Each Man an Island

Fantasy short. Godfrey Digbett III crosses paths with a disconcerting priest of death.

10k, rated T. Godfrey Digbett III, bard and folklorist, travels to an old elven temple, and to his chagrin, the Reverend Mother of the local Oghmian temple dispatches a visiting priest of a foreign god alongside him.

Note repeated discussions of death, decay, grief, and loss. Adapted from a ThreadFic.

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It wasn’t that the Reverend Mother particularly resembled Godfrey’s Aunt Regina, but there was something about her cold, stern manner that unnerved him deeply, set his teeth on edge. She wasn’t an easy woman to contradict or to argue with, and it was not easy to point out that, all technicalities taken into account, he was not a subject under her authority.

Godfrey certainly served the Oghmian Temple as best he could – after all, the Oghmians did good and valuable work, and there was a neat line of connections between Lord Oghma, god of knowledges earthly and unearthly, god of wisdom and strategy, of thought and consideration, and Lord Veritum, who had once been his servant and even now served as a personal clerk and scribe, Veritum a god of writing and scripture, god of the pen and the printing stamp, of the paintbrush and the inkwell.

Godfrey served Halloran, who was the son of Veritum – Veritum had once been given an empty pot by the visiting god Daragh, brother of Oghma. Where Oghma was celibate and infertile both, dispensing the seeds of knowledge instead of any other form of seed, Daragh was very fertile indeed, and had sired a great many of the other gods and goddesses across the land. Mocking his brother’s servant, he had filled the pot with soil but planted no seed in it, and advised Veritum to dutifully water it that it might grow.

Daragh did not believe much in the value of the written world, believing it better and more sensible to tell one’s children one’s stories and thoughts and knowledge, and it pleased him to think he should make a fool of his brother’s clerk – that Veritum should waste his time watering a pointless project and thinking anything would come of it.

Veritum did water the pot every morning when he arrived to begin his work, focused in his pursuit of this duty amongst his many others in Lord Oghma’s office – what he did not know was that Lord Oghma’s maidservant, Hannelore, watered it every night.

When Daragh next visited, he was surprised and angry to see that from this empty pot was growing a green shoot with leaves on it. He was not only fertile and a farmer, but a planter and a gardener: he knew every shoot and leaf and flower upon the earth, and this was not one that he recognised.

Angered, he picked up the pot and emptied it out, thinking that Veritum had caught his prank in motion and thought to trick him back, but what fell from the pot was not a plant at all, but a baby boy, born of his father and mother’s twin spirits of service, duty, and devotion. It was this boy who had grown to become Lord Halloran, god of service and servants, of invisible skills and silent expertise, of each and every duty performed in the quiet shadows before any master or mistress arrived to start their day, and the duties performed after they departed to bed or elsewhere, too.

Godfrey was servant of Halloran, Halloran was the son of Veritum, and Veritum the servant of Oghma – that hardly made Godfrey a servant of Oghma, as far as he saw it, but any attempt to tell the Reverend Mother this made his lips freeze and tingle and go still.

“Mother Effily,” Godfrey said, doing his best to be somewhat diplomatic about it. “I hardly need accompaniment on this little journey, it’s no adventure. There’s nothing unsafe about it, only—”

“He makes you nervous, doesn’t he?” Effily interrupted him, her expression flat, her eyebrows furrowed in obvious irritation. “You dislike him – perhaps he frightens you.”

“Hardly as much as all that,” Godfrey lied immediately, trying not to look at the man in question.

The other Oghmians called him Brother Orco, on account of the fact that he was a priest himself, but he was no priest of Oghma or of any of their gods – he was a handsome foreigner from across the sea, a priest of different gods that struck Godfrey as rather more serious than their own. It wasn’t this that made Orco off-putting, of course.

“Creepy, I believe, was the word Sister Helena used,” said the Reverend Mother archly.

“I’m not Sister Helena,” said Godfrey. “Why should I be punished for her misdoings?”

“It’s not a punishment, boy. You are no especial fighter. You would agree to that.”

