The Steel Remains

At first, Ringil registered the change with little more than weary mistrust. His time in the Aldrain marches had shown him far worse, and the shift had not been without its advance warnings. The great black road they’d met Risgillen and the others on had been fading for some time now, either aging at some fantastically accelerated rate as they walked it, or rotting through from beneath as they pressed into new territory that would not permit its existence. Jagged cracks started to appear, some broad and deep enough to put an incautious foot in and snap your ankle. Ringil thought he saw human skulls wedged down into them at intervals, but that might have been another marchland hallucination, and he was getting numb to those.

Well, most of them.

______

JELIM COMES BACK TO HIM ONE MORE TIME, PERHAPS IN A DREAM WHILE they’re camped on the road, perhaps not; in the marches it’s hard to tell. This time Ringil is standing above him with the Ravensfriend across his back, though slanted the wrong way, pommel jutting over his right shoulder. The difference feels bizarre, uncomfortable. Jelim stops a short distance away and looks up without speaking. The face is the same, though stained and mottled with weeping, but he’s dressed in far finer garb than the real Jelim, minor merchant’s son that he was, had ever been able to afford. He stares up at Ringil, meets his eyes, and fresh tears start down his cheeks. Ringil feels a deep aching in his chest at the sight. He wants to speak, but the words are jammed up in his throat.

I’m sorry, Jelim weeps. Gil, I’m so sorry.

And now the pain in Ringil’s chest will not be contained. It rips through him, upward and downward, right up into the muscles of his shoulder, right down to—

I’m sorry, Gil, I’m so sorry. Jelim seems to whisper it endlessly, staring up in horrified fascination. It should have been me.

And the thing that juts from his right shoulder is not the pommel of the Ravensfriend at his back, it’s the end of the impaling spike where they drove it through the final nine inches and locked the mechanism in the base of the cage, and the pain is not an ache in his heart, it’s an oceanic, white-hot shredding, scalding agony that drives up from between his legs and rips through his guts and then across his chest, neatly avoiding his heart so he need not die for days . . .

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

And then he’s screaming, as he realizes where he is, shrieking, for mercy, for Hoiran, for his father, for his mother, for anyone or anything to come and stop the pain. Screaming with such force that it seems it must blow his veins apart, explode his skull, shatter it and let his lifeblood drain out through the ruined mess.

But he knows it won’t.

And he knows that no one will come, that in the long, slow-leaking agony ahead, there will be no rescue of any kind.

______

HE STAMPED DOWN ON THE MEMORY, BATHED IN SUDDEN SWEAT, HEART hammering. Focused on where he was instead.

Winter trees. Quiet.