By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin (Solo)

[Leopold]

Prologue

Present Day
Berevar, Ahyark Pass

There are not many places on Althanas where a woman can truly find peace. There are many where she may find respite, a brief glimpse of solitude, but never absolute, indefinite security of the mind. There are always people, places and callings to tend to. There are always errors to correct and lives to save. The eternal demand on the altruism and patience of a woman is both the driving force of her success, as well as her downfall.

Lady Clarissa Montague was the one exception.

Since a young age she had refused to let anyone rule her actions. People were her currency, and she traded their lives to keep them distant. In her vicious mercantile selfishness, she had carved out a sanctuary all of her own. She was by all measure of merit a highly successful woman. Her business, her political prowess, and her domineering spirit had driven her there and she had not relied on any other to reach her station.

She had relied on nobody, except one man.

“Leopold Winchester…” The incitement of her age old adversary came with a lack of observing his proper title. “What the devil are you up to now?” she whispered, a pensive thought falling from her lips into the howling winds of Berevar’s tallest peaks.

From her vantage point on the small cliff overlooking the pass, Clarissa counted the number of wagons trundling through the deep snow drift. After she reached eight, she stopped caring. She was not here to take the cargo; she was here for the drivers and the horses. They, in Berevar’s harsh tundra, were worth more than their weight in gold.

“Jackson, I think we can begin.” She glanced over her shoulder at the huddled members of her Brigade. Her face remained expressionless as she counted them too. When she reached only eight, she vowed to account for the loss of one of the mercenaries at a later date, and to offer one of her slaves an opportunity to ‘further’ their career within her household. The snow of the wild lands had taken another investment from her.

“Yes, my lady,” the moustached man jittered. He tightened the hood of his cloak over his head and unsheathed a cruel looking short sword. In the dusk light it reflected the moon that loomed ominously over the distant snow-capped peaks. The ring of steel thrilled him, and Lady Montague finally smiled at the prospect of striking a blow to her bitter rival’s enterprise.

“See to it that you come from the rear, and have your associate Mr Whalen perform one of his…tricks from the outcrop to the east.” Without waiting to see the man’s enthusiasm for departing she looked back down the cliff.

For three weeks the Montague Brigade had followed the caravans of the Winchester Rose Trading Company through the broken Salvar landscape. They had scattered in Knife’s Edge to watch from the side-lines, sneaking through the junket bazaars with eyes firmly set on their target. When the caravan had departed the city on the north side, to advance into the Ahyark Mountains, the Brigade had reformed and vanished into the cliffside maze that lined the flanks of the enclosed pass.

Now, they were ready to put their burgeoning frustration to good measure. Clarissa had learnt that Thomas Jackson was anything but a patient man. She had subsequently learned how to exploit the mercenaries’ peculiar talents by plying anxiety to every waking moment of his life. He had become an excellent tool in her armoury in no time at all.

As the Brigade shuffled along the cliff face, clinging to the iced granite for dear lives, their benefactor checked her bandoleer. Satisfied that she had brought enough vials for the poison she required to ply to her betrayers’ lips, she adjusted the spider silk of her gloves and flicked her hair back behind her ears. The blonde strands shone with a charismatic and spurious glamour in the moonlight.

“<Salshan minnari!>” she roared.

The power in the syllables of her words shot across the canyon with the force of a thunderbolt.

“Whatever it is my old friend,” she said, dropping her eyes from the distant peaks to the wagon at the head of the caravan. She remained deep in thought for several prolonged and awkward moments before she cleared her mind. “It will not save you from my wrath.”

When the echo of her incantation returned to the cliff face, bouncing off the distance rock wall of the pass, she smiled.

The members of the Montague Brigade had come to fear two things in the service of Lady Clarissa. The first was her wrath. When she was angered you ran, pure and simple. The last man to test her patience had ended up suspended from the walls of St. Denebriel’s Cathedral. This was made all the more endearing by the fact he was naked and suspended by his genitals and his feet. People had spoken about that particular incident for months.

The second thing to fear was the rook that kept itself to the rafters and rooftops of the Montague residence. Its eyes, its beak and its feathers were totems for paranoia. They were portent and doom to anyone who dared to try and claim more than their fair share of the Brigade’s fortunes. They said that the rook had a mind of its own, that it knew if you were stealing.

Lady Clarissa spread her arms when she felt a swell of power rise from the pit of her stomach to the temple of her highbrow. A cry left her lips as her spine elongated and her eyes sharpened in the twilight. The delayed reaction of her metamorphosis made her doubt her ability to act quickly in the blasted chill. It was long rumoured that what the rook saw, Montague saw.

She fell forwards into the dark, the howl of the wind drowning out the last notes of a melodic shriek. Just as the Brigade and Jackson screamed out from the swirl of heavy snow and assaulted the rear of the caravan, from above, a great black rook descended.

[Leopold]

By Rook, Wrath & Ruin
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pfTXtyiZLs)

3033

Love! How so fickle?
It is trick and treat combined,
The losing and gaining hurts in just measure.
Wanted, rejected, obtained, collected Love,
I give up fighting your spiralling pull.

Love! How so secretive?
It is collusion given form,
The mind’s sedation so taught and sickened.
Permanent, unsolvable, invisible, endless Love,
How I long for it’s unrequited kick.

Love! How so fallible?
Such broken illusion,
The heart’s repose it forms delusion.
Twisted, vengeful, fruitful, hateful Love,
I’m partial to it’s malcontent way.

Cydney Oliver

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Ahyark Pass

The exact same moment the Brigade burst into the proximity of the caravan, Leopold rose from his seat on the lead carriage and cocked back Isabella. The white gold pistol found itself forcibly loaded in silence. The caravan stopped, the driver to Winchester’s right whipping the reins with the sort of expression that said ‘ready for anything’.

“Leopold, shall I raise the alarm?” Wilfred said without trepidation.

Winchester glanced down at the old man’s glasses, to check that he was being quite serious. He was very glad to have his butler by his side in these troubled times, but sometimes, he was a nuisance he would rather be without. His severity and his immensity was a constant elephant in the room.

“There is no need Wilfred, I have this perfectly un-” the shriek from above knocked Winchester back into his seat and all the confidence from his chest.

“What was that, sir?” the old man asked with a reassured smile.

“Okay, alright, maybe I do not have it under control.” Winchester adjusted the brim of his hat which had fallen askew in his sudden descent. The noise of gunfire, swords clashing and men barking commands grew louder from the rear of the caravan.

They were being attacked. In Berevar, that meant one thing.

Slavers…

At the head of the caravan Leopold was at a distinct disadvantage as far as intelligence went. He leant around the red cloth canopy that covered the wooden frame of the wagon to try and catch a glimpse of the rear of the column. The darkness and the snow did away with any hopes he might have had.

“I did not expect her to make a personal appearance…,” he grumbled, leaning back into the cover of the carriage.

Lady Clarissa, though one of Leopold’s prominent rivals, had only ever sent her Brigade to raid his caravans. The attacks on his investments had become so frequent of late he had been called to oversee this particular cargo personally. It was not one he could afford to have stolen, especially not from right under his nose. It was not a loss he thought he could stomach if she had personally pulled the coin from his golden threaded pockets.

“When life gives you lemons sir,” the butler took a breath, but when he saw his Lord’s expression he cut it short. It was a look that could shatter rock without much trouble. It was a look the butler knew too well.

The old adage right from Ruby’s mouth grated up Leopold’s spine. He let the anger remind him of the urgency of their situation and clicked back the barrel of his gun. It was a play on words from an old wives' tale that a bard in Scara Brae had made his own.

“When life gives you lemons, Wilfred, you shall indeed paint many things gold.” He leant out from the canopy again. The strain on his stomach and wide girth caused him to wheeze. “At this point in time,” he raised, eyes still fixated on the gloom, “I would rather paint those things red.”

A blackened sky cracked apart in the wake of a peal of thunder. Winchester did not flinch. He had heard the shriek; he expected the spectacle would soon follow.

“Shall I relinquish Jacqueline from her bondage then, sir?” Wilfred’s voice started to waver, uncertainty creeping into the usual wisdom of his endearing accent. The spectacles started to gather snowflakes as he too tried to catch a glimpse of their attackers.

Winchester smiled.

“Yes, that would be most appropriate. I have not seen the old girl in quite a long time.” He set Isabella firmly forwards, taking hold of the canopy’s frame to prevent his heavy weight from an ungracious fall. “It is quite criminal, really,” he added as an afterthought.

A second peal of thunder cracked the air, breaking the sudden swell of activity from the rear of the caravan. The rumble echoed up the length of the pass, shaking the rock and drift to the very foundations of the Ahyark range. A second shriek from the overhead gloom sent another ripple down Winchester’s spine. Though he had come to defend his future from his adversary, he was starting to very much doubt his ability to do so.

He heard a click from over his shoulder. Suddenly, he was reminded that the answer to a man’s problem was always a strong woman.

Isabella, though lightweight, accurate and portable, was half the woman Jacqueline was. Winchester dropped back into the shelter of the wagon’s canopy and watched Wilfred load the long rifle with a silver bullet. Her body was lithe, well-formed and clad in leather bonds. Leopold had acquired Jacqueline from a successful chain of trades in Alerar, but could never quite bring himself to fire it. Each bullet cost the equivalent of a day’s pay for one his workers, which in these hard times was a small fortune.

He frowned at Isabella, patted her, and then set her onto the worn pine bench. Today was not to be her day.

“She will forgive you if you buy her a glass of claret,” Wilfred chuckled. He readied the butt of the rifle with a kiss and then handed the weapon across the rein hooks to its patron’s waiting, shaking, eager arms.

“Oh do not worry,” Leopold took the rifle. He nearly dropped it as its weight dropped his hands to the wood. He had forgotten just how heavy she was. “It will be a vintage, the finest,” he lifted it with a grunt.

He locked and loaded the silver bullet into the barrel and raised the brass scope to his eye. He pierced the gloom that lay ahead of the caravan and made a mock sound of a gunshot. There was nothing Leopold liked more than a fine woman, strong wine, and a bit of game hunting.

