A Prophet's Portents [Misc. Original]

In ancient times, there lived a great King of Man.

The King was wise and powerful, and commanded vast armies and wealth beyond any nation before his time. Under his rule, his people prospered, their once-fledgling nation thriving into a Golden Age to rival even the grandest of legend through the ages. On his back he carried the adoration of his subjects, and in his hand he bore justice.

But in his heart, he hid his vanity. Throughout his grand Palace stood countless mirrors with which he gazed upon his own splendor, endless tapestries of his great victories, and towering stone monuments to celebrate his pride and carry his glorious image far into the future.

But still, this was not enough.

With his resources, he commissioned the greatest of artisans of the world to craft him a mirror, but no common mirror would serve his needs.

The King wished to have a single, perfect mirror with which to see himself in his true glory. The surface was to shine like the cleanest silver, smooth as the purest crystal… but, most importantly, it must have been such a mirror as to carry by hand alone. The first to bring him such a mirror would be rewarded with untold riches, great stretches of land as far as mortal eye could see, even the hand of his daughter in marriage.

Many men toiled for many months to earn the prestige of completing their lord's challenge, until finally each bore the greatest of their works to the Palace to seek the King's judgment.

The first of them presented his mirror to the King proudly; a gorgeous, round mirror set in polished gold and gems, large and fit for even the most imperial of Kings. The King gazed upon it fondly, but soon his brief appreciation gave way to a somber frown.

“No,” said the King, “for it is much too heavy for my needs. I must refuse.”

And the Artisan did mourn, but bowed and returned home empty handed.

The second presented his mirror with pride, confident in his own work after witnessing the failure of his predecessor. It was a smaller mirror, bound in meticulously etched silver, where precise gilding filled the gaps of the decorative works. Such a thing was far lighter than the first, it was true.

“But no,” said the King, “for it is much too small for my needs. I must refuse.”

And the Artisan did grieve for his greatest work, and returned home empty handed.

Countless workers presented their pieces, and all were found wanting, from those made by the dreams of common men to those more fit to be called masterpieces of art than any simple craft. At the end of the day, the King, frustrated, walked the streets of his city to clear his head of the failures. It seemed that no man was capable of fulfilling his demands.

It was at the height of his disappointment that he encountered a man sitting at the side of the road. He was a poor man, so much was clear, clad in tattered clothes and covered in the dirt of a life that included no safe home of his own. This man was no more than an old, unfortunate beggar that this city had swept aside over many years.

In the man's hands lay a mirror. It was a simple piece, unfit for a noble such as the King; a simple glass mirror, cased in worn steel. It was unlike every piece presented to him both in that day, and all those in the past.

But it was perfect.

“My poor man,” said the King to the Beggar. “Where did you find such a thing?”

“I did not find it anywhere,” said the Beggar, “for it has been mine since I was but a boy.”

“I would very much like to have it,” said the King. “What would you take for such a thing?”

“I would accept nothing for this mirror, Lord,” said the Beggar.

“I would give you great wealth.”

“I cannot accept such a thing for my mirror, Lord.”

“I would give you land.”

“I cannot accept for my mirror, Lord.”

“I would give you a home of your own. I would give you a Noble Title, the hand of my daughter in marriage, for this mirror!”

“I shall accept life in this gutter before I part with my mirror, Lord.”

The King, frustrated and impatient, scowling down at the man, asked, “What must I give you to possess your mirror?”

And the Beggar looked up at the King and said, “Nothing, Lord, for this Mirror is the only of its kind.

It is an ancient thing of forgotten craft, held by my family through past ages. It is a magical thing, Lord, so fine that gazing within it is said to show the true nature of man.

But I cannot give it to you, for a Beggar's Mirror is unsuitable for so grand a King.”

The King was not swayed by the Beggar's words, however, and merely held his hand outstretched. After some time, with great reluctance, the Beggar submitted to the will of the King and gave his Lord the mirror.

“Be warned, my Lord, that the truth of things is not always welcome knowledge,” said the Beggar as the King returned to his home. When he arrived, joy had returned to him, and he brought the mirror to his wife, so lovely was she, to present it to her.

When his wife looked upon the mirror, she grew pale and silent, and the King merely scoffed at her, for she was incapable of appreciating so simple a work, and retired for the evening.

He was woken by his servants, and in following them found the body of his wife hanging from the chandelier. His guards were ordered to search the Palace as he went to personally ensure the safety of his daughter with the mirror in hand.

His daughter was, perhaps by some small mercy, unaware that her mother had died. It was a heavy weight he did not wish to cast upon her so early in the day, and so he presented her, too, with his new mirror. Like her mother, when she gazed within the mirror, she grew pale and withdrawn, unwilling to speak. Feeling that, perhaps, his Daughter had grown unwell from the cold of the night, he insisted she rest, and went to tend to his Wife's body.

In the afternoon his daughter, too, was found dead by the servant, her body hanging from the balcony of her room in the palace, and the King went into a rage and ordered the servant executed. Clearly, having found both bodies of his family, they were responsible for their deaths. The idea that perhaps what they saw in the mirror had led to them taking their own lives was absurd.

