By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin (Solo)

[Leopold]

Previous Day
Berevar, The Ahyark Pass

Mr Whalen lay prone on the eastern side of the pass. With his bow strung, arrow notched, and one eye closed with a squint, the sniper watched and waited. In the intensity of the moment his breath had stopped, his heart seemed to die and his skin froze.

The perfect kill was his to relish.

As a young boy, Thurman Whalen had always had a keen aim. From slingshots to knife to bow, it was a natural progression for the boy wonder to become a mercenary. He was, in fact, the greatest archer in Salvar.

“Come on now,” he whispered, breaking his concentration just long enough to incite his old ritual. “Just a little closer…” he goaded the caravan as it moved through the snow.

What Mr Whalen had expected to happen at that moment was for silence to fall over the cold crag and for the caravan to continue up and out into the tundra. When the last wagon passed his sights he would lose his arrow. The death of his target would incite panic in the wagon’s guard just as the brigade burst through the swirl and cut into the slumbering occupants of the rear wagon.

He did not however expect to feel a familiar, chilly prang against the nape of his neck. He swallowed a lump from his throat and slowly released the tension in the bow. The thick shaft of the arrow rested limply against the fine horse hair string. It’s cold, barbed steel tip shone in the twilight. Though Mr Whalen had come to prefer long range engagements, he had lived just long enough to recognise a sword pressed against his skin when he felt one.

“Good evening,” a husky voice whispered behind him. The sword retreated and right on cue, Mr Whalen rolled onto his back. His head was half suspended over the edge of the crag, the vast and perilous expanse below threatening to engulf him.

“Oh,” the archer mouthed.

Arden Janelle could only smile. It was the sort of smile he had used before, and the sort of smile that had garnered him many strange names in his native Scara Brae.

“Listen closely, and you may die quickly.” Mr Whalen nodded hastily. The strikingly red attire of the swordsman could only be a bad omen for the archer. All his instincts told him to comply and wait for an opportunity to present itself…if it ever did.

“There is a man down below by the name of Mr Thomas I believe. Are you familiar with the fellow?” he raised an eyebrow beneath the red silk hood. He tightened his gauntlet about the hilt of his long, single edged and devilishly sharp blade. It re-assured Mr Whalen that he was very skilled with using it.

“Yes…”

“Good. Now, turn around, quite slowly, and when he appears from that abyssal snow veil…what do you think I am going to ask you to do?” Arden’s voice was fairly chirpy, too chirpy, Mr Whalen mused to himself. He came across as horribly comfortable with the acts of subterfuge and murder. The archer almost admired him, almost.

“I have…a wild idea.” Mr Whalen’s eyes sparkled. Arden almost admired him right back.

Arden waited for his victim to roll over and shuffle on the flattened, thawing snow. Beneath the man’s cloak, the cold frost of Berevar could not remain solid for long. The man’s clothing, dark green and brown wool were damp and smelt rotten. He had, from Arden’s limited experience with snipers, been prone on this crag for quite some time.

“Good man.” Arden leant forwards, just enough to see the carriages below. They were faint red squares in the gloom, barely touched by the moonlight that pierced the dark heavens and clouds overhead.

On cue, the distinct sound of men too brave for their own good assaulting a merchant’s caravan rose up from the frosty depths of the Ahyark Pass.

“Now?” Mr Whalen asked meekly. He notched the arrow properly once more and pulled it back. With nimble and prehensile muscle strength, the short bow, wickedly tight and brandishing red ribbons that matched Arden’s attire wavered. Even in the heavy wind and poor visibility, Mr Whalen was horribly confident with his aim.

Arden pressed the tip of Kerria against the man’s neck once more.

“Show Mr Jackson your ‘trick’. I am quite excited to see it; he spoke of it for many leagues.” Arden flashed a grin, and no sooner than the arrow fled the bow into the mist, he pushed down with his sword. At the same time the arrow struck Mr Johnson down below, his blade slipped between the main vertebrate in Mr Whalen’s neck and cut any feeling to his legs with a sickening crunch.

