Jan 13th, 500 p.d.

“You’re running out of time.”

The paladin fiddled with the cotton laces of his gambeson and studied the gilded railings of the massive staircase below him, each of the thousands of rungs thin arms that reached from concrete to grasp the tawny bar that ran three hundred meters down to the city. Rows of opportunistic rosemary lined the hilltop on each side of the long staircase, thick branches curving wildly and permeating the air with their earthy odor. With the early morning fog that covered the church on its tall hilltop, obscuring the furthermost steps that staggered endlessly below them, it looked as though they were sitting at the gates of heaven.

“I’ll tell him tonight then. Better if it came from me,” he said as if he had not already argued this point many times before.

The woman to his right let out an exasperated huff, for a moment distracted from gnawing at the nail on her left ring finger.

“You’re always like this, Jonah. It would be so much easier to just get it over with.”

“I know,” the large man agreed.

“Do you?” Pale eyes stared dubiously at the stocky figure on their left.

“Sure I do. You know what happened with Lucy.”

His companion said nothing, bringing her hand up to her mouth and tugging at the nail, hard as it was to find much purchase on the nub that remained. They sat there in tense silence for a long time watching miniature hands reach out from the depths of the mist.

“Sorry,” Jonah apologized eventually. “I just – it’s my fault, Mary. There’s a right way to tell him that, so he can be angry with me then talk to you with a clear head.”

“He might not even be mad. Maybe he’ll say – that just means you’re perfect for each other, and go back to feeding the homeless or whatever.”

It was Jonah’s turn to give a hard look.

“He’s not a saint.”

“He sure acts like he is,” Mary scoffed.

“He really cares,” Jonah argued defensively.

“I never said he didn’t. I just think it must be exhausting being perfect all the time.”

Jonah indulged in his own vengeful silence for a while.

“Do you even like him?”

“I like his ass.”

“Mary, seriously.”

“I mean, he’s perfect. Perfect body, perfect personality. I fuck up and then he apologies. I just… it just sucks to be reminded every day how shit I am.”

Mary attacked the remains of her fingernail with renewed vigor.

“I didn’t want to be a cynic Jonah,” she confessed, speaking through her teeth. “I wanted to grow up and be a good person and for everyone to love me. But…”

“It’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it? Feels like whatever you do isn’t enough.”

“Exactly. See, you get it.”

Mary turned and gave him a wry smile, and Jonah’s breath caught. She really was beautiful, and Isaac really was a lucky son of a bitch to marry her – Jonah knew he would, despite this misstep on their part. When he listened to him talk about her, he knew they saw the same woman: cutting wit and shameless laughter, piercing words juxtaposing sweet tenderness. As if she saw you for who you really were and somehow still loved you. Shame flooded him as he looked at her, knowing that he was part of ruining something great for them both. He was supposed to know better.

“You’re going to be late,” he said abruptly, wanting to be alone. “I’ll talk with him after our shift, and then he’ll be all yours.”

Without waiting for a response, he stood and made his way up the stairs to the entrance of the church. He turned at the last second as he held the massive wooden door open, but he couldn’t make out anything through the fog.

***

“I can’t believe him,” a voice babbled in Isaac’s idiosyncratic baritone, manic. Jonah froze on the steps, just out of sight, sure that Isaac had overheard him and Mary just now.

“Shifting the food service to every other day just means the regulars will starve,” he exclaimed, and Jonah breathed a silent prayer of thanks for routine injustices before descending into the room. Isaac was in the middle of the dressing room preparing for their morning assignment, struggling to tighten the straps of a shoulder piece. A deacon was next to him changing into robes, and knowing better than to interrupt one of Isaac’s rants simply nodded silently in affirmation.

“I have to talk to the cardinal today after the meeting. The church wouldn’t allow this, it goes against everything we stand for. I also don’t see how the city is short on funds when the mayor just installed that ridiculous garden. I was getting complaints for months – oh, Jonah, thank goodness, help me out here.”

Jonah diligently went to his friend and investigated the ostentatious armor, finding that a buckle was straining against the final rung.

“You put on more muscle,” he remarked incredulously, wrestling the strap shut.

Isaac winced at the tightness, then grabbed a bracer and held it over his wrist.

“Not intentionally. It’s getting to be a real pain having to re-fit these things every year.”

Jonah shook his head, forcing the taut straps of the bracer shut across an oversized forearm.

“So what has our pious local government done this time?” The deacon, still half-undressed, shook his head feverishly in warning, but it was too late.

“He’s cutting our food budget,” Isaac huffed, pulling away from Jonah to pace back and forth across the tiny room.

“Just like last year – I don’t know what he told the cardinal but he told me that there was a budget crisis, so we can’t afford the herbs needed to treat syphilis. Well, guess what, now we have an epidemic on our hands, and he’s cutting food to three times a week. So we’re supposed to just let people rot?”

Isaac ran a hand through thick golden locks, visibly distressed, and in spite of the circumstances Jonah felt a swell of pride.

“I’ll have to bring this up at the council meeting tomorrow – they must not have heard about this yet, otherwise someone would have said something. Allen,” he looked at the deacon who was struggling with the final layer of his outfit, “you’ll be there, right? Can you put something together tonight? Please?”

The older man slumped visibly.

“Sure, Isaac. Happy to,” he meekly acquiesced.

“What can I do?” Jonah asked, not to be outdone.

Isaac gave him a winning smile.

“You and I are going to make our case to the top.”

***

They stood stiffly in the cathedral, grateful for the cool temperature bundled as they were in layers of cotton and steel, facing each other across once beautiful tiled floors long since tarnished from decades of oaken feet dragged across their faces. The nave was doubling as a meeting hall for the aristocrats, its pews with varnish long since faded replaced with plush upholstery brought downstairs from the cardinal’s office.

Dandy noblemen made their way to fill the room, their sickly sweet perfume almost eliciting a visible gag from Jonah, who had spent most of his twenty five years of life smelling sweat and farts rather than ambergris. He could make out Isaac stifling a laugh at his bulging eyes, and knew he would be teased relentlessly for this later – one bittersweet thing to look forward to before Jonah’s eventual confession.

The thought twisted his stomach, offering a distraction to the flamboyant retinue. He wondered if Isaac would cut him off like Lucy did. Would he ask for an assignment elsewhere, leaving Jonah to fend for himself among the silly royalty that frequented this city? Would he take Mary with him, depriving him of the only two friends he had made his whole life? A memory of silken black hair falling undone around bare shoulders flashed through his mind, and Jonah had a sudden fear that he would be ill.

“If it please the court, the Duke of Southguarden would begin the processions,” an unctuous voice rang out, followed by a grumbling consent from the crowd. The attendant respectfully bowed to the thin man at his side and stepped away, while the lanky noble adorned in dark green finery rose from his upholstery and drifted gracefully across the floor to the pew, tanned leather soles hardly appearing to touch the long faded artwork beneath them. Jonah noticed the man look towards the right side of the room,  where the cardinal was sitting, and nod.

“Gentlemen and gentlewomen of the court,” he began, taking the time to look each oligarch in the eye, “I have come today the bearer of terrible news.

“You are all familiar with our eastern neighbors. Philistine though they are, for a decade we have hoped to preach to them the gospel, and thus save them from fiery damnation. Such is our duty as followers of this holy church.”

The crowd murmured assent.

“To spread this word of God, as I’m sure this ever capable crowd is aware, requires an immense organization of church members – priests, pastors, volunteer missionaries from among the poorest of our society, sisters to support these holy men with the preparation of food and the cleaning of their sacred supplies. It was one of these excursions that was organized hardly two fortnights ago, led by none other than our most beloved father Jean-Paul. You will remember that he was the face of our multi-generational community kitchen for the last twenty years.”

Jonah risked a glance at Isaac and saw horror writ across his face.

“I have just received a report that his mission group was ambushed, invited to rest under false pretenses and the populace then forsaking the commandment of safe respite with ruthless predetermination. If any of the more generous-minded of you once believed in any basic decency of these savages, let this be the ultimate, irrefutable proof against it.

“I would be remiss not to celebrate Jean-Paul’s heroic effort to defend himself and those under his leadership. I was assured by the sole survivor that he fought valiantly – but every soul in this cathedral knows all too well that Jean-Paul was a man of peace. He was trained to wield scripture over a sword, gospel over force. He was not equipped with such righteous armament as we are, with soldiers such as these watching over us in case of grave circumstances.”

The reedy man motioned with a nod to the four paladin that stood as ceremonial guards in the chamber, and though Jonah strained not to meet their gaze he could feel their greedy stares piercing through him.

“I do not condone the indulgence nor the recreation of senseless violence,” the man continued. “But it is critical to our timely and I urge imminent response that I share two crucial details. First, no man nor woman was intentionally left alive – no prisoners of war, no hostages with which to bargain some unfair trade. Our sole survivor managed to escape among the chaos and make his way back to the city, and when we found him he was near dead from dehydration and exhaustion. Second, before, or perhaps after their death, each sister was… Forgive me, it is too terrible to be said aloud.”

He stood there silently for a long while, looking as if he were on the verge of tears.

“Simply said, it was a violation. Directly violating our cardinal sins – no, violating any decency that ought to be expected of a civilized society. This is the enemy that we have found ourselves pit against, and I know that I speak for us all when I say that they must be eliminated. For who is to stop such savagery from creeping westwards to seek the resources we have toiled for centuries to accumulate here? Are we, as stewards of this land, of this world, expected to allow such wretched evil to unleash itself upon the innocents we have sworn to protect?

“My proposal is a simple one. Markus Alabaster, our esteemed cardinal, I would ask that you donate the temporary usage of your retinue to make a strike on the city of Orengarde. I plan to make my case to the mayor and am hoping to subsidize these troops with more from the city’s guard. We would march east, and within two weeks reach the borders of the city and purge it. Thank you all for your consideration.”

