Location: The Road to Skarra-Bree
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Summer
The campfire was a flickering orange bruise against the encroaching purple of the Orkney twilight. Still on the road to Skarra-Bree, Emcorae and Nathily had long since left behind the rolling, golden meadows of Pennal and the ancient, humming deep-green canopies of Arbola were a distant memory. Here, the steppe grasslands were scorched in the summer sun and the land offered little shade to tame the heat.
Two days had passed since Nathily’s rescue of Emcorae, and although they travelled together, little had been spoken between them. That evening, Emcorae sat hunched by the flame, the light playing across the hard lines of his young face. He was cleaning his katana, the rhythmic shrit-shrit of the whetstone against the steel the only sound in the vast silence of the plains.
Nathily watched him from across the fire, her heart performing that familiar, painful gymnastics routine. It had been more than a moon since she had defied the High Council, since she had ridden out like a gale to find her friend in Monthaven and then follow him on the Great Parkway. She could still see the image of him surrounded by that filth-ridden robber band, his silver armor tarnished, his eyes wide with a manic rage but also that horrific readiness to die that still haunted her. She had arrived just in time to save Emcorae from capture or worse, her own steel singing as she carved a path to his side. She had saved his life, but since that moment, it felt as though she were trying to save a ghost.
“You shouldn’t be here, Nathily,” Emcorae said, not looking up from the blade. His voice was flat, yet it startled the elfess from her reverie.
“We’ve had this conversation already, Em,” she replied, trying to keep her tone light, though it felt like treading on broken glass. “I’m a Novitiate of the Azora. I go where the danger is. It’s practically in the job description.”
“Don’t lie to me.” He finally looked up, and the intensity in his gaze made her flinch. “I saw your face in the Hall. I heard Teresius. You aren’t just ‘on a mission.’ You’ve thrown away the Fields. For me. For a man who didn’t even have the decency to ask for your help. And who doesn’t need it.”
The mention of the Alyssian Fields hung in the air like a physical weight. For the Amorosi, the Fields were not a mere myth; they were the biological and spiritual destination of their race. To be an Elf was to know that, at the end of untold centuries of life, one would transition into a realm where the song of the individual merged with the Great Chorus of Alyssa. It was a state of being where grief was forgotten and the soul was bathed in the perpetual glow of the Goddess’s presence. To be barred from the Fields was to be cast into the Vortex of the Unremembered—a cold, silent non-existence where an Amorosi would simply be dissolved into the grey nothingness of The Void – it was a fate worse than death.
Yet Nathily had looked at that eternal promise and traded it for a dusty road in Orkney and the company of a broken man whose love she was so desperate for that she was willing to sacrifice anything – everything – for.
“I made a choice, Emcorae,” the beautiful golden haired elfess said, her voice steadying. “I chose the living over the dreaming. The Fields will always be there, or they won’t. But you are here now. And you were going to let those bandits gut you like a fish at the ford because you’ve forgotten how to fight for anything but a grave.”
“I was doing fine,” he growled, the whetstone accelerating.
“You were committing suicide by proxy!” she snapped. “I saw you! You weren’t defending yourself when that net fell upon you! You think your ‘merciless demeanor’ makes you a warrior? It makes you a target. You’re so blinded by Lynsy’s ghost that you can’t see the friend standing right in front of you.”
Emcorae stood up, the katana gleaming like a shard of ice. “The friend in front of me is a fool! You’ve sacrificed eternity for a man who has nothing to give you. I can’t even give you friendship anymore because I’ve lost everything inside. I am a ‘Lone Wolf,’ Nathily. That was the prophecy of your people. Don’t you see, by staying, you aren’t saving me—you’re just making sure that when I fall, you fall with me.”
He turned and walked into the darkness toward the horses, his silhouette swallowed by the oppressive gloom of the Orkney night. The vast, flat horizon offered no shelter; here, the sky was a heavy dome of charcoal, and the stars felt distant and cold, like shards of ice scattered across a black marble floor. The wind, dry and relentless, hissed through the parched grass with a sound like a thousand hushed secrets.
Nathily remained alone by the fire, the small, orange blaze the only spark of warmth in a world that suddenly felt hollowed out. She watched the place where he had vanished, her heart aching with a stubborn, deluded hope that pulsed in time with the crackle of the lands around them. She saw the hardness in him, she well knew the purpose of his mission was to mete out death and destruction, and yet like foolish mortal lovers the world over, she convinced herself she could see the “real” Emcorae beneath the trauma. She imagined she could still see the boy who used to laugh at the summer rain in the Arbola groves, his eyes bright with a mischief that had since been replaced by a predatory stare. She told herself that if she just stayed long enough, if she was just strong enough to absorb his bitterness, he would eventually break through the crust of his own rage – and then, well then anything was possible.
