The body was gone. How could they be gone? Such an imposing figure, you couldn’t miss them, but the first bed in the ward was definitively empty. No covers. No sheets. Not a scrap of evidence of all the work I’d put in over the last month. I’d staggered and grabbed the support mast when I came in and saw. What happened? Had they passed over?

  Had I failed?

  The thought alone made me as ill as the cloying stench curdling the air. I fought it best I could as I did my rounds, more sheets piled up to combat the snows outside, Robin at my back, working through his row far faster than I managed my own. Tending to the last few on my side to help me out. The faces left unbandaged, I avoided best I could. Didn’t know what I’d do if I recognised one.

  “Would it be bad if I asked what happened to one of them? I know it’s not my business,” I admitted to Robin when we were finally done, getting some air outside the tents, “but I really need to find out.”

  “Oh. I’m not sure that getting so personally involved would be a good thing.”

  “I know... Have you recognised anyone yet?”

  “No. But I’ve been trying not to look.”

  “Me too. The Stygewald’s a big place and I’ve been telling myself each person could be anyone. Most likely someone I’ve never even met.”

  He got a little closer to me. “So why does this one matter to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe something about the mystery of looking like such a typical fighter. Big, broad, strong. Made them stand out from the others. And yet with their whole head wrapped up... This is gonna sound dumb, but it feels like if someone was knocking at your front door in the middle of the night.”

  “That doesn’t sound like good news.”

  “But wouldn’t you be curious to find out what it was?”

  He poked a finger at my shoulder, a curious little thing. “Perhaps you should go home and rest up. You’ve done your shift.”

  “I know, but… I need to find out what happened. One way or the other. I need to know.”

  *

  One affable nurse passed me to another. She tapped her clipboard pensively. “Could have been moved to the convalescent hall?”

  I took a frozen breath. “Spirits, I didn’t know there was one...”

  “We set it up this week. Even if the patients aren’t well enough to leave yet, they could still make improvements in a more supportive environment.” Ah – so convalescent was a good thing. I had to rub my shoulders to unseize them, hoping I didn’t look as dumb as I felt. “We found a few people from Calderfield who can come on Afdays to help with rehabilitation, and we’re trying to get more.”

  She led me down a chilly fabric corridor of trays and trolleys and reeking buckets I really tried hard not to look in. Past rooms which from the numb shouts and bellows, must be some kind of surgical area, and even with my hood pulled tight, the dread oozed thickly in. Another long tunnel of rippling fabric took us to a large space, an open world, a tent which a really generous person might describe as a pastel blue. Soft pink curtains draped on stands, mostly closed, and without the frigid cobbles underfoot, it might have even been a little comfortable. Any faces that peered out were all Forester. Confused expressions as I passed, and I didn’t blame them. “You said the first bed, right?” the nurse asked, and poked her head behind a few curtains. “Ah. Here. Hasn’t eaten his lunch; still asleep. How come you’re so interested?”

  “I’m not sure. All I want is to see them,” I said. “I panicked this morning when the bed was empty. Thought all the work had been wasted. I think I just wanna know that I… helped.”

  She smiled sympathetically, tiredly, and a name was called from somewhere and her head turned. “We all do what we can,” she said quickly, and just as quick, she hurried from the hall.

  Did I really have a choice?

  I brushed the pink curtain aside. The large figure laid in bed, sound asleep. Something started burning in the back of my brain but I forced myself forwards. Heart racing, hands sweating, knees weak. Because there he was, broad chest rising and falling under the sheets, horns still shattered to splinters, his face mashed beyond recognition but that didn’t matter. I knew why I needed to be here. I’d recognise him faceless.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  I ran. Out of the hall,

  out of the tents,

  out into the air,

  out of this hell,

  throwing up on the cobbles and barely avoiding Robin’s boots. He jumped back and looked down at me. “Morgan? Are you okay?”

  “No, no… No. I can’t. No.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I don’t think anything can help me anymore.”

  I think he went to get a bucket and mop, and I couldn’t stay. Wanted to. Couldn’t. So I did what I always do.

  I ran away.

