I followed him with a torch in my hand, taking lead where no one else would into a closure so small the sheathed edge of my blade scraped against the walls. My feet dragged, my back lowered as I kept low through and into the hole. The torch set before me with a humble glow set the lighting for a few feet in front of my face. Enough to see the curve of sleek stone. But that didn’t help much, considering the array of tunnels. Some excavated, others natural-borne. All with that same lineage of terrain, filial to the black understone of the canyons. It was all one black tunnel. All diverging and converging, turning and returning. I saw footsteps on the floor, too many of them in a trail that led nowhere. My feet dragged. Loose earth rose and muddied my boots. The floor was wet, mushy below the steel tips. Sludge that caked my pants up to my knees. One hand on the light, the other pressed against the walls.

Truth is I expected traps. I was feeling for something loose or unnatural. A false stone, annealed wire set to a hook or lever. Protrusions of spikes across the walls in a loose cloth. Something. Anything. Imaginations thumping hard into the sides of my head, feeling as if about to explode out the top.

I did not come across one. And I knew the holes led nowhere. If they had, we wouldn’t have needed to invade the cave in the first place, we’d be chasing them through desert.

Across from me the mad laugh echoed. Reverberations through the stone, carried through the drop lets. Like a stone toss on surface water, large at the front and dissipating into the undercarriage of dark.

“What’s so funny Duvall? Where’s the pride? The honor? You’re sounding a little crazy.” I said.

I paused. Sloshing of mud to my rear, I turned and followed it into another tunnel entrance devolved from the main channel (to be fair, I’d lost track of it all by now). The new space had more berth to it, allowing my spine to elongate, for my neck to crane and for me to get better footing.

Another laugh. Far head now, I stood at the tail end of echo.

“This is your legacy, Duvall. All of it. Here and now.” I said. “Or it doesn’t have to be that way, you know. Just come in. Just surrender and do right by your surviving men.”

“You think they’d follow me?” He said. “You’d think I’d trust them to follow even if they did? They already betrayed me once.”

“I’d imagined so, after you started eating people.”

“That was the last thing I wanted.” He said. “But it was necessary for the fight.”

“Is this necessary for the fight?”

“Of course.”

I turned the corner, torch first, chasing a shadow. Only to be met with the glimmer. A thousand little stars, some faded and far off and others close and burning all set their shimmer on me. I turned, looked down. Rubbed my eyes with my forearm and looked upon the set path again. A wider cavern - this one. A strange one, certainly. I looked around at awe to the shapes and colors and cross-shaped glare of light.

Crystals surrounded me. Quarts. Opals. Purples and yellows and blues, each of varying hues and sheen. Some sanded down and white-filmed, muted. Others still bright and translucent. Six sided. Ten sided. A set of stones, mineral-dotted, shaped like pyramids across one wall. Another, banked with wide sided blue crystals, each with their own epicenter of milky-white. Engimas the color of souls; assuming souls existed, assuming they had color even if they did. Little wispy underived sperm, tailed and frozen at in a bright coffin. A calcified ghost.

I looked through the crystals. They jutted out the walls. Out the ceiling (one expanding further out, as if I were at the base of a brass instrument). The field grew out this tapered hole, into a large cavern. My footsteps made strange sounds as the noise traveled through the field of crystals, something metallic, hoarse. Even my breathing carried that hint of noise.

And beautiful as this location was, I noticed one particularity; no exit. My entrance was my escape. And thus, Duvall and I were trapped. Wherever he was.

I walked through the field, looking both ways at my carnival reflection, into this labyrinth of mirrors. Each visage reflecting off each surface, a duplication creating an infinite channel from where my tired body traveled into a tired passage, to an oblivion or indivisible point.

The image disappeared. I turned. I looked at a strange elongated form of mine, the tongue of flame larger than my own body.

That too, disappeared. Each crystal a kind of universe in itself, following it’s own logic and physics to which I was only transient viewer to. I traveled then world to world, searching for the stray on whatever reflective shore he managed to find himself on. I stopped at a large surface. A wall, a white one, like the fat end of a diamond, the rough stone and dirt encroached upon this shiny surface. Or perhaps the diamond wall growing outward. Hard to tell, even in remembering.

“Why here, Duvall?” I asked the dark.

“Why not?”

