“Settle, little tiger. All things will eventually pass. All things, except for the final one, are survivable. Let it wash through you. Nod as it passes by. Acknowledge it. Give it time. And eventually, you will be freed from your suffering, one way or another.”

  Walking had once been such a simple thing.

  Kotora had marched day after sleepless day, rode night after insomniac night, through snow drifts the height of his chest, through black brambles that bloodied his hands and neck and face, through bogs and mountains and deserts. There were soldiers his equal but few, if any, could call themselves his better. Now, he slumped with his shoulder against the wall. His head spun and his throat was bitter with water brash. He stood halfway up the staircase, one hand white-knuckled over the rail and the other with a vicelike grip on his cane.

  “Here.” That was Kratzer’s voice. It sounded echoic, distorted, garbled as if spoken underwater. Spots swam in Kotora’s vision and pressure, like water flowing against a dam, pressed into the backs of his eyes. But he could make out the shape of a hand extended towards him.

  Pride was a luxury he could no longer afford. He steeled himself against his shame and grasped Kratzer’s wrist. Limp-shuffle-click, limp-shuffle-click. Kotora drew himself up the stairs in that uneven, burdened gait of his. It was slow. He stopped again when he reached the top and Kratzer stood silently with him until he recovered himself. He let Kotora’s arm go only when the samurai pulled away. “How did you know I was coming?” Kotora asked.

  “I heard you.”

  “You’ve good ears.”

  “So it’s been said. My room isn’t much farther.”

  Kratzer’s space was well-kept only because it was empty. What few possessions he had were stacked in one corner haphazardly—a pile of clothes, a couple small bags, a hairbrush, several pencils, a knife, an unlabeled and empty liter-sized bottle, and a handful of revolver cartridges (eleven millimeter, centerfire, a common enough round that it was hard to know precisely which pistol they were intended for). A small bed dominated the center of the room and off to one side there was a woodstove and an armchair. This was probably the best room in the house: most had only a bed, perhaps a warped mirror or old desk, rarely its own heat. Kotora was grateful for it. The warmth of the room enveloped him immediately upon his entrance and began to soothe the painful itch of his throat.

  “Sit,” Kratzer offered, and Kotora hesitated before he accepted and lowered himself into the seat by the fire. His masseter peaked when he clenched his jaw and, ever so briefly, those inkwell eyes fluttered shut. He allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s-long expiration through flared nostrils and his fingers momentarily tensed on the chair’s arm. They were minute details—a flicker of motion here, a near-inaudible rasp there, but the pattern of his movements were a jarring echo of his dead master’s.

  It was easy for Kratzer to superimpose the recollection of the man he loved over the one that sat before him now. Cuán’s pupil had the same strictness in the set of his shoulders, the same stone-carved stoic countenance, the same sharp gaze that stared unblinking and hawkish as if bearing into one’s bones. Their topknots, neat and symmetrical and flawless, were as identical as the formal—and sometimes almost inhuman—manner of their speech. They had the same seriousness. The same intensity.

  It recalled a memory that had lain dormant in the recesses of Kratzer’s guilty mind. It, too, was in a hotel room, not so different from this—a little bit cleaner, perhaps, and colder. The wool carpet in front of the hearth was a dingy, ragged beige, once white and now stained by dust and dirt. Yoriake’s pommel glinted lifelike in the firelight at Cuán’s left hip. He’d sunken into his seat with grace and dignity but he had that look to him. The eyes flickering closed for an instant longer than a blink; the faint release of barely-bated breath; the twitch of his hand’s aborted grasping. Kratzer—seated on the floor between him and the hearth—turned and set his hands on Cuán’s knees. He reached out for his lover’s palm and pressed to it a gentle kiss. It was a wordless I love you. A tender I know you’re not okay.

  Cuán’s skin smelled like mineral oil and horses and herbs and lavender. His eyes—his piercing, raptorial golden eyes—looked down and his calloused fingers wound through Kratzer’s hair. “All will be well,” he said. “It will simply take time.”

  “What?” Kotora’s sharp tone shattered Kratzer’s reverie. He jolted, jerked into the present, and he looked up to meet Kotora’s eyes. “You were staring,” the samurai added, softer now.

