He avoided the main roads due to his condition and so had become familiar with trails such as these, long tracks of trodden earth where his only company came as sound – the crunch of dirt beneath his heels, the wind rustling through leaves and wheat-stalks, the whispers upon his back. On occasion he would cross paths with some merchant or peasant but kept his gaze averted, listening to them pass by. Their footsteps and heartbeats would quicken; if they rode horses, the animals would become terribly uneasy. Those who traveled these provincial roads were unused to a sight such as himself. This towering, motley mangle of plate mail and priestly finery, this shaggy wolf’s head jutting out from underneath its cowl, and that was to say nothing of his sword. Only once had he been accosted by highwaymen, and they’d been reeking of drink, either to steel their courage or abandon their senses. He’d dealt with them as mercifully as he could, and resisted the urge to crunch their skulls like crisp apples between his teeth.

Today there had been no one. He’d spent the morning on a dirt road that cut between jaundiced wheatfields, under a morose and clouded sky. The blade on his back was the most striking color here – striking blue, violently blue, enough to pain the eye if watched too intently. The blade was jagged and broken as though it had been inexpertly chipped from crystal, but within its depths could be glimpsed another sword of cleaner, finer make, slumbering amidst motes of light like orbiting stars. In its pommel was set a cloudy gem, and the smothered sunlight overhead shone upon it like grease.

Then, he came to a halt. The grey snout under his hood tilted this way and that. He sniffed, growled low in his throat, and turned from the road, walking through the fields. It was drawing close to harvest season but the wheat also seemed depleted, hanging limp and rotted on its stalks; several plants crumbled like dust at his touch. He continued in this manner until he came to a flat plane of stone perhaps ten meters wide, chipped at the edges but otherwise strangely clean, unmarked by vandals. He shook off his cowl, angled his head.

He hadn’t heard birdsong all morning. His ears didn’t pick up the least skitter of insects underfoot. The wheat-stalks bowed as though begging for alms.

He patrolled the circle’s circumference, slowly, eyes to the ground. He knelt, sniffed, rose again, then reached back and cradled his sword’s hilt.

“A remnant,” he said. “Unadorned but ancient. Druidic? Or similar enough. Not catalyst, but possibly a focus.”

He closed his eyes, though this would have been hard to tell for any onlookers – those eyes were set far too deep in his head in this shape, the same burning blue as his blade, glowing like sparks within the skull. For a time he remained like that, though his head went through subtle twitches and nods as though he was conversing with someone unseen.

“Yes. Air tastes wrong. Another visitation at nightfall, most like. Hrmm.”

If the wind blew a certain way, it smelled of woodsmoke and manure. The scent of whatever meager village bound to harvest this diseased wheat. He turned in that direction, fangs glinting uneasily.

“Ill-suited for visitors,” he said. “But there is little time for delay. To fail would shame us all.”

Again he waited. The sword’s interior stars spun on their axes.

“Then we are in accord,” he said, and set off.

*          *          *

The village presumably had a name, though the signpost had either been missed or blown over by weather – there were countless like it, gathered around larger towns like flies around a carcass. Roads that were little more than sections of stomped dirt, thatched roofs futilely repaired against ill weather. Their inhabitants did what work that could find and prayed to what gods would listen, and they either left or died here, largely unchanged from what they had been at birth.

He was not unfamiliar with the brevity of human lifespans, but it had always seemed to him a dreary affair, and these settlements drearier still – though that wasn’t why he gave them a wide berth. The wound that had sealed him in this form still burned beneath his armor, corroding his thoughts; the merest whiff of livestock set him drooling, and where his appetite was concerned, there was little difference between the animals and their human caretakers. He’d instead chased down wild prey and force himself to cook it, even as his belly slavered for raw meat.

Once he had been nobility. Now he drank at streams and ate burnt rabbit off punky wood. He bore it as best he was able.

In any case, there were few such scents to be found here. His nose picked up a handful of chickens and one sickly pig, but the village otherwise had the same aroma of ashen deprivation as the surrounding fields. His greeting was what he’d expected – a fusillade of slamming doors and shutters, the few peasants milling about outside charging into their homes. One tripped over his own feet and half-rolled, half-crawled over the threshold, pulling the door shut behind him.

