Tundra

Two clean strokes, two felled bodies. Two minds and sets of memories lopped off along with the helmeted heads. Real Seafarers didn’t wear steel, Eiron thought, as he ran the other two guards through with the spike of his axe for good measure. Barely a sigh escaped them; only the sound of rushing blood gave their deaths away. Nothing else had indicated to anyone that Eiron was aboard the skitterer. He had always been a quiet climber. Men joked that silence had been sewn into his boots by a druid, but there was no laughing about druidism anymore. All along the ridged back of the metal scorpion, Eiron stalked his prey. Finally, he found him at the helm, in the coward’s seat, high above the demolished plain.

‘Erasmus!’ he bellowed, nostrils flaring like a bull.

Erasmus turned around in his seat, regarding his challenger in a leisurely way. ‘Ah, Seafarer,’ he said, belittling as if it were a mere fisherman there, with walruses or maybe even eels inked onto his biceps. ‘Finally come to your senses and decided to join me?’ Erasmus chortled. ‘I’m afraid it’s far too late for that.’

‘No,’ Eiron said solemnly, hefting solid death between his heavy hands. ‘I’m here to kill you.’

‘Very well.’ It was all the invitation that was needed for the dance. The two men bowed their heads, as though they had rehearsed it, neither one letting his gaze slip. One pair of ink black eyes and one soulless grey set bored into each other, the tension between them as important as the force pressed into clashing sword and axe. Eiron wondered briefly where Erasmus had acquired such a weapon, and quickly concluded that he had had it forged for himself. It had been no gift, no honour. He brought his double-headed force, the cold-forged twin of his body, around in a graceful arc. It just missed the serpent quick sword as Erasmus slithered out of the way, danger glinting in his eyes and in his smile. He parried with a thrust– the much larger Seafarer shrugged it easily aside. As he did, he felt the contraption beneath them both shudder. Of course, it was controlled by its master’s intentions, and his concentration was slipping.

‘Are you the last of the Cleaved Tide?’ he wondered idly. ‘Are they all dead? I know I ordered them dead. Their deaths are on your head, you know. I would have spared them if you hadn’t defied me.’ His grin sparkled once more, displaying far too many points for a man’s expression. ‘How does it feel to have wiped out your band?’

Eiron grunted as he hefted iron above his head. ‘You would have done what you did anyway,’ he said simply.

‘Probably,’ his foe admitted, callous and dainty as a faerie prince, dancing on the tips of his toes. ‘You can die guilt-free.’ His voice lilted, as though he was amused with himself, as though he expected simpering thanks. He stabbed as he finished the sentence, and wobbled as his act threw him off balance. He should not have been so foolish as to let drama punctuate his style, he thought, but the injury he suffered was not fatal. His shoulder began to knit itself closed where the axe had struck, leaving only trace blotches of fresh, wet blood.

‘How dare you,’ he said, but he sounded pleasantly surprised, as if there were a real challenge in the fight after all. ‘You’ve ruined my favourite tunic.’ The axe struck again, hacking as though into firewood, and opened a fresh gash which did not heal so quickly. ‘How are you doing that?’ Erasmus asked, and answered his own question. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he assured himself. ‘If you want to come at me with your petty Seafarer magic, I’ve got tundra magic of my own. I am eternal. And you know what else? In the aeons to come, I will not forget you, Eiron. You will die alone and unmourned, and no-one else will remember your name.’

There are no true witnesses to what happened next. Some say the demon manifested itself in front of the aurora, spreading bat-like wings to blot out the light streaming in from the Otherworld. Others say that night’s curtain fell without any provocation. I know, and you should too, that demons have these subtle ways of manipulating memory. The human mind on its own is not sufficient to comprehend such incredibly complex magic, so we receive a visual excuse. This happened in Erasmus’ consciousness just as it did in all of ours. He saw the dying of the light, and turned to Erion, who stood in shadow. Momentarily, the High Thane was blinded, but a moment was all it took.

‘Wait, what? I don’t–’

He left no lasting final words, nothing profound, nothing that set him apart from other casualties that day. Eiron swung neatly. It was a clean severance. Erasmus’ head sat a second on his neck, his eyes staring, before it toppled to the ground. Beneath it, the skitterer convulsed. It had no more intelligence to power it, no master and no drive. Artlessly, it crumpled into an exhausted heap, whereupon Eiron leaped down and cleared the avalanche of its disjointed mass. As it fell, the largest hunk of walking steel, and perhaps the brightest innovation to ever breach the tundra, buried its inventor. Crushing his body and entombing his remains, it would lie for years before the local druids erected a boundary fence to keep it separate from the natural landscape. Thereafter, it would always be a piece of the tundra set apart, almost revered with avoidance. In a sense, it would become the memorial its creator always wanted.