Halek's Story - Mirror Image

Alternate title: A Glass, and Not My Brother

[CONTENT WARNING: horror, violence, descriptions of injuries, cults, mentions of cannibalism, adult language, depressive/self-destructive thoughts, discussions of death. For real, this is fairly to extremely dark: it is a horror story! I don't know why I can't write think-piece stories with these characters before ramping up to maximum angst/things just going off the rails. Sorry!]

Also, isn't it a coincidence that the same month the new Halek card is done, this story also debuts... 👀 Month of Halek!

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Halek and Naolin are fifteen when they’re separated from each other for the first time.

Fifteen years old, nearly adults by the Hunter standard, and they have never been apart: Halek does not know the word “codependent” yet, but he will use it liberally in a few years to describe this time. Since they were children, he and Naolin have slept in the same room, shared the same meals, trained and fought and laughed in the same courtyards and libraries and hunting grounds throughout Uth Baryd. The elders call them Iza-na, soul-twins, two halves of one inseparable whole. Narthax and Tapyt were said to be this, before the great Rift came between them. Halek finds great irony in the comparison. Not only are they likened to the two greatest gods in the world—but only one was the champion of light, guardian of the Hunters and savior of all. The other tore himself from his brother and took a long fall into total darkness.

His morbid sense of humor irritates Naolin. They are both jittery and both trying hard to mask it: Naolin by being crisp and businesslike, Halek by making very dark jokes. They stand in front of their shared mirror: Naolin tries, hopelessly, to flatten his hair, while Halek somehow twists his own collar and makes himself look even more disheveled.

Outside, the sky is the color of milk and cream. There is a murmur rising up from the streets of the city, from the very turrets themselves. Nervous parents and anxious siblings confer with each other, pray to the gods for the safe return of their friends, sons, brothers, daughters.

Today is Airatr. The time of Reckoning.

In a few hours, the young Hunters of the city will depart from the gates and set off on their own season-long journeys, cast out for the winter to live, hunt, and survive on their own for the first time in their lives. They will climb the mountains of the Reach; they will rest in the high trees of the Thoth, the ancient forest; many will creep down the grey steppes into the Waste or the Realm-of-Ghosts, determined to find and kill their own demon. They will use their own clan binding ritual and preserve its head. Then they will make the long journey back home with their trophy, their prize—the final proof of their adulthood. The kill will be their indisputable sign that they deserve to become, at last, a certified exorcist worthy of respect among their people.

Then they will receive their matha, their demon-hunting mark, and join the ranks of the White Order.

But they have to survive it all first.

Uth Baryd has been delirious in celebration up until today. For a week, the streets have overflowed with wine, music, and games. Halek asked their father once why the celebration wasn’t later, until after the Airatr.

“Why don’t we actually celebrate when the initiates come home?” he asked.

Yerom replied: “That time is reserved for mourning the ones who didn’t.”

It is not the idea of killing his own demon that makes Halek nervous. He has trained for four years for this moment; he has skewered Imps with his hraqa, scented and killed even Tainted creatures. Granted, all of that was under the careful watch of his master… but it’s not the idea of fighting Endarkened that unnerves him. Hunter children are sung lullabies of such glory.

No, it’s not the demons. It’s Naolin. The idea of not having his twin to watch his back disarms Halek, disorientates him. And who will defend Naolin? Halek’s hraqa turned out to be a spear, a great whopper of a thing—but Naolin’s weapon is only a little knife. To kill an Endarkened, he’ll have to get up close and personal with it—and how will he defend himself if another is lured by the bloodshed? What if it attacks him from behind? The Endarkened have no mercy. Brotherhood and family mean nothing to them. Halek has witnessed their brutality firsthand… but at least he was always with his brother, whenever he was forced to watch it.

Naolin catches his eyes in the mirror. “I will try,” he says after a moment, his voice very even in the way that shows that he’s nervous; “I will try not to show you up, brother. I heard that Father is making bets with the other council-members. A Revenant apiece, for both of us.”

Halek tries to smile. Only one or two Hunters—the most honed fighters—manage to bring home a Revenant head by themselves every year. For a Cacophant—the greatest of all demons, besides the Archdemon—it’s only been done twice in the history of the Reach. He should at least be glad his father didn’t bet for those.

But then he remembers the other promise Yerom made, about the Airatr and what will come after, and his smile fails. Naolin sees the faltering and says, with a hint of anxiousness: “It won’t be all that bad.”