Even still, the weight of her sacrifice pressed down on her—a literal eternity in the Alyssian Fields traded for a dusty trek through a dying kingdom. Although she refused to speak it aloud, the elfess knew the choice she as making was madness; she was bartering her own afterlife for a version of her would-be lover that might no longer exist. But in the crushing quiet of the night, with the firelight dancing in her eyes, she let herself believe it was a fair price to pay.
[As I transcribe this scene into my Apocrypha I can’t help looking at the foolish little girl. She’s still trying to find the ‘goodness’ in Emcorae. She’s looking at a man who was essentially a walking wound and seeing a hero. It’s adorable, really. She was willing to forfeit the Alyssian Fields—that boring, silver-leafed retirement home—for a few more days of watching him brood on the off chance he might one day ‘love’ her. What is this thing called “Love” that you mortals are so desperate for it? We gods have surely tricked you into chasing something that costs so much. And yet so many of you are willing to sacrifice everything for it. Why?]
The Long Road: The Summer Trek
The next morning, they broke camp in a silence that was more a truce than a peace. They were deep into the northern steppes now, a monotonous landscape that felt like a deliberate insult to the variety, beauty and lushness of Arbola.
Where Arbola was a symphony of moisture and shadow, Southern Orkney was a mono-tonal scream of heat and dying grass. The scorched steppe was a pale, sickly straw color, and the wind didn’t carry the scent of pine or blooming flowers from the forests that had pulled back from the road.
“The maps say Skarra-Bree is less than a tenday’s ride,” Nathily noted, adjusting the cinch on Mossflower’s saddle. She looked at her mount, then at Emcorae’s horse, Joanne. Both animals looked weary, their coats dusty and their spirits flagged by the relentless sun and the stinging grass.
“Let’s move off the road and into the steppe,” Emcorae said, his voice as dry as the scorched earth beneath them.
Nathily nodded her head and followed, trying to hide her emotions. She couldn’t help but notice Emcorae’s thick, walnut-brown hair – once kept in a neat braid befitting a scholar-warrior, it now hung loose and ragged, catching the dust of the road. Even in his brooding silence, the intelligence that often surprised Dallegheri still flickered in his hazel eyes. The passionate young amora’s heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She was the perfect physical foil to his darkening intensity. Tall and lithe, her form possessed the effortless strength of years of grueling Azora drills. Her blonde hair, the color of ripened summer wheat, was pulled back tightly, revealing the high, elegant cheekbones and the fierce, protective light in her eyes. She looked every bit the warrior, yet inside, she was a storm of agonizing longing.
They set out, keeping the main road within sight to their left, but remaining hidden within the waist-high yellow stalks of the prairie. The summer heat was a physical presence, a shimmering, oily veil that distorted the horizon and made the distant mountains look like teeth made of smoke.
As they rode, the trail narrowed, forcing their mounts closer together. Every time Emcorae’s armored leg brushed against her thigh, or every time he reached back with those strong, calloused hands to steady a shifting pack, a jolt of desperate affection surged through her. It was an emotion so powerful in her chest that it threatened to burst. She looked at the curve of his shoulder, the familiar line of his neck, and felt a wave of nausea at the sheer depth of her love. It was a hunger that had moved past desire into the realm of survival.
Novitiate! she scolded herself, her knuckles white as she gripped Mossflower’s reins. Focus. The mission is the King. The mission is the Myz. Your heart is a distraction—a weakness that will get you both killed.
But her heart was a defiant rebel, immune to the logic of the sword. It whispered that they were riding into a slaughterhouse. It reminded her that if a Myz truly walked the streets of Fubar, this might be the last time the sun ever warmed her skin. The thought of dying in the grey gutters of that cursed city without ever telling him—without letting him understand that he was the reason she had willingly cast away her place in the silver light of the Alyssian Fields—was a torture more exquisite than any hell Diked could devise.
She watched the way the sunlight caught the sweat on his brow, the way his jaw remained set in a permanent resolve. He was so close, yet he felt leagues away, drifting in a sea of his own making.
“Emcorae,” she started, her voice trembling, breaking the heavy silence like a glass shard. She pulled Mossflower slightly ahead, forcing him to look at her. “Before we reach the city… before the world catches fire… there’s something I have to—”
“Hey,” he blurted out, his eyes snapping toward the horizon, utterly oblivious to the confession trembling on her lips. He raised a hand, pointing toward a dark, distorted shape protruding from the shimmering grass just off the roadway. “What’s that? Look at the sky above it. Why is it so… still?”
