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Hi everyone!

Sorry this chapter took so long to write. I've had major writer's block that just won't freakin quit :/ So this got written about a paragraph at a time. If it seems a bit choppy, that's why. Tried to edit it for that, but...Well, give it a read and let me know what you think.

Chapter V - Wintry Hunts

Katerin had been born and raised in the harsh North, where all adults, regardless of gender, had been taught to fight. More than that, she had become a warrior of great skill and renown by the time she was twenty summers old, and had met her husband when the wandering vagabond had fought off one of her peoples' raids into a town he had been staying in.

He had seemed so much smaller then. Barely more than a boy, Yskar had been one of the prettiest males she had ever met, which had very nearly slowed the attack she had intended to kill him with as she charged down the hillside with her father and brothers. His reaction had been to draw his great black blade, covered over with runes that ran with liquid fire and left streamers of power in its wake, and meet her blow for blow with immense strength and determination belied by his graceful boyish features.

They had fought until the raid was over, and then until sundown, and once they had no more energy to battle, they lay on the rocks and spoke haltingly in barely-shared snippets of language, until he had made her laugh and wonder why she'd ever tried to kill him.

He had never slowed down in the growth of his skill, and she had never let him get ahead of her, though his strength had one day outstripped hers, and the power of his magical blade had always given him the edge. Her speed and precision had always kept her equal to him in skill, if not overall potency.

So, when Zahira, a longtime rival from whom she had never expected true betrayal, flew at her from the doorway with a brutal overhead chop that would have cloven the skull of a lesser warrior, Katerin's heart sped past gawk-faced frozen surprise like a diving falcon and straight to a furious, fire-on-ice blaze of battle rage.

Zahira's attack was swift, brutal, an overhead cut from surprise. Katerin stepped into the strike, taking a bruising hit on the shoulder from the axe's long haft, claws bared from her sable-furred paws, and swiped twice in swift, murderous cross-body strikes that forced the golden lioness with the hard eyes to abort her attack and leap back awkwardly, only to be followed by a suddenly-roaring matron.

Katerin leapt of the cobbles of her tower chamber, and crashed into Zahira in thunderous rage, slamming the experienced warrioress back such that she fetched up against the wall, but threw herself forward and to the side enough to be missed by a brutal lashing of claws that would have ripped her open from crotch to sternum. Then the two were circling, testing one another with little jolts of forward motion, feints and counter-feints, as the Harem Guard on the stairs held the doors shut and waited, watching.

Zahira was a wily old warrior, well into her fourth decade of a long, hard life. Where lesser harem-wives were all warriors but rarely fought beyond the practice fields, Zahira had begun life as a slave, become a gladiator, and fought her way as high as her station could allow. She was cold, cunning, brutal, vicious, and now Katerin saw, also opportunistic.

She was also armed, while Katerin had nothing nearby to use. While many rooms in the royal suites had swords or axes, even maces and bows along the walls as decoration, this chamber had been built for star-watching. Astrological charts would be little use as a weapon, and the few short chairs the room bore would likely not even slow the bite of Zahira's axe.

All of this came to her in an empty-minded moment, her eyes and thoughts utterly consumed with watching the enemy who now stalked her through the chamber. Meanwhile, the aged Minister Horen, who had escorted her inside, stood with his withered back to the wall, calculating eyes wide but patient, plotting some move or another. Katerin considered maneuvering Zahira until the other lioness had her back to him, hoping the minister, once long ago Yskar's master of assassins, had his dagger handy and would use it. Then she realized how unlikely it was that the old, frail lion could do anything but die at Zahira's wiry, muscular paws.

So Katerin continued to circle, crouched low, paws to her sides and ready to defend, until her own back was to the elder, her muscular body hunched and ready to defend him as well as herself.

As always-aggressive Zahira charged, Katerin's battle-swift eyes noted the Harem Guard, bereft of any member of the Harem personally loyal to her. They had blocked the door yet failed to intervene, their eyes full of half-hidden fear, as they watched two legendary warrioresses duel. Then, as Zahira's axe reached the apex of its arc, Katerin burst forward like a catapult boulder suddenly released.

Her left paw shot toward Zahira's eyes, forcing the older lioness to twist, dodge, lose force from her swing. Katerin's right paw slashed down from the right, slicing into the other female's shoulder in a bloody furrow. Then they crashed together and slammed to the floor, wrestling in a tornado-furious, deadly and graceless display of strength and ferocity as their roars echoed from the stones.

