10 - 2 [Magus] The Slaughter of Sparrows Brings Black Tidings Krauklys Korax - 16th of Last Frost, Year 1125 A.E.

The roof of Tregthekkar’s had fallen far too many cycles back, Barry reckoned. Instead, cloth and tarp of some kind or another, kept out the snow and rain.

Strange that the brigands had fabric good enough to ward-off the elements without. Seemed that these black-hearts had been stuck in this place for a long and good while, with their decent holdings and what not. Yet why the bandits had chosen this roost still baffled the mercenary.

There were no good marks nor any flow o’ caravans near the Keep. Too far from the roads and King’s Highway, this place was. The pathways that used to lead here had all but dried up, only game-trail left behind.

What made men hold vigil in a far away place?

What made men stay in the shadows of long-forgotten ruin?

What had been their price and who had paid?

Why had they been killed in such a black-hearted way?

Barry thought these thoughts as he looked through the breach in the stonework walls, waiting in the gloom to strike in concert with Deoch’s lot.

It was disquieting, the quiet. It unnerved him just how loud the air was without ever making a sound. The tension a palpable thing, a bowstring held taut with arrow to be let loose and a lute’s chords pulled too far and straining to pop.

He waited; he chewed his inner mouth; he choked up his hold on his father’s axe, changing the position of his grip once again in but a small span of time.

He was careful to not let the light of the day glance on his steel, lest the glint catch a wayward eye from within the shadow’s hame; the covering of the dark that wrapped around him no different than a blanket swaddles a babe.

Sudden as thunder in stormless and blue sky, came shouts of alarm.

No, of terror. Sheer, incredulous terror. For no person would wail with such woe if not that they were sure of coming death for either them or one of their own.

Or worse, sure damnation that brought a man straight to the lowest of the Hells; the Ninth Layer of Dudael; the Crucible of the Gods where the Serpent Herself was bound in spirit for all eternity. To stew in the sulfurous lake of fire that bubbled with broth of brimstone for Her Betrayal.

Barry much preferred Dudael to what he had heard after the wailing ceased.

A single word cut through the silence. It had made the silence bleed. Wept, the silence had, tears of effluvia sanguine freed…

Oh gods, no.

…to quench the cold earth’s unholy thirst for all that possessed the vital warmth.

“Undead!”

The word was enough to make Barry scramble back and away to the agreed-upon fallback destination; that of the courtyard should the need for a last stand come to be.

They reconvened on the hill overlooking the Keep, trees bereft of leaf to their backs. Hearts battering against the cages of their ribs. And a coming mass of the hungry dead; men rotten and corpses raised for a bidding most black.

Hobbled gaits yet their steps inexorable, the undead came.

They made no sound; no wails; no moans. Silent as whatever grave they had been raised from.

It was a slaughter.

Brothers and sisters in a retreating line were overwhelmed by waves of bodies twisted and lifeless. The dead broke upon them like the sea in high tide and low storm, spilling over the flanks. Their numerical advantage let the unliving trap the band from the sides without much effort.

Barry counted at least fifty dead raised from the grave. Fifty enemies to their measly seventeen.

No, sixteen, the mercenary corrected himself in thought as he hacked at another rotten limb with his father’s axe.

Honor, kith, and kin-found kept all but one of the Sparrows from fleeing; A lad they had picked up on First Frost by the King’s Road near Uldenred. He ran, abandoning the Reds with most none the wiser; for why would attention be spared to the within when, without their line, the dead roamed the earth?

Shambling men with eyes vacant and lost, worse than any druggae devil’s gaze amid a dream of fever and insanity. They felt no pain; they did not tire; they did not die.

The only method to incapacitate the undead was to hack off their limbs, yet even then the beasts stabbed with their now-sharp bones—jagged and fractured spears gushing with fetid marrow—or crawled atop a member of the band and overwhelmed them with bites and weight.

Deoch was nowhere to be seen, and so Ethelden had taken up the mantle, yelling out orders to retreat back into the forest in half-step.

He took up the hame like a fish to water, Etty’s practice with the Red Sparrow himself showing its dividends.

A good thirteen of their band survived the initial contact, yet their enemies’ numbers grew larger. Like cockroaches coming out in the night, the monsters crawled out of the Keep to break their fast.

The band had retreated ten span into the first or so trees, lessening their burden as they now had some cover with which to beat back the dead. The Sparrows’ agility and dexterity was a step above the monsters, yet that had not been enough to avoid casualties.

Men made mistakes in the midst of battle. A single wrong foot or overextended strike, and they were dragged into the sea of the hungry dead.

Even when all was done right and proper, the world cared not.

Death still came, Black Crow’s Cawing Call inexorable.

