When Ayube placed his palm on the pale stone floor, he felt nothing. It was lifeless—devoid of energy. Its soft glow then could only be natural to the local geology, he concluded.

  SCREAMING! SCREAMING! SCREAMING!—

  STOP!

  Ayube collapsed further against the iron bars of his cell, now entirely out of breath. The episodes, they are getting worse, he thought. Continuous thoughts had proved to lengthen the time between his bouts of madness. There were other things, of course, though being imprisoned severely limited the tools at his disposal. For now, all Ayube could do was distract himself.

  Ayube allowed his head to fall further back. There, through a narrow barred window high on the wall above him, he looked to the sky. He had never seen the inside of a dungeon before; he assumed it would be entirely devoid of any natural light, but was thankful it was not.

  Most the white stone had darkened to blue from moisture. Ayube had made an effort to avoid large cities during his travels; anything to prevent the spilling of innocent blood. Even so, he knew from first sight that the stonecrafters of Gildaun had struck a magical balance between strength and beauty. Yet, even in their expertise, water still plagued the dungeon that held him.

  A long, thin stream of water glistened in the sun’s light, down the stone wall from the window above, and snaked toward a small circular grate in the floor.

  Fascinating, Ayube thought. They have built some sort of drainage system beneath the castle to collect the moisture. That these people would think to design such a thing. Already, through his short time in the High Kingdom, it was clear its peoples were not the bumbling slow folk that his own had rumoured.

  RUN! RIP THE HaIR FRom thEIR Scalps… and… …

  Ayube breathed slowly, deeply. Not only were his thoughts so scattered, his reservoir of energy weighed down his shoulders as well. Though the sleepless nights had disrupted the roaring rivers of magic that flowed through him, it had still been days since his last reprieve. It was an endless cycle: sleep well and his mind was at ease, but his magic was restored, requiring an outlet lest his reservoir overflow, don’t sleep at all and his magic would stay drained but his mind would grow increasingly unstable.

  “Hello!” Ayube called out. His shout clapped empty against the cool stone walls. Through the heavy wooden door at the dungeon’s end, a shadow shifted. There must be a guard stationed there.

  “I need help!” he called again, but heard nothing except the distant sounds of the city from the window. Perhaps they were listening for signs of real trouble, he thought, perhaps they could not understand his thick Sadanu accent, or perhaps it was a flicker of the torchlight that tricked his already fragile mind.

  “Please!” he shouted. “I feel pain!” he cried. It was partially true. Magic weighed down like heavy rainfall on good days, but like an icy waterfall on bad ones. Today was a bad day, and the frigid pressure burdened him sore. Again, the shadow moved human-like through the gaps in the wooden door until at last, a latch clicked, the door creaked open, and a guard entered.

  “What is it?” asked the guard, serious in her tone, as if concerned for Ayube. He was surprised to see yet another female guard, but had little time to take mental note of it.

  “Yes! Please, I beg of you! I must speak to your captain!”

  The stocky woman wrinkled her brow, searching Ayube for deception. “You can talk to me.”

  Curse it! Ayube’s mind was weak, too weak, he thought, to be persuasive. “I… I wish to confess!”

  Again the dungeon guard stood motionless. “You don’t need to confess. There’s no doubt about yer guilt.”

  “I-if I can speak to your captain, I will confess to how it was done—h-how I killed all those people!” The stout woman did not respond. Her eyes teetered left and right as she stood in thought. Without a word, she turned and left the empty echoing room, latching the heavy door behind her.

  Ayube relaxed if only for a moment, shoulders dropping, though still burdened. No real indication was given as to whether or not he would speak to the guard captain, but at least he had spoken to someone.

  What would he say when the guard returned—if they returned at all? He could barely focus. He tried to think of the captain who had overseen his arrest and what he might say to convince him of his request, but his thoughts were blurry—muddled. They had been clear once. He could almost remember what it was like to be free, unshackled from the scattering confused thoughts that plagued him. When before he shut his eyes tight, he would see nothing. Now, he saw only horrors: men, women, and children screaming; bloody piles of meat, bone, and cartilage, so unrecognizable, you would hardly know they were once human.

