THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter XVI: The Column of the Dispossessed

  The road to the East was not a path; it was an open wound in the earth, a suppurating scar of dust, tears, and despair that snaked beneath the sickly sun, a pale star that seemed to watch from afar, indifferent, the procession of wounded ants. There was no horizon, only the sweaty back of the person ahead, and the constant murmur, like that of a muddy river, of thousands of feet dragging across the land.

  Vael, Irina, and Elara had merged with the mass, dissolved into its current. They were one more mote in the deluge of broken humanity flowing, viscous and slow, away from the funeral pyre that had been Oskara. The air was not breathed; it was chewed. It was a thick soup of smells: the rancid sweat of days unwashed, the acrid ammonia of urine staining the verges, the sickly-sweet stench of untreated infections, and above all, fear. A collective, tangible fear that clung to the skin like a second layer of filth.

  Elara walked in silence, her steps measuring the rhythm of defeat. The midnight blue silk of House Vane, the armor polished with the emblem of the dawn, all that was ash and memory. Now she wore grey wool rags, rough and lousy, scavenged from a half-buried corpse in a ditch. She had no sword; the straight blade of her ancestors, the symbol of her lineage and duty, was dust mixed with the warehouse rubble. All she had left was her body, and on it, the marks.

  Her hands, pale and dirty, rose unconsciously to her neck. Her fingers, with a delicacy that contrasted with the harshness of the landscape, traced the scars. They weren't thick, ugly marks, but white lines, fine as frozen lightning roots, climbing from the hollow of her collarbone towards her jaw, branching like the map of a dry river on a desert of skin. They were the silent testimony of the light that had almost torn her apart.

  —I look like a broken map —she murmured to herself, her voice barely a whisper drowned by the murmur of the caravan.

  Vael walked beside her, with that ungainly posture that seemed to defy the gravity of general exhaustion. He distractedly chewed the end of a dry twig, spitting out small fragments of bark now and then.

  —They suit you —he said, not looking at her, his eyes scrutinizing the crowd ahead—. Before, you were a porcelain doll in a display case. Beautiful, fragile, predictable. Now you look like someone who survived a forest fire from the inside. On this road —he added, and finally gave her a sideways glance, his green eyes shining with a flat light—, looking dangerous is infinitely better than looking rich. Wealth attracts thieves. Danger… attracts respect. Or, at least, personal space.

  Irina made her way back towards them, separating from a group of soldiers whose armor, once white, was now a crust of mud and rust. Her face, beneath the layer of dust and sweat, was a mask of stone polished by the wind. The small tics of tension in her jaw betrayed the information she brought.

  —Rumors spread like wet gunpowder —she said, lowering her voice so as not to be heard by the nearest refugees, who walked with glassy eyes—. And they rot in each person's mouth. They say the walls of Oskara didn't collapse… they dissolved. Like sugar in water. And they speak of the Saint. —She paused, her blue eyes fixing on Vael—. They say a group of scouts found Ophelia's body on the outskirts, near the crater. With her own rapier… thrust in her throat. Like a skewer.

  Elara pressed her lips until they lost their color. The scars on her neck seemed to throb under her fingers.

  —And the dragon? —she asked, her voice tense—. The monstrous spider? What do they say about that?

  —No one knows the truth —Vael interrupted softly, before Irina could respond. His tone was that of someone explaining something obvious to a child—. No one wants to know it. The only thing they have, the only thing they can digest, is fear. A large, diffuse fear is more manageable than a truth with teeth and claws. They know something overwhelmed them. Something crushed them. The 'what' is irrelevant. What matters is the hollow in the stomach, the chill in the spine. That's the only real thing.

  Irina stared at him, searching his face for a crack, a blink that would betray something more.

  —You told us —she reminded him, each word measured— that they killed each other. That it was chaos against chaos.

  Vael held her gaze without blinking. There was no defiance in his eyes, only an absolute calm so deep it was unsettling.

  —And so it was —he affirmed, with the simplicity of one describing the falling rain—. Chaos, in its winged and hungry form, met chaos, in its elegant and nihilistic form. And chaos, true to its nature, consumed itself. What remained… —he made a vague gesture with his hand, encompassing the column of refugees, the grey sky— …is this. The crumbs. The hangover. Us.

