IN THE DARKMANS
Written on January 26, 2024 (♒︎︎︎)
Author's Notes: A quick birthday fic I put together to myself; full of sleep paralysis and more headcanons re: the siege of Riovanes. In much the same vein as "In Memoriam Mei." Title from "The Rogue's Delight in Praise of his Strolling Mort."
Content Warning: Implied non-con monsterfucking, but very very fade to black.
In that miserable year that moved them into long-anticipated peace and back out of it, Zalbag heard many rumors as to what had become of the escaped Wiegraf Folles. The man had flung himself into the Larner to escape his pursuers, pushed east to lend his strength to the Ebon Eye, compacted with the ancient devils of Yudora to bring himself to the sanctuary of Ordallian soil. As the snows melted from Zeakden and fed the spring floodwaters, word spread of Wiegraf seen in every port from Gleddia to Zardighas.
When the Hokuten weren’t saddled with anything more pressing, Zalbag bade them investigate. Each time, nothing came of it, and he did his best to report all those nothings to his brother with the dispassion of a man without expectations.
Dycedarg was dispassionate in turn. His expectations had never lain with Wiegraf. The wound where the assassin’s dagger had struck him was barely scabbed over before he turned his efforts almost entirely to Lesalia. Larg was of the same mind. Zalbag—insofar as he traced the occasional lead—seemed the only soul in Igros with much thought at all for the rebellion’s unhanged leader, and in Ivalice’s brief and disappointing summer without a war, he tried his utmost to silence such thoughts.
Zalbag considered, as he watched the Gallione fields turn brown and the snow cover them over, that expectations unfulfilled long enough might become as if they had never been—that just as the tracks and traces of so much animal life vanished in the wake of the storm.
He almost escaped it. Had the war that came altered its course or its timing by even a handful of days, Wiegraf would have been vanished from his concerns forever. Zalbag was no great huntsman, and he was not haunted by the hind or coeurl that escaped him. In the aftermath of Gulofavia, an upstart blacksmith’s son was mean prey.
Still, the world casts coincidences before us sometimes as though it has a respect for drama—an appreciation for fate. Five days march from the Battle of Dogoula, the Hokuten caught what they hadn’t been seeking—and had their leader not been on hand to investigate, they may well have allowed the two cloaked riders cutting west into the Yuguewood to pass uninterrupted.
Zalbag, however, was a quick shout away when the scouts found them. He was able to be consulted as to whether the men on the road were Templar as they claimed.
He was able to see him as he pulled aside the red hood of his cloak, his hair in disarray, his features hard and saturnine.
If any feeling stirred within him upon that reunion, Wiegraf’s gaze stilled it entirely, and Zalbag said nothing when the knight at his side explained they had pressing business at Riovanes.
Riovanes had not been a place for expectations either. At Riovanes, they had expected only to die. The air was thick with it that summer—the city swollen with refugees and the Romandans clustering outside, beetlelike in their black armor. The keep was packed too thick with humanity for distinctions of rank to hold. All of them heaped against one another like dead flesh already, stinking and starving under the August sun.
Zalbag had resisted his father’s prudent direction to accompany his brother into the Zelmonian capital when Romanda had first landed. He’d found himself set to die without having yet seen his eighteenth year or his first victory. The Hokuten who had accompanied him to Barrington’s lands were not much older. Wiegraf certainly wasn’t, even if he seemed older for his years of soldiering. That difference too faded. In the dark of night, all bodies became the same and all things were permissible. The smoke of powderworks blotted out the stars and covered over their sin.
And the first sin—Zalbag remembered always—had been impiety: the sharp whispered assurance that God—if he existed—owed a debt to them for the hell in which they’d been cast prematurely.
Zalbag, over the course of that summer’s growing intimacy, must have rebuffed the notion at some point. He must have denied that any guilt could lie with the divine. Exact recollections of any denials, however, escaped him.
It was with horrifying clarity instead that he recalled the night of his agreement.
“It would be better if there were no God,” he’d whispered in tones so low his mouth barely moved to shape them. “The God of this could never repay us.”
He never knew if he heard him, but he felt the force of his agreement—in glances, in speeches, in further confessions and greater sins, Wiegraf acted as a man upon whom Gods could have no claim.
Their papers were in order; their rings bore the stamp of the Holy See. The infamous Captain Folles had been transformed from so many rumors of deviltry into a soldier of Golgogrand.
“I’m sure you have seen report by now of the heretic we pursue, General.” Wiegraf was silent as his companion spoke. “I would think a man in your position would understand how ill-suited he is to detain us.”
“I offer no defense for my brother’s actions.”
“Are we free to go?”
Zalbag did not look at the elder Templar—Vormav—as he composed his answer. He cut himself off from asking many foolish questions.
“Forgive me…” he eventually said. “I had not expected to see your companion again. I’m sure you have heard tell of his last actions in Gallione.”
“We are not in Gallione, General.”
