Chapter 18: Names of the Missing
The Return Bell maintained a sustained, rhythmic battering of iron against iron that echoed from Greenmarch Hall down into the mud-choked lower lanes of Hartsgate.
Callis woke to the sound of a city bleeding.
He sat up alone in the narrow bed of Room Four, the freezing air biting his bare skin. The tangled sheets smelled heavily of Mara’s sweat and the sharp, musky scent of their coupling, but she had slipped away hours ago to return to the relentless machinery of the tavern downstairs.
Callis swung his legs over the side of the mattress. His body ached deeply from the physical demands of the night, a sensation entirely distinct from the labor of the March, yet the frantic ringing cut cleanly through his lingering lethargy.
Foregoing the washbasin, he pulled on his trousers, his linen tunic, and the boiled leather cuirass. The armor fit better this morning. The stiffest edges had softened under Yselle’s oiling and his own body heat to wear more like a second skin. He grabbed his boar-sword, took the stairs two at a time, and pushed through the common room.
The Stag & Ember sat practically empty. The few remaining patrons stood by the front windows, staring up the hill toward the Guild district.
Callis stepped out into the freezing morning and joined the current of heavy boots, rattling armor, and anxious townsfolk pushing toward Greenmarch Hall.
When he reached the wide stone stairs, the chaos stalled his momentum.
The steps were slick with fresh blood and the glowing, toxic residue of magical blight. Hastily commandeered flatbed wagons were arriving directly from the March Gate, loaded with bodies rather than merchant goods. This was not the aftermath of a single ambushed party; it was a coordinated, desperate retreat.
"Clear the lane!" a Guild enforcer roared, shoving a gawking merchant backward into the mud. "Make way for the Ashward clerics!"
Callis stood at the base of the stairs, his hand resting instinctively on the leather-wrapped hilt of his sword.
Two surviving party members dragged a vanguard fighter off the back of a flatbed cart. The man had taken a localized thermal blast, the metal of his armor warped and bubbling directly into his flesh. He screamed with a high, thin pitch that scraped against the eardrums.
Callis stepped forward, drawing his sword halfway out of its sheath. He searched the perimeter, wanting to find a beast that had followed the wagons in, desperately wanting to be the capable adventurer he had paid to become.
"Put the steel away, boy!"
The sharp reprimand cracked over the din. Braska Hale stood on the middle landing, her ink-stained apron covered in a spray of dark blood as she gripped a thick bundle of canvas stretchers.
"You can't stab a burn wound!" Braska shouted, pointing a bloody finger directly at him. "If you have two working arms, grab a pole and haul meat!"
The heroic fantasy of standing firm against the dark with a drawn blade shattered against the gruesome reality of the stone steps.
Callis looked at the half-drawn boar-sword in his hand, then at the screaming man with the fused breastplate.
He shoved the blade back into its sheath. He ran up the steps, grabbed the opposite end of a canvas stretcher from a breathless scout, and hauled.
For the next three hours, Callis suspended conscious thought to become a beast of burden.
He hauled stretchers from the carts into the Open Writ Hall, which had been rapidly converted into a triage center. When the Hall reached maximum capacity, he hauled the overflow down the street to the Weeping Mother’s Shrine.
He carried a woman whose legs had been pulverized by a burrowing tremor-beast. He carried a man coughing up pale blue spores, his visible veins glowing with a sickly ambient light. He carried a boy missing the lower half of his jaw.
His fine linen tunic soaked through with other people's blood. The boiled leather cuirass collected smears of caustic green sap and ash. His blistered heel eventually broke open, filling his boot with a hot, slick pain that he simply filed away and ignored.
He hauled, he set the stretchers down, and he ran back to the mud to retrieve the next casualty.
Around noon, the influx of carts finally stopped. The Guild sealed the March Gate.
Callis found himself standing in the central nave of the Ashward Infirmary.
The quiet, sterile tomb he had visited days prior had vanished. The air hung thick with the smell of burned flesh, copper blood, and the sharp ozone tang of raw healing magic. Clerics in grey robes darted between the tightly packed rows of cots, their hands glowing with pale gold and vibrant green light as they poured restorative mana into failing bodies.
Callis leaned against a stone pillar near the doorway, his chest heaving and his hands shaking violently from the adrenaline and physical strain. The hauling was done, leaving him adrift in the chaos.
"Hold him down!"
The commanding voice cut cleanly through the groans of the dying.
Callis turned to find Elowen Valehart standing beside a cot against the far wall. Her pristine pale grey dress was soaked from the waist down in dark, sluggish blood, her golden hair escaping its neat braid to cling to her sweat-damp forehead.
A massive, heavily scarred mercenary thrashed violently on the cot beneath her. A jagged wound stretched across his abdomen, but dark, purple tendrils of necrotic magic spider-webbed outward from the gash to actively consume the healthy tissue.
