s skin neared a pale blue, with blood pooling a sickly purple in his face and forehead. Cyrus rolled the luckless bastard back to his icy respite. The dead man wore a fine saber, too, with the curve of a cavalryman and similar inlay on both the hilt and handguard to that of the gorget. The sword shone half-exposed amidst snow and coattail, sheathed in a scabbard likely worth more than the Raven’s horse. Cyrus worked his fingers through webbing and belt loop, easing the scabbard from the leather as the body bounced and jerked with his yanking. Dead before he could draw his pretty sword, he thought.

Atop the new mare, Deimos trotted her over to a foraging Cyrus. Frightened, she seemed, but steady—steady enough to ride, which was more than Cyrus might’ve expected. The horse’s head bowed deeply with each gait, as if to avoid Cyrus’s stares. He smiled, knocking the saber loose from the belt, and he held it up to Deimos as he rode by. The Sage astride the mare gripped the sword’s handle and yanked— the sword stayed sheathed.

“Frozen,” he laughed.

The Raven reached out, gripping the scabbard more tightly than before. He widened his stance as Deimos wrenched the handle. The leather creaked under Deimos’s gloved hand, and the saber slid cleanly from the spathe, offering a sharp ring to the still night air as his painted horse nervously jerked away.

“Sing to me, Goddess,” Deimos muttered. He held the blade toward the stars while closing one eyelid in order to inspect the weapon more faithfully. The Sage swung and sliced and stabbed at the darkness, with sounds of whipping wind and steel sharp enough to pierce the very air.

Immaculate, Cyrus thought. The sword sang a tune to the moon and her stars, the weight of her plunges resounding through the cool wind that rustled the trees and shivered the hearts of the living. With a final plunge, she froze in place, outstretched to the Raven.

“A beauty,” Deimos said. He played with it delightedly, like a new toy to be hurled into the air and caught mid-turn or twirled between dexterous hands as the old Furii found the sword’s balance.

Balance, Cyrus thought. The Sage threw the sword high, suspending it in the stillness before catching the flat edge delicately across his fingertip. Perfect. The sword itself beamed, balancing and bathing in the bountiful moonlight. She shimmered like the snow and stars and the greens of Deimos’s eyes, still ogling the piece from hilt to head. The unspoiled blade began to fog in the cold, and the Sage let out a cloud of smoky breath, scouring her in a misty white hue. Every hair was carved with careful precision—branches curled between steel leaves of acanthus, rolling in the intricate metalwork without so much as an etch out of place. A piece of fine art to Cyrus’s eyes, but with the duality that lives in such tools of destruction, where the rolling, artful sincerities of a craftsman meet the harsh truth of the razor’s edge.

“Absolutely marvelous… a work of art, to be sure,” Deimos said.

“Looks like the poor bastard never used it. It’ll fetch a fine price, but not in these parts.” Cyrus handed Deimos the scabbard and turned for the wood line.

“No qualms here—too cold for the likes of me.” Deimos flourished the sword for a final time before sliding it back into the scabbard with a last haunting note that echoed through the trees.

“Hurry,” Cyrus urged. “We haven’t much time.”

Deimos followed on his new crimson-black steed, marching up the ridge through dead pine and snowfall toward the horses they’d rode in on, still hitched patiently beyond the clearing.

“What will you call your new mare?” Cyrus asked.

“Didn’t think it just yet,” he said. “Maybe … Shadow?”

Cyrus’s eyes lingered on the bloodied horse for a moment but fell away. “Tis a fine name,” he admitted.

Deimos frowned. “What’s wrong with ‘Shadow’?”

“No, earnest—it is a fine name for a fine horse. I just expected less from you is all.”

Deimos snorted. “Like most, I daresay. I imagine our dearly departed cleric might’ve said the same.”

The Raven let out a laugh. “To be sure, brother. How about that pretty sword of yours? What shall her name be?”

“I should think … Moonlight?”

“Ah, there it is! A terrible name, if ever there was one.”

Deimos smirked. “Envy doesn’t suit you, my friend.”

Cyrus ignored the Sage, focusing on the hill ahead. It was steeper, buried in thick nesting snow and foliage blocking the path. Cyrus wrenched himself up with handfuls of slick limbs and paltry branches. Deimos the Sage found a path across the small clearing for Shadow to step through while he wiped some residual blood from the beast’s mane, but with little success. A mess of dry, frozen sludge stayed knotted in the stranded reeds of her hair. Unbecoming for such a horse, Cyrus thought.

“I s’pose this should be some of your aged, sagely wisdom?” Cyrus called out.

“What’s that?”

“Make them underestimate you, right up until you cut their throats.”

“Or blow their brains out,” said Deimos.

