The last day felt special. Like a festival, except somebody stole all the color.

On his way down to the patio for the last training session with Thayne, he glimpsed the crowds of faithful dressed in all black. Robes of crisp silk design, patchwork cloaks dipped in ink, the occasional silver and black of a guardsman’s stained leather armor. All of them were here to see the Raveness off, to give here their good wishings.

Ike would spend the morning fighting in isolation. But as he strolled under the arch behind Thayne, he was in good spirits. There was even a little smile on his face.

The Grandmaster noticed while he was unhooking the greatsword from his back. “Excited for the trip? Don’t be. It won’t be easy.” He said all this with a smile of his own. The man had a certain type of humor over the suffering of others. Honor without the aesthetic. The sort that Ike wished to respect from very far away, for fear of opening his stupid mouth and ticking off the tick sized temper.

He just couldn’t help himself though. “Fair,” he said, “but I was thinking about something else.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“I’m gonna take your sword.”

He’d been playing it out in his head for the past three days. The training wouldn’t be for nothing, of that he was convinced now. The test was his own, and his own to pass. Disarming Thayne was about as likely as the gates to hell sealing themselves and rolling green fields returning, but once the idea nested itself in Ike’s head he wouldn’t let it go.

The big man smiled through the dark beard, long and greedy, with rows of staggered teeth showing like a wolfs.

“Do that… Hell. Do that and I’ll rune your shovel.”

Ike had no clue what that meant, but it sounded good, so why not?

They took up positions opposite one another. As per the usual, Thayne started, his boots clipping on the ground as he charged forward. Ike sidestepped a slash down and lifted up the bottom of the shovel to block another swing from the sword. They went blow for blow for a minute, the edge of the blade occasionally digging into the shovel's handle, or the shovel's head banging against the flat of the blade.

By now the whole affair was simply rote. Thayne was strong but he was predictable and relied too much on his weight. Ike waited until his breath became labored. Then he kicked up his own pace, stepping back and hopping about more than a frog. He stopped, leaving an opening for the sword to come biting down. Then he smacked the bottom of the hilt into the Grandmasters hands, and the sword clattered down on the stone.

“Hah! Good trick then, wonderful, wonderful…” He grabbed up the sword and sheathed it. Ike expected something more. A new lesson maybe, some sort of evidence that he’d done the right thing and proved himself. The Grandmaster just started walking out, so Ike strapped the shovel to his back and followed.

They crept through parts of the courtyard that were covered up by the tallest bushes. A narrow path of stones guided them, though Ike was certain Thayne could have done it blindfolded the way he moved. Each of his timid questions were met with silence. All there was to do was follow.

First through a lane of overgrown bushes. Then over a short wooden bridge that looked older than the blight crossing a gurgling stream that started in a pipe and ended in another. They probably used that same waterline to water all the garden.

Somehow it was pleasant. Then the road terminated in the steps to a stucco building with metal poles jutting out of the top, wires crossing the exterior walls, and then it became curiously frightening again.

Grandmasters Thaynes boots stomped up the steps and pushed open the door, beckoning for Ike to head in. He nodded on his way, hair rising on the back of his neck with the buzz in his stomach of worrisome timidity. The door slammed shut behind, followed by the flick of a switch and soft orange lights burring to life above.

Off to one side of the building was a workshop. Tools covered benches, metal dust coated the floor, there was even a large metal cylinder which looked like something that belonged in a generator or ancient machine. To the other side was even odder. A single chair, and a desk covered in box machines with dials and green and red lights.

“What is this place?” Ike heard himself ask.

The man took the shovel off Ike’s back as he was lost in ogling the equipment, eliciting a simple ‘huh?’ from the boy. He took it to the workshop, grabbed some tools and started scrawling on the head with electric fire tools.

“My own little temple away from the temple, I suppose. Take a seat.” Ike plopped himself into the seat by the equipment, pulling it a little further away to avoid whatever witchery there was. “The lady commissioned me to set up a connection with the outside world, other settlements and the like. Radios, everseen one?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s a big one.” He started up the cylinder machine and stuck the shovel in. Was this what he meant by runing? “Anyways, I had plenty of space and power left over here on the side. Figured I could use it for some good, maybe keep the old skills in shape as I listened to the radio.”

“Old skills?”

At this, he turned and smiled with the bushy grin of his. “Aye. Suppose I haven’t told you then, but I wasn’t always the Grandmaster. Spent most of my life with the Arcani warriors, cutting down demons out in the fields and saving little settlements from big bastards like the one that almost gutted you like a fish. Some of the bravest men and women in the world fight with the Arcani. I found something a bit more stable, but I’ll work metal for warriors and pilgrims passing through from time to time.”

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Ike’s eyes were glittering by the time he finished. Not only had his mentor finally said something to him that wasn’t an order or a critique, it was like being handed a piece of gold. He’d disarmed an Arcani.

Those people were basically legends to the muckrakers, occasionally cursed for never helping out the ‘little guy’, but Ike always held a little reservation of respect for them. And here he was, two feet away from one.

Then it made sense. Runes, like the symbols pressed into the weapons of the Arcani warriors and blessed by shamans for their hunt of the demons.

The machine made a clicking noise, then Thayne opened it up, pulled out the shovel and studied it back and forth. A satisfied nod was the only gesture he made before tossing it over to the near unprepared Ike.

“Go on. Your training is complete, and anyhow the ritual shouldn’t take much longer. Congratulations, Guardian Ike, and good luck to you.”

Ike nodded, mumbling his thanks as he stared at the red curves engraved to the metal. One big symbol. He recognized it loosely from Garnet's books as the symbol for mud. Fitting.

