It was almost two o'clock, and for about twenty minutes the knight and the fallen had been trudging through the icy mud surrounded by rushes, reeds, cypresses, and cedars. Splashes of mud reached the edge of their greaves and Anker felt the tips of his toes freezing. Not much must have changed since the news events reported in the archives of the Library of the Society of Ethnographic Studies of Meridania, as, from time to time, it was still possible to find disturbing pendants of bones and deteriorated black cloth hanging from the low branches of the evergreens.

When Anker was beginning to feel that they were going around in circles, the ground became solid under their feet and they came to a wall of bricks disjointed and eroded by time, a few feet taller than Viryl. Assuming it was the perimeter wall of Veltagia, they began to go around it until they came across what must have once been an arched door, but of which now only the outline of some bricks on the ground covered by the snow remained.

The knight and the fallen entered the evidently abandoned village with dismay. The sloping roofs of those dilapidated shacks had mostly collapsed, and cedars and pines had grown anarchically close to the walls. The tools of farmers, blacksmiths, farriers, and carpenters lay in neglect and covered in rust, as if the inhabitants had gone to sleep with the intention of continuing their work the next day and then never woke up. The stones that paved the main street were torn up, and perennial grasses proliferated undisturbed between their cracks.

«I think whatever we were looking for, we won't find it here, Viryl,» Anker said, breaking the silence.

«Now that we're here, it doesn't cost us anything to take a closer look,» Viryl retorted, who instead seemed intrigued by that desolate spectacle.

Therefore, they continued along the main street of the village, until a horrendous vision unfolded before their eyes. After a gentle climb that curved to the left, the street ended in a hexagonal square. In the center of the square was an imposing beheaded bronze idol, and at its feet, a pile of bones and human remains covered in a shroud of snow. From the access point to the square, the profile of the statue could be seen facing the swamp, with vast crow's wings spread out in all their length.

The first thing that came to Viryl's mind and said was: «Shit, no matter how you look at it, it seems to me that the innkeeper was right. We've gotten ourselves into a fine mess.»

Anker tried to be more thoughtful and approached the pile of bones. With the tip of his boot, he gave a few taps to a skull on the edge of the pile to clear it of snow, and then gently pulled to disentangle it. The skull brought with it the cervical spine and what remained of the rib cage. A few bones of the right upper limb were missing, and those that remained were scratched as if they had been flayed. After a few moments of reflection, Anker said: «More than a mess, it's a tragedy: the dead don't talk. It's very sad that it ended like this for them, but if you live in a village of heretics, you have to expect this kind of ending.»

«Yes? So tell me, who do you think led this massacre?»

«Judging by the bones, I think the events date back years and years ago. As for who it was, I don't know: the Inquisition, the citizens of the surrounding villages. Maybe the remains are not even of the Veltagians, but of the victims of some crazy pagan ritual, then there was a reprisal and the inhabitants of this place were forced to flee.»

«You know, I think it's the second one. We're not in Ferlonia here and the Inquisitors can't do whatever they want. If they had been called in to conduct an investigation, news of their involvement would have been all over the newspapers, and then a trial would have been necessary. A trial that certainly would not have resulted in a mass execution. Besides, these are not Inquisitor methods: they don't leave corpses at the mercy of scavenger beasts in the middle of a square. As for the third hypothesis, don't you think that once the Veltagians were put to flight, whoever led the punitive expedition would then have taken care to give a decent burial to their loved ones?»

«Regardless of how things went, the result is the same. Now the only lead we have left is to question the inhabitants of the other villages to understand what happened here. And it's a problem because they didn't seem very talkative to me. Among other things, even if they did talk, at most they can tell us what happened to the Veltagians, but they won't know anything about the cult of Velthan, and our search will be back to square one.»

«Nice reasoning, but you don't realize one fundamental thing, boy. Now we know. And that's a problem. With the idea that Veltagia is isolated and has no communication with the outside world, summary justice was done here. The perpetrators exterminated an entire settlement thinking they could get away with it, but it's not something the Belladia judicial system can let slide, whether they were heretics or not. At first, I thought that the hostility of that innkeeper depended on the prejudice towards the Veltagians, and the idea that anyone who has anything to do with them brings nothing good. Now I know there's more. They can't afford for us to go and report what we've seen. They'll do their best not to let us leave this damn basin alive.»

«You're making it tragic, Viryl.» Anker downplayed it.

«I hope you're right, boy. Anyway, we're not done here yet. Do you see that building over there?» Viryl said, pointing to a two-story wooden structure with two overlapping circular rose windows on the facade that could be glimpsed between the severed neck of the statue and its wings. Anker nodded.

