HANGED MAN

’Til Death is Done

Chadwick Ginther

 

DYING

The sky became crows. A black rainbow of talons scratching, beaks biting, caws shrieking, and I knew the world was lost. I had lost it.

The Crow Queen. I’d called Her and She came. To save me. To save the world.

Crows swarmed the Lonely Tree, flapping wings louder than the distant explosions. Back home, I could’ve never told the difference between one crow and another. Here, now, was different. One bobbed its head side to side and cawed—gently—against the cacophony of its fellows in the sky, and I knew it. It recognized me too, and it landed. It brushed my face with the broad of its beak as if to comfort me, but staring into its black eyes was no comfort at all.

A peck.

Gentle, inquisitive.

Probing.

Another, firmer. Insistent. It liked my taste. My heart thudded, pushing life from every cut and wound to mingle with the already blood-sodden ground, steaming against the surrounding snow.

With the third jab, it plucked my eye from the socket, gulped it into his beak and flew off. The pain.

The pain.

Enough to bury every hurt I had now, or had ever, received. A thousand glass shards scraping over a blackboard. A dam burst inside me and I screamed myself raw in one yell. I kept my good eye crushed shut, as if that could stop the pain. Hoping not to see the state my body had been left in.

But, I could still see.

I saw myself, a speck, from above.

A second crow took my last eye, unleashing a new reservoir of screams. Their friends landed in the tree and took the rest of me. I watched from above until I could watch no more. I saw Her then, through the eyes the crows had stolen, a cloud of fluttering darkness. Snatching souls liked I’d sniped food off a friend’s plate a world away. Murder spread across the sky and She took me home.

 

 

FIRST FIGHT

It was the end of the world. This world, at least.

I’d been sent here to save it. To stop it.

To fight.

And fight I had. I’d never learned the world’s name. Maybe it no longer had one; its name could’ve been lost, cut up in the Rising when the dead started to walk, and eat again.

I could save this world—every world—from what waited in the dark. I couldn’t fail. I had to show Her my gifts had found the right home. How many good people would have followed Her to Her cave? How many would’ve accepted Her gifts? How many would’ve made the Bargain.

I couldn’t say. I’d never know.

All I knew was I had. And I wouldn’t fail.

Who would’ve thought, as I got lost in the woods, I’d have stumbled into Her. Into this world, staring at the summit of Marrow Hill. There was no avoiding it. It drew the gaze like a black hole eating light. We’d been trying to take it for years.

I’d left my Sally back across an ocean of worlds, so far I couldn’t find a memory of home in the night stars. Her locket hung against my skin; a small portrait filled the silver heart. The only silver I hadn’t melted to fight the End King’s army.

I spat in mud black with blood and offal. Long before this war began, men fought over this hill, for empires long dust. I’d seen what happened to the worlds where champions failed to rise. I wondered how She chose when, where, to send Her champion, when there was so much pain and hurt and conflict in existence. Why had she sent me here?

A scream and the stink of burning meat jolted me from reverie. I forced myself to listen. We burn our dead now, the dying too. Fresh wounds, old wounds, infection, trench fever. That used to be that. They were given Gods’ Rights, and put in the ground. Then they started coming back. The soldiers had protested the fires, until our dead clawed from the earth to join the enemy. Christ, that’d been a lifetime ago. A world away, I would’ve protested too. But not here. Not now. Not after what I’d seen. And done.

Our sorcerers, hunted and Turned, became necromancers in the End King’s army, accelerating the assault against us. It was hard. Hard for the soldiers. For me. We had to kill friends. Brothers and sisters. Again.

Now you’re wounded and the doc don’t like it, on the pyre you go.

It’s a hell of thing to have to do. To have a dying person’s hand clutch your wrists, nails scraping your skin as they go screaming into the fire. Cursing you, your family. Cursing their fate. We used to give them a soporific so they wouldn’t go in awake, but we ran out of drugs two years ago. There was no other choice. Kill them before they go in, and they shamble off the stretcher to gut you. Another scream. You wonder what you’re losing trying to stay alive. If the fight is ever worth it, given how you must fight.

Once, I would’ve felt the same. Here it made me believe She was with us. We hadn’t died yet. We’d fought hard. If I pleased her, this world might be spared.

