There are numerous reasons why a child often finds themselves unable to sleep at night. The excitement that comes with the memory of the day, the unrelenting urge to resume the day’s barely concluded adventures. Sometimes, it is the fear of the requiems lurking in the corner from tales mothers tell to frighten ill-disciplined children into civility, or simply thoughts of what complex trickeries are to be had when the morning comes.

For Ezril, he found it was most often the darkness. In the waking world he found a peace in its presence, a presence that came with a silence. But sometimes it came to him in the comfort of his sleep, a darkness casting out all light and turning dreams to nightmares.

Tonight Ezril could not sleep. In the darkness he wondered at Urden’s scar. The rumors claimed that there existed those amongst the Hallowed who had the power to heal their own injuries. The same rumors claimed the stronger a Hallowed was, the less likely it was to see a scar on them. Ezril found himself wondering if Urden was simply not as strong as he seemed or if the enemy that had given him his scar had simply been that strong. He wondered if the injury had hurt as much as Hunmar’s, a man he’d known in the underbelly who had a scar running down the right side of his face making its way past his unseeing eye.

With it, Hunmar had spun a tale of his great escapade where he would be found fighting off a saber-toothed snow tiger in the icy peaks of Nidra, to the north. But even at a young age Ezril had known it to be naught more than a tale. The man had most likely gotten it from picking a fight with a brute over the wrong whore. Everyone knew what kind of man Hunmar was. But somehow, Ezril knew he would believe if Urden got his fending off a horde of mammoths.

The man certainly had the feel about him in the absence of aunt Teneri.

There remained a part of Ezril that still believed what was happening wasn’t real, a part of him that believed that when he slept he would wake up in his bed with aunt Teneri somewhere in the kitchen preparing breakfast, their goodbyes never having happened, her insinuation of not being long for the world false and imagined. But there was also a part of him that knew it was all false hope. A priest of Truth had come for him and now slept soundly a few paces away from him.

In time, the last embers of the hearth to which Ezril drew his warmth from in the cold night withered into the dull white ash of consumed sticks. It was now naught but the slow rising smoke of its death, plunging the surrounding forest into endless darkness. The night made its final submission into a silence only interrupted by the lullabies brought to life by the chirping of insects and the hooting of owls watching from the comfort of whatever tree branch from which they perched. Ezril closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. After significant strain, he slept.

I did not come easily and it was without dreams.

Sunrise saw them back on horse-back, riding at a steady canter. Ezril trying to forget the bodies of the people Urden had killed a day before, found himself—as he always did—unable to forget at his own choosing. The priest had cut them down with an ease and a speed so great that they hadn’t even had the chance to take their first swing. Despite the speed, Ezril could not help but think that Urden was capable of striking significantly faster than that. Somewhere in him he knew the carnage had been displayed in such speed for his benefit. The man had instructed he learn, and had been certain to teach. The question now was: did he learn? And even if he did, did he want to keep learning?

Teneri had asked him to learn whatever he was taught but Ezril found himself wondering if he really wanted to learn how to kill. What he’d seen was powerful, but it had also felt wrong. It had churned his stomach just to watch.

Ezril and Urden rode for a week in silence. The wind blew, weaving its way between the trees to send a cold tingle up Ezril’s spine. The journey within the forest was anything but interesting. Around every corner, grunts and groan, stamps and throttles threatened emergence with a fury. And though his mind knew the priest would bring him safely to the seminary, Ezril found himself wondering if he was required to be in one piece.

In the mornings, they ate breakfast of stale bread and a sweet water unlike anything Ezril had tasted, and he had drunk a lot of things, from the vinegar ginger ale of the underbelly, to the nice wines of the easy living people of Green Horn. But nothing with alcohol as aunt Teneri never allowed it.

At night Ezril and Urden indulged in smoked meat which the priest always seemed to extricate from one of the sacks strapped to the horse’s saddle. Dainty, he had called the creature. It was one of the few things Ezril had learned from Urden on their journey.

By the third day Ezril found a sense to return home. Back in Green Horn, he had eaten three times a day as long as he remembered to and slept under a roof and in a warm bed. With Urden, all he had was two meals. In the mornings he had stale bread and sweet water when he woke. At night, before he slept he had smoked meat which proved sinewy and battled with the teeth as if it was not designed for food. At night there were wet trees that always happened to smell like—and Ezril was compelled to believe—something had died in them, to sleep beneath. Save after meals, the only other time he was allowed water from the canteen was at midday.

But of all the discomfort of their journey, Ezril found the night temptations the worst. The priest would unsheathe his blades and drive them into the dirt, leaving only their hilts to the embrace of the darkness. Mesmerized by his curiosity of the swords, Ezril’s reserved complains of the stress of their journey would soon be forgotten as they held his attention. He fought his childish curiosity, telling himself that Urden’s friendship with Teneri would not save him if he did something foolish. After all, she had said it herself, Urden would become a different person outside the city and he had proven her right thus far. So if his control waned even slightly, there would be nothing to keep him from pulling the hilts from the dirt. It would be an act that would no doubt cost him something. If not his life, then most likely a limb. When that time comes, he would do well to inform the priest of his shared guilt in the sin for leaving the swords unattended.