«It's a parish in too good condition considering that a priest hasn't set foot here for almost three centuries. It looks like it's a deconsecrated church and then dedicated to the pagan celebrations of the village. If there are any traces of the cult of Velthan left among these ruins, we'll find them in there.»

Good condition was an overstatement. The entrance door had been forced and was now frozen ajar by the rust of its hinges.

The church was lower than the external volume would suggest, because a loft must have been built between the planks of the roof and the coffered ceiling, and on the walls of the side aisles were arranged six square tapestries as tall as the entire wall and suspended by iron rings, alternating with eight narrow rectangular windows that, together with the lower rose window, provided lighting for the huge room.

The benches along the central nave were dislocated and dusty, the censers and other liturgical furnishings thrown haphazardly on the floor. Only a trilithic granite altar remained in its place, the rough surface of which was still stained with the brown blood of ancient sacrifices. The boards of the walls appeared rotten and mossy, in the places where they were not hidden by the tapestries, tattered and discolored by humidity.

These were the most interesting elements of the entire building, even though it is now difficult to discern what the artist had originally intended to represent. In clockwise order starting from the first on the left, the illustrated drapes roughly depicted the following scenes: an enormous hermaphroditic anthropomorphic bird devouring the liver of a bear while protecting naked men under its wings; the hermaphroditic anthropomorphic bird watched over a child being baptized with blood collected in a golden cup while the faithful, once again naked, glorified the unfolding of the sacrament; the anthropomorphic bird towered with outstretched wings, while eight or nine children similar to those in the previous tapestry began to take on the features of birds and devoured raw meat; the bird children had grown up and were facing a dense crowd of wild beasts; an orgy in unspeakable detail in which the hermaphroditic anthropomorphic bird participated by devouring those with whom it performed intercourse; a beaked newborn emerged from the womb of the hermaphroditic bird mother, devouring her abdominal wall.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Anker, after carefully observing the six tapestries, rubbed his eyes, as if he wanted to erase those last two scenes that had imprinted themselves on his retinas. He turned to Viryl and said disgustedly: «Listen, this filth is a bit too much for me to process. I don't know what exactly was going through these people's heads, but maybe they’re better off dead.»

«The important thing is that we have evidence now, boy. The being depicted on these tapestries and on the statue in the square looks just like the Fearkan who attacked us on Morghorou's horn.»

«Viryl, I don't think that beast had large breasts and a large penis like this one.»

«Oh, because you can make a better drawing of how birds' dicks and tits look, right?»

Anker looked at him in confusion, then replied: «Excuse me, what the hell are you talking about? Birds are not mammals. They don’t breastfeed and their genitals are very different from ours.»

«That’s right! These are allegorical representations. They probably mean the duality of the Fearkan, its fertility, its resulting sexual appetite and its ferality.»

«I’m starting to think you’re delusional, Viryl. You’re making up lies to deny to yourself that we’ve been adrift for almost a month, following a trail that leads nowhere,» Anker decreed discouraged.

«You don’t know shit! You’ve never faced a Fearkan!»

«Why, have you?» Anker retorted dejectedly, and he continued along the nave and towards the apse, ignoring anything Viryl had to say. When he reached the altar, he noticed that behind the semi-cylinder of the apse wall there was a staircase that wound towards the attic where the priestly rooms were probably located. Rather than stay with his crazy companion, Anker decided to explore that new room alone, and ventured up the creaking steps.

After walking around the semi-circle of the staircase, he entered a long attic in the shape of an isosceles triangle, flooded with light filtering from the second rose window. After being dazzled for a moment by the unexpected whiteness of the snow-laden clouds, Anker had to rub his eyes thoroughly to make sure he wasn’t imagining things.

Sitting on the edge of the circular window, with the crystals of the broken glass window at her feet, the diaphanous figure of a sweet girl was waiting for him. Anker didn’t even try to speak to her, the apparition was too surreal. Even the immaculate geometry of the room, completely bare and long, except for a queen-sized bed placed exactly in the center of it, contributed to that feeling of estrangement. Spending all that time with Viryl must have made himself go crazy as well , Anker thought.

Since Anker didn’t speak and simply looked at her in shock, it was the girl who started the conversation first: «You desperately looked for me, Anker of the Black Moon, and now here you are in my bedchamber. It’s so funny to repeat your chivalric epithet, which is so similar to my name. Maybe our clash is really destiny.»

