I

Benighted specters stalked the air in stillborn twilight. The man gripped his steel, both his pistol & rapier, as the breadth of eventide choked the scattered groans of the looming hour. A woman’s promising shape bared fleet inspiration from the shimmering veils of bilious mist. A gorgon moon stood watch even as it’s pale stone form fell to a gaunt sneer over nauseous umbrage. The business of the gallows and the waning law trotted in each carriage passing down the far lanes. Colossal swathes of the city, Gorgotha, were chewed in the bowels of the doldrums. What stagnation and smog did not claim, only murderous froth & violent ambitions moved in the murk that pervaded each alley and abandoned market square. Passions, misgivings, antipathies, and sweetling delusions were in that far traveled murk. Fattened, ripened, for blade or bullet.

They were to meet at dawn at the crossroads between the garden district of Illyria and the blighted slums of Salloden & Duskford street. At that cloven mound where lampposts and lifepaths leered mocking contrast Arden Harrow was set to duel for honor and a heart worth holding to. The young but weathered gentlemen, of upstart caste and smoldering alchemies, marched down the gravel of the dusky filaments where the city’s belly spilled into its heights.

“Lucilla.” He whispered her name and affirmed all pride & shame through the stark sound. “Lo, my muse.” Ceaseless chanting furrowed beneath each breath, reminding himself of the soul of the hour. “Blood for your flower. Red to bloom. Lucilla, my star.”

People passed by as gulps in the gnarled thickets of gloom. Their expressions were tucked under cloudbeds that hovered over strained soil and padded streets that hid no filth. Old Windshire wood moaned as he passed. The elegant architecture ahead – gnashing with the fens of lower castes - seemed to furl their brick & granite brows at his coming. His fingers clenched his holster while the other hand gripped a bottle, strangling thought with spirits and the imminent reflex of this day’s challenge. The dawn: inclement and bleeding frayed drops, captured by fibrous industrial nets and night fog. Sleeplessness, anxiety, and determination moved him. His own sins clutched the cold instrument of the grave as much as his passion, driving his iron to feverish spasms.

The anointed hour approached heavy in the present’s prospects, shimmering through the billows and the smog, pulling heavy on his head, wrapping his pulse to new threads of secret gravity. Here, now, the beams of the sun through the industrious mists were but mocking dreams. Silvery effulgence slid through the chutes, fills, and charnel rivers. The bloom of lampposts against dying fires and a moon who’d grown shy fed seeds of delirium in the bed of his impatience and the spurious ecstasy of his hope.

Past the yards & spire-mounds of Gorgotha and the town’s chest where chimneys and forges spat fresh fumes into the gray sea of ether, bedimmed congresses perspired in their toil and fulfilled their tolls. Church knells droned through the slumbering glow of pre-dawn, but eventide’s sway denied their full echo. Plague chimes and shrill cries still ruled the voice of the dying night. Mournful pockets of gloom and their groaning shapes parted clouds to allow the dark’s foul creature’s to prepare a rest for their work. The resurrection men and kindred ghouls who haunted the wake of blight & murder (those spells that split the once immaculate city) sulked in the breadth of deathless dusk. The carts of the dead rolled down cobbled streets some distance. Even from the outskirts of the finer districts, the signs of eldritch imminence and the wider region’s anguish crept into courtyards.

Ill ringing & the vespers of many wakes bled into the chittering wind and the croaking of old solace. Each stone and branch bellowed with the foul chorus on those gales. Yet despite the power and strangling pressure which might suggest the coming of a great storm, no rain came, no tempest arrived. Only the tension building in the temples of citizens and in the ether lingered with the ceaseless gray. The fog grew gluttonous in its reach, the sulfurous fumes of legions of forges fed on the listless prayers of the moaning populace. All who were awake were sworn to their terrors, their sins, or else bulwarked into their misery by fears of what the day would bring.

