Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around

Are you a devil still?

There is not enough shape in her voice to name the words as question or accusation, but there was more than enough to make the red stallion think. He had called himself the devil because he wanted nothing more than to mete out punitive Justice to those pious brutes whose arrogance had caused so much suffering and neglect. He thought the turn of phrase apt, that he should be the one that sinners fear lurking in the dark shadows of the church nave.

But was 'devil' not his nature?

What was the devil but the great adversary, he who spoke truth to power and punished the wicked even in the face of his own condemnation? What had Raymond but his mortality to separate himself from that?

He offered a dour half-smile in lieu of an answer, the shadows at the corners of his lips a no-contest plea to her accusation.

Brandishing her horn in subtle warning, the mare invited him with all the enthusiasm of a DMV clerk - which was to say, no enthusiasm at all and a resignation threatening to spill over into contempt. Raymond murmured a courteous thank you and carved out his own territory next to the corroded remains of what may once have been a badger. He had no horn with which to break the ground and a distaste bordering on revulsion at the thought of making use of his scythe like a common spade, so instead used his hoof like the pariah dogs of the desert. It worked well enough, provided the soil was yielding.

After a spate of silence, when the messy divot had begun to resemble a proper grave, Raymond glanced her way.

"I don't think I ever got your name."

The uncertainty in his voice was an affectation; he knew it, she would know it, however genuinely friendly he wanted to be. Isra had never given him her name, and had wanted to forget his. But perhaps she would see the devil differently now that the tyrannical shadow of dragon wings had passed. Perhaps amongst the silver moonlight and the echoes of the dead, she would understand that the dead were not the only ones seeking peace.

Raymond never minded silence. It was conversation that deviated from his overall norm, however readily and enthusiastically he seemed to dive into such things. The bare fact of reality is that one's own self is a very boring conversation partner, and it was relatively recent in the red stallion's life that he figured out that not vanishing could also be an acceptable option when faced with the concept of society.

Working in dutiful silence toward a common goal, however pointless the exercise seemed to him personally, proved to be a comfort. Consider it penance for the spark of fear in her eyes at their first meeting: if she wished to lay her dead to rest, then the gesture cost him nothing and earned him...

a name, it seemed.

The night concealed the ghost of a smile tugging at his soot-grey lips. It was a satisfied, victorious thing, perhaps best left hidden among such company, but satisfaction was a welcome thing to a land so long bereft of it. Taking the conclusion of her own efforts as a signal, Raymond called the pit he'd excavated sufficient and dragged the badger's remains into it with a pall-bearer's deference. It seemed small, surrounded by the earth it had called home in a way that it had never foreseen and would never appreciate, but beneath the earth it might rest now as it had in life.

Some superstitious folk see to the burial of their dead to appease the spirits, lest such forests as these teem with the souls of countless restless dead. Raymond believed in such restlessness only insofar as it manifested in the ancestral fire of a creature fighting to succeed or survive, but he appreciated the sentiment. It was kind and gentle and romantic, as he imagined Isra might have been in the absence of her private horrors.

Did all your range find an end? she asked, and Raymond's head tipped thoughtfully her way. His eyes were distant and pensive in the moonlight, but this time when he smiled it was for her to see, and it was full of something not quite spilling over into sadness.

Wistfulness, perhaps.

Regret, perhaps.

"I came too late," he replied wryly around that strange and dissatisfied smile. The thought of the regime escaping without so much as a stripe to mark the shame of their misrule filled his mouth with the taste of bitter bile, a scab ripe for the scratching. Here were abusers who had gone free, yet more proof of the fallibility of justice both mortal and divine. "I have to live with that. But while rage is good for a lot of things, it doesn't comport well with moving on."

There is a time to scream and a time to weep. One day, perhaps his rage against the delinquent king might be sated upon the lifeblood of another equally deserving, but the burning brand of justice unquenched would likely remain patiently in hand for the rest of his life. It was the least of his worries and the least of his challenges.

"They might be gone, but Denocte is not. Denocte is more important now."

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw.


and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around

Isra of the graveyard

A century went by and all the graves were filled only with dirt and the bones were gone, gone, gone


If Raymond is sword and sun, iron and will-power, she is made of all the things that he will never be. She is teardrops and rain clouds. She is the sea to his eternal rock, the clouds that shift round and round the sharp peaks of his mountains. Isra is all the heartbreak that is left after war and none of the victory.

Perhaps those are the reasons why she looks at his smile and sees only confidence, a devil easy with this darkness and the blood that has surely crusted that blade at his back. She sees only things to both envy and fear, for the darkness calls too quickly to those cracks in her soul. How easy would it be to sail the seas to her homeland and leave only dead demons behind when she left?

Could she ever learn to love feeling their blood coat her skin, to watch as the wickedness bled out from their veins in oceans of red, red, red?

Isra watches him turn away and it's so lost in her own thoughts that she's slow to turn his voice to words, slower still to understand him. And when she does she only gives him back his smile. It's a sad look on her face, dusted with tear-stains and ash. “I will always carry them.” For a moment she wonders how he cannot carry them and close his eyes and dream of tombs rising from the dirt like a hundred anthills. For a moment she forgets that his soul is not a hollow pit that takes stories to fill up an endless emptiness that has no end.

There are universes inside her, black and speckled with stars and comets and black holes.

“Perhaps their peace is my peace.” Isra whispers too late and he's already gone by the time she wonders if she's talking about the stories of the bones or her own death.

Around her the night still carries on and it's only the dead that are left to keep her company as the dawn begins to rise.