Part 3
"What is this place?" Vin asked.
Daimon stopped petting the wolf and looked up, first at Vin and then to the trees beyond. His eyes narrowed and he frowned slightly before beaming a smile of self-satisfaction to his guests. The wolf's head jerked up and seconds later something big came crashing through the brambles. Vin and Chris drew their pistols and stood all in one movement, and began backing away, the guns pointed at whatever was coming through.
There was an explosion of sound, angry growling and violent curses, then the thick hedge burst open.
"Buck! What the hell are you doing here?" Chris exclaimed.
Buck looked up, surprised. "Looking for you two, that's what."
Ezra emerged from the bush brushing down the sleeves of his coat. "When you failed to return in suitable time, Mr. Wilmington insisted we send out a search party."
"What are you talking about? We've been gone less than a day..."
"It's been more than that, Chris," Nathan said coming to stand beside Standish. "You left early yesterday."
"Yeah, and now it's late today," JD added.
Josiah was the last one through. He stepped into the clearing with a nod to Chris and a glance at Vin. The tracker had turned back to stare at a man standing at the end of a broken stonewall. Josiah followed his gaze and met the amused eyes of the stranger. "Daimon," he nodded a wary greeting.
The rest of the seven turned to stare as well.
Daimon smiled widely and stretched his arms out in welcome.
"Welcome to the Keep."
The dark man's voice sounded like rainwater over loose gravel as he spoke the first words of his Telling. "The foundations of the Keep are set so deep they have become entwined forever with the earth's memory, her soul. They form the backbone of every legend ever told about the secret paths to the Underworld. They are the shivers on the skin at the onset of every nightmare, the nameless horror that lurks behind every smile and welcome. But no one living knows the truth and only those who carry the souls of a people eons buried beneath the stones will ever hear the Telling of the Keep."
Josiah Sanchez stared hard at the man. He could feel words trying to tumble out, questions that would not get answered because they would never be asked. Something inside him, a long closed door screeching on rusty hinges, began to stir. He had a terrible feeling that he really didn't want to hear what the man had to say, didn't want to know why a wild and rabid wolf lay calmly resting in the stranger's lap. In the recesses of his mind he heard wood creaking and cracking, moaning in protest as some great force ripped through it like a knife through butter. Josiah shook the image of Christ crying tears of blood from his mind and glanced back to Vin Tanner.
The tracker had yet to move. He didn't understand what was going on any more than the others. A sense of dread had been growing ever since he'd traded stares with the wolf in town, a tiny tendril of suspicion that he was being played with - strung along like a child's toy. He didn't like it. Around him, the other men were shifting positions and glancing at each other, some looked his way - he could feel their questions darting into him, as if he knew the answers to everything weird that happened. He ran his dry tongue over dry lips and contemplated shooting the man and the wolf and ending the impending nightmare before it could start.
Larabee noticed the look of recognition on Sanchez's face and the change in stance that plainly spoke of a fight in the offing. Chris's hand tightened around the grip of his pistol, Tanner looked like he was ready to shoot the next thing that moved. Larabee turned his head to the man and wolf. How the hell had the other men managed to catch up to them so fast without them knowing? And why the hell would they act as if Chris and Vin had been missing? Chris noticed for the first time how quickly night had fallen. It had been just past noon when they'd reached the thick hedge of brambles and that had only been a few minutes ago surely. Fifteen minutes, tops, Chris thought, mentally counting them down.
"Mister, you better get away from the wolf. It isn't safe," JD said, wondering why no one seemed concerned about the animal slobbering over the stranger's hand.
Daimon scratched the wolf's neck and chuckled. "The wolf and I are old friends, boy, and he is no more rabid than I."
JD shrank bank as a sudden vision of glistening teeth and yellow eyes assailed him and the stranger laughed again. "Sit down. The time of the Telling is upon us and all are assembled."
