THE UNBREATHABLE SILENCE

Written on July 7, 2022 (♋︎)

Content Warning: This is an exercise in indulging some of the worst excesses of my id, and it is unrelentingly and unrepentantly vile. Death, rape, torture are front and center in this piece even if the full extent of things is only gradually revealed, and there are eventually graphic, pornographic flashbacks. Characters cope and react badly, and make very poor sexual choices in the midst of their bad coping/reactions. The ending is not hopeful. The rationale for this atrocity fitting into canon as we know it is not very robust. Those familiar with my greater body or work might notice tropes and lines shamelessly lifted and repurposed. I make no apologies for any of this.

It should be noted that there is M/F rape mentioned as occurring as is additional M/M rape beyond the tagged pairings. There is a lot of implied violence in general beyond all the explicit violence, and there is a lot of variation in how explicit and horrible violence is in its presentation. There is unsafe breath play, and nobody cares. There is a little Hurt/Comfort that is not terribly comforting and does not lead to catharsis or healing. Everyone is grimy. Mutilation, dental trauma, and other grossness are present (). Medical realism has been replaced with a lot of hand waving about JRPG magic probably being able to repair things.

In short: this dove is dead. It's off the twig. It has kicked the bucket. It has shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible. This is an ex-dove. Do not open it expecting something else.

Introductory Notes: Title from Jean Anouihl's "Antigone:" "Every kind of stillness. The hush when the executioner's ax goes up at the end of the last act. The unbreathable silence when, at the beginning of the play, the two lovers, their hearts bared, their bodies naked, stand for the first time face to face in the darkened room, afraid to stir. The silence inside you when the roaring crowd acclaims the winner—so that you think of a film without a sound track, mouths agape and no sound coming out of them, a clamor that is not more than picture; and you, the victor, already vanquished, alone in the desert of your silence. That is tragedy."

---

Wiegraf knew before the fort was in sight that this would hardly be a battle. The Ordallians had been in dire straits since last winter, and with the mass Zelmonian retreat, the location had been cut off from supplies. If he hadn’t had to answer any nobleborn generals, he would have just spent a few weeks waiting and let them die or surrender as they may. As it stood, the Thundergod had decided that this was the new bottleneck through which they’d push into Viura—that it would be the path forward where so many other routes had failed. Wiegraf supposed that it cost the Southern Sky little to send the Dead Men in to clear the way—refuse to wipe out refuse.

He’d heard rumors, of course, that there was more to it than that—that all these proceedings had the cast of some personal whim. Apparently the reclaiming of the eastern cities had left a lot of men with grudges. They’d held to a stalemate so long that it seemed a true upset to have Ivalicians driven back to Ivalice—that men who’d weathered two decades living in Zelmonian cities with Zelmonian wives had been rudely reminded of Ordallia’s claims.In my personal Fifty Years War continuity, I typically have Ivalice occupying a good portion of Zelmonia from a little before the Romandan invasion to a few years before the war ends, when Ordallia pushes into Zeltennia and Limberry for a bit.

He was ready to feel a brute for cutting down a gaggle of starving soldiers, but when the heap of rock before them finally came into sight, he found no desperate men set to meet him. When he caught the scent of smoke in the air, he frowned a little. Gustav gave a shout a few minutes later that the flag on the battlements was not one belonging to Ordallia.

He spurred his bird as they drew closer. He preferred impetuosity to unease. When the lead unit finally closed in on the heap of stones before them, Wiegraf could see that it had already been abandoned.

They waited for some ambush or surprise. None came. When Wiegraf finally bid them push ahead, he did not know what to expect. The banners on the parapets were a plain muddy red—void of device or blazon. The damp earth beneath his courser’s talons was covered over with footprints.

He kept riding–all the while waiting for some disaster to free him from anxiety; kept riding until they were well past the gates and into the ruin beyond them.

Wiegraf heard a man behind him begin to retch.

His eye landed on an apple at first: a little lump of yellow brown in the rest of the slush, one part of all the scattered detritus that lay strewn about the talon-marked ground. It was a foolish thing to notice. here was a brief flash of appetite before he registered how rotten it had goneEven before the war ends and things get dire, I like little ocassions to emphasize how hungry Wiegraf is., and it was only from there that his eyes traced the tableau before him: the coil of bound hands within the mud, the dull red of hemp soaked through with blood. Nothing seemed to move for a moment save the bob and flutter of the animal beneath him.

There were five of them—piled up like storm-felled trees, limbs stiff and bent, skin pale as the dust of quick melting snow where it was not blotted with bruising.

"Sweet cunting Ajora…"

Four men and a woman–eyes wide as saucers where their eyes were open–bound hands gripping against their throats as if to keep what little blood must have been left to them from escaping. They had all been used badly before it ended.

"Anybody here read this chickenscratch?"

There was blood on the stonework behind them. There was blood everywhere. Still bright. Still damp. He hadn’t seen it at first. He hadn’t been able to make out the shapes of coiling Ordallian script. He had been looking at the apple and then he had been looking at the bodies and then he had been looking at nothing.

"Fucking animals!"

Wiegraf gripped at the pommel of his sword–breath still, his knuckles white. He dismounted, walking slowly toward the spectacle that had been left them.

No ambush came.

"This must have been a matter of a few hours," Gustav said icily. "It rained all night and the south gatehouse is still smoking." He coughed. "Like as not in the ridge eating pine bark and candles. A few weeks to flush them out at most."

It was an apt assessment of the situation; Wiegraf envied Gustav for his detachment in making it. In the meantime, he was still moving towards the captives, trying to reckon when they’d been taken and whether the ground was soft enough to bury them. When he knelt before the heap, he noticed a pit in the snow where the woman’s last few breaths had melted a little circle about her lips.

"Sweep the rest of it," he said to whomever was behind him. "Make sure there are no surprises."

There was the shuffle of feet as he tried to think if they had anything to cover them; there was barely a stitch of clothing between them all. He reached down, aiming to close their eyes, when there was a jerk and stuttering cry: bloodied flesh coming to life and convulsing before him.

He must have cried out. Somebody else did, a woman somewhere–maybe one of Miluda’s girls. When he was able to see what was moving–how one body not quite killed lurched and struggled before him–he knew with a shocking clarity who it was.

Even before they could decipher a face from his torn features, even before somebody translated the writing on the wall, Wiegraf knew the man beneath his grip. He knew the angles of the body and the pitch of the voice. He knew who would try to gasp the names of saints from out a throat inexpertly cut.

There was a general clamor of oaths and shouting as healers wove their way over to them. Wiegraf quite forgot himself and mouthed out a name. Nobody noticed.

As they spilled out two month’s worth of alchemyI'm not big on having potions in a "restore 100 HP!" sort of way in fic, but I feel that the prevalence of in game healing mechanics makes it reasonable to assume Ivalice has some sort of magical healing in it. Typically, I make potions a little iffy in their efficacy, terrible tasting, and a lot less efficient than they are in a battle menu. trying to keep him alive, Wiegraf said nothing more; he let the Dead Men move and mill around him. He was silent as they pieced together, little by little, what he had understood from the moment he had felt the man's skin tremble against his own.

Gustav, with typical dispassion, was the first to remark upon it.

"Seems just about right God would waste a miracle on General Beoulve’s damn son."

They loosed a pigeon toward Zardighas and kept to the fort. Wiegraf saw little sense in chasing after Ordallia’s deserters now–not without orders. The wilderness was vast and Viura far away; coeurls could make better work of them. He assumed the Hokuten would be riding fast towards them once it was understood what they’d found.

Zalbag continued to live. It was decided that they would burn the rest of his company with what rites and respect they could muster.

It took time for Wiegraf to reckon the extent of what had been done. He had heard talk of black things done beyond Germinas. He had seen black things done on the Romandan front. He was not ready for things pushed so far though–for one body seeming to bear the weight of a nation’s spite.

He had been beaten. He had been burnt: a large part of his left flank blistered over in addition to the marks of so many stubbed out cigarettes. There was a fractured wrist, bruised ribs. They’d had to sew together the edge of his mouth where somebody had slit open the meat of his left cheek. The gash along his neck held with less work.

It was no question that he’d been raped; it was no question that all of them had been at some point. Nobody spoke on it in those first few days. Even those chiurgions doing most of the mending did not give voice to what they knew.