And yet the King thought back to the Beggar's words, that the mirror showed the truth of all those who looked within it, and realized that he had yet to personally look within it. Certainly, if he looked within the mirror, he would know with certainty that the death of his family was no fault of his. And yet, despite his certainty that it was merely a mirror he found to be perfect, he found himself uneasy as he looked upon himself within it.

Thus the body of the King was found amidst the broken glass that once was the Beggar's Mirror, and only Death did smile that day.

 

He'd carved it from bone when the dust came back, and the air was still and cold. He'd meant for it to protect them from what lurked out in the darkness beyond, to protect from the shadows of the dead and the horrors that had awoken in the Fall. Now it sat atop his doorframe, looking down upon him, and for the first time he found himself scared of the madness he had created. Beyond the walls of his home, lurking in the gray mist and the dust cast from the earth, shadows were hunting. Waiting.

Somehow he believed he would be safer outside, caught in the dust by whatever lurked by his windows and gnawed at the stone. The land outside was treacherous, and within the smoke of eons of ruin upturned by the end stalked unknowable, misshapen things, but this pagan thing atop his door was an unwanted torment. He supposed that he should have suspected when the first shadow of the New World had peered into his home, and the tide of bodies had crawled from upturned dirt and shallow graves to surround their bastion of safety.

They made no attempt at entering. No effort to tempt him from his home into the Ashes of the Old World. All they did was stand by the windows, peering in at him from all angles. They were not here to hunt him. No creature beyond these walls wished to drink the flesh from his bones, carve the life from his body, mutilate his very essence until all he knew was the terror they could bring. They felt no need to.

They were here to watch him, now that he had made something worse.

Koris stumbled his way into the basement, now that he had drunk his fill of madness and terror again. His hands, once so steady in their craft, had not stopped trembling for days; he was unsure if it was from the fear wracking his spirit to its core, or from their dwindling supply of clean water demanding careful rationing. The others needed it more than him. His family. What few had braved the Death of Death to seek shelter with them.

“How goes the dig?” he asked, wiping the sweat of frayed nerves from his brow as his brother perked up in his return. “Have we reached the next house?”

“Not yet,” his brother responded. Koris was already a man of dour sorts, and his perpetual frown only sunk deeper at this news. His brother, Gareth, only having news of continued failure did little to comfort him. “To be honest, we aren't entirely sure we're even digging in the right direction any more. Shera swears we should have reached her home by now, but-”

“We keep digging. We have enough food and water to last us another few days, if we're careful. More if we reach another home's storage. If we manage that, we could try making for the Keep underground. It would be safer.”

“… And what of the...” Gareth's words dwindled into an uncomfortable silence as he stared as his brother, shifting nervously where he sat. Briefly, Koris saw his brother's eyes dart towards the stairwell. “… The… ah… thing.”
I am here.
“Still on top of the doorway.”

“It hasn't moved? That seems… somehow out of the ordinary. Not that it is… particularly ordinary, really.”

“Hm. The others are still in the tunnel working, why aren't you?” His question was answered by his brother gesturing awkwardly towards his shoulder with his left hand. Koris had not taken time to inspect his brother too closely, especially in the dim lighting of the cellar as it was. He sat there, arm bound in bandages from his shoulder to his elbow, blood soaked in so deeply that even now his shirt was growing damp from its flow.

“It… It was an accident. We hit the… Ah, you know where the cobblestone wall sank into the earth a few years ago? Hit that. Was stuck in real good, so I had to try loosening it a bit by hand, and...” He paused, frowning sheepishly at his brother. Gareth was paler than usual, Koris noticed. His nerves were so frayed by now that the stress of such realizations seemed to do little, but… “Well, ah, the wall shifted when I moved the piece that was stuck. Collapsed on me.”

“When? How long?”

“It… ah… When you went to check upstairs, see if everything was still… See if anything had actually tried getting in. So… About three, four hours now.” His blood ran cold at this knowledge. He was at his brother's side immediately, steadying his sibling as he set down beside him. “The- The bleeding hasn't slowed much, I'm afraid. If it keeps going like this, then...”

“You'll be fine. I need to get these bandages off you. We- I have a needle and thread stored. It's… It's upstairs, in the bedroom. I'll get it, we'll stitch your wound. Cauterize if we have to, just...” Part of him wanted to wretch as the bandages came undone. He had expected it would be bad, simply from the amount of blood and the bandaging, but this. It was a manner of injury that, were his brother a career soldier, he would have simply had amputated.

