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Whew, here's another new chapter. Let me know what you think, good or bad! :) It helps me stay motivated to write and improve, after all.

Chapter IV - Seeds of Death and Salvation

Pressure. A deep-sea crush, filling his skull to overfull and bursting, was the first sensation he had felt in what seemed like years. Then he noted that his legs hurt, calves and thighs burning and shaking with effort. In a flash, he remembered.

They had hoisted him up, the rough hempen rope cutting off his air, filling his eyes with blackness and stars, as they pulled his body up into the air. He'd tensed his neck muscles, knowing from his reading that it was the best way to prevent his spine from breaking, of having any chance of survival. As icy wind clawed at him, battering and twisting his slender body, stinging his wounded forehead and wrists, he had fallen to silent prayer, asking his father for help, though he knew the ancient worship of ancestors was invented long ago, to help keep the uneducated public in some semblance of order.

He had asked his father to help him, to give him the strength to survive his wounds, though he knew well he'd soon hang to death. He prayed to his father for help in determining a plan, some way to save the kingdom despite betrayal by it's great hope of alliance.

He had prayed until his footpaw snagged against sharp, biting bark, and was sliced, adding a spike of pain to the agony in his wrists and throat and skull, and the tingling numbness of the biting-cold wind and snow. In spite of the pain, a shot of realization had gone through him, and Nallak had jammed his footpaw against the tree, ignoring the blazing heat of agony that shot up as one of his toepads was torn entirely away by the hard, frozen bark. With his foot wedged in place, he'd twisted slowly, still choking and struggling to breathe, until a mammoth effort of muscle and determination used that one point of contact to bring his body near enough to the tree.

The young king would have screamed out in agony if he hadn't been choked of air, despite his stoicism and training, when his other footpaw jammed into a crevice in the tree so hard that he knew at least one claw had been torn clean out of his foot. By titanic effort of will, he flexed his legs, struggling to remain conscious, and yanked himself backward and up, scraping his cold-numbed flesh and icy fur against the tree bark until he found what he sought.

With a push of his legs, and what little grip he could manage through his wounded paws, he managed to hook his mane and the skin of his scruff into another gnarl in the hoary bark. The noose, inexpertly tied, loosened enough that he could drag in a hard, harsh, gasping breath he hoped the hyenas would somehow fail to hear, though it sounded like an entire storm's worth of thunder in his throbbing, pulsating ears. He squirmed and clenched the muscles in his neck, despite their rebellious frozenness, and struggled for more breath, even as his mind swam in a sea of growing darkness.

Somehow, through the sea of swirling black, the ache of his straining legs and burning wrists, he felt an odd sensation of fullness, heaviness, in his head and groin. As if the blood had been forced to the two places, as he strained for breath, heart pounding sluggishly in his ears, his maleness was swelling. Against all reason, and as he struggled to comprehend, his body was responding in a way that it had never easily done, even under the schooled advances of his harem wives. Or under the perfunctory and yet somehow perversely satisfying fucking he'd received while bound and held down upon the stone butcher's altar just minutes before.

A surge of panic throbbed from his aching chest, through the bone-wrenching shivers he struggled to conceal. If the few releases he had experienced were any indicator, such a thing, however inexplicable, would only hasten his demise. The gasping he had done, those few times the wives had brought him that dubious and unwanted pleasure, coupled with nearly blacking out, could cause his muscles to go slack, and push his throat against the rope once more.

All the same, the boiling, sweet heat that grew in his boyish groin was undeniable and ineffable, flowing through his body in a tingling tide unlike anything he had felt, while trapped on that damnable fur cushion. Nallak's shaft was hard as stone, even bitten harshly by the freezing wind, and twitching as his bleeding toes tried to curl of their own accord.

Down below, his swimming ears could only vaguely hear the shrieks and roars of combat, that clashing of arms and roaring of battle-cries that would normally have won his attention over nearly anything else. His mind, muddled and overrun with pleasure, terror, pain and darkness, struggled for naught to make any sense of what reached his ears as a cacophony of meaningless noise, staccato and terrible like crackling rock in a landslide.