Finally, Katerin had both paws on the axe's smooth haft, and bulled the smaller lioness over with a slam of her shoulders and the weapon's decorated shaft, before bearing down on her, shoving the beautifully-grained wooden bar up under Zahira's chin. With murder and rage strengthening her grip, throwing her forward and down with all of her muscled weight, Katerin's mind swirled and battered at the back of her consciousness, demanding to know, before the wretch died, what had happened. The harem matron's eyes bugged and bulged, as she kicked and thrashed, pinned by the warrior woman that knelt over her, glared into her eyes with orbs full of a mother's wrath.

"Where is my son?!" she roared, a bellow that shook the windows' paned glass, and slowed the tentatively advancing Harem Guards. Katerin shoved the axe downward again, forcing Zahira's head back as it jammed under her chin.

"WHERE IS HE?! WHY HAVE YOU BETRAYED HIM?!" she howled, in agonized fury.

Then pain exploded through her spine, shattering her enraged strength, as something hard and cold slid with sick ease through the back of her neck and into the rear of her throat, drawing up a gag as blood slid from her maw. Her muscles gave out with an instantaneous limpness, and she slumped forward, mind howling for her suddenly-numb body to respond, as a choking, gasping Zahira squirmed out from under the suddenly-motionless queen mother.

From behind, as the world faded, as her lungs refused to move to draw breath, Katerin heard Minister Horen's aged and magisterial voice, tinged with a maliciousness she had never before sensed from the loving, kindly old advisor.

"Because the kingdom's rightful masters demanded it. Now Zahira, please explain to me why you deviated from my plan, and why we don't have Nallak's damned body.

"Someone throw this corpse off the tower. We will claim she killed herself in grief."

"He was gone in perhaps a minute..."

Nallak floated in the hazy black river of the void, and listened to the voices that faded into and out of existence seemingly at random. He felt neither cold nor hot, hurt nor well, and his mind sluggishly accepted everything it sensed in a way utterly alien to the inquisitive, ever-active boy king.

"...Atarasi, certainly, by the description. He must have been a Bard...Waysinger....-trider?"

The lightless void's water flowed gently, but thick as flowing mud, and he sensed slow but steady motion, as that dark river bore him into the forever-nothing that rested beneath consciousness. He lingered upon that edge, he somehow knew, in that unknowable place. Hung upon the edge of wakefulness and of slumber deeper than enchanted sleep.

"...think the boy is a noble-f...the prophec..."

"...cruelty! If we had been an hour sooner, we might have saved..."

"...is catching us up. Pull the cart to the side, over there..."

For a while, even the distant voices, so full of meaning he could not parse that lilted on the edge of his mind, quieted to nothing. Then, slowly, the river ceased to flow, and he lay in a tepid pond of nothingness, surrounded by the unfathomable emptiness for a time.

An odd sensation pierced the blackness. His chest had begun to feel again, begun to ache in a horrible, hot but dull way, as if someone were squeezing it tight to hold in his breath. His eyes were burning, and his throat was clenching, and if he had not been trained from birth to be a king, to show no weakness, to be the master of his emotions, young Nallak would have sworn he was about to burst into hysterical tears.

Then he felt the rough scratchiness of a commoner's blanket, and something around that which held him tightly, like bands of gentle iron, against a warm, muscular body that smelled of mud and road-sweat. His ears could hear again, and what they heard was howling, like a million wolves crying to the sky in an endless single note. His mind worked again, though sluggishly he noted, as it informed him that howl was the noise of a terrible deadly storm-wind.

He felt the cold, biting harshly at his toes, at his fingers, as the blanket covering over top of them flapped quickly open, only to shut again as a second weight landed in the rough-hewn splintery wooden cart that stank of rotten hay and cow dung. Another body, no less muscular than the one that held him close, wrapped around the both of them as if intending to be another blanket, smothering the cold with soft fur and bristly woolen clothing.

His chest felt like it tore open, as the first sob wracked itself out of his shaking, fire-aching body, ripping blazing spikes of pain from his savaged scalp and a thousand other small wounds besides. He felt like his skin was burning off, though at his core he felt frozen-cold, and as paws began rubbing over his body, he knew through the tears that streamed from his agonized soul that these two had rescued him, were saving him from the cold that had threatened to end his life after that plunge into the river.