From his shoulder to his elbow, the flesh had been less cut and more sundered from skin and bone alike. It was some miracle that the bone itself had not snapped from such a force as to cause this wound, with flesh torn open less like an injured man and more like a roast pulled apart by hand. Finding the strength to tear his eyes away to look at his brother again was a greater task than he had ever intended to expose himself to in his life.
It is mine.
“I… This is...” he stammered. Gareth just gave him a wry, tired grin. It was just like him, trying to make light of what was no doubt a source of immense pain. “Gareth. You have to listen to me. Stay awake. Do not try to sleep this off. Just… keep doing what you've been doing and try not to move your arm. I'll be back.” With that he bolted back upstairs, out of what was ostensibly the safest part of their home and back into the den of madness that the rest had become.

He had been the sole doctor of this town for over a decade, before Death sundered the sky in his fall and shattered the world, but never before had he seen an injury so horrific as this. He had seen town hunters mauled by bears, soldiers with limbs brutally sawn from their bodies so they could be properly treated by individuals of arcane knowledge. But he had never seen his brother with one foot in the grave, and that frightened him terribly.

This fear and his shaking hands that made collecting the tools of his trade so damnably complex. The needle and the fine thread used for stitching large gashes, certainly, were where he always left them, but this demanded more. He needed medical herbs. A strong drink of some sort to disinfect the wound with. More, fresh bandages. But Koris was a man driven by desperation and need, as he had been when he had resorted to such a pagan thing as the trinket that rested atop the door of his home that was now the source of their greatest fears.

It was not until he had gathered all of the supplies he needed from his home and old workplace that he saw it was no longer above his door, and the shadows outside had grown still with watchful intent. Slowly, terrified eyes turned once more to the stairwell descending into the dim, cloying darkness at the foot of the stairs. It seemed darker than he recalled. Ever deeper. Ever darker. Slowly, gingerly, he stepped down.

“Gareth? Are you alright?”

“As much as I can be. Is everything alright?”

“The- The carving has vanished again! I- I do not see it anywhere up here, it may have gone into the tunnels.”

“The others'll come back if it has. Did you find everything?”

“As much of it as I could.”

“Good. My arm is going numb, and I had other ways of losing weight in mind than its removal!”

Part of Koris relaxed at that, at Gareth's attempts to make light of terrible circumstances with his groan-worthy, macabre humor. If they could make light of the situation… well, maybe it was a small turn towards better. It went without saying that, against all odds, things could be worse. Not by much, perhaps, but they were alive. The things outside had no interest in entering, for good or ill. And, though he had invited some horrid madness into his home, they were at least some measure of safe.

If only his hands would stop shaking.

“This is going to hurt,” he warned as he began to thread the curved needle. It was a more difficult process than he remembered, courtesy of his unsteady grasp on the objects, but it was an inevitability that need overcame simple physical inconveniences. His brother nodded quietly beside him at both his warning and his success. Small bits of progress had driven them for days, now. Something was better than nothing at this stage. All he had to do was grit his teeth at the potent spirit's burn as it was poured onto his arm. A quick swig of what was left helped numb that discomfort.

Koris shifted uneasily, taking a slow breath in an attempt to calm both his nerves and his trembling fingers. Stitching a wound and tending to it with medicines was not the most complex of procedures, but the conditions of it all continued to disturb him greatly. His brother deserved none of this misfortune. None of them did, but the others had the luxury of avoiding injuries beyond the superficial. There was…

All of this blood. His brother's blood. And by the gods, the stone that had split his arm had cut down to the bone…

His mind drifted as he worked. The simplicity of what he was doing gave him that small luxury. Perhaps he had done something wrong when this had all started. Maybe. There were any number of things he could have done at the start. There must have been some reason this had all gone so terribly awry. His brother hissed in pain… yelped? Whimpered, maybe. Not enough time for the drink to set in. That was unfortunate.

“Koris,” hissed Gareth, “what are you doing?”

His brother was weak from the extensive loss of blood. It wasn't much a surprise that he was difficult to hear clearly. The weak gurgling didn't help when the dagger was put in his throat. It was simple. He was fixing a mistake. Something had been done wrong, he was sure of it. That damnable bone idol in his home was a mistake. Something had been done wrong.

He wedged the knife into the joint of his brother's shoulder and pulled the fresh bone free with a wet 'pop' as sinew and tendons split and unraveled. He'd done something wrong. He didn't know what he'd done wrong, but clearly some catastrophic mistake had cast this terror into his home and he needed to know what to do. How to fix it. He had to make another, this time with fresher bone and materials.

Gareth stirred and fumbled and flailed about at the whole affair. Another pair of swift pokes with the carving knife put a stop to that. He would fix everything that had gone wrong. He would make the idol properly this time, and they would all get out of this basement and go someplace that was actually safe.

He picked up the Effigy from the ground next to his brother, and pinned it to his lapel now that his hands had stopped shaking.​

 

When he was but a child, Meridin learned that his father was not considered to be a good man through his lessons on the nature of the world. There were many of those cold, detached lessons in his childhood. He learned of the harsh laws of the surrounding lands, of what it took to take power and keep it. But, of those lessons, only one resonated with him so clearly. His father had told him that the true value of a thing was not measured in gold, nor mortal man's base desires; the only true measure of a thing's worth was the amount of blood spilt to obtain it. Many knew his father as a tyrant and a despot, but hatred did not make him wrong.