Then he let out a hoarse rasp, as the passing wind jarred him, and he felt a spasm from his crotch that was an explosion, an ocean of throbbing pleasure so strong it hurt. His muscles sagged, and his throat pressed into the noose, sending stars bursting behind his eyes that were utterly drowned out by the lights he already saw there, as his cock jetted hard, feeling as if it were trying to eject his balls' entire contents at once, flesh and all.

His eyes finally opened again, though he could barely see, only a tunnel of vision in the center of a sea of swirling blackness suffused with glittering multi-colored stars. Nallak saw his seed, spilling in white trails, more than he'd ever released for the wives, and wondered if this was some hyena magic, to humiliate their victims. As his world faded out entirely to darkness, he wondered idly why the wind didn't seem to be battering the spurts about.

In the aftermath of battle, Cel limped through the strewn detritus, fighting the gorge that tried to rise from her stomach. She had felt queasy in the morning several mornings before, and though the sun had presumably passed the center of their storm-ripped sky, the sense of sickness hadn't left. Wandering through a field of corpses, battle-cleaved and stinking in the snow, certainly did not help.

Nonetheless, she had a knight's duty to search for survivors, and despite Timid's protest that Vanyal and Toryen were up to the task, had decided to walk the battlefield. Her counterargument had been that Van was needed at that great and horrid tree that towered over the slaughtered remnant of the town, to hunt for survivors she could not reach, among the grisly frozen ornaments adorning it. Timid had given her a gray-faced look that pierced her to the heart with pain for his sorrow. There were no more survivors there, but for the naked, brutalized lion child they had gently cut down and lowered.

A quick turn of her own mutilated, still-healing head, showed over her shoulder that brave Timid was still working on the child, sewing the terrible bashed-open wound on his forehead, as the bedraggled boy rested in a metal tub full of water warmed by a fire Tomasj sullenly stoked.

Then her hackles rose unbidden, as Toryen Casso traipsed up to her, dancing over the corpse and gore-strewn snow field laughing. The urge to strike him, to bash his sinisterly gleeful face in with her gauntleted fist, was so strong she heard the leather under-gauntlet creaking from the tightening of her knuckles.

"Total slaughter! Look!" he crowed, kicking a half-frozen corpse with a crunch of crumpling icy flesh.

"Slaughter. What is funny about it? Listen to yourself, Casso," she spat, fixing the childishly snickering creature with a stare as icy as her eyes' color. Cel gestured around, at the nightmare place their short battle had uncovered. At least a hundred corpses, she now knew, and those just the ones unburied by drifting snow that was beginning to pile again after the brief reprieve they had seen after battle.

"I AM listening! To MYSELF, like never before!" he crowed, enigmatically, as he knelt down and scooped his paws through a drift of driven white, to uncover an ice-pale face buried underneath. She turned away in disgust, as the tiger proceeded to poke and prod at the frosted flesh of some poor old male, thumping his questing fingers against the frozen-hard flesh.

"You disgust me," she grunted, and limped away wishing she could stomp in disgust.

Meanwhile, in a quickly-cleared and branch-floored spot he and Van had swiftly constructed, Timid leaned in close to bite off a strand of thread, tying the stitch shut, before gently drawing his paw through his unnamed charge's sodden, golden-brown headfur. Barely a hint of a mane showed, despite the boy's impressive but bruised musculature. No peasant, he knew, would be so well-formed, their diet having made such things impossible since birth.

Thus his presence in what seemed a tiny country farming village seemed incongruous to the feline priest, and more than that the glowing golden-green that glimmered in the boy's chest to his strange second sight. Even with his eyes open, when he was not looking for the Sarellas-flames burning in furs' souls, he could see glimpses of that enigmatic, vibrant power within the boy.

Still, the child remained unresponsive, simply breathing in and out and lying limp as he was cleaned and warmed and cared for. Timid sighed and sat back on the stump he'd found, and looked the child over once again, assessing for injuries he might have missed on the first go. Swollen wrists and paws, which were purpling through the fur, spoke of broken bones, and the newly-stitched wound on his forehead was likely to become postulant and infected, he decided. The wounds to his footpaws had been painful-looking but not severe, and by the angle it drifted at in the warm water, his tail was dislocated, which was a simple if painful thing to fix.

