74 years ago.
Matthew.

Sand covered in snow, the near frozen slush of the ocean water, the cold brittle lapping of ice water noisily folding upon the shore. The noise was a rancid slap to the ear, in the wake of each heavy shove nothing but debris and death. The air was opaque with sleety precipitation, coating everything with a fine sheen of frosty dew. 

The wood.

The cloth.

The flesh of the bodies that littered the beach. 

Of course, the wolves were watching everything already. 
Yellowed teeth peering out from foamy mouths, flecks of aged blood dried upon the ivory. A hunger inside that tattled on the madness that was simmering barely concealed under the surface. 

They had eaten once in five days and even then, it was cannibalism. 

The pack snarling and snapping at mawl and snout as they devoured the limping youngling that had followed the pack, wanting so much to fit in to the hierarchy, which stumbled in the thicket and badly sprained its own front paw. Limping injured and weak the pack had seen to him as though he was a sacrifice to their own souls and appetites.

Five days of greedy, madness inspiring hunger had driven them to the shore – 

a place they had never set foot, which now offered them a bountiful feast indeed.

They saw the oak beam of the mast and the tangled web of sail, knotted in oily ropes that now soaked up the grey sand and the ice of the lapping water.
They saw the bodies washing ashore. Bloated, bruised, battered and dead. Carcasses of sailors and of officers from the skeletal wreck of the passenger ship Ulysses. 

The wolves hunger drove them. 
 

The primeval part of them took control and they lunged toward the bodies of sailors, passengers and the former crew of the ship that had met its fate not three miles from the shore line.
Ravenous teeth and tongues tearing flesh from bloated torsos; wolves pulling throats from carcasses, two wolves pulling a bearded midshipman’s body between gnashing jaws. An arm in one mouth, an ankle in the other, and the body dancing a demented jig as the two animals pulled this way and that to win the prize.

The Alpha gave his customary throaty warning to any wolf that dared come too close to the body of the woman, dressed in powder blue dress and bonnet, gloves still upon her hands, but with a face smashed and broken by the wooden mast, caved in and disfigured. The Alpha chomped and chewed and gorged on the skull, a mouth full of eyeballs and bone, crunching and slurping down the meaty mass. The beauty of the woman’s dress, her dainty but pleasing figure, her golden hair juxtaposing horrifically with the gore that was once a face and now become feast.

From the water though came a noise that stopped the pack from its banquet and made them edge cautiously back toward the outcropped green of the woods from whence they came. 
 

The first stirring movements of a survivor. 
 

With greed building behind their conceited eyes, they saw the boy as well. 
His hand slowly grasping at the wet ground, his face a harshly bruised mess of red and blue, a gash above his eye dripping thick congealed dark purple blood drip after drop to the sopping sand. 

The boy.

 

So oblivious to the danger that was ahead of him, so scared and shaken he was by the danger behind.

The boy hacked and choked.

Wiping his mouth with the sandy back of his hand, gagging on the saltwater taste behind his tongue, distractedly he spat out two teeth and coughed up a lungful of frigid, bitterly salty ocean. He vomited harshly to the sands and pulled himself free of the ropes that bound him and the sail that anchored him down. 
Not a day over eleven, the boy sheepishly, painfully helped himself from the debris of the ship, his only escape blocked by bodies, a coastline littered with them. 

Men, women and children. 

The boy did not see them. If he did, not once did he let it be known. Blood in his eyes, fingers numb from the cold, his ribs bruised, and his breathing labored and deeply gasped. The boy crawled squeamishly - from pain alone over the corpse of a boson, a porter and a galley-hand and onto the smooth, dark incline of the beachhead.

As he touched the first pebbled stones of the edge of the beach, the wolves made their move. For, every one of the animals thought in unison – 

dead meat will sate our hunger, but live meat will breathe life into our souls. 
 

Ravenous grey hurricanes. 
 

Furious blurs across the dull sandy dunes. 
 

Teeth like razors, some broken and stained red and foamy.

Deadly ivory knives. 

They stabbed down into the boy’s calf and pulled him angrily toward the water, clear of the pebbled outreach, a line of blood and sinew drew a divot into the beach where he was lay. 

The wolves had him and they pulled him between their mouths and jaws, growls low and guttural and threatening. The beasts angry at each other for their individual gluttony. Their feast now struggling and crying for freedom. 
Pulling away from snapping mouths, even as the presumed leader of the pack continued ever onward to the beachhead, the jaws not once loosening on its quarry. 
They were too consumed with appetite to see the man storm from the edge of the forest that looked down over the pebbles that cropped the sand.

Bursting from the vantage point of green that looked out over the whole beach. The sandy dune reached out like a fat grey ribbon for two miles, only toward its end did it taper from grey into a golden white. The palm trees with bowed branches and vines of the forest reached out upward toward the water and blew back shivering in the wind. 

A fine mist of rain lashed down on the beach, flecks and blustery waves of wind and sand and rain spun pirouettes on the ground. The wolves were too busy snapping at each other and the boy to notice the figure charging toward them. 
He had made sure he was down-wind of the animals and therefore undetected by their senses until it was too late. 

Only the Alpha saw him.
 

Its grip on the boy quickly released and tail turned toward the outreach of the forest, giving a tentative look back at the giant figure of the man, catching the exact moment that his low swinging arm connected with the jaw of the nearest wolf.
 

A clattering, sickening blow. 

Bone snapped harshly under the first wolfs jawline, sent its neck cracking backward broken and limp. The wolf slumped toward the floor and the man continued on his rage around the other wolves. 

 In his hand was a huge arched sun-bleached hipbone of some long dead creature – a horse or a bison’s, maybe. A streak of blood lay thin and deliriously red on its edge, he swung sideways and connected brutally across the jaw of another wolf, as the makeshift mace smashed the maw of the beast. From the man a savage and feral scream poured forth from red throat. 

Anger.
Fury.
Release. 

The rest of the wolves, startled, soon realized that despite their number they had no chance against this giant bear become man. Breathing bloodlust and screaming hungry intention, the wolves scattered and ran toward the edge of the forest that bled onto the coastal sands. Pausing as they touched the green overhang of vine and leaves the lead wolf, the Alpha, took three or four cautious but plucky steps toward the beach, stared at the man, watched as he brought the club down hard onto the skull of the dazed and brutalized second wolf victim, and the animal let out a wild, lingering, guttural howl.
The man unabashed and unafraid caught the animals’ gaze, fixed and determined, then screamed right back.

The sound hung heavy on the air like a muggy fog. 

The boy lay prone and shocked, witnessing the exchange between man and animal, burned the memory to his soul, forever to remember the sound – more primal and dangerous than anything else his young ears had ever heard.
More violent and unknowable than even the groan, creak and eventual crack of the mast and hull on the Ulysses itself. Ignobly torn asunder upon the southern coast of this unconsidered island, by ocean waves that were as bitter and lost as the deepest contents of man’s soul.

The boat a petty offering to quiet their hunger; their murderous rage.

He watched as the second wolf shook and shivered in palsy from the final blow. it’s lower jaw four inches away from where it should be naturally set. A gash in the skull now that seeped brain matter and blood like thick treacle to frothy surf. 
The man’s rough hands grabbed the dying animal by the scruff of the neck, and with his eyes fixed on the Alpha – and the Alpha’s stare piercing right back, the man held a solitary finger out to the beast, then slid it across his own throat and finally, brutally, with a gruff twist snapped the wounded animals neck.

 

A final whimper of… relief, maybe? – and the animal slumped to the sand quiet and quite dead.

            The man slowly brushed his hands of the grains of sand mingled with bloody fur, silenced to a still motionless pause. The lead alpha wolf gave a small throaty howl – as if in tribute to the fallen pack soldier - and scurried into the brush to meet with the rest of his surviving pack. From here into the jungle itself, to regroup and quiet their bloodlust and swallow their shock.
 

Watching the outcrop of the brush where the Alpha had stood, his instinct on fire to make sure no surprise bolt would suddenly burst from the greenery.
When he was satisfied the huge mottled grey creature was truly gone, he confidently marched toward the boy and bent down beside him, huge hands scooping him up in thick, muscular arms. 
“What’s your name son?” The man gently whispered.
“C...C... Calvin.” The boy meekly replied.
“You sleep Calvin.” The man said, a gentle smile on the curl of his mouth.
The boy, for his part, bleeding still from his calf, passed out relieved into the man’s warm heaving chest happy to do as he was told.

“Sleep heavy and still little man, Matthew has you.”

Matthew, holding Calvin in one arm, reached down to stow his bone mace into his belt,  then cradled the unconscious boy and strode toward the feint opening in the green bower of the woods, toward the other survivors.

The coast was red.
 

The bodies eerily pulled to and fro by the slush of the waves.
 

The waves, wanting to play their cameo in the scene as professionally as they were able, seemingly folded quietly like silk and crashed like the burst of a canons muzzle on the grey, crimson sand.

Sands that will, by the end of our tale, have seen an entire history, a legacy, be writ, born and die.

19 years ago.
Agnetha - Daedalus. - NathanieL

I. Mother Lands.

Cold water smashed hard against the hull.
The wood yawned lazily as the tidal surge of waves battered the surface harder with each eddy. The sky was as colourless and as oppressive as the ocean upon which they sailed.
The lick of the sea-salt spray stung bitterly against the skin and the cracks in the lips of Agnetha and Gustav ached with the sting of the taste. Their faces were caked with the mist of the waves and their eyes were red and swollen from the exertion and strain.
Their hair matted and soaked, their skin shivered and ached from clutching each other tightly as protection from the waves. 

The Hold had a putrid stench that rested heavily in the nose. Sweaty and sweet. People were packed in tight and uncomfortable; limbs squashed hard against each other. Breathing made difficult by the errant elbow dug deep into the twisted rib, necks stiff from the cold, the soak and detritus of the above decks dripping through the cracks of the timber o'er them into the boxlike, dark, cramped store they were imprisoned in.

The groaning became louder.
Wood strained against the water, the tiny window in the Hold had broken miles from where they were now, the weak cloth bundle they had used to plug the hole was now soaked and useless. Spray poured in with every violent whistle of wind, strafing against the flesh of their faces. Tiny whiplashes of pain with each blustery smash against the hull. The stuffy collective of abandoned souls struggling for breath and space in this hellish prison below deck. 

Agnetha looked out of the porthole, one hand raised against her temple to visor against the blinding white light of the lighthouse that shone in pulses and strobed bright before turning to the other side of the bay.

They were so close now,
The shore was so near.
Almost there, but for the rocks. 

The light strobed once more, and the sharp brightness stabbed her deep behind the eyes. It was a jagged, harsh pain, one that penetrated deep into her skull and shook her senses.
The lighthouse.

Agnetha could see beyond the pin pricks of civilization. Tiny shimmers of hope, each. She held onto the pain of the sudden blinding flash of the lighthouse’s savior bulb, she absorbed that pain and stored it deep within, telling herself in healing whispers that resonated soothingly within her own mind. Then sternly reminding herself each stab of pain behind those beautiful blue eyes of hers was payment in part if not in full, for she and Gustav to be free at last.

Her other hand fell to her brothers open palm, Gustav grasped her fingers tightly, but his face dropped into a deep shaken ghost like maw as he looked out the hole in the hull. What he saw was not at all his sisters’ vision. He saw only doom.

Agnetha turned her head to him and caught his gaze; she looked perplexed and worried trying to place the spur to this sudden look of panic washing his face.
Half turning to the porthole, she saw the reason mere seconds before the impact of the rocks, sharp, deadly irresistible loomed heavily and sudden into view and the boat rocked hard and buckled under its ferocity.

The hull smashed in, timber roared and spat wet splinters inwards. A flush of ice cold, brittle ocean water gushed through the hold, drowning the chorus of screams and terror as sudden as it had conjured them.
The pitch slowly lowering as screams turned to gurgled gasps.

The boat split in two like an over-ripe mango, and the bodies of those not fast enough to cling to anything they could hold were grabbed by the oceans water, grasped in vast oceanic grip and pulled screaming into the Gordonian waters.

Women and children.

Strong limbed, well-muscled men tried to cling to flailing arms and hands, dragging them into the hull, only to see them snatched once more by the next surge of ocean foam.
The men swallowing lungful’s of the freezing liquid, weighed down and exhausted, succumbing to the waters heavy push. 

Gustav clung to his sister by the fingertips.
A tight, but strained monkey-grip all that kept him inside the boat.
Agnetha desperately gripping and pulling at his sleeve for anchor to no avail.

The waters pulled harder still.

A second huge blow slammed down upon both Agnetha and Gustav as she lost her grasp and was forced to watch helplessly as Gustav – in a glancing moment she would never forget in all her remaining days – peacefully looked her hard in the eye, static and immobile, smiled his sweet, thin-lipped smile that she so dearly loved and mouthed the words 

“I Love You Sister” 

- before the vice-like clench of the retreating tide pulled him whiplashing into the air and then slammed hard onto his back. The sickening snap of his spine echoed in the skeleton of the Hull, as the ocean squeezed him tighter, his body buckled and he disappeared under the waves.

Gustav was never seen again, he was now nothing more than another denizen of the deep, cold, murky depths.
Another trinket for the Boson’s locker. A lifeless prisoner to the floor of the Gordon. 

Agnetha flung her arms out snatching and grasping for anything that that could help her save herself, but she was seized just as quick by the waters hand. 

She tried to drag herself hand and claw over the smashed beams of the Hold to the far side which miraculously had remained above where the water could reach. Climbing over the bodies of fallen and drowned comrades from the journey. Agnetha slipped and submerged awkwardly below the wave, her foot snagged on a split timber stanchion, she pulled herself forward and felt the warmth of blood run from a deep gash on her ankle. 

She slipped below the waters surface one more time, her lungs ached and burned from the attempts to escape the brittle, furious water. She tugged hard once more and felt the blood run thicker, her face screwed up in agony and then surprise as the jagged split of wood unlatched from her and she was free, she burst from the surface and gasped a thick, glorious breathe and no sooner had she swallowed it deep down than the avaricious ocean pulled her screaming back into depths, her efforts proven to be for naught. 