We fought in shifts, but we always fought. No one had enough sleep—not even the dead. There was no escaping the sounds of battle as you planned the next attack. Explosions rang out against the din causing earth and detritus to rain down, peppering my neck and sliding under my jacket.

My friends waited.

 

 

I saw Eyes first. He guarded the entrance to our planning area. His dark skin blended into the shadows, but the white ink tattoos covering his body, and which gave him his name, shone as they took me in. His crossed arms unfolded, pointing two bone-handled pistols at me.

“C’mon, Eyes. You know it’s me.”

“Hat off, Morgan. You made the rules, not me.”

He had a point.

I tipped back my hat’s brim and let Eyes see my face. Assuming he could see any of the man he’d met years ago under the shaggy beard and long hair I’d grown. His tattooed eyes blinked and turned toward me. He could see through any living creature, see what they saw. That he could see through mine, told him I was alive. It didn’t tell him I wasn’t the enemy. Neither did my face alone. We’d dealt with enough shapeshifters and fetches over the years.

Satisfied, he nodded.

I clasped his hand and glimpsed what he saw: battles, hot with blood, skirmishes still unfolding, and further up the hill, what my crow spies were seeing. No one saw more of Marrow Hill than Eyes, but I doubted he could see a way we could win this.

“A few prisoners are still alive, for either torment, fuel, or food for the Turned, I don’t know.” Eyes’ shoulders slumped. “And the End King.”

“We won’t get another shot.”

Eyes released my hand and turned his back. I followed him into the Specialists’ bunker. There used to be a lot more Specialists, those of us with gifts defying natural law. Sorcerers. Paragons. Tallmen. Now our paragons were broken, our tallmen cut down, and our sorcerers dead. Or Turned.

All but one.

Diahann, a muscular woman who preferred the axe to the sword, chewed her lip as she washed the body of her wife, Vonn. The cloth was red as if it had been dyed. Diahann rung out watery blood from the cloth and stared at her hands. She was no stranger to someone’s life staining her fingers, but this time bothered her more than any other. While Vonn’s wounds didn’t look bad in the dim light, I knew they were mortal. Our last sorcerer. She meant something different to us all, and yet, most of all, she was loved. I’d been sent to save this world, she represented our last hope of victory.

“I can do this,” she rasped. Sweat damp hair, once a lustrous yellow clung to her scalp in thin, grey strands. The shadows made her sunken eyes look more hollow,

“Better you stay behind,” Diahann said. “Rest. We’ll have a drink and a smoke when we’ve won.”

“If we win, I won’t live to see it.”

Diahann shook her head in protest, but couldn’t stop her tears. She clutched Vonn tighter. “Don’t say that.”

“This way I go out by your side. That’s something, at least.”

Diahann turned to me. “She can barely speak. No fucking way she’s getting up Marrow Hill.”

“She’s coming all the same.”

Diahann scowled. She didn’t want to back down. Her misplaced guilt for allowing Vonn to be hurt in the first place could doom us. Doom the world. Not that I blamed her.       

“We can win this,” I said to Diahann, as much as the other Specialists. As much as to myself. “We have won this by fighting. We’ve bought time for countless families. Every day we’ve breathed and fought is victory, a middle finger in the face of entropy and the End King.”

Diahann asked, “How can we possibly defeat them?”

“The End King is up there,” Eyes said.

“Then we’re doomed,” Diahann said.

I shook my head. “No. We’ve faced the worst he’s had to offer. And we’ve survived. We take the fight to him. Take him out.”

I knelt next to Vonn’s bed and held my hand out. Eyes clasped it first. Vonn raised a shaking hand and placed it over ours, then, finally, Diahann topped the clasp.

“Save the world,” she said.

Easy, right?

 

 

All around Marrow Hill, crows filled the few dead trees still standing until they looked lush with leaves. Legend said the hill was no natural rock and soil, instead built entirely of bones, and it would keep coughing up bodies until the world’s end.

The hill shuddered and the crows left their trees, circling overhead. I chose to take the quake as a good omen. My Queen watched. Between my crow spies, and Eyes’ gift, we avoided any patrols as we climbed. We took breaks as necessary. Vonn needed them. We all needed them. Specialists or not, we’d all been ground away by the war. In those moments when we could sigh in relief, eat some old cheese or hard tack, wash it down with weak cold tea, or fortified wine, we were ourselves. Who we’d been before the war.