"Telling? As in ghost stories?" Ezra asked. "This is a rather elaborate set up for a few moldy old stories, isn't it?" The gambler glanced suspiciously at Chris and Vin, but both men looked too dangerous to be behind any practical jokes. Buck, his normally friendly face currently as hard as the stones at their feet, didn't appear to be in a humorous frame of mind either - that left only Nathan, Josiah and JD. JD had gone as white as a sheet, Nathan was standing poised for action - with, Ezra noticed with concern, a throwing knife held loosely in his hand - and Josiah seemed on the verge of wrestling every demon and ghost that might have the audacity to appear before him. Ezra gulped back a hard lump in his throat and wriggled his left arm - the sneak gun rig gave him comfort in a decidedly uncomfortable situation.
"Sit," the man repeated. "You are as safe here from that which haunts you as any place else you may wish to rest your bones."
The wolf whimpered and moaned. Its ears twitched and a shudder ran through its body. Daimon stopped his constant petting and reassuring of the beast to rest his hands lightly on his knees. "This place was once heavily wooded. The trees grew so high, their branches swayed amongst the clouds. The sun shone through the thick canopy of green where it could to leave a dappled pattern on the earth beneath. Gold and silver patterns of light lit the pathways, turned ordinary shades of brown to rich earthy tones and glittered in the dewdrops that collected on the pale green shafts of grass. Birds sang so loud and so clear their calls could be heard for many miles. Silence came only in the clear hours of the dawn and even then there was music to hear for those who knew how to listen. The people here lived their lives around the colours and music of the woods."
One by one, the men sat down on the stone blocks, mesmerized by a voice that brought back memories they didn't know they possessed.
"Villages were scattered throughout the woods protected by the seemingly endless tracts of trees. The people lived simply, but well, thanking that which gave them life and sustenance in every act they performed throughout their days and nights."
A cool breath of air entered the clearing and settled around the unmoving men. Breath turned frosty as soon as it left warm bodies, beads of sweat formed on pale brows and began to freeze. None of the men noticed a thing.
"But time moves in circles, rippling out from the Centre of all things like the ocean tides - never the same, always changing. The tides of time, like the ocean, are especially capricious during the Great Moons. It was at one such moon that a stranger came to the woods. He was as different to the people here as the sun was to the moon, as day to night, and he brought with him the scent of doom. The stranger stayed a single night and was not seen again, but seven days later an old woman - out gathering roots and berries - went missing. No trace of the woman was found though the people from her village and the next along searched most diligently. Her passing was mourned in the tradition of the people and her soul, in absentia, given passage to the next world. A week later, seven days to the minute that the old woman left this world, it happened again."
Nathan felt a stab of pain course through his body. His gut twisted into a tight knot, the muscles around it spasmed in sudden, gasping agony. He wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth clenching his teeth and fists against the need to cry out. Beside him, JD felt hot tears forming in his eyes, his hands opened and closed then began rubbing up and down his thighs. He felt lost. No, he thought. More like he'd lost something; left something behind somewhere. His eyes darted down to his hands. He'd forgotten to bring something with him, he was sure of it.
"A child, playing behind her family's hut near the middle of the village while her mother worked nearby, dropped her toy and giggled as it rolled against her mother's feet. The mother bent down to pick it up, an amused scolding on her lips, and stood to find the child vanished, her giggle still sounding in the mother's ears."
A sob rent the air and Buck slipped to his knees overtaken by millennia of grief. The stranger didn't spare him a glance as he stared directly into the eyes of the preacher. "Seven days after that, it was the mother that vanished. Seven days later, again, it was a youth, not long for manhood. He had just that day received his first gift from an interested girl - a handmade bracelet, which he wore proudly throughout the last hours of his life. Next a young man on the eve of his commitment to another and then a grandfather, moments before the birth of his first grandchild, vanished from the village and the surrounding woods as if they had never been."
Vin felt his hackles stand on end once again. His throat constricted as his eyes fell on the grinning wolf, its teeth so long and sharp. He absently lifted a hand to rub his throat and loosen his collar. Chris recognized the bereftment and emptiness as old friends. His hands quivered and he stared at them wondering when he'd put his gun back in its holster, when his hands had become so old and lined, when he would stop missing those he loved. Ezra sat staring into space, a grating jarring feeling he hadn't felt since his own youth was growing within him. He couldn't understand why the old bitterness should rear its head now.