Onward, to the steps of the Duskmont property - the third, in location, count, & luxury, estate owned by the proud line whose daughter inspired the morning’s conflict. Here, fellow insomniacs and rival shapes gained ground. Faces wove their flesh from the half-light (of aurum, ebony, and solemn silver-threads). As familiar as foreboding, these phantoms of a day that would neither perish nor arrive glissaded by lantern glow. The young domina of the House was there too, resplendent even under such sallow lighting. She was pure ivory against the grotesquely opulent furnishings of the manor’s façade.

Even being the reason why his blood simmered to boiling tempests, the man could not besmirch any aspect of her beauty and her radiance unto his heart. Yet Lucilla’s ageless iridescence did burn the pits of his being, stoking his pith with reminders of his sin & ghoulish habits. How far his soul was from hers, the breadth of the gulf between them. Alchemy surpassing his dabbling means (and carnal distractions) would be asked of him to splint that nascent abyss.

“Ah, both parties are arrived.” Croaked a manservant, in a tone of indifference coated in affability. Stepped from his charge, the man looked to be composed of as much withered sinew as sculpted thew; a living statue of a Greek hero whose demigod visage had been chipped away to a servile, haunted, mien. “Our Lady is most disturbed. This errant show keeps us all from sleep. So, let us conclude the grim business posthaste. I shall serve as secretary.”

The helot of aquiline alabaster bid the fresh visitant enter through the iron maw of the gates into the little glade in the estate yard. The umbral proportion of the rival duelist fluttered from the threshold stair to the catered reeds of the Duskmont grove. For the rich hand & nobler heart of that house’s heiress would he bleed or be bled. He killed the last swill of his bottle in a bitter deluge and tossed the feckless glass vestiges onto the street, where they hissed an acrid cadence to be shattered. Then the man, called to this private battle, chafed for the handle of his iron.

“Master Gale.” The servant bowed to the graven face of Vincent Gale. Etched in idolatry of a mortal Dionysus melded to an imperious mold, Gale emerged into the pale-silver glow of thinned moonlight. He was as much like a young Lucius Sulla in feature as he was fat of treasure like a weary Crassus. “Master Harrow.” The helot then nodded to the rival of the hour.

“Well then, Arden, our scribe enlists all legality to our quarrel.” Gale’s voice was cold, flickering through his tongue with fanciful inflections that scraped the air with forceful clarity and a stern dearth of compassion. “You’ve spoilt our night & this dawn, so let us brush away your offense. At least, you seem in good haste to meet this end. You will cease harrying us.”

“You have your arms?” Asked the servant, his voice swallowed by the lugubrious sweat.

Arden draped the wings of his coat to the side, showing splintered sheens from his sword & pistol. “You certain you wouldn’t prefer to draw swords to first blood? For fairer showmanship?” A gravelly laugh crackled through his weary cords as he studied his challenger. “This could be fatal.”

“This will clear our hearts quicker. Chase down your smog.” Vincent revealed the fang of his gun, poking from the holster at his grinning hip. The steel in his arm matched the veneer of his simper. “It must be so. Do not dither, lest you confess fear.”

Lady Lucilla averted her eyes from both warring suitors. They made themselves into blind belligerents, waiving her will for animosity that blistered over what affections they held for her. Her sapphire glint turned from Arden and all luster in the world drowned in wan miasma. Those few stars capable of piercing the veil of plague mist and industry’s billows failed to shine long in the mire. The dilapidated moon took her repose as gauzy threads wrapped about her body.

“Besides, blaggard, you have no skill by either means to surpass me in this contest. By sword or smolder-powder, you will find bane. My hand will smite the fiend in you. For the laws of our Queen and the honor of the goddess.” Gale’s head tilted to appraise the waxen glory of the Duskmont woman. Then the full furor in his eye returned to his hobbling opponent.

“Our goddess.” Sharp breaths rattled the man’s cage as Arden lunged into the light. By the reach of flambeaus and moonless sconces those inebriated clouds fleeing from him were illumed; those wisps that leached from his spirit and curled out the corners of his mouth. “For what great crime, what glorious offense, must our antipathy for one another turn lethal? I curse not Queen Caoimhe’s name. Will we not wound our Lady so by maiming each other? What shall become of her eyes & spirit to have blood and sinew given for her ‘honor’ by our ill will?”

