The Demon of Red Gate

Sweat covers the body of the man standing in the predawn light. His skin is rough, cracked and leathered under countless sun burnt days of labor. He is not a handsome man, and his immense frame is not attractive, muscles show through his hard belly like potatoes in a sack. He strains under the weight of his burdens. He continues.

Before his ascension, the man here was no one. A farmhand. A porter. A builder. He came to the town of Red Gate in a caravan, with no money and no friends. He looked for work by day and tried to find food by night. He slept in the back of an empty stable. He spent a long summer with only hunger as a friend and only solitude as a lover. He does the work of two men in the morning,and two men in the afternoon.

The boulder, gray-purple in the early morning haze, has begun to drip condensation onto the man's head." You're going to fail here. And then I will kill you if the weight of the stone does not spare me the task" says the voice. It is an old voice. A voice that has met gods and taken lives. A voice that raised grandchildren, and a voice that has conquered lands. "You are nothing to me" it adds. The voice uses a flat tone, like a gardener looking at a weed.

Before he was Chosen, before he became the Will of the Heavens on Earth, the man left the fields to train as an apothecary's apprentice. The man could not read, nor was he clever or learned- but he was attentive and thorough. Where others would use intuition, the man used diligence. He advanced in his craft like a ploughman through a rocky field: slowly, inevitably, and with much strain. There were no breakthroughs, and no setbacks. The druggist would have preferred a clever student, but he sensed goodness in the large man. Certainly, the druggist's daughter was at ease with him,but no prospect of marriage was ever discussed. The large man treated her like he would treat a young animal- with a certain gentle kindness, but without expectations. He never looked at her unless talking, and he seldom talked. This changed on the night of the Summer Moon Ceremony.

The man's muscles have moved beyond screaming. They had already passed strength and weariness, moved through pain into agony before reaching the ache that only the desperate know. His will alone held his body together. The boulder sits on his shoulders. He can feel the weight of it on his neck. The sweat moves down to the tip of his nose as it drips. Watching it hit the ground has been his only distraction throughout the long night. "She would have lived. Your interference caused her early death. Her life was nothing, but you were too weak of mind to know even that".

Summer Moon Ceremony was a long and beautiful tradition in Red Gate. Once a year the full moon aligned with the mountain, and someone lost to ages had built a simple but beautiful torii to frame them both as though the sky were a painting. Each year many rich and powerful magistrates came from the Capital for a summer party, and there was much excitement. The man did not go. The daughter did. And she did not return after the ceremony. The druggist said "please go into town and look for her" because he had a father's worry but a weak body. His worries were well founded-the daughter lay in a ditch, beaten, her clothing ripped, and her hair cut short haphazardly in large patches. She was crying. "Please tell no one of my shame" she said to the man "please do not, for my sake and the sake of my father". The man was said nothing, but put his coat around her and carried her home. When she slept at last, he stepped out into the night. There would only be an hour until dawn, and he had much to do.

"Destroyed Red Gate. Ruined a landmark. Made mockery of the Lineage of Dragons. If you were not so ugly I would kill you myself, but I'm afraid your bad looks will infect me". The insults continued. The degradation. The interrogation. The boulder remained on his back. The manacles dig into his stretched out arms. An iron rod is fastened to his knees. "You aren't a man. You look like an ox. Are you an ox? That would explain the smell".