"Six people in all, one every seven days leading up to the Great Moon. The shaman of the village pleaded day after day with her gods and spirits; the only answer she received was a vague image of a strange face surrounded by columns of blood-red granite. Seven days after the grandfather's disappearance the people collected in the village center - scared and worried that any one of them would be next. At dusk, with none yet missing, the shaman decided to follow the vision that had plagued her since the dawn and set out with only her staff and the clothes she wore. The people watched her leave, eyes wet and hearts heavy, understanding the sacrifice she made and who the seventh would be."
The wolf pulled back from the stranger's lap and stretched back on its hind legs, a low-pitched growl coming from deep in its throat before it stood up straight and shook itself from nose to tail. It reached up its snout in a submissive gesture to the man's face and whimpered, begging for a sign from its master. The man rubbed his cheek across the wolf's nose and lightly stroked its neck. A pale tongue flicked out to touch the man then the wolf drew back and disappeared into the shadows beneath the trees.
"The shaman was never seen again."+ + + + + + +
Red leaves littered the path the woman followed, her staff tapping out a repetitive beat on the hardened ground. The birds, for once, had fallen quiet. Scurrying animals could be heard but not seen. Bushes shook, tufts of tall grass parted, the scaly slithering of snakes, following, the woman suspected, whispered in the fading light. It was in the last of the light that the shaman discovered a place that screamed its wrongness to her so loud she wondered how she could not have discovered it before now. Walls of thick stone blocks had been built, emerging from the earth like a tree on its roots. Thick blocks that outlined the beginnings of a massive construction of a type unknown to the people of the woods. In other places, such constructions would later be called pyramids, ziggurats, great castles of magical properties and mysterious, dark stories of virgin sacrifices and heroic battles. The woman felt every one of her years suddenly crowding in on her as she shuffled her way around the stonework. The young growth of brambles scratched at her ankles, her blood pearled on green thorns and ran down tender stems. She didn't feel a thing.
The woman had known each of the missing persons as she knew everyone in her village. She'd helped bring the younger ones into the world; she'd assisted the older ones in times of personal crisis. She'd saved the mother during the birthing of her child, saved the child in the urgent days that followed. Now, both were gone. She'd advised the young man on his choice of mate, brought the grandchild into the world even though she'd felt the doom that would follow, comforted the parents of the missing youth - a popular boy with no future - she'd always wondered about that but reading futures was haphazard even with those who had talent in such areas. Her talents had lain elsewhere.
The shaman was brought from her reverie by a jolting pain in her ankle as her foot snagged on something hidden beneath the brambles and she fell in a graceless heap. She sat up, grimacing and automatically reaching for the ankle to check for damage and rub the pain away. The snag that had tripped her stuck out from the ground at an awkward angle. It was a bone, thin and jagged at the end, it showed out starkly in the dim background of the brambles and grass. Caught in the brass stems next to it was a narrow, beaded twine bracelet.+ + + + + + +
Josiah jumped up. "Stop! What are you doing?"
Nathan and Ezra were now both on the ground. Nathan was on his knees in agony, Ezra on all fours gasping for a breath that wouldn't come. As Josiah watched, the southerner rolled onto his back and grasped his left arm. If he could breathe he would be screaming. The other men seemed unaware of the situation. Vin was pulling frantically at his shirt collar, one arm raised to protect his throat from a horror only seen by him. JD was openly sobbing, rubbing his hands up and down his legs, pausing only to wring them together so hard the skin turned white and red, then returning them to his legs. Buck's face was closed, his eyes tightly shut, his lips pressed together between his teeth. His hands were on his head, fingers tangled in his wild hair. Chris Larabee sat so still, his face so pale he could have been carved from marble. His eyes were fixed on the dark storyteller.
