Burning Embers

Prologue

"Is there anything on your belt for a fire?" the boy had called out, blowing a warmth into his hands. It was cold beyond the hills—colder than that of Blackwater—and there was nothing but desolation in sight beyond the frozen lakes.

Giddy, the eunuch that Rhodes told the boy to venture with, was a stern old-man. There was time to time that Rinton thought Giddy would slice his throat upon the damp snow on which they walked. 

"Warm enough as it is. There's nothing to light a fire beyond here. We're past the map's telling," the old man had said, his left-hand scratching upon his right as he drank his ale. "If you want to warm yourself then tell yourself a story or sing a song."

Ever since the day he was born, Rinton had known of neither. He was sent to be in desolation since he was a baby. He wasn't the first boy to part from innocence; the world was full of drunks and fiends, those who kill for their liking. He'd lived with many of those men. "I never knew any stories or ballads...you're the one always telling them. Don't you have anything?" he asked.

The moon shimmered a disturbing black. They were in the snow, a growing blizzard amongst the woods just a hundred-miles out from the last of the discovered realms, and they were to find if any men still lived about in the hills, if Little Ruther had lived. The stories of the dead came by the Modusk, and so had the tales of the beasts that lurked amongst the nessentaurs. Everything beyond the hills was threatening; the old that was natural would bite, and they would come along with the likes of Peter Thomas when he would rise again. Although, it wasn't a man that Rinton feared; it was the beyond which froze him.

"All my stories end in death," Giddy had said. It was true, when he spoke or sang, he told of the tragedies around the world or the plagues of the past. He would speak of the crizarts: the ones of the cycles who held every gift there was. He would speak of the whores he would bed with before his cock was cut from him and he would cry upon the brothers he had lost from protecting the worlds of beasts. With the Blackwater soldiers fighting in Brandon's Rebellion, all he seemed to speak of were the Modusk; those that were hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles north, out of sight to rise to power once more. With the tales of the dead and the beasts and monsters that lurked—the stories told from the three men of Blackwater who returned from their journey to exile the thousands of Modusk who were led by a hundred soldiers—there was a constant fear up the spike. They were to kill the Modusk after their reign with the sixth crizart, Peter Thomas, who could not be killed, only imprisoned. Nobody knew where Peter Thomas had gone, though Rinton believed the Ryders had an involvement with it. He believed that it seemed a more-fitting resolve to let the cult of the Modusk suffer in the unknown, the cold.

When Rinton heard the word death, he felt the snow fall upon his hand which rested on his sword in the dark. A sword gifted to him by Robert Shaw, the young boy of Blackwater. He'd felt as if something were coming to them; there was a growl in the forest that sounded of someone struggling for breath and hadn't eaten in some time—Giddy's old ears couldn't comprehend it—and so Rinton thought of ghouls. There were always the dead in tales, especially when the velvet lady would come into his dreams, "Speak of the dead. Did you hear that? I enjoy the darkness, Giddy, but we have weeks of travel ahead and we are no calvorters! We're here to find the dark, are we not? I don't believe that even the Worrens have ventured this far, why would Little Ruther tackle to the caves?"

Another growl came, and with it were footsteps. Rinton arose in worry, taking his sword, but Giddy had sat with a blank stare, "Sit down, fool. The monsters are of the North. We aren't far enough to have to draw our swords."

Rinton sat down reluctantly, keeping a hand on his sword, quivering.

Giddy laughed genuinely, looking at the boy as if he were reckless, yet he felt sympathetic as he drank his ale, "If a story will warm you then I guess I will tell it," Giddy drank the rest of his ale and began fondling with his knife. "In the dark days, the Ages of the First Crizarts, the world was one. These ghouls that you fancy were real...all of the tales were not fallacies like they say; they were of the cold dirt, more natural than you and me. The first men would hold their kingdoms above all, in the high mountains without discovery. They would face the likes of beasts. Serpents the size of the trees of Ravenoak, giants twice the height of towers—ready to eat the minds of men, nymphs—naked as the whores of the brothels—that would bring men to boys before they drowned in the cold, and the dead who walked with them. The leviathans of the sea and the killers among men all ruled, having the Ages of Crizarts without code made the telluxed objects, the ones from the brothers and sisters that had gone to the white, the only way to survive. The first crizart had come of grey eyes, and then, there came the second—"

There was a sudden crunch in the snow of the forest that sent a tingling shriek of pain up Rinton's spine, and with it had come growls. He could only think of the dead...never had he thought of Little Ruther since the beginning of the journey. All he wanted was to be home, in his cot, where all he had to worry about was whether or not King Anir would be slain by a Greystone or his brother for wanting to marry the Laten bitch. He thought of the king when he grabbed his sword; was he fighting for Anir or was it for the gods? Kings seemed to change so quickly in the time of poisonous vapors.

"Did you not hear that, Old Man?" Rinton asked. His sword shined from the reflection of the moon, and he felt authority at the end of his blade as he heard the growls: surely he could kill anything in his path, "You speak of beasts! How far north could they wander?"

He'd seen a glimmer of grey and yellow eyes beyond the trees. When one had opened, so too had a spectacle of dozens. They poked with shadowing bodies that walked, dragging their feet with a heaviness that did not whisper, but screamed, for a hunger. Some were short, walking in a sort of trot; the nessentaurs with yellow and grey eyes, Rinton had thought. He heard one growl turn into a scream, roaring thunderously so that the crows above would fly from their trees and into the dark night where the mountains were wandering alone with the vileness of men and the monsters alike. Rinton wanted to scream, but he couldn't. The grey eyes that glowed in the night began to walk to him, and one had come with a howl.

Giddy took his bow and shot an arrow, hitting one right between its glowing eyes. When he turned to Rinton, it was as if the boy couldn't hear; all the stories he heard were true, even the words he had heard of the foreign boy to end all things of the natural, James Ryder. When he had finally understood that they were to die, he could hear Giddy scream, "Fight you coward! Take your sword and fight!"

He took his sword and whimpered. As the grey eyes pulled closer and closer, uncomfortably running to them in snarling shrieks to that of monsters; he had only quivered his sword as the old man attempted to shoot the beasts in the dark. Soon enough the prowling animals had come running, dripping blood from their teeth; he knew them as dead, yet some still walked the very behind, their hearts still beating a cold whisper.

The dead had choked upon their blood, their flesh crawling into their faces. Their eyes turned grey, seemingly to nothing, as their sharp teeth and ripped limbs took down Giddy, the once mercenary who was said to kill any man. Blood poured out of the old man's skin as they ripped him flesh from flesh under the pale moon that casted with the stars. Rinton found one peer up to him, and he knew that he couldn't use his sword against him...a little boy who wore a coat of black. Little Ruther, a dead man. Rinton watched, with his thin, darkening hair, and crooked nose, to see that it was the boy he once knew as a friend. Little Ruther took Rinton, spitting blood into his eyes, and began to chew at his chest.

When Rinton looked up, in his last moments, he had seen the grey eyes that walked slowly in the distance as men of the black and one of the white. He'd known the men, all along, as those he was told of in stories. The men of grey eyes, those who'd been cast as evil, lurking for their survival. The man of white and his hooded men, all the thousands that walked with blood, had staggered in the snow. It was the Modusk that had come, seeking the revival of the lost.

Rinton's last thought was of Peter Thomas. He thought of pain as Little Ruther chewed upon his arm: the pain given by Peter. Where the watchers would lurk, he wished to see James Ryder...that was always the story that made him forget of the dead.

The boy was soon to come.