He stared at her, not knowing what to do next. She appeared limp, her head slightly tilted to the side, her eyes still open and gazing across from her, gazing at where the boy now sat. The sword was pointing at him again, cold and unforgiving. There was a guilt rising in the boy. He felt as if he could have done more to help her.
He imagined himself saving her, killing everyone who dared try to hurt her. He imagined himself a hero, pushing the hermit away from her before he had a chance to murder her.
Shadows moved slightly, flickered across the room randomly. The boy looked up, and saw a racoon walking along a long board running across a hole in the stone above. Vincent found himself wondering how he could climb up there, how he could get away–but he decided against it, and he stayed. He didn’t deserve to leave; wasn’t worthy of escape. He had just watched the blind woman die. He was helpless and worthless.
He felt eyes watching him now, many of them–and not just animal. He felt human eyes watching him. This sent fear splintering through him in ragged waves, veining through his body like poison. The woman’s eyes were still lifeless, so it wasn’t her that was giving Vincent this feeling of being watched.
But there were eyes coming from somewhere.
From everywhere.
He closed his eyes, too afraid to face the situation before him. Beneath the darkness of his eyelids he saw faces in the distance of his thoughts, shadowed figures watching and unmoving, feeling their eyes against him like cold hands. Cold like a dead woman’s touch.
He tried imagining himself someplace else. He imagined that he was one of the black armoured soldiers. He imagined himself strong and fierce.
“Is someone there?” he asked, opening his eyes. He almost expected the woman to be gone, but she wasn’t. She was still there in the far corner, head tilted, blade pointing.
Vincent stood up.
Stepped towards her, and pulled out the blade.
The sound was grotesque; something he also thought he would never forget, but somehow did.
And then he heard the door make a sound, a dehydrated creaking.
He said nothing and waited.
The door began to open, and the anger hiding down in his stomach rose up, smearing out into his hands and mind, and gushing into his entire being like a red, foggy wind. He lunged at the door, both hands gripped madly around the ancient weapon, lunged for it without thinking of what he was doing, without thinking of anything. Just letting the anger guide him.
The door opened, and behind it stood the hermit. The katana gripped in the boy's hands glided through the hermit’s side like a hot blade through butter. It all happened so fast that Vincent hadn’t even realized what he had done.
The old man tried to speak, but couldn’t, shock stealing the colour from his grey-black skin. Not even air escaped from his mouth, just more silence, and he fell backwards, mud splashing in all directions. The muck seemed to swallow him, eat him alive before he had the chance to die. The boy pulled the blade from the body, and it made the same sound it had when he pulled it from the blind woman. He barely heard it. He was lost within himself now, unsure of what he had just done, and staring at the conclusion of his actions.
“You came back for this?” the boy muttered, holding up the katana.
No answer.
“It’s mine now,” he said. “You are mine.”
The boy then glanced at his surroundings; he was in a small alleyway outside of the old door, and the day was bright and clear. There was blood splattered against all the walls around him, remnants of a battle perspired, but with no bodies to give evidence. Only gruesome walls with drying blood, and a strange emptiness. He left the alleyway, and walked out into the stone street. The town had been abandoned before, but now had an even more bizarre emptiness to it.
“Hello!” he yelled out.
Nothing responded.
Emptiness prevailed.
The boy felt empty and alone.
He looked down the street, out to the entrance of the city, its high archway of pale stone reaching up into the cloudless sky like a dirty glove covering something grungier underneath, and past the archway was a sight the boy had no expected.
Normally there would have been a road surrounded by scattered boulders peering up from tall grass, but now that sight no longer existed.
There was only sand, like desert, or a beach of some kind.
Just a never ending wasteland.
He felt himself getting dizzy, and stumbled out further into the road. He felt pain coursing through him.