Cyrus laughed heartily. “Indeed.”

The shadowy silhouettes of the pair’s horses emerged from the tree line, still as the night air and tied faithfully to the same fallen log at the crest of the ridge. Their hay was a salty white and the water bucket frozen solid. Muzzle prints dotted the surrounding embankment.

Horses eat snow? Cyrus marveled as he snatched a last glance at the carnage at the mouth of the trail they’d left to freeze in the dark. The men moved quietly and quickly, re-holstering long guns and tying down powder horns to their overflowing goatskin knapsacks and leathery saddlebags for the long night’s ride to Norsefyre. Muted shouts resounded faintly in the distance, accompanied by flickers of lamplight that twinkled through the crags of the wilderness they’d put behind them. The wind whistled quietly, undercut by the soft padding of horse hooves trudging through the drift. According to the Sage’s plan, the men would head west before cutting north with the dawn, away from the main road and the inevitable highwaymen that patrolled it. The ride was enveloped by the quiet of the early morn, the tedium broken by crunching twigs underfoot and the snorts and whinnies of cold and tired nags in need of a deep rest.

A long while passed before the stubborn sun rose to melt the frost and warm the bones of the men and the horses that plodded through the whitened wood. A rhythmic fog smoldered from nostrils and mouths, giving way to rays of sunlight that burned the cold and warmed their hearts as the trees grew thinner with each passing mile. We’re hardly out of the woods, Cyrus thought, an idle thumb itching at the hammer of a rust-colored six-gun cresting his stomach, snug in its holster but eager to be drawn. The hilt of an estoc longsword jutted from a tie-down on the lower saddle, well within arm’s reach, and a repeating rifle nestled just beneath.

The Sage repeatedly unsheathed his new blade, swinging aimlessly at wayward branches like a boy might do with a particularly sword-like stick. He treated the blade with the deference of a simple stick, hacking and chopping at things indiscriminately along the path. Cyrus insisted he sheathe it more than a time or two, and only once the sun was up, broadening the risk of newfound onlookers, did the old Furii agree, but at the cost of his usual smile.

Deimos the Sage looked more pauper than Furii, this much was true. His robes were held together by hemp and straw cord that draped from each shoulder and across a broad chest. The coiling rope was frayed and tattered like the other piecemeal layers of his garb—mud-brown burlaps stained and faded and old as Tara. Cyrus would have thought him a beggar could he not see the steel gauntlets distended from tattered sleeves—antiquated metal gloves and vambraces that portended a grave robber far more than a Furii. Deimos commanded a kind of secret violence that proved a strange bedfellow for his pleasant demeanor. He was a Furii, after all, ignoble as it made him. A veteran, he was perhaps the oldest living of the elite warrior caste he shared so little resemblance to. Deimos the Sage wore no standard, wielded no familial great sword, and donned no illustrious vultus warpaint, but a Furii he remained, unlikely as it looked.

Cyrus the Raven was no Furii. A man he was born, and a mortal man he always would be, cursed with the failings of age and time, which Deimos and his Furii brothers and sisters never need fear. Cyrus ascended no ancient rite, met no friend or foe in the arenas of the Forge, and his blood remained untainted—just like the day of his birth—by the ilk that corrupted so many before. The Furii’s Burden, he remembered it was called. The ritual blood, the unnatural ooze that beset the potential of honest men. The Furii are not men, Cyrus thought. Full of madness and rage, those ones, pumping some witch’s brew through their veins like the Devil himself. They signed their souls to him, Cyrus believed, for the shallow price of boundless power and immeasurable strength next to mortal men, but the price was steep. Their minds slowly waned to the cosmos or bent the knee to the humors and ill will of spiteful gods. For that is what the Furii are and always will be, he had decided long ago, servants of deities long abandoned, vicars of petty cosmic squabbles and puny endeavors gone awry.

Nay, Cyrus was only a man—a cursed man, troubled and doomed to boot, but mortal and nearly free, as all men truly are. And yet, he had more in common with the Furii than he might’ve wished for—much, much more.

“Tis a midday, my feathery friend,” Deimos said. “We’re making good time.”

Cyrus looked down to the tattered frayed ends—the feathers—of his duster hanging loosely over his back and shoulders. He shook his head, but smiled, too. “Agreed,” he said, “and I can finally feel my fingers again.”

“A problem I rarely suffer these days, I’m thankful.”

Cyrus smirked. “That sludge that courses through your veins poses another problem altogether, brother.”

“Aye, and bloody welcomed. The madder I go, the better, I say. Is a madman not truly the most content? Ignorant of all that ails this world?”

“I daresay he is,” Cyrus said. “Blissful, but more fool than friend … but you know as well as I that the mind makes fools of us all—a prison without walls, and so on.”

