Chapter 471: The Missing Figure

This conversation was not going the way I expected, but there was something intriguing about this man with no eyes that made me want to hear him out. Mostly because he sounded calm, and when surrounded by madness, I like picking the calm road, even if I knew this one was paved with poison.

The stranger was silent, and I asked, "And when they say yes? Those you meet at other fires."

"Then we talk for a while, and then I move on." He shrugged. "It is not much of a life, but it is the one I have."

He held his hands out to the fire. He had long fingers and very clean nails. I was fairly certain he could not feel the heat, as his hands drifted too close to the flames and stayed there, even as I began to smell roasting meat.

The stranger sighed and looked off into the distance. "You are only the fourth fire this month," he said. "The others were all soldiers. They are usually a boring lot. They talk about food, and home, and cry at night when they think no one hears. I can practically recite what a soldier will say when I meet one."

He turned away from the sky and looked at me with those empty eyes. "I hope you would be different."

My eyes tightened, and I forced myself to relax. "So what exactly do you do that necessitates these trips?" I asked.

"Nothing, anymore." He shrugged. "I used to have a trade. I was a wheelwright, back before. I made wheels. Good wheels. The kind that last. People came from everywhere to buy my wheels." He smiled as if at a joke only he was aware of.

"Oops," he said, and brought his hands back from the fire. "Forgot I left those there for a minute. No wonder I was feeling a bit hungry." He flexed his burnt fingers, the bone showing through, and blew on them, and they rapidly healed. "There, good as new." He glanced at me. "One needs to learn to take care of oneself on the road."

"Yes, the road can be a dangerous place." I agreed, and returned the conversation to where he had left it, because I was becoming more curious. "You used to make... wheels. Why did you stop?"

"Oh..." He scratched his head. "Well, the war happened. And eventually, it gets to everyone, even me. You either lose your trade, or you lose your village, or you lose both... I lost both. The workshop is gone, the village is gone, everyone I made wheels for is gone. There is no one left to need a wheel."

"Losing a life’s work can be hard. I am sorry."

He looked at me strangely. Perhaps he had not expected that sort of consideration from me. "So am I," he said slowly, and nodded at me. "But there is no point in being sorry forever. You have to do something with the time you have left."

"Without your trade, what do you do?"

"I walk," he smiled. "I look at things. I remember them. That is what I do now, and occasionally, I am called to bring balance back to reality... Like all good wheel-makers, I had a great sense of balance, and I know when something is out of place."

He pointed at me. "Like you."

The fire cracked between us, and I placed a new piece of wood on the flames as I asked, "What about me?"

The stranger shrugged. "You are out of place."

He pulled out a familiar painting, the one Ruggah had shown me, with the rest of the warband on it. "You see here..." He pointed at Ruggah in the painting, and then, out of thin air, he brought out the bleeding head of the Beastkin.

Ruggah had not been decapitated cleanly. It looked as if his head had been twisted off, and his one eye was open and filled with rage.

"...This is him, is it not? I get so confused with the faces of mortals, as you can imagine." He gestured towards his empty eyes.

I looked, and I made myself look properly, with Eldritch Perception, because there was still one hope left and I wanted it taken from me by evidence rather than by a stranger’s word. It was Ruggah. It had been Ruggah four days ago.

"There," he said. "That is better. You were asking about the wheel-making, and I was boring you, and now we have something to look at." He set Ruggah’s head on the ground beside the fire, gently. "I do not like to do this part, you understand. I am not cruel. I was simply called to bring back the balance."

He reached into the air again, and his hand came back with most of the top half of Ogg’s body.

The Troll had been killed badly. There was no other word for it. His skull was still in one piece, but the face had been crushed from below, the jaw was gone, and his tongue was hanging out of what was left of the mouth. His arm, the one he still had, was attached to a piece of shoulder, and the fingers were curled, and there was a handful of feathers in them. Everything below his chest was gone.

I looked at his curled fingers. He had been fighting crows when he died.

The stranger set him down beside Ruggah, and then reached into the air again.

∞

Thurrim came next. His beard had been braided, and the braid was still there, but the rest of him was not. The head had been severed at the shoulders, cleanly. His eyes were open, and I could see a sneer on his lips. The dwarf had not died a coward.

He set the head down.

Then Ines. Then Tam. Then Coin. Then the Shades, all three of them, which was strange because their heads did not bleed the way the others did. They just hung there in the air for a moment, dark and still, and then he set them down too.

I did not say anything, mostly because there was a dull ringing inside my head. Inside me, I was screaming.

"I can taste your name on their lips," the stranger said. "I have been tasting it for days. They call you Elric. That is the name they use when they are afraid, and it is the name they use when they are hopeful, and it is the name they use when they are dying. They had... faith in you." He tilted his head. "But I cannot find you in the painting."

His finger moved across the board as he said it, and it passed over the bolt of lightning at the edge and did not stop.

"And the Necromancer is many things, but she is rarely wrong, and she has not steered me onto the wrong path before. At least her crows led me to you," he said. "That means you should be here." Then he glanced at my pocket, where I kept the crystal. "And it is here as well."

I looked at the heads for several seconds, and I spoke to them in my heart. There was no way I would let this stranger see my grief. Then I looked at him.

"When did you kill them?"

Again, he seemed surprised that I had asked, and maybe even a little pleased.

"Three days ago, or was it three years ago? Time is different for me." He shrugged. "They were heading north, and were camped in a valley about two days’ walk from here. I came to the fire, and I asked if I could join them, and they said yes."