  “Ah. Sorry. You…I was just reminded of something. That’s all. Forgive me, but you don’t seem well.”

  “The severity of my malady is not particularly subtle in its presentation, no.” Weariness had crept into the tremulous timbre of Kotora’s voice.

  “What is it? Tuberculosis? Bronchitis?”

  “Snow.” It was a moniker spoken with bitter familiarity. ‘Snow’ was a nickname soldiers had given the gas, for white particles it tended to leave behind. It was a nasty little paragon of human cruelty and genius. An advent of the Coalition two years into the World War, it’d been intended to bring the conflict to a swift and decisive close. Instead, it’d succeeded only in upping the ante of inhumanity, and the Cavalry was quick to retaliate with necromantic techniques made taboo centuries prior for the incomprehensible horror of them. Snow burned on contact—skin, eyes, membranes, anything it touched—and the fine particles were poisonous when ingested and typically lethal if breathed. It clung, cloying, to clothes; contaminated food and water supplies; and to those unlucky enough to survive exposure, it slowly ate away at the lungs until, eventually, it was terminal. It was a slow and agonizing death as one’s respiratory system was eaten away by acid and coughed out in rotting, necrotic chunks.

  It also explained why Kotora hadn’t made this journey sooner. He likely hadn’t been in any condition to travel since he’d been gassed—the war had ended a decade ago, now, so at least ten years. Now, with his death impending, he was honor-bound to at least try, or else his ancient blade would be abandoned and wardenless in pagan foreign lands. He was doomed to failure. But the attempt might make his demise a respectable one.

  “You served the Coalition, isn’t that right?” Kratzer asked, sitting down on the edge of his bed.

  “Yes. Did you serve?”

  “Yeah.”

  “...Well? Coalition or Cavalry?”

  “Cavalry, by matter of necessity. I can’t say I have a particular fondness for either faction, though. I’d sooner have stayed out of the whole thing,” Kratzer shrugged.

  “Mmh.” There was no ‘right side’ in that war. There had been in the War of the Ancients, the Twelve-years’ War, and the various armed conflicts in Tsarvolkiv before the Ablon Empire and Nercea forcibly overtook the majority of northern territories. But wars were won by inhumanity. They left no true survivors. And this war, the World War, was as purposeless and bloody and futile and banal as any war could be.

  “What’ll you do if you make it? To the isle, I mean.”

  “When.”

  “Right, yeah. When.”

  Kotora thought a moment. His eyes were affixed to tongues of flame lapping at fresh wood. When he finally spoke, it was softly, somberly. “I will lay myself at the feet of my Enlightened God-Lord or his emissary. I will present Yoriake and the name of my master in reverence for his great service. I will ask forgiveness that I’ve failed in my duty, and beg my lord for the ritual of honorable suicide. If my wish is granted, I will disembowl myself and fall forward when I pass on. If it is not, I shall pray to the only other god I know that I am offered oblivion or a second chance. Then, I will be executed and my name will be marred by ash. Either way, I shall finally cross the milky-white river to my brother and my master, at long last.” Another pause. A thin breath which was almost a sigh. “And I will be relieved.”

  This was the most honest thing that Kotora had said yet and Kratzer had no doubt he told the truth. It was easily conceivable simply because he could clearly hear Cuán’s voice saying the same thing. “How old are you?” he asked.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Young to be so eager for death.”

  “Old to be living, after everything.”

  “Is that what he saw in you? Someone eager to give themselves to noble sacrifice?” Kratzer all but scoffed.

  “I’m disappointed to hear such disdain in the voice of someone my master considered his closest confidante. I would have presumed better understanding from one with such obvious affection.” For the first time since he sat, Kotora turned his head to stare straight back at the northerner. There it was again. The flash of something primal in the cripple’s eyes. It was as ephemeral as it was immediate and he returned his attention to the fireplace.

  If the circumstances were different, a comment such as that could’ve earned its creator a black eye or broken bones. But Kratzer’s surge of ire withered when the truth of Kotora’s comment struck him: his contempt discounted wholly the cultural context of Cuán’s values. There was no faster way to alienate the samurai than to scoff at his tradition and his perspective. However radical his worldview was to a foreigner like Kratzer, Cuán—and, it seemed, his apprentice—had dedicated themselves wholly and faithfully to those ways, to that lord, to this philosophy, not because they had to but simply because they believed in it. So, instead, the northerner’s eyes fell to the floor.