His own pace was unhurried. He stayed in the middle of the road, careful not to let his gaze linger too long on any single home – no reason to let these people think he was here for prey. Eventually he stopped and again touched his blade-hilt.

“Here?” he asked.

A fenced-off hut to his left, beside which was built a rough but sturdy awning. Underneath that roof was an anvil, forge, workbench. Not hard to guess the vocation of its inhabitant.

“Here,” he said. “Yes. The convergence.”

He stepped past the gate and examined the forge. Its coals were cold. Smithies in these villages were, on the whole, not terribly skilled – generally called upon to shoe a horse or hammer a bulge out of a frying pan, with maybe the occasional blade or repair job for passing militia – but the tools on the workbench looked well-cared for, and were laid out with rigid precision. Their owner was either a proper craftsman or fancied themselves as one.

He returned to the front door and knocked – gently, but it still rattled on its hinges. Something whimpered inside. Footsteps across planks. Then the door opened and the house’s owner looked up at him.

The smith was not a muscular man – instead he was wiry, bald, as though all excess had been shaved away from him. His chin jutted like a plowshare and his expression was surprisingly fearless. A hint of wariness, but mostly curiosity.

“Afternoon to you,” he said. His voice was hoarse from years of coalsmoke.

“Send it away,” someone whispered from behind – the smith’s wife, presumably.

The smith instead looked him up and down again. He towered a full foot above the doorframe itself, so this took a moment. He stared especially hard at the pommeled gem hanging over his shoulder.

“My grandad was well-traveled,” said the smith. “Liked to tell tales. The elven ones, in particular. It’s my understanding that only a righteous man could wield that sword.”

“Were it so simple,” he replied.

“You a cleric?”

“Of sorts.”

The smith snorted. “Could be you’re the answer to our prayers.” He turned away. “I suppose you’d better come in. Watch your head.”

Inside the house, the hearth had been lit, which lent some color to its interior – sparse, clean, but in a way that somehow only accentuated its bleakness. Depression hung over this place in a cloud, particularly around the smith’s wife, a frail and mousy-haired young thing who might have once possessed a sort of everyday beauty but had now been reduced to little more than one of the hearth’s shadows. She stood and shivered by the fire as he shut the door behind him.

The blade was leaned precariously against a nearby cupboard. The smith pulled out two of the three chairs and poured water from a jug. He was about to refuse the offer – hard for him to drink with any dignity, in this shape – but the smith wordlessly pulled open a cabinet containing four tin bowls and took one and filled it and set it on the table. He glared at it for a moment, but the brusqueness of the gesture implied that the smith meant no insult.

“We’ve little else to offer in the way of hospitality,” the smith grunted, sitting down. “You might have noticed, Ser…?”

“Vicario,” he said. The chair creaked in protest under his weight. “Priest of Selûne. Itinerant, as of late.”

“Spreading the good word of the Silver Lady?” he asked dryly.

“I’ve been searching for a girl. She would call herself Fang, most likely. Half-elven, white of hair, sharp of tooth. Coarse of manner, despite my best efforts.”

The smith shook his head. “There’ve been no elves in these parts since my father’s time.”

“I see.”

The firelight pooled in the crooked angles of the smith’s face. Vicario could again feel that stare rummaging through him. He seldom thought much of humans – force of habit, even in his current predicament – but already he’d revised his estimation of the smith. Not an educated man, perhaps, but one who’d nevertheless come by intelligence in his own way.

“My grandad told me some of Selûne’s clerics thought of your condition as a blessing,” he said. “But I’ve never heard of one who went traipsing in broad daylight looking that way.”

“I was injured. Only this shape can bear the wound.”

“That and you were separated from this girl? Sounds like you’ve had your share of misfortune.”

“It isn’t my misfortune that brought me here,” he said.

The smith took his cup, drank, set it down like a gavel. “I said we had little to offer for hospitality. Less still for any sort of payment.”

“I require no payment,” he said. “Though I’ve grown partial to salt pork, if you have any to spare.”

The hearth crackled. The smith looked past Vicario, to the shape of his wife beside the fire. She’d looked over her shoulder and her haunted gaze met his. Then she turned back to the fire, and the smith sighed and began to speak.