Halek’s reflection in the mirror has gone grim. Oh, it will.

Because Yerom has announced that should both of his sons return from their Airatr safely, he will retire immediately and pass the rule of the Reach over onto Halek, making him sol. Fulfilling the next step of the prophecy that has defined all of their lives for the last fifteen years.

He wants to laugh, but his face feels too heavy for it. In other cultures—in other tribes—giving leadership over to a fifteen-year-old would be considered insanity. Almost certain disaster.

But the Hunters do not have long to live, and Yerom, at forty, is fast approaching the end to his natural life. Halek does not necessarily blame his father for wanting to spend his last ten years or so in peace: the only rest he’ll have known since he assumed his own reign at fifteen. Yerom spent all those years since birth in preparation to become sol; then he married their mother at twenty, sired the twins at twenty-five—and now, here are they are, with his father staring at the end of his life the way you might stare at the end of a tunnel growing bigger and bigger with each step you take in the dark. No, he does not blame Yerom for wanting to find quiet while he still can.

But it is a grim reflection of the path his own life will take, and he is trying not to think too much about it.

“Maybe,” Halek says, his lips twitching, “maybe it would better to let the Revenant take me, if I even find one. Anything would be better than coming back and made sol. Death seems like a neat escape, right at this very moment.”

Naolin turns and punches him so hard he sees stars.

#

Three weeks later, Halek’s swollen eye is just beginning to fade. He is almost sad about it: it was a good keepsake, a good reminder of his “soul-twin.” Their actual goodbyes at Uth Baryd’s gates had been so formal, so sanitized; watched by all of the expectant masses seeing off the young Hunters, they’d only managed a clinical nod before they’d taken off in separate directions. The rules of Airatr dictate that these trials must be faced alone. If one Hunter comes across another in the wilds, he must leave the vicinity immediately, without speaking or interacting with the other initiate.

Even if it’s his own brother.

Halek laughs to think of how his father’s eyes had bugged when he’d seen Halek show up at the gates, eye blackened and collar askew. Naolin had adopted his “shamed face,” the one full of cultural guilt and self-flagellating. He’d hung his head when Halek had said, for all to hear: “I tripped and hit my face on the corner of the wall.”

He’d shouted at Halek, of course. Naolin. He’d gripped his shirt and shaken him like a ragdoll in front of the mirror in their room; Halek hadn’t been aware his weedier brother was that strong. He doesn’t quite remember the words Naolin had said, if he’d said any at all—mostly he remembers the frustrated, angry tears, the terror. He’d known then that Naolin was just as scared of losing him as Halek was. He’d always known that, of course. But it was refreshing to see it all laid out like that, plain as day. Solasnever yell at their sols—but then again, he’s not sol yet. The black eye was a good reminder.

He travels another three weeks, through the Shield Peaks and into the Waste. Most of the other initiates will be heading into the Realm-of-Ghosts—a harsh and desolate but somewhat traversable region full of strange Tainted creatures. Demons are harder to find there, but it’s also safer than tackling the Waste alone: there are always stray caravans of bold travelers trying to take shortcuts from the North, tiny settlements here and there. If you die in the Realm-of-Ghosts, at least someone will be around to find your body. Eventually.

The Waste is an entirely different story. Although Halek suspects that the volcanos that created this—well, wasteland—are now fairly dormant, the sky here is still dark with ash, black clouds, and the fine, silken gray dust underfoot, which rises up in hot, irritating clouds with each footstep and gust of wind. And with the sun blotted out, the land here seems totally devoid of life. Not even birds or insects fly overhead, and he has to rely on the salted venison and even bear that he hunted prior to entering the Waste to survive. For weeks he doesn’t hear anything—no scuttering wildlife, no rattling tree branches. It’s all just rock and gray, wicked sun and the occasional hot wind, choked with ash and the smell of something evil. Once he thinks he sees a figure in the flat distance; a huge, hulking man with long blood-red hair, hunched over the ground like an animal. But then he blinks, and the figure—too far away for his Hunter-senses to touch—disappears into an outcrop of rocks, the shimmer of a mirage. He chalks it up to a sight-starved brain hallucinating things and picks a different path to walk, away from the mirage.