  Tears streamed steadily down Ayube’s pockmarked face when the dungeon door opened once again. He wiped the tears, stripped of their salt in his malnourishment, and tried to calm his nerves.

  With the dungeon guard stood the very captain he thought of, the man with the high voice. The captain, the one his men called “Cian,” stood straight, arms crossed behind his back. He was tall and thin, svelte even. He was also old, possibly nearing his seventies, though Ayube had noticed the fair-skinned folk of the High Kingdom wore their ageing more visibly than people of the south. Ayube’s gaze remained low, staring at Cian’s freshly shined boots, devoid of the dirt that coated them only hours previous. The female guard stayed at Cian’s side, though with a lift of his hand, she returned to her station.

  “Now young man, I’m told to you wish to confess. Wasn’t sure we needed it, but I’d be doin’ myself a disservice not listening to what you have to say.”

  “Please, you may not believe me, but I am in great need of charcoal. A single lump is all that I require.”

  Cian ducked his head, an eyebrow raised. “And why should I do that?”

  “Because, if you do not…” Ayube hesitated, “everyone here may die.”

  “Listen, boy,” Cian’s voice quickly soured. “You’re not in any place to be making threats!” Cian snapped sharply to his left, billowing his short cape.

  “No! Please! I am not making a threat! I will tell you all you wish to know, but I need this thing, if you can bring it.”

  Cian’s upper lip curled in hatred as he looked down through the thick iron bars, but the quaking man before him softened his malleable heart. Cian was not a man of spite or revenge. Any attempt to hold these feelings twisted his stomach, and he would not taint his values so late in his life.

  Cian retrieved the charcoal himself; there was a small pile kept in a metal container in his room high in the castle. Not everyone serving the lord Daithi kept chambers within the castle walls, but Cian had watched Gildaun grow. Seeing the sun’s orange rays kiss the humid air every morning felt like a reward for his and everyone else’s hard work. He ruminated on those thoughts as he fetched the prisoner’s request; thoughts of the hard workers that Gildaun would mourn. Fifty souls, lost.

  A single lump of charcoal clicked to the floor outside Ayube’s cell. Without thought, he quickly snatched it and clasped it firm in his hands. He held it almost as if he were praying. His breath was sharp and deep, his eyes closed. For a moment there was nothing, and for a moment longer, nothing still. Cian scrunched his face, about to take leave once again until he finally saw it.

  It was subtle at first, but soon light seeped between Ayube’s fingers like a hand over a white flame. With each deep breath, the charcoal grew brighter, its dusty, matte blackness paling into an ashen white.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The charcoal clicked a higher pitch as Ayube placed it on the ground outside his cell, as if it were lighter. Cian crouched, ignoring the pain in his ageing knees. The charcoal’s glow was bright; not strong like the sun’s, but soft like the moon’s. Cian looked away in an attempt to stave the urge to touch it, but before he could even know it, the seemingly living material was balanced delicately between his fingertips.

  There, in a damp dungeon at the furthest reaches of the High Kingdom, Cian held the legendary element with a simple name.

  “Whitestone,” he marvelled.

  Ayube dropped to his backside, exhaustion and relief washing over him all the same. Without knowing it, Cian was one of the richest men in the world, even if only for a moment.

  “We call it, ‘Gamohtuug.’ It means ‘a stone which has been set alight.’ It is forbidden in my country.” Ayube’s accent was thick, but his Clisten was perfect in its diction and grammar; years of study had seen to it. Speaking, however, was something he’d only practised in the most recent weeks. It was pointy and forced his mouth into strange shapes. It seemed to change vastly between small regions of Clistetír as well, testing the limits of his listening skills.

  “Illegal, you say? Now why would you go making something so grand, illegal?” asked Cian, still infatuated with the shining stone.