Zalbag, in the meantime, continued to live.

After the initial shock, however, after being witness to all those wounds and hearing them healable, Wiegraf did not want to see him.

He had been one month in Commander Folles’ company. Three weeks of hating one another until that hatred poured itself into new shapes and forms; until they plunged themselves into a week of almosts. The Romandans had withdrawn. The streets of Igros were garlanded green. Zalbag was confronted at each moment with the burden of his own heroics.I tend to write Zalbag as being incredibly weird about being a national hero.

He knew–as Wiegraf knew–that it had never been Hokuten clearing the Larner alone. Nobody had ever claimed otherwise. Both men resented greatly that they might be brought together in plans to clear the Finnath. Zalbag had little love for an army of volunteers groping after pay, set to shrug off those obligations he could not escape in the moment gold crossed their palms. Wiegraf had no love for a man granted every glory for battles built on Dead Men’s bones.

It was only when Wiegraf discovered how little Zalbag loved glory himself that they could be united in one contempt. There had been a confrontation at the chapel: shouting that somehow fell away from blows and into silences.

When Wiegraf discovered what few worldly things Zalbag did love, they were united in other concerns.

There were only a handful of days in which something might have happened. Denamda was barely a week in the capital before he was spurring east. They could not tarry long after him. Everything was too much: the August sun too bright, the August air too hot, the orchards in which they walked bleeding with fruit too red.

Five lingering afternoons. One ill-conceived evening. The Finnath did not bring them together.

By the time Zalbag was riding for Limberry, Commander Folles was thirty leagues north, called to meet the Touten near Zeltennia. There had been only the prelude of sins passed between them then: an hour’s kissing and clipping that fell away again to silence.

Zalbag made no reckoning of what might have occurred; he did not dare intrude past the edges of memory and into speculation. Still, through the bleak years that followed, those six days remained to him in clarity, their colors blooming for him like flowers in some saint’s reliquary.

Wiegraf did not know if he hated the meeting when it came upon him. He knew he could not escape it. There was still no messenger from the west, and Zalbag had had enough physick and magic poured into him to be awake and reasoning. When Miluda told her brother a few days later he’d been sent for, Wiegraf did not ask who it was.

It seemed a very ordinary thing when he entered the room. Dim light leaked through the narrow window. The table was bare; the floor was clean. When he looked to where Zalbag sat on a palette, he felt they were going to discuss something mundane and inconsequential. It was as though they were back on the Western front, still at odds, quibbling over supplies and men.

If Zalbag’s skin had not been mapped over with injuries–if his posture had not stiffened at the creak of an opening door–it all might have been an illusion in which Wiegraf could linger.

"I was told you asked for me."

Zalbag looked at him, his expression unreadable beneath the bruises.

"I did," he said quietly.

"What is it you require of me, Ser Beoulve."

Zalbag closed his eyes.

"I am told the others were set to rest with what honors could be given."

"They were."

"Were there any articles remaining about them?"

Wiegraf shook his head.

"I did not think it would be so. Smyton has a son he said should have some of his things, however. I needed to ask."

Wiegraf nodded. He stifled the urge to ask why this couldn’t have been asked of somebody else. Zalbag returned to his silence for a moment.

"The…" He paused, blinking hard. "The men who were here. I’m told they fled?"

"They did."

"Is there any plan to pursue?"

"Not at present. They’re unlikely to do well for themselves this far north."

"They weren’t doing well when they were here."

"I know we’re bound to obey if you bid us give chase," Wiegraf started, "Is that…"

"No."

Zalbag looked at him very intently. The space between them had altered, however little Wiegraf remembered approaching the bed.

"Holding this place until the Nanten approach is our priority. I presume we’re still supposed to push south with the thaw."

Wiegraf nodded.

"We shall wait then."

They were closer still now, and Wiegraf stood waiting for something more–for anything more. It was all acutely uncomfortable. It was honestly neither Zalbag’s obligation nor his business to be giving orders. There was no reason to discuss any of this with him in particular. However briefly their lives had intersected, Wiegraf had not imagined he would call him here without dragging some thread of the past along with him.

And so he waited, kneeling to where he could meet Zalbag’s gaze. He waited, and he watched Zalbag–his posture tense, his expression blank. He let his eye trace all the lines on the man’s body that would make their way into scars.

"I thought sometimes of you," Zalbag said suddenly. He looked at the ground, and for a moment Wiegraf did not think he would continue. "I thought of how we parted."

A flash of summer heat and the scent of church incense fired through Wiegraf’s memory. He remembered the weight of body against body, of the strange crush of a velvet doublet against his skin. Now as then, he did not know what to do.

"I thought of you once or twice myself, I will confess." Wiegraf’s voice softened, but he did not smile. "I think you would do better resting, though, rather than thinking on me further."

Zalbag said nothing, but he swallowed hard as though there was something he was preparing to say. Wiegraf tried not to stare at his throat and at all the purple that had bled together there. He tried not to look at the puckered trail of stitches that had mended his torn cheek.

All these stigmata—these traces of violence. Wiegraf could not help but imagine their origins. Every time he lingered upon them, his thoughts were now alight with images of all that those soldiers must have done to him. He saw the bright blood across his features, the tension in his wrists as he was held down, the stoicism he had no doubt tried to maintain as they mutilated and fucked him. He wondered if Zalbag had ever broken with reserve and wept.

When he turned to look at him once more, Wiegraf felt his face grow hot and his stomach turn sick.

"I will rest." Zalbag fidgeted with a stray piece of straw poking through his palette. "I would like it, however, if you might stay a while."

"I have other things I must attend to." Wiegraf stood up abruptly.

"Wiegraf."

"Remember that I still lead a command," he said sharply. "If you need a man to wait at your bedside, I’m sure you can find one to order about back at Igros."

He left without looking back, and he tried very earnestly thereafter to find some task with which to distract himself. Gustav later told him bluntly that the best thing they could do was to keep the Beoulve heir in good condition and high spirits, such that his father might be inclined to some reward.

Wiegraf did not take the suggestion kindly.

Wiegraf did not regret leaving then, even as it became clear that whatever warm feelings might have played out between them were lost for it. Zalbag, however hurt or humiliated he might be, lost little time in reverting to all the insufferability Wiegraf had come to expect of his class and rank.

He made a fast habit of giving all those orders he hadn’t obligation or business to give, and Wiegraf did less than he ought to contradict them. He was no longer a brash youth of twenty eager to squabble over every little point of pride. He did not think he would gain much from reminding Zalbag of the debt he presently owed the Dead Men or how far they all were from Lesalia. If the man felt the need to rearrange the men guarding the wreck they were occupying or to needle Gustav over the last few weeks of the campaign, Wiegraf could afford to indulge him. He tried to consider it in such terms: as his indulgence rather than Zalbag’s imposition.

They spoke little. Zalbag carried himself as though whatever had befallen him the week prior was effaced the moment he woke–as though all men came to the world with flesh burnt and mangled. Everyone save for Wiegraf learned quickly not to stare.

It almost seemed that there would be nothing more to any of it–that Zalbag should persist, that word would come from the West, that they would part as newly made strangers. Wiegraf, as his thoughts endlessly chased the particulars of Zalbag’s ordeal, wondered if it could all be erased-if they could not discard all memory of this meeting and the one prior. He imagined he must wish it so. He could not dwell in this unease forever, witness to all those wounds Zalbag could not hide.

He thought, at times, that he hated Zalbag for them–for having borne a suffering that he must witness.

He knew it to be a contemptible thought.

Zalbag tried only once to speak to him again, and he did not press the matter when Wiegraf rebuffed him. When next anything of substance passed between them, it was after the arrival of the deserter.

The boy was thin, blond, his skin dull and his clothing mud-spattered; he could not be more than sixteen. The white scarf he’d used to signal was a yellowed gray against the expanse of snow behind him. When they dragged him back to the fort, he collapsed. Gustav, one of the few men who’d been in Ordallia proper long enough to pick up any of the language, managed to suss out that he’d had a poor parting from his countrymen. They were–as all had assumed–not doing well in the wilderness.

"Says they’re out of what they had at the fort. Seems they’ve been hair's breadth away from starvation ever since Elmdor cut off the roads through the South. Viura’s left them to hang."

