Fifth moon, afternoon, day forty-three of the siege
Grand temple square, First Circle, Rilporin, Wheat Lands
The wind tasted of sulphur and rot, black and cold against the sweat on his face, the thing that used to be his hand.
The stone rocked beneath his feet, blasted, cracked and as desolate as time. Black light burnt in his eyes, obscuring his surroundings, and black wind howled in his ears, smothering all sound.
His body was heavy, rooting him to earth, and yet weightless, straining into the sky. He didn’t know if he stood or floated, didn’t know if he breathed. If he lived.
There had been something inside him once, but now it was gone. He thought it might have been his soul, but such words and concepts didn’t exist any more. Empty, he understood. Pain, he knew that too. There wasn’t anything else.
He couldn’t remember his name, or where or why he was. Just pain and emptiness and the blackness, in his eyes, in his ears. In him. The wind blew, and the black light burnt, and he existed at its core, in its very heart, a spinning fragment of consciousness in a vortex of madness.
His mouth was open now, the rotten tempest howling past his lips and teeth and down his throat, poisoning him with its taint. Straining to fill the emptiness and failing. Too much emptiness, so much he could drown in it with just a little effort. Just a step.
‘Why?’
Hands on him, pawing, slapping, shaking. He felt them rain against him, distant as hope, heard the slide of a knife drawn from leather.
‘How could you?’
Sobbing now, the sound skating into his ears on the back of the wind, the sobs sliding into his throat, oily. Another’s pain for him to choke on, to swallow down into his bones, corrupting. The sharp bright sting of parting flesh high on his cheek; he blinked, embracing the pain, welcoming it as the slightest anchor of mind to flesh.
‘You loved Her.’
A flicker within now, something other than pain. Something so huge it surely couldn’t all be contained within, not unless his insides were as vast as the night sky. A frown creased his face, the edges of his awareness lightening further. He came back to the earth and himself, knowledge of feet on stone, the weight of his body dragging and the slow throbbing agony in his left hand, dead and wrong.
He blinked again and then he saw. A woman stood before him, coal-coloured loops and swirls decorating her skin in sigils of power, runes of magic and summoning. Dark magic, black power, and the bright lunacy of loss burning in her face.
‘You loved Her,’ she repeated, her tone broken and uncomprehending, and the vast emptiness within roared its denial and its lust for obliteration.
She raised her knife and though he wanted to open his arms to welcome the blade, he reached out instead and seized her throat, squeezing, shaking, slamming her to the ground before she could give him back his name and everything that surely must go with it. The knife skittered from her grip.
Gods fought behind her and he turned away. He couldn’t look back; the gods’ presence threatened to remind him of something that would tear him apart and he refused to acknowledge it. Not now. Not ever.
Legs unsteady beneath him, he staggered from the square, leaving the madness of battle, taking the emptiness of loss. Behind him, broken and alone, the woman sobbed.