  “It is magic,” said Ayube, “and magic kills people.”

  Cian’s expression turned. Thoughts of the bloody village returning to him. His fascination with the whitestone vanished—it might as well have been any other lump of charcoal.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, lad,” said Cian, his hip cracked as he stood once again. “You killed people. And now you owe me an explanation.”

  Fiamór was the furthest of Gildaun’s hamlets, roughly a three-hour walk. Worne’s cumbersome frame was not well suited for long distances, however, and thus he chose to ride. He found its location easily using Madwen’s suggestion: Take your anger out on some sorry city guard if you must. His horse stamped in place with a tug of the reins. Worne dismounted, leaving the creature untied; the mare wouldn’t go far in this now-peaceful place.

  Emerging from the forest’s edge, the mark left by Daithi’s men on the land in and around the hamlet was obvious. The ground had been thoroughly trampled and the bodies cleared, mostly. Some scraps of hair, flesh, and bone still corrupted the otherwise serene landscape.

  Worne started toward the nearest home but stopped in place, remembering the words of the omeness and the added difficulty he had created for them both through his own inaction. The grass, he thought. There was something peculiar about how it lay. Dropping to one knee, Worne roughly combed the grass with his thick fingers. Strange, he noted. It had been packed down tight, but to one side only.

  It was almost amusing. Such an obscure phenomenon felt like just the thing an omeness would care deeply about, or at least, something that Madwen would. But such observations felt pointless; why waste time hunting shadows and mysteries when a simple truth was often in plain sight? Madwen, however, worked in subtleties—in fact, she thrived in them. And though Worne saw little value in it, he had seen her succeed in places where he would have resorted to simple violence. If this strategy had worked for Madwen, so too could it work for him.

  Worne stood, straight-backed, following the sheen of the grass as it curved around the mix of dwellings and functional buildings. He followed the unnatural curve around the entire village, meeting back at his place of origin. The grass had been flattened pointing outward in a circle—as clean of one as he’d ever seen—with a sudden stop at the forest’s edge. What then lay at the centre, he wondered.

  The first building on his path inward was much like the others. It had been split in two: one room for cooking, eating, and working, and the other room for living, leisure, and rest. Like any building he’d seen in Gildaun, it was well constructed with both form and functionality in mind. This home had children, perhaps quite a few. Piles of small clothes and shoes were sprinkled about both rooms, as well as a dozen homemade dolls, each with an almost nonsensical, childish design. Something about the dolls called to him, however, so Worne leaned over and picked one up, feeling about and pressing it roughly in his hand.

  “Straw, wicker, and cloth,” he observed. Just like home, something in his mind told him.

  Breathing deep, Worne could still smell the blood-iron that lingered in the air like petrichor after a storm.

  The other nine dwellings that formed Fiamór told a similar tragedy, though each uniquely macabre. Some homes stood nearly empty, with barely a spot of blood or torment to be seen, whereas others were perhaps better described as paintings—or grotesque imitations of ones.

  Every home had been built in relatively close proximity to one another. Why did that speak to him? Why did he know that such obvious codependency was more frequently seen in communities that valued honour and warriors? No matter how hard Worne forced himself to remember, the something inside of him that told him of his past could not give him an answer. Worne honed his focus. Now was not the time for vague memories.

  Each large dwelling had been built of the same pale concrete as was used in Gildaun, though Fiamór maintained the traditional thatched roofing seen across most of the kingdom. Some of the buildings appeared to serve other purposes, however: a fursman’s workshop, a communal storehouse, and a granary. But the most prominent structure of them all was a long, L-shaped alehouse with rectangular wooden tables and benches both indoors and out.

  This is where it happened, he decided.

  The alehouse had seen the brunt of the carnage. Crimson coated the ground, the tables, the benches, the walls. Flesh flies buzzed loud, laying their eggs and feasting on the morsels of flesh strewn about. Plates and tankards still lay scattered across the tables, food still rotting and staling. A mess such as this was clearly too much for Daithi’s frail guard to address. In all likelihood, they would await the rain and rodents to dispose of the gore.