Those moments never lasted.

An explosion on the other side of the hill rained dirt on our heads, and peace evaporated like fog in the sun. Sometimes, the wind whistled around the Hill, dissipating the mist. Sometimes, those high-pitched gusts weren’t air at all.

“Gaunts!” Diahann screamed, shielding Vonn with her body.

Black tendrils, only visible where they hid the stars, gaunts found any cut or scrape, and turned your body septic. Made you kill and devour yourself until you became one of them. A soulless shadow. A flying hunger. And they’d found us.

They smelled Vonn’s blood. Wanted her. I couldn’t let them have her. I ran my sword edge across the back of my forearm, and flicked my blood into the air.

“To me!” I hissed at the gaunts, backing away from Vonn. “Keep going. Eyes, keep them safe.”

Eyes blinked, his tattoos scanning the horizon. He grabbed Diahann’s shoulder and pointed. “There!”

I led the gaunts away, toward the fighting. My gifts couldn’t kill them. They wanted my blood and life, but both were pledged to my Queen. Their corruption would find no root in me.

I hoped.

One of my crows stayed with me, the other with Eyes to lead me back to them. Again, I hoped. I ran pell-mell through the night, zigzagging on instinct. Marrow Hill was riddled with traps; some planted by our sorcerers, others by the End King’s necromancers. The traps could swallow a person whole. Turn them into a vampiric bloody mist. Possess them with a trapped spirit. Buried on Marrow Hill were nightmares worse than its current reality.

I wasn’t running from the gaunts, or, at least, not only running. I wanted to lure them into a trap that would hurt them, not me.

They caught me first. Swarmed me. I bit my lip to muffle my scream as they touched my cut. I tensed, hoping I’d guessed correctly, and released a breath. They recoiled as they tried to Turn me. I had guessed right. When they tasted the Crow Queen’s power, they tried to take it, to take me, but couldn’t.

I was still too close to Vonn. Many gaunts melted into the night, back on the hunt. The rest: they couldn’t Turn me, but they could kill me.

A mote of light, like a firefly, twinkled as it buzzed past my head, and around the gaunts. I turned away, and closed my eyes. With a muffled, “whummph” it exploded. I knew the tactic and both cursed her for expending the effort, and blessed her for coming. Through my clenched eyelids, I saw the daylight glow as a dome of power encased me and the gaunts. They shrieked, and came apart like a sweater with a loose thread pulled.

Vonn stared, leaning on Diahann, breathing raggedly. “We have to go. Now.” She looked to the hill’s top. “That won’t have gone unnoticed.”

I agreed. We were better together, which I should’ve remembered. My fear of Vonn’s weakened state could’ve ruined our plan.

“To the summit,” I said. “Let’s end this.”

We crept past walls formed from bodies too disarticulated to do more than bite or scratch futilely at us. I fought the urge to command Vonn to burn them to ash. We couldn’t afford to be seen, and she needed to preserve her strength for the End King.

Beyond the walls, we found time for one more respite, where I caught Diahann alone. “If you suspect she’ll Turn, finish it yourself. We can’t allow Vonn to fall to them.”

I hated myself for saying it, but not as much as Diahann for hearing it. Her face was hard as my Queen’s when she turned on me. “If you find it so easy for us to die, do it yourself.”

 

 

Marrow Hill’s peak loomed. Prisoners whimpered in paddocks more suited to pigs. Free them now, and they’d get us killed with them. If we lived, they’d be free, if not... It hurt to creep past soldiers we’d served with, but their eyes barely registered us.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

“Waiting,” a chorus of voices said from beyond the paddocks.

Former friends, now Turned; unrecognizable walking corpses, faced us with skeletons’ eyes, and hands crackling with purple lightning. Plumes of smoke and ash billowed where their flesh had been. Their clothes—gone to rags—gave no indication of which friends they’d been. I could read the future in their dead eyes: my friends would fall until I was alone.

There were too many. A score, at least. More than us. There had always been more than us. Lightning wrapped around Eyes, lifting him into the air and hurling him aside. He rolled into a crumpled heap. His real eyes cooked from his head, and his tattooed ones scorched black, closed forever. He groaned, still alive. For now.