Her voice a shrill banshee cry as the water filled her lungs again and gagging and spitting ice crystals out, vomited green-black water. Her head smashed against a piece of the Holds obliterated timber wall, blacking out, she was draped over a shard of the hull amongst a torn and ragged strip of the green and white flag that once was displayed proudly on every building in the once glorious, long legendary eastern city of Thörendahl. 

The water washed over her like a blanket of night, pulled tight against her chest and throat, as a trickle of blood ran down her beautiful forehead into her eye, where it pooled, dark and sickly, like some twisted patch.

The screams of the fellow passengers dotted and peppered around, dying by the second, one by one, the freeze and the debris picking them off indiscriminately even as they fought for their lives. If anything, these ineffectual attempts at fighting off the encroaching water spurred the tide on further. 

Alone they drowned. 

The boat buckled and snapped, folding into itself like a shard of glass under a hammers blow and the crew and the ships weary, war-torn passengers - who had surrendered and given up everything for this illicit journey to freedom and for peace - slowly and agonizingly became nothing but another citizen for the underwater kingdom of Boson’s locker.

Each one a token to the tide.
The levy forfeited to the ocean, tribute demanded and paid, one lungful of water at a time.
All dead and drowned.

 

All but Agnetha.

 

Alone, alive and spared the gloomy depths and the rocks. 
She slowly washed ashore on her raft of timber and canvas; the slice of hull tangled into a sail. A ragged strip of her flag flailing in the wind.
The tide dragging her shoreward. 

Dragging her home. 

II. Father’s Land. 

The escape from Castele Solitaire was relatively easy when compared to the trials that the mountains held for them. The black calls in weird and wonderful ways, everyone it touches takes their gift in different, unique and deeply personal ways. Tomasz was touched by the power young. He had all but mastered his Black into a science, and where it would leave him drained and exhausted as a youngster – he had found that the harder the situation, the greater the odds – the easier he found pulling from the pool of his magic. 

He would think of a person, think of their face and their heartbeat, he would soon hear the blood running from their heart and racing around their bodies – pulses pounding in their necks – he’d see them clear as crystal and then, without even trying he would be with them. 
It was as though someone had folded a piece of paper with a drawing of both of them stood, one at each end. One moment the length of the paper separates them, the next moment both figures are next to each other and the distance between just… never existed. 
No transport, no journey. 
One moment here, the next there.
Hold the hand of the person and he could picture any place or location, picture the wind gently sweeping over the grasses of the far away glade, a wind brushing the surface of a stone on Brill hill, rain hitting the ground in soft pops by the Twins and they were there.

This is how they escaped the Castele. 

One by one Tomasz had hopped cell to cell, picking up more hitchhikers before the final thought of the Deep Cut, at the southern most edge of the Jagged mountains – on the furthest northerly outskirts of Pikes Smithe.
Tomasz had taken them all, the prisoners of the Solitary Castele prison, across over a quarter of the country with no more than a blink and a thought.

Had he have been aware of the land north of the Jagged mountains he may have been able to take them further, and, there may have been a happier end to the story. Instead, Tomasz had met his fate deep inside the hungry, angry mountains. 
His dying thought the deep pride in himself that someone, anyone, may survive – HAD to survive. Because this had to be worth something. 
All this effort had to be worth the sacrifice that was offered.
This was the thought that flashed over his mind as he fell inside the place that would be his eternal tomb. 

Tomasz would not have been surprised by who it would eventually be that finally stood as lone survivor. 

Not at all. 
Not one bit

 

A cold mist rolled over the top of the Jagged Mountains tumbling into the small winding Wanderers Pass that cut through the brittle but sharp granite crevasses and sliced through the lowlands that lead toward the town of Gates Forge to the south and the deliriously dangerous Pikes Garrison to the North. The mercy of the Shuttered Veil did nothing to dull the cold in here, the mist rolled deep and low and brutally cold. It whistled hard and cut through the layers and furs the men had fashioned into protection from the mountains and dug deep into the bones, nestling deep and taking root in the very marrow like a parasite. 

No matter what you did to allay the assault of the mountain, the mountain found the core of you all the same. Drilling deep, taking shelter in the veins and riding free inside you, your arteries freezing from inside out. 

Once the mountain had you your days were numbered unless you made it to warmth, water and food, there, to let the heat of open fires shatter the crystals that had taken foundation inside your body, like some rhizome lodging free inside your capillaries and resting silent and deadly inside the walls of your heart, ready to stab home. 

            Dade practically fell through the Blue Gate, ice crystals had taken root on his rough and scruffy beard, his arms were wrapped in pelts and furs, his face was wrapped in scarves fashioned from raggedy and torn fabrics harvested from bed-sheets and blankets. He pulled through his companion Anders – who staggered and tripped and dragged his left leg limping behind him, like a lame horse; he was injured with a gash the size of a mans palm scored deep in his calf, it had stained the material of his blue faded denim overall-jeans a dark and ugly red, which was now frozen and ice speckled, the cloth stuck fast to his flesh.

“Come on Anders, for the God’s sake – the horns are close, I can hear the Guardia!” Anders grunted in understanding, pulling his leg like a lame horse dragging a broken hoof. Teeth clenched in barely suppressed pain, tears flash frozen to his eyelashes. 

Dade pulled him through the thin slit of the rocks, his leg snagged a sharp protruding edge of rock, he baulked hard at the sudden stab in his leg, lost his footing and tripped childishly backwards over a rock that jutted from the crevasse floor. Anders had gripped his fur overcoat so tightly and his eyes were so puffy from the ice crystals he barely realized that they were falling until it was far too late. 

 

In a way, this was a blessing to Anders with what happened next.

Both men collapsed hard into the snow, Dade onto his back with a sudden huff of air and expletives and Anders face first, his head hitting hard and fatally off the corner of a sharp blue rock, the gash deep and mortal.
He rolled over to his side, a trickle of thick blood now running from his forehead and temple onto the fresh, deep snow, freezing immediately. His facemask of torn bedsheets slipped and his fragile and broken smile with black teeth and blacker gums was all that Dade could see.  

Dade held his anger deep inside, but in his mind he screamed a guttural and primal roar at the sight. His eyes held piercing onto the body of his compatriot and friend. He did not cry, he knew that it would be nothing more than signing his own death certificate, he knew Anders would have hated him if he cried, so instead, he pulled the mans scarf up over his mouth, kissed his hand and tapped Anders forehead, closed the mans eyes and picked himself up and moved on.
Not once looking back. 

Six had been lost in the escape, three to falls between endless blue icy shelves, falling into a netherworld of deadly frost and darkness, wrong footed and surprised, the mountain swallowing them whole.

Tomasz, the brave soldier who had saved them all from the darkened cells of the belly of the Castele Solitaire had been caught surprised by a sniper from the Guardia. 

A lucky shot ringing around the granite of the mountain. 
Men shooting blindly through the mist and hoping for a kill. 
The round lead pellet-shot penetrating through the back of his neck and splashed his throat and final cry of… not quite shock, but something near to surprise against the grey and blue rock.

Brave, beautiful Tomasz smiling at Dade as his fingers touched his throat and then – held up in front of his dauntless eyes – he kissed the blood from them, drew circles in the air, blew the kiss to Dade, who reached out fruitlessly for his friend, as Tomasz fell hard from the side of the shelf and into the misty forever below. 
Dade watched as the man fell into utter, impenetrable darkness, sure as the day was long the man did not stop smiling the entire way down.

Now, of course, Anders too was dead.

 

By far the most painful death for Dade, beside Tomasz and Anders, had been the one that was to the grip of cold from the mountain itself, grasping deep and freezing the man as he tried to get through the crevasse. 
The mountain was alive, it was inarguable.
It’s breath was a flash-freezing gust of deathly cold air, that turned anything in its path into statues freezing the flesh, blood and sinew as though a man was made of marble. 

The man it claimed had been caught in a deep explosion of air from the core of the mountain, a gasp of breath from the belly of the beast. The man was caught mid-sentence and hand upon the rock, one foot forward and the other resting upon the small jutting pillar, reaching to push forward over the ice-step – a look of bewildered surprise and a hint of sudden stabbing pain. His face froze in rictus and open-mouthed confusion.

This was Dade’s father, Alexander.

Dead in mid-step, mid-sentence as the cold dropped further in temperature and literally froze the man in motion. He fell forward and his arm had shattered into tiny fragments, flash-frozen flesh splintering across the glacial shelf.
One such jagged and deadly piece ricocheting into Dade’s cheek, jutting out like a whisker, plucked fast and leaving a pucker of red which quickly froze to a scabbed pearl to his skin. Under his eye, the scar resembling a red, crimson tear – dropping form his deep, penetrating blue eyes. 

He gave his father one last lingering look, a moment of silence before he muttered a muted, quiet prayer, one recited by the Spyrites generations past by bedsides of the sick and dying, incanted over gravestones of recently passed relatives, he drew the circle in the air curtly in front of him with his thumb and blew a final kiss to the fragments which were once his fathers body, before he turned and pulling his scarf up high and tight, pushed on through the crevasse with Anders in tow.

However, now? 
Now he was alone. 

The town of Gates Forge and the Shuttered Veil all that separated him from his final escape, that kept him from the lush green fields of the Glades of Gamaliel and the winding path to Brill and the hidden brothers of the Black Spyre, the true Spyrites and the broken road that lead to the golden shore of Sisterly Castele – three thousand miles east, but so close and warm in his mind.

From seven to one.
Daedalus Elan Mackenzie had survived despite all odds stacked against him.

He would prevail because of - not despite of - his fallen comrades sacrifice.
He would live…

 

III. The Shuttered Veil. 

Standing from the northern coastline of Dahl’s Port to the southerly edge of Pike’s Smithe separating the Capital from the Isolated Peninsula and exiling the last remnants of the Inmates of Castele Isolaire to the cold winds of the southern Gordon Sea stands the bewildering and imposing feat of industrial engineering called the Shuttered Veil.
Fifty feet high and made from black root timber from the Eldar trees of the Forest of Underwood, reinforced with iron from the smithy’s of the Jagged Mountain and Gates forge; the Shuttered Veil was built to keep the capital safe from the wild tribes of the Spyre and protect the President and his Army during the time of the terrible civil war that dragged the land into horror and bloodshed not thirty years before. It now separated the righteous from the dregs of the land, still roaming the world despite the best efforts of the Capital War Machine lead by the President – Calvin Bagshaw. 

            Sixty Thousand pairs of hands went into the construction of the wall. Carpenters, blacksmiths, engineers, builders and slaves each. 
Twenty six thousand never lived to see the finished veil, taken by accidents, imprisonment or falling under the whip and hoof of the Pikes Guardia, under orders from the mouth of Bagshaw himself.
The largest structure in Gamaliel history had separated Pike from the bulk of the rest of the country and though the guns and swords had been rested on hooks and stands and cabinets and the civil war had been over for a generation, the old wounds still bled sorely and the Capital under Calvin Bagshaw -  Marauder of Isolaire, the Butcher of Brill – remembered as much for his treachery against the Order of Black and his annihilation of Royal family in Sisterly Castele and Spearepont. Now dubbed President of all of Gamaliel, protector of the faith…
What little of it remained, twisted and perverted by the capital and Bagshaw himself.

 

In the east the strongholds of the twins, and in the south, the isolated peninsular and its lonely, mad, deluded citizens.
Whilst the cities maintained their pre-war statuses, what was left of the once proud native religion of the Black Monks, and later the Order of the Knights of Brill, was now largely absent and scattered as an influence. Enclaves of free monks were found here and there living in quiet fear of the capital
Enemies of the capital were tortured to the point of insanity or executed to stop their rampage and madness. Gamaliel’s native people, the Black Monks were now hermits and silent pitiful shards of the past, rarely seen, practicing the Black in secret meetings and shadows, away from public eyes and ears, their number dwindled to no more than a few hundred. The defeated Soldier order of Knights of the Black Monastery now no more than rumour and legend, kept locked in darkened tombs. Imprisoned in the broken asylum of Castele Solitare, to the deep south of the capital, the most dangerous and influential of the Knights – those who escaped Bagshaw’s gallows were still long rumoured and whispered publicly - never denied or confirmed by the capital – to be dead, were secretly locked away in the Castele Isolaire prison, on the Isolated peninsular, the wind and the blight of illness and madness taking them one by one.

Those that survived the madness, the illness and infirmity, those who stayed strong and kept faith cast beady, vengeful eyes across the tides and waves of the Stein Sea. Toward the Garrisons and the Guards of the port defenses, dreaming quietly of revenge and retribution – of blood and honour and the war thirty years past. 

Characters with stories yet to be told watched and waited for the moment to make their entrance and influence upon our story.
Steely eyes were hungry and braying for the light of darkness.  
Waiting in the gloom.
Hoping for the night.

The Veil bore down heavy on the land, a shadow cast wide and heavy.
Where it met the southern edge of the land, and the northern tip of the peninsular, the timber wall became useless in contrast to the thick, mountainous ruin that pierced the land and rose into the skies.

The low mountains rippled in a line like a fractured and deadly spine for four hundred miles down the peninsular, inside these mountains was nothing except death and horror. Creatures lived here spoken only of in fairy tale and folk tale, horrendous beasts that spat disease and fire and scorched flesh from bone.

At the southern coast at the final death-throes of the mountain range, hewn from the rock itself, was Castele Isolaire, no guards here. 

The inmates literally running the asylum. 

 

Within its walls there was no possibility of escape.
Impossible thanks to the vicious indigenous animals and the acrid deadly air that surrounded the coast from the iron deposits that rusted and poisoned the water and the skies.
Completely self sufficient, anything needed for survival cultivated within the grounds, the Castele was a fortress, sanctuary and prison in one.

Guardia watched from their observatory in the north, and from the western coast of Spearepont three hundred miles off of the poisoned shore of Isolaire. 
But nothing was seen. Silent and ominous, it was a barren horror.

Signs of life almost entirely absent.
But it existed, of a sort and fashion.
Of that you can be sure. 

Richard Cadogan was king here.
His cell a throne room of insanity and solitary thought.
His mind and eyes forever trained upon the walls, waiting for his sign.

