Upon landing his weary eyes on the hobgoblin city of Thajh, Tusk was reminded of the great termite mounds he'd seen in the scrublands of the Lower Crescent when he visited those reaches on an Anatoli excursion in his early days of training. But here the structures were magnified a thousand times in scale. The sandmen had somehow—perhaps with the help of sorcery, perhaps through sheer love of suffering and toil—built crude mud towers that pierced the very sky as their makers' needles did their flesh, hundreds of stories tall and countless in number. Their very buildings strove to climb closer to their sun-god. The Reaper suspected the wasters' control of insects through sound and sorcery had something to do with their construction. The spires were pocked with windows that winked like pinned fireflies in the chalky twilight and lined with a connective tissue of bridges and scaffolds. The sweltering city hummed with doings, much of it devoted to hurt. Cries of pain occasionally erupted from buildings and tucked-away alleys but many of the gobs suffered their flagellations in sacred and prolonged silence. Droves of the zealots were strapped to poles and walls, stretched into sublime agony. The place crawled with twitching and moaning life.

Tusk regarded Risper with concern. The journey of chokingly hot days and nights of aching chill had furthered the toll on his disarticulated frame. Risper was pale as the Banshee ghost from the childhood tales, his breaths short and ragged. Tusk knew the sight of a man close to death. The eyes looked beyond. Risper's wracked body lurched and rolled as their caged wagon rode through a great labial door and into one of the towers and up a winding ramp fashioned from earth and glass and other matters unknown that had been hardened into a composite strong enough to sustain the structures' impossible heights. The wind howled through the tunnels within but never did those sounds fully smother the wretched moans and lamentations of this pandemonic city's occupants. Tusk could only guess what was in store for him and his comrade, if this was what these maniacs did to themselves. As the convoy drew deeper into the tower's heart the sickening cries only grew more powerful. The hobgoblins' word for this hell could be translated to the Julian tongue as 'The Painworks,' and never had a name been more fitting.

Fear made Tusk as prostrate as his companion—but he had known that emotion much in his life. He and his Reaper trainers had taught him to choke down fear, to acknowledge it with calm and set it aside. He'd found the bodies of his parents, murdered by road agents, as they still twitched and gargled. From that day forward fear came to Tusk on the back of every night. Ghosts of past ills tormented his psyche... his participation in the misguided slaughter at Edsohonet, apparitions of Mad Skelen's unthinkable revenge in Marrow, the subdued and sterilized nightmare curations of the Anatoli halls, a phantasmagoria of moments from his own bloodstained career as a Reaper. He oddly thought of Thirteen from his team, how lucky that man had been to have no conscience. Tusk realized that he would likely never see his old teammates from Team 3 again. Halo, Shroomer, Jinx—he'd miss those boys, they filled the hole that had been rent open when he was brutally orphaned. He looked over at Risper. The broken man's eyes stared into some other place better than this. He was already lost, blessedly numb. Immune to the horrors around him. Dead but for a stubborn heart.

Tusk discreetly picked up the stone under which he had hidden the reserved scorpion's stinger. He cupped the needle in his palm, careful to avoid injecting himself. The contents within the gland, still intact, were only certain to kill one person, perhaps two. He would have to time this right.

There were half a dozen hobgoblins around them—black eyes set in skeletal faces, pierced and scarified flesh, rattling bones and chains. A bristling arsenal of spears and blades and spurs ready to unmake them. Even if Tusk could kill one of the wasters, it would be impossible for him to fight off the rest, Reaper training or no. He was dehydrated, starved, fatigued. And Risper certainly couldn't help fight in his shape. It was decided... Tusk knew his course.

As the hobgoblins unlocked the latches and flung the cage doors open Tusk quickly turned and jammed the stinger into Risper's neck. He pumped the venom into his comrade's bloodstream and then as the hobgoblins fought to pull Tusk off Risper, he did the same to himself. He felt the sharp stab as he injected the needle into his own jugular and the hot chemical flush of the venom as it darted into his veins, his traitor heart pumping the acidic stuff through his flesh. The chamber spun into a wheeling blur of screaming and snarling hobgoblin faces. Tusk's heart-drum pounded in his skull. His stomach kicked and lurched in a caustic fit. The ranger thought he heard Risper mutter a final thanks for bringing him the escape he so wished, and then all was darkness.

— • —

"Whether he is alive or dead is not important here."