Vonn screamed “No!”

The Turned whipped their dead gaze to her as one as she gathered her power and wailed. It was as if she held the sun in her hands. Eyes raised his bone-handled pistols in shaking hands, firing by instinct in the direction of the cries.

“Go,” Vonn said. “Finish him.”

“No,” Diahann begged. “No.”

“You can’t keep them from me.” Vonn slashed a blade of fire in a wide arc, burning the Turned around her to nothing. There were more. Always more. “We can’t win if we all die.”

“We’re all going to die if we don’t fight,” I said, interposing myself between the Turned, and Diahann and Vonn. Their lightning danced over my blade and I spun it back toward them. My sword looked as if it were made from metal, but it was forged of magic and blood.

The sword scythed through their magic as easily as it cut through their bodies, and disrupted both. They could hurt me too. My blood froze. My will slipped. I slumped to a knee.

With a snarling yell, Diahann was at my side in an instant, an axe in each hand. She whirled like a tornado, spinning the cold iron blades through our enemies. Gaunts poured from the sky, enveloping Vonn. She jammed her staff into the ground, dragged herself upright, readying her magic.

“No! You won’t have me. You won’t have us. Never.” And she turned her power on herself.

The blast threw me into the air. I couldn’t see for the smoke and debris. Couldn’t hear for the ringing in my ears. I hit something hard, unyielding. The impact stole my breath and I fell, cracking against other surfaces, until I felt a pressure on my leg. I screamed as my ankle snapped. Blood rushed to my head as I hung, upside down, above the ground.

When the smoke cleared, I was stuck in the Lonely Tree, the last thing standing on Marrow Hill other than necromancer fortifications. My crows would roost there from time to time. I fought back a bitter laugh. Now I roosted there. The first time my Queen had sent me out to fight for Her, and I’d failed.

Failed everyone.

My friends were gone. My body broken. Near the summit, but I hadn’t made it. Close. Close wouldn’t cut it. The Turned—Vonn among them, cracked ribs yawning out of her body—circled the tree, but didn’t attack. I didn’t know why—until I saw him.

The End King had come. He was a yawning void, not a man. Where the Turned and his gaunts had covered the stars with their darkness, he seemed to pull starlight into himself. His forearms narrowed to a sword’s tip, and as he incanted, they stabbed the air leaving arcane gouges in the world’s reality. As if, through every symbol more darkness, more hunger seeped into a world already flooded by it.

I couldn’t see my sword, but I could sense it. The fight wasn’t over yet.

“Night has fallen and the dead are hungry,” he whispered as I called the sword to my hand. When my fingers closed on the grip, I cut off my leg below the knee.

I fell in a heap, new pain lancing my entire body. I braced my back against the Lonely Tree and pushed myself upright.

I spat blood from my mouth and levelled my sword at the End King. “Fight me.”

He laughed at me. He laughed.

If I couldn’t kill him, maybe She could. Her names tickled my tongue and knew they were three, and She would only answer to them once. I called.

“Great Giver. She Who Decides. Mother of Dead Men.”

Once I’d called for Her, Her rules locked into me, like creeping vines burrowing into every crevice in my soul our Bargain had touched. I knew the rules because I couldn’t not—the platitudes were burned into my soul, when She’d made me Hers.

At the sound of Her names, the symbols the End King had cut into the air whirled tightly around him, orbiting like a protective cloak.

Crow shrieks cut a hole in the sky, and She came. But She didn’t come to save the world. Or me. We were all carrion and She came to consume the corpse.

 

 

FIRST MEETING

When I was a younger man, still a boy, really, and a foolish one, I went looking for magic. For Sally, so she might live the life she deserved. I found her: the Crow Queen. Beautiful. Dangerous. Magical. She came to me in the night. Dressed in shadows and blood.

She led me through a forest in the centre of my home city. We walked until I didn’t recognize the trees, the sky, or stars. I followed because I needed to. Needed to know where She would take me. To understand something greater than myself. I followed Her until I lost my way home.

In a cave with a vaulted ceiling and tree roots breaking through the roof, a skeleton dangled from a noose dancing on a breeze that wasn’t there. The remnants of its body held together by a will beyond death.