 

His silent sentinel guard never ending. 

The Shuttered Veil may have cut the world in two - however - like anything made from materials of the land it was subject to the same laws and nature of the land from which it came.
And in Gamaliel Magic was very real and it wanted to be used.
No matter what Bagshaw said or did…

Magic existed and was looking for a master.

Whilst Cadogan sat in lonely seclusion, waiting for his sign, other Knights were stirring. 
The Black awoken in their world.
Dade Mackenzie, lone survivor of the escape from Castele Solitare, a brother of the Knights of Brill. Our hero in this – the beginning – was one such master.

He had magic in him that needed release.
No matter how tall or foreboding the Veil may claim to be.

Magic found a way to be taller and stronger and much, much more powerful. 

IV: The Coast and The Ghost.

Heavy footed, Nathaniel trudged the sandy dunes of the shoreline with his mind drowning in questions, some he had answers to, some he could not fathom nor was prepared to ask out loud.
His neck throbbed with a heavy pulsing anxiety, he rubbed it absently clasping the skin tightly, massaging himself to try and do something that would loosen the muscle and the deep rooted pain, nothing worked. 

            The waves crashed hard onto spiteful rocks that jutted out of the water five hundred feet or so from the beach. The sound was like rolling thunder echoing across the arched beachhead.
Nathaniel collapsed heavy on the grassy ledge that overlooked the whole beach, he stared out over the rippling water and smiled weakly. 

Despite the weight on his mind, despite the heaviness on his heart – Nathaniel was, by his very nature, a happy man; warm spirited and humorous, he rarely had a bad word cross his lips, always ready with quip or joke to alleviate the mood. The smile was more a shadow of his character than a genuine line of mirth or happiness.

It was a smile of a doomed man slowly finding solace in the knowledge he would soon face the gallowsman, soon have fate’s rope fastened snugly to his throat.  

            Nathaniel Bagshaw, General of Pike’s Army – older brother of the butcher president, the marauder of Isolaire, The most hated man of Gamaliel’s green and pleasant land. Nathaniel sat and watched the crashing waves roll in hard and batter the rocks, he idly watched as the lighthouses beaming, spinning torch reflected off the waters, off of the grass momentarily lit as if daylight had washed the ground and as it flashed candid and sharp into his own eyes. He slugged down some of the fire whiskey he had bartered from the Sisterly Castele’s kitchens, bribing the guards of the pantry and the galley to fill his flask, paying in coin and secret. Skip-stepping out the Castele’s gates smiling to the guards as he did, whistling a sweet song of the civil war – a folk ditty championed by the men of Pike’s Tooth and sung in ale halls and breweries. He danced foolishly up the knoll toward the coast and when he was out of sight of the gates and guard, the dance ended as spontaneously as it had begun, instead of a two step shuffle he trudged lonely and morose through the sandy dunes to his favoured spot to drink his wares and sob at the memories of the baying dead clawing at his mind from those bloody days, and to drink a toast to the Bosons locker.

Every night exactly the same.
If not with flask, he would come with some booty to dull his mind and quiet his demons. It made no odds.  

Tonight, he stared out and whistled quietly the song of “Underwood sweet, Underwood Slow” raising his flask high, and blew a kiss to the waves, where deep below his son and wife were waiting, their ship long since swallowed by the Gordon’s waters. 

“Under the bowed green leaf my love

I shall met thee fair and sweet
In Underwood we make our meet
to Underwood we will go…

Oh, Underwood Sweet and Underwood Slow
The land of green and hue

In Underwood forest I meet my love.
And together to God we’ll go…”

He delicately clawed the fine grey strands of hair that fell heavy around his face back over his ear, he winced back the sadness the song conjured in him, the songs he sang at his sons crib-side, smiling broad and lovingly at his doting wife as he did so. Brittle eyed. He gulped down the fire whiskey.  A rush of blood to his throat, his cheeks burned red for a second and he shook the warmth down to the depth of his bones. 

As he looked out over the sea, he caught the teasing flash of the lighthouse on something fast approaching the rocks, the dark shadow of a galleon cast wide on the grey and tumultuous waves, the rocking motion of a timber ship careening into the cove and straight into the teeth of the Gordon’s rocks.
No lights on the ship, meaning it was a pirate vessel or a trafficker’s ark, Nathaniel watched in horror as he realised the horrendous and sudden fate this ship had coming. The waves were a deep rich green, the water was folding in hard and heavy, the ship was so dark, so black – timber from some dark forest oiled up and stealth-like, one minute invisible on the wide open sea, the next moment as haunting as an apparition, ominous and out of control, caught on the Gordon’s rip. 

Nathaniel was on his feet and ready, his instinct taking over before he knew himself what to do, his mind numb and hazy, his body – however – was alert and coiled spring-like and already pounding down the knoll toward the shore, his flask spinning errantly from his hand and jangling empty and dead on the ledge.

 

Ankle deep.
      Knee deep.
      Waist deep - into the water.

All around him already washing ashore the debris of the hull, the broken remnants of the galleon, empty smashed boxes pouring weak and rotten provisions into the grey and green waters; bodies of dead children and men, women clinging limply and tied into woolen jumpers and blankets, vast materials ripped shredded from the mast and sails.

And among it all, in the flotsam and jetsam of the wrecked ship, nothing moved.
No breaths taken, no chests rising and falling, weak or strong or anywhere in between… 
Seemingly nothing.
Nathaniel stood, cold waters crashing icy and painfully against his chest and all around him were the bodies of the dead.

All bar one. 

A slither of hull washed close, a ripped green and white flag, caught in ropes and shreds of sail, one hand lazily submerged, hair lank and wet against cheek - but alive, somehow alive, was Agnetha.

Nathaniel pounded through the waters, submerging himself twice, falling over the wooden debris under the depths, re-emerging with his long silver hair clung strangled to his face and throat, his beard long and grey now wet and pointed like the devils own into a sharp point.
He reached the woman, grabbed her arm and over his shoulder he bore her to shore. There they collapsed in the sand, of Coves beach and away from those icy, devastated waters.

            He breathed air into her lungs, massaged her chest, breathed twice more and the woman gagged a cold, piercing lungful of water into the air, an arch of liquid splashing violently onto her chest and the beach’s lapped white sands, followed by a heave of vomit and a series of barked, husky coughs.
She opened her eyes wearily; focusing in on the face of Nathaniel who lay next to her, his chest rising and falling heavily and fast, his clothes now saturated and caked in sand.
He looked at Agnetha with surprise and smiled, at first light and weak, soon wider, toothier, before he rolled on his back still gasping and wheezing,
He slapped the beach with both hands and gave a full uproarious belly laugh into the black night sky.
It was a sad sound, dressed in the finery of mirth, but lacking any heart.
It was a celebration, tinged with darkness.
Mourning the dead, but celebrating this one soul saved.

Agnetha looked at this strange, silver haired man, dressed in military finery, the navy blue of the Pike Army, the Grey bars of a general on his arm, his boots sand covered and his hands digging greedily into the white grains, laughing, with tears in his eyes, a sadness in his smile…
            
Her savior.
She laughed as well. It was equally as sad. She reached a hand out and touched his hand and gently patted it in appreciation.
He clung to the fingers and squeezed them in acknowledgement.
And they lay there, both breathing heavily into the night sky, their breath dancing in misty clouds before them, dissipating on the wind as quickly as it appeared.

She happy to be alive; Nathaniel happy just to feel something - for once - other than the cold embrace of loneliness.

The cold water lapping the shore.
Debris and bodies soon following it home.

The coast was dark.

 

The bodies eerily pulled to the hungry shore by the slush of the waves. 
Donning their cap and winking toward the audience for their brief return to the stage.


 

16 Years Ago.
 

I. An Invitation West.

Deep lumbering breaths were drawn down. Cool night air seeped through the vented windows, and flooded the hallway with a fine sheen of damp mist.
Walls glistened with the moist airs touch, and the granite floor of the west wing of the Sisterly Castele shone like a diamond-strewn ribbon.
            The moon was still in the sky, but now muted as the first teasing tendrils of sunlight crept out over the horizon of the glade, that stretched for three hundred miles of unoccupied wilderness before the first signs of the Free Spyre.
The room was coated in a bold purple light as the night gave way to day, and the dawn stretched its weary limbs with a crack and fizzle of lightning far away over the bay of the Gordon, over the deep waters of Bosons locker and the tides that stretched to Mantaray to the east, Alaskeen to the north and beyond.

            Nathaniel nervously chugged and puckered hard on his pipe, and blew plumes of blue smoke from the corner of his mouth as he paced the corridor hallway outside of the guest chambers.
His hand reached to his hip pocket and he took out the silver chained pocket-watch and unclasped the lock to look at the time.
He looked at the door behind him and then back to the watch, and then, retiring the pocket-watch back to its bed in the darkness of his fine Navy blue waistcoat, he took a final coughed toke of his pipe, and exhaled the blue – not unpleasant  - fug one last time, before tapping his pipe on the windows edge, and then the small skirting that fed into the hallway, before he blew the bowl of the pipe clean, and retired this to the pocket of his great jacket.
A rich royal blue with golden bars and finery.

He coughed a final anticipatory cough, and straightening his long silver hair and his jacket, he knocked briskly on the door of the guest chamber before entering his head bowed, and a hand tucked neatly behind his back.

“Milady…” He said upon entering. His free arm sweeping in front of him in a half bow, half grand gesture of arrival.
“How does thee fair, Milady Agnetha?” his voice a gentle and solemn almost-whisper. 

In the far corner of the room, arching into a semi circle of trellised stonework and a beautifully ornate stained glass window bracketing a single clear window was sat, upon fine cushions of many colours, her hair long and a rich mahogany red, Agnetha. The sole survivor of the Brandied Buck.
“General…” she said, a warm timbre shook through her voice, and her cheeks flushed with heat, making them a bright red.
Her soft green eyes glinted in the light, and a thin shaft of red, yellow and green light from the Stain glass reflected on her pale skin.
She smiled to the man who had been her savior, and started to stand, before Nathaniel was advancing his hands ushering her to remain seated.
“Please, Milady. Not on my account. Rest easy, stay seated… I did not mean to intrude your morning…” he looked out of the window, and saw the sun breach the glade and start its journey toward the empty blue sky. His steel blue eyes came alive and his pupils woke dazzled by the view from the chamber.
Agnetha noticed this, as she did everyone who came to the room and saw this window and its vast, panorama.
“I know…” she said, smiling a thin, loving grin. “It really is something else, is it not?” her accent was a clipped, far eastern one, it had poetry and verve in its tongue, and it floated and lingered on the air as a song would that had direct access to your heart.
“In my country, we have little in the way of such views. Mostly just stone and smoke, steeple and pyre.” And at the final word she looked down, her green eyes breaking with a teary shimmer.
Nathaniel reached a hand out and cupped her chin, and bent his knee to meet her face to face, crouching.
“Now, Now, Milady Agnetha…” and he wiped the tear from her cheek with his soft skinned, but no less rugged thumb, which then bent into his palm gently and with pathos. Agnetha could smell his pipe tobacco and the salt of her tear on his hand, she raised her head softly to look at him, and she smiled again, the crook of her mouth, the very corner raising a quarter of an inch to show she admired his touch.
“I am sorry General…”
“Nathaniel… I have said countless times, Milady. My name is Nathaniel.”
“I…” Agnetha swallowed lightly, and gave a huffed curt laugh, and flapped her arms to compose herself, wiping the cheek herself and looking at the tear in her hand.
“I am sorry, Nathaniel…” she coughed a single full stop of a cough.
“It is alien to think of Home so warmly and nostalgic when it was so cold and so broken and brutal… But given the fate of the Brandied Buck, and the terrible tragedy that brought me into your life, I am sometimes overcome when I think of my life that was.”
She looked at the window, a smile once again overcoming the sorrow, and then to Nathaniel, she took his hand and lay a solitary kiss on the back of his palm.
“I am thankful for everything you have done. Truly.”
Nathanial smiled back, and then enjoyed a moment of his hand in hers, turned the gesture round and returned the kiss to her hand.
He stood and bowed, one hand behind his back, and a leg forward and the rear leg bent, he presented himself again in his finest military curtsy.
“Milady. You need never thank me. Your smile is thanks enough for a lifetime.”
And Agnetha gave a girlish laugh and wiped her eyes again, and faintly curtsied back from her window.
“You charm me sir.” She whispered, her cheeks fresh with the apple of a blush again.
“And you me, for allowing an old man the occasion to flirt so fancily.”
They both laughed. Nathaniel now blushed as well; he enjoyed the warmth across his face. His beard bristled with a charge of glee and happy static.
“I have come to bid you a temporary farewell, however, Milady. Word arrived this morning via messenger that I am needed west and have to leave with haste. I could not bare the idea of doing so without bidding you a farewell first…”
Agnetha did stand at this.
In the month that she had been in the Sisterly Castele, she had seen Nathaniel a handful of times, enjoyed a meal with him and his honour guard in the banquet hall, and had been walked around the grounds of the two castles – separated by a hundred miles of fortified coastline and a garrison of small villages and townships that made up the vale of Sisterly on the eastern edge of Gamaliel. 

            She had seen the waters where her brother now lay silent and still as a citizen of the Boson, where Nathaniel had half commented, half joked that he would be reserved a seat at his wife’s table without question if he was anything like Agnetha. A comment that had made him smile and choke back a glottal of sadness, and which came with an immediate apology for being so crass in such tragedy. Agnetha had waved it away, understanding the gallows humour and the reactionary way he had referred to the Boson and the Gordon at all times.
His heart clear as day whenever he had to talk of it and the tragedies it almost hungrily created.

Agnetha had seen the casteles and the gardens, the vale and the edge of the glade. She had seen the towering Black monastery ruins that were a feature of the North-east horizon, with its monolithic spyre and chapel, as well as the smaller, less impressive city town of Monkston – through the northern Casteles viewing mirrors.
Three hundred miles or so to the north, the mirrors painted them in delicate but partly magnified fashion, that you could see the main architectural delights, but as if peering into a cloud of the past.