It had started about two months ago. Little more than a disturbance in the atmosphere, a sort of general ill-feeling – restless sleep among the townspeople, nausea, inflamed tempers. The crop had started to falter not long after that, becoming weak and limp no matter how desperately they tended the soil. The skies became ever-clouded but the rains had ceased, and the air hung heavy like a soiled dishcloth. Then the chickens had started to die, cold and feathery lumps atop stillborn eggs. Then the pigs, then the horses. And then, the children.

Behind Vicario, the smith’s wife made a sort of half-choked sound, deep in her throat. He could make out the rhythm of every heartbeat in this house, its quietly frantic pulse. He took up the water bowl, delicately lapped at it. It was slightly sour but otherwise palatable. At least the water hadn’t yet been tainted.

The townspeople had prayed fervently, the smith went on, but no intervention came. They were poor as dirt but had nevertheless sent somebody off yesterday to the nearest town, to beg a cleric for aid. But the smith was skeptical they would ever return – the messenger was an unmarried man, the land was dying, and it was an arduous enough trip on foot. Better to just be quit of the whole thing.

“Is that how you feel?” Vicario asked.

“It’s how some feel, and I can’t rightly blame them,” said the smith. “But as for myself? That little forge is my livelihood. Even now, I’m loathe to leave it.” He stared glumly into his cup. “Besides, you stay on a piece of land long enough, you become bound to it. You’re elven somewhere under that pelt, aren’t you? You should understand.”

Vicario sighed, and in that sound was a heavy freight of unspoken memories. He picked up his bowl again, raised it to his lips, and paused.

He said, “I wouldn’t, girl.”

Every head turned to the corner of the room, where the sword rested. A child now stood there, frozen, her hand half-extended to the blade. She turned to them, her body all about to flinch. The child was her mother in miniature, though there was something of her father in the set of her jaw.

“They’ll abide your touch,” said Vicario, “but the sword is heavier than it looks. You wouldn’t want it to topple on you.”

“She’s spent too long watching me work,” said the smith, glaring at her. “Become over-familiar with weapons.”

He slurped at the water and set the bowl down. “And what happened to her sibling?”

No response, save for the crackle of flames.

“Four bowls, but three settings at the table,” Vicario said matter-of-factly. “And I doubt you keep extra cutlery for guests. It was recent, wasn’t it?”

“He was taken.” This from the wife, in a voice toneless and broken as a creaky floorboard.

“Same as the others,” the smith said bitterly. “Started with bad dreams. Fever. He wouldn’t eat or drink. No amount of prayer would break it. Slipped away less than a fortnight ago.”

The girl didn’t show any particular unease at his appearance, but she seemed diminished, eyes dull. He could feel the sword’s murmurs in his marrow.

“You’re dealing with some manner of wraith,” he said. “As you’ve likely assumed by now. It preys on the weak and gorges on the misery engendered by its deeds. A misery that spreads more weakness, creates more prey.” He paused. “It’s settled on her, next.”

The smith pounded the table with such suddenness that even he almost jumped. The girl, for her part, showed little reaction to the news.

“I knew, damn it,” he snarled. “She’s been having the same dreams. And how did you know? Did you follow it with that mangy sniffer of yours?”

He let the insult pass. “If you like. I traced its scent from the fields. It coalesces here.”

“We have to flee,” said the wife, in her fractured voice.

“You could. Abandon your home. Of course, if you did escape, it would simply find a new victim. This village won’t last much longer beneath its influence.”

“But you can banish it,” said the smith.

“Yes.”

“Out the goodness of your priestly heart.”

“Think of it more selfishly, if it suits you. An occasional reminder of what I am. What I’m meant to be.”

“Better priestly than beastly, eh?” He gave a brief, sardonic smirk, and then wiped it away. “Is there anything we can provide? I doubt my tools will be of much use to that blade.”

“The blade alone will suffice,” he said. “However. I would ask for the girl’s assistance.”

There was a moment of volatile contemplation. Vicario remained perfectly still as the floorboards creaked behind him.

“Please tell your woman,” he said, without turning, “to remove her hand from that kitchen knife.”

She froze with her grip on the handle, complexion chalky, her mouth a bloodless line. The girl stood against the wall like she’d been painted there. But the smith appeared lost in thought, rubbing that impressive chin.

