It wasn’t that the specter inside wore different equipment that gave me pause, though that certainly was a factor. The warden in question, much thinner in build than the rest, wore unfortunately familiar black leather and was toeing the ash of my campfire with intent, like it was investigating a crime scene. Then I saw the scabbard hanging from the creature’s belt.

  Where the other wardens carried what I figured were European-style straight swords of varying lengths, this sheath was curved, and not in an anime-friendly direction any weeb would instantly recognize as a katana. I couldn’t place why I recognized it, but I knew the shape belonged to a thinner version of a falcata, the bigger, sword-length relative of the kukri. I also knew falcata excelled against unarmored targets, targets much like myself.

  Well, fuck. I realized I’d spoken those two words aloud when the specter’s head jerked up.

  Wide-eyed, I quickly, quietly sidestepped out of the doorway as the specter moved with purpose to where I’d been standing. For a second I thought I’d gotten away with it. None of the other wardens seemed to notice me, why should this guy? Or so I thought.

  The moment he came to a halt at the doorway, tiny pinpricks of light began winking in and out through my entire field of vision and my stomach suddenly soured. Before I could draw another breath, the shadow’s head slowly rotated toward me. The space where the things eyes should have been glowed violent, radiant purple.

  Suddenly it was night and I was standing on the steps in the courtyard, yanking my blade out of the abomination in front of me. People were yelling and the air hung heavy with the stench of burning flesh. I opened my mouth and bellowed, “Breach! Fall back to the keep! FALL BACK!”

  Just as quickly, without any appreciable transition, I was on my knees in the gravel just feet from my tent, my lungs screaming at me as I suffocated and fought to keep from vomiting at the same time.

  “Quinn, there’s no time to argue,” I told the frightened, blood-spattered priestess behind me. Her face, already dark from exhaustion, tightened. Just as she opened her mouth to argue, something smashed against the keep’s iron-banded door, knocking dust into the air and sending one of the rivets flinging across the room. “Someone has to live.”

  I’d watched the monstrosity outside tear the gatehouse apart as everyone fell back on my orders, but it moved so quickly we barred the door before everyone made it inside. The screams outside had quieted some time ago, and I had little illusion what had happened to my fellow defenders. Earlier, I’d seen several of our allies dissolve into puddles of stringy goo in moments when it had bellowed forth a sickly green flame carrying gobbets of blackened pitch. Pitch that bubbled away at flesh and wood alike. I centered myself with a deep breath, eyes on the buckling door, and I heard the door behind us slam shut. Green Goddess, grant us, your favored sons and daughters, one last boon. Let our sacrifice be not in vain.

  Daylight bled through clenched eyes. Air never tasted so sweet, even though my throat burned with acrid vomit. I struggled to rise and barely managed to get on my hands and knees. The stone below me was awash in the remains of my breakfast, streaked with a dark oil that glistened with colors not seen by the human eye. Suddenly my gorge rose up with such violence I barely noticed the bile jetting out of my mouth as my limbs lost all strength.

  The door suddenly burst into ash, green flame eating through it and nearest two of my fellow Harvesters in an eyeblink. The misshapen visage of the beast filled the doorway, its lidless milk-white eyes seemed pleased as its long, serpentine tongue swayed limply from its maw. Our teachings were clear. Deny the enemy the luxury of thought, the luxury of enjoying its victory. I leaned into the charge, screaming my Goddess’s name.

  Light stabbed into my swollen eyes as I tried to use the wall to rise, but instead of gripping the stone and pulling me up, my hands contorted on their own. Every muscle suddenly spasmed at once and then randomly in an ever-quickening pattern. Something dark dragged its claws across my mind.

  I lay twitching against the far wall, my limbs at unnatural angles. The abomination had simply leaned back as I came for it and then swiped me out of the way like an annoyance once I cleared the door.

  As it leaned down toward the door, the chime of a small bell filled my ears and I heard Quinn’s voice, tinged with fear, with perfect clarity, “Aoibheann, hear my prayer. End this atrocity. Raise my defenders so that they may put our enemies to the sword. Smite the unclean, burn them to ash. Deny them their gods. Thresh their spirits unto the void.”