With this, the verdant nobleman walked off the stage, and the crowd to this point struck silent exploded into an uproar. Some shouted words of damnation against the brutes, others crying for bloody vengeance. A few that knew Jean-Paul well shed open tears at the loss of their friend. The variety in responses regardless, the consensus was clear, and after long minutes of yelling and fist-pounding the cardinal walked to the pew, adorned in as flushed a garb as the faces he looked upon, and consented.

***

The next few hours were chaos. Isaac and Jonah rushed to organize their fellow paladins, and then fell into the agitated logistics of military transportation: horses, mules, food and water, medical aid, which of the clerics were the least likely to bolt at the first sign of danger, weapons – would they need a cannon or ballista, no there were no stone walls of the city – enchantments, staffs, scrolls, tomes that could be spared from the library, spare clothing in case of rain or snow, tents, wood and flint for fires, blankets to stave of the winter air, and so on.

Before Jonah knew it evening had fallen, and the conversation he was supposed to have with Isaac could not have felt more implausible then at this moment where they were both surrounded by dozens of other men, not to mention Isaac’s preoccupation with the sudden death of his old mentor. While the exhausted retinue milled about in the courtyard, waiting for further instruction, Jonah snuck off to the library, Mary having motioned for him to return after they had stared at each other with wide eyes as overzealous soldiers plucked spell scrolls off the shelves like candy.

“In here,” Mary hissed as Jonah poked his head into the hallway leading to the ransacked archives, motioning to a small room around the corner. They stuffed themselves within and shut the door, and Jonah immediately regretted not stopping by the baths to wash himself.

“What is happening?” Mary asked, breathlessly, eyes wild.

“Orengarde,” Jonah said stupidly, before extrapolating. “They killed the missionaries. Isaac’s boss.”

“Fuck.” Mary impulsively brought a middle finger to her lips, forgetting her determination to limit the damage to just one nail.

“That’s what they get for proselytizing all the damn time. So why are they sending you?”

“Clean up.”

Mary stared at him.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“The cardinal wants us to wipe them out. Revenge. In case they come west.”

“That makes no sense. Why the hell would they come west? They probably just want to be left the fuck alone. Lord knows what those freaks were doing to them without direct supervision.”

An image of Jean-Paul emerging from his sister’s bedroom surfaced from the vestiges of Jonah’s memories. He remembered being jealous of the towering man’s ring during the height of his aspirations to work for the diocese: burnished gold, the church’s color, with a massive  sparkling emerald. The man had looked quite frustrated with Jonah for disturbing them… That would have been right around the time –

“So are you going to go?”

“I have to,” Jonah replied, shocked at the suggestion. “I can’t disobey the cardinal’s direct orders.”

Mary gave him another long look, and Jonah squirmed under her gaze.

“I have no choice. Besides, Isaac is going.”

“There’s always a choice.” Mary crossed her arms and looked away, and Jonah realized that the conversation was done. He squeezed awkwardly around her and pushed open the door.

“I’ll talk with him. Isaac, I mean.”

“OK.” Her voice sounded hoarse.

“We should be back in a month.”

Suddenly she reached out a hand and gripped his wrist tight, her grip surprisingly painful given her size.

“Jonah – there’s something odd about this whole thing. Promise me you’ll both come back?”

Jonah looked into pale, glittering eyes, and put his other hand on hers. Her knuckles were cold.

“No matter what.”

Jan 14th, 500 p.d.

Jonah slept fitfully that night, the soldiers released to their homesteads for one last evening of relative comfort before marching the following morning. Mary’s voice thick with worry haunted him, and his dreams were filled with manifestations of the various ways he would inevitably fail her. He thought of a hundred ways for Isaac to die, and of how he could not prevent them – stabbings, lancings, arrows through the gap in his helmet, cannonballs, poison darts, trampling by horse or any large enough animal, surprise attack by beasts on the road, illness, syphilis (Jonah knew Isaac would never sleep with anyone other than Mary but it was on the rise), falling off the cliffs along the most direct road to Orengarde, being pushed off said cliff, maiming, torture, getting in a fight with the other soldiers (Isaac would probably struggle with the laisez-faire attitude of the lower classes) and getting hit in the temple, aneurysm, heart attack, heat stroke, frostbite, and so his mind wandered viciously. He lay in that liminal space between rest and awareness wishing that he could transport his soul into the body of another and escape this madness, until he was forced fully awake by a loud pounding on his door and made to drag himself in full armor to the entrance of the city.

The gates that led into the bitter wilderness beyond the stone walls that garrisoned Jonah most his life stood shorter than he remembered. Huge branches of rosemary rose nearly to the gates height, dwarfing the other foliage that crept in from the wilderness beyond. He had never actually left the city at any point – he was born in the church, lived in the crowded residential area his whole life, then moved back to the church once he had been formally apprenticed as a paladin. The last time he had really looked at these gates were many years ago when as a child he would sit on the steps of a bar that had long since shut down and watch expectantly for Lucy’s return. She never did come back.

Thankfully Isaac had finally appeared, and Jonah gratefully moved his pack around to make space for the massive man. He had come surely over prepared, strapping himself with a backup long sword, a short sword, three daggers attached haphazardly across his chest, and a massive lance whose heel drug unceremoniously along the ground. Jonah fell silently to his habit of cleaning his friend up – adjusting straps, repositioning weapons, rubbing at the most obvious stains on his friend’s neglected armor. Isaac stood there fidgeting all the while, scanning the horizon and huffing when he did not find what he was looking for.

“I haven’t seen Mary,” he said, finally, and Jonah cringed, grateful that his face was hidden while he moved the lance on Issac’s back up a few inches in its holdings.

“I ran into her yesterday at the library. I think she was held back helping the clerics prepare their books,” he lied. “They probably kept her later than they kept us last night.”

Isaac sighed deeply, shoulders dropping comically in the morning sunlight. Jonah, finishing his ministrations, moved to face his friend.

“She made me promise we would both come back,” he assured, putting a hand on Issac’s shoulder and looking into his friend’s worried eyes. Isaac was crestfallen.

“I feel like something has been wrong. I’ve hardly seen her the past couple of weeks.”

“Isaac… There’s something I need to talk to you about.” Jonah willed himself to confess his sins now, and relieve himself the torment of waiting for some perfect opportunity; willed that he could do what needed to be done in the moment, for once. Yet the thoughts of Isaac’s many potential demises resurfaced in his mind – how was he supposed to protect him if he ended their friendship now? Isaac would storm off in a fury and get himself killed before they even made it to the battlefield. Now was not the right time – soon, when he was somewhere safe.

“We have to talk to the cardinal before it’s too late. About the food.”

Isaac’s sunken face reanimated.

“The food! How could I forget? Yes, yes! Let’s go, before everyone leaves!” They both hurried away with hardly a glance from the others, their colleagues long since taught to be unfazed by Isaac’s sudden mood swings. The steps up to the church were grueling in full armor, and they were both sweating profusely by the time they made it to the cardinal’s room. Isaac rapped politely, learned enough dealing with church leadership to stay his excitement, and after a couple of long minutes the elderly cardinal Alabaster opened the door and invited them in. He motioned for them to sit, but they both refused, worried about ripping the fine velvet seating with their armor.

“Isaac,” he said with a nod, “and Jason, was it?”

“Jonah, sir.”

“Right. What can I do for you both? You’re both due to march out any minute now.”

“Yes, sir,” Isaac said, a little too quickly. “We wanted to make a request, while we were gone. With Jean-Paul’s departure I had been the one managing the community kitchen. I found out yesterday morning that the mayor plans to reduce the city’s subsidy, from a daily supply to only three times a week.”

The cardinal nodded slowly, causing Jonah to frown. He did not appear surprised at the news.

“Well, if I can be blunt, sir, it’s just not right. As you of course know it’s our duty to protect the most vulnerable, and having managed the kitchen for the past two months, we’re barely keeping up with demand as it is. Just one day less would be devastating – four days less…”

The cardinal held up a hand.

“Of course, Isaac. You are absolutely right, and very correct to bring this to my attention. It would be the height of hypocrisy to send you on a crusade against an existential threat to this city while turning a blind eye to the immediate needs of its inhabitants. I will take care of it.”

“Thank you sir,” Isaac gushed. “I asked Allen to put together a statement for the council meeting, but if you are taking care of it then I can tell him not to get in the way. The mayor built that garden last year and -”

“Thank you for taking initiative, Isaac,” the older man interrupted. “I will coordinate with Allen. Now go, before you both get left behind.”

“Yes sir!”

They jogged as best they could, more of a hurried walk with their armaments weighing them down, and made it back down to the city gates just as the rest of the military retinue was beginning their march.

“Thank you, Jonah,” Isaac whispered as they paraded down the road leading out of the city. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

Jonah forced a smile.

“I’ve got your back, Isaac.”

***

They camped that first night on the side of the dirt road, one tenth of the way to their destination, already aching from the full day’s march. The more experienced soldiers from the city garrison, laughing at the young paladins, told them they were idiots for marching the first day in full steel, and so rather embarrassed they spent the evening peeling off their many layers and tying them down on donkeys.

Jonah had made it a point to steer clear of the stables most of his career, but the camp was already infused with the smell of equine waste. It didn’t help that the city troops were not particularly hygienic themselves, leaving their own feces lining the side of the road rather than digging holes like the paladins had been instructed.

Overwhelmed, and tired of cringing at Isaac’s over-earnest attempts to befriend the jaded militia, Jonah had to excuse himself from their company and spend his time in the darkness away from the camp. Not willing to walk very far, he found a patch of dead grass thirty meters away and collapsed, stretching his aching legs and shoulders in the cool evening air. Somewhat away from the pungent smell of the retinue, he could make out the familiar aroma of rosemary wafting down from somewhere upwind. That damn weed was everywhere, it seemed.

