C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 173 - The Last Night
🕑 Added 2025-05-31 18:02:01 +0000 UTCFrom atop the mound that looked down upon the column, Dovik couldn’t help but sigh. Once again, he was leaving Danfalla in the company of adventurers, rough people eager to find some things to kill so that they could make some better pay. They would be sitting around fires this very evening, talking to one another about what they will do once the money comes in: settle down in some backwood, spend a year in a tavern drinking until they black out each night, apply to a university to try and prepare themselves for the next rank.
All of the hopes and dreams shared were utter horseshit, especially the ones speaking of potential university scholarship; achieving the third rank was a whisper of a dream for almost anyone. Those who started the attempt often gave up before they made it halfway through. That was the sensible thing to do after all; living on the edge of a knife, risking your life and soul day in and day out just to claw a bit closer to that impossible destination isn’t something that the intelligent often do. If any survived the operation long enough to get their payout, they would likely blow the coin in less than two months, just to find themselves on the road once again, looking for the next payout. That is the life of an adventurer.
Dovik had romanticized it before, but now he realizes just how much dirt, terror, and tedium are involved. Not that he could stop; that was never an option. That simple fact makes suffering the campfire stories all the harder. Today, he is just glad that what remained of the 4th had been given mounts to make their way toward Black Rock with. Marching across the landscape, limiting himself to not outpace the pack, was torture.
The line slowly winding around the hill is smaller than the first time they left. Of the five armies, the 4th so far has suffered the greatest casualties. A hand squeezing his own pulls his attention away from the army setting out, over to the concerned face of Jess, looking up at him.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
Dovik pulls on a smile, though he can’t find the energy to make it convincing. “Just in a sour mood. The last time we set out from Danfalla, there were so many more of us.”
“Now, it’s just us two,” she says.
The comment interrupts his thoughts. He hadn’t meant to bring up what happened to Charlene, of Jor’Mari leaving them to pursue his crusade against who he thought had killed her. Gods, he wanted to tell the man what Illigar had revealed to him, but he had been sworn to secrecy. The worst thing was, he didn’t think that it would change Jor’s mind. If Dovik put himself in his friend’s boots, he didn’t think that words would stop him either. Once Jor caught the woman he was after, once he had calmed down a bit, then they could talk.
“And what are you thinking about now?” Jess asks.
“Jor,” he says. “It feels wrong to leave him behind.”
“He has his own path to take,” Jess says. “It will be safer than our own.” She pauses, studying his face for a moment. His eyes may be able to pierce past the body of an individual to spy on their very essence, but he thinks now that she sees more than he could. “You are keeping something from me.”
The accusation makes him turn away. Dovik tries to stare down at the moving line of people, but he can’t focus on the sight. “Yes,” he says.
“Why?” she asks. There is no accusation in her voice. Her words are soft, almost like she is afraid to hurt him when he knows that it should be the other way around.
“I’ve been asked to keep a secret,” he says.
Jess nods, her gaze turning down toward the army. “Isva cara nes,” she says.
“Meaning?”
“If I should know, I trust you to tell me,” Jess says. She leads her horse around by the reins, moving it slightly away from him before clambering up. Looking down on him, she says, “It doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed, though.”
Somehow, it is the steadiness in her tone that turns the smile on Dovik’s face genuine. He climbs onto his horse. “I will have to figure out a way to make it up to you.”
“You haven’t failed in that regard, yet.” She leans out of her saddle, planting a playful kiss on his cheek as he leads his horse past.
The two don’t even make it down from the hill before they are intercepted by another ride, a burly man covered in furs known as Richard of Keln, one of Illigar’s lieutenants. “Dovik, Jess, the boss wants you on the right flank. Attach yourself to the fourth battalion.”
Jess raises her eyebrows at that. Dovik can’t help but look at her, admiring the way she has taken to copying different expressions their friends have after acquiring her new form a few months back. By now, her face was the most expressive of any of them, probably because she worked at it. He is distracted briefly by trying to imagine what it must be like to not have eyebrows one day, only to acquire them the next.
“We are using battalions now?” Jess asks.
“It isn’t many, just two or three squads put together. Have to call it something,” Richard says. “That is your place, best hop to it.”
Jess salutes the man far too stiffly, receiving a rather obscene hand gesture in return before Richard leads his mount away, he and Jess quietly chuckling to themselves.
