“Look at me. Hold my eyes. There is no shame in it. You are not shameful, no matter what your father tells you, no matter what your father thinks. I am as proud to call you my apprentice today as I was yesterday and as I will be tomorrow. Now. Fetch the horses. The train will not wait for us.”

  ? “Daniel” by Aidoneus

  “Tell me what it was like.” Kotora had sat in complete silence for the first quarter-hour of their coach ride to the stable and he broke it without warning. He watched streets rush by through the smudged window. A perpetual haze hung over the city. It was a dark, smoky fog, released in billowing clouds from factory smoke stacks. The walls and windows and walks here were covered in a yer of bck soot so that the original shades of red brick and painted concrete were completely obscured.

  “What what was like?”

  “You and Cuán, back in the day. How long was it you were together?”

  “Oh, goodness.” Kratzer hummed, thinking. “Sixty years. Seventy, maybe. It was a long time.”

  Cuán had been nearly three centuries old when he was finally sin. This gift of semi-eternal life was a blessing from his mother’s supernatural lineage. While his father was human, her blood was that of mountain-wind spirits called tokema, a race of benevolent, birdlike beings that were worshipped as minor deities in the far west. They fulfilled a simir role to the north’s faefolk and by some taxonomic accounts were considered in the same cde. And, like faefolk, it was not unheard of for one to give up their eternal pce in the spirit realm if they became infatuated by a mortal. By human accounts, the man had appeared to be middle-aged or even slightly older, if exceptionally fit. Kratzer, though—he didn’t look beyond his thirties. And he certainly wasn’t half-bird-spirit. He looked, sounded, seemed, entirely human, from the way he spoke and moved to the lifeful flush of his cheeks.

  “It is. Exceptionally so.” Kotora turned his attention to the man across from him instead of on the roads outside. “So? What was it like?”

  “I don’t know where to begin. I’m not eloquent like he was,” Kratzer admitted. “At first, it was…functional. Convenient, for him. Intriguing for me. I was bored and he was tired. I needed someone to remind me of my self-control and he…he needed a voice in his ear that wasn’t so strict as the ones in his mind. He spared me for my utility and day after day, cimed he would kill me on the morrow, and then the morning came, and it seemed he had better things to do. Then…I don’t know how it happened. But I woke up one winter night when we’d tucked into the same bedroll and I realized I never wanted to be anywhere else. All things come to an end though, don’t they? For better and for worse.” He sighed. “Listen to me, going on like this. I sound like an old fool.”

  “You loved him.” This was a statement of fact, not a query. It was a bold one to make in Nercea, where the only deviants more heavily persecuted than homosexuals were teratophiles—but Cuán’s people of the far west and Kratzer’s of the old north were more liberal when it came to who had retions to whom. “Did he love you?”

  “Yeah.” Kratzer’s smile was rueful. It was his turn to look away and he blinked to clear his eyes. “Yeah, he did.”

  “The war you mentioned. The one that tore you apart. You said you were on the wrong side of it—why?”

  Weighted wordlessness hovered in between them. The cab’s wheels rattled on the wet, uneven cobblestone. “Because I succumbed. It is the single greatest regret of my life.” Kratzer dropped his head whilst he spoke and his voice, usually bright and melodic, had become a thick whisper. “And I never even got to tell him that. Kotora…his death—how did it happen? Did he suffer?”

  “Is his suffering the most relevant question?”

  “Not to him or you, maybe, but to me it is, yeah. That’s why he kept me around. To care about the things he couldn’t.”

  Kotora tapped his cane in contemption. He seemed to find this expnation satisfactory, however. “He was felled in battle. It was a quick, respectable death. I don’t suppose there’s a pleasant way to die, per se, but…his is one of the better ones I’ve borne witness to.”

  “How old were you?”

  Another hesitation. “Nineteen.”

  “Nineteen…you were sixteen when the war started?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went with your master, to fight?”

  “It was my pce, as his apprentice, and my home had no pce for me.”

  “Thus the desperation you mentioned once before?” Kratzer asked.

  “I suppose so. What about you? When you began monster hunting.”

  “Oh, I was a proper enough adult by then. Twenty, maybe, something like. I wasn’t a soldier until much ter.”

  “Why did you do it? I suppose it was a more common career back in the day, but still.” Before the World War, one could make a comfortable living turning in werewolf children’s heads to your local sheriff. Bounties on nonhumans were abundant, particurly in the northern Coalition nations, be the target darkheaded or not. That was what the ancient civilizations called both mankind and the numerous sapient and humanoid species that poputed the world, from the subterranean-dwelling tauran beastmen to the common lycanthrope. Not people. Not mankind. Darkheaded. The war’s beginning was rgely attributed to civil unrest and social justice movements attempting to criminalize these bounties and their attempts at indiscriminate genocide. In some quarters—particurly southern ones, which had ter come together to form the Cavalry—a monster hunter like Kratzer was a criminal of the highest order. There, they prioritized the rights of their nonhuman denizens whilst turning a blind eye to their thriving bck market of human trafficking, where chattel were bought and sold for meat and blood and bor. Kotora suspected, however, that had they met in such a country, the story Kratzer told of his life would’ve been distinctly different.

  “Well, I was a mercenary, first. Still am, really, truth be told. Sellsword, bounty hunter, monster hunter, hired muscle, whatever keeps a roof over my head,” Kratzer shrugged. “Monster hunting is just the most socially acceptable one of those in these parts. If we were in Escinthium, I would’ve probably told you I’m all in it for bounties.”

