Hitherto the well-trodden fields of blood drenched ground did come the stranger. A tall smudge of a man, all forgettable features and pallid greyness. He wafted immaterial over that churned earth like a winter chill, for so to was his arrival preceded by the icy strangulation of December.
Raiders had come the month before, men possessed of wicked blades and similar dispositions, their vile crimes reflected in sickle like grins. It was to that bereaved, violated city did the stranger now come.
He rode through the splintered gates on an emaciated nag. Mangy fur and tattered flesh sloughing from its bones. The guards had stopped him with a glance, a reactionary optical glint of one seeking an excuse for violence. With a response of much the same had they recoiled, for something deep within those yellowed, befouled eyes had reviled them. And they, gagging in their throats as they sat back down, waved him through, opting to forget the gelatinous carcasses which had held them transiently hostage. And so the stranger entered the city, cloak billowing behind him as if the land itself had tried, with a frostbitten gale, to expel this figure of profound wrongness.
For six days and nights did the man, dressed in rags and bandages, ride his animalistic automaton of bones and skin pulled tight across through the claustrophobic city streets. In all that time he sought no succour, his stomach sat empty, his throat dry, and he gave no ill or kind regard to any who inquired after his queer existence. Nay, from the first day, when he had ridden the rising sun through the gate, right until it had later peered ashamedly over the horizon to gaze at its subjects on the seventh did the man engage in his ceaseless, ponderous crawl.
And yet when that wincing solar gaze settled centrally into the sky on the sabbath did the man and horse, abruptly, stop. No itch or twitch, no wink or blink. Just the morbid stillness of the grave. The only sign of life shared between the pair being the putrid gouts of acrid breath which spewed from the horse’s scabbed nostrils. If breath the rider also had it was well hidden beneath his voluminous beggar’s garb.
He stayed there for a long time, undisturbed and unperturbed by the gathering throng of impoverished souls. All craning their necks above one another to catch a glimpse of the stranger whose mystery had so briefly entranced them away from their grief.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
And yet, as the sun, almost as if reluctant, began to enter its death march into unconsciousness did not a soul come forth to slake their curiosity upon the man. As if the pervasive, communal unease of his arrival had calcified their bones into politely distanced statues. None daring to once more approach the stranger with his tired eyes and grim disregard.
Eventually though, and as is so often the case, human inquisitiveness prevailed over their better sense. The archetype of this phenomenon, a young orphan boy of sticky fingers and a dimpled chin, scuttled tentatively to the hooves of the wicker thin mount and plopped himself down on the stones beside it.
“Why are you watching the sunset?” Asked the boy, bright eyes having tracked the hollow and barely visible gaze of his mounted companion. The pause which followed was heavy with bated breaths and cupped ears as all waited to hear if this most mute stranger would reply.
The well held consensus was a decided no, for why would he respond now when all before overtures toward this dried out and lanky interloper had been spurned with naught more than curt nods or shakes of the head.
And yet what followed the innocent tones of the boy’s questioning was not the expected silent stare of bored contempt but instead an exhalation like a crypt’s opening, all sickly sweet and warm breath rushing out from between tight pressed, knife wound like lips. And then, in the silence that followed, and with a voice like an anemoic dream did he speak thusly:
“I’m not.” The boy’s surprise soon turned to elation when he regarded the words coming from those wrinkled lips and cracked tongue. He had been the first to get the stranger to talk, the other’s would hear of this.
“Yes you are I can see your eyes!” He shouted in the cacophonous, stampeding jumble of youth. The man did not respond, he only continued to stare at the bruising light of the sky. The boy squirmed like a stuck pig in the following pause, trying to think of more to say.
“Then what are you doing?” Spoke a nun whilst crossing through no-man’s land’s wide berth. She was attempting to retrieve the small creature now affixing her with furrowed brows at recognition of her approach to wrest his fun from him. The boy scampered under the placid horse as to put it between himself and the oncoming caning which would follow his retrieval. It was an unnecessary gesture however, for the austere woman had frozen in place upon the settling of a tumorous, fatigued gaze upon her from above the playfully smiling child.
“The second sun.” He spoke in a melancholic drawl before turning back to the now navy-blue skyline.
“The what?” Snickered out a cocksure grin from somewhere beneath the fetid mass of decomposing equestrian flesh. The man simply paused and gazed knowingly at the grasping, tendrils of fire which hung desperately to the far off churn of the Atlantic swell, he flinched imperceptibly as each of those hellfire digits were prized from the material world and sent asunder for twelve hours more of a moonlit night. At least normally.
“You’ll see.” Said the man as he contorted a stiff and cracking neck to look behind him. Through the strategically chosen straight shot streets and further off, through the gate and back out to the forested horizon. More so to the sickly green, gangrenous glow which decomposed the starlight tapestry in its ever-encroaching crawl up the sky. It would be a long night.