[Leopold]

Jackson did not waste any time removing any opposition that got in his way. The first carriage, as Mr Wilhelm had correctly assumed, was full of guards. His sword had pierced the canopy of the wagon and severed the captain’s aorta before any of them could reach for their axes. Even though they had screamed as they had burst into view, they had apparently caught the caravan off guard.

The gargle of blood had injected adrenaline into the veins of the entire Brigade as they readied themselves. The warm and dark crimson sloshed to the carriage floor and splattered onto the snow. It steamed. When the guards burst out of the rear of the wagon the sound of bows drawing and arrows darting through the cold night was their welcoming.

“Gentlemen, we mean you immense harm! If you would kindly put down your weapons we can get the inevitable over with.” The man’s moustache and cloak concealed the malefic smile plastered over his face as he spiralled about the edge of the wagon. With a swift strike he cut his sword back over a young lad’s throat. He burst from the shelter of the wagon and crashed into the flank of the Winchester House Guard with zeal and murder in his eyes. His youthful corpse fell forwards into the white cloud like flakes.

Several guards dropped with unceremonious flops to the drift, arrows in their necks, pain in their eyes frozen permanently onto their faces.

“Do not disappoint me gentlemen,” Jackson resumed his soliloquy; quite undeterred by the advance of two more able looking but utterly terrified individuals. One was a woman who had striking red hair beneath her helmet. The other was a woman of dark skin and a cheeky disposition. For Jackson, there was no distinction between age, gender or race.

If Lady Montague told him to kill, then that is exactly what he did.

“I am neither a gentlemen, nor am I one to idly disappoint,” the red head roared. It took Jackson several seconds to process the information before him. He levelled his sword down to the ground, its bloodied tip marking his territory onto the wheel marked snow. “The only inevitable thing, good sir, is your comeuppance.” The woman smiled.

An arrow whistled through the night and struck Jackson in the chest. It darted through the shadows from up on the cliff tops. The two women frowned as the man’s body fell to the floor. His corpse joined their comrades unceremoniously and without applause. Though the red head did not disappoint readily, Jackson, it seemed, had disappointed someone with a cold heart. They looked at one another re-assuredly before they turned in the snow, heavy boots flattening the growing drift.

The remaining seven members of the Brigade had thrown down their bows and drawn an array of blades. The red head picked out a khaddar, a falchion and a great sword. There was a menagerie of culture before them, and no doubt an array of skill behind each length of metal from across the globe.

“To me, men, to me!” she roared. Her sword, a single edged curved blade, flashed in the dark as she waved it overhead. It acted as a standard for the distraught and breaking ranks of the caravan guard. They swiftly gathered in a half circle around the rear of the wagon, nine in all, eleven total with the two women.

“Do not let them reach the cargo. Do not let them take your family’s food from their table!”

The blonde guards woman took a sterner approach, holding nothing back and keeping kindness in the depths of the frozen pass where she thought it belonged. Her jade eyes pierced the nearest adversary from beneath the ridge of her helmet’s nose guard.

The Brigade charged out from the shadows proper, and the two battle lines clashed together with as much gusto as arrows and words had.

[Leopold]

One Year Ago
Scara Brae, House of Master Bigstar

Each month the council members of the Merchant Guild of Scara Brae took part in an ancient rite. It had been known by many names in its long history, but now it was referred to as the Van Degalion. It was a ‘gathering of masters’ seeking to steep themselves in a provincial communion of ideas. Its many laws and bylaws bring together the ruling bodies of all the guilds to discuss and address any presiding matters relating to business and development. This ancient ritual has been practised for centuries and it is steeped in as much mystery as the guilds themselves. Though shrouded in intrigue and often debated by the lower levels of the many circles of the Scara Brae guilds-man circle, what the Van Degalion actually amounts to is a chest and brow beating drinking session.

The juxtaposition was precisely why Leopold Winchester loved attending.

“What did people say to get away for this meeting this time?” he asked the others wryly, half uninterested but asking out of conformity.

At the Van Degalion, he could be debonair with his wife about attending urgent matters in the under belly of the city’s mercantile elite. He could then spend the evening discussing her under garments and the latest political events to embrace the island without fear of reprisal. The other men and women sat around the large oaken table all thought the exact same thing. They jolly well enjoyed this tradition, though they never let on for weeks before the event.

“My wife still thinks I come to these meetings to audit trade records,” Magnus Tarred chuckled.

He was a man with a particularly large forehead and olive green doublet that Leopold had no particular feeling for. The man’s comment made him smile however, and he made a note to keep an eye on the brash and arrogant fish monger’s progress.

“I tell Damian the exact same thing,” chipped in Lady Montague. She was a headstrong woman who was both the most active member and the long standing matriarch of the Seamstress Guild. She was a young entrepreneur that had successfully developed a machine to hem stitch durable underwear for the hard working woman of the docklands. To say that she was responsible for much of the female ‘support’ in the city was an understatement, and a constant source of belittling for the proud, blonde haired adventuress.

“What about you, Leopold?” Magnus enquired, setting his tankard down onto the well-worn surface of the meeting chamber’s solitary table. It had witnessed far too many raunchy exchanges, clandestine trades and back handed dealings to be bothered by another ale stain on its history tarnished veneer.

[Leopold]

With a slow rise from a slouch to a rigid and regal position in his wingback chair, Leopold carefully considered how best to respond. Though the air of secrecy afforded them all a respite from their spouse’s prying eyes and well-tuned ears, you could never be sure just what got back to them through the grapevine. Some things he knew Ruby could forgive him for saying. She even said she expected him to vent when she was not there…but others would result in a swift kick to the ground and an assault with scissors on his formal wardrobe.

The thought did not bear observing.

“Ruby is part of my trade and business as much as the nails tacking together the crates. She knows where I am, and most likely knows exactly what we all get up to.” He wrinkled his lips and then stroked his beard with wise, stubby fingers. “I tell her I am attending the Van Degalion and she dutifully nods, kisses me on the cheek and hands me my hat.” She did it with far too much relish for the admission to be comfortable for Leopold.

For all Leopold knew she was having just as much fun at home with her sewing circle as he was with his fellow tradesmen. If Lillith had not been away on an anarchic assignment to Akashima, he would have been certain to return to a dishevelled looking and angered housekeeper. The amount of times he had been shouted at by Rose about ‘the mistresses’ behaviour’ had gone into three digits.

The six members of the council, Leopold included, all nodded glumly.

“Indeed,” they mumbled together in a slumbering chorus.

They sipped their drinks and sent spirals of cigar and cigarrete smoke up into the dark rafters of the store room in silence. Each month, the Van Degalion took place in one of the council’s own homes. For the first month of spring they had commenced proceedings in Master Bigstar’s mansion on the edge of the docklands. He was a churlish baker who ran a large chain of franchises across Scara Brae, with a penchant for cake and the moist baps on offer in the city’s red light district.

This evening he was nowhere to be seen.

The manservant had opened the door and seen them in to the back room; much to the suspicious glances of Mrs Bigstar’s piercing hazel eyes. Behind the heavy oak door that separated the makeshift meeting room from the large industrial kitchen they commenced their gossip with hushed voices until they grew confident and drunk enough to not care.

“It is true what they say then, I take it?” Magnus chuckled, his ego taking centre stage and casting the large piles of crates and stacks of wine bottles in their dust racks into obscurity. He half seemed eager to jump onto the table and start swaying back and forth with his tankard held high.

“Behind every good man there is”…Lady Montague tapped him on the shoulder and he stopped mid-sentence.

[Leopold]

“We will have less of that if you do not mind Magnus. We have not even begun to address the items on the agenda, and you are already teetering dangerously close to sounding like the chauvinist pig we all know you to be.” She dropped her gaze and her warning digit back to her knitting needles. With a strange focus and continuance she continued to weave magic into the ochre and fuchsia wool.

Leopold developed a sudden adoration for the woman. He vowed to show her a respect the other members of the council would have to work considerably harder to obtain.

“How da,” Magnus realised he was in the minority in his shock. The other members of the council all stared at him sternly. He slouched in his chair.

“Drinking does it to the best of us,” Lady Montague continued under her breath. Leopold wondered how the she managed to stay sober after four double measures of Salvar vodka. The ice had tinkled in her glass too many times for him to remain without suspicion.

He had to hand it to the women of Scara Brae. Unlike their counterparts in Radasanth, the Scara Braen queens and princesses took no prisoners, took no nonsense and did not fanny about with time wasters. With a quick flick of the wrist he knocked back the last dregs of his first long iced tea and set the tall glass onto the table top. He smacked his lips and adjusted himself to get comfortable.

If he did not get a move on, they were going to run out of vodka.

“As this is going to be a rather long evening by all accounts I am inclined to agree with Lady Montague,” Leopold took on a stern accent that was devoid of any hint of intoxication.

Despite the laid back nature of the guild’s proceedings, there was still business to be done. “Since it is painfully clear that Master Bigstar is not only neglecting his wife but his station this evening, let us make our declarations and begin,” she continued, smiling at Leopold before finally setting her knitting down onto the table top.

“Would you like to begin Mr Winchester?” she raised an eyebrow in his general direction. With her hands now free, she topped up her cut glass tumbler from a hip flask she produced from her undergarments.

The declarations were the simple introductions of each council member to the rest of the group. It carried tradition with it, but also security. A man’s ledgers were said to be his legacy and through knowing them off by heart you could hold sway over his empire. To declare a profit from them to the guild was as good as buying their trust.

“My name is Leopold Winchester, director of The Winchester Rose Trading Company. This month, I made three hundred gold net profits over my last period. This is an increase of four per cent over the same time last year. My trade with Fallien has increased, with spice returning monthly now on time and without interference from the Ruuya Bedouin.” He thought for a moment, as if he were trying to recollect one final piece of information vital to his cause. “The war in Corone has seen to it that my profits are drained by the Royal Household, and my declaration this month, is to see to it that the guild hampers the involvement of Scara Brae with that conflict.”

