Matthieu hastily signed the letter as he stepped off the train with Céline, the young girl holding his briefcase out in front of him as she rushed him with barely intelligible hissing. They stepped off together, much to the confusion of the commuters around them. He carved the last L into the paper as steam filled the air of Susa station. He asked Céline to hold down the top as he folded it into something more pocket-sized.

“Thank you,” he said, sliding the letter into his overcoat's breast pocket. Céline smiled back, holding his briefcase in both hands.

“You’re welcome,” she said, offering a hand for him to shake. He obliged her and reciprocated the oddly transactional gesture. Perhaps she had found something worthwhile in the experience, although it unnerved him to think what that might have been.

He nodded, and she waved a hand in farewell. He returned it, and they parted ways.

Matthieu waded through the crowd, significantly smaller than Porta Nuova’s, but enough for Matthieu’s poor knowledge of his whereabouts to leave him confused. He was to make a connection out of Susa onto another line further into the Alps, yet there seemed to be none that continued the journey. Susa was the final stop.

Matthieu looped around the platform, intent on asking the ticket booth for directions and praying they had answers. Susa was, by all means an established town where he otherwise would not have minded staying the night. But there was a job opening to meet by sundown, and he was running out of time.

Matthieu doubted there would be anyone to punish him, but he did not want to run the risk of finding out. After all, staying idle partway through his journey did not sit right with him in the slightest.

He approached the booth and took his place in line, tapping his foot as the train whistle blared and pierced his eardrums. He leaned and took a peek down the queue, spotting a heated bout of miscommunication between an elderly woman and the worker behind the booth. It seemed that neither the ticket seller’s voice nor the woman’s hearing could compete with the blaring whistle and sudden bustle.

Matthieu let out a silent sigh, checking his watch and rolling his shoulders forward and backward. The connection was a once-a-day affair, and the seconds seemed to be flying past faster than he would have liked.

When he had finally resorted to budgeting the cost of a room for the night, he felt a soft tap on his shoulders. Through the wisps of steam and bodies moving back and forth, the same pair of eyes seemed to pierce through it all. The girl must have been some sort of Witch.

“Are you looking for the little station?”

“The little station?”

“When train lines were first laid down here, another teensy connection was made from Susa into the valley. Only locals ever use it, so it’s hard to find.”

Once again, the young girl had pried through the strings of fate and plucked out exactly what Matthieu needed. Knowing her name and generosity, Matthieu decided to take her advice without complaint.

“Grazie.”

“Non c'è di che!”

He followed the frolicking girl through the medieval town, down quiet streets and past age-old churches, sheer faith and sturdy rock keeping them from crumbling. Matthieu did not speak much during the trip, instead giving short answers to whatever question Céline flung at him.

“Where are you from?”

“Lyon.”

“Lyon! I love it there! I don’t go as often, but I wish I had reason to. What was it like when you were growing up?”

“I imagine it isn’t all too different from what it’s like now.”

“Have you ever been to Paris?”

“Yes. I trained at the École Militaire there.”

“So you were a soldier! What was it like?”

Matthieu readjusted his grip on his suitcase as Céline twirled to face him, waiting for an answer.

“Mm. Not how the posters portray it.”

Céline frowned, “I thought soldiers who went to fight in the Crusades would be happier.”

“Promises of salvation are only fulfilled with those that die. The living must wait their turn,” Matthieu blurted, never intending to reveal such a bleak outlook to someone so cheerful. He pursed his lips, intent on not continuing, but Céline was not deterred in the slightest. She continued walking backwards, the frown lingering as she pondered.

“There seems to be a lot of hurdles to this salvation stuff. What’s so good about it?”

It was Matthieu’s turn to be confused, although he had been experiencing the lion’s share of it between the two. Only then did he realise the absence of a gold chain around her neck, something he had come to assume was a given all across the subcontinent. The absence of one around his had felt strange for the first few days after wearing it had become unbearable.

He could not put it past her to forget such things on occasion, but at the same time, Céline seemed like someone who had never worn one in the first place.

“What’s so good about salvation?” he nodded, his voice trailing. “I mean…it’s good because you go to Heaven—”

“Oh! I know that! It’s the place they talk about in mass.”

Matthieu was once again speechless. Perhaps his position as an Inquisitorial officer being in such a remote place was not a fluke. The tendrils of the Vatican truly did weaken when faced with the might of the Alps.

“You attend mass, yet you barely know what Heaven is?”

“Mass is boring. I only went because the old Inquisitor would blow his top if we didn’t.”

“Ah,” Matthieu sighed. Finally, pieces started falling into place.

And it seemed as though Céline’s tugging at the strings of fate only ever grew more egregious. Once they arrived at the ‘little station’ no more than a single platform, they boarded the same train. They saw the same scenery, passed across the same bridges and partook in the same conversation until the line ended.

Which was where they arrived at the same coach service and waited for the same coach to arrive. Their conversation continued in much the same dynamic as the topic bounced back and forth from triviality to triviality. From the mountains to the harvest to the ski resorts to the year’s vermin, their chat meandered as aimlessly as the coach while being no less pleasant.