“More of a lover, me,” Godfrey admitted. He was a tall fellow, luckily, but on the lanky side, and while he wore sensible armour and did carry a rapier, he was a musician and a historian, not a dashed adventurer. Adventures were just something the universe saw fit to inflict on him along the way.  “And— Well, really, more of a faller-downer than a lover.”

“Orco is a healer, a skilled one – two men are better than one, particularly if one of the men is you.”

“Alright,” Godfrey muttered. “I don’t know that you need to be quite so honest, Mother, or at least not so scathing along the way.”

“If bandits set upon you, boy, would you fight them all yourself?”

“I should hope no bandits would! What have I got that’s worth robbing a man over?”

“Banditry is not always practised with worth in mind – nor hope a defence against it. Orco will go with you.”

Aunt Regina had always had that sort of final tone in some of the things she said, always a sense of decree in her voice. There was no arguing with a decree: there was no arguing with the Reverend Mother now, no matter that Godfrey had every right to go where and when he pleased, regardless of what an Oghmian priestess had to say about it.

“Jolly good,” said Godfrey weakly, and awkwardly got to his feet to take his leave.

He was a rather big chap, this brother Orco, and as Godfrey came into the main hall he stood beside him and looked sidelong at him rather than immediately facing him head on. He busied himself putting his pack together, catching his breath and doing his best to put his composure together at the same time he organised his notes and his bedroll.

Brother Orco wore all flowing black robes that went filmy at the edges if you looked at them too long, on account of all the magic concentrated under his flesh and through his armour. It was easy to guess he would be pale, based on his clothing, his manner, but he really wasn’t – the apparent paleness was just from the lilac pallor his magic cast over him, making him resemble a corpse, and it was easy to mistake his hard-muscled cheeks for gaunt ones, at first glance.

“Ah, hullo, Buran, what ho!” said Godfrey desperately as two priests came in from the downstairs library.

“Hello, Godfrey,” said Buran. “Orco.”

“Ah, gods, hello, erm, Godfrey… Orco…” said Sister Helena, who awkwardly stumbled back through the doorway and then walked around Orco, keeping two feet’s distance away before she hurried away down the corridor, murmuring another hurried apology.

Buran looked after her scornfully, and then said to Orco, flatly, “She’s frightened of you.”

“Yes,” said Orco quietly, looking down at the floor.

“Don’t feel sorry for her,” Buran ordered crisply. “She’s frightened of everything. Mostly hard work.”

Godfrey blinked, opening his mouth, but before he could make some vague defence of poor Helena, who was only about eighteen, Buran was walking off in the other direction, and Orco had a very small smile on his face, a tiny little shadow of a crescent.

“Are you friends with him, that Buran?” Orco asked.

“I don’t know that anybody is, erm, friends with him, exactly,” said Godfrey. “Not from his perspective, anyway. But we work together regularly enough, and I’m, erm, well. A lot of the other priests are intimidated by him.”

“And you aren’t?” asked Orco.

“Oh, certainly, I’m dashed intimidated by him,” said Godfrey. “But I know how to work with him.”

“The Reverend Mother said you work well with a wide variety of other people,” said Orco. “Shall we off?”

“Best let’s,” said Godfrey, and pulled his pack onto his shoulders.

* * *

As they made camp that evening, having walked most of the way in silence, Godfrey asked, “Do you, er, well. Have you been at this long?”

“I’ve been a priest of Dea Tacita for some twelve years now.”

“Called to her service, were you?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Godfrey glanced sidelong at him, at the cloud of thick, dark energy that surrounded him, clung to him as a moving shroud. “You… died?”

“No,” said Orco. “My wife did.”

“Oh.”

Sounding somewhat amused, Orco remarked, “The Reverend Mother said you were charismatic.”

“Oh, I’m sure she didn’t.”

“I’m certain she did.”

“I expect she said, old man,” said Godfrey, “that I could be charismatic. I’m only ever charming by accident, you see. It’s never on purpose – not likely to occur, I mean, between us chaps, as we go, in the course of normal conversation.”

There was a frozen look on the other man’s deathly face that Godfrey for a few minutes didn’t actually know how to make sense of, but then he realised when Orco turned his head a little that there was a faint curl to the other man’s lips. It was far subtler than it had been before, when he was smiling at what Buran had said.

