Chapter Six, Reckoning

The Hour of Battle

Deafening cacophony of murdered fowl split the air. The swansong of sacrificial birds took phantom flight across the treetops. When their dreadful lament ceased in place flapped the wings of impenetrable shadow, enveloping the cerise moon. That lunar sphere, taken by umbrage of clouds, flirts with surrender to bloody eclipse, though its bright body is not yet bared.

Drakkon and his men moved silently through Farrow forest. Stalking up the glum thicket, there could be seen no discernable path. Bastions of blackened bark and obstinate bush blocked all but a few slithers of light. The sparse steeds straying behind refused to follow. Without being able to press further the young avenger ordered a slight retreat. Instinctively clinging to the former treads, retracing those hidden steps, until a wink from the moonlight through cloud blanket confirmed the way. There they came to the edge of the woods just perpendicular to the parapets of Hearthfarrow.

The indomitable bastille of Night apprehends all. Nocturne tightens the latch on their fears, snuffing all save the anxious anticipation for blood’s first drops to be shed. Subtle wisps of mist exude breathe of wraithlike apparitions, floating through the wicked wood. Echoes of blood & coming battle pound the air’s pulse, the wind berating mortal folly below. A mass grave, afoul in its yearning, the ground they tread was to be. The ashen miasma of the woodland weaves a ghostly webbing, allowing their approach to be an invisible. Enigmas manifest on their eyeline. Ghosts & night-gaunts poke out from behind every hulking tree. Shapeless nightmares creep up the sides of every soldier’s periphery only to vanish into well of dusk.

From beneath their shawls of eerie spray came a sudden awareness of being watched, seen through their cover. Observed through ubiquitous glares from the malevolent murk, growing in pairs and hostility as they closed the gap. Sinister gleams flicker across thickets. A pale haze of wraiths & war-fed ghouls glides over the soil. The ghastly haste with which they made to the outskirts should make those specters above blush.

A baleful Autumn gale seizes the sky. Swirling about the clouds it pushes them apart to herald the glowering body of the Blood Moon, hovering over all with imposing lambency. A streaming hiss flew into the warriors’ ears. Rattling and rousing their nostrils with its repugnant gusts, carrying stench of putrid flesh and carcasses. So too with this malodor comes the moon’s crowned countenance. Its carmine smile appears, grinning over sepulchral march.

Through the dwindling coat inundating the outlying layers of Farrow Forest the Ferali fiends emerged. They slice through the fog with incising axe. Across their faces lay the pale veils of death; painted with a white foundation that begot a terrible image: that of Draugr raised for vengeful purpose beyond deathly gate. Streaked along their alabaster base were black oil smears & animal blood. They shaped themselves into daemons, hungering ghouls. Undead warriors only freshly risen from their haunts.

That verminous stench gave them away before any sight of their grave swathed skin. The rot of denied burial; black dirt against jutting bone; white paint, the pungency of innards leaking with abandon, and smeared gore of game and man. Once these night-gaunts penetrated the perimeter of the defenders’ vision they beheld uniform wall of foul Ferali berserkers, arisen after mortal fall to fight on for the horns. Cannibal’s hunger gnawed and glared behind every pair of unnatural eyes boring into their hearth. Some seemed skeletal in frame, while others were wrapped in despoiled organs and spilling entrails, yet undying.

Corpse-paint & wan wax drenched their bearings and bore brumal spears of fright into the nerves of those who first saw these ursine revenants. The intimidating affect was well achieved. What mortal man could consider himself capable of slaying that which is dead but refuses to seek its home in the cold ground? What soul would not be snared by that spectral gloom?

The colossal silhouette of Kassan’s monstrous proportion appeared. He donned the same dreary masquerade as his minions but proudly wore the distinguishing Crown of Bellieus atop his head. Crooked horns of demon’s shape brought him to even greater height. His was a terrible shadow that came upon his prey from on high. Veteran soldiers, defenders of their clan, shivered alongside nervous villagers who held arms to fill their lines. All quaking, arrested by panic and heaving prayers against malefic sight. All afeared that the fight of the last twenty years and the ancestral blood spilt for their claim was in vain.

