They rode out in the dawn when the sky was yet a shade of iron and the stars still lingered in their distant and pitiless watch, the town behind them little more than a smear of dim lights.

  Bernadetta rode among them, cowering inside her cloak.

  Her stomach was churning from the night before, thinking of those grasping hands, the awful noise of gunshot.

  The Judge’s voice, soft and commanding. “You handled yourself well.” But Bernadetta did not feel this was so. She felt raw, stripped down to something skeletal, a small and brittle thing left too long beneath the unkind sun.

  The path before the company wound through a desolate plain scarred by old conflicts, echoes of violence still lingering like salt in the earth. They came upon the remains of a battle where the ground was strewn with bones half-buried in dust, skulls cracked and weathered, ribs protruding like the fossilized roots of a primordial swamp. A broken rifle lay among them, rust blooming along its barrel. A few tattered strips of cloth hanging from a broken carriage frame fluttered weakly in the breeze.

  Bernadetta could not look away. She shrank deeper into her cloak, her breath tight in her throat.

  One of the men nudged a skull with the toe of his boot. “You reckon they was Yumas?”

  “Tonto Apache,” another muttered. “You can tell by them arrowheads.”

  The Judge dismounted and crouched among the remains, his pale hands sifting through the dust. He plucked up a shard of flint, turning it in his fingers, the edge still sharp enough to slice flesh. He smiled.

  “This war is eternal,” he said. “The land itself is shaped by it, and all who walk it are bound to its law.”

  He held the flint out toward Bernadetta. She recoiled.

  “No, th-thank you,” she stammered.

  The men laughed. The Judge only watched her, his expression fathomless like untended clay.

  They moved on without further rumination, with nothing of material worth there to gain. Ere long a canyon rose before them, its walls sheer and sun-blasted, streaked with the ancient marks of water long since evaporated. They followed the ridge where the path was narrow, the drop below steep and jagged, a sheer descent into broken cliff rock and silence. The horses stepped carefully, their hooves sending small stones clattering down into the abyss.

  Bernadetta’s grip on the reins was so tight that her knuckles ached. The thought of falling—of slipping, of plummeting down into the waiting void—sent a sickly chill through her limbs. And vile though he was, she could not help but to marvel at how the Judge rode ahead, his posture straight, his expression untroubled. She wondered if he could have been a specter of the land itself, a thing too mighty to be merely mortal.

  After braving the narrow ledge they came upon a place where the canyon widened into a dry basin, the walls pockmarked with the shadowed openings of old dwellings cut into the stone. What appeared to be the abandoned dwellings of a tribe of primitives yet unknown to civilization.

  Bernadetta swallowed. The wind whistled through the empty windows with a surreal woodwind clarity.

  “What happened to the people who lived here?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  The Judge turned in his saddle.

  His grin was slow, deliberate. “They were conquered,” he said. “As all men are, in time.”

  Bernadetta only shuddered.

  The sun sat swollen in the sky as the company trekked further along the ridge through the heat-warped land. Crossing a dry riverbed, the tracks they followed saw them through arroyos carved by storms in times immemorial, into a rugged country where the cliffs leaned over their solemn procession like leery sentinels. Here, too, the land bore inklings of past struggles. A burnt-out wagon wheel lay half-buried in the dust, beside a broken musket with its wood split from long exposure, planted there during a bout of some unknowable fervor like a makeshift grave marker. In the hollow of a nearby stone, beneath the shelter of an overhang in a small indentation, there was a skull gnawed clean by the passage of time with one of the eye holes sealed fully in melted candle wax.

  The Judge, as ever, rode at the head of the company, his great pale shape casting no more shadow than the vultures wheeling overhead. His eyes roved over the land with neither haste nor need, his expression unreadable.

  It was Tobin who first saw the ruins, shifting in his saddle.

  “Christ,” he murmured. “Ain’t seen a sight like this in a long time.”

  A pueblo, it lay half-collapsed against the face of a distant cliff, its adobe walls slumped from years of weather and neglect. The stacked dwellings were little more than empty husks, their windows hollow, the ladders long since rotted away.

