Chapter 5 – Warm Welcome

  The first thing that came back to him was smell.

  It hit like a fist: wet, intimate rot warmed by stagnant water. There was old blood gone sweet, the sour reek of bile, shit, and something faintly like flowers. For a long moment, it drowned out thought. It should have been unbearable for him.

  Instead, it was absurdly wonderful.

  The realization didn’t stop him from gagging on the concoction. The air was an insult. Yet part of him had missed the simple brutality of having that sense after all this time. There was a stretch he could not measure. He’d existed without most of his senses—scent, taste, skin—without the anchors that told a man he was real. Now the world shoved itself into his lungs. It announced itself with the tenderness of a boot to the ribs.

  He drew in another deep, heaving breath anyway.

  If the smell was awful, the taste was familiar. The air tasted of copper, coating the back of his throat, thick as bad whiskey. His stomach rolled, but his mind, what was left of it, clung to the sensation like a starving dog to a bone. He gagged and tried heaving again. Only thick saliva spilled out of his mouth.

  When his eyes could finally focus, fighting through the tears and bone weariness tearing at his body, the rest of the world's welcome arrived. The first thing he noticed was the stranger's hands under his control. He flexed the fingers in fascination. They were bigger than he remembered, as were the wrists and arms. But that wasn’t what really baffled him. The skin color was wrong—darker than ash, like old campfire remnants. That led him to look down and see his legs and bits were the same colorless grey.

  While focused, he received another piece of troubling information. He knelt atop a monstrous pile of bodies.

  Not the first time this had happened. But these were not bodies piled like at home—men in blue or gray, stiff on fields. These were wrong things. Warped silhouettes. Armor fused to flesh. Limbs bent strangely. Faces alien and slender, or bodies wider than they were tall. Some had fur matted to their cheeks; others bore scales; still others looked almost human until you noticed tusks and green skin.

  "I can’t... hello? Hellooo." His voice cracked, barely audible to his pounding ears. Wrong, too. He tried again, testing it. The tenor was now a harsh bass. Not the deepest, but on his tongue it sounded alien. He steadied himself. Time to focus.

  As he shifted and scanned, it looked as if the ground wasn’t ground at all. It was a hill of corpses floating in a bog the color of bruised wine.

  "Where the hell did I land?" the strange voice rasped. "This isn’t what she promised." Words lodged between ragged coughs.

  He didn’t expect an answer from the piles of bodies, but one still came from behind him—warm, cheerful, and far too conversational for a place that smelled like death’s crotch.

  “Well, my surprisingly violent friend, you are within the Fen of Still Souls.”

  He spun so fast his balance betrayed him. His bare feet skated on slick gore, and he went over backward, tumbling down the corpse pile like a drunk down a church stair.

  Luckily, he landed softly, his head plunged into the exposed back of some bloated cowthing. The skin parted around his diving face like lukewarm sheets. Something inside it sloshed. Something inside it burst.

  He choked, screamed, thrashed, and tried to pull his head from the fleshy prison.

  Muffled, the voice continued from above, “Not how I would have recommended coming down, but it will work… hmm. Are you eating that poor Taurari? Surely you can’t be so hungry.”

  He wrenched his head free with a wet suctioning noise that made him want to vomit again. He hacked and spat, wiping gore from his mouth with the heel of his hand. The gore smeared. It did not leave. He scrambled, trying to find the source of the voice. He found footing on bodies that had sunk beneath the ambrosia-death water—an oily slickness that clung to him like a second skin. He staggered upright.

  He retched again. Whatever remained in his stomach, perhaps acid and now regret, came up hot and thin.

  "Yes, yes," the voice said, dryly amused. "Common reaction, really. But get over here—I’ll help you find real food."

  He blinked rapidly through stinging eyes and finally located the source. A figure stood a few dozen feet away, hunched at the corpse-hill’s edge, where the muck grew thicker. The man looked like the swamp had spit him up and decided it didn’t want him back. Ragged moss-gray robes, a crooked walking stick, and a thick hood barely shadowed a face too old to still be animated.

