“It’s called fear boy, keep it, it may just save your life.”

  -Heard by Michal before meeting Death.

  Telleb unloaded and reloaded his revolver. There was something soothing about carrying a gun—a revolver in particular. He looked up with one eye to find several other men oiling their own weapons. Tonight would be a lively one.

  It had been five weeks since Marshe had fallen by the gods. In the chaos that followed, looters swarmed like vultures, each scrambling to claim whatever they could pry from the bones of the fallen city.

  Telleb hadn’t aligned himself with any faction—not here, anyway. But he understood the frenzy. Disaster always drew the same first responders: merchants. And wherever merchants went, crime was never far behind.

  Telleb smiled. He wasn’t here for the same reason as the others. Every man was here for either work, money, or women. Yes women were prevalent in broken cities.

  Whether they were generous or degenerates, men came from nearby cities, trying to claim a girl who’d been broken. Men who were previously ignored would be considered for offering something the women had lost.

  Stability.

  Telleb stood up, using his cane. It was getting better, but even walking was much harder than it had been. He started walking around the few buildings left in the city. He’d suffered from freeze-pool a few months ago, a condition that limited his mana. That was when he encountered a nightmare on the train from Nurks.

  He looked down a passing alleyway to see the hole in the normalcy. A massive section of the city was covered in nothing but rubble.

  The city council had been putting most of their effort in the people. And while construction was under way, they had too few workers to make much of a dent.

  Telleb looked up, putting a hand to his revolver when he heard something roll down the road ahead. A carriage with seven children, three women, and a single man was being pulled by two horses.

  The man wasn’t handsome, but wasn’t ugly either. Judging by the carriage however, he was fairly well off. The women and children appeared to be wearing rags. Likely refugees being taken in by a wealthy man from another city.

  Telleb shook his head to the greed of the man. Polygamy was legal in Navahownum, and to Telleb’s understanding, most people sought for it.

  But three? He questioned, who would need three wives? Or want three wives? Telleb shook his head. He was Helladorian, his people believed in monogamy. But he was influenced by more than just his people’s beliefs. One woman seems excessive enough.

  Several blocks down his path, Telleb found his target—a hidden alleyway. It had been blocked by small stones stacked together to make a makeshift wall. As if that could hold anything up.

  He smiled, then kicked the center of the “wall” causing it to collapse. It hurt his foot, fragility was yet another side effect of freeze-pool.

  He heard the slight sounds of children wincing, and smiled. He raised his revolver at the group, only for a girl to scream.

  “Please!” she shouted, “we don’t want any trouble.”

  Telleb looked at the girl. She had a bandage around her eyes, probably blindness. Telleb himself only had one working eye. That fact inhibited his aim, but he was close enough to hit his target.

  It didn’t take much strength to pull a trigger.

  The young boy Telleb had spotted yesterday looked back, his eyes alight with a fierce fire that mirrored the setting sun behind Telleb. A painful, but not life-threatening, hole marred his thigh.

  The boy looked to be in his early teens, but gave off the kind of confidence that kept people away. Perfect, Telleb thought.

  “You there, boy,” Telleb said, unable to hide his accent. “You want a job?”

  The boy hesitated, then spit at Telleb’s feet.

  “I ain’t working for a degenerate like you,” the boy responded with the crisp of his own western accent.

  Telleb smiled, “you won’t be working for me. You’ll be working for the progress of the world.”

  Green moved with spring in his step, not from excitement, but from the arts pulsing in his veins. While painful, they did liberate him, they made him feel alive somehow.

  He carried a large stone on his shoulders, and set it on a cart.

  “Thank you,” a man said, “we’ve been smooth sailing since you started helping. Gotta say though, you don’t look half as strong as you are. Guess that’s what you’d expect from an Elf.”

  Green nodded, they had made quite a bit of progress in the past couple days. With the arts, Green could easily increase his strength by three times his original. The part about the Elf though, bothered Green.

  He had kept his hair longer to conceal his ears, now that it had been cut short however—well, the stares never stopped. Of course having a blind fold on didn’t help.

