Here all colour was drained from the world. The ground was coated in ash, the sky was in perpetual overcast. The trees resembled snakes arrested in their ascent to heaven, wavy and rigid, pointing straight up, each dead and dry and packed close together.

Without ceremony Sai severed the head from the pale man at his feet. He threw this by the strands of its' wispy white hair into a pile of others, there were seven in all, and their bodies were splayed out in the small clearing in which he stood, now wiping at his stubbled chin with the back of his hand. It was cold, it was always cold in the dead tract, and a fine mist ever fell if not an outright deluge. It made it difficult to walk, caked soot to his sandals.

“Are you okay?” Sai asked, regarding the sky with deliberation. He didn't want to look down, to lose control of his eyes again.

“I'm fine, Sai. Stop asking,” Yabona replied curt, with a little sigh.

She added her own severed head to the pile. He looked over to her, he could not help it, and she was in the armour he watched her peel off the corpse of a soldier, piece by piece, expressionless, a year ago now. That had been a grim year, it marked the last offensive, a failure like the rest.

The suit was black with green accents and lacing, and the bulk of it could not hide the contours of her body entire. Sai quickly looked away, cleared his throat.

“This will not be enough, I think,” he said.

“Mm,” Yabona intoned. Her voice was music, even this flat tone of irritation. He risked another glance down to where she knelt over the body of a pale man. A lock of her black hair had disgorged from her wide brimmed hat, stuck to her tanned cheek and just caressed her lips, she brushed this back with a paw and motion that was all grace. He dwelt on her lashes.

Ridiculous.

When this change had come he could not mark, but they were grown now, and sometime in these last five years he had lost control of himself. His mouth wouldn't obey, it would become cotton when she was around, his arms would feel like alien growths unnatural hanging at his side or across his chest or fiddling with something, anything within reach, and his eyes were the worst offenders. They would wander of their own will and had their favourite spots. Like the elegant crescent above her almond eyes.

When he next hunted, it would be alone – not for her safety, for his. He couldn't risk being so distracted. This, he knew, would not happen. If he stole away in the night, she would catch him up on the road. If he announced his intention she would ask to come along, if he insisted, she would laugh and pack them both a satchel.

“Miyo can't loose you,” she had said when he first tried to sneak away to join the hunt, to collect the bounty. Standing there so close in the moonlight outside their shared hovel, speaking in whispers. “I can't loose you.” And his heart nearly stopped.

He was still staring, he jerked his head away, pretended to be vigilant, to scan the dead stand of ghostly, twisted bamboo. He flicked the blood from his blade with too much aggression. Irritated, he was often irritated of late – he all but willed a monstrosity to come crashing through those trees, a fight calmed him, he found a pure centre there, thoughts faded – of his parents, his brother whom he still held out hope of one day seeing, of Yabona radiant and dominant somehow even over the tragedy, even through the gloom of the dead landscape. Always at the fore.

Get a hold of yourself.

“It might be enough, for a few days at least. Assuming the price of rice hasn't gone up since we've left,” she said at last, standing up, stretching. He caught her eye, and she smiled. He looked away again, sure he was blushing, sure his face betrayed him brutally. It did not. His stoic mask had only improved with age. She sighed again. “But I can see you're going to press on, aren't you?”

That's not what he had been thinking, but he nodded. Better she think that than to know the crude poem he was always constructing about the arc of her lashes, the bridge of her nose.

“There is some light left,” he said.

Hard to perceive rustling, subtle, carried just under the timbre of the wind. His thoughts dissolved, he assumed a mid-guard, and he was not nervous when he felt Yabona press her back into his. He scanned his half of the clearing, and knew that she would be doing the same.

“Do you see anything?” She asked, voice firm, steel.

“Not yet.”

There, between the dark crack of two shoots of unearthly bamboo a tall many limbed thing, briefly glimpsed. It was obscured as quickly as it had been seen.

“I've got one!”

“Pale Man?”

“No!”

“What?”

“I don't know – be ready!”

