73.
Act 2. Despair is the Color of Ash
His earliest memory always began in the same place.
A vast plain, turning gold beneath the sun. Wind swept across it.
As he pushed through the undulating grass, an unnervingly deep blue sky poured down overhead.
Varkas wandered aimlessly along the boundary of gold and blue, swept away by a sudden rush of exhilaration.
At some point, he forgot where he was going. He simply ran into the wind as if possessed.
He was free.
He could go anywhere, do anything.
The magnificent world before him whispered as much.
His heart hammered as if it might burst.
Blood rushed hot through his veins, and the cool, dry air filled his lungs.
Every sensation told him he was alive.
He tasted the ecstasy of living.
Yet that brilliant moment did not last.
Thick gray walls closed in on him from every side.
A space so narrow he could not sit, let alone lie down. Trapped inside a chamber no different from a coffin, he clawed at the stone until his fingernails shattered.
That futile resistance soon crumbled.
Through a narrow fissure in the wall, a fanatic’s eye peered in at him from time to time. The priest would never release him until every trace of the evil festering within him had been burned away.
Drowning in an abyss of despair, he began to extinguish his own senses.
First, he tore away the sense of pain.
Next, he deadened taste and smell.
Soon, he ceased to feel hunger, and the need for sleep melted away.
He could no longer be called a living thing.
Only when everything inside had evaporated, leaving behind a hollow husk, did the door of that tomb swing open.
With hollow eyes, he looked up at the silhouette standing against the light. Instead of a steel-cold face and eyes burning with eerie zeal, he saw a slender face, pale with shock.
A woman with dark hair and light eyes reached out to him. Slender fingers brushed his chapped cheek. Yet all he felt was a faint, weightless pressure.
That hand, which might have been salvation, drew him out of the grave. Chilly sunlight poured over him.
An unnervingly pale landscape filled his vision.
He soon realized that everything he saw was washed in ash.
A colorless, odorless, faded world.
It felt as if the entire earth might crumble to dust at any moment.
No. Perhaps it was he who had already turned to ash.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
For a moment, he could not tell where he was.
Only after several seconds did the ceiling of the tent, steeped in deep shadow, resolve into view.
He raised his arm.
Instead of a child's gaunt hand, he saw the thick bones and ropy tendons of a grown man.
As he rubbed it to steady himself, something like the howl of a beast echoed from the distance.
Varkas rose mechanically. Almost at once, a soldier burst through the tent flap.
“Lord Shearkan! Direwolves!”
His legs swung off the cot. Snatching the halberd propped beside his bed, he strode out; as he walked, waiting attendants converged on him, strapping a light breastplate across his chest.
Brushing off their meddling hands, he quickly surveyed the disordered camp.
The pale dawn light faintly outlined the orderly rows of tents and the soldiers darting frantically between them.
Before long, he caught sight of a pitch-black beast in the thick of the fray, its body stretching nearly eight kvets long.
The monster noticed him as well. The great wolf crouched low, let out a feral roar, and lunged across the ground.
He stepped half a pace forward with his left foot and brought the halberd across his body. The heavy ax blade at the spearhead dipped toward the dirt.
The instant the black shadow filled his sight, his grip tightened, and he swept the shaft upward in a broad diagonal arc.
The crescent blade cleaved through tough hide, severing dense muscle and thick bone in a single stroke.
Dark, viscous blood spouted like a fountain from the severed neck.
Wiping the spray from his cheek with a sleeve, he turned to scan the camp. Gray shapes were already scattering among the palisade of conifers.
Seeing that they were in full retreat, Varkas looked down at the heavy carcass crumpled on the earth.
‘…It seems that one was the alpha.’
A pack unravels the moment it loses its leader.
He planted the spear point in the soil and walked toward a collapsed tent to assess the damage.
Between broken poles and mounds of sand-colored canvas lay another dead, fur-matted beast. As he leaned over the wolf whose heart had been pierced, an airy, careless voice called from behind.
“Quite the rowdy welcome for your first day back home.”
Varkas looked around. A man stood there with a loose coat draped over his bare chest. A warrior of the Barakan. He drove his poleaxe into the dirt and tipped his chin toward the forest.
“Shall I have the boys track them down?”
“We cannot afford to scatter our forces right now. Tend to the damage first, and secure the perimeter.”
“There isn’t much damage to speak of. They only managed to run off with one pack horse.”
The man rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, unconcerned.
“One of the fledglings who came of age this year took a cut, but no one was killed, thankfully.”
Varkas straightened.
The sun had climbed high without his noticing, casting bright light into every corner of the battered camp.
After quietly looking around to take in the full scope of the disorder, he turned back to the warrior.
“Clear the grounds. We move before more beasts catch the scent of blood.”
“As you command.”
As the man strode off at a leisurely pace, Varkas headed toward the center of the camp.
Soldiers struggling to soothe panicked horses and servants dragging away broken canvas passed through his sight.
Passing them by, he walked to the water skin set beside the large pavilion.
A ghostly, pale reflection shimmered in the clear rainwater collected the day before.
He gazed down at it for a moment, then cupped water in his hands to rinse the blood from his face. The lukewarm water sent a faint prickle across his skin.
Wiping it away roughly, he lifted a hand to his nose and drew in a breath.
The metallic reek of blood had thinned, replaced by the faint, earthy scent of stagnant water.
He could not tell which smell was better.
Smell had been the first sense to return to him. Yet he still could not link the signals sent to his brain with any emotion.
He could distinguish the nature and strength of what his nose picked up, but none of it sparked fondness or revulsion. He had simply learned, by rote, what others found pleasant and what they did not.
And by that lesson, the smell of blood was particularly abhorrent to people.
He stripped off his soiled breastplate, dropped it to the ground, and checked his shirt.
Fortunately, there was no sign of blood. Still, some other foul odor he could not detect might be clinging to him.
He turned back toward his tent to change.
That was when he caught sight of the Quarter Dwarf, pacing anxiously outside the pavilion at the heart of the camp.
Varkas went straight to her.
“What has happened?”
His voice came out so rasping that it sounded foreign even to his own ears.
The woman flinched, casting him a frightened glance.
“Ah, I haven’t seen the young lady in some time now…”
In that instant, a sharp ringing filled his ears.
END