Nayden turned his head slowly, with effort. The Whisperer stood there, leaning against the stump of a burned tree.

  "This whole melodrama," mocked the man, pointing carelessly with his hand at the body. "Do you, Sun-sworn, have some time limit for mourning failures, or does it last all day? Because time is money, and we are wasting both."

  He tore himself away from the tree and approached closer, shaking his head with disgust at the sight of the corpse.

  "Look at this mess. Death is so... inefficient. And dirty. If you want to change something, pick up a sword, and don't bawl over spilled milk. And blood."

  His white eyes narrowed, assessing the lying corpse. His gaze stopped on the stone shoved into the mouth and the face turned towards the earth. The corner of his mouth twitched in something resembling mocking appreciation. He stopped by the corpse and kicked with the tip of his boot into the stiffened ribs. The body didn't even flinch.

  "Though I must admit..." he muttered, staring at the back of the corpse with cold incomprehension. "I did not expect that this would work. You called the sun, and then choked it with earth and stone. You confused the weaves. You glued together two contradictory forces. On pure logic, this hysteria of yours should have torn off your hands, and not sent away a soul."

  For certainty he kicked the corpse one more time, harder. Nothing. A piece of dead, frozen-through meat.

  "Strange," he summarized, wrinkling his eyebrows. Right after, however, he sighed quietly and turned on his heel. "But since the corpse politely lies and does not try to eat us, I do not intend to delve into it. I have enough of my own shit on my head, to waste time on analyzing someone else's incompetence. Apparently Veles took pity on this botchery of yours. He opened to him the gates of the Underworld out of pure pity."

  "Fuck you. And your Veles. And this fucking raven of his." Nayden spat to the side, as if just this name left in his mouth a taste of rot. "It was the Sun that accepted him. Not your shadows."

  The soldier growled, wiping tears with the back of a dirty glove. He smeared soot over his wet cheek. "How did you find me?"

  "Aren't you a bit too young for an orgy with such momentum? Me, an old god and a bird?" The Whisperer looked at him for a moment in silence, with an eyebrow raised in feigned, ironic concern. Then he sniffed, grimacing ostentatiously. "And how do you think? You stink of despair and cheap incense. You shine with this solar misery of yours like a lantern in the swamps. Hard to miss you, even if I very much wanted to."

  He lightly kicked Nayden's boot. "Get up. We have to talk about why you are still wasting my oxygen."

  Nayden sprang to his feet. The pain in his ribs exploded, but the fury was stronger. He jerked the hilt of his sword. The blade, smeared with mud and blood, aimed straight at the Whisperer's sternum.

  "Are you finished?!" he screamed, and the tip of the sword trembled in the rhythm of his breath. "You speak of him, as if he were trash! Lovro was a hero! He was better than you!"

  The Whisperer looked at the steel blade dividing him from death. He did not step back. He raised a hand in a leather glove and with one finger, slowly, pushed it to the side.

  "A hero?" he repeated, dragging out the vowels with venomous slowness. "What a charming word. And what did they give him, these virtues of yours? Honor, courage, faith... Did any of these trinkets cause the monster to break its teeth on him? Look there. A dead hero is still just a corpse. A pile of meat, which begins to cool. Utility zero."

  "You have no right!" Nayden's voice broke. He wanted to cut, but his hand refused obedience. The sword fell. "This is because of you! Because of your henchmen! I know that you brought this monster down on us!"

  The Whisperer rolled his eyes so hard, that for a moment visible were only bloodshot whites.

  "Oh gods... again these conspiracies of yours? Listen carefully, because I will not repeat. Just an hour ago I sat in an inn, three hundred miles from here, and drank quite decent wine. I had a plan for the evening and it did not include wading in the mud with a fanatic." He took a step towards Nayden, entering his personal space. "Suddenly something jerked me. Tore me across half the continent and threw me here. I woke up with a headache and your scream over my ear. It is not I who brought this upon your heads. It was you who was at the altar. What did you do?"

  "It was the Pact!" shouted Nayden, stepping back. "The Rune on the Oak! Perun was supposed to strike! He was supposed to bind the beast, like in every Yule! For three hundred years this worked!"

  The Whisperer's face remained motionless. No smile. Only the cold in those dead, white eyes became deeper.

  "So your only defensive strategy was... hope?" he asked quietly, but this whisper pierced through the roar of flames more effectively than a scream. "You lit a bonfire and counted that the Heavens would bother personally, to clean up your yard?"

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "He is the Lord of Order!" Nayden's voice cracked, passing into a desperate squeak. "He promised protection! The Order says..."

  "Gods do not make promises, boy. They accept sacrifices." The Whisperer shrugged his shoulders and pointed with a sparing gesture at the massacred body of Lovro. "And they just got one. Apparently this was not enough for them, because the rest of the city they left to be devoured. Look at him. Does this look like 'order'?"

  Nayden opened his mouth, to deny, but the Whisperer shortened the distance in a fraction of a second. His fingers clenched on Nayden's wrist – the one, which held the sword.

  "But fuck theology. The gods are deaf, and I am bleeding." He jerked the boy, forcing him to look him in the eyes. "What interests me is the mechanics of this error. Why are you still breathing? Why did my knife stop in the air? Speak. Who marked you?"

  "What...?" Nayden tried to break free, but the Whisperer held firmly. "I don't know, what you are talking about!"

