Vasilisa’s chest burned as she jolted awake, taking in deep lungfuls of the cool, alpine air.
Was this another dream? She remembered the cleaver stuck in her neck - choking on her own blood as she struggled to breathe - and she took in another deep breath to still the trembling that took over her. Her eyes looked up at the gray clouds slowly hovering above the towering pines, and she felt at her neck for a gaping wound. Where flesh was once rent apart by crooked teeth, there was only a faint bump - a small scar that felt like the seam on a dress. Her ripped skin and flesh closed as if sewn shut by threads of the gods.
Gods…gods…what happened to that monster? The gigantic black obelisk still stood in the middle of the outpost, but the sounds of battle were gone, replaced by the incessant cawing of carrion crows. Vasilisa sat up, and felt her head spin from the sudden rise. The Khormchaks lay scattered - the three men who had fallen before her now set upon by flies and birds who arrived in the battle’s wake. A black corpse charred beyond all recognition lay against the wall of a house. The robed swordsman, Yesugei, lay on his back - his chest and throat pierced by glinting metal shards.
Nearby Yesugei lay a great pile of black and gray ash cast in the rough shape of a fallen man. A gust of wind blew across the ashen pile, and from within it Vasilisa saw a tiny crystal - her mother’s crystal - smoldering and darkening its surroundings with its eerie vigor. Everyone lay dead. The monster, Chirlan’s guards, and the Khormchaks. No. Not all of the Khormchaks.
She saw Yesugei’s chest rise and fall erratically as the nomad gave a sputtering cough - his skin turned as gray as the clouds above. She rushed over to him and knelt down to examine his wounds. The nomad’s eyes widened as he saw her lean over him - his lips moved, but made no sound as he tried to speak. Vasilisa hushed him, and gingerly lifted his head into her lap as she examined the seeping wound in his neck. The fact he was still able to breathe gave her relief, and she tore off the cleanest part of her dress sleeve to pack the wound and stem the trickle of blood from his neck. The nomad thrashed weakly against her clumsy attempts to heal - but Vasilisa paid him no mind.
“I need you, my friend,” she muttered to herself as she cast a glance at the metal shard in the nomad’s chest. It had struck him just near the heart, but by the luck of the gods seemed to have missed. He wouldn’t have had the strength to keep pushing against her if the shard truly had found his heart. “I need you to guide me home, at the least. You aren’t dying today, and you aren’t dying here.”
To this, the nomad gave a sharp gasp. He brought up one bloodied hand to grab her arm, and pointed with the other at ashen remains of the monster, and at the cleaver which remained stuck in the ground.
“Warn…warn them.” came the strangled words in the Common Tongue. “Kurultai…warn them...”
The short utterance took everything the nomad had, and he collapsed back into Vasilisa’s lap, breathing slowly but steadily. How much longer would it last? Would it be a cruelty to leave him alive, lingering like this on the edge of death?
“Who do I warn?” Vasilisa demanded. She wanted to steady the nomad’s lolling head, but was afraid to damage the wound in his neck further by forcing him. “Who is kurultai? I need you to guide me back home, to my family. They must also be warned. Do you understand me?”
Her mind flashed back to her father’s throne room. The false posol Chirlan and his masked guards. If Chirlan had carried her away from Belnopyl, it would have only been over his parents’ dead bodies. She imagined her mother and father lying cold and bloodied on the floor of their throne room, and felt a wave of sorrow and fear rise in her chest. She forced her fears down - perhaps Chirlan’s mind tricks had let him evade them, just as he had caused her to slumber. She would mourn only once she returned, and would leap with joy and promise to never argue with them again if they were still alive. But leaderless or not, Belnopyl was in danger, and the princes of the Klyazmite lands needed to be warned of the silver-masked invaders and their gray demons.
She imagined great black crystals rising out from the Klyazmite steppes, pouring forth death and darkness out across the countryside, the miasma of the so-called Apostles swallowing whole entire villages. She could not imagine Ilya or her father’s druzhina - the armored pride of the city’s army - standing against monsters who cut through iron and flesh like cloth, and wielded floating toothed swords. But then, this nomad and his band had managed to kill such a monster - even if it cost them nearly their entire company. She needed to know how, and she needed to warn Belnopyl.