Laying on his back and staring at the mass of stars above him, something strange occurred to Jonah. It seemed as if the lights in the sky were bending and aligning themselves into a shape, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the stars had returned to normal. Jonah figured he must be hallucinating from sleep deprivation, and gradually fell asleep to the sounds of raucous laughter and snide jokes.

In his dreams, the slender aristocrat adorned in dark green livery from yesterday morning appeared, sitting on a leather couch in a well lit room that reminded him of the cardinal’s elaborate office. He did not appear to acknowledge Jonah’s presence, and was otherwise alone, his head braced casually against a hand, reading from a massive book on his lap. He turned a thin page with a reed-like finger and began to read aloud.

Jonah was a simple boy from Gath-hepher who knew little of right or wrong. His father was a prophet and had no time for a carefree son who had no interest in spreading the word of God. In fact, if anything, Jonah had an especial aversion to the relationship between prophet and deity, seeing how his father bent unquestioningly to the fickle will of his Lord. Eventually the older man passed and Jonah was surprised to experience, for the first time, the relief of a stable life. He worked for many years, married a woman as every young man then was obligated, and expected that he would soon begin a family of his own.

Yet on one summer eve, overjoyed and exhausted after his wife told him she had missed her cycle, he slept and had a vision from the Lord. We do not know what he saw, or how it was described to him, but he awoke early the next morning with an overwhelming certainty that he was to go to Ninevah and instruct them to repent for their wickedness, and that if they did not repent they will be smitten from the Earth. But what did Jonah care for the enemies of Israel? If they chose to anger God then they could suffer the consequences. Besides, far more importantly, he had no siblings nor surviving relatives, so how could he leave his pregnant wife to fend for herself in the city, given that long travels were no place for an expectant mother?

So he prayed that his vision was merely a nightmare or hallucination driven by his memories of his father and went about his life. Yet on the eve of his daughter’s birth neither mother nor child survived and so Jonah knew such was the call of God.

How could a man not be bitter at the death of his family? At the absurdity that both father and son must share the same fate, when any other able bodied servant would do just as well? So Jonah more out of spite than fear went to the docks in Joppa and purchased passage to Tarshish on a trade boat, in the opposite direction of his assignment.

The crew on the boat was unfriendly but not inhumane, and he spent his time with little human interaction as passenger aboard the merchant vessel. After three days it became clear to the crew that the containers below deck that were supposed to contain food for the last legs of their journey were filled instead with textiles. With twenty crew and ten passengers, the remaining food would hardly last a day, much less the week remaining needed to reach Tarshish. So the captain gathered his crew and his passengers and told all aboard they must draw lots, and those with the shortest stick would be killed and eaten, and Jonah drew the short stick and knew this was his punishment. Could they have turned and docked along any of the numerous ports to resupply? Certainly. Such was the will of the Lord.

Not able to bear the thought of his own body consumed by others, Jonah in a fit of madness, or perhaps rationality, flung himself from the docks and expected to drown. So the text claims, though surely this could not be, he was swallowed by a fish and trapped below the water for three days and three nights. Much more likely he washed up along some distant shore half-dead, miraculous but not impossible, or picked up days later by some chance vessel and delivered delirious to the nearest coast.

Regardless, Jonah survived, and finally consented to his holy mission. However long it took he made his way to Ninevah and began to preach to passerbys on the street.

Hear my tale, we can imagine he cried. I have heard the will of God and refuted it, and for rejecting my duty I endured travesties no human should.

Surely he was one of many madmen that lined the populous streets of Ninevah, and just as surely was he disregarded. Who can say if it was months or years, but eventually Jonah realized that the city would remain as it was, and he despaired. What was the point of his pathetic life, then – of all his loss and misery? Would he a true believer perish while a city of heathens prospered?

So he left the city with the fervor for life long since burnt out of him and he lay upon a hill side facing towards Ninevah and waited to die, sleeping beneath the shade of a large fruiting tree. He awoke and motivated by great hunger reached for the sole fruit hanging heavy on a branch, yet he saw that the flesh was worm-ridden, and beneath it and around him lay the bodies of the vermin that had fallen and felled themselves on the arid ground.

So Jonah lay there dying, pondering the mass of wriggling invertebrates, and thought: am I the worm? Do I struggle vehemently just to die beneath the tree that sustains me?

The man robed in green smirked.

But Jonah was wrong, for he was not the worm, but rather the gourd.

Jan 19th, 500 p.d.

The five days of travel were taking a toll on the green paladins, all of them young and frankly untrained for the march. Even Isaac’s ruddy disposition, which had served a powerful motivator for the increasingly sleep deprived Jonah, had begun to fade, beaten down as much by exhaustion as incessant haranguing from the jealous soldiers.

“Isaac,” Jonah prompted, head pounding from after yet another turbulent night. “I had a strange dream.”

Isaac glanced at his friend and pursed his lips.

“Have you been having nightmares as well? You look terrible,” he responded, scrutinizing Jonah’s gaunt face and sunken eyes.

“I don’t know. It was about the man from the noble’s meeting. He was… no, nevermind. It was just a dream.”

Isaac nodded..

“You’re worried about what we’re doing. If it’s right.”

Jonah almost laughed. He had been so preoccupied with his bizarre vision and Isaac’s survival that he had barely spent any time pondering the morality of their crusade.

“Right,” he replied, not wanting to admit where his mind had been.

“Well, I’ve thought a lot about it the past few days,” Isaac confessed. “Jean-Paul was a gentle and loving man. If these people really did kill him in cold blood, then they are a danger. Better those that can deal with them do so, before it becomes the problem of those that can not.”

Jonah was taken aback.

“What if… what if they didn’t do it? Isn’t it a little too convenient a story?”

Isaac’s eyebrows furrowed.

“The cardinal isn’t stupid,” he said hotly. “He would have considered all possibilities, and made the call that resulted in the least amount of human suffering.”

“Well, as far as we can tell the cardinal only heard what the duke told him. What if the duke was lying?”

“He wouldn’t do that in a church.”

“Isaac,” Jonah chided, exasperated, “you wouldn’t do that, but couldn’t someone else?”

“Look, the cardinal communes directly with higher powers. Our duty as his servants is to follow orders, not question them.”

With that Isaac stormed off, leaving Jonah pacing dumbfounded behind him. The armament proceeded along the narrow ridge of the cliff side among the midpoint, sheer face laden with shale and granite. A thought of flinging himself off the side briefly flitted through his mind, but was quickly suppressed with visions of a slow demise lying lacerated among the rocks below. So, with no other option, Jonah labored on.

Jan 23rd, 500 p.d.

They set eyes upon the town on the eve of the tenth day of marching. Jonah’s feet were covered in blisters and his muscles ached from overuse, so it was a relief to finally gaze down upon the wooden gates of Odengarde. He was not sure what he had been expecting, but was surprised at the constitution of the structure – it was difficult to tell for sure from a distance but seemed that nine or ten foot tall wooden beams had been meticulously glued together with some sort of cement or industrial adhesive, spread diligently around a circumference of a thousand or so meters. Umber buildings stood sturdy within their shroud, curving in an elaborate architecture, with moss-laden roofs insulating them against the cool winter air. Squinting, he could make out woven sheep’s wool hung openly along windowsills, and vibrant textiles blanketing the ground near the center of town.

One of the gruff, balding city guards Jonah had learned called himself Tarnish spat on the ground.

“Peasants,” he grumbled.

A group of older men murmured assent, although Jonah noticed Isaac fidgeting silently besides them. The soldiers got to work setting up camp for the night, with orders from their commander to prepare for an early morning siege. Donkeys were relieved of their burdens though sporting deep red sores from clumsy bindings during the long journey, leather sleeping pads lined with dirt-stained cotton were rolled unceremoniously along dirt road and gravel roadside, and cold hard-tack was passed mutely among frigid fingers.

Jonah could not keep his eyes off the swarthy village, eyes registering movement in the evening twilight – small figures chasing each other around alleyways, a large cauldron of something carried to the center of the town and left there, painted branches brought from houses to decorate the makeshift city center. Then, a large fire lit and what seemed the whole town gathering together, ladling something out of the cauldron, men and women pulling out instruments that Jonah could not hear but imagined hearing, tiny figures animated like motes of dust prancing about and holding each other, until many hours later the last embers died and only the crescent moon illuminated the exhausted faces of the crusaders as they stared from their vantage point with spite.

He had never felt so strange in his life, sat as he was insomnolent and hypothermic and apart, so apart from the joviality he had just witnessed. Would that he could switch places with any of the sable figurines now asleep one night more, like dolls in a dollhouse, some make believe utopia impossibly better than its reflection. Would he also sing and dance and be merry? Could he? Was there some version of him, some orthogonal apparition that diverged at that moment, where father and mother survived, where Lucy returned, or perhaps never left at all? Where he was a man who was not so coward as to rely on his only friend to decide the moral authority for them both?

“Isaac,” he whispered. He knew he was awake from the incessant, obsessive shuffling to his right. The golden haired mountain besides him merely grunted.

“Mary and I slept together.”

The shuffling stopped, and for a long, long time the air hung hollow, broken only by an uncomfortable breeze occasionally flowing through the camp. Jonah, in disbelief at what he had just said, sat poised for Isaac’s reaction, adrenaline coursing through constricting veins. All senses amplified to superhuman levels, he recognized a familiar odor from upwind, and through the pale moonlight made out one lone wiry rosemary bush ten meters up the mountainside. It arched wild and desperate, thin branches almost bereft of leaves, and Jonah in nigh delirium imagined himself poised in its shape.

So transfixed was he that he did not notice the fist until it struck him across the cheek, laying him on his stomach.

“Bastard,” Isaac muttered, seemingly to himself.

Jonah lay there in his shame.

“It’s my fault.”