  Brushing his mouth off, the Chosen glared. "Who the hel—" his throat tightened. "—who are you?" He slogged toward the old man’s perch on the solid muck.

  Not merely elderly. Not even older than old. He had the look of someone who had forgotten he died years ago. A wiry white beard—long enough to tuck into his leather belt—spilled from beneath the hood. His shoulders pitched forward in a painful hunch. Yet his face held nothing but laughter, creases carved by centuries of it.

  It reminded the Chosen of prospectors he had met in the West. Men who’d spent decades in the cramped confines of Earth’s womb, clawing gold out of rock until the sun was a foreigner to them.

  The stranger regarded him with bright gray eyes that didn’t match the ruin of his skin. Those eyes were sharp and curious—far too alive for that face.

  "Who am I?" the old man echoed, grinning. His voice was butter-warm—unfitting for that ruin of a face, but perfect for those keen eyes. "I’m me, simple as that."

  Then he cocked his head. “The real question is, who are you?”

  “I’m…”

  The word hung in his mouth like a hook. His mind reached for his name out of habit, an old reflex, like reaching for a gun that isn’t there.

  A flash of memory cracked like a whip.

  An angel’s warning in a room that smelled like nothing. A saloon too clean to be real. “Do not give your name to anyone but the most trusted of Chosen. Names have power. In worlds of mana and magic, a name can be a collar, a shackle, or even a noose you hang yourself with.”

  He swallowed.

  “I… have no name,” he said. Even as the words left him, he wanted to slap himself. “No name? Who would—”

  "Nonsense," the old man cut in, wagging his staff. "My marinated friend, it’s right there." The gnarled stick pointed above him. "Go on, take a look—anyone with eyes can see it."

  “What?” The Chosen man craned his neck, twisting as if there would be words hovering above his head. He saw nothing but swamp air and pockets of drifting gnats. He snapped his gaze back to the stranger. “Jokes, huh?” He continued his sloshing swim, “When I get over there, I’ll find a new use for that stick.”

  He wasn’t one to threaten the well-seasoned, but today was already turning into a real... slog.

  The old man guffawed, thinking it was quite a joke, then quieted, gaze drifting past him as if listening to someone else. He muttered to himself, still loud enough to be heard. “Strange… very strange. What creature have you sent to my doorstep, Belfast?”

  The name meant nothing to the man, but the way the swamp seemed to hush around it gave him pause.

  While the old man contemplated his invisible audience, the nameless man finished slogging toward him, half-wading, half-scrambling over slick corpses until his feet finally found something like squishy ground. The relief of standing on something that wasn’t a ribcage almost made him laugh.

  He stopped an arm’s length away. Up close, the stranger was even frailer than he’d thought. The peak of the hood barely reached the confused man’s chest.

  "Look," he said, forcing patience. "I’m not here for jokes. Give me straight answers. Why the corpses? Who are you? Where the hell am I? Where are the Chosen who were supposed to meet me?"

  The old man’s fingers drifted to a strange necklace at his throat, a silver chain, an onyx bead cradled within a silver leaf. The trinket caught the nameless man’s eye. The old man noticed and tucked it away too quickly, clearing his throat with a dry cough.

  He pushed his hood back, revealing a liver-spotted scalp and those same sharp gray eyes.

  “Why, my boy,” he said warmly, “we all wish to know the answers to those questions... well... some of those questions.”

  Before the Chosen could decide whether strangling an elderly swamp hermit counted as an act of kindness, the old man continued, gentle as a grandparent, “Do not worry, my newly minted Chosen. I will answer everything. But we must flee this place, I fear.”

  He turned on his heel and began moving, surprisingly spry, picking a path through the muck as if he’d walked it for years. “What you have done this day has caused… a commotion,” the old man called over his shoulder. “Across all of Alcondria. Many will be on their way, if they are not already. We must make for my sanctuary in the sprawling sepulchers of our people.”