For a time, he could do nothing but sob incoherently, as the horrors of the last day washed over him in an endless, vivid stream. The horror of sudden betrayal by Talroth, the laughter of his nobles as he'd fought for his life. A look of glee going to horror as he slashed out a jackal's throat with the Obsidian Spear. The shock and anger in Sortan's eyes as he fell back, being strangled by that Jackal girl in the bright robes.

The satisfied yet apologetic look in poor, brave, loyal Johan's eyes, at the knowledge he had saved Nallak's life, at cost of his own.

The horribly painful, humilating yet somehow satiating feel of the hyena raping him, perfunctorially, atop a flat granite boulder covered in his peoples' gore. The feeling of his balls spending themselves, blowing streamers of white away from his body to arc down upon the fouled soil as the noose made his head feel as if it were overfull to bursting with heaviness.

His world had crashed down, like the stones of a castle set upon shifting sand.

Finally, after what seemed like every eon had passed and the world was ready to begin anew, the shaking, terrified child within him began to recede, curl up and cry itself to sleep, as Nallak became cognizant of hushed talking between these two furs that were either his captors, rescuers, or both.

"I've no idea how I'll communicate with him...The child was delirious, and spoke only Atarasi, right?"

"These are not the Atarass lands, Tim. If he's a noble, he will have studied languages...Perhaps Middle Vanim is among them?"

Yes, Nallak thought, he understood them now. They were discussing, in the language of the mad Easterlings, how to interact, which meant they intended to talk to him, giving the young lion a faint thread of hope to which he could cling. His mind slowly returning to full lucidity, he plumbed his memory for what little he had read of their people and ways, discarding most of the recalled snippets as bias-laden and arrogant works by ignorant 'scholars' penning judgments of foreigners.

His first attempt to join the conversation failed, a soft croak dribbling from his lips that neither seemed to hear above the cacophony of the storm.

"We're lucky to have found this barn," the gravelly but female voice said. "The cart can help protect the three of us, but the horses would likely not survive."

"Indeed. I hope that those three are all right out there."

"Tch. We could do without Toryen. Maybe Tomasj too."

"Cel! Tomasj has saved both our lives, and Toryen's part of the prophecy. I know you dislike them but..." the male voice, hard yet soft like the thin shell of an egg over its golden heart, faltered a moment.

Into the uncomfortable silence, Nallak's words sounded like thunder to his ears, and a whisper to theirs.

"Very thirsty...Could I please...Have some water?"

Silence settled onto the two whose faces he could not yet see, his eyes unwilling to open themselves at his command. His whole body felt chapped, raw, almost sunburned, and Nallak was surprised even his voice would take his orders.

His ears told him the two were moving, and a soft slash told him they had opened a water skin shortly before cool, delicious moisture fell on his swollen lips. He lapped at the trickle, though even that seemed to take far too much effort. The water tasted sweet, clean and pure, as if it had fallen straight from the clouds onto his tongue, and he thanked whatever gods happened to listen for it, before reminding himself to be polite and thank to living who had actually given him the precious stuff.

"Thank you very much," he murmured, as the waterskin was pulled away. A paw, gentle as spring breezes, came to rest on his temple, and the gently drifting cat forced himself once again to clarity, smelling the scent of honest sweat and hints of incense long-since burnt.

"My name is Timid, and this is my mate, Cel. May I ask your name?"

For a moment, he considered telling them the truth. That he was a king, betrayed by his own nobles, and by his hoped-for ally. A king of a kingdom that had deposed him, thrown him down and tried to kill him. That met with a bitter flavor rising in his throat, and he tamped it down, swallowing the vitriol with cool knowledge that his people were not to blame, and that no fur would believe a feverish child was king, when he'd been found hanging and naked in a village of farmers hundreds of miles from the capitol.

"My name...Is Nall...Thank you for saving me..."

Then he faded off again, sliding backward comfortably into the warm darkness, to the sound of fading questions about where they were, what they were to do, and prophecy he yearned to hear.

Van ducked low, chest flush to his horse's neck, as they careened through a forest grove and crunched over fresh-fallen snow, chasing the blood-splattered trail that had broken off from the other women they tracked.