“You dance about as a craven? I will not let you share space in her heart.” Vincent growled. Restless curses seeped from his lungs to slither in the air. The harrowed breeze returned to the courtyard, tossing gilt strands about the nobleman’s mane that showered his marbled shoulders. “This pagan aberration by which we know each other pollutes what should be simple & pure. Your presence perverts what is ordained by nature, the grace of good blood & standing law.”

A drunken eyebrow jerked up, raising a sardonic angle over Arden’s temple. “Oh, you aren’t threatened by any other aspect of my rising star? You haven’t asked our Venus, our Helen, in Lucilla if elevating this spite between us to mortal measures is to her liking.”

Gale blessed his arm with a spiritual gesture, an evocation of hallowed aegis against the evil that stood before him in the shape – the mockery - of a man. “You ascend only through witchcraft. Your studies, the work you’ve bled new fortune from are forgeries, stolen from the veins of prouder lines. By devilry, more than real charm, you blind pious eyes. Your blood is a threat to all Gorgotha. Your presence stains our court-”

“Confess the truth of your reason, man. My stain, my ‘sin’, to you is the threat of my warming the good lady’s bedchamber.” Arden paced in his boots, weathered from so many excursions to pluck exotic reagents by his own mettle.

“Vile cretin! Impudent wretch! I shall bleed those words from your mouth till you confess your evil. I will sever it with steel.” Vincent’s countenance, forged by the graceful hands of all noble unions that blessed his sculpting, writhed with spouts of rancor that made molten spasms of his erstwhile composure. Shudders stole his poise, itching at the grip of his gun. “You hath hexed uncounted maidens already, despoiled them. I know it. Foul truths of you are whispered in the highest house. The same horrors are affirmed in the lowest hearths, beneath which you belong.”

“And yet, Lucilla’s noble father blessed the prospect of my hand in hers.” Arden’s steep libations on the steps to this square engorged their influence over his affect, glossing his shine with a gross confidence. “We should – and shall – have our prosperous appointment.” Yet that mercurial aplomb of his fell to scoria when his gaze met the waning fires in Lucilla’s. “That is, if it is still the Lady’s want.”

“You hexed his judgement, warlock. I know your sorcerous ways, demon. Only by mischief and impish cunning have you risen from the dirt of your birth.” Bemoaning gusts carried the shared cadence of Gale’s acrimony. Winds scratched the stone of each neighboring estate and upset the seals of recent burials upon the nearby mounds devoted to the (growing) dead. “Oh, but you shan’t smear her hand with those pauper’s paws. You shan’t crawl into nobility through her virtue.”

“None of this passion in me is drawn to her dowry! But of course, your conceit shrouds all else. Tis lust & greed with you.” Growled Arden. “You scions of old houses and degenerate lines are always so caught up in the murk of your own decadence.”

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“Silence, lout. No more filth from that tongue. We know this must be. Take count, scribe.” Tremors caved all stoic granite from the young lordling’s mask. Loathsome certainty furrowed through his sockets where sat the effigies of two hoary candles. “Unless you recant your preposterous proposition to this woman of immaculate feature & supernal moral sinew? Beg my forgiveness for this insult now, and you may get your odious presence from here.”

“Or be bound to the barrow?” Arden chuckled, but no feigned wit helped along by the potent spirits swimming in his liver obscured the sweat of pained reticence from his brow. A ghost of fear swept torrents through his husk, feeling now so shallow and naked before the eyes of Venus in Lucilla. “Mayhap we should ask our Lady. What insight will you share, our star?”

“You hath decided it already.” Lucilla sighed. The wind perished a short breath before returning to swathe her defeated words in solemn vapors to match her knell. “Regardless of my wants or misgivings, you each have burnt all else but this bridge. This brutishness is chosen by the both of you. I shan’t halt you for my sake.”