As a Lord of the Wood and master of monsters, the chieftain strode forth atop Malderath’s black steed with fateful presence, commanding forsaken wraiths to his horn. Hellish alarum blared their advance and waylaid the hopes of the living. The ghouls’ rabid rush took Hearthfarrow’s defenders by surprise. While these brave (yet fearful and near hapless) souls were warned of bear-clads at their border they had not foreseen how swiftly nor that the dead would accompany them. For those whose bones were once claimed by the forests now knocked together in procession of annihilation.

These humble men of the Hearth, rallied to their homes, were painfully wanting in preparation and too few to challenge the full brunt of the Bear’s imminence. This accursed aura of un-life wreathed about Kassan & the saturnine sheen of the moon had these men (who’d made peace with giving their lives for their families and tribe) swearing off vows & burying dreams. They feared. Terribly so. Not just for their kin or not seeing another dawn but for threat of being dragged to the abyss by these twisted daemons.

With horrid haste the sentinels of the Hearth were routed. Retreating in dazed stumble, they fell back to the redoubt just before their village. Here those with enough wits left to stand as warriors made to muster a shield wall to halt the onslaught. But within their besieged jewel of a town more chaos came, summoned forth by the Lord of beasts, wretches, and night-comers.

Right into the bloodshed an array of Kassan’s painted sap-slingers & archers perched in high branches sent pitch-drenched missiles to immolate the bulwark from the inside. Furious volleys hail helfire from the nether. The Hearthfarrow tabernacle and barracks ablaze. Then the stables went up beside the favored tavern pub of many denizens. Many of the young, ill, and old hid in that inn and now faced the flame in their shelter.

Fires feasted on the structures; appetites helped by thatch-wood & wytch-fyre. Infernal flames licked at the faces of those frightened, fleeing wives & children. Laughed roaringly at those trying to halt its scourge with buckets of water and dirt. Pockets burst, spitting back destruction to those who defied this dragon’s breath.

A diversion dastardly enough to distract the thinning frontline. As the men of the town turn their heads to yell for their wives and children to escape to safety, the Ferali push forward and shatter the advance guard. The strength of the Farrowkin wanes, and their commander orders the gate shut and barricaded further. But what could that do but stave them off only slightly? When they’d yet to tame this furnace inside their town.

A gloating Kassan beats his chest in vulgar display. The warlord’s deathlike howl booms through bush and over cackling crackle. Ursine roar soars over the conflict. His shadow stretches taller, echoing the reach of his screech. Declaring all under the moon as belonging to him.

Drakkon’s forces rise from the forest flank. Waving torches and fresh banners in the moonlight they inform the garrisons, friend & foe, of their coming. At their head the young challenger rides ahead on majestic steed, neighing with warlike glee. The destrier flies across field and thorn to break the Ferali’s confidence with its own, matching its fearless rider. His vanguard charge with him into the fray as the wraiths freeze in their unseen steps.

The horsemen divide the packs of night-gaunts into strewing herds. Having revealed the fallibility of their enemy, their leader sings a storm before his line with divine confidence. Sword shaft points to accurse & accuse his adversary. Kassan, taken aback by this rival, clinches his craw. This young (but not so sophomoric) leader’s outriders smash the demons. They hammer fear against them, dazing these ghouls and bashing brains, splintering their shapes back to those of men. Shrieks of victorious joy turn to ones of their own terror.

Crackling cinders and dying gasps became the battle’s symphony. Atop his horse he projects his cry to the soiled, scattering sentinels of the crippled village. “Hold, Hearthfarrow! Though they wear the masks of Death they are but mere men who shall meet it! Do not fear blasphemous spectacle but hate them for it! Loathe them as the fiends who stole the skin and stomachs of fallen brothers for their devil’s decoration! Know that they can be trounced, the Bear slain!”