He looked down. The little dagger he had attacked the hermit with while trying to save the blind woman was lodged in between his ribs, the handle dangling there like a limb which never quite finished growing, never had a chance to mature. And there was blood, sticky and warm against his skin. He could also taste it in the back of his mouth, a metallic flavour.
He stabbed me, Vincent thought.
He must have pushed it into my ribs when I put his own blade through his side.
I’m dying.
He looked back out to the never ending beach at the outskirts of town, and saw something in the distance, something very far away. Something black and moving quickly, stampeding towards him like an army of dark chariots which made no sound, bringing with it only more darkness. The black line in the distant horizon swept over the boy with a wind so fierce it knocked him backwards. Day was devoured by night, and he found himself falling. Although he could feel ground, he was falling. His lungs began filling with water, and he realized he wasn’t falling, he was sinking. He was drowning.
12
The old man had a hunger. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, or how he would obtain it, only knew that it had something to do with the boy. Something to do with the man he had found on the battlefield by the water, the one he had locked in that room with his sword and that dead woman so many years ago. It wasn’t that he had been out of find the boy, hadn’t even thought of him for years, decades even. It was just something that had fallen into his lap, so to speak. Something that he hadn’t asked for, but had unknowingly been hungry for. And now that he had him, he was even more hungry. It opened up new desires, and broadened old regrets. Strengthened the remorse which had laid dormant like a living corpse, but now coursed through his veins like hot sand. When he had seen him in the battle field, he hadn’t known what to think. He just acted. He pulled the boy from that scene, the power of doing so intoxicating. He was like a god almost.
The old wolves had been lurking in the distance for months before seeing the boy. That part made sense. Made the purpose of living in that area that much clearer. The pieces of that part fit just fine. Sure they did. But why had they come so close so soon?
The yearning for something he didn‘t understand hurt. Hurt badly. The mangled leg seemed to help with the strange ache, took his mind off important prospects he may never understand, and forced him to look away.
The hermit glanced at the sky, noticing suddenly how dizzy he was becoming.
How long have I been wandering for?
Time was a blur.
Was escaping him.
Won’t let the boy escape, he promised himself.
“We can’t walk forever,” Vincent said, his voice breaking the silence of the new day like a rough stone taking apart stale bread, disconnecting the old man‘s certainty, and replacing the sounds the wolves had made with something just as threatening: “you’ll die.”
Die, the hermit thought.
The follower of the dead. Akied.
That’s why the wolves came.
13
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” the old man muttered.
“You’re right, but here we are.”
“Here we are?” He stopped walking.
“What now?”
The old man still had the katana–gripped with shaking hands and white knuckles. It made him seem small. Even though he was taller than Vincent, there was a meekness
in him now. “My hands never shake,” he said, “not ever. They're catching up to me. It all is.”
He turned around, faced Vincent, and pointed the blade towards him–but said nothing.
Just stared with blurry, bloodshot eyes, a distance in them.
“What now?” Vincent asked again, feeling dislocated from reality. The confusion behind his twisted childhood memories made him feel numb. Made him feel as if none of this was really happening. As if he were someplace else.
“You’re all I have left,” the old man said.
Silence.
“What happened to us?” the old man asked, cracked lips pale, peeling, and grey. “How did you get out of that room?”
There was another moment of silence, the tip of the sword still directed at Vincent, and still shaking.
“How did you get out?” the old man asked again.
The question seemed distant. It had an otherworldly nature to it, like something that had happened in a dream, and Vincent didn‘t know how to answer.
“How–"
“I heard you,” Vincent, cut in. "You let me out, and you know what happened after. We both know."
The old man shook his head, seemed to regain his consciousness, and looked into the soldier's tired eyes. “That woman. You saw a woman come out of the ocean?”
"I don't know what I saw," Vincent said, thinking back to the dark haired woman coming out of the water. He saw her die as a child, so how could she have appeared to the soldier the way that she did? The guilt of seeing her die was rising in Vincent again like a slow tied come to drown him. With the emerging guilt, there was also fear. Vincent was