Some way ahead, visible only as a shadow through the blowing flurries that led the storm at their backs, he saw a shape shambling through the whitened twilight. Clenching his thighs, he rose up in the saddle, forester's bow rising up as he nocked an arrow and called out with a sharp yell.

"Halt!"

The wily woods-fox knew well the locals would not understand him. However, if the shambling shape were alive, it would have jerked or thrown itself flat, perhaps covered its ears and screamed. Instead, it jerkily turned, with the slow clumsiness that still made his hackles rise even after having slain so many of the damned things.

He emptied his mind and released his arrow into the blowing wind. He didn't reach for a second arrow; didn't need to. The fox bowman knew his shot was good, even before it slammed into the dead creature's head, snapping it back and slamming the creature motionless to the snowy earth.

As he approached it, slowing his steed, Tomasj yelled out from across the half-frozen creek.

"Found two others! Killed them good, haha!"

Van waved a paw to show his understanding, and dismounted, landing in a crouch next to the crumpled girl. What he saw still never failed to weigh upon his heart, even after so many dead.

The girl couldn't have been more than fourteen summers old, and though her cheeks were gnawed out by her own teeth, he could see she would once have been pretty in a homely sort of way. Now, she was an undead monster, fit only to be destroyed, an arrow protruding from her shattered skull, grayish-pink brains dripping off its tip to slop onto the dirty snow.

He allowed himself no more than a few seconds of prayer for the girl's soul, and apology for what had to be done, before picking himself up to yell across the river.

"There were five, when they split, Tomasj! Have you seen signs of two others?"

Barely visible across the river, Tomasj twisted to and fro in the saddle, as Toryen slunk like a whispy shadow through the murk, watching his master's back.

"No!" the wolf yelled back, cupping a paw around side of his muzzle to channel the sound over the wind. "Maybe they simply froze?"

Vanyal considered the possibility, then dismissed it with a frown. They had all been bitten, most like, and the undead seemed to have been slowed only minimally by freezing weather. Shaking his head, he remounted.

"We double back and look again, before the storm covers all trace!"

An hour later, the sky was growing black with blizzard clouds, the air thick with heavy, wet flakes that dumped from the sky like feathers from shot pigeons. Tomasj's bristly black fur shifted in the biting, frozen wind, and the scent of frost nipped at his nosepad in a way that reminded him entirely too much of home. Sharing the saddle with him, the lithe tiger Toryen shivered against his master, despite the heavy wrapping of wool that cocooned him against the hungry storm.

Back in the murk of his mind, Tomasj heard his wife whispering, jealous and protective all at once. She wanted the tiger dead, yet wanted him protected, wanted him for herself, wanted him for her murderer-husband. The wolf shook his head once, stiffly, to quiet her, and wrapped his arms about Toryen's midriff, to the tiger's purring if shivering pleasure.

"M-master...It's too cold...Your lungs..." he whispered, and turned those wide, shiny eyes, intense like sunlight off diamonds, toward Tomasj. The strange obsessive love that shone through them left the wolf with a swell of pride and self-loathing every time, with knowledge he could still have something for himself in this world, even if he deserved none of it.

Without preamble, he wrapped his paw around the back of Toryen's head, digging his snaggly nails into the tiger's headfur and scalp, and shoved their lips together in a kiss that was bruising hard, and had the feline squirming and whining in the saddle. A whine of lust and enjoyment, despite the freezing cold, the rotting corpses they hunted, the roughness of his teeth against the cat's flopping tongue when he nipped it.

Then, from the corner of his yellowed eye, Tomasj spotted sign of what they had been hunting for, and roughly shoved Toryen away with a paw to his throat, causing the cat to fetch up uncomfortably against the saddlehorn with a panting grunt-choke of lust and desire.

Without bothering to call out, Tomasj jerked his horse's reigns hard to the right, and lifted his right arm up to signal Vanyal, as he kicked into his steed's flanks and set it to kicking up clouds of snow in sudden pursuit. Toryen grabbed a dagger from his bandolier and readied it, fingertips grasping it by the blade as his clever head shifted to and fro seeking signs of the path Tomasj had seen.

Behind them, Vanyal's horse snorted and leapt nimbly over a blowing drift of snow, trying to catch up the two front riders. Tomasj yanked his long, fire-blacked sword from its sheath and grinned his yellow grin, knowing the forester could not catch him in time to stop what needed to be done.