Zalbag nodded. “Nor are you headed there.”
One of the Hokuten fidgeted with his polearm as Zalbag looked to where Wiegraf stood, silent and unmoving. He was thinner than he had been when last they met—somehow even more insubstantial than that ghost he’d chased down the plains of Zeakden. As their eyes met again, Zalbag had the impression that the man was looking somewhere far beyond him.
“Templar Folles?” He spoke the first word with an emphasis. “Forgive me if I had not thought much business could have driven you back to Riovanes.”
Wiegraf blinked, and there was a flicker of something across his features—some cross between annoyance and sorrow.
“I think you do not know my companion as well as you reckon, General,” Vormav said, eyes narrowing. “And for all your reputation in the Church, you seem to poorly understand the business of Templars.”
Zalbag nodded, still not looking anywhere other than upon Wiegraf, realizing with gnawing futility that he still wanted something from this encounter—that he somehow hoped to hear the man speak.
“Forgive me again, then.” Zalbag tensed as though he might take a step towards him; he moved no more than Wiegraf spoke. “You are—of course—free to leave. Lesalia has no claims over you.”
“You are satisfied?” Vormav asked.
“You are free to leave,” Zalbag said.
There was the shuffle of feathers as Vormav’s black-plumed mount bobbed its head and turned, its rider tugging sharply at its reins. Wiegraf pulled the hood back over his head, obscuring his face from view.
“I confess I would not push through the Yugue by night,” Zalbag continued. “You’re welcome to shelter with us for the evening—it’s long after Vespers.”
Wiegraf’s bird reared and turned as Vormav’s broke out running.
“General Beoulve,” Wiegraf called out behind him as he departed. “Forgive me if I had not thought much business could have driven you to shelter with me again.”
There was a peel of laughter that carried on the air a moment—some quality of the dusk and dark warping it such that it sounded like the clatter and shriek of metal against metal.
Shelter.
It was an apt word for that second sin.
Riovanes itself had seemed no shelter, for all it managed to keep Romandan blades from their bones. In those last days, the fineries of the innermost keep seemed ill comfort to the Grand Duke himself, all those khamjawork baubles and gold-threaded tapestries serving only to adorn a presumed sepulchre.
Zalbag had never liked Barrington—and the man made little secret as to how he felt as regarded General Beoulve’s decision to send only a secondborn, untested son to the Western front. Still, he recalled thinking that the man’s position warranted some pity. He had inherited his title but a few years prior and seemed condemned to die with it and with Fovoham already.
The castle—to Barrington and to all the Gallione youth trapped by his side—was shelter without sanctuary: a paper barrier set between them and the thousand deaths inexorably rushing towards them.
Wiegraf—in the stale air of those starless nights—was a bulwark more substantial.
They were not the only two to fall thus. So many whispers and groans in the dark attested. Zalbag, come to Riovanes untried in more ways than one, found himself quick to rise when his courage was tested—quick to fall when his chastity was. He recanted his half-mouthed blasphemies the moment they were off his lips, but he made no effort to stop what other sins replaced them.
The rough stubble of a half grown beard against his mouth, the ache of his rib and hip bones angling against the body atop them, the hot ache of his legs locked against the swell of a thigh—none of these instants persisted outside of the dark, flying from the two of them like a dream faded to day. They did not acknowledge what happened in the midnight hours of their desperation, regarding one another with almost the distance their respective spheres demanded.
As the siege extended into those first days of autumn, Zalbag was ready to die in the midst of those sins—daring the God to whom he’d been pledged to prove himself real by condemning what only Gods could see.
The encounter rankled Zalbag, and he was ashamed of it in due turn. His father’s bosom companion crossing blades with him, his father’s bastards given over to heresy—and Zalbag’s evening was haunted by the likes of Wiegraf Folles.
Coming down the road from Mount Langria, he did much as they had as Riovanes and tried to reduce all of his memories of and expectations about the man back down to nothing. The rain, when it arrived, was gentle, drumming a steady rhythm on the roof of his tent. It kept the noise of the world—of men injured, drunk or gossiping—from reaching him as readily as it otherwise might. In private prayer and at rest, he felt very distant from the rest of the world in which he moved.
The disquiet he suffered now was the disquiet he ought have suffered a year and a half prior—back when he had tilted towards Zeakden without hesitating, back when he surely hadn’t stayed his hand for sentiment. He recalled then how little he had thought about just who the leader of the Death Corps—who had harried his troops, wounded his brother, and assaulted his house—was.
He’d thought very little about many particulars back then.
The bellow of men laughing outside penetrated the sound of rainfall, and Zalbag felt himself drifting. He remembered the scent of magic and gunsmoke and the weight of another body against his. He remembered how he’d moved only when he was sure he couldn’t make out the vault of the ceiling above them—when everything was blackness and nothing could be seen. He remembered the acrid taste of each initial kiss—their lips cracked, their skin dry—how he had imagined them already half made corpses. He had wondered which of them would die before the other sometimes, wondered if Wiegraf might touch his body once by day—if only to see it brought to a lime pit or fire.