Nonetheless, given his injuries, Timid was startled into jerking backward when the boy's bright blue eyes flashed open, and one of his purple-swollen paws jerked out toward the priest's face, only to stop short as the cat stumbled backward and grabbed at the Finder's Star. It pulsed, warm, like a lulled heartbeat, at his touch.

Tomasj was at the stumbling cleric's side in a moment, sword sliding free of its sheathe with a sinister hiss, the mad-eyed wolf advancing toward the tub with a look of determination in his eyes. He'd seen the lashing-out, and thought what Timid had momentarily feared, that the boy had already turned.

Then the child spoke, in a croaking, scratchy voice, in a tongue neither wolf nor cat shared. Tomasj's shoulders hunched, and the look he shot Timid over his shoulder seemed almost disappointed. The wolf knew him well enough to know just what the priest would tell him, as he slid the sword back into place.

"Bah!" the wolf barked, throwing a studded-glove covered paw into the air in exasperation, foiled in his desire to shed undead blood by the inconvenient fact that the boy yet lived.

"He has no bites on him, Tomasj."

"Feh. He could have eaten one. They can spread that way too."

Timid made a face of disgust, brows furrowed at Tomasj in unsurprised disquiet that the wolf could think of something so intensely disgusting. Then, as the boy made another sound that came out rough and pleading, he hastened to the young lion's side, in time to see his eyes lid shut, his muscles go slack.

A few words won free, dappled with the syrupy drawl of oncoming unconsciousness, and though Timid knew not what they meant, he recognized their provenance.

"Tomasj, go tell Cel she needs to come back here. The boy speaks High Ataras. If she is here when next he wakes, perhaps we can gain some insight into what is happening here."

Sortan rode a tall horse, the finest steed in all the Jackal's herds, and stood high in the stirrups he'd shown them how to build when they crested the final hill. Down below them, leagues ahead onto the great desert sand flat now covered shin-deep in driven snow that fell in powdery blusters from a bruised sky, he spied through tunnels made by gusting wind the great fortress they had marched hard to reach.

Towering above the white-clad desert, mighty Al Zar Fortress stood as a testament to the stubbornness of her people, a great spiring yellow stone castle unlike any in the known world. His heart throbbed with pride and also trepidation, for he knew that the moment he arrived, preparations would have to begin for his coronation. He knew that the moment he arrived, Katerin, mother to the king, would have her hopes dashed against the wall. Though she was not his own mother, who had died in the throes of birthing him, Sortan knew a mother's love through Katerin, and his chest ached with the knowledge of what was to come.

As mother of a dead king, she would no longer be eligible by tradition to stand with the Harem Guard. As unpopular as she was with the noble council for her outspoken manner, she could not safely remain in the castle. To save his kingdom, he would have to choose between her and the very noblemen whose guts he wanted torn out and strewn across the country's wide expanses. Unfortunately, they had resources he could not survive without. All Katerin had was a dead bloodline.

Tessira, whose graceful form was belied by the fact she was fit to keep up with him on foot, reached up to touch his knee after trotting back from swift conference with a panting runner. She was dressed in a thick woolen robe that hid her statuesque, deceptively delicate features, to protect her soft-furred body from the biting wind. All the same, the beauty of her ocean-depth eyes haunted him with hate and longing, the desire to slit her throat for her participation in Nallak's death, and kiss her for the loyalty she'd shown to her father and the beauty she offered him now.

Her voice was smooth and strong, to carry over the howling winds.

"The scouts say our enemies are still at least four hours west. My father sends his compliments and asks your advice on whether to seek entrance to the fortress."

Sortan nodded, concealing his conflicted emotions behind a façade of steely stoicism. Deep in his gut, a pit of acid had formed, sure sign to the experienced young warrior that battle was upon them and soon.

"My compliments in return, to your father. Tell him that I advise we conceal the army in this storm and behind the hilltop, and allow the hyena barbarians to establish their siege camp. Before they can finish their fortifications, we sweep down upon them and lay waste to everything we can reach. Your people still have those exploding light-sticks, yes?"

She smiled, the sort of smile men would slay one another to see, subtle and promising of dark and sensuous things, as she nodded and began a soft chuckle that thrilled his already-strong-flowing blood.