Callow Lily could no longer feel her feet or her paws. Still, she clung tightly to her baby sister, and forced herself ever forward through the growing snow and biting wind that cut straight through her thin shift. Tulip Bud had stopped shivering some time ago, her breath having gone gentle and quiet in the woolen blanket that wrapped up the infant canine girl.

Still, though the babe was warm now, the shivering maiden knew there would be no surviving the terrible ice storm if she could not find shelter. What was more, the torn bite-wound in her shoulder throbbed and burned, and had seemed to grow more and more painful as time went on, flowing upward into her head and down into her gut in a wave of hot, gnawing agony. Bravely pushing on, Lily struggled not to think on that horrid creature, with its rotting eyes and snaggled teeth, as it had grabbed her with a terrifying strength and sunk its shark-like fangs into her flesh.

In her gut, a growling, aching hole seemed to be growing in mirror to that pain from her shoulder, while her snout told her, over and over at incomprehensible intervals, that something delicious was so near it made her dry maw want to water. She had long since left the others behind, as they had fallen into the snow, her heart broken but knowing she could do no more for them.

Then Tulip Bud squalled, for the first time in hours, and Lily found herself transfixed, a lance of strange and terrible sensation stabbing through her gut as some spectral paw forced her head forward, to loom saucer-eyed over the fuzzy morsel she held in her arms, cradled so close...

So close to her snout, she knew now that the squalling babe was the source of that delicious scent, a smell that bore within it a promise of something like salvation. Deep inside, she knew that if she bit deep into the bloody, delectable, delicate flesh, the hurting would stop, at least for a time. Her jaw creaked, its muscles clenched tight, and she felt a tooth crack without pain as a strange misty grey-black-red began to swell up in her vision, pulsing into being faster and faster with every throb of her wound and gut.

Horror grew like a weed in her breast, as she realized what her mind had just presented; that her little sister, the baby she'd protected as if her own, was nothing more than squalling, delicious food. When her arms refused to move, except to slowly raise the squirming form closer and closer to her suddenly-yawning maw, the girl tried to scream for help, tried to force her jaw closed, only to find nothing was responding to her commands.

Only to find that her mind was drifting, lost in a haze of fuzzy pain and overwhelming hunger.

The mindless thing once called Callow Lily yawned its maw open wide, and raised the shrieking baby, as blood dripped from its broken teeth, spattering the swaddled child with pinkish, lifeless drops of haeme. All the once-Lily thing could think was of hunger, and rage, as its lower lip caught against the baby's cheek, as drool slavered dripping to its defenseless face.

Then Tomasj's sword sliced the monstrous creature's head in half just above the jawline, splattering the shrieking child with gore and bits of scattering bone, its lifeless once-sister flopping to the snow-cushioned ground like a poleaxed mannequin.

By the time Vanyal caught up to them, Tomasj was out of the saddle, the yellowed-eye wolf staring down at the earth as if transfixed, heavy ornate sword still in paw and trembling ever so slightly as Toryen picked at something from beneath the half-headed foe, with gingerness belied by a focus intense as the summer sun. Something about the tiger's pose, his hunched shoulders and staring, fascinated wide eyes, drove a shiver up Van's vulpine spine, fluffing out his brown-cream tail as he slowed his horse to a walk and then dismounted, sliding off its side with knife in paw, boots crunching through hard snow with a sound like crushing bone.

"What is it? What have you found?" he demanded, advancing on the mad duo. He trusted neither of them, and though he could already see the girl had turned by the marks on her lips, something told him with sick certainty that he would not like the answer.

Toryen turned toward him in a twirl, enthusiastic joy billowing over his face like the sun emerging from clouds. His wide eyes, shining with wetness, cried out nothing good, before his lips parted and he shouted, holding up the squalling, gore-splattered bundle.

"Look! I have a new brother!"

The Nameless One crouched low to evade an icicled branch, the tattered hood of his ragged cowl giving a distressed tearing sound as a hanging blade of ice caught in it and tore through before snapping, as the horses kicked snow and bolted through the frozen corpse of a well-groomed date orchard with the chilly minions of Hell on their tails. Though the Walker in Winter had bypassed them, true to his word, the hyenas that seemed to trail in his wake like sharks behind a whaling ship apparently took no orders from him.