Her shadows melted away when we entered the cave, and the Crow Queen came to me clad in gown of Her subjects, their feathers so black they seemed iridescent and chattering as if alive. She smiled as she took in their music.

I asked Her, “Are you a god?”

She smiled, as I tried to keep the fear from my face. “A small word to contain me, but it will suffice.”

I’d never believed. Not in the God my parents gave me. Not in fate. Or astrology. But I’d always searched. And all the harder after Sally got sick.

“You wanted magic. Yearned for it. How does this feel? You have walked between the worlds. Are you ready to go home, or do you need more?”

I don’t remember saying anything. Not yes. Not more. Not no. And yet I must’ve said something. I must’ve said yes.

The hanged body crumbled to ash that swirled in a tornado around the Crow Queen’s body, until She gathered it all in a bowl. One crow in Her cloak tore the throat from another and its blood spilled into the bowl.

“Sit,” She said. Her request had the weight of a command, a one word avalanche.

She set the bowl before me, and two more birds stole away from Her cloak and landed, balanced upon the bowl. The dipped their beaks into the black slurry of ash and blood, and into my chest. Again and again, until they’d outlined a tiny crow. Then another. And another.

“A knight must bear his Queen’s device.” She ruffled the crows’ feathers. “They will always be with you, so I may find you when you have need.”

The crows nipped at my cheeks and I winced, thinking they wanted my eyes. Maybe they did, and only Her power stopped them. She stepped toward me and clutched a crow in each hand and spread Her arms wide. A sword formed between the crows as the birds turned to mist.

The blade was single-edged, with a gentle curve, alike a cavalry sabre, but not so slender; its metal black as a crow’s eye. She set it atop a black suit; a jacket and trousers, no shirt. A wide brimmed hat and a thick leather belt with a scabbard buckled to it. She gestured for me to take the blade, I did. All the weight of a mountain and yet lighter than a dream.

“What do I do with this?”

“Will you fight for me?”

“Fight?”

I wasn’t a fighter.

“Your Sally will live. ‘Til death is done with you.”

She touched my forehead and I saw what She needed of me. She showed me worlds ending in fire and blood. Worlds where the dead walked. I heard civilizations scream themselves into oblivion. Heard them beg for an end that took longer than I could bear to arrive. I heard a voice from my home calling my name as if I were lost.

I’d come for this. Wanted to make a difference. Wanted to help, and here were people without number, crying out. I wasn’t sure I could trust the Crow Queen, but I’d never trusted old employers, those meant to protect me, cops or government. I trusted myself. I trusted no matter who She was, I knew who I was.

“These worlds will be reduced to ash in an instant without my intervention.”

I had to try. I couldn’t go home knowing I could do something. It was too late. Her mark was on me. I’d said yes even if I hadn’t said the word.

“I’ll fight for you.”

“When you have done all you can, call my name three times.”

“What is your name?”

“I have three names. Always three.” She smiled. “You will know them.”

 

 

AGAIN

My body whole again, the Crow Queen sent me to a second world. It fell faster than the first. I died again, never facing its nemesis. The third, a world buried in an endless winter, face more than the killing cold. A walking bestial frostbitten corpse, half-man, half-wolf, controlled the winds and the snow. He had brought the winter. His end would bring back the sun, and the spring.

Crows were a bad omen here. They followed his servants, wolfmen, like himself, ate their dead, and their kills. I built no army. Joined no battles. The locals too few to take to the field, were too concerned with staying alive for the day, than to dare dream for tomorrow. I helped them where I could—until I found the enemy. I had a new way to win: creep into his mountain palace, past his cannibalistic worshippers and his snow maidens, to kill him. Alone.

But that wasn’t why I was made to live and die again and again. I wasn’t a hero. Or a savior. Not even an assassin.

I was a sacrifice.

The snow maidens caught me before I reached their master. I called.

“Thorn of Sleep. Discord’s Daughter. Queen of Damnation and Dread.”

The sky opened, the veil lifted. My crows turned on me. I fell. Only me. The crows came only for me. The world fell without me, to ice, to fang. To despair.

 

 

AND AGAIN

My eyes blinked open. I hung from the tree in the Crow Queen’s cave by one foot. Long hair and a beard tickled my face. Always the same. I felt dizzy and sick, but better than how I’d last remembered feeling. Outside Her cave, outside time and space, the happy hunting ground—heaven, paradise—teased, but my steps never take me there.