She had seen all of this by his side, and come to admire this older gentlemen warrior a great deal - not romantically; she was sure - but in a familial, fatherly way. Both her and Gustav’s parents had long since been dead, victims of the revolution in Yanayev.  Taken down by the Great War and famine in the east.
Indeed, it had long been the seeding of their fatal decision to flee west and find succor at the breast of Gamaliel.
The fabled new world.
Nathaniel was the ideal of everything good she had heard about this land.
Bold, honourable, fierce tempered but fair.
She held him in such high regard not only for saving her life, but also for his manner and his sweet, gentlemanly way.
And in return, he had grown fond of her – despite knowing that should his brother find out about their closeness then questions would be asked and answers demanded.

He had already received many about the boat, about the victims, about the flag, tattered and torn and washed ashore around the girl. 

The custodians of the casteles had reported back west as well they should, Nathaniel had not even thought to ask that they hold off on the messengers. Kashor and Bendle, his cousins and wardens of the two Sisterly fortress casteles were loyal to a fault – despite what they lacked in intelligence and guile, they were still devoted soldiers. Reporting the wreckage was an obvious and correct response, considering how many ships had been seen and lost to the Boson and its brutal, unpredictable waves.
Still. Nathaniel had wished he could bring the girl to health without the constant barrage of queries from the man he had taken the journey East to escape.

President Calvin Bagshaw did not like mysteries and hated the unknown.
Had this not been the reason for his hatred of the Black and the Brill?

Mayhap it was…

But that was story for another time, was it not?

 

            Nathaniel shook his head silently and gently, as if to shake the image of his stern faced and serious brother from his mind.
His face haunted enough of his waking life, to dwell on those haunted, paranoid brown eyes staring down on him, stripping his body layer by layer until he had scoured the soul for that which he was obsessing on…
Nathaniel shivered without meaning and turned on his heel and walked toward the door, leaving Agnetha stood, a gentle confusion awash on her face.
“Milady…” he said, as he gracefully faced her, his back to the door.
“Until we next meet, may the Winds save thee and the heavens keep thee safe.” He gave his elaborate bent knee curt bow again and looked up as he was arched at the lowest bend. He caught her eye and gave a smile, a single strand of silver hair tumbled into his face, framing his right eye.
Agnetha smiled, he looked dashing and mischievous. 
A handsome old salt.
She returned his bow with a curtsy of her own, then sat back in the window and turned her head away from him. His smile faltered at first, then he gave a soundless gentle laugh as he realized the girl was crying.

The door shut behind him as he left the chamber.
Paused, silently. Fixed his hair and jacket, and with a hand upon his ornate swords hilt, the other on his gun belt buckle, he marched toward the stables where his steed, Ambrose, was already garnered and buckled in his rich chestnut coloured bridle and saddle waiting for him.
To the west…
To his brother.
For what? - Nathaniel did not know, except that whatever was waiting for him was making him anxious and sick all at once.

Regardless…
Westward bound he was.
Duty borne, loyal to a fault.

II. From Forge to Forest. 

            The Jagged Mountains had taken their toll on the weary, broken body of Dade. His left foot was a toe short of its full count, his right hand a finger short from the index fingers first knuckle. His hearing in the right ear was less than half its previous and normal power. And his right knee was damaged to the point of constant locking and cramp.
His body had bore him across two hundred miles of angry, hateful permafrost and ice storms that could strip flesh from bones in lazy and lightning quick fashion, landscapes had taken hundreds of lives in their time, coughing and spitting bones out to crevasses and cracks in the earths skin like a cat hacking up a hairball.
Ambivalent and violent.

Along the way he had lost seven of his kin and kind. 
Not least of which his own father – Alexander Finnigan Mackenzie, the former Lieutenant of the guard of the Pikes garrison militia. A former soldier of the Free Pike army, a member of Calvin Bagshaw’s inner circle during the time of the war and the feuds.
Banished and imprisoned for his belief in the Black and his ties to the Knights of Brill, to the book of the Wolf and the bowing of his head toward the grave of the Alpha. 

            Dade had watched his father tumble and shatter – as the frost took him body, mind and soul – as a token and tithe for the safe passage of his own son through the Jagged Mountain pass.

Witnessing his father explode in flesh and blood coloured ice splinters, picking a fragment from his own cheek, which now was marked with a single teardrop scare, red and raised under the eye. Like Dade was permanently shedding a bloody tear of sadness in remembrance of the man. 

            The surviving son had carried on, lonely and delirious, travailing the fifty miles of hellish and barren white terror until he had made it to the small town of Gates Forge that bridged the mountains to the garrison city-town of Pikes Smithe; the armorer and manufacturing center of the capital. The burning, torch lit fortress that fed the sitting army of Pike’s Garrison, Pike’s Tooth and the watchtowers of the Shuttered Veil day and night. 
A place Dade absolutely and totally wanted to avoid unless absolutely necessary. 

            As he made his retreat from the shadow of the mountains, he had found the traitors marker and left his sacrifice of a strangled Rabbit upon the stone slab, worn circular with wind and water and left under the bough of a black cherry tree. By the traditions of the land, any Free Spyrite or Cleric of Brill who had made themselves a home on this side of the veil had to take him in when he was in need. 
He retreated to the cave he had found in the sparse woods on the very outskirt of the Forge, and there, less one finger, one toe and battered, broken and wretchedly ravaged by the mountain’s misery – Dade slept. His dreams of shattering glass mannequins and scarecrows, of bursting black explosions of Ravens and Magpies, of hawks and Eagles snatching the carrion birds from the sky and slamming them shattering against the side of giant wooden beams that made the Veil. Of his fathers last gasping breath before falling. Of Anders – bleeding out from the horrendous gash from his fall.
He dreamt of two brilliant green eyes and a flash of red hair like fire cutting a whiplash crack through the sky. Of Silver and Steel blue, of red river water and the perfect emerald green of the grass that grew across the glade and up the quiet and welcoming bowed fields of the Brill.

He slept restless and feverish.
A day? Two?
He would never be able to tell you – not when he woke, and not later when he eventually made his way on the next stage of his journey – but he would forever remember the fever dream until his dying day. 

            When he did awake, it was to a warm hand on his temple, and muted brown eyes looking down upon him. The man who knelt above him put a strong hand on Dade’s mouth, and with the ungloved rough but warm hand that had been gauging his temperature, lightning fast, a knife had ben grabbed from the snow patched grass by Dade’s head and placed neat and razor sharp to his throat. The man who had found him leant in quietly, his scarf covered mouth had a small patch of ice coagulated on the fabric before his lips, from where the condensation had built and flash frozen in this intemperate climate 
“I am going to ask you three questions.” The man whispered, his voice a shiver of threat, barely audible, but for the fact it was direct into Dade’s ear.
“Answer them true, and you will have sanctuary. Answer falsely – and I will know the difference betwixt the two – and my knife will feast greedy upon your blood. You ken me lad?”
Dade raised his eyebrows in a query of being able to speak.
The Man, whose knee was now buried hard into Dade’s sternum, knife deftly, dangerously placed on his throat – nodded and gently raised his hand from the mouth, whilst applying further tender and deadly pressure to the blade.
“Was that question one?” Dade smiled. 

Bright, lively, genuinely.

The man looked at him, his free hand pulled down the scarf from his mouth, to reveal a hair lipped, tooth revealing scar, which ran from the side of his nose to his chin. It painted a fine smile on the man’s lips, one that sat permanent and static in position, regardless the mood.
His eyes closed to a thin, penetrating glare. He leant forward again, so he was nose-to-nose with Dade.

The knife did not falter, move or waver.

“Aye.” The man whispered. And he smiled wider.
Lesser men – those who were distracted and sullied by fear, those who were wooly headed with thoughts of treachery and deceit, would have been gagging in a pool of their own blood now. Their throats slit in a wide gash as fine and thin as gossamer silk, failing the test at question one.
The man could not help but spare a smile for the vain, calm arrogance of this boy.
“Second question.” And he slapped Dade’s cheek heartily, leaving five red welts from thick, warm fingers.
“What copper turns upward, splitting emeralds and sapphire in two?”
The man stared at Dade’s magnificent brown eyes, no movement, no quiver, no movement of fear or of confusion. 
The eyes were a perfect chestnut brown lake of stillness and silence, then, all at once they lit up in a glow of nostalgia and memory, a glorious shimmer of life erupting from the iris.
“The Rusted Braid, parting the Glade and piercing – like a copper dagger – the clear crystal waters of the River Comadre. Named after the Alphas bride.”
The man loosened his knees hard push into Dade’s chest, but the knife did not move – not an inch, not a fraction.
“Final question… I like you boy, t’would be a desperate shame to bleed you now after being so good at the game. Would it not?”
He smiled down, his split mouth showing again that toothy grimace of faux joy.
His eyes nodded where his head stood still in steely regard of Dade.
“A shame indeed, but the blood would be dutiful sacrifice to the Glade forever free.” And Dade closed his eyes and waited for the knife to finish its job.
A beaded droplet of blood had frozen from the edge of the steel pushed hard and firm into his tender skin.
“Dutiful sacrifice to the Glade forever free, says you?” The man repeated, probing the eyes again for a shiver of doubt.
“Three questions, says you. Three answers says I, you ask me four and expect my reply, silence is all I can offer now my brother. And a willing throat to feed the earth.”
And Dade raised his head gentle and slow against the blade.
“Cut true or cut it out Brother. The day be wasting.”
The man leant in closer, nose-to-nose again, split mouthed smile wider than ever… 

“Cut true or cut it out he says…” the man laughed, spitting a wad of yellow phlegm against the ground by Dade’s head.
“Then blade goes back to its bed once more, and cut’s it out I do.”
The man sprung to his feet in a bound, sheaving his knife as he did, his right hand came down to offer Dade a way to his feet and with an almighty pull, Dade rose and was enveloped in a huge manly embrace.
The man bear-hugging him close and laughing heartily and loud.

“Three questions, three answers – and all as true as an arrow through the wolf’s heart, so they were. A truer man I couldn’t hope to meet!”
He laughed again, and holding Dade at arms length, both hands on Dade’s shoulders, he took measure of the boy and then pulled him in for another huge embrace.
Dade allowed it and patted his new friends shoulders gently and fraternally.
“Thank you brother… I am glad I entertain you so.”
“Entertain he says!” The man said, throwing his arm toward the sky and turning toward the small village not 500 hundred metres down the hill.
He laughed loudly and gestured toward the trees – Firs, Spruces and some barren, skeletal ash trees – and laughed out loud once more.
“Entertain he says!” and he laughed once more.
“The puzzles we employ to keep our secrets safe, they are nix without the knowledge of the land beyond the veil sir, and ye and my kin knows it well.”
He dropped his arms to his side and the look in his eye was no longer jovial and no longer welcoming, but steadfast and full of confident concentration.
He stared at Dade, and he gave a mirthless half smile.
“Had ye not known, me and mine would have buried you in swaddling garter and thrown you to the mercy of the Hungry Chasm yonder…” 
He pointed to the gorge, that split through the Jagged Mountain pass, not half a mile from the small jutting lesion where Dade had made good his escape.
“There to wallow in the void and think of your treachery.”
He leant into Dade once more, and grabbed him by both shoulders. A clear head above Dade he stood, imposing and giant, his arms were like tree branches, and his body was wrapped heavy in pelts and furs, but even so, you could see he was clearly an Alpha of his tribe, of this village.
Dade looked down the hill, and from behind each tree stepped younger, shorter men – still as daunting and strong looking as the man who had quizzed him, each had a bow with arrows trained on him, all but one younger man - 19 or 20 if he was a day – who had two revolvers, muted matt black metal barrels and mother of pearl handles. A fine line of gold ringed the barrel in four circles.
Dade recognized them immediately as his grandfathers’ guns.
“Tell me sir. Your name, and how yon man-child gained such fancy weapons?”
Dade looked at the tall man before him, and then pointed a single finger down the hill toward the gun man.
“Because I reckon – and pardon my manners so soon after meeting – that they ain’t his. You ken?”  
The tall man gave his widest, most gruesome smile – looked at the gun man, and back toward Dade, and he held a hand sharp and hard against Dade’s face, pulling him close, his other hand pulled Dade’s eye lids open, and he peered deep into the chestnut brown eye.
“What makes you reckon so?” he said, spitting a wad of the yellow gunk from his throat once again.
“What makes ye so bold with your mouth?”
Dade smiled at the man, knowing the time for gestures and grand talk was through, he placed a hand on the mans, and pried the hand from his face, took half a step forward so he was now peering straight into the tall mans eyes, and his smile did not move as he said the thing the man was waiting for.
 

“Because those are Mackenzie guns. And that boy is no Mackenzie. This world is in short supply of Mackenzie blood now. Last check and count ain’t nothing but eight pints left on the soil of Gamaliel. And all eight are in my veins, give or take what your greedy blade and those bastard mountains took as token and tithe.”
His smile disappeared.
The man’s hand dropped from his face, and his smile faded as much as the scar would allow. He took a step back, his head dropping an inch or two in reverence and honour – and looking back over his shoulder he raised his arm with open palm extended to the men by the trees and patted the air to lower weapons and stand easy. As he did, he took one knee, and beckoned forward the boy with guns.
Dade watched this all play out, not moving, not speaking – just silent witness to this shift in power. This tilt in balance of the moment.
The tall man took the guns and beckoned the boy take a knee also, and raised his hands open palm, gun belt in offering.
“Your grandfather said you’d come. Said you’d be worse for wear but lacking in any airs and graces – you’d be humble and answer the questions… Have to admit, di’nt think you’d be as tame as you were, not with the blood you carry, but I’m a man put in his place. Forgive the impertinence sir. These times they are dark and rusty, trust is in short and narrow supply.”
Dade put a single hand on the guns, and his fingers closed around the palm of the tall man, clenching gently. The tall man for his part smiled wider, toothy and bright, despite the scars.
“The dawn is but a lonely night away brother. And the wolves are dead or sleeping.”
“The wolves are dead or sleeping.” The tall man repeated.
“I’m Daedalus Elan Mackenzie, son of Alexander, son of Ephraim, knight of Brill, bearer of the black. And I have a mission, now tell me brother, how in the nine hells do I get to the Forest of Underwood, and over that bastard veil?”
The tall man looked over his shoulder, and toward the edge of the woods, nothing much more than a ringlet of trees seven or eight deep, but thick and brambulous, beyond which the stretch of timber and iron that was the Shuttered veil stood.