He tapped the desk and leant back into his chair to let the next person speak.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Ahyark Pass

At the front of the caravan, despite the fact that his confidence was bolstered by Jacqueline’s unveiling, Leopold frowned. The second eruption of shouts and the sound of swords clashing once more brought doubt to his mind.

“I do hope the true lady in life worth getting into bed with at night will be alright…” he bit his lip.

“Worry not sir, Mrs Winchester is quite capable of holding her own.” Wilfred did not for one second doubt Ruby’s sword arm. It was as legendary in Scara Brae as the force of her boot to an untended groin.

Leopold chuckled. Wilfred was right on the money.

“I think we have something bigger to worry about on our hands right now…” Leopold mused. The shriek and the thunderclaps meant that somewhere overhead, in the gloom that cut off the sky, she was swooping back and forth.

“I daresay sir, she is going to quite the extent to put this caravan out of business, wouldn’t you say?” Wilfred lifted up Isabella, being the only man allowed to do so without losing a limb and raised it to the sky overhead. There was a brief silence, in which only the soft landing of sow flakes on red noses dared speak out against the heavily weighted question of the butler.

Lady Montague never pulled her punches.

“She is not after the caravan Wilfred, you know that.” Leopold glanced down at the old man, rifle still raised, scope till primed, heart still racing. He was not sure if it was his fear or his stamina that was failing him. He started to wish he had only one helping of pork at dinner before departing Knife’s Edge.

“Quite right sir. I was trying to avoid thinking about what our fate will be if we do not,” he wrinkled his lips. With a dry, hoarse, doubtful smile he added, “Shall we say, do our mercantile duty?”

There was another shriek overhead that was considerably closer than last time.

“That will suffice Wilfred, quite good enough I should say.” Leopold looked back through the scope with baited breath.

With pistol cocked to the dark sky, the moonlight barely breeching the front of the caravan, Wilfred made a brave show of trying to look like he knew how to aim. Leopold, a little better off in the fire arm department watched through the swirl of snow fall for the tell-tale signs that would mark his target out. The moonlight could not help but catch the polished black wings of the Lady Rook if she continued to so boldly declare her presence.

Overhead, swooping back and forth with relish Lady Clarissa Montague examined the caravan up close. On her third pass, her wingspan skimming the cliff face either side of the gulley she opened her beak above the lead caravan. The shriek she let out the third time coincided with a third peal of thunder. A flash of lightning lit the sky, and in that split second two things happened.

A rifle, somewhere below, loosed a shot.

A woman with red hair lashed out with her sword, and as she drew it back blood steaming on its blade she flinched.

Two birds felt the cold thrust of silver into their flesh in unison.

Lady Montague and Lady Winchester both screamed in the shadows of Berevar’s inhospitable welcome.

[Leopold]

The rook screamed with an inhuman outburst. There was a thud in the air over the caravan as it beat its wings and began to fly upwards, desperate to avoid a follow up shot. It’s survival instinct caused a reflex to try and be free of the claustrophobia of the pass. The soft snowfall swirled behind each ascent, the avian advance kicking up a storm as it climbed and climbed and…fell.

Clarissa’s rook form was heavily weighted in the middle, a great, puffy chest with plumes several feet long. It dropped first, bending her wings and tail feathers behind her. Her head snapped back, feathers flapping, beak opening and turning to the side with another shriek. A trickle of blood rose like a rose of blood into the sickly sky.

CRASH!

The ground all along the pass shook, though many were too enthralled by the need to survive to notice. The horses whinnied and shuffled their hooves nervously at the head of the caravan. Icicles and miniature avalanches dropped their weight into the darkness, small changes to an ever transforming landscape.

“It has been a while…” she whispered, the snow dust rising about her fallen corpse.

Lady Montague had been shot at many a time, it was part and parcel of being a slaver. What had not happened before, however, was being hit by one of those shots. Alongside the searing pain in her chest, she felt a burning agony in her ego. It was a humbling moment for a woman who was used to totalitarian power amongst her peers.

By the time the snow settled, like the innards of a snow globe about a resin rook she had transformed back into her erudite human self. Her small body remained face down and prone amid a large bird shaped crater. Her arms were bent awkwardly in the same position as the great swathes where her wings had been.

She groaned, spat, and rolled over.

Her spider silk stitched tunic and silk cloak were speckled with clumps of white, packed snow. Her nose, turned red by the exposure to the frozen floor of the pass was running, and the vials on her chest were glowing. The proximity to the trickle of blood running down her bosom was inciting a reaction.

“I owe you twice for that Winchester,” she snarled. She patted herself down, back arced, legs stretched, muscles all over aching.

After several recovery breaths she pushed herself upright and stared through the gloom towards the head of the caravan. Her button nose wrinkled, resisting her attempt to warm it with her gloved fingers. Realising the futility of her actions she knocked the effort square on the head. There were more pressing matters to attend to asides limbs and skin she could easily regrow.

“<Humman lemark, ill devus shar!>”

The peal of thunder that followed her incantation dropped down into the pass and echoed the life out of the air in the crater. Lady Montague shook violently as if a bolt of lightning had hit her. Her skin started to hiss with steam as the snow melted from her and the patches of water evaporated into nothingness. The lost magic of the necromancers of Raiaera was not so lost in the dark of Berevar. To the worshippers of the old gods, it was a way of life, a talent to be pandered to in the service of the unforgotten names.

“<Ill shanka devus,>” the second line was softer, and darted through the dark towards the direction she guessed the lead wagon was.

What could piously give life, could also sickly take it away.

[Leopold]

Lady Montague wheezed as she clicked her spine back into place and rolled the stiffness in the muscles of her neck. It took her a few seconds to compose herself before she started trudging forwards, climbing out of the bird shaped drift with sluggish advances. The tip of her sword scabbard left a long line as she scrabbled most undignified on her hands and knees. The look on her face could have dropped a man to his knees at twenty paces, though for all the wrong reasons.

When she staggered through the fog into view of the caravan she clutched the wound on her chest, slipped a vial from her bandoleer with her free hand and pulled the stopper with her teeth. As she spat the cork into the drift, she glared daggers at Leopold Winchester. He was stood lofty and several feet abreast than when she had last seen him on the front of the wagon, rifle still cocked to his chest, eyes gauging the threat in the skies.

"You always did have your head in the clouds Leopold!" she roared.

The second the rifle dropped to aim at Lady Montague, the vial rose towards Leopold. The spell bounced back towards her, ricocheting from the steep rock face of the pass and struck the red liquid. A shock wave erupted from the slaver and washed down the wagon train in a swirling, rolling fire storm.

"Tut, guns are so undignified." There was vibrancy in her words that seemed to echo in Leopold’s mind.

The flintlock mechanism of Jacqueline burst into flame, leaving Leopold with little choice but to drop the heavy rifle to the drift. It struck the reins and wheel shaft, leaving a dent in her Liviol form like a woman scorned. Leopold scowled and Wilfred, keen not to lose a hand dropped Isabella very quickly. He did not expect the woman feared a small trinket of war like the pistol, but he loosed her from his grip just in case.

"Fight me like a real man," she challenged, dropping the empty glass tube with the same impulse to draw her steel rapier.

Leopold Winchester, never one to let a woman with a bigger ego than his wife get the better of him leapt with a grunt from the wagon. His heavy boots thudded to the dirt and crushed the snow beneath his bulk with little resistance. Wilfred rose, hesitant for his Lord's safety.

"I do not think this is a," when Leopold rose his hand in protestation, the butler sat down in a blunt and sudden silence.

"Worry not, Wilfred, I will only be a moment. Be a good sport and put the kettle on would you?" he moved over towards the beckoning and delicate wrist that called for his attention. Wilfred shook his head as he dissipated into the canopy of the wagon, pulling the red canopy closed behind him as he went. His instincts as a man servant took over his instincts as a friend and protector. Tea would heal any woes suffered by his Lord, as long as he had remembered to pack the milk.

"Clarissa my dear, if you wanted an audience with me, you really need not have gone to such trouble." For the first time in Leopold Winchester's short life he approached a woman with less than good intentions. He drew the length of steel he kept on his hip quite often just for show. He rubbed the leather handle between forefinger and thumb to keen its grip in his hand and levelled its tip at the woman's throat. "An appointment really would not have been needed."

Lady Montague cut a cross in the air, the pain in her chest draining any sanity and etiquette from her mind.

"Consider this an impromptu and off the cuff business opportunity," she snarled.

Leopold bowed, "an appropriate sentiment."

She charged through the snow in a trail of feathers. Remnants of her transformation bloodied and useless fell behind her in a flurry of shadowy plumes. Her sword caught the moonlight as it cleaved forwards into Leopold's defence, and they set their cards on the proverbial table.

[Leopold]

One Year Ago
Scara Brae, House of Master Bigstar

“Thank you for that enlightening snippet of the Winchester Rose, Leopold,” Lady Montague raised her glass to her colleagues continued success. “I think that sentiment is one we all quite gladly support. Am I right, gentlemen?” she raised an inquisitive eyebrow in question. To augment her dominating presence she looked down her nose at the others at the table then drained the glass in one. She set the vessel onto the mahogany table before she started to put away her wool. It disappeared quickly into her flannelled satchel.

The men all nodded. They dared not contest Lady Montague’s opinion, especially in their weakened states.

“What about you, Lady Montague? How have you fared of late?” Leopold turned to a waiting tankard of honey mead which he had let breath since he had first arrived. As a consumer of fine wine and good, strong ale, it was the only way to drink it in his view.

She curled her lip as she righted herself.

“Oh, do not look so coy Lady Montague. We all have to take our turn to declare our intentions. It is, after all, part of the Van Degalion's long standing tradition.” Leopold gave her a stern glare and smacked his lips free of the foam that he had attracted after a series of thirsty glugs. The tankard clinked on the chipped worktop as he set it down again and leant forwards. He cupped the steel possessively with both of his chubby and well worked hands.