Wiegraf nodded but said nothing. He looked at the youth’s face–outlines of the skull visible in his sunken eyes–and he remembered the blight for a moment: fields of black wheat rotting under the Gallione sun. He had been young. The Romandans were in retreat. The ride towards Dorter was across roads strewn with beggars: children and old men piled up like straw animals for a festival–limbs brittle where hunger had carved the flesh away.

"What does he want from us?"

"He wants to surrender–hopes we’ll feed him and I don’t reckon he’s thought much farther than that. Says he doesn’t know where the rest of them are, but I think one could ease him out of forgetfulness."

"We weren’t going to pursue," Wiegraf said coolly.

"Somebody certainly said we weren’t." Gustav coughed.

Before Wiegraf could reply, the boy gasped, and he realized that Zalbag had come out to meet them. Wiegraf looked to him–to the wine dark splotches across his face and neck, to the bulk of so many dressings lying under his tunic–and he tried to read his expression.

The prisoner fell to manic laughter.

Nobody moved. The boy kept laughing. He laughed until tears rolled down his face, until he choked and doubled over. When he said something in Zalbag’s direction, Gustav didn’t translate.

"What we do with him is up to you, I suppose," Gustav turned pointedly to Wiegraf. "I think it’s fair to say nobody would be averse if he met with a little rough handling." He coughed again.

"I would be," Zalbag said coldly.

Wiegraf, hands balled into fists, remained quiet.

"We do not abandon our duties as soldiers–not here, not now. A surrendered enemy is to be granted those rights Lesalia renders him."

The boy spat and said a word that Wiegraf did not recognize. Zalbag blinked hard, but his hand did not shake as he moved it to rest on the wall beside him.

"We are not barbarians."

"See he gets what rights we can render him then," Wiegraf said through gritted teeth, nodding to Gustav. "I’m sure the Hokuten will thank us for our charity."

The boy said something to Gustav as he led him away, and Wiegraf turned back to Zalbag. The wind picked up, and he could see how the man winced where it stung the side of his face.

"You didn’t need to come out here," Wiegraf said brusquely, approaching him. "You don’t need to manage any of this."

"Would you have killed him?"

Wiegraf shrugged.

"How would you want me to answer that?" he replied. "Do you want to hear that I have every respect for Lesalia, Zalbag?"

Zalbag looked at him, silent, his breath fogging the air as he breathed a little faster, and Wiegraf recalled anew the tableau of which the man had been part. It was with him again: the feel of blistered flesh; the gummed over traces of spend; the blood on his neck, on his hands, between his legs. He remembered how cold he’d been–how even writhing under his hands he’d still had some aspect of a corpse.

"You’re right," Zalbag said after the silence grew too awkward to persist. "I did not need to be here."

It was only after he left, Wiegraf contemplated what he might have said. He thought how he should have mocked Zalbag’s talk of barbarity and told him how he’d have the boy’s throat slit to save his men their rations–how he should have told Gustav to pull open his belly and leave him to the rooks.

Zalbag did his best not to listen–he tried not to hear talk of the prisoner, he tried not to hear talk of himself. He inferred–of course–that word of his disappearance at Germinas had never spread in the first place, that none of them had heard anything of capture or negotiations. Nobody had expected to find him. Nobody had heard rumors. It was as though the two weeks and however many leagues through which he’d passed never were. Back then, back before, the escort had been small and Zeltennia distant. Nature had perfectly arranged itself that five soldiers might vanish after a sudden ambush. He could not blame his father's men for thinking Salter’s claims amounted to a great nothing.

He could neither blame Wiegraf’s men for wrenching him back out of nothingness.

The problem was that only they remained where they were. Some messenger from his father–beyond blame himself–had not yet arrived to free them. He had to contend with that. He was a different sort of prisoner now, even if the only gaoler was memory. He returned every day to the same scent of damp stone–to the timbre of echoed footsteps no longer punctuated by Insway’s sobbing. In the twilight of waking, how could he tell the present from the past? How could he not anticipate the weight of hands and bodies set upon him?

Zalbag let his mind thread back to other memories when he could, trying to anchor to some fairer past more distant. He seldom escaped in the end. If there was any little grace the days prior to Wiegraf’s arrival granted him, it was that he had learned how to stifle a scream.

No messenger came from Zardighas–not for many days. There must have been some scholar out in Gariland who could reckon out the exact difference in ground a messenger bird and a chocobo might cover–who could measure out the dohms and divine dates and times. If the Dead Men could have stomached a university man, this hypothetical might have put their fears to rest–assured them with the stamp of expertise that there was no delay.

In want of this prodigy, Wiegraf tried to tell himself that he misreckoned the weight of the days that passed. Few others seemed oppressed by them as he was. Most men seemed to enjoy their respite from the march. Miluda was not merry, but it was clear she had untethered herself from the affair beyond practical considerations of filling bellies and portioning supplies. She did not need to make it known how she felt about expectations her girls continue to spend their magic on the general’s son once he was awake and walking. Gustav, who had become uncharacteristically conspicuous in everyone’s affairs, did his utmost to leave her unruffled even as he stalked her brother throughout each slow-moving day.

Over a score of reports, Gustav told him that Etien–for that was the Ordallian boy’s name–was growing interesting.

In the first week since he had been taken, he’d proved eager only to say how little blame he was to have in the whole matter. His captain–a half-Romandan gunner named Salter—had been possessed of some mania, he said: things had gone farther than they should have. Nobody else would have done so. Etien had not done so. Etien had not done anything–had not known anything either. In those first seven days’ grace among the Dead Men, Etien assured Gustav of his immaculate innocence before each hardened heel of bread tossed his way, offering up deflections like evening prayers.

He hadn’t been interesting then. It was only later, when the little changes to his cant drew forth a few particulars, that Gustav found himself interested. Poor Etien–he learned–had had no choice, had done so little, had almost protested it. The Ivalician general had some fault in the matter too: it took a heartless father to refuse when Salter had asked for so little. They were still dying in the mountains for it, besides, when the poor general’s son should have gone to the God he loved now.

The world was nothing but injustice Etien said. Gustav quite agreed. He took the privilege of gifting him a little sliver of salt pork after any particularly productive round of denials, and explained all of his contradictions to Wiegraf at length. He was thanked for his diligence.

Wiegraf never asked Gustav if Etien had fucked him, of course. Gustav, if he knew, certainly never volunteered it.

One morning, the cleric who was set to change the dressings of the poor general’s son happened upon him when he was not quite sleeping–when he was in some place beyond dreaming but not yet awake. In the span between the sound of her step on the stone lintel and the scream that roused the nearest soldier, there had been only a little struggle. Zalbag had been quick, thoughtless, mechanical. He’d wrenched an arm around her throat just in time to cut off a second scream and had just stopped short of snapping her neck. When Wiegraf eventually made his way to the center of the commotion, it was clear that Miluda had shown extreme restraint in managing the situation. The girl was weeping. Zalbag was silent. Miluda tried her best to keep her voice to a low hiss as she pulled her brother close, her nails biting into the flesh of his arm.

"Do something about him or get ready to report that the Ordallians left no survivors."

Wiegraf nodded, thinking through all the reassurances he did not wish to make while Zalbag sat on the bed a few feet away, head in his hands. He told her in so many half-whispered promises that something would be done–that Sybell need’t see him again–that he’d manage Ser Beoulve on his own if it so suited her. All while Zalbag remained motionless, like a grotesque somebody had not yet fixed to its cathedral.

Eventually Miluda, the girl, and the handful of troopers who had arrived in answer to the clamor all left. Wiegraf and Zalbag were alone.

"Do you have anything to say, my lord?" The venom in the last two words was readily apparent.

Zalbag lifted his head—slowly—to look at him. Some of the bruising had faded around his eyes, turning from black to brown to a dull leprous green. Wiegraf had a sudden, impulsive urge to strike him.

"I told you before that if you needed somebody to wait on you, you should look to somebody back at Igros. It was folly for my sister to send anyone."

"I mistook her." His voice was firm but distant; his expression once more unreadable. "I did not mean..."

"Stop it" he spat. "You're a man, and you can still answer for yourself as one."

"I’ll answer then: she was not harmed."

"That was lucky, wasn’t it?"