  The beast froze, as did the dozens of limbs sprouting from its diseased flesh.

  A deafening, deep bell strike rung out. —BE NOT AFRAID—

  Something gripped me, body and soul. Bone ground against bone as my limbs straightened on their own accord. The bell’s deep peal suddenly wavered and grew discordant before distorting into something chaotic and haunting. A veil of velvet shadow enveloped me as I reached for my sword. My spirit stretched as I stood, peeling away as I stumbled forward. Suddenly I was free of it and with perfect clarity I knew the interlopers must pay with their lives.

  Rapid, uselessly shallow breaths. The sun was burning weird patterns into my vision. Wracking coughs took me, rolling me onto my side. When that passed, I unsteadily propped myself up against the wall and rose to my feet.

  Leaning heavily into the wall with my head down, the pressure in my skull rapidly receded with every panting breath. “What. The. Fuck.”

  While I was sure I was the only person in my skin, I knew at a fundamental level I hadn’t been the only occupant of my mind. The presence had left a slowly fading oily stain on my mind and a bevy of memories that required conscious thought to differentiate from my own.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Already wrestling with what had just happened, a secondary horror settled onto my shoulders. I knew what the abomination at the door had been—or rather, the warden did. I shook my head, trying to keep my memories from intermeshing with his too completely. It had been a dragon. A young one, but dragon nonetheless, at least before the contagion had taken it, twisted it into something unnatural.

  The contagion. We’d dismissed the earliest tales of their arrival from the far north as flights of fancy, explained them away as stories told to scare children taken too seriously. How wrong we were. Once infested, the host grew ravenous, violent. Within the day, the host’s intellect would dwindle and they’d collapse. Apparent death followed quickly, yet the corpse would rise, seemingly unaware of its previous life. This risen form sought to only take life, and if it seemed to fear anything, it feared fire. Blisters and weeping wounds would form. Skin would slough away. Eventually, rot would take enough flesh to render the corpse immobile. Sometime after, stillness would reclaim it.

  Some creatures, like the dragon, had an opposing cycle, wart-like growths would appear, small at first. If the creature’s form managed to persist, limbs and other features never intended for their location would emerge from the growths.

  We never found out how it spread, only that it did. We never knew the full reach of the contagion, only that the victims it favored were either large of body or quick of mind.

  I shivered and my mouth echoed a thought not my own. “We were lucky, isolated here. Far from the worst of it all. Not far enough, though. Not nearly far enough.”

  Like a tide, the strange memories receded with my nausea. Also like a tide, they left driftwood and debris behind, a chain of brief memories, moments of distilled darkness. Our Lady’s unsummoned appearance before our high priestess in the middle of the night, proclaiming the emergence of evil beyond the cycle of this world, calling us to ready our arms and march to the aid of our brothers, our neighbors. With every successive memory fragment, Aoibheann appeared successively more wan, more haggard when she delivered the latest occurrences. First a village fell, then a county, then a city-state. One by one, ally or enemy, nations fell and our forests burned. Then the infested arrived at our borders here at the Glade. How her eyes trembled when I suggested those who could not fight take to the trees while the rest of us joined our allies at the ancient fortress perched upon the forest’s heart. We knew from the words of fallen neighbors that beacons would draw in the infested. We would do our duty so that others might live.

  When the final memory finally ebbed, horror had left me. I was calm in a way I hadn’t been for years, since a patrol I’d been on went pear-shaped. I’d made my peace with death that day and it was a minor miracle my ticket hadn’t gotten punched.

  I centered myself with another long breath, holding nothing but respect for the fallen warden. Most men falter when death’s gaze falls upon them, but the warden stepped forward willingly for the sake of others.

  I swapped backpacks for the cargo-focused one and packed the first load in silence. When I stepped out onto the landing, the warden guarding the top of the stairs suddenly turned to face me. I half expected it to attack or attempt to grapple me like warden inside had. Instead, it silently pounded a mailed fist against its chest and bowed its head ever so slightly. Reflexively, I returned the gesture. The warden returned to its duties.