“A tradition I sometimes loathe,” she bit, and Leopold could only smile. “Very well,” she sighed. She made a ritual of preparation and poured herself another drink from a second flask. Reluctantly she settled back into the satin backed chair to recount her own business exploits.

Lady Clarissa Montague fell in love with Lord Leopold Winchester all over again at that precise moment. The stitches of the seamstress’s cold, cold heart were coming very much undone.

“My name is Lady Clarissa Montague, head of the Seamstress Guild and matriarch of the Montague Brigade. This season, we have expanded into the shattered lands of Salvar and the snow wastes of Berevar.” There was a certain element of concern, hesitation and secrecy in her words. Leopold, who was not quite drunk enough to be ignorant of her subtleties picked up on it like a hawk spotting potential prey. He watched her body language closely.

“Berevar? What the fuck is in Berevar?”

“Magnus…please…” Leopold scolded. His earlier fondness he had allowed to develop for the man died.

With a look that could poison a man’s heart, Lady Montague disarmed Magnus before she continued. “We have begun importing building materials, namely wood from the Brokenthorn and rocks from the Windlacers. It is to aid the regeneration of the country in the wake of its civil war.”

The one flaw in the ethics of the Guilds-man Circle was its desire to achieve profitability at any cost. Though the guild did not tolerate illegal activity, it did not exclude making profit from war, suffering or natural disaster.

Leopold might have come to accept this eventually over the years, but that did not mean he liked it. He certainly did not admire those who took full advantage of the Law of Gold Errantry; Scara Brae’s archaic piracy and mercantile charters.

“The Montague Brigade has doubled its turnover since my last report to four thousand or so. As you can appreciate, for net profit that is a lot of gold in our coffers.” Her ego shone through her eyes, puffed up her chest and brought her a chorus of whistles and delicate claps. Leopold, astute to her perspiration remained unmoved and silent.

“Very good…,” he said softly, his words heard clearly by no one except the rim of his tankard. He sipped at it with relish, drawing on the deep, spicy draft of the hops to damp the sweet after kick.

“Leopold you sour dog, you seem unimpressed?” Magnus, who was boisterous but calming at such good news half made to slap Leopold on the shoulder. When Leopold leant back out of the way he stopped.

“It is…not that I am unimpressed.” He looked between Magnus and Clarissa, then back into his foam. He ran a finger over it and traced a clover into the froth. He sighed and set the tankard back onto the table.

There was an awkward silence.

“Then cheer up! This deserves a celebration and one more so than usual!” there was a chorus of applause that shook the pots and pans hanging idly on the long oak rail overhead. They continued to tinkle together for a good few minutes.

Leopold started to realise something, a faint, nagging doubt that he knew something he should have realised a long time ago.

“Let us hear her declaration, first…” Leopold set his gaze on the seamstress, hoping she would realise he was not going to be fooled for long. If she was branching out into Berevar, then something was afoot.

Only the Old Gods dwelt there, and the Old Gods did not take kindly to the interferences of mortal men.

Leopold Winchester, the Raven, knew about their curses and damnations all too well.

[Leopold]

One Year Ago
Scara Brae, House of Master Bigstar

“People expect me to pledge allegiance or assert my desire to be a charitable woman.” The exchange of glances between the male members of the guild riled up Leopold something horrid. They, unlike he, would never consider their esteemed feminine colleague to be anything other than resplendent. “However, my declaration this quarter is a little…” she licked her lips, “unusual.”

“What could possibly be so unusual as to cause Leopold to act so uncouthly?” Magnus chuckled. He continued to down his drink as his eyes, hazel in colour and glazed over rolled haphazardly with sarcasm.

“I, Lady Clarissa Montague, vow to restore the slave trade to Scara Brae.”

Beer was spat in harmonious sprays everywhere.



Present Day
Berevar, The Winchester Rose Caravan

Leopold grit his teeth as he advanced through the snow towards his would be aggressor. The memory of their last encounter drove him to a previously unrealised swiftness. Despite his girth, his weight, his luxurious lifestyle Leopold swung his blade in a left arc into her advancing rapier. The clash was drowned out by the wind and the sound of battle behind him.

“You fulfilled your promise, then?” Leopold stepped back, dropped his blade to parry her counter thrust then chipped it away with a hefty tap. His sword was much thicker and heavier than her foil and it made short work of her quick but weakened state.

“A Montague never breaks her promise,” which, as far as Leopold was concerned, was her way of saying yes.

In the swirl of snow that thickened about them, a duel of blades was less familiar to Leopold than a well-aimed shot. Despite being an honest man, with honourable intentions, he was not going to suffer an embarrassing defeat here. He drew on every old trick he knew, and every harsh lesson he had learnt in public school to boot.

Clarissa stepped into his guard and raised her blade into his midriff. Cutting his sword in on its stable grip, Leopold flicked the blade up out of harm’s way so that it cut past his ear. It sliced into the cartilage, dividing one of the man’s most prominent features in two. He stumbled back and his hand defensively lifted to feel his injury. It was, as he expected, blissfully warm in the midst of Berevar’s untenable weather.

“I warned you Leopold when you turned me down.” She waved her sword left and right, as if it were a bat preparing for a serve of cricket. Her sword arm was apparently stronger than Leopold realised. There was a power behind it that did not come from muscles or sinew or adrenaline. “I warned you I would be your ruination.”

Leopold steeled his body for another exchange.

“You dared to tarnish the reputation of the guild with slavery, Clarissa. I would never, could never love a woman who thought that was a just, righteous application of her mind.” Leopold had never doubted that it was indeed a brilliant mind. Her acumen outshone even his in mercantile matters and her speechraft was beyond legendary.

Her honeyed words had literally toppled empires.



One Year Ago
Scara Brae, House of Master Bigstar

The uproar took several minutes of Leopold flapping his arms and Magnus stamping his feet to die down. The awkward silence that followed was deafening, smothering, and corrupting. Slowly, the heavy breath in liquor filled lungs stagnated, until no one could bear to remain silent any longer.

“You would never be all-”

“I do not need permission, Magnus,” she snapped. It was then that Leopold finally saw her true form flicker through the costume of skin and bone. She was slowly becoming the Rook once again.

The Old Gods were waking.

“What you do need Clarissa is a Royal Charter. That is something Queen Valeena would never consent to, and you know that damned well.” The etiquette of the meeting was thrown well and truly down the drain by Leopold. He had observed her slow unravelling of form; he would not pretend it was not happening any longer.

“I assume that means I do not have your support?” her eyebrow, eternally a weapon in her more than capable hands rose ready to strike.

Leopold Winchester, eternally suffering husband of Ruby Winchester, had seen it all before. He coughed, cleared his throat and languishingly downed the rest of his drink. He set the tankard down onto the table forcibly, so that the sound caused everyone to flinch.

“The Guilds-man Circle condemns the mere thought,” he said sternly.

“Then I, and of course the Montague Brigade will take its business to Salvar and away from this wretched hell-hole.” She snapped as she raised, a dramatic flair lifting her to new heights of disgust in Leopold’s mind.

First she had tried to steal him away in the night with champagne and roses, a heartfelt poem and a long, agonising list of material promises.

Now, she was trying to steal the prosperity of Scara Brae.



Present Day
Berevar, The Winchester Rose Caravan

“We can remain hidden no longer, Raven.”

Leopold curled his lip.

“We made a promise, Rook.”

“The Old Gods make promises to nobody,” she screamed. The last of her plumes shook free from her tattered, half frozen flesh as she ran at him and launched into a downward, cleaving arc with her blade.

[Leopold]

Ruby Winchester, like her husband, was no stranger to the fickle world of business. Unlike her husband however she was also no stranger to death, pain and suffering. The cold prang in her chest was like an old friend standing on her porch, knocking on her door without a thought for common decency. She staggered, lips curled, red hair bobbing as she wavered on her high heeled boots.

“Good god, Ruby!” Lillith roared, striking out at her opponent before she knocked him back with a triple strike and gave herself the opportunity to run to her sister’s aid.

She embraced Ruby with a loving, gentle hug

“Oh god, Ruby, stay with me!” she whimpered, quite overcome with melodrama. She took the weight off her boots as she started to slip into the drift, until she was satisfied she was stable.

“Arden!” she screamed.

“ARDEN!”

It was often said that if you travelled far enough into the north, strange things started to happen. Whilst the caravan was not quite that far beyond the borders between Salvar and Berevar, things were strange all the same. Whereas convention suggested to Ruby Winchester that a gladius to the side should hurt, this particular gladius in this particular side just felt like an ice cube against the skin.

She looked down at the impact, where the tip of the sword had pierced her cloak and outer tunic, but become stuck on the delicate metalwork of her floral hauberk. The mithril, quite beside itself with joy for saving its mistress still sung with a chime.

“That was not very nice,” she clucked, spinning Lucrezia about to knock the hovering sword away, poised to deliver a second blow to the injured soldier. She followed it up with a thrust to the surprised man’s surprised face, and penetrated the wind pipe with a soft exhalation of air and pent up rage.

Another member of the Montague Brigade slumped into the snow.

Ruby pushed herself away from her sister, whose expression screamed surprise at how quickly her sibling had dispatched a seasoned soldier whilst being swaddled by a doting and overbearing self.

Another red headed soldier appeared through the snow veil, his long curved blade aglow with blood. The silent swordsman remained silent as he approached; knocking incoming strikes aside, oblivious to everything and everyone else except to respond to the summons of his sister. The man that was also called Mr Wilhelm carried a bow over his shoulder. He had spent all his arrows, and had left the simple leather quiver high on the eastern outcrop.

Nobody thought to ask how a half blind man aimed so true.

“You still wore that damned armour, under all of that?” Lillith said, happiness barely showing through her seething mask of anger. “Oh I could kill you myself!” she screamed, before bouncing back into the fray. Though the members of Tantalum were immortal their kin were not, and the battle was swiftly coming undone in their absence. Screams joined the whirl of the snow, the crash of thunder and the shock of the lightning in the darkened sky.

Ruby could only pat her side in thanks.