The nomad’s eyes were unfocused. The bump in his throat moved up and down occasionally in between breaths - pushing down swallows of blood and spittle. She couldn’t even figure out if he had heard her the first time she spoke.
“Belnopyl! Do you know where it is?” she asked, slowly nudging the nomad as she tried to pull his attention. “How do I get to Belnopyl?”
The nomad’s eyes closed, and for a moment Vasilisa’s spirits sank as she feared the worst. She felt at the man’s gray wrist for a pulse, and breathed a sigh of relief - his pulse was strong, filled with desperate life. For now. But she would not get any answers from him. Not for now.
The fiery sigil that was burned into the outpost gate had faded, and outside Vasilisa saw several horses tied off by a tree trunk. Vasilisa slowly stood up, and with a quiet grunt placed her hands under the unconscious nomad’s armpits as she began to drag. The nomad’s fine leather boots carved two faint marks in the earth as she pulled him out of the outpost, and propped him gently up against a tree. The bleeding in his neck and chest had stopped, and she felt again for his pulse. Still alive.
The horses seemed to not be put off by the smell of blood, and Vasilisa gently approached the strongest, stockiest of the herd - a chestnut-colored horse wearing a saddle marked with a tribal symbol. The Khormchak horses were smaller than the destriers her father’s men rode, resembling ponies more than real horses. She stood several inches taller than even the largest of the bunch, and wondered whether the stallion would even be able to support two riders. She softly patted the horse’s shoulder, and leaned down slightly to let the horse sniff her hand. When the sniff was followed with an aloof turn of the head, Vasilisa softly whispered to the horse in her native Zemlyan tongue. Did Khormchak horses even understand Zemlyan? Did horses even understand language at all?
Vasilisa went through the saddlebags of the other bound horses, grabbing a few meager supplies of salted meats, cheese, and bread, and a pouch containing several dozen silver coins. The horsehair banner of the Khormchaks - tied to one of the smaller horses - she left sitting by a tree. After grabbing all she could and packing the chestnut stallion’s saddlebags to bursting, she untied the remaining horses and sent them clopping confusedly down the valley.
As the other horses slowly moved on, Vasilisa took her stallion by its bridle and guided it over to the unconscious Yesugei. The horse seemed familiar with what she planned to do, and it only took a small bit of guiding to get it to lay down as Vasilisa carefully heaved Yesugei’s body onto the saddle. She threw a loop of rope around the nomad and secured him to the saddle before climbing on herself. The horse slightly buckled under her mounting, but Vasilisa was surprised when it began to trot a moment later without issue.
The nomad’s lips moved but made no sound as he settled against her back, still unconscious. Vasilisa thought back to his words of warning, then looked back at the ruined outpost and its scattered bodies.
No, one last thing.
She climbed off the Khormchak horse and hastily sped back into the outpost. The giant cleaver remained stuck in the ground, still slick with the mixed blood of her and the dead Khormchak warrior. Vasilisa grasped the handle, and nearly fell flat on her back as the giant blade ripped free from the ground as easily as pulling a weed. The grim weapon - as long as she was tall - weighed heavily on her as she hung it across her back with a length of rope. The blade was uselessly heavy, but the body of the Apostle was gone - only the blade remained to be taken and presented as a sign of things to come to the princes of the west. Even the most untrusting among them - the princeling of Gatchisk, and the aged patriarch of Pemil - would have to give pause on seeing a sword formed from slick flesh and teeth - held together by strange magic beyond even the foulest blood-sorcery.
With the fleshy sword mounted on her back, Vasilisa climbed back onto the horse, and cast her glance about the open forest landscape as she tried to gain her bearings. The sea of pine trees seemed to extend in all directions, and the dirt paths leading out of the outpost extended every which way. The snow-capped mountain peaks that rose dauntingly over the trees and through the clouds were unfamiliar, and the flowing stream could well lead her astray in the wrong direction for days before reaching any place she could use to orient herself.