Having taken one of the riderless steeds left over from their brief and bloody battle, the Nameless One stood in the stirrups with a practiced ease, and fought not to waste time pondering on from whence such skill at horsemanship came. Ahead of him, the focus of his attention was the severely wounded young lord that had helped him, been the first mortal to speak to him since he could recall.

The fact that his one contact with the mortal world dangled on the verge of life and death lent the Nameless One a strange sense he had not at first identified. It was acidic, in his chest, hot and cold all at once like a thunderstorm in winter. As if it would break at any moment and inundate his entire reality, he rode hard, hoping to outpace the growing sense of unknowable flooding emotion, as his eyes stung with unsheddable tears.

A dart arched from the trees behind them, as the howling pursuit continued, and he swung his left paw up on reflex to block its path to the pallet containing Barahan's unconscious body. It hit him, tip-on, punching through his paw with nary a moment of pain, only an odd sense of pressure and awareness that he was pierced to accompany the fleshy crunching sound. The wound bled only a drop or two, which melted snow with a sizzle as it landed. Twisting in the saddle, he looked back through the clear, snowless air, even as his knees directed his steed to leap a low hedge and land on the snow-buried cobbles that led to the half-league distant safety of Barahan's manor.

There, amidst the trees, the hyenas were still giving chase, though the mostly-naked creatures had fallen farther and farther behind, until the only reach they had was with lucky throws of their forearm-length dart spears. Nonetheless, he had counted at least two dozen of them, moving swiftly and with purpose and tactic, unlike those that had accompanied the Walker in Winter. The Nameless One guessed, with a growing certainty borne of some experience he could not place or recall, that these had to be scouts for a larger host, and a different force than the one that had promised to leave them be.

Yet he could do nothing to warn these others of his suspicions, for all the yelling he attempted came to their ears as nothing more than one more burst of wind among the cacophony of the pounding gallop toward safety. To save these good folk who had sheltered him, he would have to be certain young Barahan survived. Perhaps Barahan could even point him toward his own purpose, he hoped. Anything, to break the numbing melancholy of watching the world not-so-slowly swirl its way down into death and darkness.

Ahead of them, guards upon the manor's walls began to yell out, their voices thick-laden with urgency, coaxing, begging their young and beloved lord's bodyguard to greater feets of speed, while nocking arrows to their long-shafted bows. Even with a dart through his paw, his horse bleeding into its foaming breath, the Nameless One smiled a grim rictus of victory, as the first arrows flew over his head to strike down among the gathering hyena host, sending the chattering creatures scampering back for the cover of trees.

Then a shout from the tall watch tower had him turning again in the saddle to look back, and his sound of victory caught hard in his throat. There, behind them, a tree shattered as a massive, terrible grey beast slammed its way through the grove, bellowing and coming on at a horrific speed the flagging horses could not hope to beat. From its face, a great serpent of muscle wrapped in bronze and leather armor hung, and in it an axe longer than the Nameless One's body was gripped, swaying back and forth as the armored creature thundered forward in an inexorable, tidal wave.

Upon its back, an archer wrapped all in black stood up, and fired from his ten foot living platform, drawing an agonized howl from one of Barahan's bodyguards as the wolf was smashed from his saddle, immolated by an arrow that burst into black flame as it flew.

With a snarl that began at his gut and roiled, volcanic, to the back of his teeth, the Nameless One recognized the shadow spawn for what it was - One of the greater undead, created in the image of one or another of the Shadow Masters' greater avatars. He knew he could devour this thing, as he'd eaten the Singing Child, and perhaps steal some of it's evil power.

How he knew this, he could not say, but his course of action was clear. As the guards spurred their horses bloody in the effort to reach safety before they could be overtaken, the Nameless One grabbed his own steed's reins and yanked them about hard, spinning the blowing, terrified creature.

Then he lowered his head, stood in the saddle, and roared as he charged, a bellow that carried with it every mote of sensation and power he'd taken from the Singing Child in an ear-shattering crescendo that sent hyenas shrieking out of his way, clutching their bleeding ears and vibrated guts.

The thing atop that grey monstrosity stood in the perch, loosing another arrow that hissed and exploded in black flame, only to miss entirely as the Nameless One ducked sideways in the saddle of his galloping steed as it flew over the snow. It drew, nocked, pulled and fired again, only to have the arrow explode where the horse ought to have been, missing thanks to the near-prescient horsemanship of the charging Nameless.