“Ah,” said Godfrey. “See? Stumbled right into it.”

“You are a very odd man, sir,” said Orco.

“Yes,” Godfrey agreed, rubbing the back of his neck. “I really don’t mean to be – just how I am, you know? Dashed sorry to hear about your wife. My condolences.”

“Thank you.”

“I can’t imagine it made it easier, but did it… I don’t know. Did it strengthen you, or bolster you, to have a calling as a widower?”

“Strengthen me,” Orco repeated softly, looking into the fire.

At first meeting, his face shadowed by the hood, Godfrey had thought his eye sockets were empty, as a skull’s were – now, lit by the fire, he saw the sea glass green of them. It was a sad colour, Godfrey thought, or perhaps just a sad man.

“Perhaps,” said Orco.

Godfrey laid his lute across his lap as he sat back from the fire, and he absently plucked and played with the strings. It was no particular melody, more to occupy his fingers than to make music, but Orco’s eyes went from the fire to Godfrey’s fingers on the strings, and then to just one of them.

“A signet ring?”

“Yes, you know, for letters and such,” said Godfrey. “I send quite a lot of them, and I seal research and such as well.”

“The Reverend Mother made mention of your noble birth.”

It sounded increasingly like Mother Effily had given Orco quite the dashed information packet about him, and Godfrey wondered at how much she’d apparently wanted to, what, convince Orco he was worth taking with him? Assure him of Godfrey’s soundness?

Effily Heron was not generally a woman that wasted time on unimportant chatter – she wouldn’t have told Orco so much about him if she hadn’t thought it was important.

“Oh, no,” said Godfrey, “this, ah, this isn’t from my family. It’s a servant at work, the symbol – you see him bent over? One of the symbols of Halloran, the god to whom I’m pledged. I’m a cleric, you see, I know I don’t wear robes like the monks.”

He couldn’t stand that. Buran Highfield always walked happily about in his big brown potato sack, and obviously Orco looked well in his black ones. Godfrey didn’t spend a great deal of money on his clothes, but he cared about making sure they were well-tailored, well-kept, stylish.

Where Orco was in a swathe of black cloth, Godfrey wore red hose and a handsome dark blue gambeson with shining metal studs, his gloves and boots and belts made of matched brown leather, and his breastplate was made of the same material, although he wore it under the gambeson. He wore a blue hat with a red feather in it, too – the blue matched the colour of his eyes.

“Did Mother Effily mention my calling?”

“That you were a cleric, not of whom,” said Orco. “And that you were a musician, that you work in some field of… Ah. Forgive me.”

“Historical musicology,” Godfrey supplied with a faint smile. “I’m a musicologist and folklorist – I do bring lost books back to the Temple of Oghma in the course of my work as well, of course.”

The Oghmians did pay him for his work – for the lost books and scrolls he returned, collecting them from one temple or dungeon or other strange and half-forgotten, half-buried place – but also for the ones he penned himself, for the lyrics he wrote down or translated when he heard new songs from new people, and the music he transcribed too, where he could find it.

“It’s a sort of necromancy, what you do,” said Orco, and Godfrey felt his jaw drop away from the rest of his face.

“Beg pardon?” he said faintly, aware that he was gaping like a fish. Surreptitiously, he moved his hand up to close his mouth when his face muscles didn’t feel up to the job.

“You find dead songs,” Orco said, smiling his thin, subtle smile. He meant it as a compliment, too, Godfrey could see that he did – of course he did. “Doomed to the quiet, sewn between dead men’s lips, and you bring them life and the light again. Enable them to be sung, to have new breaths bring them into being.”

“Oh,” said Godfrey. It was really quite chilling, how Orco said it – he felt quite cold, his blood chilly in his veins despite the warmth radiating from the fire. “Erm,” he said then, because he was raised to be polite, and in any case, Orco was not the sort of chap one went about disagreeing with, especially as he said haunting things over the fire to you, “I suppose, yes. If you like.”

“It’s noble work,” Orco added.

“Erm,” said Godfrey again, and then, “Oh! I mean. Thank you!”

He wanted to ask more, obviously.