He stooped and plucked up the bow, so that his ‘costume’ for Mrs Winchester was complete, and muttered a soft prayer for the dead. If she believed he had done exactly as she had asked, instead of get others to do work he did not consent to doing, then all would work out right in the end. She had seemingly forgotten, when she pressed him to infiltrate the Brigade because her husband would do nothing in Knife's Edge to stop them, that he blind in one eye.

“I would not invite you to parties because of it…,” Arden chuckled, his punch line falling on deaf ears before it was whisked away into the wilds, where only the Old Gods would remember it. He pulled his sword from Mr Whalen’s corpse, and turned to descend the jagged cliff face.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Dunbar Tundra

“Why did you leave her, then?”

“I did not leave her Ruby. Clarissa made her choices in life and she left me. When faced with a decision like slavery versus love, no love is great enough to deserve such bondage…” Leopold tossed the butt of his cigar over the edge of the wagon, tarnishing the tundra with one tinier advance of the south into the wilds. “At least that is what I thought until I met you, some thousand years later…” he smiled warmly at her, and she smiled back.

“So love made you scorn immortality?” Ruby did not know wherever she could ever come to understand a decision like that. “It is a fickle choice to have to make, do you not think?”

Leopold sighed.

“Before I knew who, or what you were Ruby, you forget I had to watch my true love die.”

Ruby frowned. She looked ahead, struggling to find instantaneous words to console her husband. Those early days of their marriage were fraught with many trials for their affection. Her absence in the struggle with Lucian was one, her eventual death was another. It had taken her almost a year before she had been able to turn up on her own doorstep, an older, more furtive self, to explain that she was a shard of a dead Thayne.

She realised now that she felt exactly like Leopold must have done back then. Lost, alone, confused, and scared.

“That is precisely why we are here, because I do not want to ever suffer that strange fate again. Knowing we will live forever takes away the meaning of life…at least, it does for me.”

“You want…mortality?” Ruby looked back at her husband, her hip and torso swaying naturally with the motion of the carriage as it trundled out from the snow and onto the broken sheet ice. The immensity of the conversation, along with the dark chasms littering the open plains left the Spellsinger feeling like the world could swallow her up there and then.

“What I want, Ruby, is to grow old with you. What I want is to die happy, knowing I have spent every moment of my life lifting you up to such heights you can see the entire world beneath you. I want to believe that my generosity, compassion and my warm embrace got you there.”

Ruby practically melted.

“You cannot ask me to watch you die, Leopold…” She did not think she could give him that request, that dignity.

“You were going to do it anyway before I told you what I was…” his tone darkened, eclipsing the shining, dancing light that skipped over the shimmering glass plateaus. Drifts of snow started to fall from the shapes, like plumes of smoke from long dead hearths.

There was no real answer to that, and Ruby could find no way to dress the fact. She was, for the first time in her life, rendered quite speechless.

“Ruby…the soft sunlight of the morning, the cold glow of the moonlight in the last moments of the day. Those are the moments I want to experience as a mortal man. I cannot have that whilst the Old Gods still slumber, I cannot have that whilst I sit by and do nothing…” he pursed his lips, his attention torn between holding up the wagon and embracing her with a warm, smothering hug.

“I cannot…” a tear welled in the corner of her eye. She looked away, trying to wipe it from her skin before it froze.

“I am not asking you for your permission, Ruby.” He cracked the reins again, and for a few moments he composed himself by attending to the course of the wagon train. He checked the unfamiliar landmarks of the tundra, looking for the slightest trait that would mark where the Ice Henge stood. He wished for once that the deities of Salvar were not so secretive.

“When I asked to be a bigger part of your life, Leopold, this is not what I meant…” she pursed her lips. They had shared a particularly heated debate not a month ago in Corone, after the theatre. What had seemed like a perfectly innocent spectacle to show the occupants of their favourite bistro they were married back then, all of a sudden seemed quite childish to the spell singer.

“This has nothing to do with your shadow ritual, I assure you. I have been planning for this moment my whole life.” Leopold was taking his wife to see the Old Gods. There, he would barter for his freedom, for his right to be a man, and to share his life with the woman he loved.

He would pay any price, even one as steep as death.

[Leopold]

“So you chose to inflict your ideals on me, your mortal dreams, instead of falling in line with the immortal, beautiful, eternal wife the gods chose for you?” she could not help but come across as sarcastic. Faced with all the other emotions swirling in her chest, it seemed the most appropriate. “You are a fool Leopold, a fool through and through.”