Never.

Maybe one day if I do enough. Pray enough. Kill enough in her name, She’ll let me rest.

If I was awake, another world would die. I’d given up on going home, but Sally would live so long as I fought. I pulled myself up and untangled my foot from a forked branch. I dropped to the cold floor.

The Crow Queen wasn’t here to greet me this time. She wanted the struggle, not just the end. Her cave reeked of Her displeasure, but one crow greeted me. It held a ring in its beak, a ring that’d belonged to one of my dead companions a world away. I put the ring on the silver chain with Sally’s locket.

Finally, my Queen arrived. She wore a sundress, cowboy boots, and had a light, long-sleeved button up sweater covering her shoulders. A pleasant image, but one that couldn’t obscure an oily slick of death clinging to Her pale skin.

She’d made me a revolver to pair with the sword. I spun the cylinder and it seemed to roll endlessly. I saw no bullets in its chambers, and yet, I knew it was loaded. In my hand, it would always be loaded.

“Will you fight for me?”

“Yes.”

I took my mantle and I walked to another dying world.

 

 

AND AGAIN

“Your last efforts have not impressed me.”

I hung my head. She was right. I’d been an abject failure. All my sacrifices. All the death, the loss, for nothing.

“What will you respond to better? The carrot? Or the stick?” She ran her fingers through my hair, grabbing my beard to pull me closer. “Let’s try the carrot, shall we? The stick might break you.”

She snapped her fingers and two spirits appeared. I recognized their shapes. Friends from other worlds. Friends who’d lived until the end. Until I’d failed them.

“Where you fight on my behalf, I will spare one soul. Which will be yours, rather than mine.”

The first spirit, Diahann’s, touched my chest where the bare tattooed crow outlines were and disappeared from view. The tattoos, once merely outlines were filled in black. The crows’ eyes blinked back at me from under my skin.

If I couldn’t save a world from the Crow Queen, I could at least save one person. Even if it was never myself.

“You may call them from your body to serve you.”

I put my hand over my chest, feeling my heart, and theirs. Two tiny hearts beating like jackhammers. I had no idea what to say to the Crow Queen besides, “Thank you.”

It was the tiniest bit of hope for me; a glass of ice water in hell, having my companions back. A short-lived feeling. My friends were trapped in their own hell. They’d be watching me die, feeding on my corpse until the end of all days, the end of the Crow Queen, or until She grew tired of me.

The third option felt most likely.

“They will need blood to be called.” Her eyes narrowed. “Now go. Find some.”

Part of me feared what would come when She was done with me, as much as, in my pain, I welcomed the idea. I knew if I woke again, I’d try again. I’d fight.

We hadn’t said the words yet. She hadn’t asked. Maybe She wouldn’t.

She did. “Will you fight again?”

I barely heard Her as I stared into the face of a crow that’d once been called Diahann. While the Crow Queen hadn’t explicitly asked me if I would fight again, I knew Her request was implied.

Save one life or none.

No choice at all.

“I will fight for you.”

 

 

AGAIN AND AGAIN

It was easy to build an army, and I found it easier every time the Crow Queen sent me to do it. When the End Times come, people always look for someone to say, “Let me shoulder your burden.” An easy thing to do, to build an army, every time, while it grew harder every time to lead it, knowing I commanded them toward death. To pointless death, with no hope for victory. Feeding them to a monster as bad as the one I promised to fight.

When the end came, we held each other knowing we’d die, and the world with us. I carried the extra weight of knowing when we did, my fight wasn’t over. It would merely be moved to the next world waiting to die.

Lifting me in Her arms, the Crow Queen took me home—Her home, not mine, though I could no longer tell the difference.

My weapons waited.

Every time, the same.

 

 

I lay bleeding, last living witness to a dead world. It wouldn’t last.

The peace of the grave coming, but it wouldn’t last. It never did.

There’d be another world. Another fight.

 

 

I remember flying and being cast down.

I remember crawling chaos and the sounds of teeth on plaster.

I remember the pounding of shells, so intense, the din would drive you mad.

 

 

“Will you fight again?”

“Yes.”