That same ‘Bear’ spit into a second, smaller horn. It coughs a wheeze of caution in contrast to the boastful bellow before. Anteing up, Drakkon pierces the grim miasma with thundering threat. Whistles through an axe that falls sharp before the hooves of the warlord’s beast. Call to kraagspeer A wager, one tactician against the other. A chieftain’s gambit to inherit his rival’s claim of clan. “Kassan! Thou blackened churl, thou bastard in guise of bear! Tyrant and slave to vain conquest, be crowned a fool! I curse thee to stand against one who bears Will and blade to break thee! I, Drakkon, the manifestation of the Highest, will put thee in thy place within the ground! Surrender thy pride and kneel to the Living Light. Repent to the judgement I bring or perish. Refuse this, answer me with axe and accept my kraagspeer, & meet thy punishment!”

Save for the spiteful sound of the blaze and infrequent clashing of shields splintered by spears, the Ferali war party’s raucous hysteria diminished in awe of this intrusive cry. To see such proud man raise challenge to their demigod of war shocked them to stasis. Some gave assailing shouts as their circle pivoted rabid gaze to spectate this smiting. But that challenger’s voice carried some innate power which agitated their muscles, which clenched with need to see his end swiftly come.

“Rambling pup! Lunacy addled fool! Let us put this mad hound down before its bark bites off its own arse! Back word with steel or die beneath my moon this night!” Kassan belted back.

His challenger redoubled his shout. “The moon thirst for thy blood to bathe its sheen, so I will not tremble before thee! A pretender whose carrion stamped; ash painted brutes will prove a fitting image in how they match the dead dominion thou shalt be delivered to. Be not craven! Let us duel claims without interruption.”

“Hold, night fiends and raiders! I will close this insult intimately. Hold, herd of Hearthfarrow! I must break this mad buck before our feast of you can begin fairly. Let us solve this with sword and end it simply through kraagspeer. Unless this blustered upstart would wish rather to apologize for his arrogant overstepping and beseech his Lord, the very real one before him, for forgiveness?” Kassan unhorsed and eyed the axe as a toothpick. His horns, given greater gleam by the red moonlight, stretched out across the way to extend under black hand. “Perhaps absolution could be your path, through martial service to me? Submit. Lest I prove the better – as I am - and rend that smug cheek of yours so deep through the dirt. Bear blade against the Bear and face your maker, the true divinity your lamb’s mouth befouls! Behold my crown! Bend before the horns or be cleaved by them!”

“Nay, beast! My sword and speech shall ring true! Be proven superior!” Drakkon delivered another addition to his searing and grandiose challenge. “As I am the sword from the sky, as I am the Living Light streaming into vessel of man, I shall banish your existence and unseat your soul from bloated body! I shall display your putrid remains before all the land as a testament to what shall befall all those who plant petty claim to what is not theirs and defy the sanctity of faith, fraternity, and the Great Pantheon! Make what petty peace thou might with the gods but know that they turn their Aegis from thee!”

Upon hearing this dire challenge Kassan’s heir-favored son, Beron, emboldened by the misguided desire to prove his mettle by defeating this rival took up his father’s steed and raised a javelin. Stieg held back Heron, his other, younger stepson by his late wife, as to subdue him. To stave him from sharing in his sibling’s fate, from charging to death as his brash brother just did.

Unflinching in resolve, Drakkon charges back at this brash challenger. In fell swoop borne by Astarte’s boon he strikes the Ferali heir from his horse. Steed and rider sliced to shambles. The horse collapses onto the young man’s chest, crushing bloodied bone. Beron cries for the mercy of death. At this his better dismounted and held blade to gurgling throat. When the boy’s father halts, refusing surrender, the victor gives sign to his reserves concealed along the forest’s fringe. His wood cornett trumpets renewal of violence.