“Beyond the veil is it?” he smiled.
“Beyond the veil it is, brother mine.” Dade replied, the guns now tight around his waist, the left-hand holster slightly lower to his thigh, loose on his hip.
“The black has called, and I would answer it. I am headed home.”

The tall man smiled wider at this, and gave a short-coughed laugh, Dade laughed with him as a reply. The tall man turned to the men scattered down the hill.

“He answers the call of the black.”

The men all looked at each other in stunned silence, soon, curious whispers and chatter spread amongst the dozen or two of them

“The black…”
“Calling?”
“The call has gone out…?
“We thought the Wolves were sleeping…?”

The tall man silenced them with a raised hand.
As if to answer them all, and quieten the final query, he raised a fist with a single digit raised to the sky.

“The wolves are stirring my brothers… The wolves are stirring.” 

            The heavy-footed, leather booted stomp of Calvin could be heard throughout the corridors of the manse. The stewards, servants and day-men and women of the presidential home were on constant state of alert for when his unique strut was heard around the building. 

            Calvin had a limp that meant his walk was a clumsy, unsubtle gait. His hip swiveled beyond his own control in a way that made him look like he was pomping and preening like some Peacock. He would stand legs shoulder length apart in a way that made him look like he was constantly on alert, if only so as to alleviate the ache in his pelvis, and his hands would almost always be crossed behind his back, his chin high and his chest pushed out and stern. 

A most presidential stance, but one borne of necessity rather than desire.
Employed either way in a powerful gesture each time he struck the pose.
 

            The President was awake, and from today's stomping, he was unhappy, bordering on a form of anger. His feet thudded on the wooden beams and floorboards, dust shaking below floors to warn further of his approach; Tinderman, his valet, often assumed this was a deliberate act on the presidents part to give himself an air of vulnerability, despite his constant acts of aggression that would scream he had none.
Give the little people enough to feel sorry for him, and not always fear, and then he could surprise further when he notched up the horror.
 

The horror.
Something that Calvin Bagshaw was a master and artiste in. 

 Tinderman looked at the sprinkle of dust shake free from the Burnt oak rafter and then to the faces of the staff and Day men. He stood up slowly from his seat, a wide armed wooden rocker he would sit in peeling and slicing apples he would eat from the blade of his silver dagger. A remnant from the civil war.
Biting hard down on the succulent white flesh, peeling the green skin off in fine silky ribbons, he would later discard to the birds and the briar.
“Come along. Jump to it. The President is awake, so let us get started. Today after all is a new day.” 

He clapped twice more, in startling volume, each one like a retort of gunfire, a burst of Cloud ripping thunder.
To a maid who was stood in the doorway of parlour hallway, leading to the kitchens and the dry-store.
“Girl? Are you new?”
The girl smiled weak and thinly. She nodded nervously at Tinderman, and curtsied awkwardly, as if she had never actually done it in practice, only seen it and executed what she interpreted to be the bow.
Tinderman looked at her up and down, and spun his finger in the air in a circle, illustrating for her to spin around. She did so - 
“Slower.” He barked. Orders came easy to him, his awareness of his power over these helpers was clear.
The girl span slowly, holding out the hem of her petty coat and skirt.
“Come here.” He commanded.
“Let me se you…” and he roughly held her face, a lock of rusty red hair fell into the space between her eyes, and rested on the bridge of her nose.
Her eyes were a murky blue, with a hazel corona around the iris.
Her lips a juicy and luscious berry red. Fat and thick.
“Open your mouth. “ he said, directly, lacking any subtlety.
The girl did so, and he looked inside her jaw, observing the teeth and the tongue, the roof of her mouth and the throat, as far and as best he could.
“Breathe out” he said, little more than a hushed but awful whisper.
The girl did, and Tinderman smiled, pleasantly surprised.
“You smell of lemonseed. Good girl. Though, I hope you have not been taking from the store – or worse – the garden.”
“No, sir.” The girl said weakly, her accent a gentle southern twang, the unmistakable slur and charm of the Free Spyre.
“I grow it and Gingroot in a small window box in my chamber.”
Tinderman smiled, holding the girl’s head in his rough coffee coloured hands, he looked deep into her eyes, and then ran his hand through her lush, thick hair, smiling widely. 
“How industrious of you.” He walked around the girl, his fingers tangled in her hair, letting the red locks tangle and fall from his fingertips. As he was at her back, Tinderman caught the eye of the head housekeeper Feona in the doorway of the kitchen, watching silently upon the Valets examination and interrogation of the new maid. He smiled widely at the woman; his mouth full of yellowed tombstone teeth. “Too many for his head,” she thought “Like an Ocean Pike.”
She watched still, not moving, even when the man grabbed hold of the maid’s backside firmly, his mouth and rancid breath deliriously close to her ear, him leaning over her shoulder.

“Do you know where the Presidents chamber is?”
The girls face was open mouthed in shock as Tinderman grabbed her ass in both hands, roughly squeezing.
A tear rolled down her face, and she swallowed hard and panicked in shameful flush of nerves.
“I… I…” She stuttered the words, unable to spit the final part of the answer out.
“You do.” Tinderman hissed in her ear, his right hand now around her waist, caressing her stomach.
She nodded, her eyes now broken with crystal tears, welling and cracking her vision. They rolled fat and heavy down her face.
“Good.” He walked around the woman, his hands sliding around the fabric of her gown, until they were on her torso, one cupped under the supple small breast, the other on her hip, rough palmed and sweating.
“Be a dear, and go and clean your face in the privy closet, then take the president his morning breakfast. Be fast, be pretty, and be thankful that he – not I – chose you.” both hands now rested cupped under the small, but pert breasts. 
He roughly fingered the under-breast, looking at her with a lascivious smile on his mouth, the hint of his yellow and ugly teeth in the corner of it peering out. 
His hands slid form breast to hip, around the back and then he gave a final painful squeeze of her backside again, before slapping her hard and sending her on her way. 

The slap was fierce, as soon as the contact was made and the whip crack of contact popped on the air, the girl was hurrying toward the kitchen, and past Feona, who gently patted her head, and ruffled the hair as she crossed the way.
Feona looked at Tinderman, who slowly turned and smiled wide and despicably at the woman.
“Good day Feona. All the blessings of the day.” And he gave a fake bow and giggled menacingly, before raising his hands in a hurt gesture of feigned injury.
“What?” he said to her, silence his response.
“What did I do this time?” Nothing but silence back.
“The president wants another of the girls to break in as morning comfort, what he wants he gets. Who are we – us both – to argue?”
Feona looked him up and down and spat heavily on the floor at his feet.
“You are little more than scum and villainy, and ye knows it well.” She hacked the words in a phlegmy hatred.
“All the doors and fates in Gamaliel despise you.”
Tinderman looked at the woman, beaming. He held his chest as though an arrow had pierced his heart.
“My aching heart, that I should upset thee so Feona. Such pity from someone so esteemed in my heart.” And he laughed hard, vicious and cruel.
Feona turned and aimed toward the far stairwell, and crossed the path of the maid returning, her eyes cleaned if somewhat puffy from the tears.
Feona grabbed her arm and looked the girl in the eyes, and squeezed lovingly, maternally on her forearm, red welts appearing under finger tips on the flesh.
“Do not cry. Not once, not ever. He likes when you cry. Do not give the bastard satisfaction. You’ll feel like you won after if you don’t. Do not let the bastard have any power. You understand?” Feona asked the final question with an extra squeeze.
The maid nodded, and smiled a thin, corner-mouth-smile that gave Feona an involuntary shiver.
“I understand Mother.” Mother being what Feona was to all the female staff. 
“Good. Run along and see to your Presidents needs.”
The maid looked her in the eye with a final look of disgusted fear. And Feona nodded slowly, her eyes closed. Her hands left the girls and fell to her side.
The maid picked up the tray with Bagshaw’s breakfast - a pastry, a ramakin of butter, eggs; boiled and cut into slices upon a green leaf garnish, and a slab of meat, bloody and rare – and headed to the stairs where she made the slight footed walk to the Presidential chambers.

Tinderman watched her go.

“Fair thee well, my scullery beauty. Heaven awaits thee there.”
And he laughed. Taking a bite from his apple, sheaving his dagger in his hip scabbard, and walking past Feona, smiling and chuckling as he went his way to the gardens to feed the apple skin to the carrion there.

Feona watched him leave, thinking as she often did of what it would feel like to sheave the dagger in his heart and watch him bleed out, whilst she ate apples of her own. 

            The sisters were starting to lose their magnificent size as Nathaniel rode on into the glade toward the City of Free Spyre. Every galloping, thunderous beat of his horse’s hoof bore him further away from the twin casteles and deeper into the lonely expanse that bridged the distance between the Spyre and Sisterley. 

            Out in the glade there were little pockets of civilization, villages and townships, but nothing larger than a few hundred or so citizens. Gamaliel was a fledgling country – barely eighty years old, carved from the oceans and the mountainous far northern territories by the earthquakes and schisms hundreds of years before. What civilization that existed here before was nearly all but wiped out by plague, sickness and the tumultuous shake of Earth and ocean. 

            Nathaniel had been here his entire life – but for five short years he could remember only in flashes, of the world to the south across the Clement Ocean.
He remembered his parents in glimmers that would invade his dreams. 
Bodies upon the shores of the Isolated Peninsular. 
Beaches full of debris and terror.
The floating dead and devastated wreckage.
So much had the shipwreck of the Brandied Buck brought flushing and washing to the surface of his mind. Of his wife and child being grasped and shaken by the waters of the Gordon, of his mother and father gasping and begging for air as the Clement dragged them down. His hand tightly wound around that of his brother, Calvin, as they clung helplessly to the torn shredded remains of the flag of Union Goderich, the island country one thousand five hundred miles south of shores of Gamaliel. Clung to the side of the broken mast beam, rolling over black waves into the grey sands. 

Nathaniel shook his head.
Eyes clenched shut, the images scorched themselves still for a moment or two longer, before burning into embers and disappearing

He rode on harder and faster into the Glade, kicking his heels firmly to the haunches of Ambrose, who whinnied and huffed, and fleet footed and furious, galloped harder over the soft green turf.  

In the distance stood the shadows of the villages of Edengreen, Hissock and Wiltsh. Further on the city-town of Annabelle, and then the Stony River, which ran for five hundred miles to the Shuttered veil itself and was the easiest and safest road to travel to get from one coast of the Commonwealth to the other. Nathaniel pushed on, his neatly handwritten letter of invitation to the capital tucked into his overcoat pocket tapping gently against his watch, with every hill and divot passed.
He thought about the meeting ahead, looking his brother in the face again after five years of being Lieutenant at arms of the Sisterley Castele, commanding the sitting garrison of soldiers in the eastern coast, guarding them from attacks from pirates and barbarian hordes, always spoken of but never arriving from the far off lands of the far eastern war-torn countries – mentioned in hushed tones in such vilified and hateful ways by the ambassadors of the friendly countries that bridged the sea ways and ocean to offer hands of friendship to the new island nation of Gamaliel.
Borne from the burnt embers of one mans heroism and a tribal indigenous people, all but eradicated by isolation and sickness.
But keepers of magic untold.

Magic that did not exist in more “civilized” societies.

 

The legend of the Alpha, of Wolfshoulder and his bride, of the knights and the Black not so much myth to Nathaniel, having lived through the best and worst of the days, witnessing so many fall to the plague that spread across the native people of this land, and watching his own succumb to the land in other ways that still spun his stomach and made his mind churn as if an inferno was bursting behind his eyes. 

            Gamaliel was a toddler, but learning and growing fast, and with his brother leading from behind his timber and iron wall, the plots and devices in his mind ripe and terrible, the country was one of brutal loneliness and teetering on the brink of sudden and chaotic change. 
Yet, as horrific as his brother could be – as angry, spiteful and petty – he had a visionary’s mind. Science and industry were his obsessions, and in his time   Gamaliel had grown hungry to advance. Steam rose like thick white towers into the sky over Pikes Forge. The garrison of the northern capital was lit by infant electricity, harnessed from the powers of the waves and the waters of Dahl’s tanner – the northern sea. And the capital was hewn from architecture unlike the primitive and dark age forging of brick and mortar in the East, in ways that baffled and confounded the eastern people. 
The country split in two by the veil, keeping the primitives at bay and allowing this industrial war machine to flourish. 

            Kashor and Bendle – the cousins and kin of the brothers Bagshaw, immigrant family carried over black waves from the Union Of Goderich, now sat in command of the Sisterley Castele, a twin each for their loyalty.
Nathaniel was a general of the army alone, no fight or war to ignite his passion or fury, no invading ships from the eastern states oft rumoured navy – none ever seen by western eyes on any horizon, only fatal wrecks of the immigrants escaping the gulags. 
Nathaniel was a soldier without a war, happy in peace and happier still to be away from his younger brother who craved one. 

            Ambrose struck the ground steadfast and sure-footed, and kicked turf behind him at pace, happy to have the space and freedom of the glade under hoof, fresh country air in his nostrils.
The rider and horse followed the thin grey vein of the Eind river, that ran from the edge of northern coast of the Ruins of the Black monastery, and cut through to the town of Edengreen by way of the northern Sister.
The waters were a fast flowing grey mass, crashing against stone and jagged rock, carved like an artery into the green paddocks of the east glade. 

Like much of the commonwealth of Gamaliel the landscape spoke for itself where marker or sign would not. To traverse these lands, one must know the land, and Nathaniel would boast he knew each blade of grass and blossom that bloomed by first name. He struck on toward Edengreen and his first rest stop. An evening of food, entertainment and rest. And if the fates were so happy with him, maybe the warm embrace of a woman’s arms in one of the local hostelry.
A gentleman he was… but a lonely one who (and even though Agnetha did not know his plan this evening, she would agree nonetheless) deserved it as well. 

