"You are a monster!" growled Nayden, trying to catch his breath under the weight of the Whisperer's forearm. "I hope you rot in hell!"

  Onto the man's face flowed a pale grimace. He tilted his head, and his eyes – two dead, white wells – narrowed slightly. "For dramaturgy, barely passing," he muttered, wiping his face with his free hand, as if he wanted to wipe from it the remnants of patience. "But for originality, absolute bottom."

  Nayden jerked, trying to kick, but in this position he was helpless. "This is your doing!" he screamed. "Sabotage! You destroyed the ritual! Lovro is dead because of you!"

  The Whisperer narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. "Ritual? Lovro?" His voice hardened. He loosened his grip slightly, but only to look at the boy from up close. "What the hell are you babbling about? I don't know any Lovro. I'm not interested in your village dances."

  "This is your doing! This whole slaughter! The fact that the ritual didn't work out!"

  The Whisperer shook his head with pity. "Pup, if I had wanted to destroy you, I wouldn't play with lizards. I simply wouldn't have come here and allowed you to set yourself on fire with this 'spark' of yours." He brought his face closer to Nayden's face. "The fact that the ritual didn't work out for you is a matter of your incompetence, not my conspiracy. The gods don't care about you, and the Order... well, the Order just proved its usefulness, dying in the mud. The fact that you are still breathing is a pure anomaly, and not a divine intervention."

  Nayden opened his mouth to scream out another insult, but suddenly the Whisperer's arm stiffened. The muscles of the man's forearm contracted violently, and then went limp. The Whisperer let go of the boy's throat and staggered backwards. He grabbed his temples with both hands, digging his fingers into his hair.

  "Ah..." he hissed through clenched teeth. "Not now, fuck, not now!"

  Nayden did not ask for the reason. He turned on his heel and rushed towards the forest, until his legs refused to obey him.

  The Whisperer stood with his legs apart, fighting not to collapse face first into the mud. "Okay... calmly..." he muttered to himself, clenching his hands on his head. He staggered onto a scorched beam. He raised his hands before his face – they were trembling. "What is this hole?" he wheezed, narrowing his eyes. "Where the fuck am I? Why does it stink here so much?"

  He looked around. Corpses of spawns, smoke, mud. Under his eyelids, afterimages began to flash: fire, a golden tunic, some kid screaming about honor. "Right. I saved the brat. Bravo me," he muttered. He touched a pulsing vein on his forehead. "And what was later? I remember fire... I remember the fight... and then? Damn it, what happened over the last ten minutes?"

  He hit himself with a fist in the forehead, as if he wanted to hammer the memories back into place. Nothing. Only darkness and a ringing in his ears. "Something drew me here," he hissed, straightening up with difficulty. "This greenhorn. He is an anchor, or someone used him as bait." These gaps were becoming increasingly dangerous. "I need to catch that little shit," he growled, moving with a shaky, but increasingly faster step. "I need to clean up this mess, before I wake up in a gutter and won't even remember how to take a piss."

  Nayden turned sharply, slipping on the bloody slush.

  "What are you doing, idiot?!" shouted somewhere behind him the Whisperer.

  Nayden did not listen to him. Lungs burned with living fire, and the stench of burning twisted his insides, but one image did not give him peace. Lovro. He had to return under the wall of the winery.

  He threw himself running into the smoke. Familiar streets ceased to exist, replaced by a labyrinth of smoking ruins and rubble. He jumped over the carcass of a horse, whose abdominal cavity acid had eaten out – steaming, purple entrails spilled over the entire width of the cobblestones.

  Nayden stepped into them, feeling the sticky heat soaking through the uppers of his boots. He did not slow down. He turned into an alley by the bakery. The wall of the building had collapsed, burying beneath it a stall and people. Some woman lay on her back, with fingers clenched on the stones, as if she tried to stop the life escaping from her. Her skirt smoldered quietly.

  Nayden tripped over her legs and fell to his knees, tearing his gloves on sharp fragments of bricks. "I'm sorry..." he spat out bitter mud, with difficulty lifting himself back onto his legs. "I'm sorry..."

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  He ran further blindly, guided exclusively by muscle memory. He passed a well and burst out onto the main square. Destruction was here absolute. The earth had been plowed by claws, the cobblestones melted into glassy, sharp puddles. Only under the stump of the collapsed wall of the winery did he spot the flash of dirty gold. A pauldron.

  He reached his friend, hitting his knees against the melted cobblestones. In battle frenzy he remembered only the roar and the wave of heat. His mind preserved a merciful, safe image: Lovro, who slowly, almost gently, slumps into the gray dust. But now the dust had settled.

  The steel edges of the crushed breastplate stuck deep in the torn chest of the deceased. The stench of heated iron and open entrails hit Nayden in the face with such force, that his stomach came up to his throat. He rested his dirty hands on the stones and spat into the mud pure bile, with a wheeze catching air, which suddenly stopped fitting in his lungs.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, forcing himself to look down. And froze.