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Whenever Urden rose and retrieved the blades from the dirt, Ezril often wondered if he saw a hint of disappointment in the man’s expression. Most unlikely, the only cause for such would be if Urden was looking for an excuse justified before the eyes of Truth to punish him. Everyone knew one did not simply lay their hand on a priest’s weapon.

Urden remained a fortress of silence for most of their journey and his very own presence, through silence, turn into a form of isolation for Ezril. It was to the point that Ezril found himself rarely drawn to speech. His propensity for talking waned. He found that even in the sounds of Vayla all around him, there was a deafening silence in the absence of human words.

Even Dainty seemed an accomplice in Urden’s attempt at Ezril’s silent imprisonment. The occasional snorts and brays common amongst horses seemed to elude the horse, and despite the nature of their first and only other interaction with humans, Ezril found himself looking forward to another ambush, if it would grant him the company of words. Whether he would understand the words exchanged or not was not much of a requirement at this point.

Before Urden, Ezril had never once set eyes upon a priest. He had heard stories, though. Stories that claimed that the seminary was the foundation on which the kingdom of Alduin owed its expansion. He’d learned well enough at a tender age that priests were to be feared. Their stories and rumors spun words into tales of gore and carnage… but never glories. Tales of priests never had space for glories.

Now, Ezril had a memory from which his fear could feed, and grow, and fester, should it choose to. Somehow, he had always thought his childish fear for priests would lighten when his travels with Urden began, they had definitely been nowhere to be found when Urden had been laughing and talking with Teneri. Ezril thought a familiarity with being around Urden, like most other things he feared, would ease the fear away. He had been wrong. If anything, it proved a greater life source, fueling his fear until he often had to remind himself that he needed to breathe to live.

At the beginning of their second week together Urden finally spoke again. It was a sentence Ezril had not heard much but remembered all too well. The man scratched at his scar from his position behind Ezril, an action he remembered the priest engage in once before at the start of their journey, and never again. He knew with a child’s certainty the repercussions of the action. Dainty slowed from its gallop to a canter, to a simple trot, and finally, it stopped, and Urden dismounted.

“Do endeavor to learn something.”

The words were spoken in the same affected calm Urden spoke with on the few occasions when he chose to use words. Even calmer than that of the sisters when they required a child learn the names of all the venerated Hallowed already committed back to Vayla.

The trees rustled and the cool breeze moved, raising the dead leaves and having them flutter in the air like ghosts come to haunt the remnants of families long moved on. The wind, no doubt, crept its way on its exodus. It carried with it the cold air of the Saltin rivers to the east. Their location was just a brief stop before its final rest somewhere before the northern peaks.

There was a serenity to the forest as Urden took his place a few paces ahead of them. One blade was drawn and held out to his side in a casual stance while the other remained strapped behind him, taken from Dainty’s saddle sometime during their journey. Urden’s stance spoke nothing in a man, but from a priest it promised retribution.

Everything came to a sudden stillness. The only sign of life was in the whistling of the breeze lumbering across. The insects ceased their chirping. The birds brought their songs to an end, like the finality of a dirge beyond the comprehension of man, perhaps sung in memory of a legendary bird, Ezril would never know. Even Dainty seemed an audience, waiting in anticipation of what events would take place.

The calm that settled upon the forest was unmistakable. It was a calm before a storm.

The ground began a tremor beneath them, increasing ever so slightly, but a constant increase nonetheless. Soon proving itself contagious, the air around Ezril took it upon itself to herald whatever had chosen to shake the ground. A tremor rose to a shake. A shake to a quake. And with it, a stomping.

A Titan boar emerged from within the trees. It raged from wherever it had begun its solitary stampede. It was twice the height of the average man at its shoulder. With a power to maul down any tree in its path, it bounded towards them. With the calm that had washed over them just moments ago gone like the sun during a blizzard, Ezril caught the faintest of reaction from the priest: a firmer grip on the hilt of his weapon.

Barely thirty feet away, the beast lowered its head. Tusks large enough to gouge a tree out bent at the ready. At twenty feet, the priest lowered his stance. His body told of a strength beyond its size…

At ten feet he waited undaunted.

At five feet the Titan boar was a charging monster.

At the last moment, Urden pivoted on his left foot. He placed the other against the dirt to his side and spun himself from the beast’s path. The subtle cape of his faded cassock, extended from the collars to delicately cover his shoulders, swirled about them in its own display of grace.

Urden’s action in itself was void of grace. It displayed the absentminded simplicity of a man who cared nothing for the presentation of his actions. It was of a man who struck only for the sake of the kill. Yet, in such simplicity, it was a display Ezril could not hope to attain. The priest’s white hair, more grey than it was white, flayed in the air by its ends, revealing the once covered nape of his neck.

There was a howl so loud it could have been mistaken for a roar as blade met with flesh, tearing, digging, and drawing blood in one fluid motion. The sound of the roar was odd as Titan boars were not known to roar.

The beast veered to the side and drove into a tree. Its weight, amassed of muscles, bent wood, and it tore through the tree, felling it. The creature staggered once, then dropped on its side. It gave an attempt to rise, failed, and fell again.

Its labored breath gave way to the claws of death and a final puff of hot air rose from its flared nostril, blending into the forest air. Ezril knew the moment the beast died. With its death, he released the breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

As much as his mind had been in doubt at the sight of the death of another human being, Ezril knew that if this was the power the seminary would give him, he wanted it.

Titans, after all, were never beasts to be taken likely.