“Damn you.”

“We were drinking”

“Damn you.”

“It was late.”
“Damn you to hell.”

“It was a mistake.”

Silence, then, “was it?”

“Of course it was,” Jonah murmured into the dirt.

“I never understood her,” Isaac said quietly, suddenly pensive. “You did, though. You both speak the same language.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fuck you. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Jonah lay there, immobile as the granite cliffs around him, because he did.

“I didn’t want this. Isaac, you’re-”

“Open your mouth one more time and I swear on your dead parents’ graves I’ll rip your head off.”

Jonah shut his mouth, and after an hour of nothing the two fell asleep.

***

He awoke to shouting, and he struggled to his feet in the dawn light, neck aching from laying askew on the hard ground. Isaac was in the center of camp with the commander, face red with fury.

“I won’t stand for this,” he roared, causing stirs among the rest of the encampment. A man not from the retinue was on the ground next to him, presumably some scout from Orengarde, bleeding from a blunt wound across his temple. Jonah saw that he was not quite dead yet, evidenced by slow breaths, but his eyes while open were unfocused and his mouth hung almost comically ajar.

“You knew what we were getting into, kid,” the commander replied, irritated rather than indignant.

“I thought…” Isaac faltered. “I thought it was the right thing to do.”

The commander snorted derisively.

“We don’t have time for this. Put your armor on, soldier.”

“No.” Isaac’s voice did not quaver this time.

Cruel laughter erupted from their side, and the steadily growing crowd turned to see Tarnish saunter from his crew into the center of the circle.

“Seems like our resident crybaby-”

Jonah saw the flash of steel but was standing too far away to stop Isaac’s hand. The guard’s head flew off his neck and tumbled to the ground, face frozen in one last sneer. Jonah began to run, but as Isaac was focused on the consequence of his impulsive vengeance, the commander raised a saber of his own and struck Isaac in the stomach. Isaac fell in a heap, clutching at the gut wound, and just as Isaac reached them the commander finished the job with a swift jab to his throat. He leveled the blade against Jonah as a warning, but the paladin ignored him, falling to his knees and clutching at Isaac’s body.

“No, Isaac, please.” he begged, desperately running through the forms for healing magic he had always been terrible at.

“Cleric. A cleric,” he shouted, but as he looked around desperately none of the armament dared move.

“Enough,” the commander said with finality. “The lot of you, prepare yourselves.” He motioned to the soldiers, who shaken out of their reverie scrambled to follow orders.

“Pull yourself together paladin,” he said, looking down at Jonah. “If you’re not there at the charge, I’ll finish you off myself.” Then, stepping over the injured foreigner, he walked off.

Jonah barely registered the threat, frantically pressing against the gouged skin beneath his friend’s jaw. Try though as he might, the neck wound was a deadly, practiced strike, clean through the artery, and blood flowed unabated through Jonah’s shaking fingers.

“Please, no,” Jonah begged. “I still need to fix this. We have to go back and you have to marry Mary and – please… don’t leave me too.”

Isaac aspirated blood one last time, pink foam dripping down his cheek, and then he was still. Jonah’s tears blurred his vision, too busy clutching at Isaac’s body to wipe at his face, and the wet astigmatism began to skew unnaturally. His compromised vision swirled and rotated, and he looked around in horror, realizing that he could not see. He stumbled to his feet, nearly tripping over the two bodies in front of him, and staggered as if drunk around the camp. Then, just as suddenly as it began, it ended, and his vision stabilized. He wiped at his face, rubbing blood across his face, and blinking furiously saw that he was standing in front of the solitary growth of rosemary he had noticed the evening before. The branches that just that evening had stood frail and sickly now burst with new emerald growth, and Jonah finally understood.

So he walked mutely back to the empty camp and adorned himself with the church’s armor as golden as its railings, strapped his longsword across his back, and following the commander walked to the front lines to join the assault.

***

What is it to take a life? A natural thing, perhaps, one soul in exchange for another, all fair in the eyes of an indifferent God that wishes pretty insects into existence and demands they dance for him. So Jonah mused with the zealous troops as they stood just outside the range of arrow fire and considered the stalwart gates of the city, starving creatures salivating on the eve of a feast.

What choice is there but to fulfill his will?

Jonah peered upwards, gray sunlight shining through an overcast sky, and looked at the blurry outlines of the village’s defenders. He imagined they stared back with a grim resolution, hoisting weapons of their own, waiting, and that in their insufferable purgatory they prayed.

The commander raised an arm, gauntlet of silver and maroon reflecting the dull light of the morning, and the men around him roared and charged. A response echoed through the ranks of the men and women along the ridges of the wooden walls and they fired the first cloud of arrows. The projectiles struck true and soldiers collapsed to the floor in cries of pain, barbed arrows protruding from gaps in their armor.

Jonah and the retinue sprinted onwards, leaving the unlucky men to their fate, and suffered two more such volleys before reaching the perimeter of the town. They huddled underneath their shields as arrowheads and rocks rained down upon them from on high, biding time. Finally, a wheezing pot-bellied man emerged from the depths of the huddled men and began to move his shaking fingers in a pattern, whispering furiously to himself. A rogue arrow snuck between a gap in the shields held overhead and struck him in the thigh just as he neared completion, and as he cried out, a massive wall of flame fell from the sky and incinerated him and the ten nearest soldiers.

Despite a cheer that rose through the crowd above him, the siege magic had done as intended, evaporating enough of the wall to allow soldiers to begin pouring through. They struck at the unarmored villagers ruthlessly, the reinforced metal of the armament castrating the lethality of makeshift spears. Another ball of flame erupted in the center of the opening, blowing men away like leaves and setting the dry wood of the breached wall ablaze. Jonah traced the arc of embers to a tall woman ducking around the corner of one of the buildings. He pushed through screaming men and made his way to her, feeling arrows hit his armor but failing to pierce it. Just as he turned the corner an iron spearhead flashed out from below and jabbed into the open space along his inner thigh, piercing through the muscle. He cried out in pain and instinctively flailed his sword arm, and only when it was too late did he realize he had cut into the thin body of a teenager. The reedy boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and he stared at the sword pushing through his lung in disbelief.

Blood began to fill his lungs and he started coughing, saliva mixing with crimson life force to form a raspberry paste that trickled viscous down his cheek, and it reminded Jonah so much of Isaac’s death that he pulled his sword out and impulsively swung again. The sword cut across the boy’s rib cage, not deep enough to kill, and he fell to the floor choking. Jonah fell backwards, mage forgotten, and stared at his victim in horror. He was clawing at the dirt in front of him, fingers attempting to find some purchase or perhaps some answer in the coarse ground, and Jonah watched and saw how his bloody fingernails now digging through ferrous mud had been chewed down to nubs.

“No,” he breathed. “No.” And he crawled to the boy disregarding the agony in his leg and put his hands on his chest and prayed more earnestly than he ever had before. He prayed not for Isaac’s rebirth, not for Mary’s love, not even for Lucy’s return – but that whatever monstrous deity that governed this hell grant this child just one puny shred of mercy. He felt an uncomfortable heat course through his arms and his eyes scrunched shut in supplication flew open but the wounds on the boy’s chest remained and in addition now black scorch marks that matched the shape of his palms lay branded upon his pale skin and the boy lay still and so Jonah cradled the body in his arms and wept.

***

The battle continued for another hour or so, the shouts and screams of the skirmish gradually decaying to the occasional clash of weapons, or the rough grunt of someone impaled by a blade or javelin. Jonah lay the whole while leaning against a wall with the child limp in his arms, willing anyone – villager, commander, stray dog –  to chance upon him and end his unholy existence once and for all. But no one came, until the bloodbath had ended and the surviving watchmen patrolling the carnage found him bleeding and called for the only remaining cleric.

This one Jonah recognized as one of the newer recruits, a younger man that he recognized from Isaac’s circle of earnest do-gooders. He smiled in a grim but friendly way, and as if he thought it perfectly reasonable that he cradled the body of an enemy, gently tugged at his hands so that he relaxed his grip and pulled the corpse to the side. His body humming with light, he placed two hands on Jonah’s leg who watched in wonder as the pain in his thigh began to subside. On the verge of passing out just a minute ago, he now felt unnaturally energetic and vigorous, and with that vigor he channeled a mutinous death glare at the novice healer. The new recruit politely ignored him, and when he was done got up and hurried in the direction of more shouting from the scouts.

Jonah, filled suddenly with purpose, tried the door of the house he was leaning against and found that it was unlocked. He opened the entryway and made his way into the living space, and inside it found a simple painting on a makeshift canvas, crushed berries and horse-hair brush used to paint figures on a light papyrus. On it was a carefully detailed portrait of the boy outside, an almost sallow skin and too-big eyes covered in ragged hair and a toothy smile. He had the grace to stumble outside before allowing himself to be sick on the red ground by the door.

Heaving and sweating, he made his way back into the house and after some rummaging found what he was hoping for in a small room on the bottom floor – a simple spade with an oaken handle. As he walked past the painting in the living area, he picked up the horse hair brush and not able to bear the thought of the memento being destroyed pocketed it. Then he stepped around the mess he made by the entrance and began to dig. Once the hole was deep enough he carried the boy’s body to its crude grave and gently placed him at the bottom. Then, picking up his longsword from where it lay on the ground, stained brown with desiccated blood, he considered the ornate hilt crafted of precious metals into the shape of a cross and snapped it off across his knee. He took the shaft of the broken blade and stabbed it into the dirt and walked away.

In the center of the town atop once beautiful textiles, sewn with flowers now charred and muddied, a handful of the soldiers had restarted the fire that had been used the night before and were huddling around it. Jonah looked at the walls of the city smouldering with toxic fumes of the cement vaporized into a black gas, at houses with woolen drapings along windowsills that had caught fire leading eager flames into a sea of furnishments now tinder, upon the blue faces of the men he had known since he was a teenager staring dumbly at survivors quivering like dead leaves aching to be blown away in a windstorm, and wondered if it was enough.