"We do indeed. Light them once we charge, to signal the keep?"

In spite of himself, Sortan felt the blood rush to his head and loins all at once, pleased that she understood him so seamlessly.

"You understand perfectly."

Her bow seemed laughing, playful, and yet full of respect, before she spun in a graceful whirl of cloak, and rushed off at a hard run that no less showed her lines and grace in motion, as befit a Jackal princess.

Strange bedfellows, he thought, and was uncertain whether he liked the implication or not. To reassure himself, he clenched his paw to the hilt of his sword, and grunted in frustration at the niggling doubts that worried at the back of his mind, unformed and pestering, as if some thought he couldn't give form to could unravel some illusion he wasn't even sure he was perceiving.

Shaking the sensation aside, he watched Al Zar, a safe haven far away through the blowing snow, as it vanished and reappeared only to vanish once more under thickening snowfall. With a puffed, steaming breath, he pulled his woolen cloak tighter, and hoped the freakish cold would pass someday soon.

Amid the massive host of the hyenas, hunger growled and rolled, like an angry ocean, ravenous and violent and obliterating all thought in its passage. At the midst, a black-skinned, mottle-furred creature crouched, its maw gaping open from ear to ear, as it hissed and communed with the circle of females that surrounded it, dressed in their brown-stained gore spattered body wraps.

The Devourer had traveled day and night without pause to reach this place, following some unknown and unknowable need, some hunger of his own that had nothing to do with stuffing his never-full belly with fresh, screaming meat.

From his limbs, the tattered remains of what had once been a priest's robe hung, forgotten and ignored, except when one of the females reached forward and touched it, tugging at it to gain the monster's attention. With a whirl of its head, it spun and snapped its gnashing teeth at her, which won him a frightened but posturing reply from the creature, which cackled and snapped her bone-crushing jaws at him.

Enough , rang a voice the Devourer had never heard before. Nonetheless, it straightened, swallowing against the ever-present gurgle of ravenous hunger in its belly. The voice bore a crackling aura of authority, palpable and real, undeniable.

Black Devourer, you are to leave the fleshling army. Take fifty of your children with you, and go northeast, past the fleshling fortress. Seek their cities. Spawn more of your brood.

_ _

Devourer crouched and snickered, bass and grumbly-full of belly rumbling. What the voice said seemed pleasing, a certain feast of flesh the likes of which might slake his hunger. Without a moment of doubt or questioning, the creature loped off, cawing like a terrible crow to call its children.

The females leaned in toward one another, straining to hear more words. Words that came, detailing its plan for their conquest.

Nallak saw light again, after a forever-time spent in darkness, and squinted eyes that felt swollen and heavy, struggling to see past the haze of blurring whiteness that suffused his world. He felt warm, and nearly laughed aloud from the joy of simply not being cold and in pain. Then he perceived movement, and a jolt of fear shot through his suddenly-jolting heart, as he struggled in vain to sit up, to speak, to do anything at all but lie there.

Johan, where is Johan...

The soft rumble of cart wheels, and the whicker of a horse barely cut above the biting wind-sound that skirled about the vehicle he lay in. The lion's ears seemed to be working, to his relief, even if his eyes were bleary and nauseated him as he tried to open them wider. When his right arm finally agreed to listen, and tried to rise, a soft but insistent voice in a language he didn't understand spoke, and pressed the arm back down.

A shot of pain from his wrist made Nallak suck in a hard breath, which made his aching tail hole clench, causing him to tense, and before he could exert the control to calm himself, two sets of paws held him in place as his muscles spasmed in an agonizing symphony of twitches and jolts of pain.

He managed a gurgled yelp, before stars exploded in his eyes, and his bruised and broken body thrashed as if it were being pulled by invisible cords, wrapped tight around his muscles and clenching them together. Something pried his jaw open, as he gurgled and choked, and a bitter-tasting strop slid between his teeth before they could clamp back together.

Then, through the chaos of pain and spasming, a strong, level female voice spoke in the Atarasi tongue Johan had taught him.

"Young lord, please be calm. Father Timid says your head wound is to blame, but you will be fine if you can but stay calm."