Anker was completely knackered and was advancing with uncertain steps towards the girl. The words spoken in that voice, with such a mellifluous and melodious timbre, had passed through his brain like a knife. «How do you know my name?» Anker asked, clinging to the most inexplicable element of the verbal stimulus received.

Whatever the girl's answer would have been, Anker forced himself not to pay attention to it. Either his mind was playing tricks, or someone had poisoned him, but this had to be a hallucination. Yes, maybe it had been the beans at the inn. Even assuming that the pale and small girl, with raven hair in a bob and indigo eyes, barefoot, wrapped in that thin black silk dress with a temperature around the freezing point, with a white bandage wrapped around her left thigh, was really there, how had she gotten to perch on that rose window? By flying? Did she live there? Did she really sleep on that soggy, mold-green mattress?

«Oh, that's a secret I can’t utter, Anker. You will not leave this swamp alive, but I can never be too careful. However, I will let you discover all the secrets that are mine to share. I want to see the horror in your eyes when I devour your heart.» said the girl with a smile.

«Hey, what do you mean you will devour my heart?» asked Anker. He had failed in his purpose.

«Go back to the village you passed through on your way here. There will be someone who will want to have a chat with you.» continued the girl, ignoring his questions.

Anker turned toward the stairs for a moment and yelled in panic, «Viryl! Fuck, Viryl, move your ass and get up here right now!»

When Anker turned back to the girl, she was gone. Had she jumped down? Anker ran headlong toward the rose window, while Viryl raced up the stairs, but by the time he reached the window, the girl was gone. All he could see out of the corner of his eye was a black blur fluttering in the thicket outside the village.

«What’s the matter with you? You were talking to yourself, and then you cursed two times in the same sentence, are you sure you’re okay?» Viryl asked, his face extremely serious, despite the stupidity he had just said.

«There was a woman here! Dressed in black! She knew my name! She told me we need to go talk to someone in the village! Then she jumped down and disappeared!» Anker exclaimed, unable to fit all those concepts into a single sentence.

«Well, what are we waiting for? Let's do as she told us," Viryl replied without flinching.

«You don't think I'm crazy!?» Anker shouted, completely dazed.

«Look, whether you're crazy or not, we're done here. And anyway, from what I see, they've already set us up in a trap. At this point, let's jump in with both feet.» Viryl argued, with his usual bombproof logic. Then he headed towards the stairs and began the descent completely carefree.

*****

Along the way back, the snowfall began to intensify, although it never turned into a real blizzard. The first huts of the village were still a bend away, hidden by a clump of fir trees, when a warning sign of the disaster that was looming caught the attention of Anker and Viryl. A trail of feathered tracks, about four feet long, had been imprinted in the fresh snow.

«I think we’ve hit the jackpot,» Viryl said.

The two riders became alert, and cautiously proceeded toward the town. The houses that faced the main street had met the same miserable end as Viryl’s farmhouse: the facades of every single house, from the first to the last, had been demolished with incredible ferocity, and along the street, as far as the eye could see, lifeless, disfigured bodies lingered in pools of fresh blood that stained the snow a deep red.

Viryl quickly dismounted and ran toward the nearest victim. After trying to read his vital signs, he sadly stated, «He’s gone.»

After that first failure, Viryl tried to find a few survivors, but each time he examined a new body, he found himself giving the same grim response. On the fifth or sixth attempt, he gave up and returned to his steed. Turning to Anker, who had remained to watch the scene with his head bowed, he said, «That monster made surely did his job properly.»

They continued along the avenue following the trail of corpses and finally reached the square where the massacre took on the connotations of absolute cruelty. Every single corpse had been disembowelled and their eyes gouged out, with no regard for sex or age. Even the gruff innkeeper who had served them lunch was sprawled on the ground with his organs on display.

Only one man seemed to have been spared from that massacre. He was an old man, naked as a worm. His arms were stretched high, tied by the wrists to a rope secured to the protruding iron of what remained of the balustrade of the first floor of a building. Anker and Viryl went to his aid, and saw that he was still breathing. They cut the noose around his wrists and Anker covered him with his uniform jacket, then went through the rubble in search of a blanket or a cloth to wrap him in. While Anker was busy searching, Viryl made him slowly sip a warming potion.

When the old man began to recover from the shock, Viryl asked him the first questions. Who he was, and if he remembered how things had happened.

The man said in a broken voice, distorted by terror: «He's back... the son of Velthan has returned and has taken his revenge. We thought we were safe now, we thought we had cast the nightmare into oblivion. We believed that the devil had built his nest of death and despair far from here and we had forgotten our sin. But we were wrong… oh, how wrong we were…»