  Yet the place was not abandoned. A man stood at the edge of the ruins, wrapped in a tattered robe that might have once been black, but now hung about him in sun-bleached strips. He was tall but gaunt, his face all angles, a scraggly white beard framing his jaw. He watched them approach with dark eyes set deep into the skull, his hands folded over the crude walking stick he leaned upon.

  The company reined in their mounts at a short distance, some resting their hands on their belts.

  The old man did not move.

  “You’ve come far,” he said, his voice dry as the wind.

  The Judge smiled. “And we’ve farther to go yet.”

  The old man nodded, as though he had expected as much.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Tobin spit into the dust. “You living all the way out here alone, old man?”

  The hermit inclined his head. “For a long time now.”

  Glanton leaned forward in his saddle. “Ain’t much left of this place. Were it yours?”

  The hermit glanced back at the ruined dwellings, as if he, too, were seeing them anew. He exhaled slowly. “No place is anyone’s forever.”

  Bernadetta swallowed. There was something about the way he said it that unsettled her. She shifted in the saddle, watching the way the shadows clung to the hollow windows.

  The Judge slid from his mount. The movement was fluid, unhurried, as though he had always meant to do so. He stepped forward and the hermit did not recoil, though his grip on the stick tightened.

  “This land has seen blood,” the Judge said. “A great deal of it.”

  The hermit inclined his head. “It has.”

  The Judge smiled. “Do you know whose?”

  The old man was quiet for a time. Then he said, “Many hands have spilled it. Spanish, Mexic, Apache, Comanche. Perhaps yours, too.”

  The Judge chuckled, soft. “Perhaps.”

  Bernadetta shivered.

  One of the riders behind her scoffed. “We’re scouring for some blood ourselves.”

  The hermit did not look at him. His dark eyes remained fixed on the Judge.

  “The land remembers,” he murmured. “Even if men do not.”

  The Judge studied him, head tilted just slightly, like a child regarding an insect he has yet to pull apart. Then he spread his arms in a mock benediction. “O wise stranger, would you offer hospitality to a couple of weary travelers?”

  The hermit did not answer immediately. Then he turned, motioning toward a low alcove where a few cracked clay jugs sat in the dirt. “Water, if you need it.”

  Bernadetta did not wait. She slid from the saddle, her legs weak beneath her, and stumbled toward the jugs. Her hands shook as she lifted one, sloshing the contents, and poured it over her cracked lips. It was warm, thick with sediment, but she did not care. The men laughed at her desperation, but she did not pay it any mind. She had grown accustomed to being treated as something of a pet, an object of their wicked amusement.

  However, the Judge did not drink, or laugh. He only watched.

  When the others had taken what they would, it was to him that the hermit turned again. “You move toward death,” he said.

  The Judge smiled, white and terrible. “Whether we march or stand still, it finds us all.”

  A rogue blast of wind stirred up a lapping tongue of dust.

  The old man exhaled, slow, deep. Then he turned and walked back toward the ruins.

  The Judge watched him go, his expression unreadable. Then he turned back to the company. “Mount up.”

  Bernadetta lingered. Something in her, some distant and quiet last-dwindling spark of sentimentality, willed her to stay. To ask the old man if there was a way out of all this, if there was some path she had missed. But he did not look back.

  Sighing, she turned and climbed into the saddle.

  Whether I march or stand still…

  They rode on, leaving the hermit behind, his hovel shrinking to nothing in the wasted distance.

  The land yawned open ahead of them, broken only by dark scrub and the long shadows cast by the riders themselves. Bernadetta rode near the back of the column, her thoughts still troubled by the old sage’s words. She barely heeded the rock-strewn trail before her, barely noticed the sky deepening in color as the sun westered. But she did not miss the laughter that rose ahead of her, nor the glance cast back by one of the men with a grin as sawedged as a cut throat.

  "You scared of fighting, girl?" said Tobin, turning in his saddle. "That old desert rat had you shook near to pissin’."

  A chuckle passed through the gang, low and cruel.

  Bernadetta stiffened. "I ain't scared."

  "Ain’t scared," Tobin mimicked in a high, mocking voice. "Coulda fooled me. Thought you was fixin’ to faint clean off that horse during all that talk about bloodshed."