Held down, wrapped up in warmth and voices that spoke to one another in a language he knew not, Nallak forced himself to lucidity by strength of will alone. He knew her words were truth, and knew as well that none of the conspirators against him would bother with such a ruse now. Better to simply kill him, he knew, while he was still far from his loyal retainers and armies.

Then he recalled it, the voice that had spoken to him in the dark, and told him of the Star-Bearer. He recalled an image, from a glimpse of consciousness he'd had upon being pulled down from the horrid tree. A star, of gold and silver and copper, hanging over his face, limned in aura and light, a worried and stripey-brown face hovering above it.

When his muscles slowly began to go slack, a wave of exhaustion rode over him, a tidal rush of thick water bearing him down toward the darkness that loomed, comforting and frightful all at once. He fought it, refused to let go, give in to his body's agonized cries for relief. Instead, he force words from his still-shaking throat, in Atarasi.

"Jo...han..." he pushed out, forcing the syllables past a block in his throat, past still-trembling muscles.

"Johan?" the female voice asked. Then he heard her speak, and be responded to, in some other language, by a voice that seemed strangely familiar. The wagon had ceased to move, he thought, though his world continued to rock as if he were aboard a small boat in a great storm.

Her voice spoke again, asking him a question that slid off his aching brain, only to be asked a second time.

"Is he your friend? Where did you last see him? There are many bodies, and Timid's eyes can only take in so much."

Curious at the strange context, wondering if his mind were entirely working, he forced more words from his slowly loosening throat.

"Riv...er...Spear...L-look for my...Spear...Please..."

"Is Johan a spear?"

"No...Wolf..."

Cel turned away from the boy, as he lapsed back into the twilight of half-conscious stupor, whispering to himself in the strange tongue she assumed was of the lands they now walked. On the other side of their newly-claimed cart, Timid leaned with his paws clasped to its rim, looking down on the battered, bloodied, bruise-swollen boy where he lay, wrapped in blankets and with makeshift splints strapped to his wrists.

Timid looked up from him finally, meeting her sky-blue eyes with his own that were brown as rich soil, and sighed.

"What was that about?"

"He asked me to look for Johan...A wolf, by the sound of it. By the name, I'm guessing an Atarasi. He also asked after a spear."

Timid grimaced and turned away from the cart, looking back on the tiny town, empty as a skull and just as lifeless, that smoldered behind them. They'd had no choice but to gather what bodies they could together, douse them in oil found amongst the town's houses, and burn it.

"I should have kept Tomasj and Van here to search...There might be more survivors, unconscious under the snow or..."

Cel reached over the narrow cart, and touchd her beloved's shoulder, clasping her gauntleted paw against the labor-hardened muscle beneath. A throb of pride in his loving care, even for strangers, throbbed in her breast as she spoke.

"No, they were right, my love. Survivors escaped northward, and these homes were not built for winter. Which leads me to think they do not know how to survive these storms. And...Some have likely been bitten."

The cat's shoulders shuddered, as he blew out a breath. Once, she knew, that shudder would have accompanied tears. Now, it was just a shudder, and it resolved into a firm strength as he stood straighter, nodding his head once.

"You are right. Stay here with the boy for now. I'll go check a second time for this wolf. As for spears...Well, we can make more."

Timid crunched through ever-deepening snow, his diminutive height doing the cleric no favors. Though the cart and horses lashed to it had crushed a path through the mess, those ruts were rapidly refilling, and as he tightened the heavy woolen robes and cloak about himself, the priest prayed the weather would break soon.

Ahead of him, a grey and ominous shape slowly resolved back into the horrid tree from which they had rescued the lion child. They'd had no time to cut down all the dead and undead that hung from its branches, and not enough oil to burn the thing once they had finished with what bodies were strewn upon the ground. A scent of scorching meat wafted past him, from the crisply burning barn behind it, and as he covered his muzzle with his arm to block the stink, he could not help but stare at the terrible effigy to corruption that stood there in the bloody snow, silhouetted in purifying flame.

Even cleared of corpses, the farm field seemed filthy, tainted, the snow pink with a layer of gore slowly freezing in the rising storm. Somehow he imagined the heaps of mangled intestines and torn flesh would still remain when spring came, frozen solid in the blizzard snow, a horrid image that would have to be burned from the land with fire before planting could begin again, lest the undead plague infest the very earth and its fruit.

