11. Falcifer

falcifer ~era ~erum, a.

1. bearing a scythe

that night, dravik vel lithroi finds his rider outside the kitchens. His manservant, Quilliam, is working the dough for the morning pastries with a bandaged hand, and the smell is pleasant—butter and sugar and yeast. Synali leans against the wall just beyond the wedged light of the doorway, sleeping soundly—no doubt exhausted from training. Dust and dirt smear her face, a filthy cloth clutched in her hand. A corner of the nearby floor is clean as it hasn’t been for years.

Dravik watches the girl—her thin chest rising and falling—and he considers the nature of predators and the nature of those who survive them. He considers most of all the nature of those left alive and how loudly the end calls to them. Her longing for it will be her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. The knights of the War were the same; it was not their desire to survive or triumph that gave them their extraordinary riding abilities. Mother had told him quite the contrary; it was their acceptance of the end, in totality, that rendered them incomprehensible strength. In any other time, it would have been called a death cult, but in the War for old Earth, it was called a knight’s greatest honor.

How lucky he has been, to find Synali.

How unlucky Synali has been, to have been found.

Slowly and quietly, he drapes his coat over her shivering flesh and retreats into the darkness of Moonlight’s End.