"What do you want me to say? Do you think I intended her ill? Do you think–"

"I think you have little mind for whose hospitality you are now enjoying and little gratitude that you live to enjoy it. I think you imagine that out here is much the same as it was back against the Larner: that we can be set about, sifted through, and cast off like a stack of cards–pages and jacks in every fucking nobleman’s hands."

"Wiegraf." He took a breath, swallowing hard. "I am under no illusion that this place is anything like the edge of the Larner."

"Don’t try that with me."

"Try what?"

"‘This place.’ That lapse into things unspoken"

"What lapse?" he asked flatly.

"It’s a damn appeal to pity. It’s you trying–ever so quietly–to make it about how you were found here."

Zalbag's face flushed red. The hand steadying against the bed was shaking now.

"You don't get to claim the aura of martyrdom when they didn't finish martyring you," Wiegraf hissed. He kept pushing. "You don't get to lord over us—untouchable—because of what they did!"

Zalbag winced, and Wiegraf immediately felt it all again–the nausea at so much bloodied flesh, the surreality of a dead man gasping out prayers beneath his hands. When Zalbag rose suddenly to approach him, Wiegraf did not move, and suddenly they were face to face and too close again–too near to touching.

"And what did they do, Wiegraf?" Zalbag asked through clenched teeth. "What did they do?"

"Do you need it recited back to you?"

"Why don't you?"

Wiegraf could feel his breath, hot and ragged, against his skin. He tried to look away.

When a hand turned his face back to meet Zalbag's gaze, he did not resist it. He swallowed hard, heart racing, thoughts alight with things he dared not say.

"They slit your throat," he replied.

"Is that the whole of it, Wiegraf?"

"They burned you. They beat you. They..."

Wiegraf looked down. He motioned as if to shake his head, but did not quite commit to the action.

A draft of winter air came in through the arrow slit behind them. Quick as a shadow, Zalbag grasped him, fingers clawing into the muscles of his arm as he pulled against him to whisper in his ear.

"Do you want to know what they did to me?"

Wiegraf’s mouth was dry, and he imagined he could feel the hard beating of another heart somewhere beneath all the layers of cloth and flesh that separated them. Impulsively, he caught the man in his grip and soon after stopped his words with the press of mouth against mouth. Zalbag responded in kind, and for a moment it seemed they might batter their two bodies into indifferent pulp. For a moment it was summer–suffocating him in its heat–and the sky was oppressive in its cloudlessness and Romanda was far away and everything was orchards and dust and light, light, light.

There were fingernails hooked into the flesh of his neck. The kiss was not a good one—all teeth and stubble—and there was the persistent prickle of anxiety that the door must be open and that somebody must see. Zalbag tasted of blood. When Wiegraf finally managed to break from him, he could feel the impress of places where he would undoubtedly bruise from the violence of his grasp.

"Is this how we parted?" Wiegraf whispered as low as he could. "Is this what you remembered?"

"Forgive me. I didn't know about the girl..."

"We're not talking about the girl now!"

"It was a bad lapse. I shouldn't—"

"Zalbag!"

He leaned against Wiegraf then in a half collapse, giddy, shuddering. Wiegraf was quite beyond himself as he took his head once more in his hands and mouthed the words over again in all their wretched configurations.

Do you want to know what they did to me? What they did to us? Do you want to know what they did!?

He thought again to strike him but instead clung to Zalbag Beoulve as if the man were set to fly away from him—as if there needed to be some counterbalance of body against body lest he dissolve into the wind around them. It seemed indeterminate how he disentangled himself again, escaping through the door that—much to his relief—had been closed. For all the rest of the morning, as he reiterated promises to his sister and did his utmost to see Sybell compensated for her griefs. All throughout, the particulars of the scene replayed in his mind again and again—leaving their mark on memory as sure as the purple smudges blooming across his skin.

Zalbag did not emerge from where he'd been quartered—he barely moved from the place where Wiegraf had left him for a time. He did not think as to what he had done, just as he did not think as to what was coming. The present and future seemed unmade, and he was sunk again into that mire between the ransom’s refusal and the slaughter. As he found himself sitting on the bed and staring at the sky once again, it was not like memory. He did not remember. Salter’s calloused hands on his neck, the burn of rope against his wrists: these were all matters of immediate sensation. He tried his best, as he always did, to take them with the dignity his rank demanded: to utter no sound that was not dragged out of him.

"All your fine breeding–all to be my mare–to caress me as you kick your last."

He did not take a meal when it was offered him. His distraction was clear now. He did not leave to make any inquiry. He did not leave to make apologies. Instead, he tried to choke back memory—tried to make himself into a man again. When Wiegraf finally returned to him, face gray and manner calm, Zalbag was as stoic as martyrs ought to be–however little Wiegraf might respect their aura. Saint Eustace among the coeurls. Saint Germon before the axe. Saint Leontine on the flames. He kept those images in mind–men unmoving and still, snared in webs of halos and tongues of fire–their eyes looking towards the viewer with the dignified quiet of kings.

Wiegraf took a page from Gustav's book and told Miluda to think with an eye towards reward—mentioned to her how Mansel out by Riovanes had saved Grand Duke’s escort and found himself with a title and stretch of land once knights enough died to vacate a fief. They were not words he liked to hear himself speak; they were not ones he believed–not now. He could not see what would befall them after Zalbag's retrieval now anymore than he could see the end of the war. He understood that Miluda accepted his lies politely.

Sometimes though, he did wonder if there was not something mercenary to him–if there were not something mercenary from the beginning. He recalled that over six days of summer once, he had tried and failed to bar from his brain the ever-present thought as to what becomes of rich men's favorites: as to what it would feel like to enjoy the luxuries of being a nobleman's sin.

It snared him again and again: how he must remember their last parting and remember the parting at Igros. As he rounded the stair to the place where Zalbag had been lain, he tried to bid memory fly away from him—to dissolve into a nothing from which nothing might come. He would speak to Zalbag. They would reach some understanding. In a few days or a few weeks or perhaps a little month’s time, they would be sundered again and everything about this would vanish. He need not think beyond that gap; he need not think about the end of the war; he need not think at all.

When he opened the door, he realized that dusk was descending and that he had no candle. Zalbag, in the dimming gold, seemed unnaturally calm as he stood up and approached him, eyes catching the light as if it would lend them some additional fire.

There was no greeting this time, not even a nod of acknowledgment. There was only Zalbag inclining towards him, hands tangling into the wool of his cloak, face buried against his neck. Wiegraf stiffened before he returned the embrace, holding him tighter when he drew out a shudder.

This is madness; we cannot..."

Zalbag kissed him, and it was surprisingly gentle. He did not move to return it, however, even if he stilled himself and went slack to feel his lips on his lips, his hands on his jaw.

"Did you know I haven't prayed since you found me?" Zalbag said when they parted.

Wiegraf shook his head. Why should he have known?

"Maybe if you’d prayed," he replied, "God would keep you from worrying my sister’s healers."

Zalbag bit at his lip a little when next their mouths met. It barely hurt.

The sky moved from gold to red, and Wiegraf let himself be dragged to the straw palette. He undid the clasp of his cloak without being bidden. He felt very suddenly the weight of all the time between them–how long it had been since Romanda withdrew–how far Zalbag had diverged from the youth who had spent a week in folly with him. It seemed obscene that that dalliance should find its conclusion here: that it was in these straits they would finally commit to a sin cut off four years’ prior.

As a hand pressed against his arm, Wiegraf wondered what sins the room they were in had already seen.

"I used to imagine sometimes it was you," Zalbag whispered. "Even when I thought I would die—even when it was with a knife—I would think of it being you somehow."

Wiegraf closed his eyes. They were words he did not know how to hear.

"Was that some comfort?" Wiegraf asked eventually. "Did you—

"Nothing is a comfort here." Zalbag kissed him again, pulling him close. His grip on him was hard and the stubble of his beard burned against Wiegraf’s skin.

Wiegraf let his shirt be pulled off of him. He watched as Zalbag removed his own, revealing all those bright scars worn smooth by magic–all those patches of abraded flesh still weeping where they had not crusted over. Wiegraf stared at them, and made no attempt to hide it. It would have been worse to look away.

"Do you still want to know?" Zalbag whispered hotly. "Do you want to know what they did to us–to me? Do you want to hear how they reacted to hearing that no ransom could save them?"

"Zalbag..."