  *

  I ran away. Through the busy, wide, icy streets of the city. Just like how I’d ran away from the wagon convoy and all the other recruits I knew, headlong into a total unknown at a thing they called the Institute. Or when I’d spent a month alone out in the forest wilderness when my brother didn’t come back after the raids on our town, so damned tempted to stay out there and succumb to whatever frigid fucking fate the snows brought me, and only by the chance sighting of a strange, calico-coloured mystral did I return for the sake of getting nuts and seeds to offer this lost, innocent, winged traveller. The same way I ran away from all the training camps when it got too tough, too arduous, too tricky, too painful. Running away from Oldfield and the other commanders when they called me up as an easy example in my oversized and battered chestplate to demonstrate some new axework on.

  So many years ago, when me and Miles were down at the coast while our parents helped the Dreadfall envoy negotiate that deal for more materials and armaments from the Avernorri sailing traders. Did I sit in the room and listen and learn like I’d been told? Or did me and him sneak out and spend all day coursing up and down the beaches, playing as a marooned pirate captain and his loyal first mate, burying our treasure of shiny rocks and shells, chasing off the gulls and crabs and pretending they were rival pirate crews? Sea wind on our faces, the stinging salty air doing menacing things to our hair and sending us tumbling to the sand, laughing, happy. Sure, it had been the first time I’d ever seen the sea. The last time too. But what was all that, if not running away?

  Just like how I’d run away from such a long list of training sessions when the fear struck me and my heart started beating and instead of facing it, I’d cowered and fled. At the top of that list, the very first week, when Omen had been struck down by a wooden sword broadside to the forehead, his body falling limp to the mud at the hands of Oldfield. We’d been neighbours. I’d played hunters with him every week my whole life. And only when I’d been on top of his limp body, wracked with tears and choking on my breath, did he dazedly blink his eyes and wonder what all the fuss was over, picking himself up and readying to fight again. When they were done laughing at me, they told me it was only a few seconds. A few seconds for them had been a lifetime for me. So I ran away, because I never wanted to see that happen to anyone ever again.

  Because I was weak.

  Because I always have been.

  Because every time they offered me a chance to be strong, to take the hand that Oldfield and my parents and all the others offered, I ran away.

  I thought I’d saved you. I thought somehow I’d saved you back on that day, Omen. And I tried to save you again and again as we grew up. As you became everything they wanted of you. As I became everything they looked down on. I tried to save you like I tried to save myself like I tried to save my brother. Imagine the life we could have lived together. The three of us in a cottage in the woods, out on a remote farm, or in some beach shack down in a sandy cove. I’d take any of it and I think you would have, too. All that mattered was that we got out of that hellish town.

  Vaguest sensations of my boots slipping on the snow brought me back to the world for a fleeting moment and I caught myself on a wall, throat burning, chest heaving, and ran on.

  Your eighteenth birthday. The night you became a man. I’d got drunk for the first and only time, cheering and dancing by the fire pit in your backyard, and you were woozy too but you always wore it like your cape: heroically. You glowed as figuratively as you did literally. One of the many genetic quirks of a few of us beyond the everyday horns and the tails – your bioluminescence drew me to you in the night, I the moth, you always the lantern in the dark. And maybe when we kissed, it was dumb and stupid and senseless, but the second time you did it, when you took my face in your soft hands, you did it like you meant it. Like this is everything my life had been leading to. And when your hand slipped up my shirt and I knew in your touch what it meant to feel love… I wished I’d talked to you about it in the years since. Because you never brought it up, not a word. And I needed to know that you meant it, Omen.

  I fixed my gaze on the street as I ran, skating and sliding up the Hill Road. Every time I blinked, I saw his face on the pillow. Horns brutalised, horns that used to frame his face so majestically, horns I wished I’d had. The shoulder I’d tended before I knew who it belonged to, mashed to a bloodied mutilation. That ferociously confident smile smashed to a broken, hacked gash ripped across his face. His nose crooked and scarred, half of it still on some distant field somewhere. His eyes, one shut for being asleep, the other shut for being still so sickeningly swollen.

  I couldn’t save you from what they did to you, Omen. You were the last hope of the three of us, and I couldn’t save you. I’m so, so sorry.

  My body brought me to Kaspar’s door and I knocked and thanked the spirits for the reply from within. I shoved myself through, dropped to my knees on a rug that didn’t deserve my falling tears. “Ah, Gan, I was just thinking about you… Wait. What’s wrong?”

  His shadow drew across me. Kneeling down, his hand on my shoulder. “Everything. Every single fucking thing and it’s never gonna be right ever again.”