After all, much blood had been shed in returning to this place. Some of it, even, had been his own. Returning to his ancestral home, the Karne Estate, had been the labor of many months. Through the dim, dusty days of the new world he underwent numerous unforgiving trials and stresses on the road home. In the cold nights, all he could do was skulk and hide in the shadows like a frightened rat from the twisted things lurking in the woodland mists. And now, like so many cold and desperate survivors of the old world, he had returned to the safety of his own home.

Time had not been a kind patron to this place in the sudden absence of its occupants. In what few months had passed since death's shadow had crossed these lands, it seemed as though it had aged many untended years. For all the difficulties in his travels, that was perhaps what concerned him the most. In several positions the outlying wall of the Estate had collapsed to the ground. Numerous windows were broken, and what still contained glass at all had twisted and warped from their frames in troubling ways.

But he found himself most perturbed by the well. The shadow of a dying god passing over it had clearly tainted the waters beneath in some manner, and some lingering corruption lingered in those foul-smelling waters below. His home was damaged, perhaps in several irreparable ways for him as a single man, but even had he the men and materials to repair the walls of his home and estate as a whole the Well had to be his priority. Whatever tainted influence had settled into it was something he did not trust to remain idle.

To think that he would be forced to scavenge in his own home for what he would need to seal it over. Salvaging materials from a noble's private home. A half-hearted laugh at his own expense and misfortune managed to escape him as he mulled the circumstances over in his mind. Nobility. As though whatever horrors lurking in the woods would be enthralled by such things as property deeds and be dissuaded from hunting on his grounds with a charge of trespassing. Even mortal men such as him were ignoring those freshly outdated laws.

The door creaked and groaned as he pushed it open, flakes of rust crumbling to the floor where the iron hinges had rapidly aged with the rest of the grounds. Once he had grown to be a man in his own right, he had spent little time here, but even he knew what had become of this place. Aged many an untended year in a matter of months, and ransacked by any survivors that had passed through first. It would have been too fortunate for him to arrive first, it seemed. Perhaps it was better this way; with items of conventional monetary worth already looted and stolen, perhaps this estate would be overlooked by others for a time.

The expensive tapestries that had once adorned the walls were toppled or marred with long slashes that shredded them to tattered strips of cloth. Several doors had been broken inward when the interior locks proved intact despite the world ending around them, and the rooms within raided for supplies of varying sorts. Even the iron sconces that once lit the halls of the manor had been pried from the walls where they were fixed. Perhaps the surviving guards had taken what they could and fled. Maybe a blacksmith had survived, and needed the material to forge a weapon to protect themselves with. Meridin was not especially versed in such things; he was primarily a man of the courts, not of laborious crafts.

Personally speaking, he had some more direct interests he hoped potential looters had ignored in their searches. It was true, yes, that he was not brought up to be a man of action, or any sort of hard labor, but his family's intentions had done little to prevent him from pursuing more esoteric studies. While he was far from a capable mage in any manner, and certainly not proficient with a blade beyond what he had learned in recent months out of sheer necessity, it had been simple work for him to apply his wealth in the pursuit of small rituals and a variety of superstitious warding practices. Not being the greatest warrior of these lands hardly meant the world's end had caught him unprepared.

He stepped downstairs by lamplight, ignoring the subtle groan of worn wood beneath his feet. Meridin did not trust the cellar to be safe without the oil lantern at his belt. The closing days of the Old World and the past few months had taught him to be wary of dark, unlit places such as this, especially as a solitary traveler. He wished, for the first time in many a year, that the contingent of guards he traveled the road with were still alive. Then again, perhaps they would have turned upon him had they survived the passing shadow of Death himself.

He would have to make do with the sword he had taken from his captain's body. He would do far more with what he sought here, though; salt. His family was not well loved in the lands they ruled, but his kin were both wealthy and dangerous individuals. This, among other things, had always ensured a bulk storage of various spices, and he knew for a fact that at one point or another they had been storing salt by the barrel, to the extent that he was unsure if they had ever needed to replace the supply. At the very least it would have been terribly inconvenient for any looter to steal for the road.

It seemed not for lack of trying, though. As he had expected, refined salt was in no short supply in his estate even though several cases had been split open; at least one barrel had toppled from its place and poured its contents forth. At his feet lay a white mound that reached his waist at its highest peak, and spread along the floor further where it had been scattered by the movement of whomever had been caught in the flow from storage. This was better than he had expected; far more remained than he would ever need for his work.

The basics of it were simple. He took a number of leather satchels to scoop the piled salt into; he was uncertain exactly how much space he wished to cordon with this common man's ward, but he had no intent to step into this cellar a second time when he was done. Dark places were dangerous and untrustworthy, and most of the perishable supplies stored here had rotted and festered away long before he had arrived. Even if there were no terrors lurking outside the view of his lantern light, the stench of stale air and mildew told him that lingering too long would gift him with nothing more than disease and disappointment.