It was at the edge of the clearing now, fast. Six spider like legs, sprouting from the back of a human hung limp. It stood up right on two of these limbs, another pair grasped at the trees and tore, the remainder squeezed through the gap, grasping for Sai with human hands that were grotesquely normal on the end of those chitinous, off brown and hair spiked legs. The head hung down, bald and pale and pulsing, rocking from side to side as the creature tried to force it's way through.

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“Here it comes!”

The trees snapped with a thunderous crack and it was jerking into the clearing, fast, too fast to react proper. Sai rose his gauntlet to an incoming limb, afraid that the force of the blow would shatter his sword were he to use that, and unable to align a proper cut. It hurt, and he flew. Tumbling into ash, getting a mouthful of it and spitting, sword lost somewhere in the sodden soot, teeth now grit. He righted himself, ignored the dull throb of his forearm which supported him. Yabona had whirled, she dropped to a knee narrowly avoiding one of those spindly legs aimed at her head and in so dropping delivered a horizontal cut that severed one of the supporting legs. It did not fall. Another limb jerked down, supported it upright in an awkward looking crouch, the human body jerked from side to side. Two more limbs were bearing down on her as she brought her sword in for a thrust, the only thing she could do quick enough, and with enough force, from her crouch.

But it wouldn't be quick enough. Those limbs would rip her head from her shoulders. Time dilated. Agonizing years seared by, and with each another inch gained by those horrible hands, Yabona's face contorted in a snarl, her lips parting to let out a war cry of her own, cupping the end of her sword's hilt with her palm for greater driving force. Wide brimmed hat obscuring one of her eyes. She wouldn't be fast enough, he could see that, the tip of her blade was a fraction slower than the tips of its' fingers. He had to do something he had to he -

Howled.

Launched himself, drawing his short sword as his legs sprung him. He collided with the human body, wrapped his arms around and tried to bring it to the ground, using all his strength, all his weight. It bent but did not give, another limb had come down to create a tripod – he hoped that would give Yabona some time. He plunged the short blade savage into the belly, into the sides of the creature, which hissed and chittered but did not slow. It got a hold of him with one of those awful human hands, wrapped it around his throat and its grip was iron. It wouldn't suffocate him. It would crush his neck out right. Pain blossomed behind Sai's eyes, he could feel the tendons in his neck flex. He continued to stab. His howl was cut off, his mouth frothed. All was going dark, and then he fell.

Clutching at his throat he stood up in a stumble, coughed.

Yabona had circled, she had cut off two more limbs as he had struggled with it. She was thrusting her sword into the human head where it thrashed on the ground. Sai found his long blade and joined her, hacking in vicious overhead arcs with no art. Somewhere beyond the need to be assured the thing was dead, beyond the pure animal panic of a fight gone wrong, Sai was ashamed. He had been disarmed, and now he was hacking like a butcher – Oh the reproach that would be on Miyo's face, had the old man not changed so, had he been present for the fight and the light not yet gone from his eyes. It had been a month now, hadn't it? Since the lion turned into a house cat, since it crawled into the dark of the hovel to await death. It was a painful thought, more so than the physical pain of his throat, his arm.

The thing continued to thrash and twitch, and so they continued to cut. In the end it was a mess of a dozen oozing pieces.

Sai backed off, planted his sword into the earth and put his hands on his knees, breathing hard. He looked at her, and her chest was heaving too. She returned the smile he was unaware he wore. Despite the grim thoughts, despite the bleak look of the entire world, a fight was something always to savour.

“Close,” he rasped.

“Very.”

He stood up, flicked his sword edge skyward, and ran this through the crook of his elbow. His green and white shirt was now a deep black. It was cold against his skin, not warm. His heart still beat fast, but it was slowing, as was his breath.

“How much do one of these go for?” Yabona asked, and she was poking at some of the viscera with the tip of her sword. It twitched, and she flinched back, sword locking straight and steady.

Sai laughed, and she shot him a harsh though embarrassed look.