Even if Matthieu partook little in the speaking, he enjoyed even the chance to listen to someone else speak, a rarity since his conversations with Amadea. Where he had watched the nurse take quiet enjoyment from a polite back and forth before lights out, Céline’s face seemed to light up with every new morsel of information he yielded to her.

The coach rocked to and fro as it climbed a particularly steep section of gravel road. The engine roared as the front wheels kicked stones into the rear, clawing their way over the lip of the ledge. The town came into view through Matthieu’s window, and a melancholic sense of achievement washed over him.

“That’s my stop,” he told Céline. “It’s called Melone.”

“I know,” the girl said. “I live here.”

Matthieu was hard-pressed to say he was surprised.

Nestled in a valley of rolling green pastures like a swaddled baby was the small town of Melone. Nothing more than a small collection of fifty or so charming wood and brick buildings in a fertile oasis, surrounded by bulwark mountains and divided in two by a shimmering stream. Pine trees in full autumnal swing dotted the bottom of the valley, growing more abundant as they climbed the mountainsides.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The air was fresh, and the wind carried little noise with it. All they saw of the outside world were the rolling clouds that passed over the mountaintops and the azure sky, nothing more. Nothing more was needed.

Even after the legendary Crusade to unite Europe, places so pristine, untouched, and disconnected still existed. Matthieu found solace in such a revelation, where there was a chance the absence of a cross around his neck was nothing to gawk at.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Céline said from beside him, opening her window and sticking her upper body from it. A gust of wind struck Matthieu and invaded his nose, the chill reinvigorating him with new life. He watched the girl, brimming with a satisfied smile as the wind had its way with her hair. The smile was infectious, much to Matthieu’s frustration.

The coach crawled to a halt at the town’s entrance, and the two hopped off. Celine turned to him, stretching her arms over her head. “Where to next, officier de inquisition?”

“The town hall,” Matthieu recited, “where I am to meet with the mayor before sundown. After that, I will be shown my quarters on the Church’s parish.”

“On the parish?”

The two friends exchanged glances of confusion. “Yes,” Matthieu continued. “I am to live on the parish.”

“Oh!” Céline exclaimed. “We felt bad for our last officer being holed up in that room, so we let him move into a vacant house on the edge of the village.”

She pointed in an arbitrary direction, no doubt singling out where Matthieu was to head before the day ended. As he had presumed, it seemed to be on the edge of town. Ingenious, relegating the officer to such a decentral residence under the guise of pity. Matthieu would not fall for such a trick, but if he could have a whole house instead of a room, he’d play the fool for the rest of his life.

Céline looked into the sky and searched for the sun. “But it’s already this time, and I still haven’t finished my errands.” She began to run on the spot. “The town hall’s the biggest tower for miles, you won’t miss it!”

The exercise gained speed as she waved, disappearing in a dash for the town’s entrance. Matthieu looked on until she disappeared from view, jealous of her youth and wishing he still had it in him to make a mad dash for the hall.

But at the same time, he knew mad dashes were for the battlefield and the battlefield only. A life without them was a happy one.

Matthieu had taken his time through the town, avoiding main roads and heading down side streets where the people lived their lives day-to-day on the cobblestone paths. Two men wheeling cheese onto a cart, a woman sweeping her doormat, children kicking a leather ball back and forth. They all seemed to watch him as he went by, only smiling once he gave a simple greeting in French. Midday in the harvest season: it seemed most of the population was working the fields. The town was quiet, with no one to share the streets with him.

Overgrown vines climbing iron-spoke fences, brick no doubt laid centuries ago by long-dead masons, to live out the rest of one's life in such a place did not seem all too bad, provided he survived first impressions. Village folks were vicious in that way, or so he had heard.

The mayor had treated him to a warm greeting, complete with a bottle of wine, a small wheel of cheese and a set of house keys. The greying hair, reddened nose and wrinkled eyes were indignant of life amongst the fields, the people, rather than the groomed and oiled ‘graceful’ ageing Matthieu’s former Colonel had undergone.

As he sat on his bed, examining his room in the soft oil lamp light, he wondered if his last stand had been as strategically valuable as he had been led to believe. The smile of the Colonel, the empty words that had culminated in the praise of his lord and saviour. Had it been a necessity? Or a logistical oversight?

Did it matter? Did it matter when the Pope had justified the ultimate sacrifice with life after death? To the faithful, there was nothing to sacrifice if immortality in heaven was their reward for a job well done, with the fine print lost in some obscure yet insistently promoted interpretation of the holy text.

What’s so good about salvation?

Matthieu stared at his missing arm, gone from the shoulder down. The original incision had been anything but clean, taking the doctor’s full attention and expertise to dress it sufficiently. At first, every bandage Amadea had unravelled was stained with blood. She had insisted it was expected, and the less he bled each day, the more her words carried weight. By the end, she would smile at him, politely gloating about how she had been right all along. He hadn’t minded in the slightest. She had warned him to keep it wrapped in a bandage, reapplying it bi-weekly until the final scabs gave way to scars, and he had followed her word religiously.

He sighed, ashamed that he only ever seemed to think of two things anymore. He tried not to blame himself, knowing that telling himself not to think about something would have him do the exact opposite.