  "You are lying." The Whisperer's eyes narrowed. "Two times I tried. Two times my own body refused obedience. I feel resistance. A blockade. As if you were... marked. Who protects you, little one? What bastard cast a spell on you?"

  "No one! You are crazy!"

  The Whisperer let go of him abruptly, as if he were touching a red-hot coal. He wiped his hand on his coat. "I am pragmatic. That is a difference. This burning feeling, as if someone shoved a red-hot poker straight into my skull. I thought that I was dying, gods! But this pain... it only intensifies, pulses, bursts my head from the inside. You claim that it is not you," he said quietly, looking at his still trembling hand. "But your presence paralyzes my reflexes. I do not believe in coincidences, Soldier. I believe in causes and effects."

  The Whisperer reached out his hand. His fingers, smeared with black gore, hung a centimeter from Nayden's forehead. "Since verbal communication fails, we will move to invasive. I will skip the foreplay."

  "Wait!" Nayden pressed himself into the bricks, scraping his back against the wall. "What... what do you mean? You cannot hurt me. You said it yourself. Your body..."

  "I cannot kill you," corrected him the Whisperer, and the corner of his mouth rose in a pale, crooked smile. "But no one mentioned preserving the integrity of your mind. I must open the skull and check what sits in there."

  Nayden swallowed his saliva. "Resonance?" he choked out, grasping at his instructor's words like a lifebuoy. "We did this in the novitiate. Sharing of consciousness... It is safe. It is only an exchange of thoughts, shared meditat..."

  He did not finish. The Whisperer grabbed him by the jaw. He squeezed his cheeks so hard, that Nayden's teeth clashed with a crack, and his lips bent into a painful, unnatural pout.

  "Mmmph!" Nayden jerked, but the grip was a vise.

  The Whisperer leaned over him. "'Exchange'?" he repeated with venomous mockery. "Sweet, naive boy. You learned to knock on doors and ask for entry. You think that the mind is a temple." He moved his other hand onto the boy's forehead. "I do not intend to knock. I intend to force the frame with a crowbar," he whispered. "Try not to puke on my boots. I just cleaned them."

  Nayden felt a blow. As if someone drove a red-hot chisel straight between his eyes. No gentle transition. No light. The world simply cracked. A scream got stuck in his constricted throat, when darkness poured inside.

  Nayden fell onto something soft, warm, and wet. He pushed himself up on his elbows, choking on the thick, sweetish air. He found himself in a place, which was more a sensation than a sight – a cold, damp embrace of the earth, a smell of rot, which choked like a wet rag in the throat.

  He was surrounded by darkness, impenetrable, but not empty. Through this boundless nothing Nayden felt a pulsing pain. Not his own. A pain, which was the essence of this place. He felt it under his feet, in every particle of air, which surrounded him. This was the pain of countless ends, of slow rotting, of decay, which had no end. The taste of blood, earth, and fear filled his mouth, and his stomach twisted in a painful spasm. He felt how the cold soaked into his bones, as if his own muscles were becoming dead.

  Then the Voice hit him.

  This voice was not registered by ears – it bit straight into the bones. A hollow, mighty thud shook the foundations of the lair, forcing the fleshy floor into a spasmodic trembling. Words tore the air like the friction of cracking boulders on a landslide. Heavy, rough, and soaked with pure, naked shock.

  "You..." The rumbling rolled through the red mist. "You exist here."

  Above Nayden's head, instead of a sky, hung thousands of chains. Thick, rusted, wet from an unknown ooze and tensed to the limits of possibility. They grew into this fleshy substrate, pulling it upwards, drawing this whole reality into themselves, as if the entirety of this world was one great, open, festering wound, trying to close itself by force.

  "How?" The Voice hit again, closer. It filled Nayden's skull with pressure, from which eardrums ruptured, and blood began to ooze from his nostrils. "You stink of the sun. You burn me from the inside. You are like a splinter in the eye."

  Nayden collapsed to his knees. The fleshy ooze beneath him squelched, splashing his face with hot gore. His hands wandered to his temples, trying to stop his skull from cracking, but to no avail – the voice did not come from the outside, it vibrated in his very center.

  "It is not me!" he wheezed. He tried to get up, but the floor sucked him in like a living swamp, pulling him down. "I didn't do anything! It is you... It is you who has hell in your head! Let me out of here!"

  "You are... a mistake," stated the Voice with cold, surgical precision. "A pathetic mistake. A breach in a wall, which no one built. Open doors in a place, where there is no exit."

  The red mist thickened, and the stench of rot became unbearable. The chains rang out, tensing with a sickly grind. Nayden felt how the surroundings reacted to his presence. This place wanted to digest him. To dissolve the foreign body in the acid of its own, omnipresent hatred.

  "This is my cage!" he growled, and each of these words hit Nayden like a battering ram, setting the mighty chains at the ceiling into trembling. "My prison! My hell!"

  The walls of living meat shrank spasmodically. Swollen blisters burst with a wet, hideous squelch, spitting caustic vapor. The suffering of this place ceased to be just an echo – it hit the Soldier with a wave of sticky, all-encompassing heat, which clogged the throat and boiled sweat on the skin.

  "Return to your shell, servant of light!" The Voice swelled into a roar, which bent Nayden to the very ground, pressing on his joints with a force crushing bones. "Before I crush you! Before I dissolve you into gore and mix you into this muck! Flee! Before this place teaches you its song!"

  Kudos and comments warm the heart on these freezing, post-apocalyptic nights. ??

  See you next Thursday!