A better field of fertilizer for that horrid lion-fruited tree, he could not think of. The thought made his stomach feel full of acid and bile, as he turned away at last, and picked his way down the gently sloped yet treacherous bank, to where the snow melted away a few feet from the water's edge.

The fast-moving water was filled with chunks of ice, and wads of snow collecting even as it flowed, soaking through but failing to disperse, as the cold suffused that life-bringing stream in a steady attempt to freeze it to death. Already, he saw, warm-river fish were floating dead along the surface, belly-up and bloating.

The river knew what the land was just beginning to learn; death was coming, in the icy grip of a frozen winter, unlike any this famously warm and golden land had ever known.

His eyes felt heavy, as he swept the waterline, knowing Vanyal would likely have already found what he sought. The poor child could use some good news, Timid knew, well-aware that under the conditions, the boy might well die of infection before they could find a safe place to stop. So, on he hunted, pacing carefully up and down the river bank, praying not to slip and fall into the deadly run while he searched for the spot where those monstrous beasts must have pulled the two from the river's edge.

Soon enough, a scrum of ice-mixed mud and footprints signaled the start of his trail, and a thrill of mixed pleasure at finding it and worry at what he would at its end find mixed in Timid's already roiling belly. A quick turn of booted feet and he was scrambling up the bank again, following a swift-vanishing depression in the dirty white-grey carpet of frosty death.

As Vanyal had taught him, Timid paused when he reached a forking in the trail, and tried to think in the mind of the quarry. With his eyes, he sought out clues; blood splotches going to the right were heavier than those going left; to the left, a stone covered in gore and mounting snow, but no bodies, near the base of the Lion Tree; to the right, open field, littered with heaps of snow that could cover nearly anything.

A quick glance told him the tree was full of lions, that the hyenas had reserved the dubious honor only for the golden-furred cats, while other species lay discarded about the field and inside the homes that now smoldered as the barn burned outright.

He turned right, and trotted through the snow with growing urgency, knowing that if there were any chance of finding someone alive, he would have to do so soon or risk them dying of the cold. When he felt he was within good range, he closed his eyes, and opened them again into the strange world of the Sarellas-light.

It had grown stronger, stranger, since they had left Amarthane. Where once he had seen only the purple-black rotting bruises of the undead, and the dancing mani-colored and variable lights of the living, he now saw strange shades and streaks that seemed to mirror the land. Here, a hillock, full of dull grey light limned with vibrant green for the torpid plants that lay sleeping beneath the snow. There, a grey-black farmhouse, filled with oily-grey corruption and slowly burning to the ground covered in the purifying white of flame.

The field itself was full of sick blackness and charcoal color, mixed with purples and browns like a festering wound, pulsating before his mystical vision. It hurt his eyes, Timid turned his eyes toward the ground, grabbing onto a long-dead tree stump to steady himself as the world wobbled with disorientation. With his eyes closed, he looked again, filtering away the physical world, to track the growing waste with his inner sight.

For minutes, he searched, concentrating on one area at a time. Death, he saw, lay sprawled here, a charnel feast for crows that were absent, thanks to the swirling storm that came on from high above and the east. And amidst that death, no sign of life came to his eye, as he walked slowly among the field of the dead, paws extended to either side, and heart thudding heavily with grief for these lost lives.

Finally, as the wind kicked up a gust of blown snow across his eyes, the very moment he was about to give up and return empty-pawed to Cel and the unnamed child, a single scrap of energy caught the corner of his vision. Spinning, his brows raised in surprise, the brown-striped cat spotted what his vision had seen.

Thrust up out of the snow, half a spear steamed as snow touched it and melted, evaporating in an instant as if it were landing on forge-hot metal. It's blade was black, but to the vision of his Sarellas-sight, it glimmered the color of melted rock, a bubbling suffusion of scarlet and ebony that swarmed over one another in a coruscating aura of power and menace.

From the snow drift beneath it, where the spear was anchored upright, he saw the faintest gleam of life, silver and blue and green, pulsating, the feebleness of a newborn babe wrapped in a fragile veneer about a will of steel and song that held it just barely above the yawning abyss. His feet were carrying him at a powder-spraying sprint toward that spot before he could think to ask them for speed.