The elegance & appeal of the Duskmont heritage in Lucilla leached into the drifting brume. Stark exhales sent her spirit winnowing through her course, exorcising all vixen aspects of her form that had made fools of men who could have been fair lovers once. “I’ve a mind to cast you both aside. For you each pull upon me without hearing a word I have spoken since you discovered my fondness for the other. I am beginning to fear you only want me for warm whispers and soft skin, and that neither here shall possess the heart to listen to mine. We must hearken the sirens of our souls, even as they draw gulches between us. It ‘must be’, by the law of our beating hearts. I will not turn my face and hide in ignorance. I will see what cold truths your hatred wins this baleful morn.”

Her servant fetched a wary look for her, but Lucilla frowned in answer as she cursed the fools who sought to bleed for a competition she’d not endorsed. “Gods, the sun is dead to me already. As you two shall be by your own belligerence.”

In the moans of the breeze the echoes of her voice were buried. Acrimony hastened to blister in the duelists. Arden fastened his shivering fingers to the grip, showing his weapon to the scribe and his foe. “One shot?” He inquired with an open palm, ready to receive the ammunition prepared for their spar.

“Two.” Declared his lordly adversary with wretched fervency. Vincent loaded his first and spat a bullet of spite. “Bronze casing for the first. I’ve no round made of fetid soil fit for you, so it shall serve. Silver for the next, should you prove a true fiend.” His glance entombed Arden in guilt to justify all else.

“Please sir, show chivalry.” Groaned the helot, refusing to shiver from his vigil in the frigid breath on the breeze. “Is it agreed? To your marks then.”

“Very well.” Arden spattered a globule thick with liquor & fearful regret. He shed this spittle as impolite but necessary means of replacing the water that begged to leak from his ducts.

A brief entreaty through prayer, as sparse as the few breaths that chased its utterance, was ushered by the scribe. A shorter bow and three long strides. Then the rivals turned at their heels and faced the enmity readied for each other.

Arden’s arm lingered on Gale’s torrential glare for half a strained heartbeat. He recalled – and prophesized – what horrid affirmations would be made of his ancestry and living kin were he to prove his mettle and skewer this challenger. His heart made a martyr of itself, splayed in his chest where it ached on the rack of persecution, arraigned by his besmirched spirit. His handle wavered. Weighted as much by sin as with concern for how he might split Lucilla’s soul (and her consideration of his) by playing the callous victor. With a smoking flare his shot rang impotently, striking the trunk of a courtyard tree.

“Do not mock, warlock.” With this Vincent Gale unleashed the acrid hammer in his hand, sending the bullet with a taunt to gnaw & burrow into the ground near Arden’s sole.

“Make peace, gentlemen. Or else make this one count.” Spoke the sallow sentinel.

Ripe rounds were shuffled into their prospective chambers. In the span of a protracted sigh, Arden glanced to the sky and sang a silent vesper. Some supernal terror in the glare of the sun, now rising to its ascendant throne over the yet begrimed horizon, pierced his inner eye. Confounding obeisance to its rays, the prime sphere churned sulfur in the man’s intestines and froze all sight & sense in the rime of that dawning star. Listlessly, he fired into the welkin.

In that same distance of time, Gale lunged two paces and fired. Ignition scorched the aether as the silver-crusted shell lanced Arden’s chest. That stare which had gazed numbly into the promethean fire of heaven’s star drooped with the plunging of his body to the bed of the courtyard garden. The last flutter before his lids were sealed by that self-avenging fury fell upon Lady Duskmont. A fleet glimpse of life’s pale warmth and vital fire before the Lethean wakes of black ether pulled shut his view. Shadows cascaded over his essence while vitae watered the soil.

Lucilla leapt from the garden hedge, dreary wings flapping from her coattails enfolded the dying challenger. Her horror expunged all hue but the blush of heated emotion. Then incensed color was brushed by numbness; repainted a ghastly pallor, beyond the powdered anemia of her well-born caste. Cerulean glints in her exasperated glare absorbed the parting gloss in Arden’s gaze. She saw the veil crash upon his eye, smothering the gasping cinders in his skull.

...