  Alcondria. “So I made it afterall. Then why the hell here, and not in the evergreen forest as she promised me? Is this one of the things she warned me could have changed after so many years?”

  He followed, barefoot, nude, and filthy, trying not to let the bog swallow him whole. “I was told to expect a training ground... a forest of Evergreens and grass,” he muttered, more to himself than the old man. “A place filled with Chosen who would teach me.”

  The hermit didn’t respond.

  Dread, cold, and heavy, formed in the confused man’s gut. He looked back at the corpse hill disappearing behind them, at the piled bodies, so many that it could still be seen over the trees they passed by.

  “Please,” he said, louder now. “At least tell me. Are those corpses… Chosen? Did I kill... them somehow?” The thought was vile. The thought was worse because it felt possible; anything always seemed possible when he was involved.

  He remembered who he was. He remembered the endless killing. The sweet release of his death. A bullet and a girl’s shaking hands in a burning cabin. Even the endless darkness was clear in his memory.

  He did not remember anything from the moment 1332 had passed him the contract, and he had signed it with some clever remark. “Did I wake up here and do it? Black out and butcher everyone I was supposed to learn from... did he do it?”

  He spoke the question outloud, “Did I really already kill all the Chosen who were supposed to help me?”

  The old man laughed, as if the idea were a punchline. “Chosen? No, not Chosen, my boy.” He waved his staff vaguely at the swamp around them. “Those corrupted things were the God Legion… or they were the God Legion. Now they are just fertilizer for a very hungry biome.”

  “A God?” the nameless man blurted, stumbling on a well-hidden root. “All of them were Gods?”

  “Well. Yes, and no.”

  “That was not an answer. That was a dodge wearing a robe.”

  No response. Their pace stayed quick. The old hermit stepped where the ground held. The nameless man stepped where it did not. More than once, he slid, shin-deep in sucking mud. Flies harassed his eyes and lips. He swatted and tasted them, bitter little specks, that he then spat while swearing.

  His patience frayed to a thread. He finally reached out and grabbed the old man’s shoulder.

  The moment his fingers touched cloth, a force hit him, violent and invisible. He flew backward as if kicked by a mule, tumbling end over end to land headfirst in the swamp.

  This time, at least, there were no organs.

  He surfaced sputtering, mud in his nose, mud in his mouth, mud in everything. It tasted like wet coins and dead leaves.

  The old man stood above him, gnarled old hand extended, face calm. “A lesson we may wish to learn sooner rather than later,” the hermit said. “Be careful who you consider weak in this world. The norms you may be used to from your previous lives may no longer apply here.”

  The shaken man wanted to smack the offered hand away. Wanted to yank the old fool into the muck beside him. The thought warmed him for a heartbeat.

  He did not indulge it.

  Instead, he reached up with mud-caked fingers and clasped the old man’s forearm. The grip smeared filth across gray robes, then, with surprising ease, he hoisted him up.

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  If it bothered the hermit to have his sleeve painted swamp-brown, he didn’t show it.

  “Hurry now,” the Hermit said, already moving. “We will not make it back to my sanctum before nightfall. And even I don’t wish to move through these woods when they are fully awake.”

  “Oh?” the nameless man asked, hurrying after him, feet squelching. “What exactly is here besides the dead?”

  “The soon-to-be-dead, if you don’t hurry!” the old fool called over his shoulder.

  The mud-covered man sighed, muttering, “One can only hope.”

  They continued at a reckless pace... reckless for him. The hermit seemed to glide over the sucking ground. As they pressed on, the corpse-waste thinned until the bog was only mud and black water.

  They marched. And marched. Stopped. Marched again. Giving the exhausted man flashes of memory, marching in columns across southern swamps. All the while, the hermit seemed deep in conversation with himself and whatever dementia-riddled ghosts haunted him. More than once, the Chosen heard him chastising someone under his breath.

  When he drew closer, the old man would stop, smile, and say, “We are near our rest. Keep up, if you wish to avoid sleeping in a belly tonight.”