The preacher stepped forward ready to throttle the stranger if that was what it would take to stop the torture of his friends, to stop them from dying - damned souls once again - but fell heavily, pain shooting up his leg. "Stop this!" he cried out. "Stop!!"+ + + + + + +
She recognized the bracelet, a childish thing, poorly made, and stretched out her arm to take it, depositing it in her satchel before turning to the gory sight that still awaited her. The bone was half buried in the ground and the woman was sweating by the time she'd wrestled it free. It was an arm bone - both ends jagged - shattered splinters littered the upturned earth, and she thought she could see a trace of more bones and pale cloth stained with dirt and blood. Tears flowed as she judged that the rest of the body must be buried beneath the walls.
The woman tried to stand, but the pain in her leg screamed its protest and she slumped back down to the ground. A deep laugh rolled out from the walls and she felt every hair on her body stand on end. She struggled to crawl away, but the thorny brambles caught in her clothes and cut her hands. The light was fading fast, the full moon not yet high enough to cut through the dimness beneath the trees. Shadows loomed and swayed, the sounds of the night joined with the laughter to form wails of pain and grief that took substance in the air and swirled about her in ghostly apparitions. The woman was terrified to the very core of her being. She screamed over and over again.
"Stop!! Why are you doing this? Murderer! M U R D E R E R!!!"+ + + + + + +
"They always ask that you know? Why? It was her fault from the start. It will always be her fault. If she was a better shaman, had stronger powers, she would have known what was coming, would have been prepared. But she didn't; she failed. She failed, and people died. She failed, and she died too. And so will you."
Josiah crawled at hunched on the ground. "They? You blame the woman for something she had no control over? Stop what you're doing. My friends have nothing to do with any of it."
Daimon cocked his head to the side listening for sounds in the trees and hearing only the soft scraping of leaves and branches, and the pained cries of the suffering men. "Yes, they do," he whispered, and Josiah felt his blood run cold. "And that's her fault too."+ + + + + + +
The figure that appeared at the top of the wall was a dark shadow of horror amongst all the others. Twin points of amber glowed from within it, and the laughter came again. The figure came closer until it stood directly above her. The amber lights staring down at her caught her in a trance of sheer fright, a wild animal shocked into complete stillness. The voice, when it came, was low and malevolent.
"Why do you look so shocked, woman? Am I not familiar to you? Are we not old friends?"
The woman shook her head numbly.
The figure squatted down and now she could see its face, a face that had haunted her since her childhood. The face of all her nightmares. The monster sneered, baring fangs that dripped with something dark and thick. A long pink tongue came out to lick away the oozing substance, running over teeth and coarse, fur-covered skin from one side of the horrible face to the other. Fetid breath billowed out as the monster chuckled and the woman thought that surely now she would die.
"Why?" she whispered.
The monster reached down and grabbed a handful of the woman's hair pulling her to her feet, and then up onto the wall beside him. He was taller than she, his chest massive, his arms that of a human man, his legs invisible in the darkness. "You didn't believe the visions I sent you. You thought they were mere dreams." The monster drew his lips back in a vicious grin. "I suspected as much when you didn't welcome me with open arms."
"What are you talking about? Why did you murder those people?"
The pink tongue came out again, this time to scrape along the woman's face. "I murder no one. I only take what is mine. I needed sacrifices to build my new home. It was your job to provide them, yet when I came to your village you didn't know me, you didn't have what I needed. I gave you seven sunrises, you gave me nothing."
The beast started walking along the wall, dragging the woman along with him, reefing her into the air wandhenever she stumbled or tried to escape. They stopped eventually at the base of a tall column. The woman felt certain dread as she glanced across to a parallel wall a second column. Between the two was a sunken pit, in its center a single white stone plinth.
"You've failed me terribly, shaman. The sacrifices should have been given freely, but I could wait no longer. Tonight the doorway opens and I am required to be ready."