“No use lingering,” Jess tells him, heeling her horse to take her down the slope.
“Only, I don’t think we should be going,” Dovik says to himself, looking up at the soft blue of the sky. The moon peeks out, a pale orb suspended above, so white it almost matches the passing clouds. It’s almost full now.
It is already starting, the tension, the little shake travelling up the spine that harbingers the big moment. Sigrid felt it, something she hadn’t felt for a long, long time–anxiety. It was good, emotion, any emotion. For five weeks, she held herself back, refused to purge her emotions, bottled them up, savored them from afar with a starving appetite, but tonight, she would finally allow herself to open that cabinet of delights. If she was being honest with herself, she already had that morning.
In the dim light of a flickering candle, she hums a song, its origins gone or perhaps non-existent. The soft melody of the lullaby fans the flame of some primal and kind spirit inside her as she dips the cloth once more into the water bowl before wringing it between her knuckles. The cloth is cold in her hand, droplets dripping slowly over her skin, sliding down her wrist to pool at the elbow. She continues to hum, softly running the wet rag across Dal’s face as he breathes heavily, using his labored breathing as a metronome for the lullaby.
To anyone else, the scrunched face of the boy, his eyes so sunken into his head that they look almost like dark voids, would be repulsive. Most of the time, Sigrid finds him so, but just now, as she cleans his face, gently takes the sweat and grime from his forehead, she can’t bring herself to do anything but admire the boy. The youngest of the coven, his unique gifts are such a burden. Perhaps, he was the most selfless of them all.
Is this what a mother feels when looking at her sick child, she wonders. Is that the emotion she sips upon now, a mother’s love? Sigrid supposes that she will never truly know, but here, in this small room in the attic of an abandoned mansion, she imagines that it must be.
“There, there,” she coos, slowly dabbing at the accumulated sick staining Dal’s tunic and thin chest. “You have done so good for us. We could do nothing without you. You are such a strong boy, so willing to endure for your family. Tomorrow, when the sun cracks across the horizon, you will be well. I will bring you to meet the new day, healthy and vibrant. Just hold out a little while longer. Just for tonight.”
When she rings the rag out once more, setting it to rest across his forehead in order to keep his fever down, he grabs her as she moves to stand. Strands of blonde hair wrap his fingers, the last remnants of what had been before a flowing mane on his head.
“Just…” he wheezes.
Sigrid waits, but no more words come. Carefully, she removes the fingers from her arm and sets his hand on his chest. “Just one more night, Dal. Just one more night.”
The door behind her cracks open, familiar footfalls following an unfamiliar gait entering behind her. “Kessa is anxious to leave,” Ferro says.
“That sounds like her,” Sigrid replies, turning to find the lanky man standing there near the door. A small smirk pushes at the edges of his lips as if he is thinking about a joke he once heard. “You seem in high spirits.”
“Can’t say that’s not the case,” he says. “Tonight is going to be something else. Have a good feelin’ about it.”
“Me too,” Sigrid says, standing and picking up a sack lying next to the bed. “You understand your job?”
“Not the why of it, just the what. Reckon I’ll keep leaving the why to you,” he says.
“That’s a good policy.” Sigrid reaches into the bag, retrieving a small stick wrapped tightly with a red ribbon. It snaps between her fingers with only the smallest application of force, the sound reverberating ominously through the room. Six seconds later, a shimmering wall of yellow light appears just five feet from the bed. A shape falls into the room, thudding to the floor. In the harsh light of the portal, the body of the lightly-armored man appears almost like a shadow. Tanalious follows on behind, walking through and looking around in the room, his eyes landing on Sigrid.
“Everything is prepared on this end,” he reports.
“Good.” She moves from the bed, lazily carrying the bag along with her. “Tan, would you be a dear and ask Iz to begin her attacks. After we leave here, Kessa shall start her role. Pick her up when she is through and show her around.”
“If that is what is required of me,” he says stiffly, looking at her. She holds his gaze, standing just a few inches in front of him, the shimmering light of the portal playing shadows across their features. Of course, he looks down, having to step away from her to find his boots and train his eyes on them. “Whatever is needed.”
Sigrid can’t help but pat his head, turning her eyes toward the portal. “Just one more night,” she tells him. “Then, we can rid ourselves of this place. The master has promised a nice holiday if we succeed.”
The man doesn’t give her a response, a bit disappointing. Before stepping through, she looks back at Ferro, finding him smirking, leaning back against the wall. “You’ve never had a holiday, have you?”