  Weak men, he thought. Men who hadn’t seen combat, men who hadn’t seen war like this were—no—this was no time for vague memories. Though it did call into question how the small, remorseful, dark-skinned man achieved such a feat.

  Worne cleared his mind and approached one of the bodies, if they could be called that. The corpse shared more resemblance with… Worne struggled to think of anything that could be said to resemble the ball of meat before him—and it was a ball of meat. It was as if someone had taken the individual components of a human and packed them together as efficiently as possible.

  The amount of “material” seemed small. A child perhaps? Sticking out of the ball on the opposite side was a femur, full in size. This was an adult after all. Little more could be said, however. It was like looking through the ashes of a library and trying to discern the contends of each book.

  Worne turned his attention to the ground, crouching, testing his perception once more. Long marks had been scratched into the dirt. Claw marks from an animal—no, these were made by human hands. In an act of pure desperation, someone had dug their nails into the dirt, not to hold themselves in place, but to crawl forward. These were not the only ones.

  Placed centrally next to the L-shaped building was a stone well. More marks scored the earth, pointing directly toward it. If the centre of the hamlet had grass, Worne had no doubt it too would point the same direction in kind. As he drew closer, the disturbances grew larger, more pronounced. He could make out divots in the dirt where someone had dug in their foot, like a foothold in a cliff-side. An axe lay on its side, the blade covered in grime, the ground next to it chipped in the same shape. The blood seemed more congealed the closer Worne approached the well until suddenly—nothing.

  Like a bloody battlefield around a walled city, at the centre of everything: the circle of grass, the pieces of meat, the pools of blood, the human claw marks; the well sat undisturbed, clean. Except—

  Worne’s horse huffed and whinnied outside the hamlet. It came trotting toward him but veered quickly at the scent of death, coming to rest nearby. Greycrows cawed and scattered amidst the treetops. A familiar breeze caressed Worne’s face, bringing about a tingling chill. Deep in the corners of Worne’s mind, something again reached out for him; a memory begging to be recalled, like an itch on a severed limb. Worne was being watched—studied.

  His heartbeat still calm but ready to pump, Worne turned his attention back to the well. Something had embedded itself under a layer of dust. He at first struggled to free it from the ground, it was small and exceptionally smooth, once in his palm, however, he noted its abnormal density. Worne held it close to his face, the sun’s unobscured light bouncing in an uncanny nature. He’d seen this colour before; held this material before.

  Straw, wicker, and cloth.

  This was it. The pieces had fallen in place. All the signs were there. Worne had already suspected it, but this was the proof he needed.

  This was the power of dark magic, powerful magic, familiar magic. Omen magic.

  Cian’s breathing was deep, calm. In all his years, crime was seldom an obstacle he needed to face, and yet there he stood, listening to a man recite the cruellest, most heinous crime he could possibly imagine. It was still day outside the castle—the birds still chirped, the breeze still blew. Even in the dungeon, he could feel it all. But it all felt grey.

  “I never meant for it to happen—I swear it—but it happened all the same. As it always has. As I fear it always will. Now, when I feel I am in the place I need to be, I will be sentenced to death. A part of me thinks this may be for the best. I have caused too much pain. Too much suffering.”

  Cian turned to his left, slowly, his short cape barely swaying.

  “Folk are surprised to hear that Lord Daithi and I don’t agree on much,” said Cian. “He’s a fair man, I’ve always thought so, but sometimes I fear he puts the needs of the many too far above the needs of the few. It pains me to say it, lad, but I’m afraid that in this case he’s right to do so. We can’t have someone like you around.”

  Ayube listened helplessly as the heavy latch of the dungeon door locked behind Cian. The next time I see that man, he thought, I will be dead. He expected to hear the voices again, to see the living nightmares behind his eyelids. Instead, saltless tears streamed freely down his face. He was going to die.