He’s come here, to this Haelpit, because he had to. The Realm-of-Ghosts is considered by some to be a training site, the “easy” place for the uncertain or the untested to go; Yerom and the council wouldn’t accept less than the Waste as the final proving ground for their future sol. The land here is interlaced with the faint scents of the demon-corrupted: Tainted, Thralls, and all manner of Endarkened prowl this realm, a blighted landscape far enough away from human civilization that its inhabitants can disappear into it, escaping their deserved purge from the earth.

But the tracks here are now too old and faint to trigger his blood-rage. He’ll have to keep looking, walking on until he can find something to kill.

He prowls on, mulling over that last conversation with his brother. Naolin’s reaction tells him that he’s been laying it on a bit too thick with the morbidity: his brother must be genuinely concerned that Halek will run away, or… really let a demon take his life, or something. Or else he wouldn’t have reacted like that.

Though Halek would never. Die willingly, that is. Having to lead the Reach at fifteen is bad, but it’s not bad enough that he’d consider just… giving up like that. Not before he’s started. Not before he’s given it a chance. It’s the least he owes… everyone. He nods to himself, and it’s all very convincing; it braces him up against the heat, the blazing cold.

But a small part of him still resents this whole ordeal, and the resentment sits like a hot coal in his stomach, threatening to burn him through. His Airatr is supposed to be a time of focus, of individuality and growth—then of celebration. He should not dread its end; he should not secretly hope for his own failure, for something to go so badly wrong so his father has a reason to postpone his retirement, maybe question if Halek is fit to rule altogether… The thought has been rattling around in his head for months. What would happen if he simply never came back from his Airatr? What would the Reach do? They’re so convinced about that cockamamie prophecy that the idea of failure—or escape, or even just outright incompetence—never occurred to them. This is the first time he’s ever been out of the Reach by himself. What would happen if he simply never came back?

The thought gives him a grim feeling of satisfaction, of catharsis—and then of fear. Even if he did leave, where on earth would he go? Or would his story simply end there, with an early death, one of the only two paths presented to him in life, and the only option that he would actually choose for himself? No, why is he thinking about that again? He doesn’t want to die, does he? No, no, but then why does his mind keep going to that scenario? What does it mean?

What is wrong with him?

He’s still thinking about it all when the Revenant leaps at him from above, eerily silent, out-of-nowhere, nothing but a dark shape against the distant gray sun.

Halek has no idea where it comes from, how it snuck up on him, but his senses trigger just before the demon takes off his head and he rolls, trying to whip his hraqa off his back while he’s still crushed on top of it. He flails, kicks, stabs, and all the while his vision begins to bleed red, and a snarl escapes his mouth unbidden, and he feels the cold feverish heat of the nyrol, the blood-rage, creeping into him. His fingers go numb; then his heart. He feels the rake of claws against his back as a cool, distant thing, like a splash of water, but the still-conscious, logical part of his brain knows that could be a killing wound. He stabs with his spear again, slashes—but he can no longer see the Endarkened, or anything at all. He can’t even hear its screeches—of triumph or anger. The blood-rage is taking him, moving his body like a puppet on a string—and his last conscious thought before it jerks him forward is that he must have summoned the demon, like a hound to a hunting bugle, with his thoughts on what it would be like to die.

#

He doesn’t die, of course, but it doesn’t look great for him in the aftermath. He wakes up covered in the burning, caustic oil of the Endarkened’s blood, his black coat in tatters, his own groans of pain alien in his mouth. He tries to move, and then blazing agony races up his arm, and he realizes it: the venom glittering on the Revenant’s claws must have worked its way into his wounds, paralyzing him, making him easy and slack for devourment. The only thing that’s keeping him from dying is his Grace, his Hunter blood, desperately trying to stave off the infection the way a holy antidote might beat back poison.

But the wild animals will come soon, or whatever else lurks in the Waste, and then he will die while he’s eaten alive. He tries to flop over onto his side, to move, and the pain is so great and white and consuming that he faints again.

When he comes to, he’s dragging himself forward on his elbows, teeth grit so hard he thinks they might break, his throat raw from the screaming. Blindly he thinks he hears and smells running water somewhere; he gropes for it, then faints again.

All throughout that evil day, he crawls. Sometimes he has long periods of oblivion, when his dreams tell him that he’s crawling in the wrong direction, and he despairs and wonders if he should just go to sleep and lay still. Give up and let the crows take him, because the water is so far away and he doesn’t think he’s getting any closer to it. But still, he crawls and crawls.

