of Fruitless Moons.

[sunbreaker_]

Dusk depicts Sestaern a somber mother, hand beneath swollen belly, eyes combing the horizon a final time before closing to save the light. And in years to come, dusk will wrap around her waist and cover her ankles, dirty handprints near the knees and flour throughout, that ruffles like a sleeping cat when children run past in retreat of the coming evening.

And indeed that evening comes without foreword or announcement, but as it ought: descending first among the sunmost reaches of town, failing to darken no edifice as it strides unopposed into the heart of commerce and prosperity, and gaiety and knowledge, and life and conspiracy. Prostrate and willing yield all when the false reassurances of the dusk fade, and even the mightiest towers and peaks wrap themselves in black.

This is an evening that begets no rest.

"Arcturus Guildenstern, son of a murdered father, child of a decrepit nation, your hour has come."

Some among the dead manage not to hear him.

[odium.]

The boy was washing his hands, calloused and dirt stained, by a well when his name echoed through the town. It was enough to startle Star, who was tied to a post only some distance away. Arcturus drew the strings tight at wither wrist, securing his armbands before turning about face.

Star whinnied but a single time, dipping his head in the direction of the hailing voice that carried his master's name. The boy nodded before coming close, a hand against his companion's jaw, where whispers sought audience and hooves lay silent in understanding. He patted Star on the nape of his long neck before seeking who summoned him.

He already knew. Long before he approached the knight.

"I am here."

[sunbreaker_]

So his eyes follow the due course of an entity dead on his feet, a sluggish mask of flesh draped loosely over the man he had summoned.

"Yours is a strength yet unactualized…but strength it is."

Sieghild stands before the lad and curbs his contempt. In the grip of his suddenly outstretched hand is a delicate rope chain, the metal foreign and unmistakably precious, on which hangs a coinlike amulet no larger than a thumbnail, at once pit-black and gold as dreams, and at which wonder and dread in equal measure emerge at the forefront of the minds of uninitiated observers.

"It must be tempered—shaped. Made useful, like any instrument."

Should Arcturus assume the icon-amulet, it will hang near his navel, so long is its chain. And initially, he will feel nothing.

[odium.]

Narrowing his eyes, a hand took to the necklace's amulet that depended from Sieghild's hand. There was resplendence in its sheen and oblivion in the fleeting moments that escaped it.

He hasn't known anything of its likeness, not even in close proximity. It whispered to him, promises in the twilight, of the past and of the consummations its standard embodied. It turned in the palm of his hand and before long depended from around the boy's neck, not unlike it did from Sieghild's hand moments prior.

". . . To whatever end."

Arcturus lowered a troubled head, bearing a crown of hardship, and knelt before the Knight. For he understood that this wreath of thorns and trials would not be lifted from him—save for by his own hand.

[sunbreaker_]

Eyes predisposed to disdain fall upon the kneeling charge, hotter in their blue than the night's is dark, and take in his unspoken oath. Any man may kneel and serve and swear and believe, but few men drive standards through still-beating savage hearts, and fewer ride at first light to deliver a conquered kingdom, and fewer take mercy to the hilt in the name of their masters. Sieghild has seen all manners of men, and only those dead or crowned have earned his love.

"Stand, Arcturus, above these men and above this country."

It will be when the boy does stand that he first feels the pain.

"Rise with me. Rise in Avorevon."

In practiced ease, the knight's soles part with the earth. Cursed as he, so too may the boy's.

[odium.]

It first comes to him, as easy as breathing, for his feet depart the earth without a final goodbye.
　
In his anxiousness and fear, he begins to feel the turmoil undulating within him. At the behest of parting ways with the wayward path, Arcturus experiences the sensation in his most extreme of extremities. Sharp and numbing pains at the tips of his fingers, as if barbed razorwire replaced his veins. Then the heat, at first a warming of tender muscle and bone, soon to be forgotten as the agonizing realization of melting skin and boiling blood settles upon him.
　
A pain unlike anything he had ever experienced.
　
Blackness crowded the edges of his vision, as Sieghild seemingly entered some sort of tunnel, the likes of which he'd never before witnessed. Constellations bombarded the boy's brain, as a thousand storms that clapped thunder and lightning into a dark and perilous world. With every fiber of his being Arcturus fought to remain among the living, let alone among the conscious.

The further they would travel, the closer to death's door Arcturus would become. He dare not allow a murmur escape his lips, in fear it might be the final thread to undo him.

[sunbreaker_]

Something like a perverse pleasure filtered through hate marks his high features. A barely discernible biting of his lower lip lasts for but a moment as, before him, the burden of true pain wracks someone else. An image of Waltraud scolds him; ought he not feel beholden to a new bearer of his trials rather than enchanted to behold someone in such all-encompassing agony?

"Stay close. And look not on this trifling past."

Even in the birthing evening does he seem radiant, and with each moment the wood and cattle and beards of bastard-sophistry meld with the landscape until they are plains, hills, rivers without features seen from the tower windows of their king. It is a pace the boy can afford provided he abandons hope of saving.