He shrugs, not answering. When her eyes meet his, she finds the gray orbs steady, unflinching. The emotionless depths of those dull eyes haven’t much changed over the last few days, but in some way they have grown deeper, hiding now darker things within their depths than they did before.
“The blood moon rises tonight,” she tells him. “Look for my signal, you’ll know it when you see it.”
Without waiting for a response, Sigrid steps through the wall of light. Now, it had truly begun.
There is something about the night that has always attracted Doper. Something about the stillness, when everyone else retreats to their beds, leaving the world to him more or less. Being on guard at night was not a difficult task to get assigned; others didn’t like it for whatever reason, complained that it interfered with their lives too much. When he heard their excuses, he couldn’t help but scoff inwardly.
Who needed more than a handful of people to keep track of, perhaps just having a good woman to keep your home was enough by itself. Not that he would know. He was plenty fine being on his own.
The courtyard outside the guild hall sits barren, though through the iron-wrought wall surrounding the property, he can see small tents and makeshift forts littering the street–beggars. They seemed to show up every day, more and more of them, pressing into Danfalla like the city had an infinite capacity. Doper loathed them as much as he pitied them. At the end of the day, they were simply people with nowhere better to go, but did they have to crowd his city, make getting to his post each evening take three times as long, make the cost of even the most basic of food five times as high in a matter of weeks? If he was being honest with himself, something he rarely did, he didn’t have an answer. His complaints, however, were as endless as the refugees seemed to think the supplies of Danfalla were.
Doper imagines for a moment what it must be like to have the morning shift of guarding the front of the hall, having to deal with the rabble when the gate is open. What a nightmare. When he signed up to join the duke’s men, when he went through those awful weeks of conditioning and training, Doper kept his eyes trained on his inevitable prize, a cushy job guarding a door, earning well over what even a skilled craftsman would.
That kept him going, that pushed him through, and at the end, he even learned a bit of magic. He was an elf, any of them could pull upon the convergence of leylines at the heart of the city to eek out a spark of the magic held within. Not that the demons he could summon were all that impressive, but he could still do it, the bare minimum requirement for joining the duke’s men.
A metallic creaking shakes him out of his thoughts. His eyes focus on the shifting shadows across the courtyard as the whine goes on, a slow crescendo of shrillness that dies away with a crash. Movement ahead in the dark.
Doper’s hand lands on the pommel of his sword, gloved fingers working over the steel as he narrows his gaze. Someone is there, moving in the gloom. Somehow, not even the light of the full moon overhead manages to illuminate them fully. The sound of his boot slapping against the top step echoes off the stone. He gulps down a breath, feeling sweat break out across his back. The shifting form in the dark only draws closer, its steps unhurried, drawing ever nearer.
His feet touch the bottom step before he realizes. There, on level with the one approaching, the moon’s glow seems to come out from behind the clouds, casting wan light down to bathe the courtyard. The stalking figure is revealed by the light to be a woman, shorter than average height, her features sunken in by obvious malnutrition, what he mistook as a billowing cloak, nothing more than a torn rag clinging to her.
Just a beggar gotten in past the gate, he thinks.
“Halt, miss. If you would,” Goper says, standing back to his full height, the tension in his body relaxing. “The guild hall is closed at this time.”
The woman doesn’t stop her slow walk, sunken eyes trained directly on him as she progresses.
“I need you to stop,” he says. Surely, she understands Castinian. Were there smaller human villages in the duchy that couldn’t speak the common tongue? He didn’t know, but it sounded like something that wouldn’t have surprised him. “There is a food shelter three blocks away. If you get in line now, you might be able to get…”
The words die on his lips as the woman vanishes. Pain shakes through him, his body jerking as it comes to realize something is very wrong. Goper turns his head to the right, finding an arm stuck into his side up to the elbow. The pain only grows worse, a burning sensation that rattles through his veins, fire heading toward the heart. He tries to scream, but the sound comes out distorted, like a man yelling through the clanging of pipes. The last thing he sees is the woman looking up at him, a terrible smile on her face. Then his eyes erupt into violet fire as all the mana in his body ignites.
He is dead before his body hits the ground, long dead before his corpse is hurled into the front gates of the adventurer’s hall to knock them open. A man few will miss, Goper Casan, is the first victim of the Night of the Blood Moon.