“A lot,” he said. “Koji's corps call them the Hanged Men, I think. There is quite a bounty on them. They killed a number of his scouts.”

“What do we even-” and she gestured at the gore.

Sai picked up the remainder of a leg, with that pale ghost hand, it hung limp and heavy in his grip.

“This will do for evidence.”

“We're done then?”

Sai rubbed at his rapidly bruising neck.

“We should leave, yes.”

**

Dead ground steadily livened. The pair were laden with their marks strung together with rope and slung over their shoulders, a bundle of improper heads, a monstrous limb slapping wet on their backs. The march would be gruelling and not without peril, a half day to reach the first vestige of safety, where the trees would righten and the ashen floor would lighten, where tufts of green grass would poke through the grey dusting and the sun would peek shyly through clouds. It was there that they might chance on the first of the wardens, those tasked by what remained of the Imperial authority to patrol and keep at bay the gnawing edges of a world changed. It was another days walk to the village, and then some hours more to the hovel they shared with their aging Master. Much of it uphill.

Sai shifted the burden slacked over his shoulder and grunted. He hoped his arm was not broken, it was tender, hurt to move. He kept this off his face, kept it away from Yabona who trudged along beside him. The dull march had now deadened any sense of peril. There had been a scare miles ago, when a distant and agonizing screech of an animal contorted into something more echoed through the eerie wood, but nothing since, nothing glimpsed or heard. He allowed his thoughts to roam, though his eyes still scanned the wood.

Miyo had not been doing well.

He had changed when the Crown General asserted his authority over what little remained sane and proper, coming into the village with a troop of hard looking men in battered armour, proclaiming himself, Koji Katori, interim ruler and protector of what loyal subjects remained – promising them victory. The small crowd gathered in the village had bowed then, and Miyo stood a moment longer, mouth agape, until Sai had pulled him down by the hem of his sleeve, the old man shook as his head pressed into the dirt. The General was imposing, his gaze could turn blood to ice, but there was something more to Miyo's reaction, something he wouldn't talk about – something that sent him back into the man he had been when Sai had first met him, minus the drink, though this no doubt was because there was none to be had, not for any reasonable price. He had ceased his instruction, would not join them in the yard for their daily practice, kept to his bed, or stared into the fire.

Sai hefted the limb of the Hanged Man. Perhaps there would be enough left over for a bottle of wine, perhaps Sai could provide at least this much comfort to the man to whom he owed so much, perhaps it would loosen his tongue. The Master had cared for them well these long years, he regarded them as his own children, though this was never broached openly, only understood implicitly – in tender gestures and soft reprimands, in entreaties, endless entreaties to take care, to be safe.

It would be Sai's turn to care-take now. He wouldn't let harm befall Miyo, or Yabona, he would provide, even the eye clouding drink if that's what the old man wanted, if that could bring some life back into him, could repair this total lack of heart. That's what he wanted most of all, even more than he wanted to see Taku again he wanted that lion back, the one who cut his way out of the capital, who disabled bandits with the blunt side of his sword during the early scramble, when the roads were choked with refugees. The man who faced down horrors without flinching and carved for them what home they now had. Hewing the logs, thatching the roof, teaching them how to cook, how to fight, how to behave. Not this craven, sunken old man who replaced that lion so recently. The Crown General had come in as a strong gust, and had blown all courage right out of Miyo. It sickened Sai. He thought of his Father, and the change that overcame him. He thought, maybe, it was in a mans nature to disappoint, that one day he would do the same. He looked at the dead landscape, the trees grey but now in more natural postures, the ground still and covered in ash and thought perhaps there was no point to it, that everything would be swallowed by this dull grey. That the old man's reaction was the proper one, a sullen surrender.

In front of his sandal a single blade of green peeked through the soot. He looked at Yabona, he looked up the hill at which they were at the foot of, and saw the dancing of leaves. He would not quit, he formed an idea, put words to it, practised and arranged them in his mind, and smiled. Yabona caught his eye, and slowly smiled herself.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

At this he did blush, a little. At her, at his own sudden appreciation for dramatics.