Nathily’s blood cooled instantly, the confession she had been harboring dying in the back of her throat like a strangled bird. The warm, desperate tension that had been humming between them was severed by a primordial dread.
The two warriors urged Mossflower and Joanne forward, but the animals knew better. Joanne, usually the bravest of steeds, began to shy away, her hooves dancing a frantic, uneven rhythm against the parched earth. Mossflower let out a low, vibrating whinny—a sound of pure equine panic—as she tossed her head, fighting the bit. The air here had changed; it felt heavy, viscous, and carried a static charge that made the fine hairs on Nathily’s golden arms stand on end.
“Oh, Mother Alyssa,” Nathily gasped, the words muffled as she yanked her cloak up to cover her nose and mouth.
Just off the road sat what they had initially assumed was a macabre monument to Diked’s cruelty—perhaps a warning to rebels left to rot in the summer sun. But as they drew closer, the reality shifted into something far more deviant. It wasn’t a normal rot. There was no bloating, no darkening of the skin, no natural decomposition. Instead, it was a heap of intertwined humanity, limbs knotted together in a grotesque, waxy tangle of ash-grey flesh.
More horrifyingly, the pile was breathing a sickly, translucent vapor. A thin, oily steam rose from the mound of putrefaction, shimmering in the heat like a mirage. The scent hit them in a wave—a cloying, nauseating mixture of rancid tallow and a sharp, chemical sting that felt like inhaling lye. It burned the back of their throats, making their eyes water and their lungs recoil.
“Dead bodies,” Emcorae said. His voice was terrifyingly flat, a clinical observation that lacked even a shred of human revulsion. “But look at them, Nathily. They look worse than they smell, if that’s even possible.”
He was right. The flesh wasn’t turning the mottled black or green of a common corpse. It was becoming translucent, an oily, opalescent grey. It looked as if the very life-essence had been boiled out of the marrow, leaving behind a husk of spent fuel.
“Tragic,” Nathily whispered, her stomach churning with a violent rebellion that her Azora discipline could barely suppress. She forced herself to look at the details and assess the situation for what it was. “How many? I count… seven heads? Or are those just shapes in the wax?”
“Seven,” Emcorae agreed, his hazel eyes narrowed, tracking the way the vapor curled around the bodies. “But look at how they’re fused. This wasn’t a pile of discarded corpses. They were… melted together.”
He leaned forward in his saddle, his hand hovering inches from the hilt of his katana. “And look closer. What do you see? Or rather, what don’t you see?”
Nathily scanned the surrounding steppe, her eyes widening as the terrifying silence of the place finally registered. “The birds,” she breathed, her voice trembling. “There are no vultures. No crows. Not even a stray fly buzzing near the eyes.”
In the high blue of the heavens, a lone hawk circled in the thermals, but it refused to descend. It banked away sharply, as if sensing an invisible wall. The carrion eaters, driven by the most primal and unerring of instincts, recognized that this was not meat. It was not a feast provided by the cycle of life. It was poison. It was the “Shadow-Waste”—the physical runoff of a necrotic power that had no place in the world of the living. [Personally I found it quite beautiful].
The atmosphere turned brittle. As they backed their mounts away from the steaming mound, a heavy, suffocating silence descended—the kind that exists before a total collapse.
“Diked didn’t just kill these people,” Emcorae grated, his knuckles whitening as he gripped his reins. “He harvested them. He’s turned his own subjects into kindling for whatever nightmare he’s brewing in that palace. It’s some kind of plague, Nathily!”
The realization hit them like a physical blow. Their Azora training—years of perfecting the blade, the precision of a strike, the meditative focus of the mind—felt suddenly, horrifyingly irrelevant. They had been trained to fight soldiers, to outmaneuver monsters of flesh and bone, but no Mysstro had ever taught them how to parry a sickness in the air. How do you dual-wield against a miasma? How do you maintain the ‘Breath of Life’ when the very air is a traitor?
The uncertainty pressed in, breeding a swarm of frantic questions. If this was the outskirts, what was the capital? Had the Myz brought this contagion from the evil gods, or was it something Diked had unearthed in his madness? More terrifyingly—was there even a King left to kill?
“Nathily,” Emcorae whispered, his eyes wide and unfocused. “What if we get there and find a city of ghosts? What if Diked is already dead, consumed by his own creation? Is all of this—the trek, your sacrifice, the blood on my hands—for nothing?”
He looked at her confused and for a fleeting second, the spirited boy she had loved flickered behind the hazel veil. He looked pale, in the harsh sun, his jaw working with a frantic, rhythmic pulse. He was a master of the sword, but here, in the shadow of a new kind of death, he was just a young man lost in a nightmare.