The commander emerged from a nearby cottage, wiping fresh blood off his sword with a leather skirt he had pilfered, and moved to stand in the clearing with the rest of the men. 

“I didn’t see you much,” he said simply to Jonah, holding the stolen garment over the fire and then flinging it, alight, into the open door of the building.

Jonah said nothing, considering the graying man who was miraculously uninjured while he inspected his blade in front of the fire. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a figure crawling along the roof of the pillaged house.

“Not sure I understood those of your… profession,” he continued. “I always figured you were little more than decor. Fancy baubles for the rich to gawk at while they said their pretty words. Guess I was right.”

The slender figure above him stopped along the rim of the roof, and Jonah recognized her as the mage he had run after this morning. In her hands was a small egg-shaped object, and with a quick movement of practiced fingers she produced a flame and lit a small strand that hung from the peak. The commander, having said his piece, had sheathed his sword and was beginning to turn away, clearing his throat as if preparing to organize the remaining soldiers.

“Wait,” Jonah said, catching the officer’s attention. “You’ll need this more than I will.”

He took the man’s gauntlet in one hand and maneuvered him between himself and the mage, and with his other hand pushed the severed hilt of his blade into the man’s palm. As the graying officer opened his mouth for another cruel retort, the mage tossed the object into the clearing and it exploded, sending iron shrapnel through the survivors. The commander fell, one particularly large chunk of iron having embedded itself a few inches into the back of his skull, and Jonah, unharmed, stood watching blood pool on the floor while shouting erupted around him. Crossbow bolts flew into the air and despite her attempt to scramble away one well placed shot pierced the mage through the back of the head and she fell limp and tumbled off the roof.

Jonah inhaled deeply. A familiar odor had started to fill the air.

February 2nd, 500 p.d.

When the skeleton crew returned to their camp after the battle, they were shocked to find Isaac laying as he had when they left him, asleep but markedly more alive than he had been earlier that day. His wounds had been sealed shut with hardly a scar to remember them by, and he breathed steadily in his rest, unlike the Orengardian scout who lay unblinking at his side. When Jonah picked him up to dump him off the mountainside he noticed that the commander must have finished him off as he was walking away – he had a hole in his neck identical to the one that killed Isaac. The young cleric that healed Jonah earlier had prostrated himself immediately upon seeing Isaac alive and would only move an hour later to help him move the miracle incarnate onto a makeshift stretcher and down the opposite side of the mountain.

Jonah for his part refused to take a break from bearing his friend’s body, compromising only to receive help from a rotating array of soldiers as they trekked the ten-day journey back to the city. Though he willed each new night to be their reconciliation, Isaac never awoke from his slumber. So Jonah spent each evening doting on his revivified friend, turning Isaac methodically to prevent sores from forming, swapping out his clothes and dumping bowel movements, and bundling him in blankets near the fire so he would not lose an extremity to frostbite. Since he was not awake to eat Jonah had to mash hard biscuits with water and spoon feed the slurry into an uncooperative mouth.

When complaints percolated through the evening air from the exhausted guards he would walk over to them and provoke a fight, beating them mercilessly so that by their return the retinue was rendered totally mute in terror. Only the cleric dared speak, under Jonah’s orders, to anoint Isaac each night before what appeared to the bewildered army as some strange aromatherapy applied to the sleeping giant using dried rosemary Jonah would collect obsessively during their food breaks each day.

Though none would believe it, Jonah for all his intention had no more insight beyond what he was granted the morning of the siege. He had no more visions nor losses of sight, and his nightmares were filled with the hands of the boy he murdered rather than elites adorned in arboreal garb. All he knew was that the herb he was forcing into his pockets each day was somehow responsible for Isaac’s revival, and so perhaps was useful to his eventual recovery as well. Though Jonah began to doubt even this as no improvements arrived in spite of his toils.

Jonah awoke on the final day of their excursion feeling completely empty, with a conviction that he had died just like Isaac had but his body instead of left vacant was filled with the soul of someone else. He could not bring himself to care about anything beyond Isaac’s immediate well being. The mutinous stares of his comrades stirred no anxiety nor regret in his heart, just as pockets bursting with decaying foliage resulting in no embarrassment. So it was that Jonah breached the city walls and could only watch with dead eyes as Mary ran past him to Isaac’s body and begged loudly in front of the whole town his forgiveness for her infidelity.

He was spirited away to various meetings after that, interviews with more officers and church officials that demanded an understanding of how so few of their number had returned. Jonah dully told the events of the battle a dozen times, only leaving out the parts he played in the death of the child and of the commander. Either through some miracle of trauma or perhaps a deeper hatred in the hearts of the survivors for the callous commander than the psychotic paladin, no punishment was arranged for Jonah’s insubordination.

Instead the church quickly arranged lavish celebrations, and in the evening of their arrival a great feast was thrown to celebrate the destruction of their eastern foe. Chickens and goats were slaughtered and stuffed with preserved apples and sage, berries that were canned five months ago were boiled down into viscous reductions, huge caskets of aged wine were rolled from beneath the cellars of the cathedral and shared amongst the populace not for communion but for revelry. Minstrels were summoned by the mayor to entertain the crowds, sorcerors that would never have been openly tolerated by the church on another day were allowed to launch fiery displays of magic, and sly brothel owners spirited away the drunkest of the crowd into alleyways with promises of distracted guards and discount prices.

Throughout the festivities Jonah was seated with the other soldiers at the head of a giant table and brought endless indulgences. Meat and alcohol and expensive sweets all presented before him on priceless china and in crystal goblets. Averse to any sort of food, much less insulting hedonism, Jonah just sat there sullenly and absently twirled one of the iridescent drinking glasses in his hand, pondering how the light of the torches and candles bent at sharp angles in the crystalline visage.

Finally, as the clock neared midnight, the opportunity he had been waiting for presented itself. The cardinal sat unattended by his usual retinue drinking from gilded chalice, altar boys and priests finally abandoning the celebrations for an early night. Jonah pushed his chair back and made his way towards the decrepit figure, seating himself without permission on a stool to his left.

The cardinal turned to look at him, squinting.

“Jensen, right?”

Jonah just stared at the elderly man, not bothering to correct him.

“Terribly sorry to hear about your friend,” he continued. “It is a small consolation, but you would be pleased to hear that the mayor has agreed to allocate an additional ten percent to the kitchen’s food – ”

“Help him,” Jonah interrupted.

“Uhm, I’m sorry?”

“Help him. Have your pastors do a ceremony. Pray the rosary. Sacrifice a goat, for all I care. I want you to make him normal again.”

The cardinal appraised the paladin, then took a long sip of his wine.

“Of course. We will do everything in our power – within reason, you understand.”

Jonah stared blankly at liver spotted cheeks.

“With the reduction in staff, it will be quite challenging maintaining normal operations. Many of the clerics that left with you had a number of administrative duties. Not to mention we will need to re-staff the missing paladins…”

“If I do your grunt work, you’ll heal him?”

Yellow teeth emerged from a crooked smile.

“Well when you put it like that, it sounds rather quid pro quo. But, if you prefer.” 

“Fine.”

“In that case, there is someone you must meet.” He motioned with his hand and one of the young servers hurried over, a trundle of cups in his arms. He whispered something in his ear and the boy bustled off. Jonah and the cardinal sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to musicians repeat their exhausted repertoire for the fifth time, until a portly man emerged from the crowd and joined them at the head of the long table. With a shock Jonah recognized him as the mayor.

“Pleasure,” he smiled, and reached out a smooth hand to Jonah, who was surprised by the firm handshake. He wore an exquisitely tailored black suit and maroon bowtie, and on the hand that he offered to Jonah he sported a beautiful golden ring with a massive emerald.

“Alabaster,” he nodded to the cardinal, who smiled mischievously back.

“Louis, this is your new contact for all duties regarding the church.”

“Ah,” the stranger looked Jonah up and down. “We had discussed the other one…”

“Invalid, unfortunately.”

“Right. Well, pleasure to meet you…?”

“Jonah.”

It was only for a second, but Jonah noticed a flash of surprise across the man’s face. The bureaucrat, not missing a beat, sat and began to fill Jonah in with the rough schedule of the obligations he would have for a city. Over his shoulder Jonah could make out children in the courtyard playing with wooden dolls in the flickering torchlight.

April 5th, 503 p.d.

Jonah stood in the doorway, apprehensive. When he heard the news he had dropped everything and went to the house, but now that he was here he wasn’t sure whether he would offer congratulations or condolences. Just as he decided he would be unwelcome, the door opened, and Mary’s haggard figure emerged into the moonlight.

“Jonah. It’s good to see you,” she breathed, giving him a small smile. Jonah could not help but think that she looked awful. Her eyes were sunken, her face gaunt, and her nails once somewhat presentable now were raw, bloody stumps. Jonah imagined them grasping at mud.

“I heard from Markus just now. That you and Isaac are to be wed.” Her face fell.

“Yeah. In three days,” she said quietly, bringing her left ring finger to her mouth.

“I…” Jonah started, but found that words failed him.

Mary looked over his shoulder, and seeing evening-goers milling around the neighborhood, motioned for him to come inside.

“Come in, I’ll make tea or something.”

He followed her inside and shut the door behind him, and taking off his recently cobbled boots trailed behind her into the kitchen. He raised his hands in an offer to assist in some way, but she motioned for him to sit and so he sat and watched her drift around the small room. Letting himself stare under the pretense of concern, he could see pieces of his memory of her remained true, in the way she balanced on one set of toes to reach for cups on the cupboard, and the restless twirling of her hair while she waited for the kettle to boil. Feelings long suppressed stirred rebelliously in his stomach, but as he had with many other errant emotions the past few years, he shoved them away for later

“You look good,” she said finally, gently placing a single cup of chamomile tea in front of Jonah. “You never used to dress this well.”