Godfrey had grown up with necromancers and necromancy, surrounded with the constant sweet-sour scent of death in every stairwell and corridor, all about the house, in the sprawling gardens. His family loved necromancy, most of them, but none of them spoke of it as Orco did – spoke about it as if it was a comforting thing, a pleasant one.

Sometimes, Halloran would abruptly bless him with little insights, but they rarely involved direct knowledge, per se – more that he’d be given a nudge in a certain direction, and things would unfold in his favour, or for the common good.

At a garden party in aid of the Folnam Library six months ago, he’d had a sudden burning urge to ask every single librarian he met about goldfish. The first one had been somewhat embarrassing – they’d been talking about the weather, for goodness’ sake, goldfish hadn’t been a natural diversion to the conversation – and the second one only a little less, but by the fifth, people were talking about goldfish to one another almost of their own accord, and it had transpired that several of them wanted to keep an aquarium in the library, but couldn’t think of a way to bring it up, felt it might be a misuse of resources, et cetera and so on.

Somewhat less wholesomely, last month he’d been struck with the sudden urge to confess to a somewhat spooky fellow in an out-of-the-way tavern that he’d killed a man in cold blood on the road to Blare – in all his life, he’s never even knocked a chap out, let alone killed one – and this had made the chap trust him enough to start telling him all sorts of awful secrets.

Useful ones, though not pleasant ones.

No such nudge came to him now, no assistance in this conversation with Brother Orco.

“I know from other people who are in one way or another, erm, in contact with the divine, that this can be a… private matter,” Godfrey said. His fingers were itching, even as he kept on playing a faint melody. He didn’t know it, actually – a local ghost of song, probably, the imprint of it, was likely thick enough in this area that he was subconsciously picking it up.

Gods above and below, maybe this was necromancy.

Pressing his palm to the strings, he made the music cease.

“Does she speak to you, this, Dea Tacita? Tell you what to do?”

“Yes,” said Orco. “She guides my steps – forward. Behind that door. Down that path. Beneath this stone, this bridge, these tiles. These bones here.”

“Bones?” Godfrey repeated dizzily, but before he could ask exactly what Orco was retrieving, the other man was climbing into his tent to sleep. Godfrey was left alone as the fire died down, and praying offered scant comfort.

Halloran was not a god of comfort or certainty – only of work, and purpose.

* * *

They set out early in the morning, and the old temple they were going to – it was an old ruin, from the old elves before this was the kingdom it is now, before it was orcish land, even – was still two days off when Orco said, “Please, let us take a slight detour, and rest in that tavern there.”

“Really?” Godfrey asked, glancing at the tavern sign – it was only two miles out of their way, but uphill. “Are you alright? If the camping is tough on your back or anything, old chap, we can—”

“My back is unharmed,” Orco interrupted him, giving Godfrey a rather frightening look, but an amused one.

He offered no explanation at all as they began to follow the path to the Fat Goose.

“You just like taverns?” Godfrey asked. “Wouldn’t have taken you for a big drinker.”

“I do not imbibe alcohol,” said Orco in his soft, shadowy voice. “It would weaken my lady’s connection to me.”

“Oh,” said Godfrey. “Mine would only comment on the vintage.”

“Our respective masters are very different to one another,” Orco said, “but from what I understand, they are united in that they rank service to others above all else. They are easily forgotten, minor members of their respective pantheons, easily overshadowed, but that matters little so long as their work is done.”

“I don’t know much of Dea Tacita.”

“I pray you never need to.”

Godfrey was struck with the uncomfortable sensation of someone having walked over his grave, the hairs standing up on the back of his neck, and he busied himself picking flowers and herbs from the roadside as they walked on to keep himself from accidentally making even worse conversation than this.

* * *

They got to the tavern and took their beds a little earlier than they would have to make camp for the night, the place Godfrey had marked out on the map in advance on the cliffside overlooking the valley below, but Godfrey was a make-do sort of man. As Orco disappeared to pursue whatever business made him want to come here, wandering off into the evening dark, Godfrey made his own.