  Regret, evidently, sufficed in place of an apology, because Kotora continued moments later. “What he saw in me was ardor and adequate…desire. It takes a particular kind of desperation to join the order when they have no status amongst your own people. It is why so few of us are foreign adoptees.”

  “I can see that. It’s like that for my ilk, too, mostly. Not really a ‘passion project’ sort of line of work—except for some of the more, uh…how could you say?…unbalanced ones.”

  “Which one are you?” Kotora asked.

  “You sure don’t ask the easy ones, do you?”

  “I don’t have breath to waste.”

  “Mm.” Kratzer shrugged. “Dunno. Little bit of each, I guess. It’ll happen to anyone in it long enough.”

  “I suppose that is true of soldiers and monster hunters both.”

  “Yeah. Suppose so,” he agreed. When Kotora didn’t answer him, Kratzer hopped back to his feet and made for his jacket. “I’ve got some errands to run before morning. You want a blanket?”

  “An odd hour for business.”

  “Depends on what business you’re in.” Kratzer grabbed a blanket from under the bed anyways and tossed it onto the floor beside Kotora’s chair. “Here, in case you need it. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah.”

  It would have been wise to take advantage of this time to ask Yoriake what she knew of Kratzer. Exhaustion rode the coattails of pain, however, and as he sat and let the heat calm his agitated lungs, Kotora began to fade. He was so tired. It was a penetrating fatigue, the sort which left lead in one’s chest and molasses in one’s mind. It was the exhaustion of a decrepit geriatric whose eternity was spent in torment—in a lifetime of abuses so unfathomably terrible that even he could not conceive them, though he alone was witness to their births, their lives, their deaths, and he alone bore proofs of their existence on his skin and amidst his dreams and in the strained tenor of his dying voice. Though he withdrew Yoriake and set her across his lap, he must’ve succumbed when he closed his eyes to meditate.

  Yoriake spoke to him in his dreams.

  The woods which surrounded Kotora were the specter of an intimately familiar land, upon which he knew every hill and stone and tussock—a half-day’s ride north was the cliff-face upon which eagles made their eyrie; a day to the east was the last outpost before the border into corrupted lands; and a week’s journey to the south ended at the epylier, the sacred settlement and sanctum of his father’s secluded people. This place—this clearing filled with ankle-high new growth trampled by game trails and interspersed with low, tough shrubs with round leaves and peeling reddish trunks—was where he’d come often as a boy in search of squirrel and grouse.

  The trees were naked, black behemoths bare of woodpecker cavities or termite trails. A wilderness once alight with birdsong and insectile stridulation was now unsettlingly silent yet, somehow, serene. The scent of it was astringent and bitter and every breath drew in abrasive particulates of ash and dust.

  It was a land barren and burned. His steps left behind imprints as if in virgin snow. The passing of a shadow prompted him to look upwards and there, alighting in one of the skeletal branches, was a lone carrion crow. It peered at him through panes of black volcanic glass that reflected back a distorted vision of his own eyes. In its beak was a single feather—white.

  When he came to stand beneath it, it glided into the forest, and when he followed he became aware that there was no track, no trail, and that with every step the woods became strange until he lost all sense of where he might be. The leafless branches of the canopy interlocked until the sky disappeared but for a faint speckling of silver moonlight peeking through to dimly illuminate his footprints. Eyes glinted in the distant dark. But he pursued the beat of the crow’s wings which sounded here and there in sudden, staccato arrhythms before succumbing once more to silence.

  They stopped at a log cabin. Smoke billowed from the chimney yet there was no crackle of flame. Hanging from a rack by the door and from the eaves, and placed in various stages of semi-complete butchering on stones and stumps, were hundreds of vulpine corpses. Blood and ash were mixed into a thick, inky paste on the ground. Viscera glistened wetly in the moonlight where it was tossed aside in unceremonious gut piles, and the foxes’ faces were contorted into a thousand expressions of agony and anguish. Their lips curled and their tongues were bloated and blue with death.