  Rusted Steel

  Night caught up with them like a patient predator, enveloping the endless caravan in a barren clearing, a wasteland of brown grass and sharp stones. The human mass, exhausted beyond the limits of endurance, simply collapsed. People fell where they stood, without the strength to build shelters or light fires. The silence was not of peace; it was the silence of terminal exhaustion.

  And into that silence, came the noises.

  First, the dry crunch of branches stepped on carelessly. Then, the guttural hiss, the sound of air forced through rotten throats and lifeless lungs. And finally, the shadows.

  They weren't an organized horde. They were stragglers, lost souls from Oskara's night, drawn by instinct or the stench of so much living, frightened flesh. They lunged from the darkness of the surrounding forest, hunched, swift figures with the clumsy ferocity of that which no longer feels pain.

  The grey-yellowish mass fell upon the sleeping or too-exhausted-to-react refugees. The first screams were of surprise, then of pure terror, and finally were choked in throats.

  —CONTACT! —Irina's cry was an iron whip cutting through the fog of exhaustion. Her longsword, the Toledo blade that had belonged to her father, left its scabbard with a familiar whistle, a sound that was like another part of her arm.

  She interposed herself between the shadows and a huddled group of women and children. Her sword was not a weapon; it was a wall. The first Undead leaped, and she didn't dodge. She pivoted her hip with clockwork precision, transferring weight, and launched a horizontal slash meant not to injure, but to erase. The silver edge passed through the creature's torso at waist height with a wet, crunching sound. The two halves, upper and lower, separated in mid-air, and a rain of black, steaming viscera fell on the dry grass.

  —Vael! —she shouted, not taking her eyes off the next monster lunging—. Cover the left flank! Don't let them slip behind!

  Vael was already there.

  He hadn't responded to the shout. Simply, when chaos erupted, he moved. With his short spear in hand, he slipped through the panic like a ghost, dodging terrified bodies and clumsy charges with an inhuman fluidity. He didn't carry Irina's fury. His efficiency was glacial.

  An Undead, its jaw hanging by a tendon, had cornered an old man trying to rise, swaying, with a stick for defense. Vael didn't attack head-on. He took a lateral step, almost a dance step, letting the beast expose itself completely in its blind charge. Then, like a surgeon who knows every vertebra, he drove the tip of his spear right into the base of the skull, where the medulla meets the brain. The monster collapsed like a rag doll. Vael had already withdrawn the weapon and was turning to the next.

  —So noisy —he murmured to himself, skewering another Undead through its empty eye socket, the movement so economical it barely altered his breathing rhythm.

  Elara was alone. Unarmed. Separated from the group by the surge of panic.

  She saw three hunched figures, faster than the others, running straight for some children crying, huddled against a rock, too terrified to flee.

  Time slowed. Elara looked at the ground, her eyes scanning desperately. She saw the corpse of an Imperial guard, his white armor stained with mud and a dark patch on his side. By his clenched hand, half-buried in the dirt, was a sword. A short sword, with a simple guard, the blade covered in a brown crust of rust and old blood, notched in several places.

  She didn't think. She lunged. Her fingers closed around the hilt. It was sticky, viscous, and the weight was wrong, clumsy, poorly balanced. It was a piece of scrap compared to the perfect straight blade of the Vanes.

  The first monster leaped towards the children.

  Elara didn't think of technique. Didn't think of magic. A cry tore from her gut, a hoarse, rending sound not of fear, but of pure, ancestral rage.

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  —GET AWAY!

  She lunged not at the monster, but through it. She tackled it with her shoulder, using her own momentum and weight. Both bodies rolled across the stony ground in a tangle of limbs. The stench of rotten flesh, of grave dirt, hit her like a fist, making her eyes burn. She felt notched teeth trying to close on her neck. With her left arm, she shoved her forearm into its throat, pushing with all her strength. With her right, gripping the rusted sword, she began to stab.

  It wasn't elegant. It wasn't heroic.

  It was visceral butchery.

  Chak. The notched blade plunged into ribs, met resistance, stuck. Elara growled, an animal sound, and yanked it back with a sharp motion. Chak. Again, in the same spot, deeper. Chak. A third time. The blood that spattered her face wasn't red. It was black, thick, and smelled of metal and decay. Elara didn't stop. She kept stabbing, over and over, until the creature's spasmodic movements beneath her ceased completely, until there was only an inert, shattered weight.