"I’d barely understood they were talking about me before they knocked me down–before they started on me. I’d barely had a chance to breathe. We were all living before; we were all going to live. There wasn’t time to understand how it changed."

They were on the bed now. Zalbag was on top of him now, hands on his shoulders, legs straddling his hips.

"I counted just three before I gave up that first time, before all there was left was me and the table and an endless string of nobodies—it was simple then." He gasped hard as Wiegraf’s hand grazed the edge of a burnmark. "It could have been anyone." He leaned down for another kiss. "It could have been you."

He wanted to bid him stop. He wanted to be the sort of man who would bid things stop. He said nothing. He let Zalbag Beoulve continue to pant and rut against him, whispering out confirmations to every vile suspicion that had fired through his brain the week past.

"He made them do it, some of them... Everyone was to share the spoils; everyone shared the crime. There were only a few really committed to it–only a few really hot for blood. God though... they were hot for it."

Wiegraf hands were on his hips, pulling him close as he could feel the swell of his erection beneath his hose.

"It wasn’t just me, but it was me he wanted most. I tried to save them. We all tried to save one another, but it was like drowning men that pull one another down. I couldn't think of them then."

He tried to think and tried not to think of it by turns: Zalbag with two of them, Zalbag with three, pinned against a wall or lashed to a table, writhing and red as cock after cock spilled into him.

"Fuck..." he asked, "Why me, Zalbag? Why me?"

"Why anyone? Why couldn’t I just hate it?"

Zalbag was leaning back now, fumbling at his laces. He pulled Wiegraf’s cock free, and offered no sign of surprise to find him hard and eager. His hand slid around the swell near the head and began to stoke him, slow but firm, drawing a long groan from his lips as he continued to buck.

"What else?" Wiegraf gasped out in a whisper he almost hoped wouldn’t be heard. He wrapped his hand around Zalbag’s as he picked up speed."

"I bit once, early on, you know—they cured me of that. They cured me of a lot of things. I remember getting only half sleep after a while—drifts—the days stopped and I was always waking to one of them... to someone or another looking for satisfaction. Being knocked into consciousness, being taken half a minute for someone’s quick release—it just took on a rhythm. Everything just became it."

He laughed as Wiegraf closed his eyes.

"And sometimes I would imagine it was you."

Wiegraf grunted, thrusting against their joined hands, feeling his skin burn as he imagined it was him. He thought about how he would have done it: how Zalbag would have felt as he fucked him bloody—as he branded and cut his lust into his skin.

Never did he bid him stop—not when their hands broke apart and their bodies shifted and Zalbag moved to take him in his mouth—not for any of it. He wanted to have been the man who would bid him stop. Instead he lay back, mouthing the words he dared not voice as he pushed hard into Zalbag’s throat, as he imagined the swell of his prick in his neck, as he thought of how many others before him had used an heir of House Beoulve as their whore.

He took hold of Zalbag by the back of the head, digging his fingers into his short cropped hair as he pulled him fast against his hips. Wiegraf could feel Zalbag’s throat constrict, could sense his shoulders tense. He did not gag; he continued to suck, to lave the underside of his shaft, to take him as deep as he could. They kept on like that, Wiegraf pushing him harder and harder against each thrust, until he did not let him go, nails biting into his scalp as he came.

There was an instant in which they did not move. He could feel Zalbag swallow—tongue rising hard against his still twitching cock. He could feel something in both of them go slack.

Wiegraf let go of him, and he realized how little he could make out in the coming darkness. He did not know if it was worse to see or not to see when Zalbag rose to embrace him again. He wanted very much to be anywhere but where he was, caught against Zalbag’s body and all its wounds. He did not move as Zalbag held onto him, however, nor did he stop the kiss that followed.

And as before, even with the stale salt taste of spend on his lips, Zalbag tasted of blood—

He let Zalbag tangle his fingers in his hair, let him keep him snared there in a place where he ought not be. Kissing him before, Wiegraf hadn’t noticed the gap at the back of his mouth, where two teeth were absent in an otherwise perfect set. He was used to kissing people for whom such an absence was not uncommon. As his tongue grazed over the flesh beneath, it was met with still more of the dull tang of copper.

Zalbag broke from him a moment, his shuddering in the dark only audible by the alteration of his breath. Wiegraf pressed his lips back against him before he could speak—before he could tell him in words how one cures a man from biting.

Gustav knew how things went far enough out east. He’d seen what Ordallia did to honest men’s blood back before they consigned him to the Dead Men; he’d been reconciled ever since that last push out of Zelmonia that he’d be in the midst of madmen before winter’s end.

Still, he liked how fast it spread. It was one thing for Zalbag Beoulve to stalk about like a ghost now, a week after being all but killed. It was another for Wiegraf to lose sight of their position and wander around raging to no end. Perhaps it was all a symptom of birth: that Wiegraf–having been born to hammer nails and shoe horses–had no appreciation as to how noblemen think.

Had he cared the least bit as to making the general’s son presentable, it would be one thing to piddle away the potential glories of bringing Salter’s company to justice. As it stood, he was set to return to Balbanes Beoulve the child he wouldn’t bother ransoming with the added humiliation of having him half-mad from being fucked near to death.

Gustav never had much by the way of nobility. His father had forfeited his land but not his titles, and Gustav had always felt barely a knight until the title too was stripped from him. Still, he knew enough about noblemen’s priorities to play to them. As far as he was concerned, his duty at this point was straightforward. By some trick or another, he would render unto General Beoulve something to restore him to the Hokuten. He firmly believed that the boy knew damn well where his companions were hiding, and once Gustav knew too, the pieces would be all but assembled. Kill the company. Get young Beoulve the honor of it. Spin a pretty tale as to how he emerged from this hell an undefeated champion, fair and flush with victory: the hero who'd saved them all from Romandan rule.

If anything, Gustav hoped the messenger out of Zardighas should tarry a month or more–that he should have time to set right the mess being made daily all around him.

Zalbag remembered when he had fought, and how it had been less a fight against injury than one against sin. He did not know by what measure Ordallians reckoned their crimes differently than him, but if Salter had a God, it was not one that saw treatment of Zalbag as more grievous than what befell poor Insway. If there had been a distinction, he surely would have mocked him for it.

When Wiegraf’s hands were no longer on him, the press of others replaced them. He felt it always: the floating sink of his body being cast to a table or to the ground, the drumming of his heart welling up in all the places his flesh had broken. It was some freedom to be thus beset–he thought at times. It was a freedom from shame if sin was never absent, if one’s flesh could never be sullied further.

He remembered how he had tried to throw them off at first, how even pinned down by four of them, he had never stopped moving. That tension, that desperate need to resist in the face of inevitability: it was not in the hopes he could escape. He wanted to avoid only the shame of compliance: to let himself know that what would happen was inevitable.

Salter’s hand on his back. Salter’s men crushing his face against their open hose. Salter mocking him in thick-accented Ivalician as he told him how he would be used in all its grotesquerie. He was alive to that still–to the fresh bleeding sockets in his jaw stabbing pain into him like hot nails.

In the dark of the night after Wiegraf left, he lived in that scene again, stroking himself in feverish memory as he recalled the thumb pulling open his mouth, the acid tang of sweat and salt on his lips, the bile and blood in his throat. Salter was all bravado as he took him first, hard and fast as Wiegraf had. He’d spilled on his face afterwards, laughing at the mess of blood and spend that dripped on him. He could tell in the aftermath that the boy made to follow was frightened.

Back in that instant as he lived it now, he stroked himself where his bound hands could not, gasping out oaths that his lips could not have shaped. In that ecstasy of suffering, he imagined what it would have been like then had Wiegraf could have kissed his bloodied mouth then–could have felt that gap newly made and brought out more of its sting.

Wiegraf had no time to reconsider their folly. They met one another well before dusk, taking risks they should not take for actions they had not planned. Zalbag caught him out by where they’d set the birds to rest, and wordlessly led him to the half cellar beneath one of the fort’s low towers. When he began to kiss him this time, Wiegraf offered no objection or hesitation. He let himself be kissed, be fondled, be pushed against his cloak flung down upon the dirt floor.

It was somehow as it had been at Igros but not so. They pressed together, gasping and rutting, fingers hard against one another’s flesh as they stripped and caressed one another. All the while, he did as he knew he would do now. He never bid Zalbag stop: not when he held him down, naked and burning, mouth against mouth and cock against cock; not when he begged to be fucked; not when he told him again and again how he had been fucked before.