Deimos’s lips curled.

Some distance up the trail, a signpost appeared, decrepit and worn and missing a placard. The top piece held a poorly cut arrow that read ’NORSFYR,’ and they turned their horses to the trail. Trickling water rained down from melting branches as birch and spruce and oak shone in the midday sun. The endless white made way for brown and hints of emerald. Weary travelers crossed the path, too, from time to time— paupers, pilgrims, even the occasional stagecoach rumbling and rocking through ruddy slush. A crowd rife for robbing, Cyrus thought.

The last of Deimos’s childish mood left with the sun and the strangers. The man’s stoic temperament returned, but with a crooked smile somewhere just beneath the surface. Cyrus was accustomed to the cosmic shifts of Deimos’s disposition, as was accepted for most Furii, given the Burden. The Sage’s face hid the truth of him well, but his hands were tied up between knotted reins, rending the leather under a creaky grip. Cyrus thought to speak, but swallowed his words. The Sage steadies himself, he thought. We all must steady ourselves, time and again. But Cyrus felt a doleful sadness for his friend, fearing that the demon’s inside may one day demand too great a toll. He wrenched and wrung his reins under a slackless grip. Steady, brother.

“Your horse looks like the Devil,” Cyrus said, pointing at the nag’s crimson mane.

“Aye, I’d nearly forgotten.” The Sage unplugged a canteen draped over his shoulder and upended it on the horse’s neck. Shadow squirmed and brayed with the dousing while Deimos shushed her and rubbed the hair with a stray rag. “I’m not sure this will do.”

“Perhaps it is best to leave her here,” said Cyrus.

“I’d sooner die,” Deimos said flatly.

“Perhaps you will if you keep riding a bloodied horse into town and the wrong people ask the right questions.”

“More of the worrying, my dear Cyrus,” Deimos said. “What can the likes of them do to us? To you, even?”

The Raven glared, unamused. “Arrogance invites injury.”

“Aye, and a bloodied horse inspires fear.” The Sage gulped a few last drops from his canteen and plugged it up, stowing it over his shoulder. “I reckon this crimson steed dissuades more highwaymen than a pistol or sword ever may.”

His eyes rolled, but Cyrus offered no reply. No need.

Cyrus ignored the looks after a while, finding small comfort in a saddle and the Sage’s company. His mind began to wander beyond the onlooker plebs that either scowled or shied away from his gaze. The footmen and the pilgrims grew scarce as the midday doldrums set in, and the rolling trees that lined the path passed by each minute as if they were miles. He was bored by the quiet redundancies of snow drifts and saddle sores. The Raven ached for an ale, above all.

Cyrus grazed on hardtack and a few last bites of saltfish he’d been saving. He handed his own mount a few helpings of dry oats as he brushed the horse’s neck and ticked quiet comforts into soft, welcoming ears. A good horse, he thought. I hope you survive all of this. He meant the words but remembered the likely end to this poor beast. He’d never named him, for that reason. I’ve named a few horses before.

And with mild mid-afternoon, the boredom took him from the ride and the saddle. Cyrus combed the corners and cracks of his unyielding imagination. He returned to the comforting nostalgia of childhood, despite his will to forget. Clydae, he thought. What I would give to see my city one last time. But with the momentary solace came the creeping dark, clinging to the cold truth of what came next. He thought of Aura then, as he always would. He wondered where she might be and with whom, and what her opinion of him must be after all these years gone by. No matter, the Raven reminded, I have work to do.

The sun shone for most of the day on a green wood patched in white and weeping well into the early evening as the frost from branches had all but gone. The sunset welcomed Cyrus as it had from his earliest days, and he smiled with a radiance to match the setting sky. The land grew colder with the departing rays of sunlight, but the color—oh, the color, thought Cyrus—as vibrant as any he’d seen. A promise made by the celestials that the sun may set, only to rise. Balance, he mouthed.

But the ambush of the night before hung in his head and squandered the perfect sunset he wished to take in. The violence bled through, with splicing portraits of crossfire and shrieks and a kneeling man’s plight falling on Cyrus’s deaf ears. I hate the violence, he lied to himself. We are punished enough with the savagery that plagues our beloved Tara, her lands ripe for slaughter. He said he wanted no part of it, this cruel life of savagery and rage, but he knew the lie, deep down. He coveted it—craved it. The bloodlust comes for all men, after all, and he was no exception. He yearned for another fight, to end more lives like he had done in the wee hours. It played like music in his ears, the deep reverberating echoes of gunfire in the still night air, the shouts of men and the neighing of frightened horses, small steel hammers falling on gunpowder anvils, igniting the sky and the hearts of mortal men. The stuff of dreams, he vied, but Cyrus gulped hard, quelling his thirst but a while longer.