It’s twilight by the time he puts out his hand—caked with gore—and touches the ashy, filthy rivulet of water. He falls into it, washes the burning ichor out of his eyes—and when he looks around again, he sees that the Revenant’s corpse is gone. He would cry if it wouldn’t hurt so much. In order to keep demonic remains on this world after death, he has to prepare, has to ready special binding rituals to keep the head, has to have them deployed before the blood-rage takes him. But he hadn’t had the time. The thing had snuck up on him before he’d had the chance to ready himself for it. A running theme in his life, it seems.

And now he’ll have to hunt another demon, or go back empty-handed, or—not at all. Shit.

He doesn’t know how long he lies in that miserable trickle of water, blazing with pain and insensate, trying to let the venom seep out of him, the current lapping at his wounds. Sometimes he wakes up, and it’s dark; other times, it’s bright and painfully hot. He only knows he is very, very tired. He sleeps.

When he hears the soft chatter of human voices, he thinks that he is dreaming again—he’s been doing that, dreaming of Naolin and his parents and his master and some other people he doesn’t know. Then he stirs a little, and some hope trickles into him, and he thinks, It has to be the other Hunters. They sent a rescue party after I didn’t come back.

Other Hunters are the only people who’d be in this God-forsaken place, he thinks—and then he remembers that red-haired figure, suspended in a flash of reality and delusion, and something cold clutches at his heart. Or more demons, he thinks. More Endarkened, taking the shape of humans to lull him into a false sense of security. They like to do that.

He raises his face from the mud and sees a thin young girl with a dark braid, maybe ten or eleven, recoiling from him with wide eyes. Standing back from her is a wary teenager about his age, possibly the girl’s sibling or a friend.

Halek opens his throat and takes a breath, tries to taste the demon on them—but there is nothing. No trace of the Rot or the Taint or anything like that. Only human sweat and uncertainty.

He closes his mouth, coughs, and then croaks: “What in God’s name are you doing out here?”

The little girl’s mouth falls open, but the teenager retorts: “I could ask you the same thing. What’s wrong with you?”

“I was attacked,” Halek says, trying not to sound sarcastic as he glances at his ravaged body.

“Traesto, maybe you should get Mr. Danz and the others,” the little girl says, a note of authority in her tone. The teenager rolls xer eyes and vanishes from Halek’s peripheral.

He closes his eyes again just as the little girl says, now more tentatively: “My name’s Ama. I’ve got this root, if you want something to help the pain.”

Halek doesn’t scrutinize it all that closely as he wolfs down the proffered root, something tough and rubbery and fiercely bitter. His stomach rebels after days without food, and he nearly gags, but Ama thumps him on the chest until he can force it down.

“Thanks,” Halek manages after several painful breaths. “Who—where did you come from?”

“Our town,” Ama says, pointing somewhere vaguely southwest. “We were looking for more roots.”

“Town?” He’s never heard of anyone settling long-term in the Waste before. What about the ash, what about the lack of wildlife, what about the disease, what about the Endarkened? “How many of there are you?”

She shrugs, tries to lift his head fully out of the water. “I dunno. Thirty?”

Thirty? “How long have you been there?”

She shrugs again. “All my life.”

He’s struck dumb, then suspects he’s hallucinating again. How on earth could an entire settlement survive out here for ten, eleven years? A feeling of disorientation, of exhaustion, sways behind his eyes. It’s not possible. It’s not real. It can’t be.

“What about the demons?” he croaks, just as she raises his head again and blackness scuttles across his vision.

Ama smiles at him, bright as anything. “What do you mean, silly?” she asks, very amused by the question. “Demons don’t exist!”

Darkness rises up behind Halek’s eyes, and he welcomes it back again.

#

When he wakes up again, he is in some kind of dark cell, and all his limbs and even his neck are shackled. There is something brittle and sharp underneath his back; when he shifts, he hears the sound of clacking, like dice rolling on the ground. His eyes adjust and he realizes he’s been taken captive somewhere, in some little stone prison scarcely wider than the length of his body. Thin gray light leaks in through bars set about five above the ground, above him. A little face pokes through the bars as well, furrowed in concentration as its owner lowers some kind of bucket down on a rope.

Halek groans, and the little face looks up and says, “Wow, you’re awake! You sleep more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

I wasn’t asleep, you brat, Halek wants to say, but he’s got far more important things to worry about. At least someone’s cleaned the Endarkened venom out of him; he can feel how free his body feels without it—well, without most of it. How his very cells feel lighter, freer, though a little still lingers in his system, like a low-grade fever. And they’ve bandaged him up, set a splint for one leg—though his left arm feels tight and painful, and he’s afraid to look at it. He shifts again on whatever hard thing he’s lying on and says, “Where am I?”

