I burst through the castle window, dead hands clinging to me.

That moment then might have lasted forever, and it did last in my memory, stark and crisp as a waking dream even now. I remember the two moons, emerald and cerulean in the sky, dominating that great cathedral of stars. I remember the woods and fields and hills of Strekke spread out beneath the silver odlight shining from the sunless heavens, an oddly beautiful scene, startling next to the macabre darkness I’d just escaped.

Then, with a startling sense of deja vu, I beheld the river below. Its dark waters expanded in my vision as I fell. When I struck the river’s surface I hit hard and felt all the breath go out of me, knew my body would be badly bruised later. I had more to worry about than bruises then.

The wights wouldn’t let go, even when one of the skeletal creatures broke near in half from the impact of striking water at speed. There were three of them — no, four of them, as one still animate hand gripped tightly to my elbow — and they doggedly kept trying to subdue me even as we hit the mud of the riverbed.

I was blind. I’d managed to get a breath in me before going under, but it had been lost in that first moment of striking the water, driven out as surely as if an ogre’s fist had slammed into my chest. I struggled not to breath, struggled against the dead hands trying to keep me from moving. They pressed me into the mud, brown water turning the world black. I thrashed. One of those skeletal hands found the edge of my neck, scraping at skin with broken fingernails. It shifted again, managed to wrap around my throat.

I panicked. Couldn’t use my aura, couldn’t focus — I could burn it, but I had so little left after days of fighting. It could kill me.

The hand around my neck squeezed harder. In a flash of terror and rage I let my essence flare, filling the muddy water with golden-red light. The hands around me loosened, and I kicked at one armored carcass so it went tumbling along the river bed, carried off by the current. I turned, lost my sense of up and down, managed to get my fingers around the hand at my neck and tear it away. Skin came away with it, the pain like bad sunburn along my throat.

My armor — elf made — didn’t weigh me down in the water, but my natural weight did. There are times being a big man has its advantages, and times it did not.

But I was free. The dead — anything powered purely by od — don’t like the touch of pure aura, and mine is more potent than most.

I fought the urge to suck in an involuntary breath, my lungs screaming for air. All I would get was filthy river-water, but my body rebelled against the logic of my mind. Fear and need grappled in me with all the hateful violence of two wolves snarling over a diseased carcass. My vision started to blur. I grasped for something, anything, to hold onto. My hands went through liquid mud and nothing else.

I was going to die. Die on that riverbed, beneath that old castle in the middle of a haunted provincial countryside. I was weak, cold to my bones, flailing as I tumbled with the current.

Then, when I died, things would get much worse. No peaceful rest for me, not after what I’d done, what I’d failed to do.

My fingers managed to grasp something. Even in that drowning haze I instinctively tightened my grip, jerking to a stop. I nearly lost my hold. I tried to get my other hand around it — I didn’t have my axe, didn’t care just then — and slipped further. A branch, I think, some piece of gnarled, rotted driftwood. I kicked off the riverbed, managed not to get my foot trapped in the deep mud, and got both hands on the branch. I pulled, using every scrap of my failing strength.

A moment later — what felt like an eternity — I broke the surface of the water. I sucked in moonlit air, then nearly went under again as a dead hand tightened around my ankle. One of the wights had managed to keep close. I kicked, connected with a brittle skull, then kicked again. The hand wouldn’t let go. I started pulling myself along the branch instead, seeing that it connected to most of a fallen tree at the river’s edge. My arms trembling from exhaustion, strain, and that soul-deep cold of burning too much aura, I managed to reach the river, tumbling along rocks and muddy silt.

The wight came out of the water with me. It was one of the castle guards, its breastplate having acted as a dead weight keeping it at the bottom of the river with me. It climbed me even as I’d climbed the fallen tree, a dagger clutched in one dripping hand. Silver fire burned dimly in its eyes, like slivers of trapped starlight.

I didn’t have my axe. It had been lost in the river, taken by the current. I tried reaching for the dagger at my belt, but the wight pinned my arm and stabbed with its own blade. The spike of steel went into my leg, sinking through muscle. I let out a gasp of pain, muted in my breathless terror. The dead guardsman was expressionless, what remained of its flesh hugging tight to bone, a skull’s grin the mask it wore. Even still, I thought I glimpsed a sense of triumph in the dim glow of its pit eyes. Keeping hold of the tree with one hand, I pulled out my dagger and drove it up beneath the wight’s chin, ramming the curved blade into the hollow of its skull.

Stolen story; please report.