Twenty men, he mused. We must’ve killed twenty men. A seamless ambush, it opened with a swivel gun, even, like those of the man-o-wars that prowl for pirates among the Laurentines and the Breezeblock. Small, but wide, the gun rested atop fortified logs and was staked deep. The damned thing tore the axle off the front of the carriage, and a good piece of the rear horses, too. He’d put bullets in men and horses all the same, for which he felt an earnest guilt. He never reloaded, only dropped the empties to retrieve a few third-full cylinders from the dead. His uncurbed appetite sprang from the guns themselves. He knew he’d killed nary a man with the blades, only the bullets and bombs of cowards and cutthroats.

Shameful, he thought. A poetry to swordplay, there is—a jig danced with a willing partner … graceful creatures enraptured in mortal sacrifice, as only one prevails. Cyrus might yearn for peace, but the Raven adored a fight, for the fight was all he knew.

And so, the Raven gripped tightly to the ankles of Cyrus’s shattered mind, pulling him deeper and deeper through darkness and void as the Prison called to him. The humble Cyrus feared this deepest of darks, so full of malice and pain, as he tried so oft to forget. The Raven thrived in such a place, built in the quiet respites of the underworld, full of violence and the will to do so. The Raven was born of a darkened heart, and so he brought the darkness with him. But so, too, came the Furii—old gods to Cyrus’s kind. A waning pantheon with little power over steel and heat.

But gods and their power run loose in the land of Tara. The newest, and perhaps the greatest god to grace Tara’s lands was the fiery birth of industry, cutting away the meager flesh and bone of a bygone yesteryear. The Furii caste ruled mankind for a millennium. The supposed demigods of mortal men, they were vicars of an old blood in need of decay, only to be outmatched by the cold machines of a callous future.

“What are you on about?” interrupted the Sage.

“Pardon?” asked Cyrus.

“Your eyes dance like an Antigonian whore,” he said. “What ails you, brother?”

“Nothing,” Cyrus said, tersely. “I—I just—”

“I’m itching for a fight, if not to cure the boredom alone,” Deimos answered for him, his eyes raking across rolling, forested hills far and wide. “I forget how vast the Bryndelwald can be.”

“I don’t invite it,” Cyrus said, “but it certainly would be fun. How much farther, Deimos?”

“Too far, brother,” he said. “We won’t make it ’fore nightfall.”

Cyrus eyed a rat trail diverging from the road up the way. “Perhaps we can find a place to camp off the road a bit. My mortal belly could afford a fill. What say you, Sage?”

“Aye, I’ll starve before long.”

“You call yourself immortal.”

“In age only… and perhaps, in the bedroom.” The Sage laughed.

“Aye,” chuckled Cyrus, “aye, a camp with ale will do nicely.”

The men turned for the trail just as the setting sun peaked its last rays through naked branches. Cyrus spotted a clearing beyond the mouth—a patch of open sky, blazing orange and red in the heart of the deepening sunset. The path meandered a few feet more, etching into a scant hillside as the break in the trees widened away from the road. The cold air returned, met with the same billowing fog that steamed from warm horse nostrils and the sloppy drool that dangled from their bits.

“A fantastic spot—under the stars even,” Deimos said, gleefully hurling one leg over the saddle and plunging into ankle-deep snow.

“How far do you reckon we’ve come?” asked Cyrus.

“No less than fifty miles, I expect,” Deimos hollered over his shoulder, slogging toward the tree line.

“We should push farther in, brother,” Cyrus said.

“More worrying….” Deimos kicked at a few low-hanging branches and snagged them under his arm.

His horse stamped in place with Cyrus still seated defiantly in the saddle. “You know as well as I—they’ll come for us.”

“If we go any longer tonight, brother, we’ll kill these poor horses, and you might freeze to death yourself. Besides, we’ll be off at daybreak.”

Cyrus sighed deeply, looking to the horizon one last time—red, far redder than it ought to be this time of year, with cool blues deepening under the advent of nightfall. A steady breath clouded in front of his mouth, and he lifted a kerchief to the bridge of his nose, trapping the heat of his breaths over the singeing cold of his ears and cheeks. A fire might do….

“Fill your hands, if it suits you. Doubt we’ll see a soul tonight.” Deimos moved back into the open and dumped the kindling clumsily into the snow. Shadow startled at the sound.

“Easy, girl,” he hushed. “Maybe not the warhorse we thought, eh?”

“We should leave ’fore sun-up,” Cyrus said.

“Huh?”

“Before sunrise,” Cyrus ordered, dismounting. “No need to take any chances.”