 

 

Whenever the Queen dropped me on a new world, I instinctively knew what I needed to survive. Not everything. History, language, enough for me to do my work, were provided. I’d learned something else in my time: her enemies were like her. Those Who Dwelled Beyond, some worlds called them. Gods, demons. Angels, devils. Old ones. No one knew for sure. But I knew we couldn’t beat them. Couldn’t beat Her.

The Thunder killed the Serpent. Wolves ate Fathers. Dead and dreaming gods woke and joined the conflict. Titans cowered as their creators fought Deaths. Baleful Eye met Silver Hand and all the while the Underfolk and Overfolk fled and fought and perished.

Dead gods rose to die again. Second comings did not lead to thirds.

Oceans of blood. Stars burned out. Another fight, another world lost.

“Veiled One, Horned One, Winged one.”

 

 

There were always more gifts. More carrots. I get close to victory, and never taste it. In the end, it will be me. Alone. Against the horde of The End. And they will die and die and die. Until they kill me. And maybe, if I kill enough worlds for Her, She won’t bring me back. Maybe if I please her, I’ll never see the stick.

 

 

“Will you fight again?”

“No.” I was done. It was too much death. Defeat.

“No?”

“This wasn’t the deal.”

“You owe us.”

“I served until death, as my oath commanded,” I said. “I didn’t ask to be brought back.”

“But you were. And death was not the deal. The deal was ‘‘til death is done.’ And the fight goes on.” She held up my weapons. “There’s no end to your oath. Not in this life, or any after. Not in this world, or any other. Until I allow it.”

She jangled the chain of rings and tokens saved from all my lives and deaths. I thought of Eyes, Vonn, and Diahann. My mom, my dad. Sally. I thought of trees. Of blues skies. Of birds that sang instead of squabbled over the dead. I couldn’t go back there for Her. Not there.

Never there.

“Will you fight?”

My head dropped. “Yes.”

 

 

NOT AGAIN

Another world.

I stepped out onto a barren plain. Blue mountains disappeared into the clouds in the distance. I could sense the battle She wanted me to fight was beyond those mountains, but in those mountains—or under them—there would also be many ways to reach the Crow Roads that led me to other worlds. Worlds that might be, should be, or should not be.

Worlds free from Her interest. Free from Her. I’d told the Crow Queen I would fight, but I never said I’d fight here.

I wondered sometimes what was better. To have your sun ignited and spend the terrified minutes watching the glow burn brighter before turning to ash. Or, fighting a losing battle for days, months, years, decades, only to succumb, as all worlds do. Either way, they were food for Those Who Dwell Beyond. For those like the End King, or, I supposed, my Crow Queen.

My crows stared as if reading my thoughts, and cawed shrilly, demanding I follow them deeper. There was no life for them on this world, and in case I failed, I didn’t want to damn my friends’ souls too. I nicked my thumb on my sword and traced the outline of my crow tattoos. They burst from my body, fluttering through the sky, revelling in their freedom—their life. I hoped they kept both.

“Go,” I said. “Live.”

They didn’t go. They circled overhead, they rode my shoulders as I walked. They took their human forms and watched me as I slept. But they never left me.

 

 

Every world has its own seers. Fates. Norns. Augurs. What they were called didn’t matter, I found them in a simple mud hut where three rivers forked. Inside the hut, woven in gold and iron and wool, the entire history of their world. But no future. These three had been spinning out heroes to combat their world’s end.

That’s why I came to them, in another world nearing its end. It was foolish thinking; save one world, I could save them all. Change luck, fate. Change everything. They were…less than thrilled. They looked at me with one face, separated by tides of years, raven hair going to grey and white.

“Another dead,” Mother said, looking into the pool in the hut’s centre.

“This is beyond our sight, beyond our knowing,” Grandmother said, turning away from the pool and returning to her bed. “Fate’s weave comes undone. Our work unraveled, twisted. Every hero we spin out to face our foes, goes mad and joins them, giving strength to the End.”

“We are done then,” Mother said.

“I will not quit,” Daughter said. “We cannot.”

“What do you suggest, child?” Grandmother asked, placing a wet cloth over her head.

“We use the enemy’s tactics against it.”

“Side with the chaos?” Mother slammed her drink on the table, and the strong brew slopped over the edges of her stein and onto her hand. She frowned as it stained her dress. “Side with him? He’s marked by them. We bring order. If we change that, we’ve already lost. What are we fighting for? What are we doing?”