  It was not the massacred body that stopped his heart. It was the shadows. They did not fall onto Lovro's face. They were crawling out of it. Dark, oily streaks oozed from the open mouth and empty eyes, winding around the dead neck like a choking umbilical cord. The fingers of the corpse's hands twitched. Lovro's jaw snapped. Broken, bleeding nails gouged deep furrows in the melted cobblestones, searching for a point of support.

  Nayden threw himself at him. He dropped to his knees on both sides of the crushed chest, pressing the twitching shoulders of his dead friend to the ground. "Let go..." with difficulty he swallowed the hard lump in his throat, pressing his hands to his collarbones. "I know that you were afraid. I know that it hurt like a motherfucker. But you must let go."

  The body beneath him jerked sharply, with an inhuman, mechanical strength. The shadows around the empty eyes hissed, stretching straight towards Nayden's face.

  "Lie down!" Nayden braced himself harder, ignoring the burning pain in his own, probably cracked ribs. Tears dripped from his chin straight onto the dirty breastplate of his friend. "If you get up... if this shit lifts you, you will eat out our throats! You won't do this to us! You cannot!"

  He grabbed him by the frozen cheeks. Under his fingers he felt how the dead muscles of the jaw tensed for another snap. "You won't get up, do you hear?!" He jerked his head, driving him harder into the glassy cobblestones. "Don't make me cut off your head. I am begging you, brother... stay in the mud. You won't get up..." He swallowed a choking sob. "I won't allow you to become this shit."

  He looked around in panic. He dug his fingers into the mud and grabbed a sharp, dirty piece of rubble. Granite the size of a fist.

  "Forgive me..." He looked into those dead, cloudy eyes, which just this morning had laughed at his jokes. "I am begging you, Lovro, just forgive me for this."

  He shoved the stone into his friend's mouth. Deeply. The granite grated against the teeth, crumbling the enamel, and blocked the throat permanently. The shadows hissed, choking under the pressure of the rubble.

  "Bite the earth. Not us. Bite the earth, you stubborn fool."

  But the corpse's fingers still twitched, scratching the mud in search of a hold. Nayden grabbed him by the belt and the massacred shoulder. He braced his boots against the slippery cobblestone and jerked with all his strength, ignoring the burning pain in his own ribs. He rolled the body onto its stomach. Face to the darkness. Face down.

  He dropped with his knee onto his friend's back, pinning him with his whole weight to the ground. He dug his fingers into his shoulders, by force forcing the dead muscles to remain in the mud.

  "Perun!" He threw his head back to the smoking sky. "Lord of Iron and Thunder... Relieve him of his watch."

  He squeezed his eyelids shut. "How did it go... fuck, how did it go? The sergeant always said it. Where is the sergeant? Why is no one here? Why were we alone?"

  He took a deep breath, swallowing the biting smoke. He pressed his forehead to the dirty collar of his friend.

  "I'm sorry, Lovro. I never listened. I thought that you would be the one burying me."

  The shadows under his knees rippled, and the body tensed unnaturally. Nayden pressed him down harder.

  "Axe!" He hit the cobblestone with a bloodied hand. "Axe up, body down! Yes... Cut off that which is dead, from that which is alive."

  He entered the rhythm of the soldier's prayer, which he had learned mindlessly over the years.

  "Let his anger soak into the roots. Let his blood feed the grass. I command you to rest."

  Through the spine of the deceased passed a last, long shiver. The muscles under Nayden's knee went completely limp.

  "The watch is finished, Lovro." He rested his forehead against his back. "You are relieved of duty. You no longer have to."

  The shadows hit the cobblestone in a dark frenzy, but the stone in the throat and the weight of the human body held firmly. The earth began to absorb them, greedily devouring the blackness. The tremors ceased definitively. The body beneath Nayden finally became just a pile of cooling meat and iron.

  Nayden did not get up immediately. He slid off his friend's back slowly, limply, as if someone had pulled all the bones out of him. He fell into the mud next to him. He did not try to get up. He did not even try to sit up. He simply lay on his side, with his face pressed to the dirty cobblestone, letting the cold of the stone soothe his flushed, tear-wet cheek.

  "Enough..." he whispered to the mud. The word barely passed through his swollen throat. "Enough already."

  He closed his eyes. For a moment he had the urge to simply stay here. Let those monsters return. Let that damn Whisperer finish him off. Let them take him. It was all the same. He simply had no more strength to take even one more step.

  Suddenly the air behind his back thickened. The sound of footsteps on the cobblestone was slow, measured, and irritatingly calm. Nayden froze.

  He did not have to guess who stood behind him. The smell of ozone and old blood was more distinct than the stench of the fire. The Whisperer found him faster than the boy had supposed.

  "Oh, how touching," reached him a cold, almost bored voice.