When he slid to a stop, the young priest's hard-worn paws set to immediate work, digging and scooping at the freezing snow that had covered over the survivor. It seemed to suck at his life force, in the vision Timid had forgotten in that moment of hurry to turn off, as if the frozen water that showed a chill blue-white to his sight were devouring the vibrant but fast-dimming energy of the living creature beneath.

Shoveling snow like a frenzied hare, his paw came into contact with the spear's long haft, and the searing cold of terrible heat shot through his arm before Timid yanked himself away, yelping and shoving his arm into the snow in hopes to stop the blistering before it began. His eyes caught on the thing then, as he took that short break, breath hammering at his chest.

Black from tip to where it vanished beneat the snow, it shed heat in waves unlike anything he'd seen in a snow storm before. More the heat of a summer day, rising hot off the rocks on a distant horizon. It was of black glass, blade and shaft, though wrapped beneath the blade with strips of golden leather. How it failed to sear the cured cow hide to ash, yet had burnt straight through his wools and fur and skin at but a touch, he could not pretend to know. How it had not harmed the creature who clutched to its base with such one-minded tenacity, he could only guess.

As soon as the pain was bearable again, he threw himself back into digging, knelt wet-kneed in the slush, all-too-aware of the growing bluster and blizzard that seemed determined to ward him away.

Finally, a last chunk of snow flew away, and his next scoop collided with hard, chill, still flesh. Had he not seen the life-light beneath him, he would have assumed the creature to be dead at that touch, so corpse-cold and frozen. Instead, he redoubled his efforts, rather than give in to inevitability. No creature whose life force glimmered so weakly could survive such a storm, he knew, at least not through any sensible means.

Then he slapped away a small boulder of compacting snow, and saw the most-unsensible thing.

There, in the snow, lay a wolf, though that itself was not strange. Also expected, given the circumstances, was the ice-crystalled blood matted to the creature's face and exposed shoulder, as Timid threw his powerful body into heaving aside the mound that rested over this buried creature. The arrow protruding from the male's chest was also not strange, though his mind would later realize that the fletching looked too fine for the barbarians they had just fought.

What was strange, indeed unreasonable, was the grin that covered the grey-furred creature's muzzle. A smirk of victory, filled with mirth and mischief, life and light, mounted upon the frozen lips of a male who was as good as a corpse, and breathing just slightly more than one.

With a titanic heave of effort, Timid forced the last bit of ice aside, pushing it aside with a heave of his shoulder.

Armor, he recognized, was still on the wounded, dying warrior. Fine chain mail, with a shoulder pauldron and gauntlets as he would expect to see on a greatsword-wielder and not a spearwolf. Its style was not Amarthane in origin, he recognized immediately, though he made a conscious effort to ignore such details and hunt for hurt, as he grabbed the wounded male's shoulders and began to gently roll him at seeing the splotch of pink that layered the snow beneath him.

A sound so weak he thought it was the wind, at first, issued from the wolf. Then Timid blinked, when one of its eyes shifted in its socket, as if dreaming.

When the wolf's frozen lips moved again, Timid leaned in close, and shouted above the howling wind that grew from the east.

"Save your breath! Your lungs are in danger! If you speak you may die!"

Then the male's eyes shot open, and Timid felt as if he had been physically seized about the ears, dragged into them, those sky-deep pools of radiant blue so like Cel's he couldn't help but think of her. The wolf, blue-lipped and leaking scarlet from the corners of his muzzle, spoke in a raspy tone he could barely hear, yet understood all the same, for all of its foreignness.

"I have guarded him...All his life...Now you must...Must finish my task..."

"Guard...Guard the lion child?" He knew to try silencing this wolf was futile. And as he tried to move, to lift the fur from the snow and drag him indoors, he felt with a jolt of annoyance that his body was trapped. Then surprise at his own annoyance, rather than fear. Both of which were utterly eclipsed by the sympathy he felt for this poor, dying fur, trapped in the snow with a stranger.