Before his feet could catch up, his body was stopped in place by the palm of a heavy hand. Thayne looked down at him, overbearing and suddenly stark in his seriousness. “Consider this warning, boy. Let any ill fortune come to the girl and I shall personally crawl through every level of hell to find your wilting corpse and twist it into a noose with which to hang your head. Your blood will whet the stones of this monastery for a thousand centuries, and I shall keep your life intact through naught but my own burning passion to see you suffer.”

“Won’t, uh, won’t happen.” Ike swallowed a lump like a fist, then met his eyes. “Nerinai is my duty, right? I’ll help her.”

“No matter what.”

“Yeah.”

“Say it.

“No matter what, absolutely.”

“Good. Then go.” Ike was already shaking, and the hard shove in the back was enough to make him nearly collapse onto his face. Thankfully his feet managed to right themselves and take control from the mind to skitter his weak little body out of the Grandmasters building and off to anywhere else.

It took a lot of deep breathing and wringing the hilt of his shovel to calm down. Ike had wanted to trust the Grandmaster, but the look in his eyes was just as rotten and demanding as that of the bosses in the fields. To him, Ike was just a tool.

Fine. He’d been a tool all his life. At least now he wanted to, for her, to keep her alive.

The sun had risen in the pale light of the sky, burning through clouds to shine down on the monastery that day. It lit up his path from the sequestered away little radio tower and to the main temple, with its streaming crowds of faithful and stalwart pillars outside a grand cathedral doorway. On his methodical and often bungled mission of picking his way through the crowd, the idea of this duty gnawed at him.

What he was doing this for bothered him. Did he accept to get away from the muckrakers? Did he do it out of a made up life debt to Nerinai? She didn’t even want him here. Thayne didn’t trust him to do what he was asked to do. Garnet thought he was an idiot.

He was a brown fleck in a black sea. Uninvited, an intruder. He stopped in the middle of the crowd with that painful thought moved from a gnaw to a thorn digging into his head.

For a few minutes he let it, stewing in a sudden pool of feeling sick with himself for trying. He belonged in the mud. His corpse was stolen away from the cold grip of death to simply be tossed back into life without any purpose or meaning, was that it? All he had to do was turn around now and spit in the face of his opportunity, it’s embrace like a rosebush. All he had to do was walk away.

The conversations of the faithful around him picked up, and he let himself listen to their words. Their hopes and worries. Everytime he moved to a different part of the crowd he heard a new piece of the puzzle. Hopes and worries. The stick of faith that everyone had in the Raveness to shut the gate to hell and fix the world. They all believed she would do something that nobody else had in six centuries, either because she said as much or just because they had no other hand of hope to lift them up. They, men and women, young and old, workers and bosses or teachers and students all dumped their needs and wants on the shoulders of one girl, the one who looked so frail and covered herself in feathers.

It seemed so unfair. To be alone, through all of that.

Eventually he found himself wandering through the temple, stepping on a trampled carpet of dyed purple and gold fur. The guardsmen around Nerinai’s altar shifted apart to let him in, and he kept going until he was hovering over the kneeling figure of the Raveness.

No words came to his lips to explain the way he was feeling. He couldn’t come up with a way to introduce his presence there, so he just knelt down next to her and bowed his head the same. Maybe seeing him follow along would be enough to let her know he cared. Obedience of the good tool.

Away from the crowds, he could hear her mumbling something. Too soft for him, but just loud enough for him to make some of it.

“...to make sure that the gate isn’t, yes…. How? I’m set on it. Do not try to-”

She cut off her mumbling as Ike gently touched her shoulder. She snapped up to him, deep purple bags under her angry squint. A blink, and it washed away, replaced by a stoic stare through him. He felt utterly naked sitting next to her and regretted ever putting his hand within twenty feet of her shoulder.

“Hello, guardian. I think the training with Thayne was successful.”

He nodded, unsure of what really to say to her now.

“And you made your choice?”

He hesitated. “Yes. So did you, I guess. Whatever choice you were just talking about with yourself.”

On the altar in front of them (really just a raised platform they knelt on) was an intricate symbol filled with little painted on symbols, with three patches of mixed up herbs and sticks on either side. Nerinai was in the process of filling one of these piles and froze when she mentioned her conversation.

He could see her biting the inside of her cheek before answering, “So we’ve both decided to die together then. What a waste.” There was a deep bitterness in her voice, but Ike couldn’t see why.

Not now. Something changed from outside of the temple to the inside, something he couldn’t put into words but felt utterly correct in his head now.

“Better than dying alone,” he said with a smirk.

Bad choice. She grabbed his arm with more force then he could ever see her summoning and sliced his palm open over the symbol. He tried to protest, but she shushed him, then let go of his arm after enough blood spilled out on the ground.

She pulled a scrap of cloth out of her cloak and offered it to him. He leaned back from it. Nerinai just rolled her eyes and grabbed his hand, wrapping the cut with her warm hands. She said nothing while she finished that and cut open her own hand, black ichor pouring out instead of blood. Whatever ritual was going on here, Ike wasn’t a very big fan of it.

He managed to summon up a question by the time she was almost finished. “What’s this for? And why’d you cut my hand open like that?”

Their eyes met as she sprinkled a red powder over the symbol. “ Shamans don’t walk.”

Then everything went black. Pitch black, blacker than black, darker than the darkest corner of the monastery and the ichor pouring out of Nerinai’s hand or the cloud that pressured Ike’s brain into doing dumb stuff. The floor disappeared. Nothing hovered in whatever space Ike began to fall through, and nobody could hear his sharp and sudden scream that rattled in his throat.