  By the fifth iteration of this cheerful threat, the world shifted.

  They passed something, like an invisible seam in the air. The swamp gave way to firmer ground, still humid, wet, and crawling with insects, but layered with roots and dark soil instead of floating death.

  A cool breeze even kissed the nameless man’s filthy skin. He stopped, closing his eyes to enjoy the sensation across his caked body. This is when he became acutely aware of himself: naked, filthy, weaponless, and very easy to kill.

  “Will we arrive soon?” he asked, feeling a desire to cover his most vulnerable parts. “I’d like to find something to cover myself with. I don’t normally walk around so… swinging in the breeze.”

  “Hmm?” The old man had paused, studying a particular cluster of gnarled trees in the distance, as if they were calling his name. He turned, eyes widening in sudden realization. “Oh! I am sorry, my boy, “smacking his head, “I’m so used to dealing with the deceased, and they rarely complain about the state of their dress.”

  With a flourish of gray sleeves, his old staff disappeared, and a new one appeared in his hand. Black polished wood, smooth and unblemished, curving like a shepherd's crook. Beautiful craftsmanship, but what drew his eyes was a small lantern hanging from a chain at the end of the crook. The light it gave off was... black, with an eerie, saturated blue.

  The sudden appearance of the staff made the naked man flinch. And then, his eyes locked on the light. The lantern’s glow drew him like a hook through the skull. His thoughts slowed, thickened, as if someone were pouring honey into his brain.

  “What is… why can’t… I…” His tongue dragged. His mind stumbled.

  “Whoops,” the old man said, genuinely apologetic. “Sorry, my boy. I forget what Beacon can do to the corporial.” With a wave and a murmured command, something snapped into existence and plopped to the ground with a soft thud.

  Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the staff was gone. The blue glow vanished. The entranced man’s mind came racing back, breath sharp in his lungs as if he’d been underwater.

  The Hermit watched him closely, worry flickering across his weathered face. For the briefest moment, the warmth left the grey eyes, replaced by something colder—assessment? The naked man felt that look. Like a hand on his throat.

  Then the kindness returned, as if it had never left. The hermit pointed down to the bundle he’d conjured. “Your dressings, my Chosen companion. You will find them much nicer to wear if you bathe first. Which should be sooner rather than later.”

  The younger man bent and picked up the dry clothes, which were surprisingly warm to the touch. Lifting them to his face, he breathed them in, thinking, “Thank God!”

  The old man gestured over his shoulder toward the copse of ancient trees he had been eyeing earlier. “We will make camp in a little hideaway within those trunks. There is a clean pond to bathe in and refresh. I suggest collecting the water before you use it to wash off the filth.”

  Before the nameless man could ask with what, the hermit snapped his fingers, and a pot materialized in midair, dropping on top of the surprised man’s bundle of held clothes.

  The action seemed to steal a sliver of color from the old man’s face. He swayed for half a breath, then steadied. Catching the younger man’s frown, he chuckled. “It requires more of my mana to do it without my staff, Beacon,” he said, as if the other man would understand any of the sentence. “But we don’t want a repeat of last time. Looked like I almost lost you there for a second.”

  The Chosen stared at the iron pot, then back at the hermit. Magic. So open. So casual. Childlike wonder tried to claw its way up his throat. “Can you do more?” he asked before he could stop himself.

  The question was so innocently asked that the old man actually stumbled as he made to walk. He looked back and laughed. “My boy… I suppose I am not fully ready for what we must do, nor for just how little you possibly know.” He shook his head. “Let’s make camp and prepare for the night. I promise we will talk more.”

  Heat had crept up the Chosen’s neck. Embarrassment, irritation, or more than likely both.

  As they walked and he eyed the Hermit’s back, he realized something. He’d let the day’s events distract him from a very big problem: he didn’t know this man. Still didn’t know why he was here, or where he had ended up. Maybe it was the embarrassment that finally shocked his system enough to finally take stock, but he had let himself be led around by a complete stranger who had just so happened to be the one who had first found him. “Still don’t know whether I’m being led to safety or to a stewpot.”