“Would you lie down and take your lot, no matter how unhappy it made you feel?” Leopold snapped, he cracked the reins and shot daggers at his wife. The tension grew, and this time, Leopold was certain the temperature rose.

“Do not propose to lecture me on morals, Leopold. I have had my life controlled from the very second I was created. I have done nothing except the will of fucking gods!”

Every moment of her life was scripted, quite literally read aloud from a book. She carried a copy nearby at all times, unable to not read ahead, to prepare herself for her inevitable, eventual end. She had seen the final days of her life, far flung future foe scenarios. Leopold, in the book, was by her side the entire way.

“If you had the opportunity…If you could change it, would you forgive yourself for not daring to try?”

Ruby shook her head as another tear joined the first. Blood rushed to her skull and her cheeks flared red.

“Then you truly are nothing like the Old God that created you…”

Very slowly, Ruby turned to her husband. Her curiosity removed the lady like need to never be seen crying by a man, lest she lose her spurious glamour in front of him forever.

“What…what are you suggesting?” she asked through weary eyes.

“Oh,” Leopold shouted, throwing his arms wide, letting the reins go. The horses carried on their ascent up the crest, oblivious to the freedom they were squandering. “Did you not know? Your fucking precious Thayne was once just, like, me.”

Ruby blinked.

“Tantalus…was an Old God?” Ruby had been perfectly willing to listen to Leopold’s story up until then without questioning any of the presented facts. Now, however, she was not going to be so gullible. She leant to her left and snapped up the cold cracked leather.

“He had a different name before Draconus and Hromagh waged war. He was once the Bard, the personification of the lute, mead and feasting across the steppes of Berevar. This, of course, was back when the orcs were a powerful civilisation, numbering in their thousands, not their hundreds.”

“The Bard…” Ruby grit her teeth, gears working overtime. “That is the name Duffy uses...and the Forgotten One we call Oblivion.”

Leopold laughed, “Well, I guess Tantalus got the last laugh there.”

“What happened to him?”

“I dare say like myself and Rook, Bard fled to the south lands. He, from what I gathered from Duffy settled on Scara Brae and took to the inhabitants there. The Old Gods, unlike the Thayne, gain their power through belief. They are personifications and manifestations of hope. On Scara Brae, they were in much need of hope.”

“So why is he a Thayne, surely we should not be immortal if he was only a figment?”

“It is…” Leopold clicked his neck, the tired, stiff muscles snapped. He flinched. “Theoretically possibly for an Old God to become a Thayne. As equally possible as it is for a mortal to become a god, and for a Thayne to become mortal.” Though, Leopold doubted any of the al-Thayne’s children would ever do so willingly. Many had tried to ascend in recent years; amongst them were Xem’Zund, Denebriel, Caden Law, and Godhand Striker.

“Is this not all horribly weird to you?”

Leopold shook his head, and reached for the reins now his anger was sated. Ruby returned them, taking the opportunity to run her finger over his wrist affectionately. Her finger tips were warm to the touch, hotter than body heat or exertion would allow. Her soul was burning, as if she were being called to go north.

“It is not something I imagined telling you. At least not like this."

“Why are we here then, Leopold? Why tell me now, why Berevar?”

“Just ahead, unseen to most except wizards, witches and wayward exiles lays the Ice Henge.” A spark crackled to life in Ruby’s mind. The Aria started to sing. She was an Old One.

[Leopold]

The caravan began to turn to the left on a slow axis, forming a half circle. Ruby watched the shadows nervously, and realised the broken crags of the sheet ice had levelled out. They formed a grand plateau of soft, perilous and likely brittle surface frost. The wind howled even louder here, unrestrained by the geographical bondage of a rising and falling landscape. The peril and ever present danger gave Berevar a strange allure, a beauty in death and possibility. Ruby admired it with bright eyes aglow.

“Tell me something…that nagging doubt I have had for the last month, the sort of…need to be elsewhere…is that something to do with this?” Ruby had been unable to put the sensation to words. She had foolishly thought it was something to do with Wainwright’s return. After Leopold’s grand state of revelation, she was not so sure.