See there Vas’ka? If you aren’t scared, go touch the face of Leshy! She heard the voice of Stavr ring in her ears as her eyes fell upon a moss-covered pine. Before they joined the household guard, she had played with Stavr and Pyotr in her father’s hunting grounds, just outside Belnopyl. She remembered the superstitions of the Leshy - the guardian of the woods with his skin of bark and moss-covered face - and how terrified she had been to disturb the ancient trees. But it was just a moss-covered tree in the end - no great spirit had arisen to chide her for disturbing the woodland nor curse the young boys who made fun of the mythical lumbering giant.
You see? He always looks north! Look at the face! Stavr’s high-pitched voice of youth came to her mind again. The old sayings about the Leshy always looking to the north, to the mythical realms of always-winter where nature lay untouched by men.
Looking to the north…north!
The dark green moss grew thickest on the darkest sides of the pine trees, always to the north where the sun shone the least. Vasilisa spun her head around as she examined the trees around her, then picked the winding trail that led westwards. The presence of Khormchaks meant she was probably out east, somewhere in the borderlands between the Klyazmite principalities and the Great Horde. The dense woods had been thought to mark the boundary between the steppe peoples and the settled Klyazmite folk - until the Qarakesek had come storming out of the woods and from the southern plains in search of conquest. If she traveled far enough west, she would reach the open plains - from there, a village, and from a village, a city.
Vasilisa gave a soft click of her tongue, and nudged the chestnut stallion along the winding western road. She felt the unconscious nomad’s head rest against her back as they rode deeper into the woods, and heard strange murmurs in his unconscious sleep.
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***
Beneath the gray skies, the princess of Belnopyl and her nomad charge traveled slowly. Every few miles Vasilisa had to readjust her seat, or check on Yesugei whose feverish murmurs soon died down. When she could, she descended from the horse to give it a reprieve from its heavy load - walking with the stallion’s bridle in hand as she scanned the side of the dirt path for medicinal plants or herbs. Despite the vast, blooming greenery, the forest yielded little of use - only a handful of black leaves from a plant the old handmaid Mariana had called “wound healer”, which Vasilisa stuffed into the saddlebags before moving on.
When the sun began to set, she set about trying to make camp - mimicking the motions she saw her father’s trackers carry out a dozen times over during his hunting excursions. Clear the ground, set a circle of stones, gather wood and dry grasses, and pray to the gods the tinder births a fire warm enough to fend off the cold.
By the time she had managed to coax even the tiniest ember using a flint and steel in the Khormchak saddlebags, Vasilisa felt too tired to do much else besides sleep. Even eating seemed a laborious task, despite the incessant hunger pains of her stomach which appeared as the fear of the morning’s slaughter gave way to crippling exhaustion. As she searched through the saddlebags left on the chestnut steed, Vasilisa heard a groan from Yesugei and shuffled over to check on him.
Laid out haphazardly on a bedroll near the fire, the nomad’s face looked almost like a skull - his rounded features seemed to sink in, and his skin remained a sickly gray. The veins in his neck and face swelled visibly from underneath his skin, reminding Vasilisa of when she had seen a man hanged at her father’s order for murder. The condemned man’s veins had swelled the same way as the rope tightened and choked the life out of him, but still he had fought until the last, kicking and gagging until he could no more. She wondered again whether her healing was having an effect - or whether it was just prolonging the suffering, loosening the noose of death for only a moment but never cutting it free.
The nomad stared at her in glum silence with bloodshot eyes as Vasilisa knelt down and removed his robe. The wounds had completely stopped bleeding, and didn’t yield any pus or show signs of taking to rot when illuminated by the growing fire’s flickering light. As she examined the nomad’s wounds Vasilisa thoughtfully chewed on the wound healer before spitting out the crushed leaves and their dark juices into a wrap of cloth. The nomad hissed as she pressed the makeshift poultice against his wounds, and Vasilisa recalled how she had cried as a child when Mariana had done the same to tend to a cut she received playing with her father’s hunting dogs. She found herself missing even the sour-faced Mariana: the old handmaiden with nothing kind to say about anyone save her liege lord and lady, yet who stood solid as an oak for the household day and night, always prepared with food, folk medicine, and sharp-tongued advice.