At that command a hail of arrows pierced the unprepared necks and eyes of many among the Ferali. Falling maimed or dead by their companions boots sent reverberation of doom through the rest of the standing force. They knew not from whence the pinning barrage came and were slung into hysteria, brought to point of breaking rank. With Drakkon’s horn contesting Kassan’s the Hearthfarrow commander heard that second wind resound. Reopening the gates, he ordered his remaining warriors charge the befuddled barbarians.

Carnage befell the field. Every mind upon it eclipsed with gruesome fervor for their conflict. A dissonant symphony of cracking skulls, clanging swords, cut limbs, culled horses, and the cacophonous wails of the souls condemned within the moribund cyclone. Drakkon’s head swelled with the lustrous thrill of battle as his passion for slaughter waxed and the steel of his blade raised up to the sky to see how it mirrored the glaze of maroon lunacy within his own glimmer. The dissociative alar of battle sprang from his spine. He lifts over his own perception, ascends to the adrenaline junction of peril. Gory euphoria blurred instinct. Fury forged motion.

But although the Ferali ghouls were surrounded and found themselves caught up on the wrong side of strife’s capricious tide they did not surrender to dissolution completely. Their fiercest berserkers relished in the unstable flow. For them chaos was chance to prove the extent of their malicious might. They stare down the face of adversity, throttle fear, ready to die as martyrs for the Great Bear. Should they fall as sacrifice here they would ride alongside ancestral phantoms across the sky.

One such berserker, with bone snout jutting from jaw, bear fur stitched to back & with nothing to stay the cold save the warming blood of fight, barreled at the Drakoni. One of his brothers screamed similar savage reverie and bolted at the sowed townsmen, their meek partition ripe for breaking. This bestial valor compelled the fiercest of their brethren to follow chase. Battering brutally, wielding spiked batons and axes with bear skulls sculpted to their tops, they smashed the volunteer line. Pulverizing stampede stunted the trappers, divvying up terms of combat more befitting the Ferali.

This mad fervor kept the Drakoni from relieving the village. Kassan claimed this sudden split, sending his elite harbingers to plow through to spill more blood for the thirsting mist. A little further and the stubborn Hearth would be his. Once those walls belonged to him the rest could be routed back into the Farrow foliage to be rounded up later. But there yet remained a straight line between the leaders, briefly intruded upon only for those reckless lackeys to be lashed back from the row.

Drakkon traipsed to where Beron lay, unconscious, but heaving beneath the weight of dead stallion. The tip of his blade punctured the edge of the boy’s gullet. Shooting daggers from his eyes into Kassan’s, he shouts for personal bout once more. “Oh bloody ‘Bear’! The soul of thy favored son may be yet redeemed. Solely through thy slumber -long warranted hibernation among worms - may this cub’s spirit find restful sleep.”

Kassan’s alarum countered with gust, raising their contest, and warding off his fellows. “I will end this, alone. Hark! Attend as audience while I behead this bastard. Then we raze the tomb of Lysander unmolested by children who play at berserker’s sport. Bear lawful axe ov Ursinium! Give heed to the gaiety of slaughter!”

“Thou, motley mold of mud besmirching the antlers of the Wood’s Keeper, shall see no more morrows from this field! Hear & behold: The storm breaks with my lightning! The sea bends to the tides of my turning! The earth opens at my behest, yawns to swallow thee!”

At this insulting boast Kassan grunts & turns from the scorched ramparts. Gritting through graveyard look, he strides to meet this opponent. Scoffing shades any flusters of doubt. Sneering a few meters from his accuser, he breaks into sprint.

Drakkon did not balk before the bull rush of the Bear. In his mind, the clear and hateful image of this man in terrible poses: ravishing the love he had possessed in youth, the haunting shape looming over mother and burning heaths behind. He cursed the suffering the crowned cur caused; All the wrong inflicted upon Azarra, Corinna and all souls worth savoring. Swore by all that is sacred that he must pay for those sins indebted. The searing vision redoubled his prowess. Instead of tensing up, he relaxed. With meditative breaths, he waited. Assured his sword would prevail.