He uncovered the desiccated body's face, first. There was a single, brief instant where the leather bag left his hands so he could instead grip the hilt of his sword. He stood there, motionless, for only a moment. There was no sound. No movement. Many of the dead were of restless disposition in these recent days, but this one… Perhaps only for now, but this one was of no consequence. Pulling the poor soul from the mound was as simple as reaching down and finding his ankle, then pulling until the body was freed of its unorthodox tomb.

“Just a peasant,” he murmured to himself. It was the attire that told him that much. This had to have been one of the looters that had taken part in smashing open the doors and taking as many supplies as they could carry. He hadn't expected to find one of them in the cellar, much less one mummified in a pile of table salt. There was absolutely no possibility that had been one of the residents, even just a servant, and they had been buried long enough to be completely inflexible now.

Like all things in this new age, Meridin did not trust it, and that meant he needed to attend to it directly. Thankfully, it seemed that the looters had seen fit to flee from this place instead of searching it thoroughly. He had no desire to waste his sword's edge. The large, squared cleaver he located among various pieces of cutlery kept in reserve would be much more appropriate for this task. A man of the courts, lowered to something so crude as this.

He started with the hands, at the wrists. They were the easiest part to cut away, despite the unnatural hardness of the flesh in its state. Did all remains in such an unusually dried state solidify to this extent? He had never thought to study that before. In retrospect, idly passing over how to appropriately remove rivals from such dealings may have been a mistake. His father would have surely been disappointed, had it been discussed. The elbows and then shoulders, next. Thank the gods this corpse could no longer bleed.

The gash in the corpse's side went unnoticed entirely until the arm was removed. He was right in thinking the man would not have been killed by an outpouring of salt upon him. He'd been stabbed. Nay, run through. Not by his peers, but by something else entirely, carrying a wide blade of some manner. Perhaps a broadsword. A large dagger, at the very least. Feet at the ankles...

Butchering a man was more work than he had thought it would be. Setting the various pieces on fire with spare oil and flint was much easier. But the easiest was taking the multiple leather satchels full of salt back up the stairs, as well as the worn bag that had been looped over the shoulders of the corpse. He hoped that his method would reduce the body to a safe, nonthreatening pile of ash and cinder before long.

He left a line of salt across the doorway into the cellar just to be sure. Then he moved on further into the house, looking through the peasant's bag as he went. It was no small surprise that the majority of it was effectively worthless. A child's doll, dusty and worn; poor man, perhaps holding onto their child's toy in memory of them. A number of old rations, so dry as to evolve past being brittle and hard. Pointless all, save one piece. An iron nail, large and heavy, perhaps pried from one of the cellar supports. Maybe taken from a mine where cart tracks were being built.

It didn't matter where it was from. What mattered was that he had it. Mixed with the salt, and a half-broken candle he had stolen in the earliest days of his travel home, that gave him a means to protect himself in an emergency. Once. Assuming, of course, that he knew he needed it before it happened. Salt lines and circles were a peasant's ward against fae and other horrible things in the night. These were the key to something much more… direct, not that he wished to be in a position to need it.

“Oh ye fae born,” he began, “of Earth and Stone...”

Finding a safe place in his home involved a simple concept. It needed to be in the center of the manor itself, walled off from any of the points of entry granted by broken windows. As he walked, he planned. The greatest difficulty of his exploration was finding a centralized room with neither window access or a toppled door. Nonetheless, as he stalked through the halls of his ancestral home he stopped to begin the lines of salt.

“Lurking deep within an unclaimed home...”

The first order of business was obviously the salt lines, of course. Even without a fully secure room to use as an improvised shelter from danger, he hoped that these would bar passage. With the Fae and ideally any other monster, he had at least some measure of confidence they could not enter. That would make his greatest threat his fellow man, notoriously superstitious lot they were; the sight of these warding lines alone may frighten undesired company from his home. He hoped.

“Rest not on this family’s throne...”

This door was untouched, but locked. There were many trades he had learned in the courts. He had earned a sharp, biting tongue to demean his political adversaries. When sharp tongue failed to dissuade a foe, sometimes a sharper blade proved more effective. But among his many gifts, his favorite was not being seen and using that talent to enter places he was not intended to see. A twist of a small knife and twisted wire later, and the door pushed open with a tired groan.

“Lest victim be to Blood, and Bone.”

It was a lounge, it seemed. He remembered the layout of his home quite well, so he told himself, and this had not been here on his last visit. There was a ghostly shadow of dust in the air where the fresh movement of the air roused it from its stagnation. The once-bold colors of the silks and velvets had faded and worn over these past months, but still the larger furnishings proved plush and soft. For the first time in months it seemed he could have a decent place to sleep; not a proper bed, he supposed, but better than hiding in caves or treetops. The final line of salt went outside the doorway in an arc, to avoid disturbance when it opened inward.

“The rightful owner of this manor has returned. Your kind is no longer welcome here. I cast you out.”

