Dust

Bone knocked against bone, each clack a morbid beat that echoed through the dull landscape. Lucien laid the last body on the pyre with a grunt and a muttered curse, then stepped back. He wiped his palms on his thigh and eyed the results.

They had built the funerary pile several yards off the road, where the scrub parted and the soil turned stony, far from the scorch marks and gore that had marked the initial carnage. Wind worried at the stacked branches and tugged at the dead pilgrims’ torn cloaks, raising the faint, sour reek of dried blood and fear gone cold. The demon-wounds that had wrecked the pilgrims’ bodies had already crusted stiff in an ugly, ragged, and familiar pattern.

“Maybe we should, you know…” Lucien rolled his hand toward the stacked wood and bodies and added, “say some words. Do you think?”

“Probably,” Gideon replied.

Silence mingled with the smoke from Gideon’s torch, while somewhere out in the scrub a carrion crow cawed, impatient with the delay.

“Well?” Lucien said.

“Well, what?”

Lucien jutted his chin at the stacked wood. The gesture took in the pilgrims’ broken faces, the makeshift bindings across chests and throats. He and Lucien had done what they could to prepare the bodies in a hasty attempt to give them a bit of dignity after ruin, but the results were less than these poor souls deserved.

Gideon flicked his eyes from the mess to Lucien and pushed at the air with his torch.

“You’re the newly ordained Deacon.”

“Well, yes,” Lucien replied, “but last I checked, Bishop outranks Deacon every day of the week. Twice on Rites Day.”

Bishop.

Gideon had yet to hear the word without the urge to look over his shoulder. Somewhere in the labyrinthine halls of Sanctuary’s High Citadel, in a chamber that probably smelled of polished wood and old incense, some fool had scratched his name onto vellum. And somehow that made it so.

Gideon Holt, Bishop of the Faith, Keeper of Sword and Sigil.

There were days he wondered if the High Council had simply drawn lots from a helmet; others he suspected the truth was far uglier, that some clerk had mistaken survival for virtue in the tally. But Hallowed Ridge still wrote itself in his sleep, those few nights when sleep actually came . Three hundred bodies piled by necessity, and somehow that counted as merit.

What a Saint’s-damned joke!

The wind picked up, tugging at the hem of his mantle, snapping it once against his greaves.

Lucien lifted his unlit torch from the ground and made a sound from somewhere deep in his throat. Gideon braced himself.

“Saints watch you,” Lucien said toward the bodies. “Or at least send someone along who knows which end of a ward-stone is up. You walked too far on bad advice, in bad weather, and worse luck. We will try to make the road safer for the next fools.”

Lucien looked to Gideon, waiting for something more, some approval perhaps. When it became obvious Gideon had nothing more to add, he bent his torch to Gideon’s until it caught with a sullen cough. He pressed the flame into the cradle of kindling under one pale hand. Resin hissed, and the dry brush seized the fire, passing it greedily from twig to branch.

Gideon stepped to the other side. Flame bled across the pitch, warm against his knuckles. He drove the torch into the gap beneath one pilgrim’s torn shoulder and stepped back. The tattered cloth blackened and curled, then bloomed orange. The fire licked along wool and skin, climbing until it swallowed everything into anonymity.

Heat pressed at his face, and he rushed through crossing himself in the sign of the shield.

“Into the Flame, and out of the dark,” he murmured before turning to the horses waiting near the road. Lucien’s mount, Sasha stamped and tossed her head, her silver mane catching stray sparks of light. Bastion answered with a low, disapproving snort, pawing once at the ground as if he meant to dig his own trail away from this place.

Lucien tucked a thumb into the edge of his belt and fell into step beside Gideon.

“Where do you think they were headed?” he asked.

“Not sure.” Gideon eyed the packs they had salvaged from the bodies. There had not been much, a few bolts of homespun wool and strips of cracked leather. The food had gone spoilt days ago from the looks of it, and nothing bore any merchant stamps. “ Deepford , maybe.”

Lucien reached Sasha first and caught her by the reins. “Too far to walk with nothing but bad sandals and worse sense. Sorry bastards should have taken the river.”

Gideon half-turned. The pyre already stood a head higher, flames knotting into one another, smoke drawing a dark line against the washed-out sky.

“River takes more coin than most have out here,” he said.

Lucien was already in the saddle, Sasha dancing sideways under him. Gideon caught Bastion’s bridle before the stallion could decide he had better places to be. The horse rolled an eye at him, ears laid flat, but he took Gideon’s weight without a stumble when Gideon swung up.

They nudged their mounts back onto the rutted ribbon of road. Hooves found the familiar grooves left by countless wagons and poorer feet while the fire crackled, then roared as the wind leaned in behind them. The previous day’s rains would keep the fire from spreading, or so Gideon hoped.

“Doesn’t explain why we aren’t taking the river,” Lucien said when they had settled into an easy, ground-eating pace.

Gideon kept his gaze on the road ahead where the plains broke against a distant smudge of stands and hill. “Afraid of a couple of Night Howlers?”

Lucien laughed, short and genuine. “No.”

“Then stop whinging .”

Lucien clicked his tongue at Sasha, drawing her slightly ahead, then let her fall back alongside Bastion again.

“I just thought, you might be a little eager to get to where we’re going.”

“I don’t think it’s going to pick up and move.”

Lucien’s eyes rolled upward. “I’m only saying…” He shook his head and sighed. “This is your home we’re talking about.”

Home.

The word slid under his armor, slicing at bone and marrow.

Ahead, the land rolled out in scrub and low, tired grass. No walls had appeared yet, no crooked chimneys, and no bell tower leaning at the sky like a drunk. Yet the memory of them hit him somewhere just under his sternum, which was worse.

Twenty years had passed since he had last ridden this way. A life time gone since he had watched River’s End shrink behind him in the dull light of early morning, Sabine’s figure small and solitary atop the gate’s watchtower. Two decades of other roads, other keeps built from the same blue-gray stone, other chapels with the same cracked steps and muttered prayers.

To Gideon, home was a diary full of unfinished sentences. The house that no longer stood. The parents whose faces he remembered only in brief flashes he dare not trust as truth. A boy’s youthful certainty that leaving meant becoming something else.

Could memory survive his return?

People changed; even if streets did not. Corvan was still there, still coiled around the church like a patient sickness. Sabine would be…. What? Married? Moved on? Worse? His absence left too many pages for other stories.

The wind shifted, carrying a last, thin strand of smoke from the pyre. Bastion flicked an ear, then stretched his stride, as if eager to outrun the scent.

The road narrowed ahead, dipping between low rises, the sky flattening to a pale, hard blue. Somewhere beyond the next day’s horizon waited ward-stones and watchtowers, the Stonereach’s slate ribbon, and the squat, familiar angles of a keep that would not care how long he had stayed away.