The hyenas escorting that fell grey beast surged forward and tried to overwhelm him, but the Nameless One simply rode over them, trampling foes beneath his steed's thundering hooves or dashing them aside with the impact of its muscular flanks. One swung at him, and he raised his left arm, slapping a spear away as if it were wielded by a child, despite the dart that still protruded bloodlessly from his paw. Then he was at the great grey bellowing beast, atop a horse that was suddenly panicked, terrified by the great loamy rotten smell it emitted, as it bellowed and lashed about fruitlessly with the massive bone-shearing axe he was too close to be hit by.

From the corner of one eye, the Nameless One saw the gates of Barahan's estate swinging open, and the first of four hourse-furs galloping through. He threw himself from his screaming horse, scraping the fingertips of one paw against the monster's wrinkled hide, and hooking the fingers of the other into a strap of its strange saddling. Above him, the blackfire archer howled out in a hoarse, strangled tone, and struggled to take aim on the climbing killer, firing two shots that glanced off its own mount's bucking hide.

The Nameless One was whipped and buffeted by sudden winds, as if the very winter itself wanted him to fail. His own doubts, his own fears, bubbling up from behind a wall of nothingness that separated him from his own past, mirrored that wind with equally little success. Paw over paw, the burnt creature climbed, until he was so high up on the roaring, stampeding grey monstrosity that he no longer had defense against the blackfire archer's arrows.

The thought didn't slow him, as he rolled to his feet atop the roiling beast, to come face-to-face with the creature that stood there with its smoldering ebon bow, arrow nocked but un-pulled. Its eyes, surrounded by a circle of decay and rot that showed through with yellow skull, seemed staring-wide as they met with the Nameless One's seared face. The archer mouthed words, in a hissing voice that tickled along the forgotten nerves of the Nameless One's ruined flesh like raw wool on flensed skin.

You have come too late, Nameless One! We will be ascendant! Your gods are dead, and we have already won!

_ _

The Nameless One grimaced, and brought one arm up to cover his eyes, as if the words somehow could bite at them. Gnashing his teeth, he snarled back, in a rolling susurrus of the strange words only minds could hear, thick with a rage that came from a place he did not know, buried deep beneath the scars upon his Unnamed soul.

Then I will drag you into oblivion before I die, minion of the dark!

_ _

Then he lunged forward, paws outstretched, and stretched wide his maw, racing the rise of the blackfire archer's bow, just as the last of Barahan's warriors raced the ravening hordes of wintry doom toward safety.

Deep in a dark place, buried in stone and hidden by the shifting sands, the dead demigod lay in fitful slumber, wiling away the black and empty eternity that he had so gallantly defied for all of his heroic lifetime. Upon his massive muscular chest un-thinned by death and burial, the heavy black iron of his great sword lay silent in time with mighty Yskar's still heart.

Yet beneath the gauze that shrouded his motionless face, within that cold and unmoving shell, a tiny spark of consciousness roiled, boiling and enraged, as events above unfolded. Furious that he could do nothing, the dead demigod lay still upon his bier, paws clasped about the hilt and pommel of the great flaming blade that had slaughtered the enemies of his Golden Kigndom, it's now-silent runes burning bright with the angry cherry of hot steel.

Deeper still, beneath the flesh and bone and buried within the spirit that yet resided there, a single flickering flame burned in a world attached but apart, in a space where it could burn nothing, light nothing, warm no paw and scorch no foe. In that lightless, airless, un-physical place, the soul-power of the demigod Yskar, hero of his people, burned in fury to stave away the hopelessness that had ever threatened him all his living days.

It was joined, by a presence that it sensed but was unable to see, in that lightless place.

So you have found me, Finder of the Lost. I had hoped to remain here for time immemorial. I deserve a rest, do you not think?

_ _

You may lie to me, but do not lie to yourself, Yskar of the Endless Flame. _ The response was gentle, in a voiceless tone that spoke to him of bells and spring breezes, of rain's gentle fertile patter upon grass new-grown after hard frosts. _You see the struggle above, and you wish to join it. Nothing could please you more.

_ _

Begrudgingly, the demigod's soul fire laughed, and danced in angry shades of purple flame.

You and I once made a deal, Tauriel Who Has Many Names. Are you suggesting I would break faith with you? You should know, I have killed for lesser insults.