“My Lady, I must restate my discomfort with this insistence.” Legions of infinitesimal ghosts fled from the helot’s hushed & hurried breaths. “Ghouls prowl this hour. The constables are overworked. Whatever words you might lay upon your… friend’s grave can surely wait till morn.”

“Mr. Tidwell,” Lucilla spoke in a whisper that was neither feeble nor denigrative, “I do not doubt your willingness & ability to assure my safety in the wake of any scavengers. I cannot trace the why of this feeling just yet, but I know that he is calling to me in the dark. I may never hear the answers, but these questions press upon me. I must speak these concerns which afflict me.”

“Speak them to the deaf, the dead? No offense, noble Domina, but he will not hear you better for lack of light-”

A forlorn wisp took form from the dew & mist of the Lady’s lungs. “Mock not this feeling that ails me so deeply already. I must make ash of my woe, even if only by giving breath to this phantom plaguing me.”

She clasped a vase of fresh flowers and the yellowed parchment of an old letter to her chest while her servant chased back the engorged dusk with his lantern. Dressed in threads of eventide herself, Lucilla’s pale mien seemed a disembodied spirit in her passing; levitating through the rows of Gorgotha’s buried mounds as a bodiless head, draped in twilight save her bare face. “Ah, Hels!” Lucilla muttered to the wind, then veered into the glow of Tidwell’s lantern. “Another aspect vexes me… do you recall that… uncanny woman? The one who came from the depth of evening as the rites perished. She had a courtesan’s affect, if not an actor’s.”

“I believe she was indeed a lady of the night. Perhaps she knew mister Harrow in life. In certain circ-”

“Perhaps.” Lucilla chastised the firmament with her stare, squinting against the drifting halos of the stars to sieve impossible answers from their vacuous crowns. “But remind me, who allowed her appointment to speak in eulogy?”

“Hmm.” Mr. Tidwell’s lip curled to a sunken scowl for a brief flash. “I don’t believe anyone allowed it. She came, spoke, and went of her own ill accord.”

“Odd.” Lucilla’s utterance died rapidly, yet her ponderance lived on past the word to pursue greater angles of disgust & confusion.

“Not so, if I might say. I need not perspire to repeat how much expense was given for the ceremony from your own estate, Domina. The Harrows have never been much loved here. Thin is their line remaining in exiled Waldengrot. Most attendants, I fear, only came out of morbid interest in the show of-”

“-That ‘sorcerer’s demise’.” The Lady bit down on her servant’s tongue. She strolled on, trespassing into wider gloom. “And yet that lawyer, Mr. Conwell, said my Arden’s estate, by his hastily scrawled Will, is to be split threefold; between my House, a certain cousin who’s ought to have never set foot outside his Den, and the liking of some woman whose name bears no recognition to any court.”

“I do not seek to maim your grief further, Lady.” Tidwell stared on into the dark, surveying grumbling thickets and chafing headstones. “But on the latter matter… Well, that could well be evidence of his, hm, misplaced faith?”

“Faithlessness in me, you mean. Do not be bashful for my sake. Yet what greater faith would he have had in this strange woman, this potential night-spouse, compared to…. To the one he died for.”

“I mean no offense, great patroness.”

“Then do not leaven my pain to something wicked, old friend. Leave me to mourn and the means I might cast off this damnable shroud.” Lucilla siphoned dread vapors from the air as their steps neared Arden’s alcove in the sepulchral village of burial fetishes. Deep into the belly of the city, this hallowed soil to honor the fallen drew her thoughts into the lures of the funereal mist from the stones & their elegies for those, among the voiceless & the slain, they heralded. “Let me say my words to him, then let us part from this ghoul-yard faster for it.”

Tidwell nodded, gulping down the slight tremors of dejection, and began to pace a guarding circle about his charge. His Lady strewed her honorary, if tormented, petals for the man inlaid beneath this burrow, while he spread salts to stave off the damned and a lantern to ward the cumbersome dark.