“With the Church of the Sway gone, the Old Gods are reawakening beneath the frozen wastes of Berevar. They are crawling out of the dark, out of exile, out of ignorance and amnesia to reclaim what was once their rightful place.” Leopold’s matter of fact expression of this small truth, not so small in the grand scheme of war, unnerved Ruby through and through.

“Why would they call the Bard, if he is no longer one of them?”

“If I could answer that I would my dear. I can only presume there is some subdued part of the Thayne now called Tantalus that cannot quite let go of his past.”

“He has not been an Old God for over five centuries now. Though this may sound hypocritical coming from me, five centuries is an awfully long time to bear a grudge.”

“That is not long for the immortals at all. I do find myself wondering why you, though. Why are you being called at all when Tantalus is, from what you told me…quite dead?”

Dead was a relative term for the Thayne.

“He is not ‘dead’, per say. He is currently sundered, split into four. Perhaps one of the aspects of this Old God wants to be free of its new form?”

Whilst Ruby could not deny the man his victory over her in their debate, because Tantalus was dead…he still resides in the troupe. They were shards of Thayne, but Thayne all the same. The god of art, of theatre, of creativity lived on in them and through them; Scara Brae was kept in the light of the stage.

“Which aspect do you think you represent, though?” Leopold sounded appeased, but still uncertain and perhaps jealous of his wife’s involvement.

“I guess we are going to find out…” Ruby watched the empty vastness of the Dunbar as the caravan finally pulled to a stop. It had, as she had felt formed a half circle. It was a traditional method used by merchants across Althanas to protect their investments. It was a close knit formation to increase vision and to shelter and shield itself from the westerly winds. In the eastern curvature she could not help but stare at the emptiness. There was something there, but not there, that she could not pull away from.

“Celia will never leave us alone until we are truly free, Ruby. She will not rest until I am dead, or until I am back at her side as the gods decreed.”

Ruby frowned.

“Then I guess I have to watch you die old, ungraceful, but beautiful and kind as ever…” she whispered. Her words froze in the air, memorised and burnt into her skull for an eternity. They danced away over the navy ice and the black hard rock patches that made up the strange tapestry of the tundra. In the gloom, they struck something, and echoed.

“It would be an honour…,” Leopold whispered.

He set the reins to one side and adjusted his lapel. He made a big show of fishing about in the under carriage box. With a rush of energy, he delved into the Vernal Vault and pictured his dress hat. When he rose, he produced a top hat, which he exchanged for his battered looking riding gear. It had a simple length of black ribbon tied around the base of the rise, which he set to the rear as he propped it onto his greasy mop of curls. He glanced at Ruby for approval. There was a smell of sulphur about it, but the cold air removed any sensation in their nostrils.

“It will do,” she chuckled. It was a half-hearted attempt at humour. A growing sense of dread was weighing down on the Spellsinger, whose need to run, to flee, and to be anywhere but here was reaching fever pitch. Whatever was out there, it was clawing at her sanity.

“Do come my dear. Let us go and show the gods that we do not want them anymore. Let us show them that their children have grown up and flown the nest.” He smirked at the pun. With a grunt he rose from his seat and leapt from the carriage.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Winchester Rose Caravan

Lillith and Arden sat on opposite sides of the inner carriage. They were stooped on the long thin benches that carried the guards of the Winchester Rose Trading Company where its master and cargo went. The frame, an oak and mahogany contraption well on its way to being on its last spokes rattled and bumped their tired, bruising buttocks. If neither of them were going to be paid for this excursion, they would have most certainly given up and gone home by now.

“Your go,” the swordsman said, slapping a dog eared playing card onto the small crate that rested between their knees. Lillith cocked her head at the strange play. He had dropped an ace early in the game, which the assassin could only guess was some sort of strange, tactile stratagem.

“Interesting,” she mumbled. She stared down at her hand. She hummed whilst she tried to work out her play. So many ways to beat him, she mused silently to herself.

“You were telling me about Yanbo?” Arden raised an eyebrow, speaking up to her over the rumble of the journey but not enough to show her his tell. His eyes shone with fire whenever he was nervous, angry, cheating.

Lillith glared down the ridge of her nose. “I am going to go to Yanbo Harbour when we get back to the city. I have…a hunch.”