  The thought sobered him, and he followed the shambling elder into the trees, a remembered sense of alertness starting to return to his rusted brain.

  Within the copse, they found exactly what had been promised. Old trunks arched around a small hill, their bark furrowed and dark, their leaves forming a canopy that muffled the swamp’s distant chorus, hiding the hill from anyone who was outside the leaves. In the center lay grass, green and warm, so dry it made his heart ache just to see it. He stepped on the green and felt the familiar sensation prickling at his muddy feet.

  A small pool of water sat cradled at the hill’s base, trickling and bubbling in gentle ribbons down the slope.

  After the endless mire, it was obscene, picture-perfect. “What… how is it so…this shouldn’t be possible in the climate. Is it-,” he couldn’t help himself, “-magic?” he finished.

  The hermit shrugged, as if the impossibility were as average as the clouds in the sky. “Now, why don’t you get cleaned up and put on some clothes. Gather some water, and I will make something you can keep down.”

  The words made the nameless man’s stomach lurch in anticipation. The gripping pain of an empty stomach finally making itself known.

  Though something in the old man’s words made him hesitate. “Are you… going somewhere?”

  “Yes, in fact.” The old man’s eyes drifted outward, toward the trees. “Gather a few useful things for a good soup, and I’ll make sure the barriers are still intact around our clearing.” His grey eyes focused back on the Chosen. “Don’t want any visitors approaching us unaware.”

  Some of that answer floated past the nameless man like smoke. The important part was the one his suspicion latched onto: the hermit was leaving.

  Now would be a perfect time for him to fetch help to take the Chosen. Or fetch a knife or weapon. “Though, with the ability to make clothes appear from thin air... would he really need help to do whatever he wanted to me?”

  “Sounds good,” the nameless man said anyway.

  Once the old man shuffled off, he knelt at the pool and scooped a small amount into the pot.

  A finger dipped into its clear surface. It was cold, shockingly so. Clean, and it smelled like stone and moss, not rot.

  He leaned his face down, careful to try and keep his filth-encrusted face away from the water, and drank deeply. The taste nearly made him weep. After scooping up a pot full, he began the ritual of cleansing his skin.

  He washed his face, then his arms, scrubbing swamp-filth from skin until the water ran brown. The cloth bundle lying beside him was like a promise of future comfort.

  As he washed, he took stock of himself. He was less thirsty than he should’ve been after miles of humid marching. His body didn’t ache or hurt from being barefoot the entire time... he also didn’t feel any real aches or pain. Strange notes in a song already full of wrong chords. “More things to figure out.”

  As he finished and began to air dry, he took the iron pot and looked around for firewood. Everything in the clearing was alive, lush, damp, and green. “Nothing suitable for burning, and all of it would send up massive smoke clouds for anyone to see.”

  He soon felt he was as dry as he would ever be in the humid atmosphere he returned to his bundle, leaving the pot for when the Hermit returned. He dressed quickly: rough trousers, a shirt, socks, and plain leather boots that felt like heaven.

  He took a seat on the warm grassy hill, trying to think through the day's events. “If the hermit wishes to harm me, the charade will be over,” he thought to himself, “and then I could go back to damnation.”

  The thought didn’t bring him the comfort it once had, but it did help him relax enough to lie back on the grassy hill and stare up at the foreign sky.

  His mind drifted, unbidden, to the last things he’d been told before leaving the saloon.

  A woman’s voice across a bar. Papers spread across the wooden surface.

  “Alcondria is not a kind world,” she had said. “It is a world that runs on power. Think of Earth. Money, fame, and weapons were the defining principles of power where you were from.”

  He remembered half-listening, eyes scanning papers he barely understood.

  “When you get there,” she continued, “the other Chosen may realize something is wrong.”

  “Oh?” he’d asked, eyes still on one of the pages. “Because I’m a killer?”