“Dare I say it, Cyrus? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you so … on edge. You don’t believe the old tales, do you? Those pesky Wolves of the Wald come to get us?”

There it is, the patronizing whoreson.

“I fear not the wolves,” he said, “but if we can ambush them, they can return the favor.”

“Tis true,” Deimos replied, clacking logs together in a modest stack, “but we’ve done our due diligence—fifty miles, deep in the Bryndelwald. Not a Patrian trapper alive that could—or would— track us that far, and on the road, mind you?”

Cyrus’s lip twitched. “What world do you live in to think us so protected? That sorry Bishop makes thirteen—a baker’s dozen, that is—and the League will come for the blood of the Church, Sage. Think. The Acolyte and his Tattered Banner, his Furii arbiters with all their loathsome titles…. We should be ready.”

The Sage rustled the dry leaves and kindling in open pockets of the pile and fetched his flint from Shadow’s newly donned saddlebags. “You speak as if I am unaware,” said the Sage.

“Of course, I don’t mean—”

“Please, friend, peace,” Deimos said. His words were warm and welcoming, but Cyrus felt the stern finger someplace behind the smile. “The Patrian League is not what it was, brother, but I understand your concern. By mid-morn, we’ll be mere miles from Norsefyre and the Four Furies. By nightfall, we’ll be supping at a Brynjari hearth. The time for killing clerics is nearly at an end.”

“Nearly,” Cyrus aped.

“Why the melodrama, Cyrus?” asked the Sage, spewing sparks from flint and dagger into the dry heap. “We approach our goal, same as planned. What sod has since pissed in your porridge?”

“Do you trust him?” Cyrus asked, “the Brynjar, I mean.” He fished deep into his saddlebag with a blind fingertip, working at the cleaning kit that seemed glued to the bottom. Cyrus snatched it free, the other hand untying the rifle bundle draped on the side of the saddle. He hoisted his repeater and breechloader from their buckskin covers. He secured the small deerskin cinch-bag of cleaning supplies under the other arm as he hiked toward the Sage and a pitiful fire aching to breathe.

The Sage blew gently into the pile. “Careful,” he said. Small tufts of smoke snaked out of lesser embers, and he smiled wide. His face froze there for a time, watching patiently as the delicate flames caught the tinder. The flares redoubled with each of the Sage’s puffs, where crackling timber and smoky fumes gave Cyrus the go-ahead. He laid his arms against the wood stack and unclasped two worn leathery buckles, producing a splotched rag and swathing it across the snow as he lined his tools in rank and file. He kicked a log, sat on it, and drew his six-gun from the holster with a flamboyant twirl around his trigger finger. The Sage looked away, still smiling, aimlessly.

“You didn’t answer my question, brother,” said Cyrus.

The frays of Deimos’s garb lined through the flames as he buried the light with a thick branch. “It would be wrong to speak ill of my noble patron, even here,” he said. “I’m a Furii, dear Cyrus, and nearly always have been. Speaking ill of a master is poor form, no matter the master. Besides, I can’t trust myself, let alone anybody else,” he said. “And especially not you, there, Ghost of Clydae….”

“Not that,” Cyrus said tersely. “Never that.”

“Worried someone will hear?”

Cyrus’s wolf-like eyes beamed through the firelight. “Aye,” he nodded, “a card we shan’t play … at least until the time comes.”

Deimos leaned back. “Have I not kept your secret safe to this end?”

“Safe?” the Raven asked, astonished. “A madman, like all the rest of your Furian brothers and sisters? Secrets are safe only with the dead.”

The Sage chortled, “Oh, of course, I’d nearly forgotten….”

The two sat in silence as dark blue heavens turned to black. Cyrus avoided the Sage’s gaze, focusing on the fire and his revolver. The night was quieting, the sounds and stirrings of the early evening faded away into lonely, muted starlight. Cracks of the wood and Cyrus’s metal brush scraping gristle and grime from his disassembled pistol were all the sound that pierced the air, and each was deafening. Deimos chewed heartily on a ragged piece of jerked aurochs from a shady tin of his own hardtack he produced from someplace between sleeve and pocket. The snow around the fire was melting as the concealed dirt beneath turned to milky mud. The fire grew, whipping in a vibrant, menacing splendor as soundless cracks turned to roaring welcomed warmth.

“What would bring you happiness?” Deimos asked, breaking the silence.

“Huh?”

“Or rather, solace more like?” he said. “Happiness, after all, may be a stretch for the likes of us.”

Cyrus raised his brow but offered no reply.

Deimos persisted. “If tomorrow, dear brother, we could wake up kings of Tara and all our struggles would be at an end—all the goals and deeds met, services rendered, and enemies conquered in one fell swoop, what would you do? Who might you be? Where might you go?”