Arden approached her from behind and rested a hand on her shoulder. It was all he needed to say by means of an introduction. Two days ago, he had been tasked with infiltrating the Montague Brigade whilst they were running the streets of Knife’s Edge, trying not to look conspicuous. Leopold, aware that he was undoubtedly being followed through the glacial landscape had tasked the double agent with a simple engagement with sabotage.

“I am sorry; Mr Jackson,” he whispered “but Lady Montague will no longer need your particular talents.” His dry, sarcastic tone brought a smile to Ruby’s face. She tugged at her helmet and tossed it into the back of the wagon. It landed with a thud before it rolled down to the back of the wooden innards by merit of the pass’s rising slope.

Her red hair, striking in the darkness, unfurled. She shook it loose and then turned to her companion.

“That was very humorous Arden. We will not need your blade’s peculiar talents today, just its swing.” She wasted no time in skipping back into the melee, scream piercing the swirl of snowflakes that rolled about her. She joined her sister in a flurry of sword swings, melodic verse and witty insults. The worst came from the soul of her sword, which longed to have a body of its own to smite its mistresses’ foes.

[Leopold]

It had been many years since the Ice Henge had received visitors.

Or at least, it had been many years since it had non-Wizard visitors. Apparently, if you wore a pointy hat, you did not count.

At dusk the night before Lady Clarissa Montague, the once godly being called Rook had stood on the outskirts of the great ice spires. She was quite beside herself. She could feel the corruption that lingered there in the wake of a mortal’s visitation. It was a fiery, passionate chorus of power that she both feared and loved.

Rook had mistaken that man’s taint for a sign from the Thayne that it was time for the Old Gods to rise.

“I have heard the Old Song,” she snarled, their blades striking once, twice, three times in a carefully choreographed exchange. Her downward arc was easily rebuffed by a slicing cross slash, and her follow up just as easily discharged by a spiralling counter blow. Her anger was getting the better of her, and Leopold watched her every movement, analysing her like a series of business transactions.

Raven was weighing her up for a quick dispatch.

“You heard nothing of the sort Rook. You heard nothing but the wind and the howls of the half-orc clans!” the wind howled, as if just to prove his point.

Leopold took the opportunity to bring his sword into Rook’s, and pushed it aside to his right. She pushed back, causing his arm to shake as it strained to prevent it from cutting into his guard and pushing over his sword arm into his shoulder. That would worry Ruby far too much. Apparently, she quite liked her husband’s body intact.

“Just because you turned your back on the Ice Henge,” she snarled her eyes aflame with jealousy, rage, love, fear. “It does not mean that we are not being called.”

Tired of the theatrics, Leopold slowly brought his left hand up towards her chest. Gritting his teeth to steel his muscles against her efforts to usurp his defences, he muttered an ancient verse of his own, bound in the same tenets as the lightning and the fire brand she had conjured. His old magic possessed a dark malefic to it, one bridling with fear, loathing and death.

“<Makassar Santorin!>” his clenched fist glowed with a vibrancy that was beyond words, like a purple sun in the abyss of the Void.

A vermillion sphere of pure shadow shot out from his fist and ploughed into Rook’s chest, striking her square dead centre between her ribs. The sound that followed would stick in Leopold’s mind for the rest of their journey.

“Grah!” she screamed, her lungs pushed to new heights of excess as the implosion crushed and scattered her bone back into her chest cavity. She rose in the air and flew in a long dive arc back into the bird shaped furrow in the snow, just ahead of the head wagon.

The snow continued to fall in her absence but somehow, it fell away from Leopold. Somebody was watching him, and Berevar dare not touched those observed by its very soul. He panted several times with feathery fingers wavering and helmeted brow sweating. The creature moved forwards slowly, trails of red and black cloth that seemed to possess a life of their own dragging in his wake as he seemingly floated footless through the drift. The curled horns and shining silver of his headdress shone in the moonlight as the clouds began to split asunder, their mistresses’ magic spent.

Looking down into the crater, his newly conjured staff steadying his tired, fatigued and corporeal form, Raven, the once servant of Draconus glared with the baleful stare of the ages at the prone body of the creature once called Rook.

“What happened to you…,” he whispered, the tendrils of his voice seeping into her mind so that she could hear him, even as she writhed in the agony of his Vorpal blast.

“I refused to lie down and take our exile lightly,” she replied, the energy in her mind still as sharp and keen as ever. Despite her mortal form’s dying throes, her spirit, her half-immortal soul refused to lie down.

Overhead, the aurora Borealis revealed themselves in all their multi coloured glory. Long stretches of vibrant jade and olive swirls danced in the sky, waves of maelstrom flame setting the heavens ablaze.Raven looked up at them through the slits in his helmet, and shook the fetishes at the tip of his staff in reverence. The Old Gods had given Rook the power of shadow, obfuscation, mystery…but they had taken it away just as readily.

The Old Gods were noticing their lost children once again.

[Leopold]

“They have spurned you Rook. You are to be exiled even from Berevar.” The council of the Old Gods was convening in the Ice Henge far to the north, further north than even Rook or Raven had ever been without the calling of their deities to guide them to the heart land of the Wilderness.

Rook would never see the Ice Henge again.

“I only did what they asked…they want you, Raven. They want you to return to them, you took their power and fled to the warm south…”

Leopold frowned, his cynicism still intact even in his horrifying Fae form.

“I am not returning to them, nor am I going to give the staff back.” He waved the offending relic in front of her and she opened her eyes to look up into the now clear sky. Her arms were bent, her legs splayed, her bleeding, tattered chest heaving with painful, blood fuelled breaths.

“They do not want…the staff, Raven” She spat blood, which landed on her chin in a claret gobbet. There was a guttural rattle to her words, a clear sign her lungs were perforated, her vocal chords drowning, her heart failing.

“That is all I took, Rook. When the sundering divided us I took the Staff and vowed never to return to the Ice Henge. Our time is over, the Old Gods are dying, and the al-Thayne’s children are rising once more from the Vhadya and the damnation of the Second Child.” Leopold’s knowledge of Althanas history surprised him at times; he was not sure if he had listened to Ruby’s lectures or if he had simply learnt it on the principle of osmosis from being so close to the Thayne’s children themselves. It felt like an ancestral recall, a hidden library in the mind that had been born from the Ice Henge, long ago.

“You…” with her dying breath, Clarissa formed a damning truth in the cold air, “took their dignity.” With one final cough, a lung deflated and she let out a long, pained exhalation of air that fled the body with such speed it dragged a feathered soul along with it.

Raven watched the glowing wisps of her life force float up into the darkness, illuminated by the northern lights and glimmering with its own, immortal prominence. When it reached a hundred or so feet in the air it took on the shape of a rook, though much smaller than the grand monstrous form it had when it descended into the pass and beat its wings one last time.

Leopold dropped his helmeted gaze back into the crater, which was now be speckled with a bloodied circle at the heart, mimicking the bullet wound he had inflicted on the grand rook, and the last, damning wound on the chest of his oldest friend.

Her corporeal body was gone, but her presence remained as strong as ever and weighing on his conscious.

“We will meet again,” he mused.

He turned back to the caravan and strolled soothingly towards the head wagon. As he advanced, the cloth and other worldly figure fell away in broken shards. Each facet of his alter ego faded into nothingness as he advanced, until he arrived at the still whimpering horses just as he was moments before.

Leopold cleared his throat, patted the mare on its mane and looked at the closed curtain that separated the driving bench from the inner space of the wagon. He heard tea cups clinking.

“Is that tea bloody ready, Wilfred? I am dying of thirst out here,” he shouted.

“Coming right away sir!” a surprised voice shouted from within.

Leopold rolled his eyes, sheathed his sword and reached onto the wagon for Isabella.

“You best set out several more cups, we are expecting guests,” was his parting command as he made his way down the long line of wagons, heavy boots stomping through the snow with a sudden urgency.

Though Lady Clarissa Montague was out of the way, there was still the small matter of wielding the dignity he had stolen from the gods and using it as a potent tool against the remnants of her brigade. He put on a façade of heroism, one not broken or threatened by the cut ear or the bruised arm, and rode in not so shining armour to the rescue of his wife.

[Leopold]

Ruby Winchester was very much enjoying herself, but for all the wrong reasons. Unlike her husband, she never had good intentions when she approached another with a sword. There was no honour to be found in the spell singer’s heart as she made for the dwindling ranks of the Montague Brigade. They were threatening her future, and there would be nothing but wrath from a woman scorned and removed from her avenue to buy shoes.

“Come on then…” she whispered, her chest heaving with strain, the bruise that was forming beneath her arm already undoing her determination and stamina.

Lillith stood to her left and Arden to her right. Her companions formed a barricade between the last wagon of the Winchester Rose Caravan and the last handful of it’s would be raiders.

“It would be wise to return to Knife’s Edge,” Arden suggested, the bloodshed already riling his senses, gnawing at his soul, churning up the dark demon within that begged him to give in to the temptation and feed on the carnal atmosphere to extend his own power, his own immortality. “It would be wise to do it now.” He glared, and the intimidating expression he pulled burnt into the retina of the Brigade.

Seeing themselves defeated, or perhaps spurned by an unseen power Ruby did not quite understand, they slowly but surely retreated. They moved in reverse, working on instinct to avoid footfalls and corpses, swords still rose against them, just in case.

They broke away quickly and darted into the shadows.

Ruby slapped Arden on the shoulder, “Go after them!”

The swordsman looked down at her, unpaved by the flare of emotion and aggression from the matriarch. He shook his head.

“Arden, if they get away she will only kills them anyway. I…” her accent slipped.

“Ruby!” the sound of Leopold’s gruff and husky voice instantly dragged her kicking and screaming back to civility. She turned on a heavy boot and sheathed her sword. The surviving members of the Winchester Rose house guard did the same, unable to do anything else but stand, quite silent, sated on fatigue and the devastation that lay around them.

Leopold kicked into a run towards his wife, pistol cocked in a defiant show of machismo.