During the flurry of spinning swords, a locked glare was shared between them which could cause any lesser men to crumble beneath such fiery pressure. But Kassan’s enraged assault did him no better. Making many a rash and unwise move against his opponent, who took advance of every noticed vulnerability. A squall of clashing steel beset the moon-branded air, the blood sheen bouncing off their blades.

Kassan’s size & fury met a match in the might & momentum of Drakkon. Every swing, any split-second stumble, could spell the end. A demonic hail quickening towards him with such speed & brutality behind his strikes. Anger came along with those blows, emboldened the longer it took for the challenger to fall. But Drakkon held fast, refusing to stagger from stance – riposting with his own lifelong rage; the purpose he’d atoned for since birth. The dueling giants wrestled with one another, pore scraping against pore, unable to land the finish.

They swing, shove and sting with their great swords. Apparent equals of titanic measure, each kept the other back without closing the gap. Even with skillful half-swording and reversing clinches, the young challenger could not deliver any decisive blows. Were it not for the heavy horns & grave gauze on the villain’s head, the duelists would’ve seemed mirrors; ageless twins of each other.

Their arms slashed wildly different shapes with similar reach. The unwitting father’s design – with axe-like guard about the hilt & jutting serrations along thick neck – matching the thinner, but solid blade his unknowing son wielded; forged from unique techniques of Ty-Drasil’s superlative sage of the smithy.

This contest dragged on longer than both fighters & spectators desired. But one to spur on the poets & players, troubadours of all assorted ability, with inspiration. To sing of the struggle once it passes to history with flash of fatal quill, legend writ with lethal ink.

The Bear’s nostrils snort huffs. Heat of the Hels breathes through them as they struggle to gain an angle. The panting warlord shoves his unwitting son back. A beat to recenter, he slips a hand to his belt and draws out a hand-axe. He swings with span of his grit, aiming to sink head into neck for swift end. His axe, however, had not be readied before his target snatched shield from a soldier’s corpse in time to catch the slamming throw. Its head splinters the wood of shield but shatters its handle, in signet of shame.

The false strigoi roars. Screeching full fiber of unnatural ferocity, he hoists dual grip sloping with deathly arc. Only to be parried by Drakkon’s swift precision & (almost supernaturally) trained technique. So taken back, seizing with scourging ire, was he by real resistance to his unrivaled arm, that his sword hand shook. For a moment, their gaze met, and Kassan was then captivated by how uncannily kindred his opponent’s eyes seemed to his own.

Fascination charmed him to letting his guard droop for but a moment. Marveling at how akin that raven mane was to his own and their hue of eye the same. So struck by paralyzing horror to be facing not merely a contender to his dominion but truly his long-lost heir. This boy, the bastard of prophecy by the oracle woman – that witch who cursed him in omens beneath an older moon-tide’s bloodied wake – had escaped his gaze to meet it now as a man and Enemy.

This wordless revelation had no time for utterance. Nor could it be fully believed or humored lest it swing the balance. Brief as it was the slip opened the exit door to their duel. Although the pale behemoth martialed against that odd inkling, that disarming familiarity defeated him, just then.

Drakkon’s precise blade punctures stomach protected only by mesh, bearskin, and tweed kilt, stabbing his side. Bubbling bursts of innards wrenched out onto dead sward. The grievously wounded party stoops low in messy gore.

Kassan stumbles to audible gasps from his troops. His Ferali froze, aghast at their leader’s repulsion by swordsman of half the cycles. Drakkon dug at his foe’s pupils, which flare with steep revelation. His father & foe clutched his side for support. Lurching forward the weight of his crooked coronet pulled on his head. Worn out with imbalance, gigantic mass made clumsy.

Thunderous reverberation of recognition returned alongside shivering sign of understanding. In his enflamed iris arose a tinge of resentful respect for the one brought him down. That his line would persist by proxy. A sliver of perverse love, as though his soul survived in the eyes of this killer, his kin.