  Crossing back to where my rope hung, only one other warden took notice of my passing, the one standing watch over the rope itself. That warden merely offered a respectful nod when I approached, let the hand slide off his unseen sword hilt, and walked off to continue his eternal patrol.

  A dozen new faces shot up at me the moment I began pulling the rope up. Rowan barked at them to get the travois they’d brought with them ready, so I didn’t bother with any sort of acknowledgement. Lowering what I’d brought didn’t take terribly long, and after giving Rowan an estimate of how many trips this would take on my part, I got back to it.

  Several hours later, I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and wiped the sweat from my brow. Preparing to set off on the last trip, a thought wiggled into my head, and I looked to my left. The dragon knocked him off the steps and against the wall over there. When I knelt by the wall, a simple glance at the door overhead confirmed I had the right place.

  I spent a few seconds staring at the ground. “Eh, dunno what I expected.”

  When I stood, a glint from the rock a few feet away caught my eye. It wasn’t until I’d brushed off the ring and the chain attached to it that it occurred to me that the detritus wasn’t exactly dirt. Nevertheless, both chain and ring were otherwise untarnished, made with a bright white metal the warden’s memories filled in as a platinum alloy.

  The ring’s simple design tugged at sorrow and longing deep in my heart before I tucked it and the chain into a pocket. The tears I wiped away as I trudged on weren’t mine, at first. Approaching the rope for the last time I idly wondered if Quinn had survived.

  By the time I’d lowered myself to the ground, the last group of militia had started off.

  Rowan stepped closer to me, eyes on the rope overhead. “Leaving the rope, then?”

  I nodded. “I suppose you could say I came to terms with the wardens, Ruadhán.”

  A few seconds of silence passed. I glanced over to find her staring at me, wide-eyed.

  “Is something wrong?” I quietly asked. When she blinked at me and swallowed, I realized I’d used a different name for her, a pet name. Little red one.

  Her composure didn’t quite break, but the pain in her voice promised she wasn’t far from it. “How? He fell that night. How?”

  The hair on my neck prickled. Numb fingers went to the precious cargo I’d just retrieved. When the sunlight caught the ring as it swung from the chain, her eyes widened further. The next thing I knew my ribs were creaking under Rowan’s embrace as she quietly cried a single name into my shoulder, Flynn.

  Quickly overcoming my initial shock, I returned her embrace and ignored the sympathetic loss growing in my heart. I glanced over to find the other Harvester had turned away. Whether that was because the Syr frowned upon public grief like this or the other Harvester did so out of respect, I couldn’t tell. When Rowan slowly pulled away from me and her eyes sought to point anywhere else but me, I had my answer: both.

  Instinctively, I reached out before she could step away and pulled her back in. “Mourning your fallen is not weakness, Rowan.”

  She pushed me away with a scowl that didn’t quite fit the pain in her eyes. “What would you know?”

  Is comforting someone looked down as well? I pursed my lips in frustration momentarily. “Of losing family? My sister is missing. She might be dead for all I know.” Her features softened. “Losing comrades? I’ve lost more than a few. Not long after I first joined, my unit got ambushed. We lost over a dozen Rangers that day and my name was nearly on that list. You saw the scars.”

  Uncertainly flickered across her face as her hostility evaporated. “I— I’m sorry, Samuel.”

  I glanced away as I sighed. “Nothing to apologize for, Rowan. Your customs aren’t mine. My friends call me Sam.”

  Her eyes drifted toward the other Harvester. “Flynn was my brother, my last remaining family. I never got to say goodbye.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “Family means a lot to me, too. Once I get settled in, we can get some strong drink and swap stories. Sounds like you’ve got plenty you need to tell.”

  Emotional turmoil played across her face for a long second before she nodded. “I might take you up on that. Still, I think you should be the one carrying this. Quinn deserves to know.”

  I accepted the ring back and fell into step.