“Oh I am so glad to see you are,” he looked nervously at the melee, “alright.” He stopped, just a few feet from her. “Are any of you hurt?” he looked between his friends and then at the glum looking guardsmen. There were a few nicks, cuts and bruises, and one or two groans, but nothing serious. The weight pressing against his heart lifted, even as his pistol dropped to his side.

[Leopold]

“No, but you are dear,” Ruby stepped towards him, pushed the nozzle of Isabella to one side so that she could embrace him, and ran her finger gently over his red ear. He winced.

“That was nothing,” he was lying, and Ruby knew it. She patted him on the chest endearingly.

“What happened up there?” she asked, eyes glowing with a seductive narcissism that Leopold had tried to resist over the years, but had always failed miserably. Even though they both stank of sweat and blood, she was still as beautiful and warm in his arms as she was the first day they had met.

“Clarissa…” he whispered.

Ruby’s charm faded. She flicked his ear.

“That bitch!” she exclaimed, causing Lillith and Arden to stare at one another and roll their eyes. Realising they were going to be quite a while, they turned to comfort their companions and wrap cuts and bruises in whatever bandages they could salvage from the garb of the fallen.

“Ruby…do not bother with the melodrama, she has gone.”

“To hell, I hope?” she pushed away from him, wiping her bloodied finger on the hem of her lapel. The steel buckles of her guard outfit clinked as she undid the clasp of her cloak and dropped it to the ground. Her red, resplendent attire and mithril shone in the dark, oblivious snowy landscape. “Just wait until I get my hands on her scrawny little neck…” Leopold could not quite be sure, but it suddenly got a lot warmer in the pass.

“I am just as surprised and angered she dared show herself, but she has, and that means our worst fears have been realised.” Leopold’s expression was utterly cold and emotionless, which Ruby took as a lecture in itself. “Her promise to ruin the Winchester Rose Trading Company was as sincere as her desire to bring slavery back to the island.”

“Over. My. Dead. Body,” the Spellsinger seethed.

“We can deal with her when we return to Knife’s Edge,” he moved around her, resting his hand gently on her left shoulder as he passed. “For now…” he leant to whisper into her ear, his hot breath tickling down her now exposed neck. “We have to make sure our friends are okay and press on…” he moved forwards, his girth dragging great ploughs of boots through the reddened snow.

In the north, strange things happened. This far north, even things as strange as Ruby Winchester making a U-turn happened.

"Yes...you are right, I am sorry...," she said over her shoulder. She joined him by his side and tucked her arm into his. Though this was not quite a stroll through Regent Park, it was as close to a home comfort as she could get to keep her anger contained in her kindling chest.

“Come on everyone, bring our dead into the last wagon and smother theirs in the under hangs of the pass – we move out in an hour!”

"If I ever see her myself..." she whispered back into his good ear. He smiled.

"Yes my dear, you will show her how true women in Scara Brae behave, no doubt."

The group of tired souls at the rear of the wagon began to battle the sapping cold of Berevar's wilderness as the heavens glowed overhead. They still had four leagues or so to go before they brought their cargo, still intact, to its final destination. Bandits, in Berevar, were the least of their worries.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Ahyark Pass

“I can see why you chose her over me…” Clarissa whispered, fearful her words would be elevated to new heights by the wind. She looked down once more at the caravan, from a higher position at the exit of the pass. Behind her, the wild tundra of Berevar’s northern steppes welcomed her. Dead ahead the last light of day faded behind the Ahyark Mountains and moving shadows descended over Salvar.

“That does not,” she smiled, the moonlight catching her moist lip, “mean I will go any easier on you…” her cloak fluttered in the savage wind as it lapped the crest of the pass. The gale then faded into the rocky tunnels that gave shelter to weary travellers who needed to rest before the last leg of their adventure.

The Ice Henge awaited the caravan to the north.

So did the orcs...

The Aurochs...

The Wispmothers...

“Neither will Berevar,” she chuckled, citing her smashed ribs to agonise over her movements.

The pains in her chest lingered, which for her, was troublesome. The vials on her bandoleer had smashed when Leopold’s providence had struck her, and as she had risen, she had whispered the rite of incantation that unleashed their magic. The blood of her previous victims had seeped into her chest wound and started to weave her body anew. Misdirection had seen to the rest of her miraculous ascension.

Though she had died and ascended in spirit form, she had seeded a strange phenomenon on the cliffs. The Old Gods and their servants were more wraith than mortal. Though Leopold had turned his back on everlasting life, Clarissa had spent too many years in search of a new way to live until the rise of her Lord to be so easily undone.

Even though Xem’Zund and Denebriel’s children had devastated much of the surface world, and subsequently been defeated, their powers, their disciples still found sanctuary in the wilds.

Drawing her cloak tight around her exposes but unfeeling form, Rook looked back down the pass one last time before she turned away proper. Her feet left footprints in the soft snow for only a few seconds, before the heavy blizzard swept them away.

They would meet again, the Rook and the Raven.

A woman always kept to her promises.

A man always suffered for them.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Dunbar Tundra

It did not take the remaining guard and the troupe long to stow away the bodies of the Brigade into the drift, and pile their own dead into the rear of the final wagon of the caravan. It had taken them less time to drink their tea, provided by a somewhat on edge Wilfred, and less still than that to consume a hefty amount of Ruby’s specially baked scones. They were cinnamon, with raisins, and smothered in what was known in Scara Brae as ‘Lard Jam’. Somehow, cake seemed to make all their self-doubts disappear, and the tea, as it was renowned for, calmed nerves and sated welling waves of grief for the deceased.

There would be plenty of time for that later, when they could warm their toes by roaring fires and relive their grand adventure into the tundra together.

Ruby and Leopold and their ever present manservant rode ahead in the lead wagon in relative silence. In the rear, the guards sat in silent vigil over their fallen comrades. The central column was tended only by bedraggled looking mares and a solitary, cloaked and hunched driver at the head of each wagon. Arden and Lillith rode together in the second to last, discussing matters of the heart and the I Ching – their spirit warder lexicon.

The caravan snaked over the Dunbar in the same peaceful status quo for some three leagues before Ruby Winchester finally spoke. Riding in between her beleaguered manservant and her still grumbling husband, she was quite warm, quite hungry, and quite seething. Every bump in the road made her flinch, and each flinch made her angrier and angrier.

She wanted an explanation. She wanted it now.

“Leopold…”

Wilfred sighed. He knew what was coming just from her tone. He pulled out a tobacco pouch and tended to make a cigarette, despite his thick gloves and the cumbersome fur lined cloak they had all donned for the exposes journey in the open. There was an all too familiar tension in the air that declared her need to be satisfied as it ran up your spine with an electrifying urgency and anxiety.

“Yes my dear?” he replied wistfully, hands firmly on the reins and eyes firmly on the white wash of nothingness that lay ahead. He was driving the caravan north on blind instinct and wild abandon. The Ice Henge called to him, and with it, he somehow kept them on the right path.

“What did she say to you?” it was the sort of question that was loaded, but also one that no matter the answer, it would fire off the round. Leopold was already in a losing battle.

“Nothing but barbed words and threats, the same ones she made at the Van Degalion not a month ago.”

“You are lying,” she whispered. She looked at his good remaining ear, his size imposing against her slender frame. The caravan hit another rock beneath the snow, spoiling her emotive plea.

“I am not lying, Ruby. She was there to take the caravan guard as slaves. She is a slaver; after all, it is what she does.”

“It is a little convenient that of all the people in the whole world, the one slaver to attack the one caravan in Berevar this month is Lady Clarissa ‘I’ll have your husband ‘ague.”

Leopold smirked, “I suppose you think that is funny?” she nodded, poked him in the ribs, and looked ahead.

“The Montague Brigade is always in this area. We saw them in Knife’s Edge, and we just assumed they were trailing us.”

“So why did not you put a stop to it there and then?” she lifted her eyebrow inquisitively, testing every patient bone in Leopold’s body.

“Because if we had been wrong, my dear, we would have been thrown out of the Guilds-man circle and left out in the cold with all the other overly taxed merchants scrabbling in the squalor of Scara Brae.” His matter-of-factly reply put his own teeth on edge. He was playing a dangerous game and when his opponent was Ruby, it was doubly so.

“I think it is horribly uncouth to play with the lives of your employees in such a wreck less manner. Myself, Ruby and Arden have nothing to fear out here, except perhaps ruining a good pair of boots,” she wiggled her toes on the wood, clip clopping a melody to drive her point home, “but you, they, Wilfred…you are not so fortunate.”

“No need to worry about me my Lady,” he popped the dog end into his wrinkled lips and took a flintlock lighter to it. There was a puff of smoke, a longing in Leopold’s heart for a cigar and a wisp of green tinted exhalation from the butler’s lungs before Ruby sighed.

“They are paid to put their lives at risk for the good of the company Ruby. If there was no danger involved, they would not get so much gold for sitting on their behinds all this way.”

“That makes it okay, does it?” she dropped her jaw aghast at her husband’s attitude.

“It is the way of the world.” He snapped.

“It is not the way of our world!”

[Leopold]

“You put your own life on the line to defend it here today Ruby. That merit, that action, makes it yours.” He cracked the reins with an authoritarian flick of his thick wrists. Wilfred rose, bowed, and disappeared into the back of the wagon. He had heard quite enough to know that he would not get to enjoy his smoke if he stayed up front.

“Now look what you have done…” she whimpered, sliding away from her husband into the butler’s warm spot.

This is going to be a long journey…Leopold thought with a disgruntled voice. He pulled out a cigar when the horses steadied their pace and started to clip it. He would suffer gladly to be with Ruby Winchester, but he was not going to do it without a little pleasure. She could protest about his habits all she liked, he was done with caring for the time being.

“I just feel like I am still not clued up on what makes you tick…why we are here is just a small part of that.”

Leopold put the stub of his cigar into his mouth and relished the taste of the leaf as he chewed on it in contemplation. There were, as the man knew too well, so many ways to continue this conversation that could have catastrophic results for either of them. He steeled his gaze to the north, where their true destination awaited them. With a long sigh that came only after several arduous minutes of trundling silence, he resigned himself to telling her the truth.