The Great Bear jabs at his prodigal son in half-hearted last gambit to impale him with sharp horns, gash throat of this fatal nemesis, kin or not. A futile try. Decisively Drakkon dodges, then grasps the obtuse bones of the crown. With forceful pull he brings them toward, drags skull and neck behind helm within strike. He cleaves a straight and narrow path through the ogre that rends deeper than nerves.

The fiend did not plead. Did not cower at the falling sword. There was no fear there so much as surprise. Although his imminent death came as incapacitating shock to his pride, the soul of the man who long hounded Drakkon & his mother and ensured a hell for them did not slink. Right before the last throttled pulse of his heart gave way, there came a seismic shift in expression.

“Prodigal cub...” Kassan’s head oozed, mouthing final thoughts before the abyss enclosed his spirit’s seams. “To live on through you! Blood ov bear, my blood!”

The beast toppled into crimson lake. Profuse pool of lifeblood leaked at its trembling feet. Eyes rolled about frantically before stony silence arrested their dizzying dash of defeat. Victorious, Drakkon held the beaten ‘bear’ by the horned helm. He brought his face close to the demon’s, checking its flame was truly extinguished.

“I,” Drakkon declared, taking the antlered head from dank crimson, “commit thy body to the worms! To the forest which thou sought to claim, oppress and rape: may she reclaim thee! Earth, Goddess Elderath, pois’nd by thy miserable conquests thusly offers thee to her Dark Sister of Death! May Malderath & her Hels claim thee eternally!”

The victor faced wounded Hearthfarrow. “This land, these people, are free of thy evil! Men of Ferali, lay down arms and repent the sins of thy fallen chief. Kneel to peace, that these tribesmen, your brothers, need not shed further blood in bitterness for a lying satyr. The fiend lies dead at my feet!”

Bodies Beneath the Lune

Peak of the Eclipse, Witching Hour

Shadows arced over the moon’s bloody lens. From her astral abode Selene watched from cold seat, observing the fallen through the mists of their shades as their bodies were tossed onto burning pits. Funereal flambeaus burnt the dark’s curtain. Pillows of smoke poked out of the palisade remnants. Several structures were reduced to charred vestiges, but a fair amount of the town’s troubles had been stamped out, saved. Yet more than a few were entombed beneath smoldering scar, their ash-plumes peeving the airs. Tears of survivors, women & children sent to safety, were stifled; helped from their rooftops and makeshift pantry barricades down into smog which squelched mourning. Instead of streaming out their sorrows & relief, their wan residue only added to the dismal vapors.

The mist-wrappings along the lune departed, letting bare & bold gloss alight their exit as clouds fled past the far edges of the mountains. With departure of stillborn storms, the sky streaked its canvas with the scarlet brush of lunar goddess. Her halo swept about the hillsides and a coronet of incandescent stars blinked curiously upon the aftermath.

Any prospect of sleep had been decimated by the assault, by material nightmare. All those exhausted families left to gather in disquietude. Many an eye glints for a glance of the monolithic man who executed the tyrant that hounded their hearth. No longer could that horror infringe upon their homes, their lives. That was surely something and yet this did not fill their guts with utmost elation, for this claimant of Divine power was stranger still. Alas, his vague resemblance to the slain chieftain did little to quell the apprehension of average hearts and easily emboldened the suspicions of more anxious types. They’d lost much already and were not so certain they could jump to revelry when this hand outstretched to them as savior could just as easily steal off with the rest.

Kassan’s avenger did not offer much of a glance to the townsfolk. Stationed on miniature bluff across the field, lit by dim pyres, he made council with would be enemies and allies alike.

Drakkon clasps Stieg’s shoulder, gripping the subversive elder with encouragement. Listens to his suggestion of mercy to the Ferali, vowing that some of them deserve a second chance more than himself. Hears next demands that those ‘blasphemous night-gaunts’ and ‘horrors of men’ whom the Drakoni allowed remain in enclosed camp be put to sword instead of given watch & rations. Drakkon settles their backbiting for the time by offering parley to last living heir of the Bear, Heron, should he appear before council on the morrow.