Ama doesn’t blink. “My town. The Elder said you had to stay here, because you’ve got the sickness, and we can’t let it spread.”

For a moment, Halek wonders if it’s true. There are said to be all kinds of sicknesses and fevers in the Waste, possibly from the festering air. A cold fear splashes through him; if he’s going to die, he doesn’t want it to be of disease.

But then he feels the press of whatever’s beneath him again, and he realizes that something isn’t right. “Why am I shackled?”

“The sickness might make you bad,” Ama cautions. “It might make you say things, do things… It’s for your safety as well as ours.”

She says it with the perfect recall of someone who has been told this many times, and the fear in Halek quickens. He says, breathing very shallowly now, “I’m not the first you’ve brought here, am I?”

Ama smiles, then finally sets the bucket she’s lowering safely on the ground. Its water sparkles in the dull light, and when she nudges it towards Halek, he strains against his chains and drinks greedily, plunging his face half-in like a horse at a trough.

Then Ama says:  “Every year we get sick people. They’ve all got white hair, too. Just like you.”

Halek freezes mid-drink. Then he wipes his mouth and says in an unsteady voice, “What are you talking about?”

“They’ve got white hair, the people who come here,” the girl repeats. “The Elder says they’re all sick, that they come from a sick place.”

“What happened to them?” Halek says. “Where are they? These other white-haired people, where have you put them?”

Ama doesn’t answer. Just stares at him with a mix of pity and fascination on her face.

Halek’s heart erupts into a new frenzy of dread. His pain-sluggish brain is trying to catch up, and he scrambles for understanding. For some reason he thinks of that red-haired shadow he saw again, but his thoughts are confused, jumbled. White-haired people like him? She can only mean Hunters. And Hunters would only come here, come to the Waste, for their Airatr, just like him. There are always one or two every year who never come back to the Reach… Is this where they ended up? This mysterious village with its strange people?

But that would mean…

Abruptly he realizes what he’s lying on, and he cries out as he tries to hurl himself off. The chains yank him back, choke him, and he falls back onto the pile of bones. The bones of other Hunters—the earthly remains of his kinsmen who died here—

“Why?” he shouts, but Ama is backing away from the little window. “You killed them? You fucking killed them?”

“They were sick.”

“Like fuck they were!” Abruptly he feels animal panic rising up in him, a hysteria that he can’t control, like a bird spreading its wings within his chest and trying its damnedest to escape. It’s like the blood-rage, only it’s terror instead of wrath, and he shouts, “Let me out of here!”

Ama is unmoved, staring at his plight like she’s watching the struggling of a pinned insect. “The Elder says you’re going to stay.”

“Who’s your fucking Elder?” He feels a tension against his bad arm and curses, letting it slacken; he’s not getting out of these chains unless he breaks his own wrists. “Why is your Elder killing my people? Why are you doing this?”

“The Elder knows all,” Ama replies. “She brought us here, she showed us the truth. About how there are no demons, it’s all a lie made up to keep people out of this land. The Autarchy wants it all to themselves, see, the rich soil here. So they tell people there are monsters, demons, Endarkened. But the Elder knew. She brought us all here and showed us the truth.”

“The truth?” Halek feels a bitter laugh erupt from his mouth. “That’s lunacy. Soil—look around you! And I was attackedby a demon, that’s how you find me. I’ve been hunting demons all my life, I would know if they didn’t exist—”

“And that’s why you’re sick,” Ama says, her voice pitying again. “You can’t see the truth even if it’s right in front of you. We’ve lived here all my life, and we’ve never seen a demon. None has ever come into the village. It’s only animals, and the Elder protects us from those. She even makes food grow out of the ground. How do you explain that, if it’s not good soil?”