“Every step closer to those walls is a step into a grave,” he said, his voice cracking. “This rot will eat you alive. I can’t let you go on. Please, Nat… turn back.”
Nathily felt the fear in her gut, but her resolve was a shield and there was no way she could abandon Emcorae now. She reached out, her fingers finding his hand—a jolt of electricity that grounded them both. “No,” she said, her voice brooking no dispute. “I am with you. I am your anchor. I will be the reason you’ll not only succeed in your mission, but will also come back out alive when all is said and done.”
Emcorae tried to offer a smile of thanks but his visage was still confused and hopeless. They turned the horses away from the road, pushing deep into the swaying, waist-high stalks of the steppe. But the man’s bravado only lasted a few hundred yards. The silence of the grasslands, the absence of birds, and the shimmering haze on the horizon finally added to the wave that washed over him and broke him.
Emcorae suddenly pulled Joanne to a halt and practically fell from the saddle. He collapsed into the dry grass, his knees hitting the parched earth with a dull thud. Then, the sound came—a low, broken sob that tore through the quiet – and tore Nathily’s heart to shreds.
The elfess was off Mossflower in but a breath. She rushed to his side, dropping into the grass and pulling him toward her. For once Emcorae didn’t resist. He buried his face in the crook of her shoulder, his chest heaving against her as he broke down completely, his tears hot against her skin.
“What is it for, Nathily?” he choked out, his voice muffled by her cloak. “The people I loved are dust. The girl I was going to marry is a memory. And now I’m leading you—the only light I have left—into a plague! We’re going to die here, aren’t we? We’re going to end up like that pile on the road, fused together in a waxy grave.”
Nathily held him tighter, her heart hammering inside. She dared not admit – even to herself – that if her final fate was to be that they would die together as a result of that evil rot, if it meant they’d be ‘intertwined’ in a similar macabre vision, she’d gladly accept that opportunity if only they could die as lovers. Yet she forced that horrific idea out of her mind as she looked down at Emcorae’s walnut-brown hair, now tangled and dusty. As she held him in her arms, Nathily felt the tremors racking his athletic shoulders, and her love for him reached a breaking point.
It was a physical pressure, a heat in her throat that screamed to be released. She wanted to tilt his head back, look into those hazel eyes, and tell him everything. She wanted to say: I gave up the Alyssian Fields because a thousand years of light is nothing compared to one day by your side. She wanted to confess that her heart had been his since the first time they sparred in Arbola!
It was time to admit the truth. She pulled back slightly, her hands framing his face. Their eyes locked—the spirited man and the blonde warrior maiden. The air between them was electric, charged with the unspoken. For a moment, the plague was forgotten, the mission was forgotten, everything outside their little bubble of mortality vanished – there was only the proximity of their breath and the crushing weight of their shared fate. There was only their future – together – surely both of them knew it. As Emcorae looked into her eyes, Nathily’s lips parted, the confession trembling on the tip of her tongue.
But then, she saw the truth – there was a fragility in his gaze. He wasn’t looking for a lover; he was looking for a reason to not disappear. Nathily’s heart hammered – to confess now felt like an anchor he didn’t need—a burden of guilt that he had cost her eternity. She couldn’t be selfish. Not now. Not when he was still this…broken.
With an effort that felt like tearing her own heart out, she swallowed the words. She broke their mutual stare and smoothed his hair back. Try though she might, she couldn’t help that her her touch lingered longer than it should have, her eyes searching his with an intensity that said everything her lips wouldn’t…couldn’t. Not yet.
“We aren’t going to die like that,” she whispered, her voice thick with the love she was suppressing. “We are going to find Diked. We are going to find the truth. And then we are going back to The Forest to live in peace…together.”
Emcorae took a shaky breath, leaning his forehead against hers. He didn’t speak, but he leaned into her support, his hands gripping her arms as if she were the only solid thing in a dissolving world. He was open to her now, the walls of the “Lone Wolf” leveled by the sheer horror of the steppe. Perhaps not yet in the way Nathily wanted, but at least not so dark as before – and in that she found hope.
They sat there in the tall grass for a long time, two golden figures in the deepening twilight, surrounded by a silence that felt like a predator’s bated breath. Nathily still felt the ache of her unspoken words like a physical wound, but as Emcorae finally stood and helped her up – she knew she had made the right choice for him, even if it was ripping her apart.
They mounted their horses once more, riding toward the north. The prophecy said he must go alone, but as their shadows stretched out across the dying grass, Nathily knew that as long as she breathed, he would never have to.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 