  Panting, her chest burning, she got up. Black blood dripped down her face, mixing with sweat and tears of fury. Her eyes, blazing with a fire not of her lineage, located the second Undead, approaching. She didn't run. She charged. She drove the rusted sword directly into its hollow eye socket, with such force the blade penetrated to the bone at the back of the skull with a satisfying crunch.

  The fight, as a whole, ended almost as quickly as it began. The bodies of the Undead, a scant dozen, formed an irregular, fetid circle around the camp's perimeter. Silence returned, but it was different now. It was charged with adrenaline, with the suppressed crying of children, with the gasps of survivors.

  An old woman, her face lined with a thousand wrinkles and her eyes shining with an ancient gratitude, approached Irina, limping. In her trembling hands, she held a dirty linen cloth, carefully wrapped.

  —Here, soldier —said the woman, her voice the crackle of dry straw—. A wrinkled apple and a crust of hard bread. It's all I have left from the journey.

  Irina, who was cleaning her sword blade with a shred of cloth, shook her head, an automatic gesture of discipline.

  —Keep it, grandmother. You need it more.

  The old woman insisted, pushing the small bundle towards her with surprising tenacity.

  —Take it —she said, and in her eyes was something more than gratitude; there was the bitter understanding of a fair exchange—. You… you bleed for us. You defend us when we don't even have the strength to cry. This isn't charity. It's payment. It's all I have.

  Irina hesitated. She looked at the apple, small and shriveled, the bread hard as stone. Then she looked at the woman, at her worn but intact dignity. Finally, she nodded, with a respect not usual for her. She took the bundle with both hands, as if receiving a medal.

  —Thank you —she said, and the word sounded oddly formal amidst the chaos. She put the food in her bag without tasting it, as if it were a relic.

  The Bonfire of Truths

  Later, having moved away from the main mass, they sat around a small campfire Vael had lit with dry branches and flint. The flames, orange and alive, were a small act of rebellion against the darkness of the wasteland.

  Elara, still stained with the black blood that had dried on her face and neck in strange patterns, wasn't looking at the fire. She ran her thumb over and over the notched edge of the rusted sword, feeling each nick, each imperfection. Foreign blood had caked in the grooves of the metal.

  —We've become stronger —she murmured at last, and her voice didn't sound triumphant. It sounded like recognition, a fact noted with coldness.

  —Survival hardens you —Irina replied, sharpening her Toledo blade with a stone, the rhythmic shink-shink accompanying her words—. Or it breaks you. We… are being hardened.

  Elara raised her head. Her eyes, reflecting the dances of the flames, no longer held the fog of shock or lost innocence. They had a new clarity, cutting.

  —Listen… —she said, and her tone was conversational, but loaded with steel-like intent—. There is no army anymore. No chain of command. No Oskara to defend. We are alone. The three of us. Today, when I killed those things… I didn't feel the light of my house. I didn't feel the duty of my name. I felt… hatred. A clean, cold hatred. Hatred for what did this to us. For what it took from us. —She paused, tightening her grip on the rusted sword's hilt—. I don't want to be the girl crying in an alley again. I don't want to be the refugee waiting for someone to tell her what to do. I want us to stay together. But not as three scared rats fleeing the light. As a group. As a three-edged sword. Vael —she looked directly at him—, you are clever. You see angles where we only see walls. Irina —her gaze shifted—, you are our rock. Our defense. You are the wall behind which we can breathe. And I… —her voice hardened— …I am going to master this. This power, this… new thing I feel in my blood. I won't let it kill me. I'll make it mine. —She leaned forward, the fire illuminating the determination carved into her features—. I want us to be predators in this world of carrion. What do you think?

  Vael, who was reclining against a fallen log with his eyes closed, opened one eye, green as moss under the moon. He looked at her for a long moment, expressionless.

  —Sounds like a lot of effort —he said finally, in his usual lazy tone—. Planning. Responsibility. Just the things I usually avoid. —He paused, and a shadow of his foolish smile touched his lips—. But… I suppose I don't have anything better to do at the moment. And someone has to make sure you don't kill yourselves out of clumsiness. I'm with you, leader.