  “I don’t suppose you care who your employers are.”

  “They’re all shit people, Kotora. No one who wants someone else dead is better than anyone else or, at least, not usually. I know that contradicts your noble sensibilities and your sense of honor or chivalry or duty or whatever but I’m not judge or jury. I just do what needs doing and don’t ask questions.”

  “How do you have pride in your work if you’ve no respect for those you serve?”

  “It’s quite simple, kid. I don’t. I’m not a good guy. You aren’t a good guy, either, but you prioritize different values, you know? I’m not working for some higher purpose or legacy or to bring status to my family name. I just do what I do and I go home and I kick back. Have a drink. Snort some suspicious white powder. Py cards. Whatever passes the time.”

  “You said you don’t have a home.”

  “Fine, I go to my hotel room,” Kratzer waved a hand dismissively.

  “Forgive my candor, but this life of yours, this life you’ve chosen—it doesn’t sound like one worth living for.”

  “Do you live your life because it’s worth living? Do you persist because that’s your heart’s desire?”

  “...No.”

  “Well then, neither do I.”

  The walls surrounding Moudigrav were massive industrial structures of steel and concrete. Great and grey, they stood like some terrible and lifeless sentinel, sworn solemnly to remind the citizens that they were small. Most denizens feared invasion from outside—being pgued by feral werewolves or bandits—but when Kotora and Kratzer regarded them, their shared consternation took a different form. Theirs was the trepidation of being trapped within as their ancestors before them. To be burned. To be gassed. To be executed indiscriminately for their pagan faiths. And though Kratzer knew nothing of Kotora’s past, he saw the sting look he cast towards the portcullis when they passed beneath it and the way he leaned his weight back only when they were out.

  “Where did you say you were from?” Kratzer asked. The burnt sepia skin, folded eyes, round face, and husky build all indicated an ethnic heritage from northern coastlines in Ablon, but nothing in his dress or style or manner indicated any cultural connection to them. Kotora’s accent was strange, too. It was unnoticeable upon their first encounter but as time went on it came out in barely-rolled r’s and elongated vowels.

  “I didn’t.” He leaned forward when he felt the coach slow. “Kratzer, I have one more question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My master…in the time you knew him, did he ever seek an apprentice?”

  “No. To my knowledge, you’re alone.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He seemed sure that if he was patient, then one day, things would simply come together. From the look of you, he was right.”

  Shame flickered over Kotora’s reserved countenance when the coach came to a stop. “We will see. Thank you, Kratzer, for your aid.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Kotora grasped the door frame to bance himself as he disembarked. He stepped heavily into the street’s muddy slop.

  “Kotora?”

  “Yes?”

  “Godspeed.” Kratzer raised his first two fingers first to his forehead, then to his lips, and he proceeded to turn his hand forward and out as if handing something over. It was a blessing from the old north. A blessing which Cuán, too, used to impart upon his student’s departure.

  “And fair fortune,” Kotora returned with a bow.

  Kotora waited beneath the hayloft for some time, breathing through his scarf to prevent dust from entering his lungs, standing just out of the rain to watch the street. The lover whose quarreling had sent Kotora to the tavern the night before had been told this would be a st chance for farewells. Steadily, the clock turned and its distant tolling marked the passing of eleven, then noon. The rain continued to pour down in frigid sheets. The coaches and wagons continued to spsh back and forth beneath the gates. Flooded aqueducts flowed in whispered white noise. From it, there was no emergence of his partner of the st decade.

  It was just as well. He would only try to talk him out of leaving.

  Kotora’s stallions, at least, had no such agendas. Hikaru whickered lowly on his approach and leaned his head over the stall door to nuzzle Kotora’s jacket. He—and his confederate in the next stall over—were petite ponies. They were both just shy of fourteen hands at the withers, unshod, with wide, round barrels and roached manes. Primitive markings adorned their legs with zebra-esque striping from their dark hocks to midway up their legs, thick dorsal lines, transverse shoulder streaks, and darkened muzzles and faces. These traits—characteristics of the isnd breed—were the end of their simirities. Hikaru was the smaller of the two, a strawberry roan, and he used his lips gently and sweetly to fish around for a hidden treat. Kisho—a ste grey grullo who’d once been in Cuán’s service—took the time to kick at his door instead.

  “Are you ready for the road again, like the old days, my light?” he murmured to Hikaru in that near-dead nguage of the far west. “It’s a long journey ahead. But there is no war this time. Just us, a few aging retirees.”

  He’d paid the stable for a storage closet since he’d started boarding his horses. Within was all his equipment—not only for the animals, including their tack and armor, but also his own. He’d spent time over the st few weeks adding rations and repcing parts (such as some leather straps) where age had eaten away at them. Some items—armaments in particur, for which he’d no use outside of war—he’d already boxed and shipped to meet him at the western coast. From there, he’d have to arrange passage on one of the few ships allowed to pass through the mists to reach the isle.

  To prepare the horses alone took time. “I’m sorry the weather is so foul,” he said as he led them out into the rain. “I would not have liked to depart in winter-time, either, but I’m afraid we’ve little choice.” He tucked his cane into the back of Hikaru’s saddle and then hoisted himself onto his back. Kotora was, himself, a small man, easily dwarfed in height by nearly every one of his peers, and he was grateful for his ponies’ more manageable size in comparison to the massive draught breeds he’d grown up with.

  So his journey began: a sickly silhouette perched atop a weary warhorse. He didn’t look back.