Mulia narrowed her eyes. "Such words from his own father."

"You must be pragmatic," said Leofrick as he bit another hunk of maggot cheese and chased it down with his wine. A wriggling larva clung to his bottom lip and the old senator sucked it in. "It's been long enough. Declaring Donric dead on that piece of paper means nothing. It will not change whether or not he still truly draws breath. But it will change his standing under law, and get these accusers off our backs. If Donric is admitted dead the courts will not stain his honor any longer with these lies of desertion. I've done the hard work, all you need do is sign. Dip your quill and let us be done with this formality."

"I suspect this has more to do with Donric's pension than his honor," Mulia replied in words of spite.

"The additional income would be welcome, there is no doubt. Your manor is ruinous." Leofrick looked around at the walls spidered with cracks and peeling coats. "Your staff is on the verge of mutiny. And I refuse to help you with your debts if you will not first help yourself by signing that meaningless writ."

They were seated in Mulia's study, each in a large and plush chair before a cantankerous hearth. Mulia took a bite from the cheese and fought the urge to mind the maggots. Leofrick had surely brought the expensive so-called delicacy as a gift to test her mettle, or simply make her less comfortable during their discourse. She would give him no such satisfaction and, though it turned her stomach to do so, she chewed and swallowed the cheese, squirming larvae and all. In doing so it occurred to Mulia that perhaps she had indeed failed the test, after all... that if she were truly a strong woman she would have simply told her bearish father-in-law that she didn't care for the 'delicacy'—and just watched him dribble the cheese's milky tears over his beard and suck the larval flies between his teeth alone. This was the most likely goal of Leofrick's choice of this midnight snack above all others—to get her mind working on these games and not the matter at hand.

Mulia gathered her focus. Was there something else at work here, something in the wine Leofrick had also brought? "I don't care about the money and I never have."

Leofrick snorted. The unsigned document they discussed sat on the table between them, feathered quill at the ready. The majority of the scrawlings on the parchment were devoted to the full true name of the man known as 'Halo' to his fellow Reapers. Donric von Leofrick von Callister von Keipsul von Strattahorm von Giorbrun von Thum von Matterkrymn... and on and on it rambled with every forefather accounted for along the way into the fogs of antiquity. In daily use people kept it to the first two—"Donric von Leofrick" in this case—leaving the runaway versions for official materials such as the somber parchment over which Mulia and Leofrick now quarreled. Many of the run-on monikers used by Camshire's aristocracy began to fray and unravel at their ancient ends, prone to fabricated connections and invented bloodlines to bolster one's ego and status. And it was true—many a noble did measure others by how far back their lineage could be traced and how many 'vons' or 'ofs' or 'gets' they could claim—as if one who couldn't name his or her grandsire five generations back never had one at all. Some of the social elite counted a hundred patronyms or more, plunging into the deep murk of uncertain past to the point of farce, even naming lesser gods in the boasting of their lines. Mulia chafed at the whole practice. It rejected the notion that all people were born equal and while it ensured that the names of men were inscribed into history, the appellations of the mothers, the women, were tragically discarded and lost beyond wedding records and family legendry and fading portraits and engravings upon tombstones.

"I can do without the house or the servants," said Mulia. "I will see them off immediately and put the place on the market. So the girls and I will lead simpler lives, more humble lives. Perhaps that is for the better."

Leofrick huffed. "We'll see if you still crow the same caw after a year without your precious theater and fine cuisine. Further, where is your conscience? Your Nation is at war—an honorable woman who is not barren would be busily serving that cause by bearing and raising more men to fight for us. I assure you the gobs are fornicating like gremlins. If they don't outkill us, they just might outbreed us. If you sign, you can remarry and get on with things and help fill the ranks. Help keep humanity strong."

"Perhaps I'll go to fight, myself," said Mulia. "Would that be enough?"

Leofrick snorted. "You would say no such thing if you ever witnessed what truly unfolds on the field of battle. It is no place fit for woman." Leofrick looked up at the family portrait hanging over the mantle. There was Donric, proud Reaper 'Halo,' striking in his military uniform, with Mulia at his side (so young and free of true pain back then), with their twin daughters Astrid and Amelie in their laps. "A shame that you never bore him a male heir."