They had had to wait for most of their members to get into position so a defensive retreat could be effectively pulled off. It took time for men and women sprawled all over the Keep to reconvene.

Time for the unliving to drag three unfortunate souls to be devoured alive, flesh scraped from their bones by the baleful crop of the dead; nails, long and dastardly things more like claw now that the skin was pulled back by the grave.

Those caught in the terrible mass did not die fast nor easily, screaming all the while. That Barry did not prefer over Dudael.

From ten span to now twenty, with the good cover of the trees, the band was starting to gain ground.

We just might make it, he murmured in between turbid breaths, the Flowing-River all but forgotten to the veritable sea of the dead.

Barry would later curse his nine-damned mouth.

For just as he uttered that thought into the ether, came a beast. A creature great and baleful, all red and wrong and flayed raw. It wielded a blade as thick as a man’s wrist and taller than a man by almost half. Wide as a man’s torso, too.

Upon its inhuman weapon danced profane flame the color of a voidmoon; black and foreboding of doom that was to come.

The shadow of the Ashen God weighed down all that had eyes to see and ears to hear. Where the crackle of mundane flame once reigned, now the chittering of locusts could be heard.

It was scythe reaping through the fields on Last Seed.

It took his arms; it took his kin-found; it took his love.

It was the Slaughter of Sparrows.

The Lone Sparrow II - 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E.

Barry took in a turbid breath, all long and shaky yet unable to provide proper air to his lungs; foundation built upon shifting sand and bubbling muck.

He felt like he couldn’t breathe, but still the Lone Sparrow took in breath just the same, going through the motions of the Flowing-River; the ebbs and then flows of the imaginary waterway were almost palpable things in his mind’s eye.

To the waters, he fed his growing unease and burden of guilt and grief, acknowledging them before he set each to wind down into the ether; whatever that word that Stregor had used so often meant.

The man had dabbled in unsanctioned magicking, gaining queer words and stranger things still each time he came out from some wise person’s hut in the depths of one forest or another.

The last time had been when Stregor went into the Hethekkar Foothills near the town of Sakem-

Focus, the White Wolf chidded, bringing Barry’s stray ruminations back into a somewhat decent train of thought.

The Flowing-River Breath was not enough to center the Lone Sparrow, but was enough to calm his shaky voice—the once rugged and callous quality it possessed had all but dissolved into a feckless fop of cravenry.

The Flowing-River gave just enough reprieve for him to put back on the mask of fearless and courageous sellsword to finish his tale.

If only more lads knew that his was not a path of fitful sleep or peaceful thoughts.

If only they knew that horror and loss were sure to come following a road built upon violence.

Barry’s lips stretched in a bitter smile, unfolding like the snarl of a rabid dog.

What am I thinkin’ about? All preachy like some parish priest, he spat to no one but himself.

Knowin’ wasn’t enough for me.

Stregor had drilled all the macabrery and darkness that was to come upon Barry should he throw his lot in with the Sparrows.

Yet still, he joined.

Knowin’ wasn’t enough for me, echoed through his mind; all soft and ghastly like some haunt in a kirkos troupe’s play.

Knowin’ wasn’t enough.

He took in breath and continued, voice like rock in the winter night. All hard and callous, yet still droplets of water found their way to his stony facade.

The cold beckoned the coming of the waters.

Winter beget monsoon.

Krauklys Korax II - 16th of Last Frost, Year 1125 A.E.

The giant, body wrought of the flesh of many men, rushed the defensive line with its inhuman weapon held upon its shoulders.

Each step brought tremors to the earth, Gaia Herself wailing at the pain the beast’s weight brought upon her.

They stood no chance; the line crumbled under the might of its charge, reduced to scattered pockets of futile resistance or dismembered bodies for those that met the beast outright.

Barry had only survived by his blind luck and knucklebones; skin of the teeth separated death from life. The sellsword’s position at the left, backmost flank had shielded him from the monster’s charge by a bulwark made up of the eviscerated bodies of his kith.

The Sparrows were but a flock of docile sheep left unattended by the shepherd to a pack of cunning wolves; unable to mount defense of any sort as they picked off and eaten alive.

Prey to be slaughtered by the predator.

The monster cut men in half; crushed their bones as if they were nothing more than fallen and frail sticks; and spread its blacken locust-flame through the ranks like the bloody pox.

Yggritte—one of the lasses that had run away from her angry-drunk husband to join the Red Sparrows—had been turned into a beacon of writhing black; drowned and bathed in the nine-damned stuff. Her screams ate away at Barry’s heart and ears, setting his teeth further on edge than before; something he did not think possible.

From Yggritte’s howling and wailing form, the blacken fire spread to others of the band whenever they tried to pat it away with their cloaks.