When Lillith got a hunch, things rose from the dark. She set down a four of clubs onto the ace and punched the air, triumphant. Arden slapped his hand onto the edge of the crate, then tossed his cards eschew onto the makeshift table.

“Fourteen times,” he half shouted. He did not look amused when he sat upright and leant back against the panelling of the carriage. They went over a rock and both juddered. The deck of cards half fell onto the floor with a flutter.

“Well, you were talking so loudly about how excellent a card player you were to the others. How was I not supposed to put you to the test?” the assassin sat back too and cocked her leg over one another. She lolled her head on its tired neck and tried to return some feeling to her body by tensing and clenching her buttocks, thighs, and arms.

Arden looked back at the crack of light in the rear of the canopy. “I am just glad I did not agree to any form of bet.” He would be considerably poorer if he had.

“I am going to the Flower Drum Festival in answer to your question,” she started to scoop up the cards. “I have a hunch that I will be needed.”

“Great,” he said, without any heart or enthusiasm. “It is truly a spectacle you must see once, at the very least.”

Lillith looked up from the table, her head poking over the crate as she fished up the last of the cards. She raised an eyebrow. “I thought you would jump at the chance to come with me?” her tone sounded almost hurt.

Arden mouthed something, but his attention was well and truly turned to the rear of the caravan.

“Arden…what is it?” Lillith's expression turned to one of concern; she put the cards down and leant into his perspective. Out in the cold, she could see nothing but the other wagons in a crack of light. “What is it?” she stared him in the face. He turned to look at her.

“The wagons are coming about…”

Lillith sat back with a thud. Her black silk kimono and taught stockings required immediate adjustment. She tended to herself before burying her lithe body in the folds of the furs Leopold had provided them with for the inhospitable landscape. From behind a wall of bear, she tried to sound like she understood.

“Which means what exactly?” she asked after a short pause.

Arden rose and pushed aside the curtain. Flakes of snow somehow managed to find their way in, sideways, in a sheltered gap between the rear of the wagon and the next pair of mares. Berevar was doing its best to get into the last bastion of warmth in its borders.

“We are coming about.” His matter of fact statement was accompanied by pinching the curtains closed, so that the light dimmed in the carriage. Lillith curled her lip hesitantly. She was not sure wherever or not she should be scared, curious, or excited.

“That is worth all this tension why exactly?”

“Because,” he whispered in the dark. “The tribes are dead north…if we are coming about Lillith, it means one of two things. It means we are either under attack, or Leopold has been lying to us…” the assassin drew his sword which let out a cold ring of mithril in the shadows. Lillith very slowly emerged from her fur cocoon and unsheathed her own weapons from her waist scabbard.

They slipped out of the carriage without a sound to herald their departure, or a heartbeat to signal their dread.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Winchester Rose Caravan

Leopold trudged around the front of the wagon with a chorus of wheezes and pants. He ruffled the mane of each of the by now well-travelled horses with a tentative love and care as he passed. Ruby was almost certain he whispered something into their ears as he waltzed about. Whatever it was, it seemed to calm them, lulling them into a patient stoop whilst they tended to whatever business they had to tend to. Ruby shuffled to the end of the bench and waited for her husband’s etiquette lessons to come full circle.

“I feel like I have come back to an old family home…it is, odd.” She curled her lips and flicked her hair behind her ears.

She had dropped her own cloak into the snow in the Ahyark Pass, disgusted at the splatters of blood she had caught from the fallen members of the Montague Brigade. She had borrowed one of the spares, and whilst it smelt of beer and cigarettes and was very warm, likely Wilfred’s, it was far too big for her. The hood kept slipping over her forehead with every bump in the long road. It was hard for her to look dignified in its cavernous expanse.

“I heard the same call about ten years ago.” Leopold tilted his hat, “and every day and night since…” Leopold seemed almost wistful at the prospect. Ruby looked at the features and on his cold, pudgy face and reached the conclusion it had tormented him every second.

“You should have told me all this sooner.”

He reached the side of the wagon and held out his hand. She took it gracefully with a noble bow. It was warm as it squeezed to get a grip of her nimble digits. She rose and stepped out into the cold.

“Oh good lord,” she rasped.