"All of them at one point or another–all of them and all of us. Two at a time. Three at a time. It was a boon to the others that he spent so much of his appetite on me."

His actions were automatic, practiced, rehearsed. Wiegraf moaned as Zalbag leaned back against him, as he felt his own cock glide against the curve of his buttocks. He tried to think of Igros or of Gallione or of anything else at all–to think of some circumstances where this did not feel wretched–but Zalbag drew him back again and again to the wreck in which they were stranded. Any pretense he had at wanting it to be otherwise left him soon enough.

"And sometimes it was you–-you buried in me. You fucking my throat til it bled. You pushing me against a wall... against the table... against the ground."

He pulled Zalbag’s face down as he rocked and panted, and then he pulled past what might have been a kiss to whisper harshly in his ear.

"Do you want it to be me now?"

He could not see Zalbag’s face in the dim light. He did not wait for an answer. He grabbed him by the hips and pulled him hard against him a few times before flipping him over very abruptly, pushing him into the dirt as he made a grab for his wrists. He could feel the racing gallop of his heart at the pulse points as he pinned him. The cloud of breath between them burned hot before their mouths came together again.

"Is that what you’ve always wanted?" Wiegraf hissed as they parted. "Did you want it like this back then?"

"Did you?"

Wiegraf kissed him again, drinking in his breath and the trace of blood upon it as he tried to keep himself away from an answer. He moved to stroke Zalbag as he did so, and he could feel the body under him go still as the ground beneath.

They eventually parted long enough for Wiegraf to fumble his way to a half-empty vial of oil. Zalbag remained unmoving until Wiegraf was on him again. His breath hitched as Wiegraf nervously pushed a finger into him–as he tried not to think of all the smooth-healed scars that must lie between the man’s thighs–not to feel for those trails of former wounds fused back together by magery.

...even when it was with a knife...

He kept himself away from thought still. He pushed in another finger, felt him tense, and leaned in to kiss him.

"Saints," he whispered. "We both wanted it, didn't we?"

Zalbag made a noise then that sounded something like a laugh: a very sorrowful laugh.

Everything progressed fast. It needed to. Wiegraf could not reconcile himself to fucking him otherwise. By the time he was inside of him, Wiegraf did not have room to contemplate why he should do as he did. He was not able to follow the track of his own objections. Everything was just animal motion and the pressure of Zalbag’s hands gripping his back, dragging him closer as he speared him-as he took him with all of the brutality demanded of him.

When they fell into a rhythm–when it was too late to back out–Wiegraf could think of it then: of how he had no business doing as he did. He could try to rationalize it as Zalbag’s breath echoed against the walls of the dark room in which they lay trapped–as to how it was not his business to deny a nobleman’s wishes, as to how little a nobleman would give a man of his rank the courtesy of such concern. Still, again and again, as he drove hard into Zalbag and drew out of him a new groan or gasp, he understood that it was a vile thing he did.

By the time he’d finished–sweat slick, knees dry from where the dirt ground into–he wished he could be very far away from all of it. He thought perhaps that he should flee–that he should do anything other than grope about for Zalbag’s cock and try clumsily to jack him off in the throes of his own disgust. When Zalbag reached up towards him, his hand caught against the socket of his eye where it no doubt meant to stroke his cheek.

"Please..." Zalbag said in bare whisper. His voice was cracking. "Please..."

"Shut up," Wiegraf barked in a low voice.

He hadn’t meant to say it, and he did not know whether he felt worse for having said it or worse that Zalbag should climax then–warm come spurting over his hands.

Wiegraf stood up not long after, and he did not say anything as he scrambled to gather his things. As he heard a noise, something like a sob now, he did not know which of them had made it.

He vowed silently to not repeat anything like this again–not to see him again until somebody arrived. He felt very stupid knowing how little it would mean to break a promise made only to oneself.

Etien began to break down, began to sing strange songs in his native tongue and talk of his mother. The men grew restless–hot for blood perhaps. A messenger did not arrive.

Gustav could almost wring some hope out of that were Wiegraf not a cunting idiot.

The men no longer fighting did not speak of it. The girls no longer dressing wounds did not speak of it. Miluda sure as Ajora’s immaculate asshole did not speak of it. If someone were to come upon them as they were now, nibbling on weeviled biscuits and leather-hard jerky, they might imagine for at least an hour that General Beoulve’s son had never been freed of his pious chastity.

He imagined that it would take about an hour at most before they were at it again, stealing out of all society to moan and pant in whatever crevice of this cursed heap had room for them.

He could not judge the deed, of course, given the circumstances of his own dismissal. He could little judge poor Salter, in truth, save in distaste at his excesses. Ordallia did strange things to men’s blood; madmen did strange things in their turns.

Still, what Gustav could judge in abundance, having suffered so hard for it, was indiscretion.

As he pressed Etien harder and harder for where he departed from his comrades, he tried to think through how he could possibly break Wiegraf of that real crime. He came up with nothing. A man in whatever fever it took to fuck general Beoulve’s vastly overfucked son could not be reasoned with. Wiegraf had a temper. When he thought of how he might ask him to break with enculade and idiocy, all he could envision was the indignity of having his face broken for it.

He considered also having a word with Zalbag at one point–considered it and realized that to think it, he must be going mad as well.

It had been three weeks and no messenger arrived. Wiegraf, in the meantime, fucked Zalbag in the room where he’d lain near dying and in the turret towers from which those dismal red flags had flown. He fucked him over a storeroom table, against the hard-packed earth, pushed up against the rough brick of the wall. He fucked him until his eyes face was tear-stained and his lesser wounds oozing fresh blood.

And all the while, Zalbag begged for it. He begged for it and pushed him harder, asking to be struck, asking to be strangled, asking in breathless ecstacy to be degraded in every way that Wiegraf was willing to degrade him.

And Wiegraf, more often than not, was willing.

It had been three weeks, and Zalbag Beoulve still did not pray. For all he had once feared sin and been blazoned for piety, it had been three weeks since head lifted a word to heaven.

He tried never to think of that final prayer if it could be helped–he’d track back to the penultimate one, where he had still imagined the voice of God echoing within him. He’d live in that pain rather than in greater despair.

There’d been a knife to his throat, the edge drawing a little sting—a little trickle of blood. Five of them. They’d planned something: Salter, his thick-browed first lieutenant, the redhead with a little finger missing, two of the general throng who had always been more curious than eager.

The Lieutenant was holding the knife, already fucking his throat—making some jeer in one language or another Zalbag did not know. He'd switched off for the redhead but kept fidgeting with the blade. Zalbag knew then Salter was behind him.

He heard him spit–felt the ooze of saliva in the cleft of his buttocks, braced and tensed and tried to relax his jaw as he felt the head of his cock against him seconds later. There was the strike of a hand against his ass, the quick push in and the burn after.

"Aren't you a steady beast today? Still tight as a new bleeding maid."

A long inhalation and the redhead started going hard, withdrawing the full shaft as he rammed it down again. Salter stubbed out a cigarette against his flank and he only made a little noise, body tightening against as the man behind him began to roll his hips.

"Going to cure you of that a little way. Let your Saint of the gallows hear you in heaven."

It was then that Zalbag had prayed–silently, wordlessly. He prayed that he should be spared, that he should be out of pain, that he should die and fall out of suffering through no sin of his own. He imagined each word he might shape were his mouth not stopped, tried to wreath them in fire and release them to the heated sphere above. In fleeting moments, he could hear them return.

"Ready to get to heaven still reeking of me, Beoulve? Ready to have all your saints and angels see what I do to you?"

Salter punctuated his taunts with a sharp thrusts, and Zalbag could feel the redhead start to pick up speed–brisk short strokes until he slammed hard against him, ripping his fingers into his hair as he bellowed some curse and spilled down his throat, There was little time to breath, to choke down his spend before one of the two watchers was pushed forward, laughing nervously–having been bidden to take his place.

Ajora returned no comfort. God would not resolve to save him. Salter reached around to stroke his cock as he began to piston into him with even more force, until Zalbag could feel his labors eased by the thin slipperiness of blood.

He stabbed him with the cigarette again, in the soft flesh under his jaw. He choked hard on the cock in his mouth as he spasmed.