“Three days ago she fled us,” he said. “Took one of my unfinished blades and went to confront whatever tormented this place. The sword was barely sharp enough to cut bread, but she still made it all the way to the town’s edge before I dragged her back. What is it that you need her for?”

“It seeks her,” he said. “It would find me waiting.”

Both men looked to the girl. That cloudy stare of hers had lightened a little. There was a hunger in it. The smith chewed his lip, then stood, and pointed one knobbly finger at Vicario.

“If she should come to harm,” he said, “then may that ‘blessing’ devour whatever’s left of the man you were.”

“That is agreeable,” he said.

*          *          *

The sky above the fields had darkened to the color of an anvil, a gloom that seemed to leach away what little color remained here – except for the sword, which glowed as immaculately as ever. More so, now that night was falling. He had taken the girl to that featureless stone circle amidst the wheat, commanded her to stand in its center, then reverently set the blade down several paces away and started scratching at the rock around her with one gauntleted claw – looping, ornate sigils, which themselves looped around her feet.

“This was a place of power once,” he said, continuing to write. “Its purpose long scoured away by time. But a memory of it yet lingers. The shade is not bound to it, but attracted. Hrmm. Possible that this site is what called it down upon you in the first place.”

“Mother says we angered the gods.”

The girl hadn’t spoken a single word before now, and her voice was still so faint that even with his sharpened hearing it took a moment to realize she’d spoken at all. He glanced up at that expressionless face, powdered with freckles, framed by mousy hair.

“My brother was still little,” she said. “What did he do wrong? He ate too much at dinner. He snored. Did that anger the gods?”

He resumed his work. “I doubt this happened through any fault of yours.”

“Then why?”

“Monsters such as these are ever awaiting their time. The world goes through phases, same as the moon. Waxing. Waning.” His gauntlet scratched and scratched. “These are dark times. Growing darker. A world receptive to evil. And evil goes where evil’s welcome.”

“That isn’t fair.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but his silence was its own kind of answer.

Once the circle of symbols was finished, he encased it within another circle, its etchings even finer. By the time he was finished, the sun had dipped fully below the horizon. The two of them were little more than implications in the smothered night, limned in blue by Vicario’s sword.

“What should I do?” asked the girl.

“You wait. And look up. In time, something wicked will manifest. The wraith prefers to work subtly, formlessly, but in this place, with its prey so close to hand, I doubt it will be able to resist appearing in full.” He rose to his feet, loomed over the girl. “You must not falter, no matter how your knees buckle. You must not look away or cry out. And above all else, you must not leave this circle. Is this understood?”

The girl might have nodded, or it may have just been a wayward twitch. Either way, it seemed to be enough for him. He walked off and sat crosslegged before the sword, head down, and then became as still as the rock underneath them.

The girl turned skyward.

Her brother had been three years her junior. A placid, owl-eyed child with cheeks like two fistfuls of dough – he really did eat more than his fair share at dinner, and she’d sometimes teased him by kneading his round little head between her palms. But he’d clung to her with that type of silent adoration that some children reserve for older siblings, and her mother had asked her to look after him, so she had. They’d spent days loitering around their father’s forge as he tinkered with whatever work he’d found that week, regaling them with his grandfather’s stories – everyone else in the village had long grown sick of his jawing, but his children were ever a captive audience. On some evenings they would creep away from home and into the fields, looking up at the moon. With all her father’s tales of elven blades and the clergy of Selûne, she’d sometimes think of it as the Silver Lady’s eye, slowly opening and closing within that overhanging darkness, watching them all.

Now the sky was utterly black, choked by those dolorous clouds. She didn’t know how long she stood there. Vicario stayed in place, fixated on the sword; she occasionally heard him muttering under his breath, and then he fell silent and no longer seemed to be there at all. Her neck ached. The sky’s solid blackness swam before her eyes, broke into its own spectrum, an umbral watercolor.

She felt herself being watched.

Something had formed within that writhing, swirling darkness. Her head hurt from the effort of focusing on it; there was no clear shape that she could discern. But she would swear that there were eyes in there, blacker than the surrounding black – gouges of deeper night, malformed as melted candles. Since her brother had passed, she’d seen similar things in her dreams, half-remembered, leaving her sweat-soaked and feverish. She trembled now under that stare and grit her teeth until she thought they might crack.