He did not want to be in the doghouse again. Not after their jaunt to the theatre had seen him sleeping in his study for a fortnight. His back was still out of joint.

“She knew we would be here…or at least, that I would.”

Ruby’s eyes sparkled. It was the sort of sparkle a woman got when she realised she was winning. It was a fire you never forgot to fear.

“I knew it,” she whispered, her lip curling and teeth gritting at the same time.

“Not for the reasons you are thinking. It is a little more,” he rolled his eyes, and went about patting his many pockets in search of his lighter, “complicated.”

“Oh, it always is,” she snapped back. With the same, caring love as she had hate, she produced a match from the tinder box at her feet; which was for emergencies and replacing torches in the underground tunnels. He leant over with a nod of thanks. The long trail of smoke rose up from the wagon, signalling to Wilfred that if he was not already drunk and gambling with Arden, that it was safe to return.

Leopold took a deep drag, and leant back onto the bench.

“We were lovers, Clarissa and I. This was over a thousand years ago mind.” Leopold did not think there was any reason to prolong the inevitable. He did not look for Ruby’s reaction, because he felt the heat dig into his earhole long before it came. She was glaring at him.

“What?” It was all she could say, all her quavering lip could muster.

Leopold took another drag before removing the cigar and peppering the snow with the first ring of ash. He let the wagon pick up pace so that the inevitable exchange was not carried by the wind down the long trail of wagons as they advanced over the vast, frozen, maze like tundra. The Old Ones would be watching them as soon as they crossed the aurora flats and ventured into the True Wilderness, where only Wizards and madmen trod.

“Long ago, Clarissa and I were known by different names. Names so old they have been forgotten, lives so long ago they may as well have been those of other men.” There was a certain weight of history in Leopold’s revelation that pressed down on Ruby’s shoulders. She crossed her right leg over her left, adjusting her fur cloak so that it covered the midriff and leant sideways into the nook of the wagon’s canopy alcove.

“I am…listening. Incredulously, but listening all the same.” A strand of her red hair protruded from beneath the hood of her cloak, and a feather, pressed on by the heavy wool protruded erect as well. Leopold turned and smiled at the irony. Those feathers were very much the beginning and end of his tale.

“We are, or rather, we were Old Ones. They are the lost and forgotten deities of Salvar. Unlike the Thayne, they come and go with the ebb and flow of belief from a civilisation steeped in ancestry. Only the orcs really worship us now, though that will change with the Church of the Sway demolished.” There was a distinct lack of excitement at the prospect in Leopold’s voice. He very much hoped to have remained forgotten forever.

Somehow, Ruby was not surprised by this. She had memorised the history of the Salvar states on her previous jaunt to the country. There, she had met the strange men named, amongst other more unrepeatable things, Inkfinger. Her contempt for the man was matched by his desire to free Salvar from the oppression of the former Church of the Sway. Whilst there, she had heard of the Old Gods, powers buried in the frozen heart of Berevar. If they were buried, she thought, why is one sat opposite me?

“When the Thayne came we were called upon to serve them in their petty war. Unable to resist, I sided with Draconus. I became the being known as the Raven, the watcher of the dead, tasked with guiding the spirits of the world to the afterlife.” He returned the cigar to his lips and gripped the reins tightly; so tight the skin on his knuckles turned ghostly pale. Whilst he drew on the leaf he composed his thoughts, putting fact into place so that his story was as comprehensive as he knew Ruby was expecting it to be. He would not get a chance to repeat the scene this time.

“What about Clarissa, did she side with you?” though the question was a little inevitable, Leopold gruffly cleared his throat, slid the cigar to the corner of his mouth and continued.

“No, Clarissa sided with Hromagh. She was the effigy of shadows, of spying, of remaining unseen. They call her the Rook; she is, in essence, the female counterpart in the Old God pantheon to my Raven.”

[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.

[Leopold]

“It is time for the Old Gods to rise, to wake, to take back these lands from the bastard children of the al-Thayne!” an echo of her declaration shot out over the tundra, washing over the caravan and dancing out into the cold beyond. Her words would echo in the peaks of the Ahyark Mountains for centuries, whispers on the wind to tired minds.

The flame column began to descend. It diminished until it rose only up to the creature’s head. It still burnt so bright that Leopold had trouble looking through the coruscating flicks of spirit. Orange, red, and gold swirled about in the conflagration. There was a scent of cinnamon and hot sand in the air that even Berevar’s blank and empty landscape could not quell.

“Leopold,” Clarissa pleaded. Though she was still mortally wounded she turned her attention briefly to Raven. There was sadness in her voice that humbled the merchant. “I am sorry…I am sorry I was blinded by my own rage…” in the new found calm of the tundra, the necromantic energies that fuelled her half living state began to fade.

Leopold could only mouth “I know…”

Before they gave up entirely she clicked her arm so that it rose in front of her face. Concealing her ugliness was her own doing, but Rook spent the last of its power to do something more human than deity.

“Fight for your freedom…I am sorry it took me all this time to realise we were never meant to be…”

A blast of energy flew out of her body and danced across the ice. With a high pitched screech it smashed into Leopold’s wide girth. He was winded before his heavy, snow covered boots lifted up from the ground. He was screaming before he could acknowledge that gravity was failing him. He was mortified as he flew back through the dark sky in a flutter of cloak, falling top hat and cigars. He finally vomited. Gravy and dumplings returned to his pallet.

Phoenix turned and screamed. As her voice ascended to the peaks and troughs of the clouds above, a peal of thunder broke the skies. The crackling lightning descended through the heavens with the force of a hurricane. It briefly illuminated the worn wood of the wagon train. The eyes of the on looking guards and the edges of the shattered hole in the veil shone for a few precious seconds.

“No!”

As Leopold vanished through the bright, heavenly gate the lightning struck the broken splinter. He fell into a heap at the foot of the first of the great ice columns that formed the ancient monument to the Tap.

Time seemed to slow, for just a brief second.

In that fractal moment a raven fluttered out of the Ice Henge and rose into the sky.

The bolt of lightning struck the crack and sealed it shut. A thunderous clap rocked the very fabric of Althanas as the two worlds were torn apart and sealed from one another once more. The deep thud of the air as it rippled out in a shockwave tightened chests and winded lungs. A small circle of outwardly moving snow formed around the entrance to the Ice Henge, marking its location for just a few moments before the wind resumed and the snow began to fall properly on the Dunbar Tundra.

“If I cannot have him,” Rook said, feathers pushing through her skin, “then you cannot have him either,” she smiled. A cackle pierced Phoenix’s mind, but it was burnt away by the sheer intensity the creature’s memories burnt with.

Phoenix turned slowly back to the cowed Rook, the heat of her throne of flames keeping her aloft over the spiral of molten rock.

“You have delivered to me the last piece of the puzzle…all the exiles as one, all the children in the arms of their parents…soon, it will Rise.”

An arc of flame hotter than the sun shot through the air towards Rook. In the last moments of the bird’s life her eyes shone and the flames illuminated a single tear. For the first time in her long life, Clarissa Montague realised that she had been quite mistaken. Leopold was not hers to control any more. Love, she thought, was the ficklest thing of all. Love was an emotion that could destroy worlds with more certainty than the warring and capricious Thayne ever could.

She relished another death.

“By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin…” she mumbled, repeating a promise she had made a thousand years ago, on that very spot.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Winchester Rose Caravan

Lillith and Arden watched with abject horror as their sister burst into flames and took to murder as her release. Floating in a column of fire and too far away to hear, they could only fill in the blanks in silence. The dancing colours of the lights were hypnotic, one solitary source of heat in the immense bleakness of Berevar.

“Where…” Arden turned to Wilfred, eyes still half-cocked on the distant conflict, “Did you get this, exactly?” he shook the rifle in his hands. It rattled.

The man servant tried to smile, somewhat taken aback. “Master drops things, Wilfred…‘acquires’ them.” The butler shrugged. He wrinkled his nose to show his hesitation and his growing discomfort. “That fell from the carriage whilst he was engaged with Lady Montague; I recovered it to add to the collection.”

Arden read between the lines and found a poetic justice.

“I do not suppose, Wilfred my man, that in your acquisitions you have something a little…” he smacked his lips together and set the butt of the rifle into the trampled snow between his plated boots… “Bigger…do you?”

It took Wilfred a few moments to run through the contents of the caravan’s cargo before his eyes expanded to the size of dinner plates. Lillith and Arden well versed in body language both stared at him expectantly. In the distance, there was an eruption of light cresting over the ridge of the ice tundra. A bolt of lightning broke the silence and a scent on the wind of burning flesh.

Wilfred beamed a smile, “you just made Frieda a very happy woman!” he turned on a clumsy heel and ran along the eastern convex of the Winchester Rose Company caravan. Arden watched the weasel like man fade into obscurity behind one of the red canopies, before he looked back at his sister.

“No matter what happens from now on Lillith do not hesitate.” He nodded towards the fire column, which by now had turned its attention to the wagon. “Whatever remains of Ruby will be quite safe…what lies on the surface, however,” he unsheathed Kerria and let it fall to his side, “must perish…” He turned his boot and brought his blade up high.

He charged, and Lillith trailed after him with a whirl of her tanto and a lump in her throat.

[Leopold]

Present Day
Berevar, The Ahyark Pass

A raven smothered in a veil of midnight flew across the Dunbar, its beating wings holding it aloft in desperation and hope. With the connection between its corporeal form and the spiritual hubris of its master’s power fading, it exerted itself as much as it could to reach its destination in time.

The creatural instincts of the avian vessel drove it to succeed. The world was at stake.

Clarissa Montague, tired, drained and desperate watched the horizon for signs of the Raven. Stood atop the very same precipice she had ordered the attack from the day before, her cloak flapped in the moonlight and her heart fluttered in the breeze. Soon, it would be nearly dawn, when the winds died and warmth crept up from the south into the tundra. Perhaps there would not be a dawn, if the Old Gods had their way.

