Callisto

The Wicked (pt. 1)

...

Returning to the house was like trudging through an oozing mire of painful memories. Rain-Born felt a cold-sweat cling to her cheeks as she approached the broken door dangling from its hinge where the bullet hole formed by the rattling Deathspitter could be seen. She recalled Martha's playful barks as she and Jespar first entered the house and how those barks had welcomed her vile mistress back home. The Chainman had been right about one thing: the loyalty of a dog was truly without question.

Stepping over the ruined precipice, she saw the outline of the bodies she had made: all of them were arrayed together like some grisly mosaic before the bloodied chair that had held Weeping-Ash. She gulped down her fear – the lump in her throat forming in reaction to the woman's severed limbs and mutilated form. She suppressed the urge to vomit just looking at the dead mixture of dried blood and exposed bone and tissue that now comprised her face.

Had she, Rain-Born, truly done this? Had she unceremoniously hacked away at this woman and left her like this? She had never committed such atrocity, even in the most dangerous raids against her Guthra rivals. Her hand gripped her chest, for her heart would not stop its incessant beating.

"Do not reject the image of death, sister," a voice intoned from the dark that gathered at the center of the room, below the chair. "It comes to greet us all."

She stepped closer and let her eyes resolve the thing that she had dared not even try to see: Weeping-Ash sat in the center of the corpses. He had arrayed them around himself – the man, the woman, and the girl Rain-Born had never seen – and sat cross-legged and bowed like a monk in prayer.

Then, Rain-Born realized with disgust that that was precisely what he was doing. His lips moved and quietly mouthed the Death-dirge of the Hanakh Ash-callers, rising in tone and intonation every few seconds before cascading back down into the low depths of a barely whispered melody. It was a song that was said to speed the spirits of the departed on to the Grounds of the Great Spirit, where they would hunt and feast with him for the rest of their eternal lives. It was not a song meant for outsiders.

"Brother!" She cried, grabbing his arm – whether to add weight to her words or to steady herself, she did not know. "Why do you sing for these Evil Ones?"

His eyelids opened slowly, and Rain-Born was struck again by the grey globes that shone within his aged skull, even in the falling dark of night.

"I sing for the dead, sister," was all he said.

"But these creatures do not deserve your pity. They bound you. They took your wife, they meant to consume you like –"

"Do you mean to tell me of my pain, Rain-Born?" he interrupted, clenching her arm so that they both gripped the other in a vice-like stranglehold. She felt the muscles in her good arm react to his strength. Where it came from, she did not know.

"I know of my pain, for it is mine, and mine alone," he said, breaking his song and speaking through a voice hoarse with thirst. "But do you wish to know these things you speak of as though they are already known to you? Were you there when this woman came to my farm and broke my wife's back before my eyes? Were you there when this man shot the knife from her hand and tore a gash in her chest where her heart bled for me? Did you see this girl lick her lips as they roasted her upon a spit and threw me scraps of her still-burning flesh? Did you watch them laugh like feasting jackals around the fire where my wife's body burned? I ask you Rain-Born, did you see these things?"

She felt her arm drop and knelt with him. "No."

He closed his eyes again.

"No, Rain-Born," he repeated. "These things you have not seen. But I see them even now. When I close my eyes to the waking world, I do not pass into the deep dark of the dream realm. Instead, I return to my withered farm and see these people torture my bonded before me. I feel the touch of this woman whose life you ended upon me. I feel the absence of what she took from me. I feel it even now. Perhaps I will feel it forever more."