“I don’t fucking know.” He is looking around, breathing harshly, wondering how on earth they got him into this cell with only that tiny window for light and no other visible entrance in the room. His blood-slicked hair keeps falling into his eyes, but the shackles don’t let his arms raise high enough to fix it. There’s an alarming rattle in his chest as he breathes. What rotten luck that he’d be plucked from certain death by some kind of… cult. It’s clearly some kind of fanaticism, to drive people into the Waste, making them blindly follow some hero-leader. This Elder seems to have brainwashed Ama into thinking the sky is green—he doesn’t doubt that the rest of the village is the same. And now they’ve captured him, and they’re going to do to him whatever they did to all the other Hunters who came before him…

“What do you do to the sick people?” he shouts, even though Ama has disappeared. “What are you going to do to me? I need to get back, I need to find my people, I’ve got a brother…”

He keeps talking, about why he should live, about why he deserves something better than this ugly end. But Ama has vanished into thin air. The sun begins to creep down towards the horizon, and the little girl never returns, never looks through the window again—as if she had never existed at all.

#

That night, the Elder comes to see him, stooping to see between the bars of the cell.

Halek is lying awake on the pile of bones, his eyes wide open and glinting strangely in the moonlight. He has tired himself out with fighting, trying to find some way to escape, some way to twist his arms out of their shackles.

He has been pondering the bones beneath him. He never took much notice of the Hunters a few years older than him, the teenagers who might have bowed when he and Naolin walked through the street as kids. Whose tibia is this? Who once owned this handful of teeth? He imagines that this skull is Yannate’s, a class prodigy who’d gone to the Waste on his Airatr and never come back. And what if this is old Havorik, that seasoned veteran whose deep voice had used to startle him? He’d gone on a scouting mission to this area and had disappeared…

“Your fear,” the Elder coos, “is so delicious.”

Halek’s heart surges within his chest, but he forces himself not to move, to remain very still, as prey does while being watched while a snake. Electricity crackles through him, and so too does understanding: although the Elder’s voice is the paper-thin, frail tones of an old woman, the words trigger something primal inside him.

“Demon,” he says, without turning to face the Thrall—the possessed mortal shell now housing an Endarkened.

“Hunter,” the Elder answers amicably.

Halek’s fists tighten, and the Elder gives a little chuckle. “It’s no use hiding your fear,” she taunts. “I can smell it on you; you stink of it. So did all the others.”

Halek finally turns, very slowly, but the Thrall is nothing more than a shadow against the black stripes of the bars and the moonlight. His stomach roils at the sight, but also with a new, stranger fear…

The Thrall can smell him, but he can’t smell it.

He can’t sense the demon within its host at all.

Halek feels his chains again, but he’s checked: they’re not thoret, so how…

The Elder smirks, reading his thoughts. “I will tell you,” she—it—says, leaning against the bars and breathing deeply, as if savoring the scent of him. “Only because it will strike such terror in you that I will glut for many days.”

Instantly, Halek schools his emotions; he stuffs them down deep inside him, into his bones, and he slows his heart. Deep breath, one, two, just as his master taught him and Naolin. God, Naolin—no, don’t think of it. Think of nothing. Dissipate your fear like mist.

Demons grow stronger from absorbing fear, pain, even hatred. This demon is using him, like—like a fly caught in a spider’s web, drawing energy from him over time before it makes the final kill. If he’s going to get out of here, he needs to master himself.

The Elder smiles down at him. “Very good,” it breathes. “The others controlled themselves, too… until the end. It makes it all the sweeter, you’ll see.”

It begins to talk, and Halek tries to tune it out, but there is something about the sweet, insidious way it speaks that draws him in. He has never heard a demon talk before, not really. Anytime he was close enough to hear one, his blood-rage set in; he heard and saw nothing after that, only tore it to shreds and woke up bloody later. Is this what it’s like, to be tempted by an Endarkened? Is that what all non-Hunters fear so badly?

The Elder talks, and talks. “I used to be a researcher, you see,” it coos. “An arcanist who wanted to help mankind. Ah, I traveled all over, thinking on how I could help others. How I could protect them. Feh.” It scoffs. “In the course of my travels, I discovered a secret. Hunters could always sense the Darkwalkers—my kind, the demons, lovers of the World Without Light. But we could not always sense them. Why? I had to know.”

Despite himself, Halek listens, waiting for the catch, the trap that the thing is drawing out to hurt him. It says, “To cut a long story short, I discovered something quite… horrifying, at the time, but vastlyinteresting now. An Endarkened, you see, cannot directly drink the blood of a Hunter. It is anathema to us, poison. Your god made you well, in that regard. And yet… if someone else were to drink a Hunter’s blood, and then the demon were to drink theirs…”

It spreads its gnarled, knobby hands. “The demon becomes invisible to Hunters.”

A lie. It is a lie, a lie, a lie, because all demons lie. It is in their nature. They’d rather die than tell the truth.