“First, I’d hang every Patrian I could find—”

“Please, Master Raven,” Deimos softly interrupted. “No need for all that. Indulge me, as you might yourself.”

Cyrus shook his head and chewed his cheek, relenting. Another of his tricks? Likely…. His jaw ached once he loosened it, relinquishing the words as they came to him, giving in to Deimos’s childish inquisitions. Wise and old, yet young and foolish, he thought.

“I suppose I’d hang up my guns and find solitude some place—a dairy farm in the Great Mothers perhaps, or a cottage in Nine Foes, or a Caravel at sea, even? I hear the Clearwater Whip is nice—”

“You, a sailor? Or a fuckin’ dairy farmer?! Ha!”

Cyrus let the Sage laugh but continued, albeit in a different direction. “I … no, I have a much better game, sir. Why don’t you tell me what my solace might be? You know me so well, it would seem.”

Deimos sat up with another surge of boyish excitement, swallowing a bit of jerky as he clapped his hands together. “Cyrus!” he shouted. “These are my favorite sorts!”

“What sorts?”

“Games, of course,” he said. “I love games.”

Cyrus held up a hand. “No, no, no—first, sir, ground rules. You may make your statement. I need only confirm or deny.”

Deimos’s smile only widened. “That sounds … fair. But, you must promise to be genuine. No lies, nor tricks—only truth.”

“Agreed,” said Cyrus.

“Aye, this is exciting! I’ve always fancied myself good at these things. Let me think for a moment, brother. This will require a delicate strategy.”

Cyrus chuckled with another shake of his head. “You haven’t the faintest idea, Deimos—even if you are a Sage.”

“I … reckon otherwise,” he said, Deimos’s eyes focused, fixed and scintillating with the flames.

The Sage moved to his knees with hands cupped together and index fingers aligned over a pair of curled lips. Cyrus felt the Furii’s narrow gaze bounce about his face and features. The Raven’s every curve, crevice, and silver hair shrank under the Sage’s unblinking, paralyzing stare. I’m young to his eyes, Cyrus thought, but the Raven’s age beneath the skin was far beyond the score and change he’d spent in human lifetimes. A young man’s face marred by scars and a striking silver mane, brow, and beard, all quite out of place—it wouldn’t take the Sage to tell him. His eyes—blue like the Devil, as they had been described—were an unnatural, bright glowing sapphire that might pierce the very soul of a weaker man, or so he liked to think.

“I already know of your genteel past life—”

“I thought this was supposed to be about my future, not my past, brother,” Cyrus interrupted impatiently.

“Surely, I must know who you were before I can tell you who you will be?” Deimos protested. “Please, honor my process.”

“Aye,” Cyrus groaned.

“You jest about fishing and farming because, truthfully, you’ve never considered a life outside of this one—”

“Nay, I’ve considered many things,” Cyrus said, crossing his arms.

“Of course,” Deimos said. “Let me make myself perfectly clear: though not a Furii, you carry with you your own sort of burden, don’t you? Why is that, I wonder?”

“Confirm or deny, Deimos, nothing more.”

Deimos held up a hand. “Of course you carry the burden. Tis the burden of every man, not just the Furii—a burden of Ares herself and all her dear children.”

“What burden?” Cyrus asked, as if he didn’t know.

Deimos’s smile widened, baring teeth. “Oh, dear Cyrus, you said it yourself. You desire the bloodshed—you crave it, as I do. You’re as much the blood-drunk as I—”

“I’m no madman,” Cyrus interrupted.

“That, brother, is a lie.” Deimos’s smile disappeared. “You find comfort in your supposed mortality, but you’re a Furii in all but title. As if I haven’t seen you all this time? Cutting through soldiers and guardsmen like piss through the snow. I’ve seen you thrashed to pieces by bullets and blades alike, only to fight on like the god that you are….”

Deimos composed himself. His gaze broke, and the redness from his face faded along with the thumping vein in his forehead. “Nay, Ghost of Clydae, there’s much more to you than meets the eye, a resonance that escapes me, deeper than the flesh. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you cursed—sold your soul to the Devil, or something … but for what, I wonder? Where? Or, for whom?”

“That’s enough,” Cyrus said.

“I do believe it’s high time you told us how it is you managed to escape the Prison Without Walls.”

The cadence in Deimos’s voice was like a nursery rhyme, bouncing up and down as the words itched under Cyrus’s skin and prodded the dark corners of his mind. They unsettled him, chewing, biting, ripping like rabid dogs might do a carcass.

“Have I struck a chord, dear Cyrus?” Deimos asked.

The Raven didn’t answer, reverting his gaze to the fiery comforts of the hearth, the blaze illuminating a pair of darkened, unrecognizable eyes.