  Irina, who had stopped sharpening her sword, looked first at Vael, then at Elara. A silent battle raged in her blue eyes between the soldier who craved a clear chain of command and the woman who had seen her captain turned to a stain on the ground. Finally, pragmatism, and something deeper—the loyalty forged in shared hell—won out.

  —I don't know how to live without a war —she admitted, her voice grave—. My life has been edge and order. If we're going to walk through hell for the rest of our days… I'd rather do it with my squad at my side. With people I trust at my back. Count me in.

  The Memory of the Abyss

  Hours later, when the entire camp had succumbed to a restless sleep plagued by nightmares, Vael remained awake.

  It wasn't wakefulness. It was an immersion.

  It wasn't a blurred dream, nor the jumble of subconscious images. It was a memory. A memory in high definition, with texture, smell, temperature, and sound. A slab of the past falling upon his mind with the weight of a planet.

  The heat. Not from the campfire. A heat that came from the sky, that made the air boil, that distorted vision. A white, absolute heat that promised the annihilation of all form.

  His own hands. But not the ones of now. Covered up to the elbows in a darkness that was not ink, nor smoke. It was liquid, heavy, and absorbed the light around it. From it sprouted sparks of an even deeper black, that made space tremble.

  Before him. Not a landscape. A city. But not of stone or brick. Of crystal. Towers impossibly tall, bridges that were solidified rainbows, domes that refracted light into millions of colors. A city of a beauty that stole the breath, that belonged to a fairytale written by gods.

  And that city was collapsing. Not with a roar, but with a crystalline whisper, a weeping of glass fracturing. The towers snapped like stems of ice flowers, the bridges dissolved into a rain of iridescent prisms. And the fire, that white heat, consumed everything, melting the crystal into pools of liquid light and rainbow-colored smoke.

  And in the midst of the fire, in the foreground. A girl. Small, slender. In a simple dress that was once white, now scorched and stained. She had silver hair, as silver as Ophelia's, but long and tangled. She was crawling across the ground, which was no longer ground, but a sea of molten glass and sharp shards. Her small hands were bleeding. She lifted her face.

  Her eyes were the color of lilac at dusk. And they were filled with a pain so vast, a betrayal so absolute, it transcended weeping.

  —Why? —she cried, but her voice wasn't a cry of fear. It was a lament from the center of the world, a question directed at the very fabric of reality—. Why?

  The sound. Not of the city falling. Another sound. Closer. The sound of bones breaking. Not a dry crack, but a wet burst, followed by an even more terrible silence. The sound of hope, fragile and final, being crushed under an indifferent boot.

  Vael, in the memory, observed the scene. Not from within his body of then. From a third perspective, floating, motionless. He felt no guilt. He didn't feel the burn of remorse. He didn't feel the surge of fury. He only felt the weight. The infinite, abysmal weight of the fact. The inescapable reality of what had happened. The cosmic loneliness of being the sole witness, the only one who remembered the extinction of something so beautiful. The loneliness of being the cause.

  …

  Vael opened his eyes with a jolt.

  There was no gasp. No tremor ran through his body. His breathing, measured in the silence of the night, was perfectly rhythmic, unaltered. As if the body knew the storm had passed, even if the mind was still in the eye of the hurricane.

  He rose silently, without a single creak. His movements were elliptical, precise. He walked towards a solitary tree standing like a specter against the night sky, away from the faint glow of their campfire embers. He leaned against the rough trunk, crossed his arms, and looked up.

  The moon, not the pale one from before, but a red, bloody moon, hung like an open wound in the firmament. Its light tinted the wasteland a dark crimson.

  —The past —he said, and his voice was flat, echoless, like a slab falling into a bottomless well— will never leave me in peace. Not for an instant.

  —Vael?

  Irina's voice came from the darkness behind him. There was no stealth in her approach; just the tired dragging of feet on dry grass.

  Vael turned slowly, unhurried. There was no startle. The foolish smile, the mask of the wandering farmer, was completely absent.

  Irina stopped short, two steps away. The red moonlight bathed Vael's face, and what she saw made her hold her breath. It wasn't the face of the clumsy boy, nor that of the cold strategist. It was an empty mask. His features were the same, but they lacked all human expression. The green eyes, which could sometimes seem curious or even kindly in their foolishness, were now two bottomless pits, dark, reflecting the red moon like lakes of frozen blood. There was no warmth. No curiosity. Nothing. It was the gaze of an ancient statue carved from a material colder than ice, a gaze that made her feel infinitesimally small, like an insect before the presence of an indifferent, cruel mountain.