And yet, why can he not sense the Elder? Why is his nyrolnot triggered?

Stop, stop, stop believing it, Halek tells himself. None of it is true!

The Elder chuckles. “Unfortunately, before I could share this knowledge with anyone else, I… stumbled across a tome I shouldn’t have found. I thought I was summoning a spirit, an entity who would help me spread the word to those who needed to hear it… But instead, I summoned a Cacophant, and he consumed me utterly.”

She smiles down at him. “My master desired to use my knowledge to better anchor himself here in this wretched world. We traveled the land, gathering followers who could feed us, make us stronger. And as we grew stronger, we found more ways to convince them of our powers, to draw them to us with promises and lies. We led them into the Waste, where no one could stop us. Where no one could track us down. We hid this village from sight and stranger, we turned ash and rock into food and told them it was good. And then, eventually… we set our trap. This old body can’t do much against a Hunter like you. But, whenever one of you wanders into this place… we don’t have to use it. We have the maggots to destroy you for us, break you down into something soft and palatable. The Revenant hunts you, with the help of our concealing magic… and then the insects bear you to us, as ants to their queen. We need only sit back and let the cycle play itself out. Then we sup on your fear, your anguish, your pain…”

It trails off for a moment, then shrugs elegantly. “And then, eventually, we make them eat you. They think they are feasting on boar, the wretches. And then we drink their blood, diluting yours, and oh, the brightness, oh, the strength!” The creature squirms with orgiastic delight. “I have eaten nine of your kind, and once every few moons is enough to hide me from your sight. What will happen if I eat more? Perhaps… I will gain the immunity all demons have so desperately sought?” It smirks. “Perhaps, if enough of our blood is mixed… Hunters will no longer affect us at all?”

Halek doesn’t move. I am not afraid, I am not afraid, he thinks. His heartbeat is as slow as a mourning drum. He stares right at the demon. But it sees something in him and laughs.

“Perhaps you do not care about this,” it says, adopting the same pitying tone that Ama had. “Perhaps you do not care about your own kind, as I do not for mine.”

That’s right, Halek thinks, trying not to listen, all demons are incredibly self-serving, greedy to elevate themselves over their rivals—at least when the Archdemon isn’t in the picture. Is it possible that this fucking Cacophant or whatever it was hasn’t told other demons about this—technique? No, no, the technique isn’t real, either. It’s all madness, the gibbering of a devil who will say anything, and he knows better. But if it hasn’t told…

“I wonder if you wish you had fled,” the demon purrs, stretching its hand down past the bars, as if to stroke his hair. Despite himself, Halek flinches. “You are not so different from us, Hunter. You, too, long to separate yourself from the pack. From the hive-mind. Won’t they let you be selfish, for once? Why must you exist only to serve the whole, while your true self cries out in pain? Why, if you are their precious savior, does no one hear your suffering… not even your own family?”

Halek closes his eyes, and he feels a finger of wind against his neck, as if the demon really is touching him. Bile rises in his throat, but nothing comes.

“If only you had been selfish,” the demon says sweetly. “If only you had escaped your bonds, if only you’d gone to Haven or Calta when you’d had the chance. You could be learning to cook, right this moment! And yet here you are, a feast for me laid upon the bones of your brothers, and I shall crack your ribcage open and press my lips against your heart.”

Now he really does vomit, turning his head to the side and retching. The demon laughs and laughs.

“I am not like you,” Halek mumbles, his insides shuddering at the thought. “I will never be like you.”

“Sweet Halek,” the demon says, and his name is like a dagger against his gut, because how does it know— “you close your eyes to the truth, but it is always there. I hear your thoughts, as clear as I hear the soul trapped inside me. You are like me. And very soon, you will become me. And I…” The demon brushes the blood in his hair, then brings its fingers to its lips. “Soon, very soon… I will become you.”

#

Six days after the white-haired sick man arrives at the village, Ama smells smoke and fire somewhere outside.

She runs outside and finds adults running everywhere, shouting, panicking; the sick-room is on fire, a great funerary blaze stretching up into the dark night sky. Somewhere overhead, she hears the screeching of things she’s never heard before; and the sky looks strange, not like the clear starry sky she is used to, but something dull and angry.

She is a bit sad that the white-haired man is dead, and wonders who started the fire; perhaps lightning struck and set the roof aflame? But no, the Elder has always protected them from such dangers. But then who among them would want to kill the white-haired man? She had hoped that he would recover, that he would go on his way like the others before him, disappearing in the night after the Elder tended to his madness. But he must be dead now, because she can feel the heat of the flames on her face even from the far side of the little village.