  People questioned how he could see, but they wouldn’t understand if he explained it to them. How could one explain the spiritual realm to someone who had never seen it? It was like explaining to a born blind man what it was like to see.

  With his glasses destroyed in the event several weeks back, Green had no choice but to use an old cloth.

  Green didn’t blame the stares however. Elves were rare, and to see one doing simple cleanup looked strange to say the least.

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  Green squatted down, and hefted another stone. This one was much larger, then the last. He drew a few stares, but after three days of working, it had become more or less expected of him.

  He didn't flaunt his strength for attention, he did it to send a message. That along with the posters at the hunters guild told a story of a capable Elf looking for work. Hopefully that would get him separate work in Orlar.

  Green set the stone down, then went for another. With all their money gone from hospital bills, Green and Mark helped with cleanup. Grace got work as a scribe, and Carrie had actually landed a position among the hospital staff as a nurse.

  Along with most of the city, the train station had been destroyed. Making a train ticket impossible for the time being. That was actually where Green and Mark worked now.

  Trains carried supplies, supplies a mostly destroyed city would need. Though merchants had come with horses and buggies. They couldn’t carry enough to feed the remaining population.

  “Green!” Someone shouted.

  Green looked over to find Mark waving over.

  “What do you need?” Green asked, making his way over.

  “Do you know what this is?” Mark asked.

  “What what is?”

  Mark gestured to the ground where writing had been etched into it.

  “Shore malet call?” Mark read. “Do you have any idea what it means?”

  Green stared down at the words, incredulous. Mark's pronunciations were wrong, but the meaning was lost. “Shor mellet cal” or, “we’ll be watching.” It was the Paipite’s language.

  “We’re leaving tonight,” Green said.

  “What?” Mark asked.

  “Get as much done as you can now, we’re not coming back.”

  Green turned back to his work.

  “Wait, why are we leaving?” Mark asked, “what did it say?”

  “I thought they had left,” Green replied, “I thought since my death was practically assured, they’d leave. But they stayed.”

  “Who stayed?”

  “The Paipite’s, I should have known they wouldn’t leave. But considering their numbers I thought… doesn’t matter. We’re leaving tonight. When we’re done, get my sister, I’ll get Carrie.”

  Mark opened his mouth to speak, paused, then nodded.

  That night, Green packed everything in his bag, strapped on his guns, then walked out the tent. Mark came out with Grace a few minutes later with an enormous backpack strapped onto him.

  Green raised an eyebrow. Where did he get that? Green thought. The thing had to have dozens of pockets. The bag looked to be made of leather, but it seemed to be stranded by whatever was in there.

  “Wait!” Carrie shouted in a whisper, running out of the tent the three had shared.

  Mark set down the bag and opened it to reveal clothing stuffed in. Carrie herself ran out the tent with a light red bundle in her arms. When she noticed Green, she quickly hid the bundle to her side, then stuffed it in the bag.

  Green shook his head, what’s with women and clothes? He asked himself, and started walking. His own bag was small and was made to carry ammunition and food stuffs.

  Living as a bounty hunter meant one needed to carry as little as possible, including clothing. I thought those two understood that, Green thought.

  It didn’t bother him, not really. Who was he to tell them what they could and couldn’t bring, they would be the one carrying it.

  An hour of walking later and Green’s ears started twitching every time Mark and Grace’s shoes skid against the ground. He ignored it for some time, taking a breath.

  “Green, can we stop?” Carrie asked,

  Green looked behind him to find Carrie with hands over her ears. She glanced back at Mark and Grace. As humans who had just worked a full day with no sleep, exhaustion was imminent in their eyes.

  Green and Carrie, of course, were fine. Elves could typically stay awake for a few days before needing sleep.

  Green sighed, “we’ll stop here tonight.”

  Mark and Grace immediately let out a heavy sigh, and plopped to the ground. Green and Carrie turned to them, then looked at each other.

  “I’ll stay up,” Green said, “get some sleep.”

  Green prepared for Carrie to argue, but she just nodded, then accepted the bed roll from Mark's bag, and laid down flat.