"His daughters fill his heart enough," Mulia said. The girls slept upstairs at the current hour. Mulia ceaselessly worried about them in these brutal times and had kept them home in recent days. There had been threats against the schools from the anarchs and other nefarious actors, for reasons political or religious or insane or unthinkable. She wished Donric at her side. As equals, they would help each other navigate the treacherous walks of life. She trusted no other like him, and knew the return was true.

"Donric's blood pumps in my veins." Leofrick stepped closer to Mulia. The senator's breath reeked of maggot cheese and liquor. "Perhaps I should give you that son. My seed is still strong."

Mulia shoved Leofrick from her and he snorted again, more pig than man. The old legislator headed for the door. "Declare him dead. Take the money. Or you are a fool." And then he was finally gone.

Mulia stared into those spitting flames and weighed the scales. Her eyes went to the family portrait and it soon became blurred by her tears. She snatched up the document that if signed would declare her one and only love dead and thrust it into the fire.

— • —

A great spiral shell that had long been emptied of its original indweller lay on its side in the sulfurous wastes. The nautical carapace now had itself a new claimant, an old human who had long ago forsaken his own kin. Or perhaps it was he who had been the forsaken one, depending on the teller. The fissure where once some gigantic crab or snail emerged from this great shell millennia ago with probing stalks and dumb purpose now served as a simple curtained doorway. The hermit had furnished the sandworn husk's cavity over the years with tables and chairs and a bed and such. Some he'd scavenged or traded for. Others he had personally hewn from the petrified leavings of an ancient kelp forest nearby.

The bearded nobody led a quiet and isolated existence out there in the hinterlands far from society and its laws and judges. No one to speak to him but the howling fauna and moody winds. The hermit saw it as a sign from the stars when he discovered a tattered sheaf of goblin scrolls in a sand-covered clay pot in the shell. He'd hoped to glean sorcerous knowledge from the scripts but found no aptitude for it. He kept the relics in the hopes he could sell them well in some day of need, and laid to rest his fleeting ambitious of mastering the finest art himself. He instead kept snakes in cages and grew beds of cacti and witchgrass for the eating and dried pitchol for the smoking and waited for what comes to all.

— • —

The long-timer had seen no other man or woman for years upon years before that stranger came as if birthed by the horizon with his curious and ominous sword. The hermit recognized the design of the blade to be of hobgoblin make, like the scrolls he kept, and wondered how the wayward visitor had come by the prized weapon. Was it possible this man had actually slain a holy warrior and claimed the artifact for himself? Or merely lucked into the find as he did?

The hermit had no trust for the newcomer nor any other man. But he also could not turn such an aimless soul away. In the name of hospitality and self-preservation he invited the drifter into his fossilized home. They ate a meal of half-dead snake (the old man's specialty) and the boiled eggs of urgetoads and crumbling hunks of stale cactus rusk. The hermit noticed runes carved into the hands and wrists of the stranger to match those on his stolen blade and his eyes wandered the length of the visitor's arm and found on his shoulder a different sort of tattoo. It took the septuagenarian's aging mind a moment to register the meaning of that symbol—a snake coiled round a scythe—but then it struck him. It was the mark of a Reaper.

The hermit tried to converse with the stranger. He asked about the Nation, the wars, the mood back 'home.' But the visitor spoke little, just strange mutterings of forts and nothings and men with the heads of pigs. The Reaper had the stare of someone already dead. After they ate, the hermit gave his visitor a blanket and showed him a place where he could sleep on the floor and asked that he be on his way in the morning.

It took some time for the hermit to ease into slumber. After he finally did, deep in the night, he soon woke again to find that ornamented blade at his neck.

— • —

Halo watched his hand draw the ancient blade against the pariah's throat but found himself uncaring. The part of him that would have taken issue with such cold-blooded murder was lost within that blade, sucked from his soul by the heartless and ancient emperor housed within. The Reaper was a shell of a man now, not unlike the husk this old dying hermit called home. A man made hollow. Halo could no longer remember the names of his daughters, could no longer see the face of his wife in his mind's eye. All Halo had in him now was a compulsion to do the weapon's bidding, to march deeper into the wastes at the one called Rattanak's behest, and obey the insatiable tug in his gut that would lead him to some unspoken destination for ends untold.

Halo coldly watched the old man choke and bleed out and fall from his bed onto the dusty floor. The half-Reaper took the Cephexis scrolls and those few possessions that would aid him on his journey deeper into the wastelands and then through those ragged curtains he went. That old hermit was the last man that would set eyes on Halo for many knots of the moons.