“Do you have any traps? Some spare men? An explosion around the corner?”

“No.”

“Then why?” I asked. “Why play snake in this tunnel? Why lure me here?”

“You’re confusing this for running, and confusing my coming here as a challenge. The fact is; I wanted to be here, and you wanted to chase after me. I would never go into another man’s house and assert a breach in his privacy. Yet you do it to me?”

“I don’t think anyone owns this cave. And it certainly wouldn’t be you, even if someone did.”

“I’ve owned it for weeks. Months, before your lot showed up.” He said. “But it wouldn’t be the first time Xanthus asserted himself, would it be?”

“I’m not in service of Xanthus. I’m service of Vicentius-”

“And Vicentius honors Xanthus, so on and so on. The hierarchy goes all the way up, spare me.” He said.

“Then we’ve got nothing to talk about. You know how this goes and you know where this is going.”

From behind one of the crystals, he appeared, beyond the pillar his small form took shape in the darkness. His frame covered the line of stars and he stood tall. The blood dried upon his face. I threw my torch part ways, my eyes adjusted to the dark. The flame flickers, the tar spread across the floor and little goblets of flames spotted the floor between us. I drew out my other blade and held both in front of me. He walked around, circling me and often disappeared in the pillars of crystals. Then in one moment, stopped. I ran up, checked the giant mass he hid behind, nothing. He came from behind, sword in his hand. I blocked it with both blades, parried the sword to the side and tackled him. He jumped, fell and rolled on the floor before running behind the mass of crystals again. So many pillars, so many crystals. Like tombstones. The flame had died by now, the torch having rolled back and forth and the rag and tar wearing itself against the floor. It was him and I in this room, in this strange dark. Crystals like little stars, a crack in the ceiling where you could hear outside wind, a reflection of a morning I was aware of but could not see. To be this close to an exit and to unable to leave. To see the stars, but not the sky. A month of this for Duvall.

“He started with taxes.” Duvall said. His voice echoed and omnipresent as if the domed walls were talking to me.

“Did he.” I tightened my grip on my knives and looked around.

“He set soldiers on the edge and every month pushed them in, inch by inch.” He said. “The locals hated it. I hated it.”

“Plead to him then, not me.”

“He was at our door steps, claiming the farm land for himself. He started taking my people, into slavery. Saying they were escaped, saying they were his.” Duvall appeared once more, charging. I moved to the side. The blade missed and I trapped his wrists, stabbing one hand with a blade. I turned my hips, tripped him and flung him high before he crashed into the ground.

Duvall sat, coughing. His blade some feet away from him.

“Complain to him. Tell him your plight. You might make it, still.”

He laid sprawled out on the floor, looking up.

“He won’t.” He said. “He wanted it exactly like this. He wanted me to push against him. He wanted the excuse.”

“As if you’re any better. Killing your father, sending your brother to a far off prison. Like you were ever a good person to begin with.”

“Is that what he said about me?” Duvall laughed. “The lies we manufacture…war is strange isn’t it?”

I looked around, worried for some trap as I walked towards him. Duvall kicked away, crawling to a corner in the room.

“Stop this.” I said.

He drew out a knife from under his rags, something small and hanging to his thigh by thin rope.

“Stop.” I said.

“I just wanted freedom.” He said. “The Kavalians. Me. I just wanted to labor my own soil, live for my own people, I never wanted anything more than the line in the sand that said this is ours.”

“Put that down.”

“And if I can not have a free man’s life. Then I will have a free man’s death.” He put the knife to his neck. I ran. But it was too late.

He stabbed himself. I pulled the knife out. Duvall hung limp on the floor, blood out from his wound. He coughed, spasmed. I put my hand on the wound. A straight thrust going part way to his heart. Duvall sat coughing, the skin around his wound turning putrid. Yellow, black. I withdrew my hand and waved it to rid itself of the blood, throwing my gloves down on the floor and checking my body for poisoned blood.

“Fuck.” I said.

I stared at the man as he died. His body turning before my eyes. His skin flaking and blackening. The poison going up through his veins and turning them black as it coursed through him. Until finally, his shaky eye seized and swelled and his whole face turned into the ground, heavy from the coagulated blood swelled on the side of his head. And it made me think, how bad was this war to him that he’d poison himself than talk to Xanthus. Poison himself than plead for his army.