  It wasn’t long before they passed out. Green sighed again, then looked up. He dropped his weight, then jumped.

  He soared a good fifteen feet and kept the momentum before he spotted what he wanted. He increased his weight landing right next to the water of a river, then bent down to drink.

  The cool water slipped down his throat, refreshing his spirit some, not that refreshing it would do much.

  “Not that bad huh?” a voice said.

  Green jumped, kicking his feet back and drawing his pulx pistol. No one was there.

  “Over here,” the voice said again.

  Green looked up to find a young boy sitting on top of a branch. The boy looked to be ten years old. His eyes were a vibrant blue, and his hair a clean blond. He wasn’t pretty per say, but he was conventionally attractive in a feminine way.

  Green looked at the boy, hesitating.

  “Relax,” the boy said, “I’m not going to kill you. At least so long as you don’t provoke me.”

  He smiled, hopping down from the tree branch and landing with practised ease. Though he was on the other side of the river, something told Green not to underestimate him.

  “Who are you?” Green asked.

  “Straight to questioning huh?” the boy said.

  Green scowled.

  “Doing that’ll give you wrinkles,” the boy argued.

  The boy reached down and scooped water into a bucket that previously wasn’t in his hand. He hefted the bucket, letting it hang in front of him with both hands gripping the bottom. He looked up at Green, then smiled.

  “The dungeon groans, Irira,” he said.

  Green paused, “where did you hear that name?”

  “It's yours is it not? Though I suppose you go by a few names. Many not even you’ve heard yet. Regardless, I would avoid the dungeon for a while. That is where you’re going right?”

  Green squinted his eyes. “How do you know where I'm going?”

  “Mm, the water gave me a heads up,” the boy replied, as if that made any sense.

  “The water?” Green asked.

  The boy smiled, “neet toy you have here.”

  He held up Green’s pulx pistol, and in the next instant Green felt his hands grip empty air.

  Green increased his speed and dexterity. He didn’t know who or what this boy was, but he was dangerous. He took out his one-handed shot gun and fired in the blink of an eye. The pellets tore through the air, but the spot where the boy had been was empty.

  Green spun, senses screaming, but there was no physical sign of movement. The boy was simply… gone.

  “A bit aggressive, aren’t we?” the voice floated, seemingly from the very surface of the river.

  Green’s gaze dropped. The boy was now standing, ankle-deep, in the rushing current, utterly still. Not just still, but somehow part of the water itself, the ripples appearing to flow through him rather than around him. He still held Green’s pulx pistol, twirling it casually.

  The bucket he had previously had was gone as fast as it had appeared.

  “I was just enjoying a drink,” the boy said, nodding to the river. “You really should pay more attention to your surroundings. They talk, you know.”

  He dipped his free hand into the water, and Green watched as tiny, incandescent wisps of light, like miniature glowing fish, swarmed around his fingers before dissipating.

  “They tell me all sorts of things,” the boy continued, his voice softer, almost a murmur, yet it resonated in Green's skull. “Like who you are, what you are, and what you hope to gain. And I thought you should know that you’ll fail.” He turned his head to look upstream. “It’s not good, the energy is festering there. All that sorrow… it's loud.”

  Green’s grip tightened on his shotgun. "What are you?" Green asked.

  The boy smiled, a wide, unsettling grin. “Just a friend of the river.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To leave a message, though I don’t agree, you are a part of his plan. So I’ll leave you with this: Rock is warry, leave the fairy. Return to your past and break the promise of one that would last. Forgive the creator and become all the greater. Become devastation, and lead with the knight of abominations. Fight where you can not find breath. There you will find peace, acquaintance of death.”

  Then with a graceful, almost liquid movement, he flicked the pulx pistol into the air. It arced towards Green, landing perfectly in his outstretched hand.

  But the moment Green’s fingers closed around it, a wave of sickening cold washed over him, and a thousand whispered, fleeting thoughts seemed to rush into his mind before receding just as quickly.

  Green stood there stunted for an extended period of time. When he shook it off however, he found the boy to be gone, the river flowing innocently.