  “No.” Her tone had been matter-of-fact. “There are plenty of Chosen who have ended more lives than you have met.”

  She’d tapped the spot over his heart. “When you get there, they will sense your 'Worth’. A measuring tool. The way the Chosen decide seniority, and you will be an anomaly to them.”

  He remembered the phrase she’d used, Green Blood.

  “You shouldn’t even be allowed to choose Alcondria as your first destination,” she’d said. “Alcondria is an Inner World. Deep within the corruption. The council made a... soft law, that for the first time, Chosen could only be allowed in the outer corrupted worlds. Places that normally do not require as much experience.”

  He’d grunted, distracted by a section that mentioned races on the paper. Humans, alongside things with horns and fur and feathers. He’d thought “races” meant what it meant back home. Apparently, it meant something else entirely.

  “Thomas.” Her voice had sharpened. “Are you listening to me? Chosen…”

  “Chosen?”

  The memory snapped apart like paper in water.

  “Chosen?”

  The word came again, this time not from memory. He blinked and sat up. The old man stood over him, peering down with an expression that could’ve been concern or amusement. In the fading light, the hermit looked more like a walking grave than ever.

  The Chosen man met the ancient gaze and, before he could stop himself, quipped, “You’re quiet for a bag of bones.”

  “And you’re rather unaware of your surroundings for our supposed savior,” the old man replied.

  The Chosen snorted. “About that… and all of it. Can I finally hear what the hell is going on?”

  The hermit gave a theatrical sigh and moved to the pot, dumping a handful of ingredients from deep within his cloak into the water. Something dried and green. Something that looked like a mushroom... or perhaps a rock.

  Then he crouched beside the pot, moved around a few green logs, muttered a word, and with a strange flash, a fire blossomed beneath it. The heat rolled across the clearing almost immediately, crackling and hungry. The withered man hunched in a bit on himself, breathing slowly.

  The Chosen felt another deep tug to be impressed. He instead forced his focus back to the old man, ignoring the miraculous fire.

  Night had crept in fast. Stars began to prick alive overhead. Some were far too bright, too close together, clustered in unfamiliar formations. They almost seemed to create detailed patterns in the sky, like constellations as close as the moon was back on Earth. It was fascinating to the Chosen as he looked at the strange things. Five of them, from what he could see currently.

  The hermit sat by the fire, gray robes kept neatly clear of the licking flames, and stirred the pot with what looked like a thin stick.

  “Well,” the old man said, “I suppose there is more information you need to know than I will ever get through in one night… or a hundred nights for that matter.” He watched the water begin to simmer. “And we do not have the luxury of time.” He glanced up at his company. “It would probably be more productive to get your questions out first, before we move into what I need to tell you. Ask away.”

  The invitation was so abrupt that the Chosen didn’t know where to start. A literal hill of dead bodies. Magic. Why did he appear in the swamp? The seemingly missing memories. The way the hermit’s lantern had tried to steal his mind.

  A thought cut through the chaos, clean as a blade. Names.

  “I guess names would be the most useful,” he said. “So I finally know what I should even call you.”

  “Ahh,” the old man said, pleased. “A fine place to start.” He stirred the pot again, long enough to make the younger man’s eye twitch.

  “I have had more names than most family trees,” the hermit said at last. “I think… I think the most recent is Ammon, if I remember correctly.”

  “Ammon,” the Chosen repeated.

  The name tugged at old scripture in the back of his mind, half-remembered sermons from lifetimes ago. The overlap made his skin prickle.

  “Ammon, it is then...and when you said you could see mine earlier... what did you mean by that?”

  “Yes, well.” Ammon’s mouth twisted in a gesture accompanied by a shrug. “I am able to see the name for which our God has given you.”

  “And what the hell does that even mean?” the Chosen demanded. “I share no God with you… unless you’re talking about the One.” He hesitated, then added, quieter, “And I don’t think that’s much of a God.”