No longer in the sanctuary of the carriage’s canopy, the red head was instantly exposed to the full and howling winds of the Dunbar Tundra. It came down from the north and whipped around the wagon. As it struck her face, it lanced all the colour from her cheeks, and sent shivers in little triplet waves down her spine. Even beneath the fur, the mithril, and the coarse red cotton of her dress she felt her very soul freeze.

“Come, it is not far,” Leopold embraced her as best he could with his girth, warmth and familiar scent. The cigar smoke, though fickle to Ruby’s singing voice left a pleasant aroma on her husband. Alongside the smell of the morning’s coffee, stale tea leaves and ink, it gave her the familiar drive to trundle after him as he practically dragged her around the caravan. “And I know…I should have told you a long, long time ago…” he whispered into her ear.

It took them much longer than it might have done on normal ground to round the caravan and cross the soft snow. Leopold had cunningly curved the wagon train inwards to the left, so that cupped where the entrance to the Ice Henge was. This was half to hide the structure from any prying eyes from the south, and half to make it easier on his companions. Tendrils of his power still gave him an unfeeling body, as if his nature rebuffed the cold of the tundra with natural resilience.

“Where are we going exactly?” Ruby looked puzzled.

When they reached the equidistant point from all the wagons, Leopold pulled out Isabella from the inner holster he kept her close with, and levelled it at nothing. Ruby tried to make out what he was aiming at.

“Look away.”

She turned and buried her head in his arms.

BANG!

A whiff of sulphur and gunpowder, laced with arsenic, filled Leopold’s nostrils. A second later the bullet struck something floating in the air a thousand feet away. The Ice Henge slowed time and did strange things to metal, and the bullet turned mid-air after it struck the barrier and ricocheted off into the night. There was an awkward, rattling, and prolonged silence.

CRACK.

“You can look now Ruby. Look at where we sat millennia ago, side by side, brothers in the glory of Old Salvar.” He squeezed her shoulders with a loving affection and then let her go just enough for her to crane her neck. He did not want to let her be exposed to the cold any more than she had to, not even for a second.

[Leopold]

Ruby’s piercing eyes clocked something through the tall splinter in reality. Her pupils reflected the daylight that streamed through the cracks onto the snow. There was a strange hue in the beams, almost yellow, perhaps magnolia in the mould of reality.

“Beyond lays the Ice Henge, the hub of the Old Gods power in ages past.” Leopold’s voice seemed mature somehow; venerable before the throne he had once been seated upon for an age.

It seemed to glow with nothingness, but shone so bright it hurt her to look. Somewhere through the crack she could make out tall white spires; jagged menhirs she presumed were carved from ice. Ice as old as Salvar, ice as cold as the darkest of hearts. She wondered if the Ice Henge was its real name, or just a simple way of describing it to those without the tongues of the gods on their lips.

“It is…beautiful,” she whispered, pushing Leopold away to take several steps forwards.

The Aria was singing still, louder now she was so close to the last place on Althanas where the Old Gods had power.

It sang louder and louder with every step closer to the Tap.

The Ice Henge was different, but Leopold could not quite put his finger on why. He had not been here for centuries so he put it down to age, unfamiliarity, tiredness…though it shone beyond the portal, the skein glass cracks glistening with the verdant power that welled up in the beyond, something was…off.

“The Old Gods will test us, question us, rile our…” he looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing but red canopies slowly turning white.

“Leopold?” Ruby looked up at her husband, concerned.

“-wits and push our limits. We must be strong, together, show them that we…”

WHUMP.

“Oh fuck…,” he said, rather uncouthly, and without any concern for his wife’s ears. The sound was distinctly one he recognised. That sound was made only by great black wings beating in the heavens above.

WHUMP.

Ruby looked over her shoulder too, but was also met only with a row of wagons. She heard the noise, a deep and bass like beat that came from everywhere, and swallowed the lump that formed in her throat. She reached, as one might, for the hilt of Lucrezia. The song sword rang a tune as it was pulled free, a flash of mercury on Dunbar’s blue and grey canvas.

WHUMP.

“That…will not…wo-” Leopold stopped bothering to warn his wife. He felt the wind pushed down on top of him.