He had wondered, if night were cast off, what might be revealed about his lover—if he remained the impetuous, plain born youth of the daylight hours or if there would be some transmutation. There were all manner of tales of brides and beasts and gods—of admonitions to never ask your bedfellow their name or spy upon their face by moonlight.
Zalbag already drifting, remembered all the morbid forms fancy took when starvation turned their blood sluggish. He was drifting—in the dreams of the present and the recollections of the past—and he did not know from whence the shape came when it appeared before him.
He did not question it—even as the first thrill of terror ran through him, even as he sensed that intruder he could not rise to meet.
Its horns and arms coiled into the darkness, spiraling until they were indistinguishable from the black around them.
Zalbag had seen his eighteenth year in the thick of summer, but he could not recall with much precision the day or circumstances. He recognized it only in the aftermath of the miracles that saved them, in the flurry of celebrations and reunions that provided an intermission before they pushed back towards the Larner.
Wiegraf had drawn his attention to it inadvertently, telling him flippantly at some point or another that he should find himself a wife or a monastery if he was to see another christening day.
“I hear that’s how noblemen typically keep their fortunes undiluted.” He leaned against his neck, breath hot. “You’d have been happier taking the cloth—either for love of God or novices.”
“What would you know about it?”
Had Wiegraf looked at him then? Had there been some intimation that he understood the service of the God he’d denounced? Zalbag did not remember if the exchange came by day or night, in the midst of the siege or in the wake of the victory—the words peeled away from their origins, floated back to him in fragments.
The black shape above him now had its hands on his chest and throat. The air seemed to wring itself from his lungs.
“Any layman can do the final rites at least, so they say. I could send you off, and I’m not bloody likely to become clergy.”
The bright fire of the summoning had split the night apart. Barrington’s shadow could be seen from the parapets, backlit in the gold light of a winged star above. The Nanten had come at last with Gariland’s great prodigy in their front ranks. They were saved then as he was beset now, and the celestial light of the great beast above turned to darkness as Zalbag lay immobile—as he waited for the thing crushing him to strike.
“God preserve and keep His sinful children, but I’d do it if you wanted...”
Against all expectation and sense, they’d been brought from out the fire—at Riovanes they were to live, and Zalbag needed no man to bury him. Wiegraf Folles was never to carry his corpse, and he was to be granted a long enough life in which he might die alone and untouched.
The thing that kept him there breathed hot against his skin, its limbs taut as it held him down, the foam that dripped from its lips bitter and acrid as that of starving men.
Zalbag could not move as it moved. He could not force the scream from our his lips. The beast hissed out something as it bit at his mouth, bringing up the taste of blood as its cleft hands dug into his flesh and ran against the bone. He could see no part of it anymore, nor could he will himself to see. He could only lie there, caught betwixt the agony of the present and the echoes of the past, and feel it crush him fast against itself. The meat of its tongue forced its way down his throat as he felt the press of its parts against him—the swell of flesh between his thighs.
He could feel the urge to scream as it rocked against him, but there was neither breath in his lungs nor space in his throat to do so. He was lost and unmoored as he heard the tear of cloth and felt the heat of its matted fur against his skin. With nothing for his vision to seize upon, his thoughts drifted out of the dark and back to the golden sky over Riovanes—Elidibus’ herald that burnt the world into a moment of daylight. Zalbag could see nothing, but he remembered the contours of Wiegraf’s face in that light—the look of naked emotion on his features as they were confronted with a hope they had not sought.
He was numb as it began—the knowledge that he was to be consumed, the horror of an appointment put off. As it parted his legs, he reached out to heaven, looking for a God to forgive them, and finding none, he surprised himself.
As the nightmare above him began, he had the strength to flail his arms in one convulsive motion to pull it against him—to embrace the thing poised to hold him in death.
The morning came on sluggishly; it was a grey and heavy affair that bore no real promise of sunlight. General Beoulve, quite uncharacteristically, did not rise to meet the Lauds hour praying.
The Hokuten rank and file seemed to little mind the delay when it was announced they would not march for Lesalia before midday.
When Zalbag finally appeared, almost as colorless as the vast sky above them, he spoke little, although he was quick to make up for the delay. By the time they were on the road again to the capital, all fruitful occasion for rumor had passed. Whatever speculation was made among the men as to their brush with the Templar faded alongside their commander’s nightmares—both only to fire again at the hour of their arrival when word reached them at last of the horror at Riovanes.
Zalbag, drawn back into the wilderness of the imperial palace, made no reaction when he heard the names of the dead. It was only at nightfall again that he wondered at it: at who collected the dead and washed their wounds, at who must have taken up that body that ought have taken up his.
He hoped, as sleep came over him, that he would never know—that he could imagine there had been in that awful darkness the finality of some last embrace.
BACK