It coalesced around that black gaze. Torso and limbs stretched hideously thin, its bulbous head glinting with innumerable and noiselessly chattering teeth. It brought a chill that slithered like centipedes burrowing beneath her flesh. Its whispering scraped like spiderlegs at the edges of her hearing. The darkness seemed to be encasing her from below as well as above; she could no longer make out the blade’s blue shine at the corner of her eye. The livestock lying dead in their pens. Her brother gone milk-white and still in the grey light of day. Its spindly fingers reached for her and she felt her tears carve hot trails down her cheeks and couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, as though she had already been pulled apart to join this suffocating dark.

Vicario in one smooth movement grabbed his blade and spun and slashed out and the shape recoiled, its spectral body now made clear by the blazing blue gash across its middle; its screams were unspeakable, like a swarm of wasps but dropped to a basso octave that rattled their teeth inside their heads. Its wound caught and spread across it like burning paper, spitting blue-silver sparks, and it frantically grasped at itself as though attempting to pull itself back together but before long the light consumed its limbs, and then its head, and its death-cries ceased as suddenly as a doused candle.

It took the girl a moment to understand that she was still alive. The air was still filled with innumerable pinprick lights, casting their glow across the fields. She looked mutely to Vicario but he didn’t look back; his eyes were trained heavenward. She followed his gaze and saw that his blade hadn’t just cut the wraith. The clouds themselves had been parted. Beyond was the waxing moon.

*          *          *

“Sounds like a load of arse,” said Fang.

“A load of arse.” Vicario repeated the words like he was sampling their flavor.

They’d journeyed too late in the day, lost the trail, and set up camp in a small clearing; around them the trees clustered, claustrophobically menacing, but Vicario had scattered some herbs in the flame that turned its smoke spicy and pale. He’d said that the odor would keep away any prowling beasts for the evening, and the light of his blade would do the rest. He sat before that fire now, the sword embedded in the earth by his side. Across from him crouched a lilac-skinned girl with white hair unruly as a mat of thistles; her upper lip curled, revealing a set of teeth that was all incisors. She seemed unimpressed with his tale.

“It sure was a bit of luck that you found the only human in that backwater that wouldn’t run screaming at your wolfy face,” she said. “I’ve never heard of wraiths spewing stardust, neither. And what was all that about you carving protective sigils? Never taught me any protective sigils.”

“That’s because I have none to teach.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What, then? Some other kind of spellery?”

“The symbols were meaningless,” said Vicario. “Rather, they were an elven transcription of a nursery rhyme I’d spent many a sleepless night crooning to a certain sharp-toothed hellion. Hrmm. Strange, isn’t it, the things one remembers.”

He tossed another piece of deadwood onto the fire. It hungrily accepted the wood and leapt up, illuminating Fang’s baffled expression.

“It was a necessary deception,” he went on. “The girl was useful as bait, true enough. But I needed some pretense to ensure that she stayed put, saw that shade in its entirety. I had wished to impart a lesson in faith.”

She didn’t hide the disgust in her voice. “All that was to put the fear of the gods into her?”

“Faith has little to do with fear, of gods or otherwise,” said Vicario. “At heart, it is the understanding that the miseries of this world cannot endure forever. With effort, and perseverance, they will give way. The clouds part. The moon shines through.” He regarded the fire. “It does not come easily to everyone. That child had already become far too intimate with the horrors this world could inflict. I wanted her to see those horrors plainly. To see them slain. To know that they could be overcome.”

He had been the local priest of New Aretarium for a very long time, before it had burned. In some ways he hadn’t been a very good one. He was stern, standoffish, often vaguely depressed; people had seldom brought their troubles to him because he always seemed to be occupied in dealing with his own. And he’d sermonized this same way, not so much speaking to people as muttering his private thoughts into the air. But that was more effective, in its own way. His understated, introverted sermons bypassed all the listener’s defenses and private arguments; they sidled up to you and stabbed you in the heart. Fang clasped her fingers, expression gone pensive.

“Suppose I’ve been made to see that a few times myself,” she said quietly.

“I don’t doubt it. We all find ourselves tested, in due time.”

“I never wanted to find any tests. I just wanted to find you.”