Azarra sailed course for that council, thanking Selene & her Sisters as she went. Grateful that her haunting had been exorcised. That the evil parted the fields with the thick mist. Although the worst of hell’s creatures had been punished by the progeny of its own wrong, she knew there was much more to do before she could gloat as grossly as she wished. A subtle sparkle drew her just outside range of her son’s discussion. But her sight gravitated to a newly erected monument in the way: Kassan’s wretched mug impaled upon a spear. Morbid visage disfigured, blistered by the pit next to it. As the mouth of the funeral pyre bit into her aggressor’s loathsome skull, so too did they roast her heart with cinders of ashen memory.

Azarra felt the fire in her belly spit froth, spurring the brutal bruises & lifelong nausea that this face inflicted upon her. She glared into the empty core of his deadened pupils sending her full intent to the ghost attached to this abject shell. Flailing curse of damnation, that he knows no afterlife but be chained to rot. That the soul trapped within decaying skull be fodder for the grave, a house for worms and maggots to borrow in and penetrate him as he had her.

“Mother, there is someone I wish you to meet this fateful eve.” Drakkon broke through his mother’s mental seclusion.

As Azarra turned to him the pale bust of Kassan followed trail of hateful thoughts and overlaid itself upon her son’s countenance. His image transposed with mocking purity. Corrosive horror gnawed through crags in her ribcage. She tried shaking false thoughts from her hair. She looked up at him, wide eyed and preoccupied.

“By his assistance we attained sweeping victory. This is Stieg, former emissary of that bestial clan, who helped us smite them. He is redeemed as champion of our enlightened cause!” With that introduction he gestured to a scarred, decrepit man garbed in fur-vestments of the Ferali wisemen.

“I thank you, Lord, but nay,” Stieg presented them a humble bow, “your triumph belongs entirely to you. Much of the battle’s designs were unknown to me. But the Fates’ winds blew at your back, cheering their champion in you! Without any help from this old mortal, full of folly, you slew rabid bear.”

“Nay, ‘aye’, harbinger. Take the praise which is well earned. You are helping now to bridge the fissure between feuding peoples from yawning open fresh wounds. You’ve wisdom & reverence to be dressed in.”

“Again, Lord, I insist that is all I can do with these tired limbs, while my little strength serves as solvent. The Sylvani ancestral claim remained truer than my last master’s. As did their cousins of Farrowkin return the forest to itself. Should I waggle my tongue too much I would only re- ignite that fission.”

Azarra recovered from dazed state when her eyes fell upon his wizened face. Stieg, himself a scar from her past, a terror made turncoat. Tragic remembrance sealed away the world around them. That black fur... That bone necklace... That stave... His face may be far more weathered than before, but I know this horrid beast. By his stare & charcoal growl. “Harbinger” to Kassan... This vile blackguard attended the ceremony of my ruin! Her breath sheered. No small good can undo that sin he assisted in... Does his wilted mind remember?

Stieg recoiled a bit and glanced back at Drakkon. Observing his likeness keenly and returning to Azarra, understanding burst from synaptic surge. Had Stieg deduced the nature of his new Lord’s birth? Indications of morbid curiosity dashed across his brows before he reclaimed sober expression and bowed carefully.

Drakkon split their orbiting stares with verbal hand. “There is well enough time for you to become familiar, allied. Stieg requested one final trial of honor at your behest, Mother, that he may fully resolve the turbulence within himself caused by serving Kassan. Find a fitting test of spirit for him. For now, let us proceed to the square. We must hold these vital players of Farrow, Sylvani and Ferali to congregate in terms of peace and certify matters for the future. Seems we will need more than one night to sway them into union.”

The trio and their taut posse left the smoky ramparts to pass beneath the cool stone archway, still standing at the village entrance. Pushing past through the streets into the square the people gathered, crooning in trance of doleful rites for their relatives. Their lamenting chorus encircled the whole in an effluvium of deep mourning & suspended uncertainty. Regardless of what dawns with the morrow the dead deserved their songs.