Suddenly, the molten-hot spear was against his side, and he tried to jerk away, tried to yell out. When the expected searing pain failed to come, the smell of burnt flesh and fur absent, he blinked in startlement at the wolf, who simply smiled that mischievous smile, and spoke with breath that gurgled as it came.

"He is...King...His enemies...Many...Ask him...F-for guidance...He knows your Way."

Suddenly able to move again, Timid grabbed at the spear, expecting a need to slap it away. Instead, the haft settled into his paw, though it vibrated uncomfortably, as if it did not wish to stay any longer than it had to. The wolf's paw had moved, and now looped weakly into the collar of Timid's cloak, pulling him down with more weight than strength.

He was nearly nose to nose with this stranger in a strange place, when he spoke his last.

"Nobles...Seek his death...He is...The kingdom's only hope...Tell him...Vengeance will no...not...."

And then he was gone, and his Sarellas-light with him. The paw flopped loose back into the snow, as Timid dropped the spear and grabbed at the wolf's chest, trying to shake life back into him, angry and sorrowful that someone who had so clearly fought to the death for his lord had faded away. He knew not the Words with which to heal him, or save him.

So all he could do was watch the wolf die, and try to remember his words, unable even to bury him for risk of being trapped in the storm away from his companions.

With the spear in paw, he left mighty Johan Longstride to be buried in the snow, a smile upon the dead male's muzzle, as he awaited the rains that would, some season, wash him to the river, and thence to the sea, and once more to the great cycle of life.

Katerin stood upon the highest tower's parapet, and glared down with rage-filled eyes at the horde that gathered beneath the mighty, massive gates of the Al Zar. Beneath her feet, and down below throughout the great fortress, her missing son's armies massed and roiled, an ant-swarm of activity seen from her perch high up above.

The cold bite of the wind cut into her fur, but the aging beauty ignored it, for it was no chillier than the winter winds of the lands of her birth. In fact, it put her in mind of home, upon the wind-swept tundras of the northern wastes, where she had spent her first twenty years as a warrior in her father's tribe, living off the land and fighting the many dangers that lived and died in the merciless snow.

A place no less merciful than her adopted homeland, she mused, as she gazed off into the waves of white that obscured the horizon.

Kimbek Talroth's army should have already arrived, she knew, and news of a hyena raid taking the life of her son was ridiculous at best. She had fought alongside her husband, mighty Yskar of the Burning Blade, in his battles against them. They were no fools, well-skilled in the art of the ambush, and well-studied in avoiding them.

If there had been an ambush, there was no doubt in her mind, they would have seen it well before the first arrow fell. And woe betide any who would dare to sully one of their sacred moots with such a fool act, for the Jackals were strange and terrible but honorable and fearless in defense of their traditions.

When the heavy wooden door behind her creaked slightly in the wind, her muscles, hardened from a lifetime of hard living and harder training, tensed. Then they once again relaxed, as she blew out a steaming breath, at the sound of the Grain Minister's soft and grandfatherly voice.

"My lady, you should come inside. This unnatural storm gusts strongly, and we weak-hearted Southerners fear for your safety," he said, in his friendly, chiding way. The king's mother smiled, though it felt unnatural on a face tight with fear for her son and anger at her foes, and turned toward him, one of her true allies in the courts that had so baffled and angered her late husband.

Minister Horen was a bent old thing, far past the age where the North would have seen his end, all the steel and strength of his gnarled old limbs having long since fled upward into his cool, piercing silver-grey eyes. He gave her a smile, and held out an ancient, withered paw that protruded from a woolen garment that seemed to outweigh the tiny ancient creature, as he spoke again.

"There is news from the desert."

"Kirren and Zirha?" Her heart slammed into her breast, and she took the old lion's golden paw in her sable-black own, following his lead as he tugged the suddenly-excited female inside.

"No, I am afraid not yet. Zahira has returned with news."

She had just enough time to register a jolt of hate for the woman, and disappointment, and a brief flicker of surprise in Minister Horen's aged eyes, his mouth beginning to open as if the world were trapped in honey and slowed. Zahira, hatred and gleeful, cruel victory in her eyes, rushed at murderous speed from the mouth of the stairs, her axe leading the way toward Katerin's face. Behind her, six members of the Harem Guard faced away, blocking the stairs out of the queen mother's chamber.