  Another rider, lanky and bearded, spat into the dust. "Maybe she oughta stay back with the hermit. I reckon he’d appreciate a woman’s company more’n we do."

  More laughter.

  The Judge turned slightly in his saddle to face the group, but said nothing.

  Beneath those lightless eyes, Bernadetta felt strangely emboldened.

  Her hands clenched the reins tighter. "Y’all got nothin’ better to do than run your mouths?" she muttered.

  Tobin grinned. "Nothin’ better at all, darling. But I could think of some fun uses for yours."

  “W-what?” Bernadetta was too repulsed to fletch a reply.

  “Come now!” The Judge’s voice cut through the mirth. "She’s right, boys! A long road is yet ahead. Best we all save our breaths and try to remain amicable." His tone was neither what might be considered gentle, nor commanding. Simply law.

  The laughter died down. Bernadetta buried her face within her cloak, feeling a deep shame.

  In silence the gang continued until the canyon ridge began to rise on their left, forming a broken line of stone casting deep shadows over the path ahead. Beyond which, the ridge fell away with an unnatural degree of sharpness into a shallow valley decorated like a shrine with artifacts of war. Shattered spear shafts lay half-buried in the dirt, their splintered ends jutting skyward like the ribs of a fallen beast. A rusted breastplate, caved in as if crushed beneath some monstrous weight, lay among the remains of scattered bones—whether human or animal, it was impossible to tell.

  The Judge reined in his horse atop a rocky rise and turned to regard the scene. His face, caught in the half-light, was impassive, save for the glint of something cryptic in his eye. He dismounted without a word, stepping lightly over the scattered wreckage. Bernadetta, hesitating, followed at a distance.

  Among the debris, the bones lay half-shrouded in the dry soil, as if the land itself had tried but failed to swallow them. Some bore the marks of battle—hacked, cracked, split. Others, however, were wrong. Too great in size, too thick, their shapes unfamiliar. A great spine curved up from the dust, its vertebrae each large enough that a man might place his hands upon them and not span their width. The skull, if skull it was, lay in ruin, its hollowed sockets gazing upward, as if to scrutinize the heavens that had forsaken it.

  Bernadetta felt a coldness at her core that had nothing to do with the morning air. She turned to the Judge, who regarded the bones with a faint smile.

  “What kind of a h-huge, scary thing was this?” she asked, her voice near a whisper.

  The Judge knelt and ran a hand across one great rib, the gesture almost reverent. “A thing of war,” he said. “Same as us.”

  One of the men chuckled, but there was unease in his voice. Another spat. “Some wild bull, mayhap. Ain’t no mystery in it.”

  The Judge did not correct him. He stood, dusting his hands. “The land remembers,” he said. “It carries its history in scars and relics, though few care to listen.” He turned his gaze to Bernadetta. “Perhaps you do.”

  She sensed the significance of his words upon her, but could provide no answer.

  It needled at the edges of her thoughts like a briar vine pressing through cloth. The Judge had meant something by it—he always did. He saw things in ways no other man did, as if he could peel back the skin of the world and lay bare the sinew beneath. And he had looked at her with that same terrible knowing.

  Her fingers tensed against the reins.

  It was not all fond memories that she had of Fódlan.

  She remembered the great shapes moving through the trees at night, their outlines shifting, unclean in their incorporeality. The steaming footprints left in the wet earth, too large, too deep. The gnawed remains of things that had once spoken and prayed and begged. And their howls—inhuman, wretched—her blood turning to ice at their sound.

  Most striking of all, were the eyes. Burning through the dark, hollow and wide lenses lit from within by some interminable fire. Eyes that followed, that measured, that knew.

  Her stomach twisted. She pulled her cloak tighter about herself.

  The Judge had seen something in her.

  Had he seen them, too?

  The Judge lingered a moment longer, his pale fingers brushing idly over the bone as if feeling for some residual warmth. Then, with a slow and relaxed breath, he smiled.

  "Ah," he murmured, almost to himself. "So it is."

  The group was held up at that place only but a few minutes longer, by a man in their ranks offering remarks about the size of a full grown bison. Only there was no bison left roaming in those parts.