“Please, brother, put my curiosity at ease. What did you say to that poor cleric back there?”

“The man begged for his life,” Cyrus said, “offered me riches and wealth in his last moments.”

“I say again, what did you say?”

“No quarter,” he replied. The wind howled then, resigning the men to their lonesome wilderness. Cyrus wiped snot from his pouring nostrils as the sting of cold burned his skin. Even Cyrus is no more, you fiend, he told himself. The cursed Ghost of Clydae remains, despite me. It was an enemy he sought to stifle but with nary the strength. An old life rooted in the new violence of ancient villainy, truly—living as the beast that could put a bullet in an unarmed and feeble old man. No pause … no fear...no quarter….

“That’s the one thing you don’t seem to understand, brother,” Cyrus purred. “I’ve escaped nothing.”

The Sage’s eyes stared blankly into the fire, but something tore them away. “There’s a measure of untrustworthiness in every man, I think, not just the Furii,” he said, nodding to Cyrus. “A sickness that lives deep inside—the animal that survives, angry and untamable. It’s the monster, the madman— the price of entry for the blood that courses through our veins. The madness plagues the psyche of any and all. I wish for deliverance from such trifles, but alas, my own demons haunt me just the same. But you paid a different price, Cyrus—a steeper price, I grant.”

“For that’s all it is,” Cyrus agreed. “A price. And the thing you speak of, a cost there is that sleeps inside us all—a debt beyond our means but owed all the more. Unyielding evil, our master is, one that yearns to be set free, to collect from our beholden souls. A demon of old, beyond our reckonings … like the primordial destructions of pestilence and famine and an undying sorrow that ravages the mind like it does our hearts. The King comes to reclaim what is owed….”

Deimos sat for a time without sound or movement, his gaze settling faithfully in the light. “Have you heard of the Battle of the Running Roost?”

“Come again?”

“Never?”

Cyrus rolled his eyes. “Pray tell.”

“I s’pose I shan’t be surprised,” he said. “Still, a tale of a tale—”

“Please.”

“The farther Antigonia holds rolling hills of bountiful crops as far as the eye could see. Hillsides of thick green bowled over shallow valley floors and river deltas ripe for buckwheat and rye grain—”

“Sage, please, I don’t wish to hear—”

“And beans!” he shouted over him. “Oh, the beans! The peasants ate their fills of beans and onions and peas from local gardens, and fresh raspberries came with the autumn—the makings of a bountiful life.”

The Raven leaned forward.

“But then came the Patrians—conquerors and slavers with all their fervor—to the enriched laymen of the river valley. They burned their crops and stole their stores, raped their women and enslaved their sons.” He picked up another piece of jerky and wrenched it between his back teeth. “And so, this proconsul, what was his name? Ah, Cnaeus Decima, I do believe—”

“The Nighthawk,” Cyrus supplied, playing along.

“Aye, the Nighthawk!” Deimos smiled. “The Nighthawk’s march to the sea proved most vile—burning and pillaging with reckless abandon. And so came the last bastion of the last free state of the last remnant of an Antigonia that no longer thrives as it once did—Fort Redoubtable.”

Cyrus’s stomach sank out from under him. “Fort Redoubtable?” he gulped.

“Aye, Fort Redoubtable! Who’s tellin’ this story?”

“Sorry,” Cyrus retreated. “continue.”

“A holdout far beyond the edge of the earth, in the smallest, secret corner of Tara where gods and men rarely venture….”

“Aye.”

“The peasants made their final stand in the mountain shadows of the Great Mothers’ jagged peaks. A stranger stood above the rest, a furtive, nameless monk—a nobody. The Nighthawk and his legions crowded ’round the redoubt, ten deep for every scared peasant standing among them. ‘The soil is rich in these parts and the people pious,’ the monk said in parlay. ‘Are you not a pious man? Do you not serve the Summer God, same as us?’”

Cyrus felt cold.

“‘I do,’ the Nighthawk admitted. ‘Then let our gods decide our fates,’ the monk decried, removing his humble medallions from a scrawny neck. ‘A god you are to these creatures,’ he said, pointing to a rooster plucking mindlessly about. ‘Surely the mandate of heaven might give you strength over them?’ The monk fixed the medallions around the cock’s neck. ‘If you are a champion of gods and men, then kill this modest chicken, and I shall name you our newfound god.’ ‘You mock me,’ quoth the Nighthawk. ‘I dare not, gracious knight. What power do we have here? Simpletons we are—the gravel beneath your maniple’s boot.’ The Nighthawk saw among them haggard faces of the worn elderly and starving young. ‘Agreed,’ he said with a shot of his flintlock. He missed, of course, with such aimless ball. His lieutenants missed, too, and his triarii sharpshooters missed their marks by more, and the velites hurled their spears and bombardiers threw their bomblets and chased the rooster, even—”

“Oh, come now, Sage.”