It wasn't anything like mundane flame for all its similarity to such in form and shape, the mercenary had learned—It could not be put out by the suffocation of air.

Barry had found out in a manner most personal, having tried for naught to help Yggy, embracing her with his cloak in the crook of his elbow. Anything to save her—no matter his inability to do so—flitted through his frayed nerves as he held Yggy with his left and beat back the dead with his right.

Barry would never forget the sight of her death.

Yggrite, a lass no more than seventeen years, was rendered unto her most basest of self by the locusts cowled in the fire’s hide and the shadow’s hame.

A charred skeleton—dark as coal and covered in oozing tar—all that was left behind.

No. Barry found himself wrong and wanting. For not even her bones were left in the wake of the locust’s scouring feast.

They too were rendered further, unto ash.

With a final, soundless wail coming from her agape mouth and fleshless skull, the skeleton crumbled in dry, blacken chunks before those too were eaten away.

Into bitter grey.

Ash fell from between his cloaken embrace, to the earth from whence it came.

A gust came through, sending his cloak to flutter as Barry spared a glance to look numbly at the pile by his feet being taken by the breath of the gods.

Her life was scattered to the winds, inconsequential dust before the uncaring elements without. A burial done in but a breath; awful and terrible both.

Barry had not even the time to properly witness her end, his right arm hacking away with axe and his feet kicking at the knees of the dead.

An askance look; black festered and locusts chittered on the fabric of his cloak, their placement sporadic like mold or black stars gone sick in the night.

With his left arm, Barry ripped the cloak from his nape to stop the plague-fire from spreading to his flesh.

The limb was bent backwards at an awkward angle where sight did not extend; a blind spot further exacerbated by both the tunnel vision of battle and the confines of his bascinet helmet.

With the tearing sound of fabric, the cloak was sent to float in the empty without before it turned to dust.

He had not been dexterous enough.

The tip of Barry’s thumb touched but a speck of fellen flame.

It beget more of itself, spore of mold and black stars gone sick in the night that it was.

His left arm rotted away from the contact point onwards and up, slowly savored by the licks and lashes of the tongues of infernal fire that crawled and chittered.

Locust-flame did not burn, Barry found out. It brought no heat, left no smoke, and less so spread and more so creeped forth like its namesake; a lumen most fitting for the nine-damned thing.

Parts of himself simply ceased to be as the beckoning cold came and claimed and sapped the warmth of his blood. Like flame darkening a hearth’s brickwork, his limb had been smoked thin, the smell not too dissimilar to the drying of jerky.

Barry would never enjoy rations of meat ever again.

This is why she screamed. It was not pain of her flesh being scoured. It was the numbness that raked her spirit.

Though the physical sensation of locust-flame wanted nothing more than to send the mercenary to convulse a sleepless sleep on the ground, the spiritual pain kept him on his feet.

And so did the rising beat of drums at the back of his being; a song that rose to the occasion, a crescendo with a harmony that rang with all of the world without. It thrummed a tune of threnody; a wailing ode to the kith and kin that had fallen and would fall to his left and right.

It sang of the Song of Ice and Ash, unbeknownst to him then.

The locusts were snuffed out as they touched upon the eld song; the dust-maker turned to dust; the famine starved.

Fire assimilated to a greater flame; subsummation.

That which preyed upon the predator was starting to stir from sleep yet had not fully Awoken.

Ruin met ruin and from their coupling, nothing came to be borne.

His left arm hung limp and crisp, flesh left burnt and dried and frozen in place.

So this is what it feels like to have yer soul nibbled on by the the Devil ‘erself. Dudael really ain’t for me, Barry thought idly and finally before his ability to do so was taken away by the flaying of his very spirit.

The spiritual pain was no simple thing, a dagger to his waking mind; it killed whatever cognizance he had, whatever bit that made him different from a cornered beast. A part of him, primal and old and ancient, came awake then. It fought with and puppeted his body when his conscious mind could no longer contend.

His right arm held his axe as it desperately and viciously hacked the flesh from the bone of the hungry dead; a frantic try to beat back the waves of the sea.

From thirteen to a mere fucking seven were left, most turned to ash and dust to coat the ground or to churn in fermenting clouds. The living remnants of the band were rendered into beasts of instinct and madmen; cornered and fighting for their lives.

There was no thinking, no thoughts, only action. The arts martial were forgotten, no matter where they lay in the Forms; footwork, stance, guard, striking technique.

Forgotten all pretense of skill was, for men did not fight that accursed day but instead base animals desperate to hold onto the Coil.

At times throughout the slaughter, one of the shambling undead would fall to the earth, theirs like the cutting of a mommet’s strings.