I saw my chance to sway them.

“You’re fighting for another moment of life,” I said. “To live. For everyone to live.”

Mother watched me over her cup. “You look too young to be seasoned by such loss.”

“I have fought on more worlds than I care to count.”

She looked at me over her stein. “And all have fallen.”

“I wasn’t sent to this one. It isn’t my fate to fail here.”

She sniffed. “You bring only death, not salvation.”

“Death can be salvation.” I hadn’t meant to speak the words. I pulled my locket chain from under my shirt, displaying Sally’s locket and the many rings from dead lovers and friends the crows had brought back for me. “I want it to end. For once I want to win, and I don’t care if it kills me.”

“Your death will not save us.”

“Nothing your enemy does to me will sway me. Not with what I know awaits me for failure.”

Daughter shot a defiant glance at Mother. “What we set is set. What the enemy makes, is fluid, changeable. What if we unravel their champion, and set his fate against our enemies?”

“I like it,” Grandmother said.

Mother asked, “And if it doesn’t work?”

Daughter shrugged. “What have we lost? At the least we’ve spared one mortal from becoming its puppet.”

“Aye. Spared,” Mother said. “For how long?”

If I failed, I wondered which of their souls the Crow Queen would gift me, or would the time for gifts be over? Would I be done?

Daughter smiled, and drew down a golden thread and held her scissors over it. “Won’t it be interesting, not knowing how it ends?”

She cut the thread, and all three Norns watched me walk out to die.

 

 

On the Norns’ side of the rivers, the forest was lush, full. Alive. On the other, the trees were bare, dead, their tops wrapped in silken webs. The Norns wove fate, and their enemies were weavers too. Deeper in, their dead heroes were strung up, lifeless husks missing their arms and faces, warning future fools what fate waited.

I cut and shot my way through abominations without number. Until I came to their queen. A massive bloated thing, combining the worst features of human and worm. The heroes’ missing arms lined its sides, skittering it around, slashing with swords or axes, while their faces, covering the worm’s belly, gibbered and wailed in a thousand voices, snapping and snarling.

I broke its swords. I filled its mouths with lead. I stabbed its belly as it slashed me, tearing it open. Gore and ichor poured over me. As did its young. My crows snatched them up, halving them, and leaving their bodies to fall. I’d never get them all. I thought I’d saved this world. Killed its monster.

It stung me as it toppled. I dropped my sword and gun as my body convulsed. A kind of peace came over me.

At last, it might be done. No more being wrenched from the grave. No more outliving all I loved. No more watching the world die. At least, this time, my end could be the end. The pain was as excruciating as ever, but my only consolation, that I would die before my world, that I would not live to see this last good place twisted into foulness was enough.

Not the end I’d wanted, but it was an end. The spawn my crows hadn’t killed feasted. Eyes gone. Light gone. Breath gone. Life gone…

My crows cried out in alarm as a thousand thousand worms stirred in my chest, I gurgled a cry from deep within. No. No. The crows flew into my mouth, the inky slurry that’d formed their tattoos forced its way into my lungs. Forced me to form the words. Her names.

“Wish Giver, Wound Giver. Life-Taker.”

The Crow Queen came.

And I would pay for my trick. Assuming I woke, my world would pay, regardless. Soon enough, all the world—all the worlds—would be food for her. It was only a matter of time.

 

 

’TIL DEATH IS DONE

I saw through the lie I might ever win. She didn’t want me to fight for victory. She needed me to prolong the worlds’ suffering. Force them to fight, not die in an eye blink. She wanted hardened souls to throw at her enemies. And when I show up, the Crow Queen’s herald, it’s already too late. The world will die.

She came to me in a cobweb dress and a plague doctor’s mask. When the mask came off, she seemed haggard, as if coming to that world had weakened her.

“I see it is time for the stick.” Her words cut like a snapping beak.

She tore me from the tree. No new crow waited for me. The only soul she’d brought home was mine.

“Will you fight again?”

How could I say no? Live, and walk away, knowing—having seen—what ends would come, how could I say no? How could I stop?

 

 

Home. Paved streets. Speeding cars. Golden arches. The world of my birth.

And I would fight.