"Careful you don’t bite," Salter hissed softly.

He wasn’t holding back bow, pushing into him hard as if he would hollow him out—leave him gutted and empty. As the next man came, abrupt and grunting, Salter laughed, bellowed something in Ordallian, and bid the Lieutenant come back over, leaning back gradually until Zalbag was atop him. He laughed more as he moved to finger the place where his cock was met his flesh; they laughed together then as they fumbled about–laughed trying to make everything fit together, clumsily prodding and grabbing until finally finally the other man was able to work his way in beside him and Zalbag, bound and bloody, was caught between them, impaled by them both.

They all started moving–gentle to quick to fast–and each man kept pace while Zalbag tried not to scream. He tried not to make a noise even as he felt he would be split in twain, sawed in half as the two of them fucked him–as they swelled inside him. When he felt a belt looped around his neck, he only gasped out something like a sigh before it was pulled tight. A litany of words meanwhile filled his brain–epithets and adorations and pleas–until he felt he was exhaling a prayer with every pained gasp allowed him.

And God would not resolve.

"That’s right. Give you a little encouragement–earn each breath I allow you."

Salter fucked him hard as he choked him harder.

"Does your Saint want you back now?"

A bystander said something unintelligible. The Lieutenant picked up speed along.

"Did your Saint see this when he drew the lot of your life?"

Zalbag gagged, sputtered, went numb as the last man among them moved to force his half hard cock into his mouth.

"I hope you like what he laid out for me then?" Salter grunted. "Delivered you to me all that you might please me in dying–even if you could not save me."

He closed his eyes and tried to let himself only be moved by the bodies surrounding him. Unbidden, he thought of other men, of other configurations in which he could be caught: of the broad shouldered cleric who’d tutored him in his boyhood, of all the youths upon which his imagination had once lingered too long in Gariland. He thought of priests touching his wounds. He thought of men sparring with him on the green. He thought of Marquis of Limberry, beautiful in all of his disdain as they wintered together.

And he thought, as he often thought, of Wiegraf Folles sunken into idiocy with him for less than a week–of the fever of August and how quickly it broke.

Salter pulled the belt tight then. "I hope you curse him for both our sakes when you meet him."

And Zalbag tried, in the darkness washing over him, to recede from sin and draw from himself a third and final plea–to cry to God and beg that he be spared some measure of pain.

He could hear a voice cry out even if it could not have been his own. There came the bitter wash of salt over his tongue around the same time that the Lieutenant moaned and he could feel the warm rush of seed running down his thighs.

Salter kept riding him hard, kept fucking and choking him as though he meant to break him apart. Zalbag blacked out a little before he came, falling into the sparks and lights beneath his eyelids until he was lost in that cold sea of stars.

When Gustav told Wiegraf that Etien had finally revealed where the company had sheltered–that there was a cave-riddled ridge some seven leagues south where smugglers had once run supplies from up the greater Finnath–there was a good half minute pause before he spoke.

"What do you propose we do, then?" He knew he sounded anything but pleased. "We weren’t going to pursue."

"Again. Zalbag Beoulve said we weren’t going to pursue," Gustav said firmly. "I reckon that it's your decision to make."

"Is there cause to do so?"

"If you don’t want to turn this miserable affair into something like a victory, I suppose not."

Wiegraf knew that there were many more cutting things that Gustav was not saying.

"You think that would prove a victory?" he asked slowly.

"I think whoever comes or us might think it so?"

There came another silence.

"I don’t think there’s any victory for us here." Wiegraf put his hand firm upon the table between them, fearful that it might be shaking.

Gustav, inhaling sharply, paused as if to say something, but obviously found strength to stifle his objection.

He left shortly afterwards.

Zalbag was waiting for him when they next met–it seemed now they were always waiting for another. When their bodies fell together, it seemed as natural as the weight of a cloak over one’s shoulders. In a little watch room at the east wall, breathless and hot, he let Zalbag undress him, let him tell him with almost vindictive audacity how he’d spent two weeks being cut to pieces.

Wiegraf–as always–did not bid him stop. Zalbag’s face was legible now, the bruises faded away until just their crests showed, rings of dark skin circling his eyes and cheekbones. He could see, for the first time since the man had been found, how very young he still seemed. He could recall clearly that week of wonders: how he’d found himself caught in the arms of a grinning youth—hidden from human affection too long in insufferable piety.

"The boy..." Wiegraf started, drifting off as Zalbag began to fondle him.

"Him too, if you want to know," Zalbag said nonchalantly, as though naming another rapist was of no more import than stripping off his shirt.

"No..." Wiegraf hadn’t wanted to know. "He..." Zalbag wrapped a hand around his cock and drew him into a kiss.

"He’s given up the location of the rest of the company," he said as their lips parted.

Zalbag was suddenly very still.

"I said we’d wait until the Nanten arrived," he whispered.

"I know," Wiegraf whispered back.

Zalbag kissed him again, grabbed at his neck, traced the lines of his jawbone with his two hands. Wiegraf felt a little sick then–that same sense of nausea he’d felt when he first saw Zalbag awake, battered and disfigured like bodies left to bloat on a summer field.

When he moved to return the gesture, to draw him into yet another kiss, his thumb traced the jagged line that extended from Zalbag’s mouth up his cheek. He held him fast as he drank in the little gasp it drew from him

"I could give the order, you know. It isn’t for you to decide," he said after a while.

"Will you?"

Wiegraf had no answer.

"If you want to pursue them, it’s your choice to do so. I don’t..." Zalbag blinked–the tone of his voice changed. "I would be good, I think, if the rest of them had something like vengeance."

"Do the dead care for revenge?"

"Vengeance–rightful vengeance–is its own good so I’ve been told. It doesn’t need the avenged to consecrate it with their wishes."

Zalbag lowered himself the same palette upon which he had once laid in sickness a week, and Wiegraf did not make the retort caught upon his lips. As he moved to straddle Zalbag, he wondered what it would be like were he to ever see Salter: to witness that shadow upon which he had been overlaid. He wondered what it would be like to kill him.

There was a heaviness to his motions as they began to rock together, Wiegraf stroking them both as he tried to think only of the present: of flesh against flesh.

Zalbag drew his free hand to rest on the mass of scars about his throat, and it was not the first time he had done so. There was a hunger that thrilled through Wiegraf’s brain as he recalled other entanglements, other instants: of his hands hard against Zalbag’s neck as he gasped and writhed–of all the vile confessions that had accompanied it.

He caressed that mass of wounds as if he was ready to snap them apart and moved the other hand to press against them–until there was only their two bodies sliding against one another, until all he could feel was the rush of Zalbag's breath and pulse beneath his hands and the swell of his cock against his.

"Like that," Zalbag whispered. "It was like that until I couldn't speak, like that until I didn't struggle."

He'd whispered it before, and Wiegraf had always throttled him, always felt him kick and cry until it seemed he would slaughter him where the Ordallians failed. He did so now. He felt his skin burn hot again as he tightened his grip.

Zalbag held onto him, as always, in breathless ecstacy.

They kept on like that a while, kept on and parted and rearranged themselves until Wiegraf was fucking him again, until each desperate plea was punctuated with a sharp thrust and every remembered degradation was played out again in the motion of their bodies. Wiegraf, hands still around his throat, pondered again and again what might happen were it to progress to murder, were he to finish with nothing but a corpse in his arms again.

And in that instant, in that well worn track of his shame, he could envision Zalbag a corpse already: frozen forever in all of his agonies, caught in the death Salter and he had made for him.

And in that instant, hot and panting, Wiegraf bid him stop.

They stopped, and Wiegraf had gotten up and readied himself to leave while Zalbag lay in half collapsed on the bed. He did not ask why–it didn’t need to be asked. He did not beg him to stay. It was only when Wiegraf turned to him that he felt any sting of it: that he realized that this instant was heavy with finality.

"I’m sorry," Wiegraf said haltingly.

"You’ve done nothing I’d bid you feel sorry for."

Wiegraf looked away for a moment. He shook his head. "I’m sorry for all of it anyway."

"Wiegraf..." Zalbag trailed off, uncertain as to what he could possibly say that was not foolish–unsure as to what he could say without regretting it. As he sat up he pulled the bunched up pile of his clothes over his lap, suddenly self-conscious as to his own nakedness.