There was a dark, engulfing shadow, then a brief silence. Then two great claws cupped around Ruby’s shoulders. She screamed with a bloodcurdling rattle. It was half in shock, half in pain from the sudden weight that pressed down on her. Her spine bent beneath the Rook’s descent. She screamed again as the talons squeezed, crushing bone and tearing muscle.

“I warned you,” the creature spoke with a shrill terror.

Ruby lurched out of view, a scream as wry as the talon of a cruel mistress down chalk board. Leopold staggered through the drift, his black doublet and gold trim waistcoat restrictive and tightening as his chest heaved with strain.

“Ruby!” he roared, so loud the crack between Althanas and the Tap widened. Splinters of reality fell from the portal and shattered like glass on the rocks. The dust broke free and floated upwards, forming new stars on the wide, infinite horizon.

[Leopold]

Leopold was powerless to stop Rook's ascent. The image of his wife darting upwards into the abyssal sky burnt into his mind. Her arms were slack; his breathe pounding, their hearts ablaze with mutual fear. He watched the great bird fly several hundred feet in the air then stop.

WHUMP.

WHUMP.

WHUMP.

There was an echo.

BANG!

He snapped his neck down towards the rear of the merchant caravan. Greeted with the image of aid, Leopold could only sigh with relief that returned the colour to his cheeks and hope to his soul. Arden, clear as day even in the drift and the snow veil was standing beside the red canopy, hair flapping in the gale, his one good eye resting on the scope of an old and familiar friend.

Jacqueline challenged Rook’s dominance of the scene with a single, piercing bullet to her wing.

BANG!

Wilfred was stood next to him, his shrew like form immutable. Tracing glowing figures in the air behind them both Leopold made out the shape of Ruby’s debonair sister, Lillith Kazumi. The purple symbols were clearly Akashiman, but Leopold could not read them to give hope that they would free Ruby.

The second shot piercing the beak of the great Rook, shattering the oblivion bone and careening the creature’s head back with a snap. Ruby felt a momentary weightless, one that proceeded a sudden fall and could only scream as the claws removed themselves. Their retraction caused equal devastation to her fragile body.

Her mithril hauberk saved her arms, but it did not save her from the sheer agony of the crushing strength of an Old God, with a penchant for wiping smirks of prettier women’s faces.

Ruby fell into the dark with a rush of air through her hair. She spiralled on a wild axis, sword flailing, red hem flapping, and cloak abandoning her to drift down of its own accord. There was a brief silence, an audible gasp from many scared mouths, and then a strange nothingness filled the tundra. In the suspense that followed three piercing screams erupted from the mouths of the onlookers.

She crashed into the snow.

THWUMP!

[Leopold]

The two women in Leopold Winchester’s rose slowly from the snow. Leopold appeared at Ruby’s side, a mortified expression on his face. Her shoulders were more crimson than her dress, and the tattered holes in her mismatched cloak showed the rouge and bloodied mithril underneath to the world. She was wobbling, arms slack by her sides, hair eschew and hood back.

“Stay…away…” she tried to hold out her hand, but could only wave it feebly to gesture for Leopold to retreat. In the bloody crater, she stood defiant of her attacker.

“Ruby…you are hurt…we hav-”

"Stay away!”

He retreated, pistol clenched tightly in his right hand, nothing but the air with his left. The howl of the wind somehow died, as if the Old Gods were watching and wished for the air to clear on their children’s struggles.

“I promised Leopold one thing,” Ruby roared, her broken vocal chords inflamed. Despite her injuries her words were still potent in their delivery. “I promised him that if I ever saw you again, you fucking bitch…” her voice was carried to new heights, so that it reached even the onlookers in the shelter of the caravan.

She burst into flames, a cantor of vibrato notes erupting into being about her, right on cue. The heat of the red and orange peels of heat caused Leopold to cover his eyes. They rushed upwards and started to spiral around his wife’s slender form. It made short work of the snow before it started to evaporate the thick sheet ice and the hiss of steam accompanied the strange melody that came from all around.

“-I would show you how a Scara Brae woman makes. Her. Mark.” Each of her words grew more violent, more potent and more ominous. Through grit teeth and a rising thermal that was half steam and half soul, Ruby Winchester started to sing. She had a promise to keep, and she would not let herself down.