            Ahead of him he could see the yellow pinpricks of light that heralded the town ahead, and already he could taste the Ale as though it were on his tongue. From Sisters to the veil it would be four days hard ride, six at a leisurely pace – which would not please his brother. If he made it in five, Nathanial would be happy. So, along the way, why not gauge the mood of the citizens in each town and community, all the better to report to his brother and prepare his mind and body for the rigors of the road. 

            Ambrose strode on.
Edengreen was three hours away and waiting. 

* * * 

            “What do you mean they escaped?” 
The contents of the jailer’s desk was scattered heavily across the room, swiftly swept from the huge ash surface in a single effortless gesture.
The grunt of displeasure that accompanied it was one that shook the ground and walls themselves. The three sentries and captain of the Guardia stood in rigid terror of the monstrous man before them, sweat trickled down the nape of the neck of one soldier, another held his hand behind his back to stop the shiver and shake of fear. The captain tried to maintain an air of respectable grace – but his brow was pouring with sweat as he looked on at the huge frame of the lieutenant commander of Pikes Garrison, Hector Eleel, who roared a burst of screamed terror at the desk before flipping it over and into the wall. It smashed hard and crumpled in pieces to the floor.
The captain held back the urge to gulp, but was stopped from the action suddenly by the huge hand of Eleel as it grasped him hard and savagely around the throat and – carrying him off the ground and marching on – slammed the man hard against the far wall a foot or two above the ground, as the captain struggled and choked under the mountainous hand.
“What. Do. You. Mean. Escaped, Captain?” He squeezed harder and the captain’s eyes became a bloodshot silent scream of terror. He idly pawed at the Lieutenant General’s huge hands. 

His legs kicking out in vain.
Two Sentries stared on in shock, the third reached for his weapons hilt, and partially drew the blade before he stopped dead under the swift swung gaze of Eleel.
“You would draw a sword on your commander boy?” he said, the Captain weakly tapping the hand, each tap a weaker one than before as the air and life drained from his body.
Eleel did not even look at the captain now, he just held him out as an example, and stared at the three men before him.

“Your captain seems to have lost his tongue. So one of you had better explain to me, and quick, what the devil happened and how seven – SEVEN! – inmates escaped. Including two of the Black?”

The Captains hands tapped in desperate final flail, and then they slowly fell to his side, as the Lieutenant dropped him slumping to the ground.

The noise he made when he landed was a sickening sound of wet meat hitting the slab, a loud crack as the legs gave way under weight and both ankles snapped. The captain’s eyes were just blood red now, and a line of blood ran down each cheek. 

            Eleel looked down, and roughly, but with precision and an effortless tug, ripped something from the man’s body.
He turned to look at the sentry guard who had attempted to pull his sword.

“They killed their guard. Their leader was not in his cell when we came to unlock him for mess-hall, his cell was still and empty, when we went to investigate why, their leader was somehow outside of the cell, he slit a Guardia’s throat and locked the others in his cell, that was…”
The sentry took a half step forward and froze as Eleel’s hand raised in an open palmed motion to stop.
“Mackenzie. Yes? The younger. No doubt he then freed the others and they bolted for the Mountain and the slip.”
The sentry nodded in confirmation.
Eleel threw something to the Guard. Who caught it wet and sticky, drenched in blood.
“I found your Captains tongue.” Eleel said, smirking.
“It told me what I needed to hear.”
The Sentry dropped the viscera absently, looked shocked at his own hands and back to the towering man.
Hector Eleel smiled at the man in a calm but terrible grimace grin.
“How many have you found? There is no way that they all made it through the slip. The mountain is thirsty, and surely took its tribute in blood, did it not?”
He kicked out in a distracted thud against the body of the captain, and huffed a sound which may have been laughter.
“Five we have found. Two fell and were found broken and shattered on the chasm floor, one had fallen and done himself on a rock. One was broken beyond our initial notice, but we soon saw it was man and the freeze had torn him to bright white chunks. The other was shot and bled out.”

“So two unaccounted for?” Hector smiled.
“Of those you found, were any Mackenzie?”
The sentry shook his head, “Not the younger sir. We believe his father was the man in pieces. We have as much as we could find in the cold store in a chest.
We believe that one is deeper still in the chasm, and only Mackenzie survives.
But the tracks go cold, as they are want to do in the slip sir.”
Eleel nodded.
“As they are want to do, indeed.”
He turned to look at the far wall, where a heavy door was built deep into the blackened rock. The door was locked fast. 
“You say that no one saw his father before they went for the boy?”
The sentry nodded.
“Yessir. The father was in his cell, the boy was believed to be in his. They went for the boy first.”
“Which means that the father freed the son. Escaping this room first.”
“But how, sir? He was escorted there in the afternoon from labour, and he is seen twice more before the escape in each of the logs. Once by myself. How could he have escaped without help?”
Hector Eleel stared hard at the door; a smile drew wider on his mouth.
“He had help alright.” The words were faint, but they were clear. Eleel walked to do the door and, removing his leather glove, he ran two fingers across the thick wood, pawed gently at the iron bolts and hinges. 
He brought his fingers up to his nose and breathed in the scent, then tentatively licked the smudge, charcoal dirt before spitting and looking at the door in wide eyed understanding.
“The black…” He said. The Sentry guard who had reached for his sword took a step toward Eleel, curiously.
“The what, sir?”
“The Black. THE BLACK… He had the Black… The call has been made.”
The sentries took a step back, the boldest of them stood fast. He looked at the two retreating, then to Eleel.
“The Black sir? But… That cannot be the case.”
Eleel turned to look at the man, at first over his shoulder, as if a snake eyeing his prey, then with a heavy step forward he bore down on the sentry.
“The Black, says I…” He held his hand open to the side of the guards head, looked around the room and smiled at the other men assembled.
“The Black.”
He closed his hand into a tight fist and there came a popping sound then an ungodly cracking, and then the Sentry guards head caved in and popped in a deft mist of pink and red.
The body fell lifeless to the floor, and Eleel opened his hand slowly, and blew across his palm, smiling. 
“…The call has come, and the father freed the son and they made way east toward the braid, and from there, to the Hill.”
The other sentries gleaned in sweat and fear looked terrified, his face a pale, clammy white, sweat pored above his eyes and on his cheeks.
“It’s come.” Hector said finally, beckoning for the Sentry to open the door.
“Take me to the cold store, show me the body of the father. Whatever remains.”

And they left, one after the other, a Sentry either side of the door stood guard on the circular chamber of the tower cells, and the other marching toward the kitchens with the huge imposing figure of Lieutenant general Hector Eleel following. 

            At the outskirts of the village, perched low in the fine snow that survived here was Dade, two of the village archers and the Tall Man. 

They were bundled rough and bedraggled under a bough of thicket and bush, the Tall Man rolled a stone back over their bolt-hole, disguising the entrance, and from inside they watched the far expanse of the Veil as the Garrison guardia came to the change. Three uniformed soldiers dressed in great coats and with riflespears marched to those on the wall, saluted and the quick succession of shift happened. Two side-stepping as their counterparts saluted back and marched off, then turning as their fellow soldiers had stood, and taking over the hold.
Dade counted off in his head the details of the Veil that he could remember. Looking down the expanse of wall he could see from this vantage point he tried to estimate how close he was too the nearest tower.
 

There was a northern and a southern gate, one in the high Underwood, and the other leading toward The Free Spyre, the main trading route. 

A third existed that lead to the isolated peninsular and had two guard towers one of which held the observatory which constantly watched over Castele Isolaire and the Broken Spine mountain range. Finally, there were four watchtowers that were spaced every 250 miles, each with their own subterranean entrance to the other side of the Veil and the green glades of the Spyre. 
This would be the fourth of those towers before the day or two journey to Pikes Smithe, and the main gate.
If Dade was to get past this and through, then he could make his way to Brill and answer the call that was made. His palms became sweaty with the anticipation and the thought.
“What are we waiting for?” he asked the Tall Man, who had yet to offer a name or introduction.
“Just wait, little man. We have been here for many years and we know many tricks and treats, and we will get you where you need to be. It just takes patience and time.”
One of the Archers stifled a laugh at this, Dade turned to look at his companions, and crossed his arms each hand under his armpits for warmth, and he sulked silently.
“Fine. While we wait for whatever it is you think is going to happen – at least tell me a bit about yourself.”
The Tall Man smiled at Dade, and hen to his archers. They laughed as he gave a mock salute and bow, crouched under the thicket it was especially comical.
“My parents named me Manoo Vel’A Unga, in the old tongue of their ancestors it meant ‘By hand or claw’ – I was born in Mantaray, the son of a fisherman and a cook, and journeyed to the shores Gamaliel when the gates were thrown open and the President started to draft his new civilization. My parents and I came from the Island to here, on a boat that carried 400 people. Over devastating waters, terrifying swells and breaks, until we negotiated over the Gordon and sailed untouched to the northern Alaskeen sea and into Dahl’s tanner. That was in the year seventeen after, as the Gamaliel calendar has it. I was 13.”
Dade started to do the mathematics in his head and smiled at Manoo.
“That makes you 51 now, yes?”
Manoo laughed quietly and nodded. “Though age on this island is irrelevant, as I am sure you well know.”
Dade nodded, and bowed his head, the statement was true and troubling.
“It was a year after the death of the Alpha. Calvin had already started his push to make this country shape up into his own image and drift away from the legends and the folklore. The royal family sat atop the two sisters, and the capital of Pike was where the president would sit and make his plans – and we were eight short years away from the horror of the civil war. 

In those days, the Black were everywhere. 

From the small meeting halls to the tribal enclaves, to the monastery itself. 

The new black, built upon the teachings of the Alpha and the natives – the new church of belief and thinking. But even in seventeen after, the cracks were showing and the unrest was being spread.
Calvin and his followers – those untouched by the Black, those opposed to the Alphas ways, those who were blinded by hatred and Bagshaw’s mistrust, they all started to sense that this grand new world was fragile and groaning under the weight of these conflicting ideals. And even though the royal family had the peoples trust, they bore none of the power, and there they were atop their ivory towers, or so Bagshaw would have us believe, lording it over us and enjoying the high and mighty lordly life – we were all scraping and bleeding on the floor trying to shape Gamaliel into something better.”
“Something more…” Dade interjected.
“Exactly… I guess you have heard this all before?” Manoo said, and huffed a weak, liars laugh.
“I bought into it. Many did, because the idea of crafting something new requires work, and people, invariably are lazy in mind and spirit and soul and deed.
The Black weren’t. Even with a quarter as many in their number, they still built the land in ways many of us will never understand. But you don’t see that when the new horizon is rammed down your throat, you don’t realize the natural until the unnatural is torn away.
And so… The war. And the scourges and the Black, was left decimated and ravaged and the heart of this world was torn and thrown away.”
Dade held a hand outstretched to Manoo’s forearm.
“We survived. The Knights are alive – imprisoned, maybe, but alive. Though the temples and the enclaves were burned, we are still here. Darkness in the daylight. The shadow in the Sun.”
“Shadow in the sun.” Manoo agreed. And tapped the boy’s hand affectionately
“I saw them take some of them away. Coburn and Cadogan, from the Spyre.
I saw them carry the bodies of one of the Princesses from the tower of the Southern sister. The rumours of the Monks turning on them, of the slaughter and the killings… Even then, as blinded as I was by the propaganda of the Presidents men, you could see the monks did not do that. Were not capable of such slaughter.
I knew when I saw them carry out the youngest princess, bloodstained and savaged, that the Black Monks and the Knights of Brill were incapable of such murder, but the presidents men… oh they with their blue uniforms and their golden sashes, they were monsters alright. You could see the lack of fear, love and emotion from their eyes. They were weapons only. Pointed and released.
And there I was -  as old as this country was, 25 years old. In the year twenty-five after, watching the dream my parents had from the sands of Mantaray, half starved and half mad from poverty, fall about me like pillars of smoke.”
Dade looked at the two archers. Neither were much older than nineteen, he looked at the Tall Man now with his head bowed and eyes red from memory.
“What have you heard of the Black?” he asked the archers.
One looked at him with sparkling brown eyes, he half smiled, as though he were scared to do so but could not help himself.
“My mother tells me that the time when there was anything we know now on this land there were the natives - the monks. Scattered across the land, they lived in complete harmony with their world. They could sing like the birds, they could run as fast as the wind blew, and they weren’t like the normal folk who later came from the other lands.

The way my mother tells me that these Monks were part of the country itself, grown from the earth like a tree, or born from the trees like seedlings.
But, disease and plague came and tore the numbers down.
And in the first year, when the Alpha arrived, carried on the wreck of the ship and with the Orphans and the Lady Camadre alongside him, that the Alpha saved the life of one of the surviving monks from the roving wolves that stalked this land, and in return he was made a part of the Black himself…”
 

The other archer cut in, excitedly.
 

“The ways I hear it, the Alpha IS the black now. All the powers, all the teachings, all the skills, all the history – it lived in him. Magic, I hear, powerful magic… Which is why there ain’t nary a decent amount left in the country now, because it was all in him, and from him to the Orphans, and the orphans became the Knights… And it’s because of that magic that Bagshaw and his men are so scared.”