  Ammon shook his head, a crooked smile tugging at his weathered face. “No, my boy. The One is more of a… thing. Or perhaps an it.” He pinched his fingers together as if trying to catch the concept. “I speak of someone who actually has a mind capable of reasoning, and the power to back up that reasoning.”

  The water began to boil. Ammon gestured, and the flames obediently lessened.

  Whatever he’d tossed into the pot released a delicious aroma, strangely meaty. With herbs and something smoky over it all. The scent threatened to steal the Chosen’s concentration, the way the blue lantern had.

  “No,” Ammon continued, “I speak of the God who has laid claim to you while you are here on Alcondria. My master: Belfast, the Silent Judge. God of Death and Passing.”

  At the mention, the atmosphere shifted. Just as it had before when Ammon had said the name. Not dramatically. Not like thunder or an Earthquake, but more like... someone had opened a door and allowed a cold, familiar breeze to slip through. One the younger man could feel in his soul, though he couldn’t give it a name.

  “Never heard of him,” he said, shrugging off the feeling.

  Ammon barked a laugh. “Surely you jest.” The Chosen’s expression didn’t change.

  Ammon’s smile faltered. “But… you would have already met him.”

  “Hmm.” The Chosen rubbed his hairless jaw. “Do you mean 1332? The lady in the saloon who looked like an angel?”

  The reaction on Ammon’s face was immediate disgust. “Pah,” he spat the sound like a rotten seed. “One of those agents? No, boy. The giant skeleton on a throne of black obsidian.”

  No reaction.

  Ammon leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “He would have pulled you into his throne room and explained everything before sending you to the Legion…” His voice thinned at the complete lack of emotion on the younger man’s face. “How… how is this possible?”

  The Chosen lifted both hands, palms out. “Sorry, partner. I really have no idea what you’re going on about.”

  For the first time, Ammon looked truly at a loss. The face, made of leather, scrunching in confusion. “But… but you have been marked. Named by him.”

  His gaze drifted to the air above the Chosen man’s head, as if reading something printed there. “How,” Ammon whispered, “can you possibly not know?”

  “Named?” The Chosen’s stomach tightened. “Okay. You keep saying that.” He leaned in. “For the love of all that’s holy. What is the name?”

  Ammon stared at his hands, then up into the darkening sky as if searching for answers among the stars.

  “Hey!” The young man’s temper finally bared its teeth. “Damn you, think about whatever it is later. You said you’d answer questions. Answer!”

  Ammon blinked, startled, then shook himself. “Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sure... the answer will come later...” He smiled again, but now it carried something strange. Unease, perhaps, braided with intrigue.

  “I honestly thought you were trying to pull my beard earlier,” Ammon said, “since it was a bit of a laugh what he named you.”

  The Chosen clenched his jaw. “And?”

  “My young friend.” Ammon took on an air of authority. “I’m pleased to tell you that you have been adopted by the forgotten House of Ossuaryn. A house of long standing within Belfast’s inner court. In fact, there have been many great warriors of the Ossu—”

  “And?” the Chosen snapped, impatience overriding etiquette. “Is that it? Just Ossuaryn?”

  It was a strange name. One he’d likely have to shorten.

  Ammon looked mildly perturbed at being interrupted, but he recovered with the air of a man used to dealing with idiots. “No,” he said slowly. “Nooo, my impatient Chosen.” He lifted his stirring stick towards the Chosen, as if presenting a verdict.

  “Your given name is Sayer.”

  The word hung in the air.

  Ammon continued, voice warming as if speaking a blessing. “Sayer Ossuaryn. Avatar of Belfast.”

  The Chosen sat very still. Feeling a strange sense of familiarity. He turned the name over in his mind like a coin. He tasted it. Felt the shape of it against his teeth.

  “…Sayer,” he said quietly. A breath left him that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “That will work.”

  Ammon smiled at Sayer before his eyes flicked to the side, over Sayer’s shoulder, as he whispered, “Questions will need to hold a moment longer... or a lot longer.” He flicked his hand, and Beacon appeared. “It appears we have company approaching.” Before he disappeared from existence.