Ama’s mother shouts something at her, and she remembers suddenly that Traesto was supposed to be on watch. Did xe start the fire, or…

Frowning, she picks her away around the adults, some of whom are screaming that there’s no water to put out the flames, that the fire is spreading—but no, there’s water in the well, isn’t there? Why does it look so dry? With a growing sense of unease—but that’s all it is, only quiet concern, because whatever problem she has, the Elder will fix—she goes to look for Traesto. Perhaps xe ran off to the Elder’s house?

The house is dark and silent when she approaches it. The door is open, which is strange, because the Elder always sleeps alone, though once Ama looked into the window and saw that the Elder wasn’t asleep at all, only sitting there, staring into the dark. She’d assumed the Elder was speaking to angels, or something of the sort, something celestial in exchange for the protection she grants the whole village.

Ama steps into the Elder’s home and, for the briefest moment, she thinks the Elder is talking to an angel again.

A figure, very tall and straight and shining, is bent over the Elder, who is folded down against her old desk, the one full of strange books, as if she’d fallen asleep reading. The figure standing over her has brilliant white hair, and when it straightens, Ama sees that it has a shard of white in its hand, as well.

And then, all at once, the figure makes a jerking motion, and the illusion is broken, and color and shadow come flooding back into the world—and Ama sees that it is not an angel at all, but the white-haired prisoner from the cell. Somehow, he has escaped. Somehow, he has set the town on fire.

And then the white-haired man turns, and Ama sees how his front is coated all over in black ink. She feels a jolt of surprise, in the back of her neck, but not yet fear—though it is coming. The white-haired man—a boy really, not much older than Traesto—is holding the Elder’s severed head by the hair. He mutters something, shakes it, and then spits on the Elder’s slumped torso. The arm holding the Elder’s head dangles badly, as if it’s broken; the other hand holds a shard of bone that has been sharpened into a knife. It looks like he cut the Elder’s head off with it.

Ama feels a scream welling up inside her; the white-haired man notices her, and his gaze is cold and pitiless. Not angry, exactly, just… fierce. He does not move, and the bone—the bone that killed the Elder—stares at her from his hand.

“Where’s my spear?” the white-haired man asks finally. His voice is very raspy, almost incomprehensible. It’s only her fear, rapidly creeping up her scalp, that allows Ama to understand him.

“In the—in the barn,” she murmurs after a moment. She cannot stop staring at the Elder’s dead black eyes. “At the edge… of the village.”

The white-haired man doesn’t acknowledge her further, only shuffles past her, limping badly, clutching the head like his life depends on it. Ama half-turns to watch him go; then, unbidden, she says: “Why?”

The young man pauses, but doesn’t turn around. “She pissed me off,” he says after a moment, calm and flat. “Eventually, fear turns into ‘I don’t give a shit,’ and demons can’t use that. Then they make you angry, and anger—I know how to use anger.” He pauses, the head clutched in his fist dripping black. “I broke my arm and slipped out of the chain. You left me in that cell with all manner of weapons. I drove a bone into her brain, and now the head is mine.”

Finally, he turns to look at Ama, and he is a terrible, ruined, beautiful sight, and despite herself, Ama feels something catching in her chest, because something about him reminds her of Elder, poor dead Elder, who’d saved them all and brought them to a wonderful existence, a true salvation, and something in this man’s face reminds her of that. And then the man spits blood again and says, “I’m supposed to bring a demon’s head. They want one: a Revenant or a Cacophant. That’s supposed to be the whole point. But this—this looks like a human head. It looks like I killed an old woman. I didn’t have time to prepare. The ritual didn’t work… didn’t turn her back. The Hunter blood. They won’t believe me.” He shakes the Elder’s head again for emphasis.

Ama is finally speechless; these words are familiar to her, as if she’d heard them once as a babe, but she cannot make sense of them.

Finally, the white-haired man turns away. “Whatever,” he says. “It won’t be enough, but I’ll make it enough.”

He keeps muttering that, as he limps away, towards the barn where they put his weapons and then out into the greater world—the Promised Land, the Elder had said, but now Ama remembers it’s called the Waste, and the glow inside of her, the one that’s always been there, is somehow fading. Outside, the fire rages, and the man with two heads disappears into the light.