The dead don’t need brains. They don’t even need muscle or sinew, their bones knitted together by the will of the spirit, by its want of a body. In truth, only damage backed by sorcery should be able to truly hurt them. But they were once human, and they still remember things like fear and pain. The oldest of the Living Dead forget, become less like people over long ages until they become so used to their immortality they forget how to die.

The castle guard had not been reanimated long, and the spirit within still believed my dagger should kill it, that it couldn’t survive steel driven into the bottom of its skull. Its jaws widened in a silent gasp, its shining eyes seeming to expand as though in shock. It began to quiver as the spirit animating the corpse struggled to hold onto its form. They are often fragile, the undead, because it takes so much of their strength just to keep hold of a body that shouldn’t move as though alive.

I need to start carrying Banemetal, I thought. The grinning visage of a chestnut haired woman flashing through my mind. I buried the thought. No room for distractions, not now.

I pulled my dagger out and kicked at the wight. It fell away, losing its grip on me and tumbling into the water. The current carried the creature off, the weight of its armor dragging it under.

I breathed hard as I clutched at the fallen, water-rotted tree, my leg burning where the wight had stabbed me. Maybe the thing would survive, even pull itself out of the water and return to the castle. But I doubted it. The flow of the river would quickly drag the spirit out of the corpse, and eventually all the way back to Draubard. Or the sea. I didn’t have it in me to care much for its fate just then.

I glanced upstream and saw the castle not far off, looming huge and dark under the moons. I needed to be gone. Dark shapes flapped through the air, crying out in eerie voices. Gargoyles.

Injured, nearly burnt out in body and spirit, I didn’t know if I’d manage to escape before they sent riders out. I imagined it then; skeletal horses ridden by pale-eyed knights with long spears and chains, ready to drag me back to that hall with its boy-lord and his undead mother.

Where was my edge? When had I lost it? This was as bad as Vinhithe.

The implacable Headsman, terror of Recusants across the face of Urn, last of the Table. Oh, if only they could see me then.

I hate this job.

I closed my eyes, holding tight to the tree and taking as long as I dared to gather my strength. It was a warm summer night, but I shivered violently from the river and from aurechill. My wound bled into the dirty water. I would have despaired of infection if I didn’t know I was mostly immune.

My mind flashed back to the earl’s hall. The boy, seeing his father beheaded and then looking to me with hate in his young eyes. All of the fear I’d seen in him recontextualized as my mind calmed and caught up with the past hour of bodily struggle. Not fear of the undead and his mad father, but fear for them. And of me.

Another head claimed. Another enemy made. I didn’t feel truly guilty in killing the earl, just as I hadn’t felt it with the bishop or more than two score others. They were monsters. Murderers. The earl might have seemed a clown, even shown tenderness to his family, but his creatures had attacked villages in the region, even put the castle of another lesser lord to torch. He was a warlord, and one who played with occult powers even as Leonis Chancer had played with faith, neither understanding nor caring just how far that flame could spread if left unchecked. Both had acted beneath the Accord’s knowledge, hidden cancers in the tapestry of the realms.

And when had I started helping the Choir justify all of this? I wasn’t some righteous crusader. I’d never wanted that. Knighthood had meant something different to me than bloody-handed zealotry, something… Something…

What had it meant? When had I lost that thread?

A glint of moonlight on metal drew my eye. I saw, a ways down the river, an object caught in an outcrop of tangled roots. My axe.

“Bastard thing,” I muttered. “Too much to ask you get lost in the mud, isn’t it?”

The axe had no response. Despite my bitter feelings, it was just an axe. But it was also attuned to my own aura, and I couldn’t lose it unless I or someone else deliberately tried. And, if I did that, I’d may as well throw myself on a sword. Besides, I’d be without a very good weapon.

I needed to retrieve it. Cursing, I began pulling myself out of the river. When that was done I would need to get out of Strekke, tend my injuries, and then…

And then wait for another task from the Onsolain. Perhaps they would send me after the new earl of Strekke. I felt as though I’d accomplished nothing here. Less than nothing. Why am I doing this? I asked myself as I pulled myself out of the water, sodden and limping. Is it to make a difference, or save my own soul?

I didn’t know. Not then. Thinking about it so often had become a relatively new and more frequent experience. I didn’t mind fighting evil, had dedicated my life to it, but this role as Headsman, the past five years… it was assassin’s work. I was a terrible assassin. I’d fought the earl in a duel, for Onsolem’s sake.

As I pulled my axe free of the tanglewood and began limping into the woods, I heard a distant hunting horn emit a mournful call over the land. Tightening my grip on my weapon, I pushed forward into the wilderness.

I had a long road ahead of me. If I’d known then what lay at the end of it, what answers the questions and doubts burning in my mind would stumble onto, I might have let the dead have me.