The house creaked and settled as a breeze passed through the estate grounds. It was followed by a calm, sullen silence. Meridin hoped that what he'd done actually worked; he had never been in a position where he’d needed to use any of it before. What was left of his day proved negligible in comparison. He filled what little oil his lantern had used to full again. He pushed furniture away from the center of the room, and drove the iron nail into the floor. And, finally, he closed the door and let himself topple upon the velvet-padded settle in the center of the room.

Finally… rest. Rest safe from the cold, and the rain, and the monsters. Finally.

…

Thump.

He wasn't sure how long he had been asleep; that was the flaw of not having a window to gauge the time. Not long enough to have gotten any hungrier. Maybe long enough to feel legitimately rested, though he wouldn't dismiss the idea that it was the sudden, surging adrenaline at work. He lay still for a few moments more, eyes darting around the room all the while. It hadn't been anything in this room, as far as he could tell. Still, the silence remained.

Perhaps, for once, it was nothing. The house settling, or a framed painting finally falling from its fixing on the second floor. He was nervous for good cause, yes, but still… silence remained. Time on the road had worn his nerves thin. Rest would see to healing them. And so, for the second time, he shifted where he lay and closed his eyes…

Thump.

Something was upstairs.

There were many sounds that Meridin had learned to recognize at the behest of his own career. The click of a lock coming undone, the gentle creak of a door's hinge, a muffled gasp from a knife between a man's ribs. But the most important sound he recognized was the thud of a footstep. One. Then another several moments later.

Thump. Thump.

It had been intermittent at first, more a lazy shamble than a walk, but it was beginning to get faster. The faster his unwanted guest moved, the louder the steps became. As the thing upstairs entered the hallway, its pace became brisk and resolute, like a professional soldier of his homeland's military. There was a rhythm to it as the sound passed to the far reaches of earshot in his dilapidated estate.

It was wearing armor. Underlying the keenly honed march of the footsteps was the subtle rattle of metal; it had been a strain on his hearing to pick it up through the ceiling as he had. The pounding of heavy footsteps mingled with the clank of metal as it approached the stairwell and the full weight of his visitor fell upon it. Not any armor. Plate. It was wearing goddamned Plate.

Typically, he understood that this ritual demanded a certain level of precision to function properly. He did not feel he had enough time to ensure the ring of salt cast around the nail in the floor met appropriate mathematical standards. The iron nail itself had not been set in ice. The candle he had to use was half-broken. Frankly, now that he was looking at the whole thing, his so-called emergency provision was a disastrous mess of untested ideas and half-remembered notes.

This was to say that, like all his careful warding prior, he had no idea if it would work. Maybe it did work, and he would merely find his supplies and preparation wholly inadequate. Even using it right now was likely a mistake. The horrors and twisted forms lurching about in dark places had no need for plate armor. It could be a waste of resources. It could be a necessity and simply fail outright.

Or, perhaps, he was not going to die.

… Meridin lit the candle and pressed the wax onto the top of the nail, and gently drew his sword from the scabbard at his side. The sudden silence that had returned was broken by the gentle ringing of metal on metal; he understood that was not supposed to be a sound swords made when being drawn, but he was in no position to fix it. He needed… He needed a catalyst, was that it? He had very little. No gold. No powdered gems, or whatever it was that professional Hunters used. Certainly no silver. Had he been in possession of silver, there would be absolutely no need for this process in the first place.

He cut his palm on the edge of his blade and grit his teeth as tightly as he could in an effort to avoid making a sound. The taste of salt and iron ghosted over his tongue as his fingers started trembling. Still, he persevered. The gash was larger and deeper than he had been expecting, and as the blood ran down his arm and dripped to the floor he wished that he'd had the foresight to roll up his sleeve first. This was not necessarily the stupidest decision he had made, nor the most painful. No doubt that was on its way through the halls right now.

The blood coated the fuller of his sword, slipped down the edge of the blade. From the tip fell a single drop that spattered against the hardwood floor, between the circle of salt and the centered iron nail, seeped into the hairline gap between floorboards. From there he lowered the edge of the bloodstained blade into the fire of the candle. Holding it steady there was difficult with a hand that could carry no more than pain in its current state.

The metal-clad footsteps came to a halt outside his door. He needed to focus. Having never attempted this common man's ritual, Meridin was unsure how to tell if it worked. Would there be some curious visual change that would signify the effect taking hold? Perhaps it was some pretentious ideal where it was powered by belief in justice or some similar trite and was merely a process to help believe in yourself. Like a blithering idiot's favorite childhood fairy tale.

He did not remember the door creaking so much when he first arrived. It drew both his ear and his eye as, slowly… gently, it crept open, inch by inch. He had locked that door, he thought. Perhaps in his rush to have proper rest, he had forgotten. That didn't matter any more, though. What mattered was the steel, tarnished but still shining, of the long blade pushing the door open. The plate armor he had predicted, blackened and worn in places but sturdy and well kept.