“I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to,” he admitted, bringing the beverage to his lips. It was understeeped – some things had not changed, perhaps.

“Now part of my job is to look pretty,” he continued, after taking a big, conspicuous swig.

“Must be nice,” she said off handedly, with a glance at the hallway.

“He’s…?”

“Just in the other room. Same, as always.”

Jonah nodded, a tiny flurry of hope crushed. A familiar feeling, recently.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been visiting as much. Work has been…” Jonah couldn’t look at the woman across from him.

Mary snorted. “I wouldn’t come if I were you, either. It’s fucking depressing.”

Jonah nearly spurted his tea all over her. He coughed, then laughed, a little too hard. Mary followed suit, and for a brief moment they were teenagers again.

“I really hoped something would change that first year,” Jonah admitted, candidly, after he had calmed down. “After that… I don’t know. It feels like Markus has been stringing me along this whole time. First it was those prayer books, then those visiting clerics he was recommended, then the archived scrolls. Now, well, this.”

“He’s taking advantage of you,” Mary said bluntly.

“I know,” Jonah conceded.

“Do you?”

Jonah smiled. “Yeah. You’re right, like you always are.”

Mary sniffed, feigning indignation.

“I was OK with it. As long as it got us Isaac back, right? I would have done anything. Would do anything. This, though…”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Mary whispered, and the hoarseness of her voice tugged at Jonah’s heart.

“If it worked… would you be happy?”

Mary shook her head silently.

“I don’t know. It’s been so long. Kind of hard to keep the romance alive when you’ve wiped his ass twice a day for three years, too,” she said with a quiet laugh.

“What if we left? Packed our things and just ran. We could take a horse and make it to the port in a week,” Jonah blurted.

Mary looked at him, and for one beautiful second Jonah thought she would say yes.

“Jonah… It’s not that I don’t want to.”

“But,” he continued for her, willing against all odds to keep his composure.

“I just don’t think I could live with myself. It all feels kind of like my fault, you know? I do this terrible thing to him and then avoid him for two weeks and then he’s whisked away on this suicide mission and now he’s a fucking vegetable.”

Though he could not admit it aloud, he knew that deep down he felt the same way. Especially since he was the one that brought him back.

“You were right,” Jonah said, eyes on the mug in front of him. “I should have just told him that night. It’s all my fault.”

“Jonah,” she said with an exasperated smile. “Fuck off.”

She took his hand in hers and looked at him. He stared back, transfixed.

“Let’s just agree it’s both our fault, OK? You need the priest and the Book to read scripture, you know?”

“You’re the Book.”

Mary grinned at him. “Don’t push it.”

They held on to each other’s hands for a bit longer, until a groan from the living room caused them both to jump in their seats and instinctively pull away from each other.

“Shit,” Mary looked up at the ceiling of the small room and sighed.

“Should we…”

“No, no, he just does that sometimes.”

They sat there, both trying not to look at the other, while another inhuman moan echoed through the house.

“Mary, what do you think you’d be, if you had a different life from this one?” Jonah imagined Lucy running down a hallway much like the one in this house all those years ago.

She stared wistfully out a small window across from her. “When I was a girl I thought I’d love to be a princess, destined to live my life in excess. That was before I found out about all of the arranged marriages and politics and popping out an endless stream of babies. Then, as I grew up, I thought I wanted to be a famous artist, or poet, or something. I had learned how good it felt for people to like me, but I didn’t learn until later what it felt like when people did not. And that fame was just an amplification of those things.

“So, when I got old enough that it mattered how well I did in school I thought I wanted to be a scholar. To challenge myself intellectually every day, to prove to this shithole world that I’m the smartest thing it had ever seen. That’s why I started working as a scribe in the library – I wanted to work somewhere where I was surrounded by knowledge. Then I met you and Isaac, and for just a little while I thought that being swept into a simple life with a hot husband wouldn’t be so bad.

“But, as you know, the feeling didn’t last. Me dating Isaac was like a man dying of dehydration dating a mermaid. Eventually, all I could think was – ‘Damn, this guy is literally the exact opposite of me’. He would tell me about all of the gifts his coworkers would give him every week, meanwhile I was struggling to get the priests to look me in the eyes. He would spend all his free time volunteering to help the needy, but I was crying in my room about how I didn’t have any female friends my age. We would fuck and then he’d jump out of bed for his second or third workout of the day, while I was so burnt out I just wanted to sleep for eleven hours every night.

“It is just so god damn exhausting to be comparing yourself against that every day. Then, when he came back basically dead, but worse because now my full time job is keeping this comatose meat sack somehow clinging to the dredges of life, I learned that scholarly aspirations don’t mean shit when the church that runs this city tries to make a saint out of you.

“So, what do I think I would be, Jonah? Someone else somewhere else. Anything is better than this.”

Jonah looked on in horror as two thin lines of tears ran down her face, twinkling in the lamplight like the crystal goblet he drank wine from the night of his return, with light bending and reflecting and twisting over itself but in the chaos of its confusion, or perhaps because of it, creating something awesome. He thought of the body of the boy contorted in an unnatural angle at the bottom of the ditch and of the way he had sunk his torn fingers into the flesh of the earth as if demanding some answer for the injustice of it all from the indifferent surface of a planet that had not the mechanisms nor the will for understanding his suffering but still he picked away at it hoping that if he dug deep enough an answer would emerge and that is what Jonah had done is help him find that answer deeper deeper deeper into the cold ground.

“Sorry.” Mary wiped at the tears with a sleeve, sniffling. “I’ll be fine. It’s just hard right now.”

But Jonah knew that she was lying.

***

After the tenor of Mary’s repeated insistences that she would be okay turned from grateful to irritated, Jonah asked to see his old friend. Mary led him around the corner into an open room with a large window stretching out into the street. Isaac lay propped up on a bed of pillows facing the window, eyes open but looking at nothing, and mouth hung oddly ajar. He was a fraction of his weight at his prime, now looking disturbingly emaciated. Mary took a handkerchief and wiped at the line of drool on his chin, then excused herself to finish tending to some housework.

Jonah sat on a stool and stared out the window with Isaac for a long time, watching normal people walk food and children and themselves back and forth through the twilight. Occasionally he would hear the sound of something falling or breaking, quickly followed by an audible curse, and Jonah would not be able to control a smile.

“Mary as a housewife, huh?” he said to Isaac conversationally, as if he was in on the joke.

Isaac said nothing, maintaining a dull gaze somewhere around the edge of the windowsill.

“Funny that she ended up here while I’m the one teaching,” he continued. “I’m really bad at it, actually. All of the new paladins hate me. We’ve had four dropouts already – any more and we won’t have enough to man the noble’s meetings. The clerics are all sick of repeating themselves to me too, I know that they’ve all complained to Markus. Little do they know that while at least I am trying, he doesn’t give a real shit at all.

“I sit in meetings on the mayor’s council once a week, and they serve us expensive liquor while he entertains dignitaries, missionaries, entertainers and merchants. He knows his way around people, that’s for sure. More often than not they leave having made some investment in the city. That’s how he got that garden you were complaining about. Before the battle. Some famous florist gifted him a bundle of tulip bulbs, and he sweet talked a traveling carpenter into working for a quarter his normal price. Though with no one to maintain it properly the whole thing has been overrun by weeds.

“It’s funny, too, right in the center is the biggest damn rosemary bush I’ve ever seen. It’s got branches thick as a forearm, and leaves bigger than my head. There’s something not right about that plant. I never told you this, but when the commander stabbed you I could have sworn that this one bush… No, it sounds crazy. But you did come back, after all.”

Jonah reached into his pocket and pulled out the horse hair brush he had pocketed. He had been compelled to maintain it, perhaps as a concrete reminder of the sins he had committed, as to not let himself forget – or perhaps too because it had stirred some bizarre jealousy, that this alien child had been loved so deeply that someone would take the time celebrate him so. He had taken it to a woodworker who recommended a varnish for the handle and a mixture of lye and animal fat to clean the head, so when he pulled it out it was nearly in better condition than when he found it.

“I did a really bad thing, Isaac,” he whispered, not wanting Mary to overhear him, but three years past due for a confessional.

“I killed a boy before his time. It haunts me. Every night I dream about him, and the easy dreams are the ones where I relive his death over and over. Because the hard dreams are the ones where I picture what his life might have been like. Would he have become the village chief, or a painter? Would he have married and had children or been a lifelong bachelor as the heartthrob of the village? Could he have learned five languages and traveled the world, or would he have stayed at home and taught village children how to read and write?”

Jonah brought the brush level with the bed and ran a thumb through the thick hair.

“The worst nightmare is when I picture him sitting in his room alone, chewing on his nails just like Mary does. I can feel his anxiety and worry, because I know it. I know what it’s like to feel like the world is crumbling around you, that feeling that everything has gone terribly wrong, just as I know that it’s a pointless feeling. But he never got to figure that out. Because of me. And now Mary is being locked into the life of a caretaker. Also because of me. One wrong to make another wrong. It’s such a waste, Isaac. What’s the point?”

Isaac moaned, but did not stir.

“I hate myself so much. I think every day about all of the things that I should have done but didn’t because I was afraid. I should have told you the night it happened. I should have stood up to the commander, to the duke. I should have told Mary how I felt the first day I met her. I should have fucking killed myself while we were on the cliffside on the march to Orengarde. Everyone would have been better off.”

Isaac shifted, and to Jonah’s incredulity he watched as a bony hand raised itself from the bed. The rail-thin figure flexed at his torso and stretched until wilting fingers grasped the handle of the brush. Jonah breathlessly pushed the brush into his friend’s hand and helped him close his fingers around it. He ran out of the room to get Mary, but despite their best efforts to reproduce the miracle, Isaac did not stir again.