"Fallien plume and fire,
Desert sand in beat,
Simorgh blanching arrogance,
Beneath it’s taloned feet.

Sandstorm whirl and screech,
Ancient lore in wings,
A tear that heals all woe’s dilation,
The death song Simorgh sings."

Clarissa appeared over the crest of the second rook shaped crater she had crawled of in the space of a day. Black feathers, half spirit, half plume rose up around her in a flourish of old power. Where the bullets had pierced the rook’s giant form they had also shattered the human within. Both her arms were hanging by her side, the flimsy covering of her spider silk offering no protection from the finest rifles produced in the dark elven kingdom of Alerar.

“Cute chorus,” she spat.

Her face was smashed inward and her nose was demolished from where she had been struck by the silver bullet. Despite her injuries, which would have killed a lesser woman, she continued to clamber up the slope into full view some two hundred feet away.

Leopold stared at the slaver, then his wife, then back at the slaver. There were thoughts racing around his head so quick he felt like he could vomit. The intensity and violence in the spell song only made his headache worse.

“I will put you down,” the flaming creature threatened. When she spoke, the spiralling prongs of fire intensified, as if her rage were giving them life and purpose.

“You can fucking try you stupid bitch, I was trying to save you!” despite her wounds, the inhuman edifice of her necromancy caused her lips to parse through the pain that would have levelled gods to speak her mind. The wind died altogether, leaving a cold after taste in the air, a hollow emptiness in the wilderness.

[Leopold]

“Save her from what, Clarissa?” Leopold asked, trying not to show his fear. Though Ruby was immortal it did not take the rising anxiety away from his caring bones. He wanted to badly to run to her, to tend to her wounds, to comfort her and protect her.

There was an audible rumble in the ground, a deep, rising crescendo of bass notes and tremors. Leopold felt it more, his proximity to the crack in the veil giving his senses peaks and troughs of heightened ability. He coughed up a feather, and balked as he slipped it out from the back of his throat. He flicked it to the ground, its plumes matted together with bile and spit. What in the name?

“I was wrong, Leopold,”Rook’s voice pierced Ruby and Leopold’s mind, an inner voice that rattled both Winchester’s nerves. “They were not calling us.”

“Then who are they…” Leopold mouthed the rest of his question, shock causing his eyes to widen and his heart to stop.

The Tap erupted, and as Ruby created a sphere of rage and fire about her body, her clothes disappeared in a flash of heat.

“They are calling you…” he glared at his wife, or what was a moment ago his wife.

Phoenix ascended and floated on the thermal of the fire column, arms splayed hair resplendent and transformed into a mane of fire. Like Leopold’s Fae form, Ruby now was covered in a thick array of long, multi coloured feathers that defied description. There were a thousand shades of every hue under the sun on her body.

“It has been a long time, Rook.” Phoenix spoke softly but sternly. Leopold felt hard pressed to find malice in her words.

The aspect of the Bard floating before the creatural bird gods was radiant. For miles, the column would mark a moment in history that would be remembered. Orc and dire wolf and snow leopard alike would never forget the day the Old Gods stopped being afraid.

“You have to go, Phoenix – run, be gone!” Clarissa, eternally the vicious harlot, a cold, calculating murderess suddenly seemed quite, distinctly, afraid. Leopold felt it too. "The Tap will consume you, it is a trap!"

“Everything you have done…everything you will do…jealousy drives your heart.”

When the Bard had become a Thayne, and Wainwright Jones had sundered the Thayne into four beings the different aspects of the dancing, frolicking, mead drinking orc had taken on lives of their own. It was said that nothing in the universe truly died, it only ever became something else. Buried in the gestalt consciousness of the troupe, those aspects had remained dormant.

Until now.

“Ruby for the love of god, stop this madness!” Leopold levelled the pistol back at the crack and fired the last shot he had.

BANG!

The window through the veil widened as the bullet expertly crashed into the shattered edges on the right edge. There was another rush of energy that washed out over the Dunbar, and another round of plucking feathers from his bile stained chin. Whatever was in the Ice Henge, waiting, watching, meddling…it was not natural.

Leopold had to stop it.

His shot was nothing more than a futile show of his ignorance.