“Come on…come on…come on,” she repeated, a mantra to keep her sanity intact. In those last futile moments of conflict, the paradigm shift had unnerved even her emotionless self. Whilst the caravan had wound itself over the Dunbar, she had flown north ahead to the Ice Henge to prove her doubts incorrect. When she had arrived, and felt the Tap swirling about in the ice spires, she had her very identity sundered.

All the long years she had spent warring with Raven, they were for nought. The locus of the very thing they had sacrificed everything for was nestled in the one place they had left to call home. Leopold might have wished to turn his back on the Old Gods once and for all, but he would have to take sides one last time before the freedom he so painfully longed for would finally be his.

Whump.

The soft beating of wings brought Clarissa’s gaze to the east, cupped around the cliff face which rose up behind her. Her heart whimpered, her soul burnt, her eyes watered in anticipation and the lashing tendrils of the icy wind. She clenched her fists tight about the hilt of her blade and the last of her vials of blood. If she died this time, it would be a true death; her soul could not remain tethered to the necromantic vessels gifted to her by her former master any more.

A raven crested the cliff, desperately trying to remain aloft. Clarissa screeched with joy and pounded the air with her blade. It caught the moonlight, another flash of conflict in the wilderness of the north.

“You remembered…” she whispered into the bird’s mind as it came in to land. In its final descent, she held out her arm and vented power into her limb so that a thick, leathery skin and a covering of thick black feathers burst through her glove. The raven’s claws came to land, and her arm wavered under its bulk. “Oh I am so sorry Rave.…I realised too late…so many years wasted, so much rage wielded against me…” she cocked her head in admiration at the swirling, blood red sigils and glyphs that swarmed beneath the plumes of the spiritual residue of her former lover.

It was the Old God’s soul that resided within the man now called Leopold Winchester. It was the last vestige of the power he had, for so long, struggled to be rid of.

“If you are here now…” she pursed her lips and looked out onto the distant tundra. Even from here, she could see the pillar of flame that swarmed the aspect of the Old God called Bard. It was a distant, minute glimmer on the horizon, a beacon calling her to the salvation of her kind once more. “Oh Leopold…I am sorry…” she said in mourning.

“I never meant for you to die…” she caressed the nape of the Raven a few times with a delicate hand, before she drew it into her chest and commanded her heart to reach out to the spirit of her kin.

In a flash of vermilion fire the two aspects of the Old God pantheon disintegrated and reformed in a maelstrom of desperation, watchfulness and reverence for the lost. The mass of ribbons stooped mid-air until it burst upwards, a blackbird conjured from the sacrifice of a Rook and a Raven. It arced down into the Ahyark Pass, beat its wings and let out a shrill cry that broke the winds and drowned out the watchful gaze of the Old Gods, who shook in fear from the sanctuary of the Ice Henge at the sight.

With one last beat the creature once called Rook, and the dying soul of Raven careened north to aid of Ruby Winchester.

[Morus]

Plot ~ 22/30

Storytelling ~ 8/10 - There was a certain magic to this thread when it came to the many colliding points of view, character storylines, and twists, though I'll go into more detail later on most of these points. Having read Shadow Rituals before this, I had a better understanding of Ruby and Leopold's relationship. While you make reference to it through a few smartly woven lines in the narration, By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin clearly showed a far more dominating side a Leopold. Overall, I felt that you could have been a little more detailed into the married couple's past (to show more growth in their conversation inside the carriage, after the initial raid), but you did an absolutely splendid job fitting their story into the events happening during and after the Brigades attack. I was quite pleased how well you fit in all the different storylines, because it added so much more in the way of descriptions and motivations, as well as allowed you to explore other areas of interest in the thread when any particular fight or exchange would begin to wear on tedium.

However, the multitude of points of view was also some what detrimental. In Part Two especially, the rapid shift in perspective caused more exciting (and climatic) plots to slow down (although I'll get into this more in pacing). And, whenever you split the reader's attention, you're going to end up with some stories more vague than others. Had you found a bit more balance to give to Arden and Lillith, you would have scored perfectly here.

Setting ~ 7/10 - Berevar felt very much alive, especially when Leopold revealed himself as Raven and felt the pull of the Old Gods. But while you captured a bitter cold, and gave clear and dynamic descriptions in the battles (especially Rook's multiple craters), there were a few details that nagged at me.

1.) Wagons are horrendous for snow when they have wheels. Not only is the constant wet and freeze a wear on the wood and joints near axels, but any good pile of snow is going to make poorly trodden trails nearly impossible to blow through.
2.) Wagons with sled tracks would have been far more believable, and I can't imagine their availability too scarce in Salvar.
Most of my complaints are wagon related, but it's little things like this that breath reality into a story. Though described as harrowing, I felt the Winchester Rose Trading Company found the journey far too easy with merely a bumpy road. Otherwise, I thought your setting was rather good.

Pacing ~ 7/10 - As I said before, the switch between different character points of view hurt the thread's pacing. With Part Two, Leopold's admission and understanding with Ruby shares attention with Arden and Lillith's ride in the second-to-last (or last, depending on which post you read) carriage. While I found the sibling's game and banter enjoyable, it took away a little of marriage's spotlight. There was one particular moment where you switched to Arden killing the archer positioned to ambush, that felt a bit out of place considering the posts that came before and after it.

While I was surprised at how much happened, how well, in how little time it all occurred during Part one, I was floored. Clarissa's opening was the perfect hook for a reader, and everything that proceeded it (until the dead were loaded on to the wagon) was heart-pounding and exciting to read. Even when the story went a year in the past, in a different place, it still gripped my attention. But Part Two slowed everything down, so much so that it was jarring to read the climax.

However, for all my problems with the irresolute nature of this thread's pace, I can understand alternating chronologies making it more difficult to keep a constant speed. Kudos to you for doing it so well.

Character ~ 25/30

Communication ~ 8/10 - Your dialogue, especially among members of the company and trope, is some of the most entertaining I have read on Althanas. Perhaps it's because I so rarely read members with such a fleshed out cast of characters, although most other members don't have the energy to make their NPCs into living, breathing PCs. Even characters who aren't regulars of yours, like Wilfred and Lady Montague, shined whenever they had a scene with Leopold. However, sometimes I feel like the characters would do better with some things left unsaid. Occasionally, I found real swaths of dialogue that could have been condensed. However, these incidents were few and far between enough. I only ask that you think of a bit more brevity when writing out conversations. Dialogue is a powerful tool that, when used sparingly, invites an author to try slightly more creative approaches empathizing a character to the audience.

Action ~ 8/10 - The entirety of it was so rich in the wealth of character action and interaction, it was hard to keep track of everything. This was not, of course, some contextual confusion, but an eagerness for other storylines, fights, or flashbacks to conclude. Each part of Leopold's attendance at the Van Degalion was a jewel of character insight. The second to last wagon had the heart warming game played between Arden and Lillith. Leopold/Raven's revelation to Ruby, Ruby's fight during the Brigade's ambush; all of these things were simply delightful, but lost some smidgen of impact because their scenes were so brief. Clarissa, though, shone through this by having a number of scenes (many of them "death" or post "death") that gave a greater look into her motivations. As I mentioned before, this thread reminded me of Who Mourns for Adonais? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Mourns_for_Adonais%3F), and Lady Montague would be a far poorer character if her motivations weren't laid bare by the end of part one and expanded in part two.

On a minor note, I very much enjoyed Wilfred's withdrawal in the carriage during Leopold's revelation. Not only did it help establish the oft tumultuous discussions between the Winchesters, it was damned amusing as well.

Persona ~ 9/10 - My only complaint here is that we didn't get a deep enough look into the Brigade, and that's something I looked forward to as the thread pressed on. I realize that the thread already had enough storylines going on that adding anything else would have only been detrimental to the clarity of the entire thing, but men that would follow a trader/slaver/Old God would have been interesting to peer into to say the least. Clarissa got her moment to shine, and I mentioned how important that is for a compelling villain.

Beside that insignificant point, I loved nearly every bit of screen time the characters had. I rarely find myself invested in so many characters at once.

Prose ~ 26/30

Mechanics ~ 8/10 - A small number of typos cropped up starting at the halfway point of the story, as well as the occasional awkward phrasing. It was rather jarring, considering the first half was pleasantly free of anything. Make sure to pay just as much attention to the middle and ending as you do at to the beginning when you proofread. It's understandable to wane in enthusiasm for editing work when your threads so close to submission, but it's alarming to readers when it all appears so suddenly.

Clarity ~ 8/10 - There was a bit of confusion at times, and I think it was caused by the sheer volume of activity you had going on during the thread. They are minor issues, but they made the wild landscape of Berevar even harder to imagine.
Arden and Lillith rode together in the second to last, discussing matters of the heart and the I Ching – their spirit warder lexicon.

However, the card game between the siblings, according to your post 25 (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23980-By-Rook-Wrath-amp-Ruin-(Solo)&p=194121&viewfull=1#post194121), is in the last wagon of the caravan. Keeping track of this kind of information can be difficult, especially when you're weaving an epic like this together. But solidified details are a foundation to a clear picture of what's going on and where everything is in relation to each other.

Technique ~ 10/10 - Your use of prose has reached a happy point between functionality and flair. While it made passages feel denser than they had to be at times, you always managed to make it too damn interesting to notice. Leopold's narration was particularly good, especially in the Van Dangellion scenes, yet, what I really appreciated were gems like this:
“Behind every good man there is”…Lady Montague tapped him on the shoulder and he stopped mid-sentence.
Not only is it a clever bit of narration, it ended up filled with a wonderful bit of foreshadowing..

Wildcard: 8/10 - I doubt believe I've ever been so surprised reading a thread before. Not from Leopold's big reveal, that was more than hinted at. I thought this epic would be bogged down in such thick detail that it would read like some complex tome. Instead, from the very start, you were off running. You managed to merge action and story, character development, and end it with a scene that puts Ragnarok to shame.

Total ~ 81/100

EXP - 3280
GP - TBD (considering the spoils you requested in your submission)

[Letho]

EXP added. GP still pending.