  —Just a memory —said Vael, and the words came out cold, mechanical, as if reading from a script in a dead language.

  —That face… —Irina swallowed, her throat dry. A primitive, visceral intimidation seized her—. I've never… never seen you like that.

  Vael did not respond. He just looked at her with those well-like eyes.

  Irina forced the words, fighting the instinct to step back.

  —Can I… sit with you? I don't want to be alone.

  A fraction of a second of silence.

  —Do what you want —Vael answered, and turned back towards the moon, granting her his back as if it were a cliff.

  They stayed there, in a silence heavy as lead, under the bloody light of the satellite. The cold wind of the wasteland hissed through the grasses.

  —Hey… —Irina broke the silence after a while, her voice laden with a guilt that had been fermenting in the dark—. The book. The assassins at the inn… said 'they're coming for what you took'. —She clenched her fists at her sides—. What if… what if all of this is my fault? The massacre, the dragon, Oskara… what if it was because I brought that cursed thing? Because I didn't leave it where it was?

  Vael turned again, slowly. There was no compassion on his face. Not even disdain. Only that glacial evaluation.

  —That old thing? —he asked, as if speaking of a broken shoe—. The book of parchment and ink. If you want to blame paper for the end of the world, go ahead. It's a mental exercise. But it's stupid. —His voice didn't rise; it became sharper—. What happened in Oskara was going to happen anyway. With or without the book. The seed of that nightmare was buried there long before you or I were born. The book was just… the excuse. The spark that fell on a powder keg already primed.

  He took a step towards her, not threatening, but imposing. His mere presence, stripped of all pretense, seemed to occupy more space.

  —And even if it were true… —he continued, driving his empty eyes into her— what would change? Do you think you can carry the weight of all those deaths on your shoulders? That isn't responsibility. It's hypocrisy. It's the deepest arrogance to believe you matter so much, that one of your decisions, however stupid, could unleash all that. You're inflating yourself, Irina. Giving yourself an importance you don't have.

  Irina lowered her head before the blow of truth, as cold and hard as an ice fist. Vael's words didn't console her; they stripped her bare.

  —If the book were the cause —he went on, relentless—, then your duty isn't to stand here, looking at the ground, weeping for your 'guilt'. Your duty is to fight against what comes after it. Against those who want it, against what it represents. These are simple decisions. —He leaned in slightly, as if teaching an elementary lesson—. Regardless of the situation you find yourself in, be it good or bad, you will always have to do something. Always. To stand with your head bowed, lamenting, is not an option. It's surrender. And surrender is death.

  Vael raised his hand and grabbed her chin roughly, forcing her to lift her head and look into those empty eyes.

  —No one is coming to save you —he said, and each word was a nail—. There is no army to pick you up. No hero to protect you. You need strength. You need power. Your own, whatever you can seize, whatever you can forge. Don't doubt the 'why'. Don't ask yourself if you deserve this or that. To doubt is dangerous. It's what makes you slow. What gets you killed. —His grip tightened—. If you want something, take it. If you want to survive, fight. If you want vengeance, plan. And never, ever regret who you are, what you've done to get here. Regret is a luxury for those who have time. We do not have it.

  Irina held his gaze. Vael's searing coldness, his practical nihilism, acted as a strange balm. It froze her doubts, solidified them into a cold, hard resolution. It wasn't warm comfort. It was an armor of ice.

  —Vael… —she whispered, and her voice no longer trembled—. Thank you. For always being… like this. For not lying to me with pretty words.

  Without warning, she took a step forward and rested her forehead against Vael's chest. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply, as if absorbing his coldness, making it her own core.

  Vael went completely still, his arms rigid at his sides. He did not embrace her. He did not push her away. He simply was there, like the tree trunk, like the rock of the wasteland. His expression did not change. He kept looking over her head, towards the red moon, with those bottomless well-eyes.

  Finally, after a long moment, he raised a hand. He placed it on Irina's head, not with a gesture of affection, but with the clumsy mechanics of one performing an assigned task. He gave a few dry, impersonal pats.

  —Come —he said, his voice regaining a faint tone, but still flat—. To sleep. Even a little. We have to walk tomorrow. The East isn't going to come closer on its own.