The woman whimpered as the monster jumped to the ground, taking her with it, and strode toward the plinth. Above them the moon was rising, a silver glowing disk in the sky tracking a path across the Great Blackness of the night, as did its light across the earth. Soon its light would fall on the plinth. The monster lifted its head and howled.+ + + + + + +
Ezra lay still on the ground, one hand outstretched to Josiah, pleading in his last moments for help. Nathan had rolled face up to one of the blocks and lay nearly as still as the gambler, a low groaning the only sign the man was not yet dead. Chris had not moved a muscle the entire time and no clouds of cold breath formed on his lips. JD, his hands bloody and raw, was shivering, his lips blue, eyes glazed as frigid breath after frigid breath was forced through straining lungs. Buck's eyes were open now, wide open as he too struggled to breath. Only Vin seemed able to move. The tracker was standing facing Josiah, staring straight at him. Josiah could see that for a moment he was lucid before the nightmare that was tormenting him took hold once more. The expression in Vin's eyes changed from questioning to absolute terror in one fleeting moment as he suddenly began to back step away from Josiah, away from his circle of friends and toward the storyteller.
Josiah's voice was frozen in his throat. The storyteller was rising behind the terrified tracker, taller than he was before, wider - his arms moving up into the air to catch... Josiah felt a cold wind rush by him, saw the flicker of a shadow in the corner of his eye and then the wolf was past him and on Vin Tanner, growling and snarling, its jaws gnashing together as it lunged for the man's throat. Vin fell back under the onslaught. His wildly flapping arms were no protection from the wolf and its strong teeth fastened onto the exposed skin of his throat. He fell, helpless, into the arms of a monster.+ + + + + + +
The woman began to struggle, to kick and hit out at the monster that held her. It was to no avail. She was dragged to the plinth and thrown against it, the hard stone cracking two of her ribs and rendering her breathless. The moon's light crept along the walls and she watched, gasping and moaning, as the light revealed stone blocks awash with blood.
"Seven sunrises I waited - for nothing - and so I took that which was not given and when, after another seven sunrises I was still not given that which I needed, I took again and again. It needn't have been seven, it could have been only one, but you did not come freely..."
"Seven?" the woman found her voice with a harsh grating grunt of pain. "You took six lives because I didn't understand my dreams? Because I didn't know what they were?"
The moonlight was almost at their feet. The wailing of the murdered rose to fever pitch, their spirits called out to her for revenge.
"I need to enter the passages of the spirit world. This is the only night that I may enter and return unharmed. You are the only way to open the door. You are my key to eternal life and the power of the All. If you do not give then I will take!"
The woman stood; behind her she could hear a faint movement, a slight shifting of reality that she recognized from the few times she had entered the spirit world during a Dreaming. The door was opening.
"I'll give," she told him her voice low, almost seductive. Her hand slipped into her satchel.
The monster leered into her face sensing a trick, but seeing only tired, pain-filled eyes and lined lips. He lifted her and began to bend her backward over the stone plinth. His teeth glistened in the moonlight. The spirits of the six villagers gathered around the monster in a shimmering aura of hate.
"I'll give you eternal damnation in the pit of the Evil One's dogs! I'll curse you to Umbra, may you spend eternity in the shadow of the All and know only pain and hopelessness and grief with no uchati to weep for your soul!!"
The woman brought her hand free of the bag. In its grasp was the jagged bone. The moonlight flowed over them as she brought her hand back down and plunged the bone deep into the beast's throat. She pulled it free and stabbed again, not stopping until the monster lay at her feet, a huddled mess of blood and bone and torn flesh. Covered in blood, the woman dropped exhausted to her knees. "May the Hounds of Hel take you where they wish."+ + + + + + +
Josiah threw himself forward, his broad hands wrapping around the wolf's throat and crushing windpipe, larynx and oesophagus in his iron grip. The wolf squirmed, but would not loosen the hold it had on Vin's throat. Blood gushed out and Josiah could see the young man's eyes rolling back in his head as death took him. Josiah growled, fierce and unyielding and snapped the wolf's neck with his fingers. Vin dropped limp in the monster's arms and slipped to the ground as the life slipped from his body. Josiah roared, threw the dead body of the wolf aside and charged the storyteller, knocking him back and to the ground.