  The inside of the cabin was, in stark opposition to the macabre vision outside, pristine. Lavender grew under the windowsill; a fire burned voicelessly in a cobblestone hearth; a document lay half-covered in calligraphy beside a still-wet inkwell under candlelight. The only sound was the soft rattle of falcon bells. By the fire, its source was visible. There was a hunting hawk—huge and pale and golden-eyed, presumably the executioner of the animals outside—which dangled limply from silk jesses tethered to a tall screen perch.

  Above it, on the perch itself, crouched a silver fox. It paid Kotora no heed as it chewed at the raptor’s leash in a vain attempt to save the dying bird. Each movement of its jaws rang out in another muffled jingle as it moved the raptor’s legs. It was a mangy, emaciated, filthy thing, with patches of bare skin and scars on its muzzle and a thin, greasy coat. Its saliva was mixed with blood from the futile gnawing. Kotora stepped forward and reached out to grab the goshawk, shooing the fox with his other hand—surely its body would be added to those outside if the raptor was given such an opportunity. Yet when his fingers made contact with the milky plumage of the bird’s back, the dream was rent in two by a brilliant, blinding fulguration bursting through the window.

  “Easy. I’m just letting the light in,” Kratzer said. He was tying off a curtain by the bed. His voice was followed instantly by a sensation of dizzying pain digging into Kotora’s chest when he inhaled. For a moment, he allowed himself the luxury of yearning for liberty from the chains of his decomposing body, of returning to that cabin where eyes hid amidst the trees. Were he there for much longer, whatever watched would’ve most certainly found him, but for this fleeting flash, it felt preferable to reality.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was to see Kratzer’s sketchbook laying discarded atop the covers. The half-finished sketch it was open to depicted a goshawk mantling over the head of a red fox, its talons curling into the skull and closed around a snarling muzzle. Around the hawk’s tarsus there was the faint outline of an austringer’s bell.

  “You draw?” Kotora asked. His voice was hoarse and he grasped the chair’s arm to right himself. Where was his medicine? He felt around for the cane which leaned against the back of his seat.

  “It passes the time,” Kratzer replied.

  “A peculiar choice of subject. No practiced haggard would attempt quarry so large, even if its master was negligent enough to release it on such a slip,” he pointed out. He leaned forward, now, grasping the cane in one hand and the chair with the other.

  “You deprive yourself of the point of poetry in preference for practicality,” Kratzer answered simply. “Are you off to the stable after breakfast?”

  “I ought to be.” Kotora steeled himself, then pushed his body forward and up. He stumbled when his vision dimmed and he felt suddenly as if on sealegs as his skull swam with odd, floating sensations. A few seconds later and his vertigo cleared. It happened more often than not when he got up in the morning, now.

  “That’s not a ‘yes.’”

  “Neither is it a ‘no.’ It is only that to leave so late in the morning may not have me to Yasov before dark.”

  “You’re not taking the train?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Kotora began to fish through the pockets of his jacket. “I lack the funds.”

  “Well, let me give you some, then. It’s no skin off my back.”

  “I appreciate your hospitality, Kratzer, but unfortunately I must draw the line at your charity.” He found the medicine bottle and withdrew it. It was only half-full. He pulled out uncorked it and took a measured swig. It was viscous and bitter.

  “Then let me go with you to the stable, at least, and pay for a coach. It’s a long walk—assuming you’re even going to the closest one, by the canal.”

  “I’m going to the one by the southern gate.”

  “Then I must insist. It’s still dreadfully cold and damp out there, anyways.” Kotora opened his mouth to deny him again, but Kratzer continued. “Please, Kotora. You of all people realize the importance of repaying debts. Don’t deprive me of the opportunity.”

  Kotora replaced the bottle and withdrew instead several tins of pills, which he quickly sorted and swallowed a small handful of. “Very well. But we have to go to the pharmacy first. They have an order waiting for me.”

  “Alright.”

  He replaced the containers, shrugged on his jacket, and replaced Yoriake at his hip. “Kratzer?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you draw foxes often?”

  “More than anything else, I suppose.”

  “And goshawks?”

  “I didn’t draw them until I started traveling with Cuán. He’d hawk hares off the road with them, keep us well-fed.”

  “I see.”

  “He didn’t have any when you were his apprentice?”

  “No. No, he did not.”