His smile was wan in the firelight. “And so, I am found.”

But Fang didn’t smile back, because she wasn’t so sure.

When they’d reunited, she’d hardly been surprised at the state of his appearance – the fact that his wild shape was now apparently permanent disquieted her, but some of her earliest memories consisted of that fanged and furry countenance. The real wrongness had made itself known in the days afterward. Vicario’s injury obviously still troubled him, and she heard the sudden lurch of his heartbeat whenever they passed other travelers or grazing livestock (she hadn’t argued with his choice to avoid towns). He would scratch at his head when he thought she wasn’t looking, violently, as though trying to dislodge intrusive thoughts. And then there was the muttering. He wouldn’t stop muttering, often glancing over his shoulder or fondling the hilt of his sword as he did so, and it was getting worse – several times he’d actually shushed her mid-sentence, as if she was interrupting someone that only he could hear.

Perhaps a fortnight after she’d found him, they had been jumped by a small band of assassins – not mere bandits, but hired men, the consequence of an ill-advised contract negotiation she’d dealt with after they had first been separated. One of them had cut her, deeper than she had expected, and the sound that had emerged from Vicario then was one she’d never heard from any living throat. Afterward, there had barely been enough of the men left to bury, though he’d still tried, after regaining his senses. She’d stirred later that night and seen him genuflecting before the sword, half-sobbing his prayers.

One of Fang’s earliest lessons had been not to fool around with that sword, and she’d resented it a little for that fact alone. But now she didn’t like to even think about it. She couldn’t determine if Vicario’s sudden fascination with the sword was due to his injury rattling something in his head, or if her inability to hear it was because of some deficiency in herself. Maybe she just had the wrong ears. The wrong faith.

“Time for rest,” said Vicario. “We’ll need to find the trail early, while this fair weather holds.”

“All right,” she said. “And I take back what I said. It was a decent tale.”

“Thank you.”

“Delivery needs work, though.”

“Hrmm.”

They stayed at opposite ends of the fire, backs turned to one another. The woods chittered with life all around them. It was a familiar sound to her, and should have been enough to lull her to sleep. But at the edge of her hearing was another sound that kept her uneasy. A faint, rhythmic scrape, as Vicario reached out with his gauntlet and stroked his blade like a lover’s hair.

*          *          *

The girl held Vicario’s hand on the way back from the fields. They sought out the blacksmith’s house – not a difficult task, as it was the only one with its lamps still lit – and he stoically stood by and watched her walk into her parents’ arms, both of them near-collapsing with relief. He’d accepted the provisions they offered and politely refused a place to sleep for the night, and then left the town and went back on the road, his blade lighting up the path. The girl watched him go.

The village survived the winter and limped on to another year, as the wheat shook off whatever curse that wraith had placed upon it. The girl graduated from merely watching her father work to assisting him with it, and her body grew strong with the labor; several of the local boys teased her about it, but she’d dismissed them all as idiots a long time ago. Her life continued in this way. She lost herself in its repetition.

Then, five years after that night in the fields, both her parents suddenly died of fever – first her father, then her mother, as though hurrying along after him. The whole village grieved; the blacksmith was widely seen as a windbag but he’d still been one of the more noteworthy people there, and would often shoe their horses for free. The girl buried them, politely accepted the townsfolk’s condolences, and the night after her mother’s death she packed what she could carry and left the village without a word of goodbye.

The bitterness of her losses would mark her for the rest of her days. She would seldom laugh and never marry. But one day she came across a pilgrimage of Selûnite clergy – worship of the Silver Lady was spreading in these troubled days – and after some discussion, fell in step beside them. The priests took her into their church and trained her as a healer, and she proved adept despite her late start, to the point where people from neighboring kingdoms would sometimes come to see her despite her laborer’s build and distant, melancholy air. And she learned to fight, so that she could not only tend wounds but also occasionally see to whatever wicked forces had inflicted them in the first place.

Long after a certain sword’s azure shine had faded to a distant star in her memory, she lived on, bearing witness to the ugliness of the world, and the beauty that could sometimes be glimpsed with its departure. And on moonless, cloudless nights, sometimes she would step out from whatever she slept and watch the night sky until dawn, awaiting the moment when that silver eye would once again open.