The felling happened in quick succession as consecutive instances of such built up. And then, the last ten or so deadmen, so too, were returned to their proper place in the Wheel; unmoving and dead.

It was at this time, with a smattering of clouds of dust—be it from all the trampling that happened in general during battle, the monstrisity’s rush into their ranks, or the rendering of people unto ash—that Barry came back to the fore.

He came awake, having witnessed all that had happened and all that his flesh had wrought but not been privy to conscious control over his own body. At one point or another, he had lost his right arm, felled by the beast’s inhuman blade in a glancing strike meant to reap the life of another.

He stood there, powerless and crippled, amid the lifeless bodies of deadman-once-raised and that of his family-found.

Arms gone, his connection to them severed. He could not feel even a lick of his once-flesh-and-bone.

Gone. They were gone. Gone they were. They were gone. Gone.

Any hope of fight or resistance without limb with which to hold weapon was but that; a beggar’s faith and child’s whim both.

A mere wish—desire left to be unfulfilled—before the uncaring world without.

There was no hope.

There was only the surety that came with having the sickle and scale over one’s nape.

Doom; impending, incoming, inexorable.

Yet, was it not in the quiet before the storm, the moment before the arrow was to be let loose, and in the sharp caress of steel being drawn, that the worth of a man’s soul came to?

Lu-

The fat—all of the superfluous little details easily forgotten—was scoured; rendered unto base oil to turn inferior fire into greater pyre.

-aith-

The skin—the masks we hide behind to cover the raw and the vulnerable—was peeled back; revelation brought through the threshold of thorns.

-re-

The flesh—be it tendon, muscle, or sinew that binds the hide to the pillar—was burned away; naught but ash left behind, forsaking of the chains that bind.

-ach.

The bone—the skeleton, the Standing Stone that Watches—was borne; ashen from the scour and rend, ashen from the flaying and revelation, ashen from the burning and abandon.

Luaithreach.

Ashen-One-Awoken, That Which Remains, The Darkness-That-Stares-Back.

The Song of Ice and Ash, of stars far out into the void, rang in the pit of his stomach and the empty of his head and the beating of his heart; what Barry would later recognize as the three cavities of the spirit.

From the depths, the eld song spread through all of his being, be it his physical skein or flesh-made-simple. A bell once rung, vibrating from behind and beyond the chest and resonating with the sympathetic fabric of All Things.

The core of his core came Awake, relishing in the desperation of fighting destined death and the struggle of strife unsought yet found nonetheless.

He called out his beckons and the soul answered the call.

The soul beckoned and he took upon its reigns.

A cycle unbeggining and unending, fire wrought of wrath roused by the bellows of war to be waged. Vicissitude most vicious fermented in the marrow of his bones.

He wailed his threnody and the soul stanchioned the ode with the bleat of drums unheard to the ears of Man, endowing him with Power. He made song from the tapestry of existence itself and for a mere moment, Barry was no simple and weak mortal but a god, plucking on the strings that bind All Things.

From the many voiceless voices without nary a word, came a single Name; that which was the last to be uttered. If songs were but strings of words with rhythm and verse, then this was a tiny snippet thereof.

And yet, this infinitesimally small piece of the greater whole contained such presence. Such gravitas.

It bent all else to its whims.

He took upon the Power no different than a mortal man might take upon an armament of steel. The Name fit rightly and with accord in the hands of his soul.

He had doom to bring and this was the Doom-Bringer Itself.

Yet, whatever revelation he had glimpsed was a fleeting thing. It was the glint that came from unsheathing a little of the length of a blade; a peak at what lay beyond the scabbard before it was once again hidden away.

This weapon was not his to wield.

Not yet.

He was no god, for his was a power taken in desperation and built upon a foundation of shifting sand and bubbling muck; it would not last.

Even with his newfound sorcery, Barry was not enough to vanquish the beast and avenge his family-found.

Not nearly enough.

He was weak.

And his soul knew it, too.

He had found himself wanting, afterall.

The Song of Ice and Ash gave him not the strength he desired but instead the cunning to flee.

He breathed a coward’s craven breath and with it, he fled.

Tail tucked between his legs and ashamed of being part of the two who had ran, Barry’s soul sang a crying threnody, full of grief and sadness.

No rage was to be found when the fires turned to ash, only the sooty and grey melancholia that oft came hand in hand with the frigid rains of sorrow; icy drops that pierced through the chest with the bite of the blade.

Self-preservation—fear of what lay behind the Veil and beyond the Pale—took away his vigor, his very compunction.

He did not want to die.

Barry thought of himself as a man that would not run; he was wrong.

Courage was for fools, and Barry was no fool. He would not lie to himself.

He ran.