Elowen’s hands glowed with a blinding white light, signaling high-tier purification magic. She attempted to press her palms directly into the wound to burn the rot out, but the delirious mercenary bucked wildly, throwing two younger clerics completely off his arms.
"I need his shoulders pinned!" Elowen shouted, the glow illuminating the desperate set of her jaw. "If he breaks the seal before I burn the root, the necrosis will reach his heart!"
Callis crossed the room at a sprint.
He threw himself over the cot, ignoring the sulfurous stench of the rotting magic, and grabbed the mercenary’s flailing arms. Driving his elbows down onto the edge of the mattress for leverage, he pressed his entire upper body weight across the man’s chest.
"Hold him!" Elowen commanded.
"Do it!" Callis grunted, his boots sliding on the bloody stone floor as he fought to keep the massive man pinned against the mattress.
Elowen plunged her glowing hands directly into the open abdomen.
The mercenary released a scream so agonizing it made Callis’s ears ring, surging upward with a frantic, terrifying strength. Callis’s bruised ribs throbbed in protest as the heavy cuirass dug into his own flesh, but he locked his jaw, hooked his leg around the iron cot frame, and bore down with his entire frame.
Black smoke erupted from the wound, smelling of dead earth, as the blinding white light from Elowen’s hands flared outward to wash over Callis’s face with the heat of a furnace.
The mercenary collapsed.
The violent thrashing ceased, and the man let out a long, rattling exhale before going completely limp. Callis stayed pinned across the chest, panting heavily as he waited for the surge to return.
"You can let him go," Elowen said quietly.
The blinding light faded from her hands, revealing skin covered to the wrists in gore.
Callis pushed himself off the cot, stumbling backward as his legs suddenly weakened, and caught himself against a stone pillar. He inspected the mercenary's abdomen. The wound remained terrible, but cleanly cauterized flesh had replaced the creeping purple veins, and the man’s breathing had stabilized into a steady rhythm.
Callis looked at Elowen.
She braced herself against the edge of the cot with her head bowed, the massive magical exertion visibly dragging her down as her shoulders trembled. She reached into a wooden bucket of clean water to wash the worst of the blood from her arms, drying them with a coarse towel while taking a slow breath to compose herself.
Turning to face him, she surveyed his ruined clothes, the drying blood smeared across his cheek, and the exhaustion hollowing out his eyes. Her gaze dropped to the heavy iron boar-sword sitting untouched in its leather sheath.
"You didn't draw your sword today," Elowen noted.
"There was nothing to fight," Callis replied, his voice a hoarse rasp. "Only things to carry."
Elowen’s pale green eyes searched his face.
The last time she had looked at him, she had seen a tourist looking for a romantic tragedy. Now, she saw a young man who had waded into the worst of Hartsgate’s reality, covered himself in its filth, and used his body to hold a dying man to a table.
She walked past him, moving toward a massive dark wooden board mounted on the wall near the shrine's entrance: The Ledger of the Lost.
A younger cleric handed her a piece of parchment. Elowen took a piece of white chalk and began writing names on the dark wood.
Kaelen Vance. Torin of the Ash. Lyra. Four Unidentified (Briar Path Route).
Callis stood a few feet away, listening to the chalk scratch against the wood.
"You were wrong," he said quietly.
Elowen paused, the chalk hovering over the board. "About what?"
"I don't think I am going to win," Callis said, staring at the growing list of the dead. "I don't think this is a story anymore."
Elowen lowered her hand, looking at the names she had just inscribed. She had written her own husband's name on this exact board three years ago. She turned her head to look at him, the profound stillness of her grief remaining, though the coldness had cracked by a fraction.
"That is a shame," Elowen murmured, her voice carrying a heavy sorrow.
"Why?"
"Because boys in stories are spared by meaning," Elowen said, her eyes dropping to the blood soaking his tunic. "Men die whether it means anything or not."
She stepped closer to him. She didn't offer the fiery distraction of Mara, nor the grounding challenge of Yselle. She simply reached out with her clean hand and gently wiped a smear of soot and dried blood from his jawline.
The touch was incredibly light, almost hesitant, as if she were afraid that touching something real would tether her back to a world she had been trying to leave behind.
"Go home, Callis," Elowen whispered, pulling her hand away. "Wash the blood off. You survived the day."
"I'll come back," Callis said, needing her to know it. "If they need stretchers carried tomorrow. I'll come back."
Elowen looked at him for a long, quiet moment.
"I know you will," she said softly.
She turned back to the dark wooden board and picked up the chalk.
Callis walked out of the shrine. The sun had broken through the heavy iron clouds, casting sharp shadows across the temple district. He was exhausted and filthy, with Seraphine Damaris waiting for him at the top of the hill and the beast roads shifting at the bottom of it.
He was still wearing borrowed armor, and he still carried a weapon he barely understood. The terror of the thing moving beneath the Green March had not left him. But as he walked back toward The Stag & Ember, the hollow, fraudulent feeling in his chest had vanished. Today, he had carried the weight.