There wasn’t much to think about except for the young companion he had met along his journey, and he was reluctant to let Céline invade even his thinking time.

“Quelle drôle de fille,” he muttered, flopping onto the bed and quelling the lamp.

The Inquisitor officer’s house was generous enough to have a porch with a rocking chair. In fact, the entire house was aptly generous for a single man—several bedrooms, a bathroom, a nicely furnished kitchen and a living space by the firepit. Those were the places he had seen while building the foundation of a morning routine, his original one lost to time and years in battle. There was more to explore; he could be sure of that much.

He looked up from the pages of his Italian handbook and past the porch’s wooden fencing. ‘Edge of the village’ had been an exaggeration on Céline’s part, as there was little more than a short dirt path and two fields between him and the town’s main cluster.

As Matthieu watched a pair of men work a field not too far from the front of his house, he wondered what exactly an Inquisitorial officer such as himself was to do with his time. Besides enforcing mass, there was little he could do short of walk around town with a baton and a scowl. He had heard of the Inquisition’s exploits, uncovering heretical plots and uprooting insurgencies where they stood, but this was a rural village in the western Alps, not Berlin.

He'd find something eventually, but for now, his handbook was enough.

“Salve, come stai… quanto c-costa lo…la tariffa?”

“La vostra anima.”

Matthieu jumped in his seat, turning to the all too familiar voice.

“Nobody invited you,” Matthieu scowled, rubbing his eyes. “Don’t you have school?”

“No one goes to school this time of year,” Céline replied. “Everyone’s busy with the harvest.”

“Except you, it seems,” Matthieu said, returning to his book. “You are not an inquisitor, so you must have something to do.”

“I do,” Céline admitted, climbing the stairs of the porch and squatting beside Matthieu’s chair. “But I thought I might pay you a visit. My father, the Baker, I told him all about you, and he seems keen to talk at the tavern.”

“Give him my regards, but another time,” Matthieu said, flipping the page. “I need to gather my bearings, and I’m still on duty, you know? You have no business interrupting my important work.”

Céline laughed, resting a head on her shoulder. “You know, you don’t have to be so uptight.”

Matthieu glanced at her as he flipped over another page. Céline’s eyes had dimmed ever so slightly, and her eyes seemed to be looking somewhere far in the distance as they had when they first met.

“It seems you’ve done your service to the clergy, and that’s why they put you here. The last officer had lost an eye in the reunification wars and was given the same reward. Only died recently; we buried him over there, see, in the Church cemetery.”

Céline stood, patting her skirt as she gazed into the blue sky. “The old sod was proud of himself till the day he died when we all knew it wasn’t much more than a glorified pension.” She stepped out in front of Matthieu, her eyes turning back onto him. “So if you’re not going to be proud of yourself, make the most of things while they last and join us once in a while, okay?”

Matthieu sighed, managing a curt smile. It seemed that many held the same opinion of his new job as he did. He pitied his men, only hoping they could be as blissfully unaware as his own predecessor was. “I’ll think about it,” was his conclusion.

Céline gave a smile and a nod and began to walk down the steps. She turned at his mailbox, squinted, and then pointed.

“You got mail already!”

Matthieu was equally as confused. He stood and put his book on the rocking chair before joining Céline. Indeed, there was a letter in his mailbox, the corner jutting from the slit. Tugging on it, Matthieu pulled it out and turned it over. No address, no stamp. He glanced at Céline, but it seemed she had as much of a clue as he did.

With his teeth, Matthieu tore open the envelope and, again with his teeth, carefully extracted the letter inside. After stuffing the excess into his pocket, he unfolded the paper and passed an eye through it.

Monsieur de Laval

10/10/1915

26 Rue de Glacel

42 001 Melone

Cher Monsieur Matthieu de Laval,

Comment allez-vous?

I hear you are headed for Melone. A lovely town, yet I am sorely jealous it has stolen your presence from my ward. I hope you adjust to regular life smoothly and that you may entertain others the way you entertained me.

You must use your words more; they are valuable.

The front line has not changed much, and sometimes I doubt it ever will. To see you escape it with no hope of return warms my heart immensely, and I pray you do not squander the chance God has given you. For my happiness, please find yours. You have moved on now, and may you never need to look back.

You are strong-willed, determined and sincere to a fault, and I wish I might have been there to see you live out your life and grow softer with age.

This was a short letter, but, as you know, I never have much time to myself. It seems I have been strung about by different forces all my life, and I long for one more chance to talk to you under lamplight.

Please, take my words of affection in whatever way you see fit for me. It seems as though no matter how much time God gifts me, I will never be one to seize the moment for myself. To be in the service of others always, it is ironic I ever became a nurse.

Find a young girl named Céline Allard. She must be sixteen by now. Find her and ask her of the Deathseers.

God graces us, but perhaps for the two of us, salvation lies amongst them instead.

Dio vi benedica,

Amadea Moretti

Matthieu looked up from the letter, unable to get them out of his head, the words that sounded so much like a goodbye.

“Amadea Moretti told me to find you. About the Deathseers….”

Céline was speechless.