“Why…do you do this?”
Vasilisa gave a start as she heard the nomad whisper to her in the Common Tongue, his voice low and rasping. “Why do you take me with you?”
Vasilisa placed the nomad’s uninjured hand over the poultice, unsure of what to say. “You saw that monster, same as I. And you killed it-”
“-and soon, it will kill me,” said Yesugei with a hacking cough. “A pointless trade.”
He curled his fingers tightly around her hand, and suddenly Vasilisa felt her breath die. She saw everything that came to her at once. The vast, shimmering steppe grasses that stretched for thousands of miles in all directions. The great tide of horses and traveling yurts of the Khormchaks, cursed and blessed to forever wander and behold the steppes. Flickering faces, of half-remembered ancestors, of siblings older and younger, sisters and brothers. Brothers of blood, and brothers of oath, roaming and fighting side-by-side beneath the endless sky. The red-robed archer Targatai and his favorite falcon, now masterless and alone. The stolid Khenbish, who wore his half-dozen wounds earned for the Qarakesek with pride. The elderly shaman Tseren, the khan’s ever-present medium and his swirling, unfulfilled promises of answers. Black teeth of night that swallowed the lantern-light on a dark day of blood, and the black tendrils that swallowed the sun.
Vasilisa felt pain, fatigue, and helplessness. But more than that, she felt a powerful, inhuman black hatred - not directed at her, but outward to the entire world, to the people of lands near and far, across vast seas and mountains. She felt the horrifying, consuming desire to plunge it all into the depths of a great pit, and claim what was lost and to weep for loved ones and gods that never were. The traces of inhuman, divine rage overflowed from every wound, every droplet of blood, every breath Yesugei let out into the cool night air.
A hacking cough, a shiver, and the nomad’s hand uncurled from hers. Vasilisa took a quivering breath as she felt her mind fly back into her own body and heard Yesugei speak.
“This…these wounds…it is not pestilence.” Yesugei shivered again, and his head fell back as if he spent all his strength on those words.
“It is a curse.”
Yesugei tried to smile, and Vasilisa saw he only seemed to be holding on with clenched teeth. Hanging on with what little strength he had left, while the black rage ravaged his body like a wildfire.
“A curse…wise men say spirits curse those who kill them. Legends come to life…and so does their hate. You feel it, don’t you? Endless hate - hate to blot out the sun, hate to swallow the sky and the stars.”
Yesugei shook violently, his jaw unclenched as he fought to keep his eyes open. Fighting against sleep, not sure if it will be his last. Death and sleep - how well they went hand-in-hand.
“Black crystals…teeth of night…they will save you. They will kill them,” Yesugei’s fading tone grew desperate, and he blindly grabbed at Vasilisa’s sleeve as if hanging onto her could stop him from falling back into wounded slumber. “Don’t be afraid. Do not let yourself be afraid. Teeth of night…they will save you. They will kill them…”
The nestled crystals in Vasilisa’s chest took on a new ache as she laid the bedroll cover over Yesugei, who had fallen into oblivion mid-sentence. She sat down on a small log and tried to clear her mind. Strange birds whistled in the distance, and a low breeze whispered through the branches of the many trees that loomed overhead like spears pointed to the heavens. She ran her scarred hand along the crystals, feeling each one in turn as she felt them thrum with a strange life of their own. Her curse.
They will save you. They will kill them.
Or was it salvation?
Yesugei’s question swirled in her mind as she stared at the flickering fire, hoping to find answers in the flame.
Why do you do this?
By the time the fire had died and the sun began to rise once more, she still did not find her answer to the dying nomad’s question.
