something unexpected happened? It felt as if reality had been tipped upside down, and spun in circles.
How did I get myself into this?
Vincent began to question whether or not that woman coming out of the water was even real. It wouldn’t be the first time he had hallucinated–there had been times when he had seen things which weren’t there after spending long stretches of days without sleep, ghosts strolling along empty roads, pale faces floating in the dark distance–but usually after seeing the things which were not really there, he had that comforting feeling that they weren’t real. Like dreaming: while lost in a dream everything seems dislocated but authentic; only after waking up do you realize that the dream was just a dream. Not real.
The lady from the sea had no such feeling in his thoughts.
He had seen her, and she hadn’t seemed real at the time. Now that he thought of it, she was more real now that she was a memory–and that’s why he questioned it. The whole situation was backwards.
The old man pulled out the dagger again, turning it over in his hands carefully, as if it were a delicate childhood toy. The strange expression on his face appeared confused. Lost almost. He was contemplating something.
Then he smiled at Vincent.
“You know,” he said, his voice calm, “I hadn’t spoken for years. Hadn’t even been seen by another human being. I was a ghost.”
“Maybe you still are,” Vincent said.
“Perhaps we both are.”
“What?” Strange thoughts came slivering through the soldier like dusty snakes through forgotten libraries, crawling through him like monsters covered in foul smelling dirt.
You died.
You died.
You died.
It repeated itself in ringing echoes, chiming bells from a time beyond consciousness.
The old man’s smile broadened. “Tell me boy, how did you become a soldier? How did you find your way to this battlefield? Tell me, if you can, where did you come from?”
6
The three questions hit hard, like a sucker punch sprung out of nowhere. Vincent was speechless. Numb, and unable to concentrate. The notion of dying repeated itself in the back of his thoughts like a whispering choir, hushed riddles murmuring up from a dark place, but visually all that dominated his memory now was a door. An old door covered in moss and tiny ferns. He knew he had been at this door, had seen it in person, and had reached out and touched it with the tips of dirty fingers. Fingers encrusted in blood.
But why had he been there, and where was this door? What did it have to do with anything? The memory of it was so clear, yet so distant. Like the wolves, unreadable.
“I–,” was all that could say at the moment.
I know who I am, he thought. Where I came from. What I…
I…
The hermit kept quiet, waiting for Vincent’s answer.
“You’ve been there too,” Vincent said, finally. Not making any sense, but saying it anyways. “The door. You were there. You’ve seen it.”
The old man gave a slow nod.
“What were we doing there?”
“Oh, I know what I was doing there. I was hunting–but that doesn’t answer my question, boy. How did you end up as a black armoured feller?”
The fire between them smeared up into the air in long streaking reds, painting their surroundings in a warm glow. It was only noon, but the clouds had gotten darker, swollen things with a dreary complexion.
The hermit pointed to the shoulder-guard with the arrow-hole–which was still in the same spot on the ground. Vincent glanced down at it. The wound was just to the left of the golden bear symbol, staring at him again. But also…
“You see it,” the medicine man said, not as a question, but as a plain fact.
Three suns over the bear, and five stripes just below it.
“Not just any armour,” snickered the old man.
He was right. Those were the marks of a high profile Vellonian general.
“I–” Vincent stopped.
“You?”
The armour is not mine, he thought. Stolen.
“Vellonian soldiers don’t use swords like this.” The medicine man pulled out the katana from under the mud.
Vincent hadn’t even realized it was there; the site of it filled him with a strange sensation.
“Long swords and shields are what the Vellonian infantry are commissioned, not the likes of katanas,” the old man continued. “Where is your shield?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is–”
“I don’t know!”
“Don’t get me wrong,” the old man chuckled, “you look like a soldier, look more like a soldier than most.”
Vincent fell silent, and tried to remember, tried exploring his thoughts like a child attempting to read a book in a different language. It was as if he could see things in his mind, but didn’t understand them. The images were like foreign letters with holes burnt into them, beneath the holes only blackness.