The thing missing its head was much less anticipated. There was a gentle whisper on the air, he was certain, worming into his ear with cruel and malicious intent. From all angles he heard it hiss and seethe at him with hate and fury. For a fleeting moment, he heard his own name as that terrible Fae headhunter leveled its blade in the air, before turning it sharply and letting the tip of the longsword fall to the floor. The Dullahan itself had not crossed the salt line itself, he briefly noted to himself.

Then it roughly jerked the blade along the floor and sundered the salt circle outside his door. Had he been prepared for such a thing to happen… he would have been lying. And, as it took a single step over that threshold into what had initially been a secure room, a drop of blood fell from his sword and snuffed out his candle. He had to look down at it in an almost dumbstruck awe once it had happened, before looking back up at the headless knight whose only purpose was the death of all who bore its witness.

“Oh,” Meridin groaned. “Shit.”

It took a single, lurching step further into the room, rousing dust from between the floorboards with its weight. It was the last opportunity he had to scramble back up onto his feet before it raised the sword into both hands and charged. It took more concentration than he liked to avoid tripping on his own feet as he withdrew, turning and vaulting over the settle he’d been sleeping on with nary a moment’s breath before the thing’s blade cleaved it in twain before him. He had always heard that moving in Plate armor was much easier than common folk intended, but the speed and agility displayed was far in excess to what he had expected.

It swept its blade across the floor, the wooden frame and split padding of the settle flying across the room as it leveled the blade on him again. He was at a disadvantage; his sword was one handed. Against a longsword, especially one wielded by an agile being such as this, he would be hard pressed to close the gap to counterattack. Even were he to manage passing into an effective range, he would still have to contend with the armor itself, which he would not be able to breach with the blade. And with his freshly wounded hand…

He flicked his wrist, bringing his blade up to parry as it jabbed towards his face, and though sparks flew he still felt the lance of pain across his cheek. His slashed hand reflexively leapt up to it, as though reaffirming it had just happened, before he had to duck away as it twisted the blade at the hilt into a wide arc towards his neck. This thing had a tireless, supernatural presence and power to it, and unknowable time and experience to hone its trade of death. He was a man of the court, whose experience in a swordfight amounted to putting a knife in a challenger’s spine before the date of the duel prior to the past few months.

Worse still, there were no openings he could lay claim to. The unnatural swiftness of his armored foe left him perpetually on defensive footing. A timely step backwards let him raise his exposed foot above the low slash that no doubt would have crippled his mobility if not severed the ankle entirely. His attempts to focus instead of dwelling on how unpleasant that sensation would surely be were merely interrupted by his hip discovering an unfortunately placed table behind him barring further easy retreat. At the very least, it had not been a wall.

It was at this time that Meridin wished he had formally trained for duels with a blade. Fighting a skilled opponent in direct combat was an unpleasantry he had thus far narrowly avoided with clever tactics, or had taken part in by proxy instead. The Dullahan, no doubt, was rapidly coming to that realization itself. It stepped in closer, the momentum of its turning footwork bringing the blade towards his shoulder. Dodging with the table in the way was out of the question. Ducking would bring the blade to his neck or head, instead. He chose to intercept the slash with the crossguard.

There was an unpleasant crack from his wrist as the impact twisted it uncomfortably, the whole of his body having to turn to prevent more serious injury from his awkward, amateurish block. Even then he felt the cold bite of metal against his chest as the sharp edge effortlessly carved through the leather jerkin he wore and met flesh beneath. It was a shallow cut, but still the pain brought a startled yelp from him before he could shove the blade upward to escape to open space. This was not a fight he believed he could win, nor did he believe the creature would let him escape the room alive. It stepping to the side to maintain its reach into any path he could take towards the door reaffirmed that.

Far be it from him to be pessimistic, but he wasn’t entirely clear on how he wasn’t going to die horribly in the next few moments.

An opening. If there was anything he could possibly have assisting him, it was the adrenaline mixed with a sharp mind. When its blade entered another wide arc, he slipped under it. He was sure that some of his hair was grazed by the steel edge, but still he was unharmed, and the stab forward took purchase. Or, rather, connected before harmlessly glancing off the metal plating adorning his foe. He supposed connecting a hit mattered much less. What mattered was that the momentum of his attack had gotten him past his enemy.

He turned back to watch his foe. He wasn’t sure why he stopped and looked back. Keeping an eye on a danger is a good idea, perhaps. Maybe it was just basking in the smug satisfaction of connecting a strike on an explicitly superior combatant despite the lack of harm. Mostly, it was a terrible decision. When he was halfway into his turn, it had already spun about entirely. And then its fist clobbered into the side of his head and sent him reeling so heavily his shoulder met the floor. The taste of blood filled his mouth, both from where his teeth had chewed into the flesh of his cheek and from the molar he spat out as he tried to push himself upright again.

The room was swimming around him as he pushed himself upward. His sword had slipped from his grasp in the fall, currently lying at arm’s length away from his head. His vision was obscured with black spots, flashes of pain bursting behind his eyes as he awkwardly drew his feet in closer to find some measure of leverage beneath him. But most importantly, he was not dead yet. For a moment, he looked back towards the towering armored figure. His parry had deflected the path of the blade into a piece of furniture. For a few idle seconds, the thing struggled and wrenched before the blade was withdrawn from its temporary prison.