The hands that had just squeezed the life from the rabid wolf now attached themselves to the monster's neck. Josiah felt the man's smooth skin subtly change to rough fur, felt the muscles constricting, bunching up before the man-thing brought its own hands up between Josiah's arms and batted them away. It felt like twin tree trunks had fallen across his limbs and the preacher staggered from the force of the battering. The monster stood tall, towering over him and laughing to the full moon that glowered down upon them.
Its voice rang out and the trees shook with its power. "Every thousand years the Great Moon returns and so does the Guardian to tell the story and accept or refuse the continued existence of Mot in the Land of the Shades. The woman failed because in cursing Mot she also ensnared not only her own soul but also the souls of the other six innocents, and every thousand years they too return in search of release from their damnation. Every thousand years they return here, summoned by the Great Moon and the Guardian to break the curse that denies them passage to the Underworld and keeps them in Hel."
Josiah looked around him. They keep coming back? His friends appeared dead. Vacant staring eyes accused him of yet another failure. But it's not over yet. I'm still alive. He looked back at the monster - the form was shrinking back into the less intimidating figure of Daimon. The man was waiting for him to do something. What?
"How?" he asked. "How can I change things?"
"You must understand the failure. The woman died at the doorway to the Underworld, her body caught between her world and the next. She was not willing to step through, and unable to step back. All her life she gave of herself to others, but never completely, never out of the simple need to give wholly - to give just to give. This flaw in her soul at such a time stopped her from moving on and, in so doing, blocked the progress of those following her. She became an unmoving rock in the river of life." The man fell silent.
"This isn't fair, storyteller. We didn't know..." Josiah stopped. The woman hadn't known either. He had the feeling that the stranger had no interest in what he, Josiah, did and didn't know. It wasn't about knowledge. It was about something else. But what?
Josiah suddenly felt a lightening inside him, a secret door finally all the way open and showing him the answer. It was simple. So simple it was laughable. He stood up. Images of times spent with his friends laughing and sharing some inane joke, time spent just being without thought to the future or the past, and then time spent doing - helping, living, loving. His friends were dead, but they didn't have to be. Josiah was never more certain of anything else his entire life.
Amongst the thick trees of the wood stood the remains of two tall towers of granite. A carpet of moss and lichen hid the ancient bloodstains that speckled their surface. A twisting vine reached between the two like a spider's web. Josiah hardly saw Daimon as he stepped forward into a shimmering field that had grown between the two pillars. The sunken pit had long since filled with debris, the stone plinth had been broken and finally destroyed by time and the forces of power that collected in this one spot. White shards crunched underfoot as Josiah stood before the doorway.
"I accept my fate," he intoned. "I am ready."
The shimmering shrank back and then exploded into a dazzling blue light. Somewhere in time Josiah heard a deep voice respond. "Enter then, friend, and be welcome."+ + + + + + +
"I didn't know that was all I needed to do. Just give myself. Mot didn't play fair. I spent my entire life denying his existence. What else could I do but continue to deny when faced with his reality?"
"It's hard to play a game when no one tells you the rules. How many others have played this game and lost?"
"You're the seventh."
"What happens now?
"I have absolutely no idea."+ + + + + + +
Morning dawned bright and warm. The winds had dropped to a pleasant breeze and birds twittered to each other in the treetops. A soft nickering could be heard and the occasional snorting as horses tossed their heads and waited patiently for their riders to return filtered through the thick copse of trees to the clearing in its center. The bodies of the riders lay strewn about the clearing as if they'd suddenly grown tired and dropped to the ground to sleep where they lay. A colourful butterfly flitted down to rest on the upturned hand of one of the men. The tiny insect legs tickled the sensitive fingers and they flexed automatically. The butterfly took flight and darted away to the safety of a small pile of rubble. The fingers flexed again, the hand quivered and lifted, then dropped.