He’d had this armour ever since he could remember. Before the armour, it was as if he had never existed. He knew somehow that the armour had been stolen from a corpse, but couldn’t place exactly where or when that was. All imagery of that event was shrouded in shadows. Everything seemed to lead to that door, seemed to be hiding behind it somehow.
Cruel memories of his life as a soldier suddenly flashed through his mind, burying everything in their path:
walking away from a burning village littered with screams he had been the cause of. One of many places he had set ablaze in the peaks of Gallanock, the barbarians' homes which were far to the north of where his bloodline originated. North of Vellenon, places so high that the air felt non-existent, and the view appeared too broad and too far reaching for the eyes to fully comprehend. A world where eagles grew to be as large as men, and snow leopards haunted their surroundings like great golden shadows. Where over-sized snowflakes fell slowly from a restless sky like frozen meteors descending from the great beyond. A quiet, isolated world normally cut off from all else because of the snow drifts which would sink down across all entrances during most seasons. It was winter when Vincent and the others had gone for them, when the thick snow was frozen enough to walk upon, when the barbarians had least expected it;
piles of corpses being tossed into the belly of a large grave, one after the other like unrelenting waves lapping up onto a dirty shore. The smell thick and warm. The sun deadly and boiling against his skin. Summer at its worst. Summer shedding cruel, clean light onto people he and other soldiers had slaughtered for some greater purpose, the orders for such actions lost in the thick, black fog of time;
riding dark horses to unknown goals, and passing an onslaught of questioning faces drenched in the grip of a hollow sadness. Dead leaves resting against a stubborn fall wind while black-armoured soldiers tore down mindless roads through Vellenon, a home he had thought was his. A place he had thought he knew, but now understood was just another place lost in the grey of so many others. Never his home. One setting in the way of another;
spring flowers mangled on a hardwood floor with bloody footprints. The sound of his blade running through bellies of the innocent, across throats of the helpless, and into hearts of the undeserving. Sounds of pain falling into cold silence;
rushing down a battlefield with the katana clenched in both hands, smearing through crowds, and sending limbs slopping out through the air behind his bloody trail. Feeling himself screaming, but hearing nothing. Not a single emotion stirring from within. A corpse who could not comprehend his own demise. A shell filled with mindless gloom. A mimic to Death’s tireless whisper.
These sudden reminders were too much. Vincent shook his head, trying to toss them away, but they clung on as if they had long arching claws which were snared deeply in the flesh of his sanity. Instead, they became clearer and more defined. Purer. Hundreds more tumbled in, disfiguring the others. Making them squirm and shout. He saw himself marching endlessly, his s
hadow long and a deadly black. His shadow moving to its own rhythm. He saw oceans of blood filling bottomless seas; birds once free twitching in the sky, and then plummeting down to rotting corpses on old, tattered battlegrounds. Familiar hands reaching up from fresh graves. Cadaverous faces surrounding him. Blood splattered wedding rings falling into heaping piles from an unhappy above. Things which didn’t make sense. Things which bled into what was left of his sour heart, making it pump in and out in slow dull thuds. Giving it too a mind of its own.
Vincent glanced up at the sky. The swollen clouds interlaced each other like chain-linked armour, blocking all hope a sun might shed onto him. Claustrophobia sunk down on him like the corpse of a monster squishing an insect. It was hard to breath. He tried to whisper something–what he didn’t know–but nothing came out. Sound was lost again. Was hiding.
What have I become, Vincent asked himself, still looking up.
How many had he slain?
How many homes had he snuffed out of existence?
And why?
Decades of slaughter; of murder; of darkness. All because of stealing a corpse’s armour. How had that really begun? Who was that corpse the armour originally belonged to, and who was this corpse Vincent had become? Why had he forgotten?
I am a monster.
An animal.
A devil.
He tried to define certain images in his head, attempting to place them in some sort of chronological order, but they were all disfigured. He didn’t know what had happened first, and what last. The memories were like slabs of half-rotted meat