Dade gave a small laugh. He shook his head and looked at the archers.
“It’s a good story. I bet your mothers tell it well. But they fail to mention one thing. Quite possibly the most important thing.”
“What’s that then? They all tells the story this way – from youngling to gr’up, they tells this like it’s so.”
“They fail to mention that the Bagshaw’s… The president, and his brother too… Both of them were Orphans of the wolf. And both have the Black inside them too.”
The archers looked at Dade as though he had just cursed them, open mouthed and shocked.
“Say tis lies sir?” One said, holding Dade’s sleeve.
“Say tis fantasy.” The other begged.
“I cannot and shall not – as I will not lie to thee. Bagshaw and his brother, Calvin and Nathaniel both were Orphans of the wreck that brought the Alpha. The natives in the Monastery raised them, and they both were given the Black by the Alpha after the autumn of the wolves.
But where Nathaniel was adept at the powers that came with the gift, Calvin was not… His injuries and his sickness made the Black a bitter twisted thing, and all it did was poison his already feeble frame. Fed his injuries and his infirmity, and left him angry, bitter and broken. And he resented the Black, and the monks, and the other Orphan’s – and he kept that resentment in his stomach, and it bred like a cancer inside him, and soon, the cancer was riding the man.
That is why he wiped them out. That and that alone.”
Dade shook his head solemnly, and silently recanted in his mind the Prayer for his father. Picturing the man falling and shattering as the permafrost took him whole.
He opened his eyes and Manoo was now holding his arms and looking at him with desperate sorrow.
“But the call is here, and the Black beckons. Yes?”
Dade smiled a gentle grin, he patted Manoo’s hands on his arms in comfort, and nodded.
“The call beckons.”
“And you answer?”
“And I answer.”
“Good.” Manoo said and slapped Dade heavily on the bicep, turning and pointing across at the Veil. Two new soldiers approached, one carrying a riflespear, the other a staff with a blue and gold braided handle. The soldiers on the watchtower saw and stepped forward from their vantage point and made motion to see who and why the new soldiers were there.
“Here is your escape route.” And Manoo smiled widely and beckoned that they made good their exit from the thicket, and ran toward the veil wall, there, they stooped low and tumbled into the low ditch that ran the length of the wall, until the gatehouses.
There was a clear run through the ditch to the gatehouse, but the door had neither lock nor any portal on the outside. Dade could see flat wooden slating, perfectly untouched but for the rivets and steel that denoted where hinges and bars lay.
“How are we to get through a door locked from the inside?” he said to Manoo.
The tall man smiled widely and grabbed hold of Dade by his lapels and pulled him close.
“Trust .” He said, and he hip-tossed Dade sideways, a muted scream bursting from his lips as he hit the wooden barrier of the veil, and then as though it was made of nothing but smoke and light, he went through the wood, and collapsed hard against the cold stone wall of the inside corridor that ran the length of the watchtower, and up toward the gateway.
He hit the wall hard, his scream turning into a wheezed cough, as the air escaped his lungs. He pushed himself up from the floor, and looked at the wall and could see a perfect portal of translucence where he had come through, as it closed back up and showed only stone and wood and iron, he could see Manoo smiling and giving a gentle wave.
“Well I’ll damned.” Dade managed through a heavy panted breath.
“The man has the Black about him.”
And he laughed out loud and headed toward the gate.  
 

             Nathaniel was sat quiet at the bar, he ached in places that he forgot existed. Body shaken and woken by the weary road from the twins. He bent out his back and a weak crack popped in his spine, he stretched out his arms and the sound creaked and groaned from each limb. 

He smiled as the cold and ache was pushed from his body. And he tapped the bar for another drink, using the shot glass as a hammer. 

            The barman looked down the oak counter top, his hands roughly wiping the ale-jugs that he hung above his head on tiny brass hooks.
“Can I help you friend?” he said sarcastically, raising an eyebrow cynically at the uniformed Nathaniel.
“…Get you something?” He continued, a bleak, humourless smile on his ugly face.
Nathaniel tried to smile his most charming grin, but road weary and tired, mind pre-occupied by the journey at hand, his smile was faltering; instead, he simply held the glass up and tilted his head looking at it.
“You know the thing about an empty glass?” he said, looking between the barman and the empty shot in his hand.
“Huh?” the barman grunted. Throwing his towel over his shoulder and trudging slowly toward the soldier.

“Full of potential, a glass is. Full of countless, infinite possibilities. When it’s empty – it is at its most exciting. 
Fill it, the potential is complete. 
But empty – it has so many options, so many different complex endings… and it does not know how important it can be.”
The barman smiled again, baring his teeth a little. He rested on the bar on huge pockmarked elbows; he smiled down the bar at the now eagerly engrossed travellers who had taken sanctuary within the bar, eavesdropping and gawking at the silver haired Nathaniel and the huge barman.
A table of card players stopped and watched the Gamaliel Officer holding the glass aloft.
“That so?” The barman laughed, gruff and phlegmy.
Nathaniel nodded. He spun the glass around in his hand and turned it upside down and put it down on the bar with a dull thud.
“The glass is life. Empty, waiting to be filled with adventure, love of life and purpose… You see?” and he looked at the barman, a twinkle of mischief and mayhem in his eye.
“But then you fill it, and suddenly the potential ends. You have ended its life and given it a terminal purpose – whether it likes it or not.”
The barman reached down to get the glass, and Nathaniel stopped him, he put his hand over the paw-like hand of the barman.
“You, my friend, are not an empty glass.”
The barman stared at his hand then deep into Nathaniel’s eyes.
“What are you saying?”
Nathaniel grinned, his beard was finely trimmed to highlight his strong chin, his thin face and angular cheekbones. He flared his nostrils, his eyebrows raised curiously, and he breathed-in slowly and exasperated at the barman’s question.
“You outlived your potential long, long again my friend. You are a shot-glass full of piss. Once empty, now full to the brim with stinking foul liquid, no one wants to touch, and which will be forever cursed to remain that way. Your potential wasted long ago, now left to stink on a bar, unwanted, unloved and ignored forevermore.”
He grinned again, and pushed down on the barman’s hand with his own, the base of the glass now pushing an imprint painfully into the mans palm.
The barman could not understand where the strength was coming from, but Nathaniel had stores of it inside, and he channeled it onto the mans hand in raw power.
“What? – How dare you! – Quit it! QUIT IT!” 
The barman tried to prize his hand free, panic stricken and eyes red and sweaty. He glared at Nathaniel’s steel blue iris’s – Nathaniel pushed down harder still and did not avert his stare once, a supernatural strength coursed through his hand, muscle taut and hard, the pressure on the barman’s hand phenomenal. 

 

Nathaniel did not blink. 
He just carried on smiling, and started to hum a tuneless noise, as though he were a wasp, fluttering dangerously about to sting.
He raised his other hand, ominously, hovering over the glass and the stacked hands. It hung there, the humming noise continued from his throat, as he waved his free hand tilting it left and right, up and down. 
Floating and humming.
The barman’s eyes a frantic panic now, sweat bursting in fat beads from his brow as he struggled fruitlessly to free his hand, staring up and down the bar for help from the other regulars, all of them pushing back from the bar or standing and retreating from the spectacle.
Nathaniel did not care about these people; he knew no one would make a move to help. He turned his gaze to them, and he hovered the hand in tilted angles like a caricature of a dragonfly. Humming all the while at those terrified patrons at the bar.
He turned his eyes back to the barman, now squealing in discomfort and anxious need, Nathaniel’s eyes were fixed pinpricks of steel blue and black on the barman, his lips a curious smile, the glottal humming not stopping.
Suddenly, Nathaniel brought his hand down hard and fast with a terrifying buzz from his teeth and tongue hard onto the stack of hands and the glass below.

The barman let out a scream and winced, expecting pain and broken glass through flesh and bone.
An audible sigh of horror rang out from the witnesses.
Nathaniel carried on smiling, as the room fell into an awkward and horrified silence before the hand crashed down hard.

 

The bar huffed a loud clap, there was a bang as the hands collapsed on oak, and Nathaniel barked a final “BANG!” loudly, as he stood from his stool.
Everyone watching let out a noise, a chorus of sighs and oohs and ah’s, muted shrieks and deep, gasped breaths.
The barman was crying now. 
Tears streamed down his face – not from pain but from fear – Nathaniel took his hand off the barman’s, and the barman raised his off the bar looking at the wooden surface for fragments of blood and glass, looking at his own hand for damage and injury – seeing nothing, but a red circle where the glass had been pushed down.

There was no other damage.
No fragments of glass, no injury and no pain.

He looked at Nathaniel, who was smiling now, quietly with a fresh shot of Whiskey in his hand, sipping and raising a genial salute to the barman.
“To empty glasses, and filled potential…” Nathaniel said, winking, and flicked a golden coin across the bar, it spun on its edge, noisily, before falling down, and resting heads up in a circle of spilled whiskey.
“Keep the change… For the trouble.”
The barman looked at the coin, at his hand, at the whiskey that was resting on the back bar unmoved, far from Nathaniel’s grip…
Finally, he looked at Nathaniel who had put the empty glass back, face down on the bar, and was already walking off to the corner to the open fire and the comfortable sofa that lay empty there.

The barman was still crying.
Fear and wonder.
Confusion and bewilderment. 

            Nathaniel collapsed tired into the sofa, facing the fire, and he smiled widely. Magic always made him smile.
Magic and mischief.  
Mischief and Magic.

So little left in this world… 
He wished for more chances to let loose what was his

            Agnetha wondered the halls of the Southern Sister quietly humming to herself a lullaby from her youth. Her gentle voice occasionally whispering in her native tongue, singing lyrics to a folk story that was translated to be shared with children.
Yanay was a harsh language when used in anger, but when used tenderly it had a warmth and poetry that was romantic and enchanting. 
Especially from the mouth of a woman. 

            Her hand gently floated and occasionally drew circles and lines over the stone-walls. Her arms were long, elegant and pale and the dress she wore fell from her shoulder in teasing and tantalizing ways.

            Nathaniel had told her that she was free to move as she saw fit within the castele, to roam the corridors and hallways, flit in and out of the kitchens and amongst the staff, and to make full use of the grounds.
He had said this safe in the knowledge – at the time – that Bendle, the Southern Sisters custodian and ward, was not there nor expected.

Bendle often rode to the northern sister and went on weeks long hunt with his brother Kashor into the woods and murky swamps that surrounded the Black Monastery. He would announce his departure with a drunken revelry, smashing the stores and drinking the castele almost completely out of ale and brandy-wine. 

Nathaniel hated the cousins with a eager passion.
So when he was left alone and quiet in the castele he would make sure that any semblance of the chaos that followed in Bendle or Kashor’s wake was quickly and severely erased. More for his own entertainment to see Bendle’s bemused and angry reaction to the cleanliness and order – than any sense of pride at the work itself. Nathaniel was mischief incarnate, and he liked the see the cousins ire take them over and drown their limited sensibility.

So, with Nathaniel’s words in her mind and ear, Agnetha had left her room and gently padded on barefoot round the corners of the hallway, down the long stairs, into the grand hall and then lower into the kitchen where she had enjoyed tea with the chief maid and head chef of the kitchens.
            The chef had told her stories of his youth, bawdy and loud, red-faced and full of deep and happy laughter. The maid had held her hand and told her sad stories of her lost romances and loves – whispered compliments of Agnetha’s beauty and sang with her, as Agnetha shared the words and giggled as she listened to the maid grasp the Yanay tongue.
She had been nothing but welcomed into the castele with open arms.

So far at least.

            So it was, that she made her way to the gardens, to find her refuge amongst the large cast shadow of the tower and read the book that had been found in the grand library of the Gamaliel history.
Tales from the civil war, stories of the heroes and villains of the battles – written, as all history was, by the victors – telling one half of a much larger, truer story. 

            She carried on humming and singing beautifully as she left the kitchen and galley, emerging from the small arched tunnel passage into bright, stark and wonderful daylight, into the lush green gardens. 
Flowers in bloom all around, the fragrant and beautiful colours burst alive everywhere she looked. Many of the plants she could name from her days in the Gulag garden – picking herbs for the Jailers and the officials.
But here – free – she had at last been able to appreciate the wealth and delicate awesome glory of the flora.
No longer a product, but living and breathing and wild.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the myriad scents, each one a startling fizz and pop on her senses, and she let the sunshine wash her in warm and energizing blaze.
Onward she walked, her feet so comfortable in the grass, toward the tree where she sat, hunched up knees toward her chest to read the book. 

            From the far side of the courtyard garden a door flung open and Dana, the scullery maid, came hurriedly running out, her skirt bunched up in her hands as she stumbled at pace across the grass.
“Miss Agnetha… Miss Agnetha!” she gasped, her face red with the effort. Her eyes wide and wild.
“Miss Agnetha! Come with me quickly… Now!” she reached Agnetha under the tree, and grabbed her hand and pulled, yanking Agnetha to her feet,
“Whatever is the mater Dana?” Agnetha protested.
“What could be so wrong?” 
Dana didn’t answer, she simply looked sternly and seriously at the girl and yanked hard again.
Agnetha resisted once more and pulled free of Dana’s grasp.
“What is happening?” She demanded.
Dana looked at her and with wet eyes and red cheeks she said one name and one name only.
“Bendle.”
Agnetha looked at her confused. She had heard of the wardens, had been assured that she was a guest of the Lieutenant Commander, and therefore welcome and safe, that the wardens were aware of her presence and no-further were they concerned.
What could have changed between Nathaniel’s notice and him leaving?
“…Under orders from the west. He has come and is asking after you.
He demands your presence now. In his study. Immediately madam.”
Agnetha nodded, and took the woman’s outstretched hand, and tucked the book back into her hip with her other hand, and hurriedly followed the maid back to the other side of the Castele and toward the Wardens study.

She was not yet scared.
Just confused and cautious; she followed on, and the scents and colour was left behind her, and back into the gloom of the stonewalls she returned
 

            The cold store door was a thick oak, held solid by ironroot bars top, middle and bottom, holding the timber into a thick air-tight slab. Its huge ironroot hinges creaked in raucous, angry fashion.
A breathy sigh escape from the gap in the creased doorway and a thin veil of steam snaked out round the wood and metal and slid ominously around the feet of the guards. Thick and gluttonous, it rolled and skirted the floor as if probing for a weakness in which it could find its home. Some crevice or crack, or, inside the bones of some weary fool in its path. 

Hector Eleel stood in the opposite doorway, his face a gurning flap of anger. The steam purposely continued its probing sweep of the floor, wrapping around guardia feet, snaking like the limb of some ethereal octopoid around the riflespears that were being used to prop the soldiers up. Unrelenting in its search for a new home until – that is - it reached the booted feet of the Lieutenant General, and – as if consciously aware of the deadly nature of the man – it stopped dead in its tracks and evaporated into a dozen wispy, smaller tendrils that avoided him like diverted rivers avoid small villages in a deluge and instead coiled a wide berth around his massive frame.

As if the steam were deathly afraid of the mountain of a man before them. 