April 6th, 503 p.d.

It was two days until Mary and Isaac’s wedding, and Jonah could not stop thinking about it. For the first time in three years Isaac had moved – it was the miracle he had been praying for every night since the battle, that he had been begging for Markus to bring about but that he had produced. Himself. He thought of the confession he had when Isaac was last fully present, and guilt stabbed at him. Guilt that had never really gone away after all this time, but stayed in the pit of his stomach slowly slicing at him whenever a brief moment of mirth or joy stumbled unintentionally upon him. How good it would feel for Isaac to embrace him and say – ‘I forgive you, Jonah. You are an imperfect person in an indifferent world, but it’s not all your fault’. Would he be able to sleep through the night then, or allow himself to indulge in some small occasional pleasure as payment for the toils of the day? Could he clamber up the walls of this ditch he was digging for himself, with nowhere to go but further down?

“Jonah,” the cleric’s voice pleaded. “Please, you have to focus.”

Jonah was startled back into the small basement room beneath the cathedral. The cleric from the battlefield was looking at him, eyes filled earlier with apprehension now exuding desperate frustration. Jonah had his hands ungloved placed against each other, and he pulled them apart in wonder as if forgetting that he had cut his left palm open just a few minutes ago.

“I keep telling you this,” the cleric continued, crouching beside him. “It’s not going to work if you’re distracted. The last thing you want to do is let your mind wander while you’re trying to patch someone back up.”

Jonah breathed out and tried to think of something that would calm him, but all that came to mind was the look of pain on Isaac’s face as he choked to death on his own blood. The cleric sighed and put a hand on Jonah’s and warmth flowed from one man to the other and he opened his palm and saw his hand was healed.

“Let’s try again next week. Here, Jonah,” the cleric handed him a string of beads. “Tonight, try praying the rosary from start to finish without interruption. Or count backwards from two hundred, or count the fibonacci sequence, or recite all the names of the people you knew in school. It doesn’t matter what you do, just sit down for five minutes and do it.”

The cleric stormed off, muttering to himself. Jonah felt bad, knowing that he was adding to the kid’s mounting responsibilities. Why couldn’t he do this? More evidence to the pile that something was deeply wrong with him.

Jonah stood and with a deep sigh left the room to begin his morning duties. First was his morning training with the new paladin recruits. Now that he was in charge of development of the next generation, the last thing he wanted was for swordplay to be minimized in favor of decorum – you never knew when you would be called upon after all. After terrorizing the resentful city guard for a few months, forced to comply upon the mayor’s orders, Jonah felt he at least had a grasp on the basics, and he mixed these simple techniques with basic conditioning for his training regiment. Many had dropped already, likely drawn by aspirations of the very sinecure that had sorely disappointed Jonah when he enlisted as a teenager. He was just grateful that the remaining four recruits showed some amount of discipline, and though Markus gave him a hard time for three of them being female, he did not turn them away.

Next, stinking with sweat, he met with a couple of the clerics to hear their reports on the logistics of managing the church. Standing as far away from him as could be considered polite, the two he had hired to replace those felled in battle not fully acclimated to the stench of male perspiration, the head cleric and her assistant rattled off the various problems of the day. Funds from the most recent lavish donations lubricated by the mayor’s silver tongue were running dry, so they had begun to reach into the large reserves accumulated over the years from donations and tithes. Markus, who had complained about Jonah’s insistence to shut down revenue from the latter, would surely have some choice words from him on this later.

The nobles, who had been fascinated by their perception of Mary’s inhuman dedication to her fiance, were thrilled at the news of the wedding and wanted it to be lavish, so all of the church staff were scrambling to arrange as luxurious a celebration as possible in under a week. Jonah nodded along to talks of cleaning up the mayor’s garden for the ceremony and the slaughter of not ten but fifteen cows, thinking all the while how he might postpone it but finding no plausible way to stave off the aristocrats’ excitement.

The community kitchen that Isaac had dedicated himself to was overworked and undersupplied, as usual. The mayor never compromising on additional food beyond what the cardinal had negotiated, and Markus who despite his many complaints tended not to interfere with any of Jonah’s work explicitly prohibiting Jonah from supplementing their inventory with leftovers from the church’s meals, the days the kitchen was open were chaotic and increasingly dangerous. Jonah conceded to donate the time of two of his new paladins to supplement the city guard in the meantime, and asked the clerics to look into the feasibility of a public food donation program.

Finally, rats had been found in the wine cellars, so the head cleric had taken initiative and purchased a moderate portion of poison which was stored triple bagged in a store room near the cellar, and would be spread on the floors each night until the problem resolved.

The clerics dismissed, Jonah walked down from the small office, past the cardinal’s room, across the courtyard behind the cathedral to the barracks, and collected the two most competent recruits. They grumbled but followed, and together they walked down the long open staircase to the city. Jonah noted to himself that the gilded arms were beginning to dull – they would need to hire someone to polish the staircase. Maybe someone to cut back the out of control rosemary that had exploded from the hilltops and had recently begun to overtake the steps.

At the base of the stairs they proceeded south, walking through a litany of merchants and stalls. It was in the early hours of the day while shop owners were still setting up their displays, so the foot traffic was mercifully sparse. Perhaps because of this Jonah had a full view of the colorful textiles draped along one particular stand, a dead ringer for the cloth that had covered Orengarde’s city center. Jonah paused, letting the two recruits trundle on without him, memories of burning buildings threatening to overtake him. A small woman, unmistakably Orengardian with near translucent skin and jet black hair, emerged from below the stand with more fabric bundled in her arms, and paying him no mind she continued to drape layers of colors atop one another. Watching her attend to the delicate weavings, he could not avoid thinking of the boy’s portrait, and how this woman may have known the stranger who painted it – and thinking of the horse hair brush he had left in Isaac’s hand a terrible realization dawned upon Jonah.

He walked up to the woman and pointed at a yellow pattern into which small flowers were meticulously sewn.

“How much?”

The older woman scrutinized him, and for a moment he feared that she recognized him.

“You want dress? Scarf?” She asked in broken English, pantomiming the items.

“Just the fabric.”

The woman gave him a blank look, so Jonah just took out his entire coin purse and gave it to her. While she looked at it in awe he gently tugged his choice from the pile, rolled it into a ball, and marched in the opposite direction of his pupils.

He walked north across the city, passing the stairs to the church, and did not stop until he was at the doorstep of the house he had been at just the night before. He tried to push the door open but found it locked, so he pounded on it until Mary’s face emerged frazzled and annoyed from the doorway.

“Jonah? What are you doing here?”

He ignored her, pushing open the door and past her, and made his way into Isaac’s room. He lay in a similar position as he had left him, staring somewhere just off from the edge of the window.

“What’s going on?” Mary had followed him in.

Jonah hesitated, knowing that this moment would change everything. Would it be easier not to know? Probably. With shaking hands he took to corners of the shoddily folded yellow cotton and opened it in front of Isaac, praying that he was mistaken.

“Isaac, oh my god.”

The invalid’s hand twitched, and then his arm and torso were lifting to reach towards Jonah. He mutely held out the offering and draped it over a veiny arm, and the gaunt figure slowly reclined again, holding the fabric against his chest. Mary shrieked with excitement, and ran from the room, returning shortly with more colored fabrics, but Jonah just stood there in dumb denial. While the ecstatic woman dramatically waved around various blankets and tablecloths, Jonah slowly stepped backwards to the bay window overlooking the street, unlatched the nearest panel, and pushed it slightly ajar.

***

The kitchen had been a disaster that morning, and the new recruits were furious with him for abandoning them in the middle of the markets. Three of the church members volunteering had been stabbed, and the whole supply line had been overturned, with starving paupers swarming the building and ransacking it. Jonah had sat distracted through various meetings with clerics and guardsmen but could not for the life of him remember what had been said. It had all simply ceased to matter to him anymore.

It was after these meetings while he was reading monotone over a list of events of the day to the cardinal that the errant flash of one of the holy man’s many rings that the second realization of the day struck him. Something odd about this whole thing, indeed. Fury pounded through him, but with incredible restraint he politely excused himself, and the cardinal who had been only half-listening anyways waved him away, taking another swig of his vintage.

Jonah hurried over to the barracks again and began to rummage through the crude inventory. The besmirched recruits from that morning glared at him but said nothing while he dug like a madman through heaps of training swords and armor pieces until he found the small wooden crossbow hanging from a hook in a moldy storage area. More frantic searching revealed just two bolts at the bottom of a large chest.

“Almost,” Jonah whispered to himself, leaving the mess for the green paladins to deal with. He went to his room, leaving the crossbow and ammunition on a desk by his bed, then made his way down to the dressing rooms. A few of the male clerics were changing for a service tonight, including the one from the battle. Jonah grabbed the man’s thin arms and whirled him around to face him.

“I need something. A weapon that I don’t need to aim.”

The cleric stared at him, eyes wide, and tried to pry away from his grip, but Jonah just squeezed tighter.

“Now,” he growled.

The young man nodded violently, acquiescing, and half-clothed led Jonah to his room. He got onto the floor and reached underneath his bed to pull out a cloth sack. From it he produced a variety of items he had taken from the Orengardian battle field – intricately woven sheep-skin rags, colorful shirts and flowing pants, some choice selections of pottery that had been carefully wrapped back in the city with nondescript linens.

The cleric, flushing with shame, produced one final item and offered it to Jonah – a small egg-shaped object with a thin twine protruding from a small gap near the top.

“What will you use it for?”

Jonah pocketed the first-sized piece of metal and, ignoring the man who pilfered it, turned and walked out of the room. Near his next destination already, he made his way along the hallways leading between the cleric’s dormitories and the dressing rooms until, with a quick glance to make sure he was alone, he slipped inside the store room next to the cellars. In that room he found the bag nested within two just like itself and transferred some of the white powder into a satchel whose previous contents of dried herbs Jonah tossed behind a shelf.