The peacefulness of the scene was rocked as Ezra Standish awoke and sat all in one disorientated movement. He yawned loudly, stretching his jaw and moaning as the stiffness of his body sent waves of complaint to his brain. His eyes blinked owlishly. He yawned again and then looked around confused and bewildered, coughing lightly as fresh air reached his aching lungs. The sound aroused JD, who lay half across a mound of broken stones. The young man sat as quickly as Ezra had, his eyes wide open, coughing for breath. A chain reaction had started and soon Nathan and Buck were also awake and just as confused as the others. Buck struggled to his feet and stiffly walked over to where Larabee sat slumped on the ground. The man did not look good and Buck felt a knot of concern forming in his gut.
"Chris?" Buck knelt down beside him and reached out to shake the man's shoulder. Chris's head flew back so fast Buck stumbled backward in surprise. The other man was gasping for air, his eyes wild and unseeing. Buck grabbed both shoulders and drew his friend into his arms. "Chris? Chris? It's okay. I have no idea what happened but we're okay. We..." He broke off when his eyes fell on a single booted foot protruding from a large pile of rocks. "Vin!"
Buck rushed over to the boot and started clearing away the debris that covered the tracker, a shivering Larabee working beside him, the others moving up as quickly as their tired bodies allowed. Vin was freed within minutes, but his face was ashen and his eyes stared blindly at nothing. Chris leaned forward and patted his face with trembling hands. Buck picked up the tracker's hands and began rubbing them. Nathan worked his way around and under Vin's head, lifting it gently and praying for a miracle. He thought he had one when Vin's eyes closed and opened, and a startled breath got the man breathing steadily. As life flooded back into his eyes, Vin looked at each of the faces in turn, then asked in a forced voice, "Where's Josiah?"
They found him an hour later - sitting and leaning back against the wall of a hidden cave. There was no evidence of how he'd gotten there; the bushes covering the mouth of the cave were thick and almost impenetrable. The only reason they'd bothered searching in that particular spot was due to the thin, dirty twine braid they'd found hanging from a branch.
The man sat as if he'd just taken a moment to rest. His hands were perched on his crossed legs, his eyes were closed - there was the trace of a smile on his lips. The sunshine pooled around his body keeping him warm, making it impossible to tell if the man lived or not.
"Is he... dead?" JD whispered.
"Let's find out," Nathan replied moving forward to squat beside the preacher and lay a tentative hand on his cheek. "Feels warm," Nathan said. He dropped his head down to the big man's chest and listened impatiently for a heartbeat, feeling his own heart skip a beat or two when no sound came - no heartbeat, no breathing. The healer was just about to give up when he felt a vague tremor in the body beneath him and then the satisfying sound of Josiah taking a deep breath. The breath was let out with a sigh and Josiah opened his eyes.
"Nathan?"
The other men let out a collectively withheld breath and laughed with relief. They'd all made it through the most horrifying night of their lives. Josiah was helped to his feet and offered water and some food to ease his rumbling stomach. The men joined him in the warm sun trying hard not to recall the dreams and memories from the night before. The occasional nervous glance darted into the trees, the odd silence fell as each man fought and vanquished the last traces of the Telling from their minds.
It was mid-afternoon when they finally made their way to the horses and began the long trek back to town.
JD turned in his saddle. Josiah had been exceptionally quiet since they'd found him and this made the young man intensely curious - about everything. "Josiah? Do you know what had happened last night? What it was supposed to mean?"
Josiah smiled, a fatherly grin, and stared up at the sky. JD followed the older man's gaze. Some sort of bird flew high above them, but he couldn't tell what it was. He dropped his eyes to see Josiah was now looking at him, his smile even wider than before.
"JD, son. I have absolutely no idea."
They left behind them a dusty clearing covered in the broken remains of an age-old curse and the gravel of the Keep. The body of the wolf lay where it had fallen. No scavenger would come to tear rotting meat from its bones, no grass or vines would grow to cover its shrunken carcass. Its bones would turn to dust; the dust would dissolve in wind and rain.
"Such is life," the dark man said, his voice clear and strong in the lifting breezes. He turned his back on the dead wolf and the clearing, walked away from the woods that once stretched as far as the eye could see. There were other doors to open and close, other stories to tell. He skipped along the path, kicking out at an errant stone, and began whistling.
"Such is life," he repeated to no one in particular, "and such is death."
The End
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