He watched as Wiegraf shifted his posture. He watched as both their shoulders fell.

"Please don’t let this be pity," Zalbag eventually said. "Accuse me of it if you like; I never demanded your pity."

"You demanded an awful lot, Zalbag," Wiegraf said, evidently distraught now.

Zalbag bowed his head. He felt a lump in his throat and swallowed it down with well-practiced calm. Wiegraf drew nearer.

"I wish we had not parted at Igros," he said suddenly, voice cracking. "I wish we were not brought together like… this."

Zalbag held his head in his hands.

The sun in some other land must be burning hot as white embers. The trees in some other country must be fruiting and full. Had they been a thousand leagues away, wherever it was summer, it might be different.

Zalbag breathed sharply as if he might laugh. He stopped looking at the ground and looked to the stone ceiling above him, thinking that if he did not avert his gaze the world beneath that vault might change–that everything around him would not be so.

Wiegraf sat on the bed next to him. Neither looked at one another, and Zalbag did not weep until Wiegraf embraced him again–did not let himself fall to the humiliation of tears until somebody had sunk into it along with him.

And Zalbag remembered the snow. He remembered the pain of the air against his flesh, all the points where he’d been cut and burnt. He remembered that final bacchanal, Salther cutting apart his face and fucking him after with the knife, egging on whoever still had the stomach for it to fill him further still.

Two men, three men, a thousand: there was no reckoning it. Perhaps it had been nobody at all. He remembered retching, remembered a mouth stretched farther than it should hold, remembered the hot pain of being pushed beyond all the butchery already visited on him. He was outside of memory then–however–outside of everything. If there had not been the howling of other voices, he might not have recognized his own.

And in the end, Zalbag remembered the snow.

He remembered that it would be the last thing he saw, and he remembered how his soul had screamed out to God and every saint to spare him–how in the silence of that final act he had reached after anything that would carry him through to another breath.

The sting of the blade’s last cut, the silence of every scream around him, the heaving pain of lying among the dead while his hands trying to hold the last of the blood in him: all throughout, he had called in mad desperation for some power to give him succor.

The snow fell upon him, stuck in his eyelashes, stung at his wounds–and he could feel no warmth beneath it. Nothing answered him. No God lay beyond that vast expanse of white in which he was fixed. Even coming to with so many saints and "Farams" on his breath, he knew that they only floated up to some great abyss. In all the weeks that followed, in all his comprehending of his own survival, he never once took it to be a result of that unheeded prayer.

It seemed then a sort of blasphemy, after that denial, that Wiegraf Folles should succor him now.

He told himself, as he shook in Wiegraf’s grip, that he wept for that. That it was not the pain of all that had been done to him, but another flawed and mortal man should take up what ought have fallen to the divine.

As Wiegraf kept sobbing apologies against him, he held him fast, shuddering at the prospect that this was the only grace that the wretched world offered them.

When Gustav saw them, he knew that all was done. Between the moment the bird appeared on the crest of the horizon and the instant its rider caught the first flash of sunlight, a thousand little schemes fell together and his mind and then came apart. They were–at best–to persist as they had, serving as arrow fodder for men still knighted. The Dead Men were to keep on feeding the soil.

He smiled though–knowing they were still far off–reckoning that it was nice to have an hour’s warning before things fell apart.

When Wiegraf woke for the first time that morning, throat sore and limbs stiff, he had no real dread at discovering he held General Beoulve’s naked son in his arms. Thoughts of their discovery were quite beyond him. There was–perhaps–a moment’s apprehension before he registered Zalbag as warm and breathing, before he remembered again that he had lived.

He did not wake him. He did not stir. He looked at Zalbag and held him as the devout hold to relics and icons–as Barius held Ajora cut down from the gallows.

And when Wiegraf fell asleep again, it was in the midst of telling himself that he could rise at any instant—that it was no folly to linger.

When Wiegraf woke for the second time that morning, it was on account of Dycedarg Beoulve pulling him to the floor and doing his best to smash in the side of his skull.

He had little mind as to the precise circumstances at first. There was blood on his face. The breath was gone from his lungs. When he fumbled about for a weapon, he found his opponent’s sword already drawn. He had barely time to shout before its pommel hit the bone between his temple and jaw–before he was flung to the floor again, blood running thick over his teeth and tongue.

Wiegraf tried to right himself three–maybe four–times, and each time he was struck down. If he had had a sword of his own, if he hadn’t been caught asleep, it might have been different. As it was, he had no recourse but to fall and bear it. He could not stand. He could barely see. His vision was doubled and swimming. He could hear, however, and he could make out a torrent of curses visited upon him.

When he was able to turn to the palette from which he’d been pulled, he could just make out Zalbag’s face, blurred and wavering as it looked on at him in silence. He tried to mouth something to him, but he had no notion as to whether or not it registered. Dycedarg, whose identity he had gathered in the midst of so much shouting about the wrongs done to his brother, cut him off by kicking him in the ribs.

He was accused of seduction, of libertinage, of violence. Wiegraf could offer no defense. He had, by any reasoning creature’s assessment, taken advantage of a much wronged man’s madness. He had let Zalbag debase himself–-let the two of them reenact so many humiliations that should never have been his to discover–fed all his wild appetites beyond their measure. If he were to try and explain himself, what could he say? One night of weeping did not absolve him.

Still, Wiegraf kept his gaze locked on Zalbag, hoping with each blow that he would speak. If he spoke–if he explained–it would be different. If he were to bid his brother stop murdering him, it would be just.

He said nothing. Wiegraf thought, as he finally sank away from himself, that perhaps he moved to speak, but as he faded, he could not reach after his words.

He lingered only on a half-recollected impulse then: a lost instant where he nearly asked Zalbag what it would mean were he ever avenged.

Many were uncertain what was to happen to the Dead Men in the aftermath of the scene that Lord Beoulve’s sons left them. Miluda would have been hot for blood had Wiegraf not lived, but he lived. Her healers had little by way of supplies left to piece him back together, but he lived.

Zabag said no words of parting before he was spirited away from them, and those few members of Dycedarg’s company willing to speak with them in the few days they lingered gave no hopeful news save that the Nanten were not far behind them. By the time Orlandu’s men met them, it became known that the Hokuten riders who retrieved Lord Beoulve’s son had ridden south afterwards and that they had slaughtered the last of the company that had once held the fort. Rumors ran thick, however, that all the work they had done was to document a pile of corpses, dead either to starvation or the final madness of their leader, all of them found smashed to pieces beneath the cliffs that once sheltered them.

In the end, nothing befell them either for weal or woe. As Gustav predicted, they were left to the same fate they had always been given: food for Ordallian soil.

The one mystery that haunted them from that month of horrors was what befell poor Etien. In the little span of time when the Hokuten passed through their numbers, the boy was found dead and in much disarray: his body battered, his throat slit, and the side of his mouth sliced open. There was no investigation into the matter. It was generally carried that–whomever had undertaken it–had the right of doing so

None who gossiped about it, however, could quite agree as to who the culprit was.

It was over a year later when Wiegraf had cause to see Zalbag again, riding through the Lesalian streets in his order’s colors, skin pale as the white brick around him. Several marches towards Viura had failed them, to the point where Ivalice’s sons had marched themselves back into the thick of their motherland. Wiegraf had, in the meantime, recovered himself admirably: well set to send more men by the dozens to the graves their betters had dug them.

When he saw Zalbag, it was enough to make him consider that that miserable month in the Zelmonian northlands had never been: that he had imagined some nightmare between them that could not have transpired. He was handsome as all the flower of his rank. The sun shone bright on his red gold hair. If there had once been a scar on his face, time or else hard bought Gariland magic had mended it. His manner was calm, and he bore himself with all the confidence of a man never admitting to disgrace or defeat.

Wiegraf noted that the gear he wore featured a high collar.

As they passed one another, there was a moment in which Zalbag seemed as if he would turn to look behind him–glance over his shoulder and acknowledge Wiegraf looking back at him. There was an instant where their eyes might have met.

They did not. Still, Wiegraf kept looking at him for some time, watching him until he disappeared into the throng of human life around them: a splotch of white and blue like some fallen piece of sky.

His gaze did not leave him until he faded, and he bitterly remembered how once that gaze had been commanded–writ cold and red on the rocks behind them:

All behold the Savior of Ivalice.

---

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