It had been enough to push himself back to his feet with his sword. Not quite enough for the room to cease its damnable spinning, nor him to find the footing necessary to advance and take advantage of the vulnerable position his foe had been in. Had he been in a proper state of mind he would have sworn in frustration. Instead, he just wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His head hurt. His hand hurt. Really, everything hurt. Somehow it was making the pain easier to ignore, even as the adrenaline began to fade towards a nauseating fatigue.

When the Dullahan advanced and struck, the mix of dizziness and the pain in his wrist resulted less in parrying and more in disarming himself. He knew that was what happened because, while he had miraculously avoided losing his hand, his sword was currently point-first in the wall several feet away from him. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to happen, and before his gaze could return to the hunter Fae before him its foot had leveled itself into his gut and he was sent skidding along the floor and into the table that had been next to the now-sundered settle.

With the adrenaline fading, the numb dizziness was now escalating into a pounding headache that made it feel as though his skull were about to burst through his very skin. His hand dumbly sought out something to protect himself with, or at least return himself to his feet. Anything. Above him, the Dullahan slowly stepped forward, metal and wood alike creaking and groaning as it moved, taking the longsword in both hands. Point down towards him and the floor, it raised the blade up above its missing head. Then it stabbed downwards towards his chest.

There was a slight movement. Subtle, compared to the entirety of the fight. Instead of finding the target of Meridin’s heart, it impaled through his shoulder. Then he smashed the glass-cased lantern into the Dullahan’s chest. Within an instant, there was fire. It clung to the armor where the oil spread. It filled the gaps and grooves, and wormed through mail and soaked cloth alike. Like any sentient thing, panic struck as it burned. He hadn’t expected a suit of armor would begin wildly, haphazardly flailing about in an attempt to smother the flames covering it, even as burning oil dripped to the floor and scattered across the room in a shower of fire that had not clung to his foe.

For a few painful seconds, he fumbled at the blade stuck through his shoulder, small cuts beginning to cover his fingers as he attempted to find grip on it. By the time he’d freed himself from where he lay and tossed the sword aside, his Fae adversary had already begun patting out the flames, now tracing its path with an acrid black smoke as it staggered about. He pushed himself upwards as best he could. Even then he crawled more than he walked towards his sword. Towards where it had stuck itself in the floor. In the center of the room, within the salt circle where he had set the nail.

The oil had lit the candle again. More than the candle, he supposed, as he stumbled over a patch of oil-slick flame on the floor in front of it. He grasped the grip of the sword, pulled briefly; it was stuck firm. For a few numb seconds he looked back over his shoulder at the Dullahan. It had finished muffling the oil fire, save for a few glowing sparks that it seemed to be ignoring. Even now, it reached down and retrieved the blood-lined blade that moments before had run through his shoulder. A sharp, painful ringing entered his ears again as he heard his name shrieked in his own skull again.

And when it stomped forward, blade held above its shoulder in preparation, he let out a vicious howl and drove the iron nail into its collar with a metallic crunch. The flames licked the air, but beyond the flickering light there was stillness and silence. Then, the subtle creaking of metal. The ring of steel as it slipped from gauntlet-clad hands and clattered against the floor. For a few seconds its hands grasped at his neck, then his face, weakly clawed at the long cut on his chest where it had slipped through the leather.

Then, with a twist of the nail in its body, the breastplate buckled inward with a crack. Rust began to seep from the wound like blood, where his did glow in the discolored firelight where it touched the iron. The thing’s fingers curled backwards violently as the metal covering its body suddenly began to collapse in on itself, and the shrieking in his mind grew to a horrible crescendo before giving way to silence, and the thing slumped against him.

It was an odd thing, still being alive. He was unsure how to feel about it. When the Old World had come to a close, so many had thought it was penance and punishment for all the sin and madness the terrible people had wrought upon the world. He was certain that his survival had been meant, instead, for a person of decent moral caliber and quality. And still, here he stood, injured but alive. Much like the past several months, he was in pain and far from any measure of common comforts as he knew them, but he was surviving.

The Dullahan began to collapse further as he shoved it to the floor and began numbly stomping out the loose patches of flame that still clung to the floor. The metal cracked and chipped, chunks of it falling inward while more refined components became a fine dust that even he felt was surely useless. Perhaps this entire occasion had been an omen. He was not a good man; none of his family had been any measure of good people. But still he was here, surviving doom brought to the world by his fellow man. His peers.

He was not a good man, he thought as he bandaged his wounds, but perhaps he could be one in this new world. It was an idea that lurked in his mind even as he collapsed weakly into one of the chairs spared from the fight and flame. Perhaps that was why. Perhaps the Gods had willed him to survive so he could change and grow beyond the ideals of his family.

If nothing else, it was a possibility he was willing to embrace.