Jonah snuck back to his room and arranged the items he would need tomorrow in front of him from left to right. His new saber, a plain steel thing he had requested have no ornamentation; the bag of white powder he had taken from the storage room near the wine cellar; the hand crossbow with two bolts; and finally, the egg shaped ball of iron.

Knowing that he would not be able to sleep with the adrenaline of the plan forcing him awake, he took the rosary the cleric had given him that morning and counted on each bed every wrong he had suffered, and then every wrong he had committed. Though the number was not an even one he continued, rotating the string of beads in his calloused fingers until the morning sun shone through his window.

April 7th, 503 p.d.

There was only one day left. Jonah spent most of it in his room, attempting to make up for the sleep he had failed to secure the night before. Though the rosary had helped, the pit of anxiety in his stomach was now threatening to pitch him into delirium while he tossed and turned on his cot. Eventually he gave up and stood in front of a shoddy, half-polished bronze plate he had requested from the cardinal when he took on his new job.

Jonah looked at himself in the warped reflection and laughed out loud. He had his own graying hairs now despite his relative youth; thin, unfriendly, and very bloodshot eyes through which you could barely make out amber irises; all highlighted by too prominent cheekbones jutting from a hallowed face, leading the viewer’s gaze down finally to a mess of unkempt facial hair. Jonah poked at the foliage on his upper lip and cringed, and as an opportunity to distract himself took the razor on a countertop near the makeshift mirror and shaved.

With his wiry facial hair now a pile on the floor, Jonah considered himself once more. It played no part in salvaging the horror that was his face above the nose, but his jawline was much sharper now. The brief moment of vanity triggered something in Jonah. Oddly enough, it felt like excitement. For the first time in his life, he would be taking the initiative. There was no Isaac to trail behind now, no leadership to blindly follow. Now there was just the plan.

Though he desperately wanted to meet with Mary one more time, he knew that he could not. So instead he alternated between fiddling with his weapons and fingering the string of beads until evening fell and the sounds of the church around him began to quiet. Once the sun had dipped fully beneath the horizon, it was time. Jonah donned his armor and prepared his weapons. Rapier in its scabbard; crossbow hooked onto a leather latch along his belt, bolts secured to his left wrist with some stray twine; satchel of powder in his left pocket, and last but certainly not least the ball of iron in his right.

Jonah gave one last look at his reflection in the sheet of metal. He was the fucking worm, damn it.

***

I hurt the woman I love by being too afraid to tell her what I really wanted.

Jonah walked across the church courtyard and made his way into the cathedral. The weight of his armor caused the old wooden steps to creak as he walked upstairs to the offices. Reaching the cardinal’s, he pushed open the door and walked in, closing it behind him. The cardinal was filling his cup from one of the large barrels he had asked to be installed, and he looked up in surprise.

“I need you to write Mary a recommendation to the mage’s guild in Southguarden.”

The cardinal scoffed.

“How will she manage that?”

Jonah unsheathed his rapier and, in the same way the commander had threatened him, leveled it at the old man. The official’s face fell as he looked down the length of the blade.

“You wouldn’t.”

“You had discussed with the Duke before he made his speech.” Jonah said flatly.

The cardinal’s eyes widened. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Now is not the time to lie to me, Markus.”

Leathery jowls bounced as he swallowed nervously. Saying nothing, he nodded to his desk and Jonah allowed him to sit and pen the letter. Once he signed the bottom, he held it out to Jonah, who with his free hand took it and quickly read through the contents. Satisfied, he handed it back for the pope to roll and seal it with wax.

The cardinal placed the letter delicately at the edge of his desk, and looked at Jonah.

“I have a lead on something that can help Isaac,” he told him seriously, perspiration beginning to dampen his balding forehead.

Jonah took the sealed letter, then ran his rapier through his neck. Leaving it embedded in his throat, he left the gurgling holy man, exiting the room and using one of many keys he had been granted to lock the door.

He walked down the steps leading from the office, down to the nave’s level, and then one level further, to make it to the cleric’s dormitories. He pushed into his favorite cleric’s room, who as if expecting him jumped from his bed in fear. He handed the quivering youth the letter.

“To Southgarden. Now. Please.” Jonah attempted a smile.

The cleric, looking as if he was about to be sick, took it and ran from the room.

Jonah clambered up the flight of stairs, and slowly trailed him as he rushed across the courtyard and down the long staircase lined with golden arms. He could see the cleric in the distance as he reached the bottom and veered west towards the aviary. Jonah diverged, and reaching the bottom went east.

I tried to bring my friend back from the dead so that he could forgive me for wronging him.

The moon high above him, Jonah went not to Mary’s door but to the panel he had left ajar last night. With a sigh of relief, he pulled it open without resistance, and so Jonah climbed into the room through the window. The sickly man lay amidst a sea of colorful textiles, clutching still the large square of yellow embroidered flowers. Jonah approached him and removing the satchel, poured all of the powder into a glass of drinking water that had been left by the bedside table.

He reached up to grab golden brown locks and gently tilted the invalid’s head back, slowly poured the mixture down his throat, stopping for a few seconds occasionally to allow the liquid to flow unobstructed into his stomach. The cup emptied, he returned it to the stand, and taking off his huge metal bracer he held the man’s hand as his breaths began to labor.

He coughed and gurgled and Jonah feared it would be loud enough to wake Mary, but it did not and eventually the sallow figure took his last breath.

“Rest in peace, stranger,” Jonah whispered, and then replacing his bracer left the dead man. He pushed the window panel open and hopped out onto the street, grateful that no insomniac neighbors were outside to witness him, and gently pushed the panel closed. Then he made his way west towards the mayor’s residence.

My sister was nearly assaulted, and when she ran away from home to save herself, I told her that I hated her for leaving me.

He reached the site of his many meetings with investors and famous travellers, and doggedly climbed up one final set of stone steps. Though it was nearly midnight, lamps were lit along the path towards the mansion, and he could make out light in the mayor’s main office. He pushed open the door, left unlocked for the late night guests, and made his way across the living room to the oak door that led into the mayor’s meeting space.

As he entered, he saw the mayor with his shirt off, lips pressed against a woman he did not recognize. The politician, hearing the rustling of armor, opened his eyes and pushed the woman away from him in surprise.

“Jonah,” he said, breathing heavily. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“The right thing, for once,” he replied simply, unhooking the crossbow from his belt and loading one of the bolts.

The mayor, seeing the weapon, whispered viciously to the prostitute. “Do something.”

The woman, eyes wide, began to speak strange words under her breath, her fingers forming patterns in the air, but just as she was about to cast the sorcery Jonah shot her in the stomach. Her eyes bulged and the spell careened away from its mark, clipping the edge of the weapon in Jonah’s hand with fire, ruining it. He tossed it onto a nearby shelf, and fingers of flame began to spread along expensive souvenirs and decorative books.

“You’ve lost your mind,” Louis spat at him.

I killed an innocent child because I was afraid.

“I’m the most sane I’ve ever been.”

Almost on cue, the light of the lamps began to skew and twirl, obscuring Jonah’s vision. The astigmatism caused beams of light to pierce across his vision, and as these beams bent and swirled a wave of nausea threatened to overtake him. Jonah grabbed the iron egg from his pocket and, nearly tripping over himself, shoved it into the fire he had just started on the shelf. Feeling the metal of his bracer heat and begin to sear the skin on his forearm, he prayed that a stray tongue of flame properly lit the fuse and threw it into the air.

The explosive detonated mid-air, and Jonah felt shrapnel pierce through his chest, ripping a hole in his ribcage. The obstruction to his vision abated somewhat, and he could make out the hazy figure of the mayor laying on the floor. Finding that he was having a hard time breathing, he pushed himself into an agonizing seated position and began to walk through his perverse rosary prayers.

I hurt Lucy because I was afraid. I hurt Mary because I was afraid. I hurt Isaac because I was afraid. I hurt an innocent child because I was afraid. I hurt myself because I was afraid.

Jonah felt a deep calmness fall upon him as he recounted the reality of his twenty-odd years at life. To his amazement, in spite of the grip of unconsciousness swirling around his head and the excruciating pain in his torso he felt a warmth flowing through his arms and chest and the gaping wound in his lungs and bones began to repair. A surge of energy filled him as blood vessels and connective tissue repaired themselves and oxygen began to return to his lungs.

Groaning he stood up and limped over to the fallen body of his Louis, and through the fading blurriness of his vision saw the faces of various deceptions flash across the figure’s bloody visage. He saw Louis’ face stretched in pain shift to the duke’s then shift to Isaac’s golden locks and innocent eyes. It held at the last image, and Isaac’s rendering peered into Jonah’s soul as if begging for mercy. Jonah just smiled sadly, and taking the final bolt in his fist plunged the arrowhead through the man’s skull.

Jonah stood, and though all pockets were emptied and weapons exhausted, he had one last thing to do. Taking one of the lamps off the walls of the smouldering room, he made his way out the building and into the massive garden just outside. It was a sea of rosemary, long since overtaken and suffocating any other plant life, with one central massive trunk towering over the rest in the center. Jonah tossed the lamp filled with kerosene into the center of the wild tangle of foliage and watched the mass slowly catch fire. He stayed long enough for the bushels of tiny green leaves burn away to reveal the mountain of bodies that lay beneath it, all decaying and rail-thin, the pile a collection over the years of cadavers of the starving homeless.

Jonah walked away, past crowds of soldiers and concerned citizens that had awoken to the sound of flames, past Mary’s mercifully somnolent house, past the massive gilded staircase leading up to the cathedral, and stopped at the gates of the city.

Without so much as a glance behind him he pushed open the gates.