The last embers finally stopped glowing, leaving the last unburnt remnants of the small border village of Mori’s Respite, or just Respite to those who had lived there, illuminated by the slight slither of silver moon that dared, bravely or callously, to show itself in the cloudy night sky. Normally such a conflagration would have taken a full day to cool, but the early winter night had been particularly cruel such that ash would perhaps be mistaken for snow at a distance. A little over twelve short hours ago, as evening set, the village had been vibrant and lustrous yet soothing and tranquil in its people. Now all that remained was the near-skeletal framework of a few half-charred buildings amidst the ash. And the gallows; the so terribly full gallows.
The slim trace of a moon just beginning to wax slowly traversed the starless sky, the only sounds the creaks of the gallows as the corpses swung in the wind; that was perhaps the first sign that something unnatural was at work beyond the hideousness of mortal cruelties, no carrion birds disturbed the slow precession of the nooses’ occupants.
Slate grey eyes watched from the forest, apparently content to watch forever as they waited for even a trace or glimmer of life and tragically finding none. As the sun slowly crept up past the horizon, lighting up first the warming ochre, orange and yellows of autumnal canopy and then blackened timber, pale, grey ash and cracked, baked earth, dawn descended upon the village.
Normally people would be about their daily business already, not the loud bustle of life in full flow, but those early risers who by habit or occupation wore dawn as a cloak as they did those small tasks that needed doing before the real work of the day could begin, the contrast was a dagger in the kidneys to that terribly calm and unseen gaze. Fortunate perhaps that it was unseen, for there were cracks in that level observation, smouldering ruins of a rage that had been hammered and bent upon the anvil of its bearer’s self-control. There would be a reckoning for this, but not today. Today was for mourning and recrimination.
Satisfied at last that Respite was unguarded in truth rather than in guise, the watcher stepped out forth from the treeline, its choice of sable attire rendering it almost a silhouette even in broad daylight as it proceeded to what was once the village square. In the ensuing hour, the dead were cut down, and the beginnings of a mass grave dug, the watcher working tirelessly well past the point where mortal muscle and endurance would have forced a break for water or sustenance, doing the work by hand and handling each body with something if not quite reverence then at least akin to it, guilt perhaps.
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He could have done it faster, arcane means would have rendered the task the trivial work of an hour, he could have gone so far as to have the dead bury themselves even, but such thoughts were anathema. This had been his failing, his fault, and the burden to care for the empty shells of what had been good friends fell to him and him alone. It was a small selfishness and he knew it. Even now, time he could ill afford to spend was being wasted, but that burden too was his alone. Until it wasn’t.
A slight cough from within one of the burned-out ruins caught his attention. Without any visible motion from its owner, a blade released itself from the bottom of the watcher’s staff, clicking and locking into place fourteen lethal inches of supernaturally sharpened steel, the weapon held guardedly in front, wicked point aimed roughly at what would be the throat of a human, ready to stab forward or block an incoming strike. Nothing could have survived the blaze of the previous night, or at least nothing fully human.
The dry cough came again; there was a faint movement in the ash and debris. Cautiously the staff was reversed, and the movement poked gently with the blunt end, a flawless ebon facsimile of a skull. Another cough and a faint groan of pain, the staff was discarded, rolling to a stop as the blade got lodged in what was probably once a fireplace, about three inches of solid stone cut clean through. Carefully the survivor was picked up, a boy just on the verge of his mid-teens, rendered invisible in the dirt by the thick layer of grey and black ash covering him. With infinite care, the watcher wiped the dry dirt and crumbling grey powder of his erstwhile home from the child’s face, revealing pink and healthy skin impossibly unmarked by the savage flames that had ravaged his home the previous evening.
“Well kid, I guess you’re coming with me.”