“But, the monk was keen, as only laymen are. His best men lay in wait in the hills just beyond, wielding humble workman’s hammers, scythes, and pitchforks between them. They stormed the scattered legionnaires, rending their arms away from their swords as hungry farmers dragged their daggers across soft Patrian necks. Though not a shot was fired by paltry peasants, the Nighthawk ran with his horde like a horse from a snake.”

“They beat him?” Cyrus asked.

“Not quite,” the Sage said, “delayed, more like. They came back, of course, and what men didn’t scatter were rounded right up … crucified, of course.”

“What?”

“What?” the Sage parroted.

“Was there a point, just then?”

“Of course,” said the Sage. “Never underestimate a Patrian’s love of chasing cock.”

Cyrus howled, despite himself, and the Sage did the same. They hooted and horned, and Cyrus wiped the tears from his eyes, nodding and smiling at a joke well-told. “I underestimated you, Sage,” he laughed, “as always.”

“Your estimations are apt, I’m sure,” the Sage said, sipping from a canteen. “But I offer only a smile before the frown.”

“Frown?” Cyrus asked, sinking once more.

“We must speak plainly, brother, unlike any time before. Real, this is, too real for jests and gentleness.”

“Real?”

“Like the trees and the stars and the gods themselves, this must be true now. You know of what I speak.”

“I don’t.” I do.

“Antigonus, Agathe, Ariston, Ares—these are not our gods. Tis the legends of old we must see to over these four pillar gods—the two that came before.”

His heart had become his stomach—low in his belly and sinking still. Cyrus clenched a fist and closed his eyes, but the voices pried open his ears and wriggled their way in. He felt the barbs plucking at thoughts and feelings as he winced, the pressure ever building. Shut it out, damn you. Shut this evil out.

“One of hate, and fear,” Deimos whispered, “the lord of the dead and King of Battle. But, the other, born of his own flesh, his opposite….”

“Life and love,” Cyrus groaned.

“Aye,” Deimos nodded, “life and love and the bright beautiful hope of paradise—his champion. Twin devils, they were, each one another’s match and measure.”

“And so they battled…”

“And so they battled to the ends of the earth.” Deimos’s eyes blazed a turbulent emerald as the words dripped from his mouth.

“Ah,” croaked the Raven, “where has my dear Sage gone?”

Deimos’s head lowered, his brow overhanging a piercing gaze. “The prophecy continues, Cyrus. Be wary…the King of Battle comes, and he comes for you.”

“Comes?” asked the Raven. “He is here, brother, among us … in the wind and the stars, and the mind all the more. He stares at me from close and afar,” he said, pointing, “with those wretched green eyes….”

“Where he must remain,” said the Sage. “For the sake of our beloved Tara and her people, among us he must remain.”

“I’ve escaped nothing, Sage. This—all of it—it’s the Prison Without Walls, as it always was, figments in my tortured mind where I am ceaselessly shackled, crying into ashen dirt like a powerless child in the farthest reaches of the cosmos.”

“Hmm,” the Sage sighed. “You may be right, Master Raven, but so convincing, is it not? This dream of ours, as you say?” His frayed sleeve followed the arch of his arm, motioning vastly across forest, sky, and snow. “We wade through brush and thorns along the path. Why not wade a little further? It could be no worse than what came before.”

“Aye,” he agreed. “This fire warms my hands like my heart. What more should I want?”

“Aura,” said the Sage, smile curling, “but where might she be, I wonder?”

“Nay, Sage.”

“No?”

“Whatever man I might’ve been for Aura all those years ago, he lives no more. The Prison killed him in the earliest hours.”

“Now, Cyrus,” said Deimos, “we can all come back.”

Cyrus shook his head. “We can’t. I will keep my distance, if only for her sake.”

“Then perhaps you are lost.”

“Oh, I am lost, dear Sage. As lost as lost can be. IN FACT,” he began to shout, “WHY NOT? Why not give myself to the King of Battle here and now? He’s almost here, ha!” Cyrus laughed a deep, sickening laugh, full of hacking coughs as green began to glow through the brightening blue of his eyes.

“Cyrus—Cyrus, please,” the Sage hushed, “remember yourself. Keep the devil out, damn you!”

The Raven shook violently under his cape, hair and strands bouncing between spasmodic convulsions. “The Devil … and chaos … saint of despair … destroyer of worlds….”

“Balance, brother, please,” pleaded the Sage.

“The”—he coughed—“the Prison knows no walls….”