The longer Lucilla’s stare fixated on the headstone marking the eternal rest of one ‘Arden Harrow’, the greater the throes and lashes of fevered imagination gripped her. Eternities bristled, spawning epochs for each word she spent her breath conjuring. “Should I dare even ask for more time with you? I fear we did not know one another as intimately as suspicion now derides me as keeping to. Your thoughts were never fully shared, you kept much from me. You… refused to bleed another. I know you did not strike him for my sake; you did not wish to maim my heart by wounding him. And yet… was it a farce? A mere ruse of some stage, some play I was not privy to and yet thrown upon… like that actress of eventide… the ghost at your wake…”

“You did wound me. Scoundrel!” Lady Duskmont merged the acrid spittle of a curse with the wet font of her tears. She eschewed all longing that still throbbed in her core, hissing a private inquisition of the interred. “Not solely by your departure. Oh, you played the chivalric - yet your spite still brought you to Vincent before me. Besides, you hid whole elements and histories within you from me. What horrid secrets did you bury in the dark!?”

“Did you die for me?” She tossed the last flower to the pit wherein the stranger she once called to the cradle of her embrace and had asked to suckle on the nectar of mortal affections. With it she dampened the ground, shearing what should be a few last tears for her Arden. “No. By all that is astral and immemorial, no. I know now of other specters in your heart. Though yours ceases to beat, these shadows wander past your burial. What passage was their course for you, o lambent adventurer?”

“You died for vanity! Or else for some reason – among legions more - you refused to inform me of. When we shared our essence, warmed our horizons by the hearth, you hid so much that I can no longer tell what was rehearsed refrain and what was real.” Lucilla banished the final deluges of sorrow with the wings of her sleeve. “Selfish rogue! Oh, what was I to you? Another maiden among the rows of dalliances to pluck and wither for fleet pleasure? Just some passing warmth, a comfort in the rays of false days before you leapt into the night – where you were called?”

“She spoke to me, that stranger… But was she a thief of your heart or a consort to some conspiracy you kept from me? Her shroud was worse than your pall.” She felt those skeletal words creep back into her consciousness, that unspoken whisper reverberated in her frayed psyche. “That woman seemed a natural suitor to evenfall. What was it she said? Whether warning or words of warming, she spoke that I should see your face again in more than dreams. That your spirit would not perish with Hell’s immurement, but that I should shirk your shadow evermore. I will ask no answer from that heathen actress, nor pry more water from my soul for your grave. Speak now, Arden, or turn your forever from all my tomorrows.”

“Will you speak solely to me?” She swore she heard a turning in the depths, a gurgling moan from the casket buried at a length at least twice the breadth of her own body. The plagues of want and fearful perception transpired in the width of the silk of bilious harvestmen. Those spectral weavers threaded her thoughts into a net to catch her despair and snare her hopes for a brighter morrow. From the fibers Lucilla’s soul faced the fangs of phantom conceit, churning impossible sounds from the matter behind her ears and inventing sounds that could not be sourced from where they seemed to call. “If not now, keep your shade from me evermore.”

Only the autumn wind filled her inquiry, billowing in the emptiness after her mourning ritual. The evening begat pale sermons of her shivering vespers, chaunting hymns by the whistle of each stubborn leaf and the mouth of every funeral mound. The creaking of chapel doors; the groans of sepulcher statues; the chirps of vermin & the hoots of strix in hunting flight; all adjoined in prowling circumference of the night gales and the howling dead they conjoined in chorus. Enfevered hallucinations conceived a woman in a bleak coat crossing through columns of buried heads before dispersing in the sigh of a dusky gale.

A set of ghoulish eyes set upon Lucilla from endarkened banks of grave shrouds. The faint gloss of preying spheres, the gauzy light of nocturnal hunters, shined contrast in the realm of dusk. One glare multiplied into manifold throngs, fastening their voiceless fangs on her rising pulse.

“Let us disembark from this black sea, my lady.” Tidwell ushered the heiress from the umbral choir, flailing his flare to frighten evil, and dared impose over manners to grasp his Lady’s arm. “No beat of this hour avails us, no mirth lies there. Only ticks and carrion-mongers haunt here.”