He gave a smirk, as though he were aware of the steams sudden change of heart and direction. Maybe he was, there were a great many things that Hector Eleel was aware of that no other man knew. So, the idea was not such a fanciful one.

All but one of the guards had been oblivious of the steams action and the one who had seen the tendril roll the ground and stop sharp and sudden at Eleel’s feet, and divert itself around the man had taken a nervous half step backward in retreat from the aura of Eleel – a half step that allowed him to be closer to the door out of the room and as far from the lieutenant general as was physically and tactically possible given the reason for them being assembled here.

            Hector walked toward the door as it was pulled - with some effort - wide open. The guards stood either side of the cold store as Eleel stood over the broken, shattered remains of Alexander Mackenzie. His still frozen shards resting weary and bundled inside a chest, now frostbitten and permeated with a fine blue crystal dappling from the living ice of the Jagged mountains that had snapped around his flesh and taken fatal hold.

“Leave me.” Eleel said, not taking his eyes off the frozen corpse.
“But, sir…” one guard tried to interject, mistakenly. Eleel turned his head in a swift, shocking spin and stared down the guards protestations with a red eyed look that conjured the devil and his army within his gaze.
“I will kill you where you stand, or, you will leave me.” He said. His voice was a gentle, terrifying whisper. Drenched in threat, edged with utter menace.

“A… as… as you command, s… sir.” The guard muttered, the first drips of urine had escaped his bladder and was now stained on the front of his tunic.
The fear had seen to the rest.

            Eleel turned his head slowly to the chest, and he bent at knee to crouch beside the crated remains, his hands gleefully, greedily hovered over the top of the box and the body parts, before he thrust his hands in and pulled out the face.

It was broken and cracked, a huge welted, deep sutured scare ran through the whole visage diagonally, from corner of the mouth to corner of the chin, up over one eye, and back round the top of the scalp, where the head then disappeared into a curved concave, smooth inside and brittle at edge.

Eleel held it precariously in both hands, and closed his eyes, his hands began to glow a warm orange hue, and the face turned from blue and white – incased in crystalized ice – to a warm pink, as the life returned to it once more.

The face began to groan, as the ice gave way to warm flesh again, and with it, came a deep, echoic, cavernous scream. As the lips moved and the eyes went from squeezed closed to wide open. 

As it shrieked, the welted scar split open and throbbed.
Eleel smiled and held the face up higher, now eye to eye.

“Alexander.” Eleel gave a mild, amused chuckle. His smile with a bright line of ambivalent terror.
“You’ve looked better.”
The face of Alexander Finnigan Mackenzie settled in a panic stricken yawn, no more noise came from it, instead, his eyes darted around widely and piteously, the gaze darting everywhere it could to evaluate the situation.
Eleel stared it down, darkly.
The face of Alexander finally fixated its gaze upon Hector Eleel, and the mouth slowly closed, now, a pulsing breath throbbed through Eleel’s hands.

“Good man. Even in death you can still find a bit of civility.”

He lowered himself, sitting cross-legged and placed the face in the wooden crate, propped upright. He allowed himself a deep breath, closed his eyes, and then expelling the air in a roaring sigh, Hector Eleel smiled widely.
“Lets talk, you and I.” He said to the broken, shattered, scared face of Alexander.
“I want to know everything.”

The face weakly stared at the huge man before him, a tear ran from his eye, then a steady stream, as he slowly began to sob.
What the Lieutenant General wanted, he invariably received. People were compelled through fear to do as he said, and he often got the exact thing he asked for with an added slash of dread and menace thrown in for good measure.
Such was his power when he invoked the Black inside himself.

Alexander began to speak.
And he spilled his broken, fragmented, shattered guts.

Words tumbled from his jagged, torn mouth that sounded like a resonant screech of a razor blade dragged ragged and rusty over a dry slate.
No throat to form the words, but the magic allowing them nonetheless.

Eleel listened and his smile grew wider, and with it, the menace as well. 

            
            Agnetha coyly stepped into the room, and looked around, no one was there. There was silence but for the tap-tap-tap of the heavy curtain resting upon the brass pole, and wafting against the breeze from the open window.
She took another half step inside, and still could see no one.
The door slammed shut with purpose and force behind her and Agnetha startled in retreated horror at the sound and shock.
Sat on a thin, plain wooden chair, with a bottle of wine in hand was Bendle – the warden of the southern sister. Cousin of the president and Nathaniel Bagshaw.
He wiped his fat, hairy hand across his stubbly, dirty face.
His huge jowls wobbled in red, awful shimmy.
A line of saliva caught the back of hand and stretched from his mouth in a thick, creamy strand.
He gave a huffed, belched laugh.

“Hello Milady.” His chuckle was gluttoned, greedy, oozing in avarice.
“That’s what my no good cousin calls you, I understand… Milady…”
The wine swung upward and he sloshed a mouthful, a thick line of red-purple liquid dribbled from the corner of his lips, and he lasciviously slapped his mouth open and closed, his lips popping and wet.
“Shipwrecked and alone… washed up on our shores… An eastern bitch-spy allowed to wander this castele, MY castele with absolute impunity… oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
With her heart pounding and smashing her ribcage, Agnetha softly pawed backwards from the door.
Only one way in and one way out, she was trapped inside the chamber of the office and her only way of exit blocked now by the pudgy, fat faced drunk – now on his feet, and staggering toward her.
“Warden Bendle, sir…” she tried to say, but her voice was cut short by the wine bottle flung hard and fast and hurtling toward the wall behind her.
“I AM A CAPTAIN OF THE PRESIDENTS MEN…” Bendle charged now toward the stunned and shaken Agnetha.
“I AM BLOOD AND KIN OF THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF…” He grabbed her by the throat and threw her hard against the large desk, where she clattered and collapsed in a heap, gasping for breath – winded and wounded.
Wine dripped down the wall like a bloody wound oozing.
Bendle licked his hand where the blackberry brandy wine had dribbled on his skin. And then, as he stood over Agnetha, as she began to look up at the man stood over her, in his shadow, his hand came down and slapped hard against the cheek of the woman. 

She span awkwardly on the spot from the force, and the man grabbed her and pulled her up by her hair and slammed her hard down on the desk which he had swiped clean with his other free hand.
Agnetha was face down, her cheek in black ink that had smashed in his eagerness, staining the skin a dark patch of black.
She cried, a welt as thick as Bendle was fat from his hand upon her other cheek, her eye wet and heavy, and a line of blood drawn from her brow where he caught her.

 

“So, tell me you Yanayev whelp… why are you here? What are you trying to find out for your gulag masters back east? Why the duplicitous and shadowy secrecy… and what does my darling cousin have to do with it, that he would keep you here in chambers and treat you like such royalty?” 

Each question was spat with a vicious phlegmy vitriol. He pressed his face against hers and his breath – rank and odious – licked her skin with toxic precision. He pushed his fingernails deep into the skin on her neck, as he pulled her hair and head toward his lips, now centimeters from her ear.
“What nefarious deeds are you two plotting whilst I am north with my brother? Thinking me simple and dull as a butter knife.”
He slammed her head hard against the table again, splashing the ink everywhere, its seeped across the table, his hands heavily held her down, and the ink like a creeping night terror slowly pooled around the well of her eye, met the flesh of her cheek and forehead as though it were a dam and congealed. 

Turning the milk white skin into a streak of dark hellish obsidian. 

She tried in vain to close her eye, but the fluid found her eyelids to be no barrier, and penetrated the shutters and the eyeball itself soon turned from a delicious pearl white to an insidious mottled black marble reflecting nothing but pain.
It was as if her eye was the devils own. 
She screamed hard and the room shook with her cries.
But… they were for naught.

“Scream louder. You vile whore. No one will save you. Even if they hear, there is no savior on the other side of that door, no hero waiting to come and claim you as a prize for saving you from me.” 
He pulled her hard toward him again and slammed her down once more splashing more ink across the desk. A huff of pain escaped her lips, and she could taste the iron tang of blood from her tongue and the rich, mercurial taste of ink as well.
As she hit the desk his hands loosened and she fell hard to the floor, a thudding, wet, painful sound came from the fall, and a whimper from her lips. 

She closed her eyes – one white, with the veins starting to shoot the first glimpse’s of bloodshot, the other deep, tar black – there was a dull throb from the blackened eye and she shut it tightly.
Her hand was splayed under the desk and rested on something familiar. In her hand she felt a shaft of hungry desire. 

Her fingers wrapped around the thing, tight and gratefully. 

            In Yanayev’s gulags assaults were as much a part of the day to day system as the menial and body shattering tasks you were commanded to undertake. Agnetha had twice been raped before. Both were as traumatic and as unforgiving an experience as one could imagine. The long, dangerous journey across the ocean toward Gamaliel had convinced her that it would never happen a third time. But the memory of those times haunted her daily. The first time had at the hands of a bigger boy in their wing of the gulag who shared her and Gustav’s dorm-cell. 

An eight foot-by-eight-foot stone-walled box, with six hard stone cots chiseled and hewn from the rock the room was made of. Four women and two men were the cells inhabitant “guests” – and the bigger boy raped everyone in the room at least once – including Gustav. 
He had beaten and burned and hurt every person in the cell in so many haunting and evil ways – but he had reserved his most malicious attack for the pretty, adolescent, innocent Agnetha, who even within the horrific setting of the prison always had a shimmer of innocence which stood up against the environment she was trapped within.

She endured evening after evening of assault and humiliation, and eventually, he had taken that which she would not give permissively. Every evening until then he came and then, the next night, the bigger boy did not come.
There were no blows or slaps, no strapped belt whippings, no assault, no hands on her mouth as fists rained down on her. There was no touching or assault or beatings, he did not humiliate her. At first, maybe, she thought – he had taken what he had always wanted, and she was useless now unless he wanted murder.
But no…
One night, the boy had simply never awoken from his sleep. The guards had found him, with his neck snapped clean and fatally as he lay dreaming.
Gustav was quiet that evening, he found a dark corner of the cell, clutched his sister tightly with unforgettable tenderness. Lovingly he rocked back and forth and whimpered his apologies to the few gods he still believed in.
Gods that Agnetha had no such faith in anymore. 
Gustav had reserved his grander apology for Agnetha, she could feel it in his touch, and in every comforting rock, back and forth.

            The other attack had come from the guards in the gulag itself. There was nothing Gustav could have done about this. He had tried, of course, and was lucky to survive as five beasts cornered them in a dark corridor of one of the mines, one guard smashed her brother hard in the side of the head with an iron chain-mailed gauntlet, she watched as his head bounced off a jagged wall and he slumped hard to the floor, unconscious and bleeding. He could have done nothing even as the guards spat in her face, kicked her legs from under her and punched her. They pulled her hair out and put out hot rolled up stubby cigarillos on her flesh – flesh that was still pock marked and stained with the red circles and welt of the cigarillos to this day.
Five men who hit and slapped, kicked and then eventually threw her over a sharp, stinking limestone boulder, and took her for their own.

She could never remember if they all had their go, or just the head guard had done the deed – neither did she really care – she retreated deep inside and hid herself away in the blue room she had invented inside her head where she was safe and away from danger. Safe within her mind sanctuary, she turned herself off to the violence inflicted on the body external.

The only way she had learned to cope with the daily toil of this treatment.

She had been in this situation twice before, and she felt the sudden and sickening pull of the past aiming to repeat again. The blue room was open to her, put, instead of retreating and hiding within her own head and allowing this to happen, allowing another man to empower himself over her, she had heard the apologies that Gustav had whispered to the errant, absent gods, and she made a decision that unlike before, where she had no power, here – she was able and willing to make a stand. 

Bendle leant in to grab her and spin her over, his teeth were dark, tarry, a few were rotten, broken and stained brown. He smiled ugly and a slather of drool rested foamy on the corner of his leering lips. She felt a rush of revulsion and terrible anger, as he rolled her over to face him, she raised her arm in lightning fast motion, and smashed the man hard in the face with the grey smooth stone that was used as a paperweight upon the desk now clutched white knuckle tight in her fist, then discarded in a fit of rage to the floor.

She raised her arm in such frantic and panicked speed that the noise made a whip-crack on the air as she cleanly smashed under the drunken captains chin, and sent his head in a streaking arch high and heavy. His head flopped sickly to his chin, his eyes focused for a second on Agnetha in a stupefied grimace of confusion and surprise. His eyes rolled into his head and his mouth opened in a slack and dislocated. He slumped forward and heavy, clattering his head off the corner of the desk, smashing to the floor beside Agnetha. His lips trembling as he snored loudly. Out like a light. 

She kicked away from him, and pulled herself to a sitting panic against the cold wall, pulled her legs in tight and sobbed heavily as she watched to make sure the man, the captain, the warden of the southerly sister – was quite asleep, unconscious and broken by the violently employed paperweight. 

            She grabbed for a shard of broken glass that had spilt over the floor, held the makeshift weapon tightly in her hand, outstretched toward the body of the man. When he snored for the third or fourth time – loud and heavy – she jostled over to him and took his keys, giving the man another blow as he gurgled into a stupefied consciousness for a second, before being put to sleep again by the polished stone.

“Not today you bastard…” she said, and spat upon the mans face, raising to her feet quickly and hurrying toward the door, unlocking it and falling into the hallway, before she locked it again from the outside.

When it was locked she staggered hard and heavy footed, her face half dyed black, and one black eye scanning the shadows for further danger.
A door opened at the end of the corridor and Agnetha froze, and out came two scullery maids, one dropping their tools and cleaning utensils and slapping their mouth in horror and shock at the state and sight of the girl.
“Mistress Agnetha… my gods, what has happened?” The elder of the two women busied and hurried over the girl, and with big chunky arms, fat and warm - they hurried her toward the kitchen and safety, as she cried and relayed her tale.
Their mouths widening into disbelieving O’s.
Their eyes wider still and more shocked.

“Dana will know what to do. Let us get you to safety.”

As they all half hurried and half staggered to the corridors exit, they walked past an open window, which faced down upon the castele’s moat.
Agnetha threw the keys out without a second thought. In her mind she swore she heard the splash, but she never checked, she just followed the ladies to the kitchen and to Dana.

 

And, there, to her safety.