_ _

For a time, there was silence in that black place. Yskar lay still, as he could do nothing other, and as his anger at the intrusion began to fade, the airless flame began to wonder if it had simply gone to madness at last, waiting for a response.

Do you remember when we first met?

_ _

How could I forget?

_ _

You were very young then...A small boy, fleeing demons set upon you by your father's betrayers. Driven from the kingdom that was your birthright.

_ _

Yes...

_ _

I came to you as a dream, when the dracoling in that swamp had nearly killed you. You thought I was a hallucination, and laughed in my face.

_ _

I'm getting bored, Finder. What's your point?

_ _

I gifted you with hope. I need you to pass that hope on to your people.

_ _

A long pause sat heavy, a leaden blanket atop that sizzling purple flame. The ramifications of what Tauriel suggested were not lost on the mighty hero, and for a while he recoiled from them, biliously enraged at what was being said. Then, the image of his son, naked and hanging from that blighted tree with its blackening fruit came again, a dream of the real world dreamt by a soul trapped in the dreamtime.

With a sigh that came without lungs, that burst from his soul in a motionless wind, Yskar came to understand what was being asked.

The priest that rescued my son. He's your new champion, now that I'm dead, isn't he?

_ _

He is not so strong as you were, at least not in body. In your time, the battle to save your world was a physical one. The battle now is one of the soul, and his is stronger than yours was. Irony, isn't it, that the physical war was subtle, and this war of souls is so overwhelmingly obvious to the eye?

_ _

Perhaps to yours and mine, Tauriel.

_ _

The image of his beloved Katerin, that indomitable mortal warrior who had nearly killed him upon their first meeting, as she plummeted from her tower, besieged him with a wrath that felt as if it could burn worlds to ash. The smiling face of his once-trusted minister, Horen, the wise old assassin who had engineered his return to the throne, was twisted with shadow only Yskar's half-divine eyes could see. He had eaten of the Shadow Masters, Yskar knew, traded his very soul for their aid. He had betrayed Katerin, and brave little Nallak, and all of the Golden Kingdom, though for what reason Yskar could not fathom. The anger that had fueled Yskar for so much of his life faded to sorrow then, and he cried motionless tears in an empty place lit only by his own mighty and unquenchable Sarellas-flame.

All the while, the Finder of the Lost waited in silence, letting the mighty warrior consider and grieve, for the deity knew that to push Yskar was to prod an angry bull. Like so many god-blooded creatures, stubborn pride was both their greatest tool and worst enemy.

I will let you take my Name and give it to them, Tauriel, but first I will have you agree to a few conditions.

_ _

Name them.

_ _

Firstly. Taking my Name and giving it to them will slowly unravel what's left of my mortality. When the divinity inside me overwhelms my mortal identity, I want it to join you in your quest.

_ _

I would be pleased to have you.

_ _

Heh. You'll tire of me soon enough. Secondly, your champion may wield the word, but my soul flame itself will stay with my younger son Nallak. Simply put, I trust my boy. He's smarter than I ever was, and has a good heart. I don't know your champion.

_ _

So be it.

_ _

Lastly, you will make certain my sword finds its way to Sortan. He will need it, for the treachery that comes his way.

_ _

Difficult.

_ _

But doable. Remember that you led me to the sword, all those years ago. I'll not believe you cannot do so for another.

_ _

For a short time, there was silence, and Yskar's ever-burning inner flame wavered on as always, lighting the endless night that hung about it until Tauriel spoke to him again.

The wheels of fate are now in motion. You will have what you have asked for.

_ _

With an immaterial grin, the demigod ceased his ever-present rumbling, focusing all of his efforts inward, as if he were balling a fist made entirely of his own soul. He meditated upon the Flame, the sacred life-light he had discovered long ago within himself. It had not been until years later that he had discovered that source of magic, of the great and terrible power that had allowed him to grow strong as an immortal, had come from somewhere Else.

Somewhere Other.

Finally, with a great heave of effort, the demigod broke his own soul-light in half, with a soundless thunder that rumbled along the paths of the dark underworld. Its twin lights, the two pieces of eternal fire, flared brilliant for a moment, then muted, calming like the hearth fire.

His voice sounded strained, even to his own ears.

It is done. Go save my sons.

_ _

I cannot. They will have to use your gift to save themselves.

_ _

Hah. What I said, then.