***
The gray clouds returned with the daylight, and soon it began to rain. Booming thunder roared and flashes of lightning cut across the cloudy sky, unleashing a torrent of frigid rain that soaked her and the wounded nomad. Yesugei remained half-lucid, muttering under his breath in the Khormchak tongue as they continued to travel through the sea of trees. He barely shivered from the cold, his lips turned pale, and his gray skin began to flake off and crack as they continued to travel. Soon, even his mutterings fell silent.
Eventually the rain slowed to a trickle, and Vasilisa felt a strong gust of wind chill her to the bone as the towering pines began to grow sparse. She almost wept at the sight of the familiar Klyazmite plains that yawned out before her beyond the treeline - dotted with distant wheat fields and stone road-markers.
She trotted the steady-footed stallion out of the woods, continuing to scan the horizon for villagers or traveling merchants, when she felt Yesugei begin to violently shake and convulse in the saddle.
Vasilisa threw one hand out to catch him, but the nomad slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground with a quiet moan. She climbed off the horse, and set aside the cleaver tied to her back before kneeling down to turn Yesugei over.
Why do you do this?
The blue, decorated robe was torn to tatters, and crusty with blood and dirt. Yesugei’s chest barely rose and fell now, and his dry, cracked lips parted to give a rattling breath that smelled of death.
Why do you do this?
Vasilisa tore open his robe, and saw a massive patch of darkness spreading across Yesugei’s chest, crawling out from the metal shard left embedded in the space near his heart. Out of instinct, she took hold of the metal shard and slowly slid it free. The glinting metal left a stretching trail of dark crimson and viscous black as it was pulled out, and Vasilisa dropped the cursed shard as it burned in her hand. But the spreading darkness didn’t stop - it slowly inched across Yesugei’s chest, seeming to weigh down on him and crush the breath from his lungs.
The curse was so strong Vasilisa felt she could see it, a dark smoke choking out all life around it with its unending hatred. Yesugei weakly writhed in silent agony.
Why do you do this?
Vasilisa took Yesugei’s hand, and his feeble thrashing slowly ceased. She opened her mind once more, trying to show to the dying nomad what she could not say.
She let her pain, her fears, her sorrows bleed out. But from them, she found herself wanting to live more than anything else. Wanting this total stranger, whom she had only met a scant few days ago, to live. A thirst for life bloomed from her chest - it washed over the land, the sky, the wind, and the distant villages and cities. Tiding over soldiers, lords, and serfs alike. Everything that she knew and loved was to fall into the great pit of hatred, and the only thread that held it, that prevented the world from falling into the abyss forever, lay within her heart.
She loosened her dress, letting the cloth covering her left breast fall from her shoulder. Exposing the teeth of night buried in her chest to the vast, unfeeling sky.
It was so quiet, out in the Klyazmite plains.
She didn’t understand what she was doing, not entirely, as she took hold of the cursed metal shard. She stifled her wince of pain as the hateful metal burned in her grasp, and she slowly slid the pointed tip into her chest, just beneath the smallest of the crystals.
Vasilisa froze for a moment, a voice in her head telling her she was on the verge of the abyss. Whatever happened now-
You can never go home. Never again.
She hesitated only for a moment.
Dull pain flowered from her chest as she dug the metal shard deeper into her flesh and slowly scraped free the smallest crystal. She let the blood from her wound drip onto the ground and her dress, and was surprised by the strange feeling of lightness that came over her with the crystal’s liberation from her heart. She clutched the smoldering, light-swallowing fang in one hand and heard it hiss in the presence of the cursed wound - a light-swallowing fang charged with life, with passion, with desires and imagination and a thirst for living. She dropped the cursed metal blade, and steadied herself by placing her free hand on Yesugei’s chest.
The words came to her on their own as she placed the hissing crystal inside Yesugei’s torn wound.
“Gods of mine…”
Vasilisa fell backwards as she felt a sudden, crushing weight release itself from her shoulders. Confusion crept into her still heart as warm blood continued to leak from the hole in her chest. She heard that same voice in her head. Its tone rang with resolute determination in her mind.
And so it is done, and so it shall be.
Gods of mine…
Fire, earth, and stars above…
Accept my blood, my spirit, and my love.