The orcish contingent drinking in the corner were surprised but delighted when a human bard walked over and greeted them in a local orcish tongue, and they were even more pleased when Godfrey opened up his songbook and played some popular orcish songs, both local to the area and from farther afield.

Some orcs were rightly suspicious of a non-orc who would ask after aspects of orcish knowledge, though most did tend to soften somewhat when they realised he was after songs and music, stories and tales, rather than wanting secrets to smithing or building, or wanting to somehow steal more orcish land out from under them.

This party was not suspicious at all, and were quite pleased at the idea of his taking record of songs and poems – the ones that could read in elvish or human scripts learned from the Oghmians, and one of them, a tall woman with red hair called A’arla, had a brother in the priesthood.

Godfrey sang and drank and took dictation from them, hurriedly making music notation in both orcish and elvish styles – the former he could transliterate from the latter later, but he always liked to pay for people’s time with a legible copy to take home themselves, if he could – and as hours went by, there was no sign of Orco whatsoever.

His pack was still in their room, waiting patiently at the foot of Orco’s bed, when Godfrey finally retired in the early hours of the morning, so he shrugged, washed up, and slipped into bed.

He stirred a little before dawn to the quiet, surreptitious sounds of Orco washing his hands, and he sat up suddenly when he saw in the scant light that the water in the basin was turning red.

“Good Gods, are you alright?” Godfrey asked before he could stop himself, and Orco’s eyes flickered up to look his way a moment before he looked back to his hands.

“Fine,” he said. He blended almost into the darkness, no robe shrouding him so it was just his field of shadowy magic instead. His eyes glinted green like sparks in a pitch-dark room. Only concentrating on him, focusing his eyes, could Godfrey make out the shape of his face, and half of that he was filling out from memory.

Godfrey had been around a lot of different sorts of necromancers and other mages who corresponded in one way or another with death and the dead – it wasn’t wholly unfamiliar to him, the way that Orco seemed sylph-like and misty at his edges, blending into the darkness, and the darkness blending into him in kind. His robe, now hanging over the bedpost and lit by a little of the lamplight coming in from the torches in the yard, looked abruptly and strangely solid, no longer affected by his body and his magic.

Orco’s hands looked more solid than his wrists, the magical effect stymied somewhat by the shine of the water on his skin. It was not blood he was washing from his hands, Godfrey realised now, but earth – it wasn’t too thick in its consistency, but Godfrey could smell the clay as Orco washed it off.

“Successful, were you?” Godfrey asked. It was the only thing he could think of to ask that didn’t involve actually asking what Orco had been doing.

He was frightened to ask, he realised. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t know if he would have asked even if it had been blood on the other man’s hands.

“Yes, thank you,” Orco said pleasantly, a smile drawing at his lips again. It was all Godfrey could see of his face, the shine of his green eyes and then the crescent of his lips.

“You’re not, ah, named for orcs, are you?” Godfrey asked.

“No,” said Orco. “I’m a Varnan – Dea Tacita and Dis Pater, like Ianus and Virilis, they are old gods, somewhat older than the gods of these kingdoms, though not quite as old as most of the elven gods or the orcish ones. Orcus is a minor god himself, but his name is synonymous with death, or… or death’s mouth, one might say, death’s hunger. Orco is a form of his name.”

“Ah,” said Godfrey quietly. He did know, of course, some of the Varnan texts, and Ianus and Virilis, at least, he was familiar with. “Delicia is a Varnan goddess as well, isn’t she?”

“Yes, goddess of pleasure and earthly delights. Sister of Virilis, god of fertility and fecundity.”

“Right,” Godfrey said, slowly sinking back into bed, and as Orco moved across the room in only his leggings and his shirt, Godfrey saw the bare parts of his flesh – his face, his feet, his hands – leave tendrils of shadow hanging on the air behind him, strands of cloudy fog. As he passed through the light and slid into bed, Godfrey held his breath as he watched the blankets settle over his body, watching Orco’s aura pass through the fabric again, a figure of dark mist that moved through the sheets.

It was only an illusion.

Godfrey knew that, really – it was why he could still see Orco’s hands solidly through the water. If he reached out and touched the other man (the thought sent a shiver through him, made his stomach do an uncomfortable flip) he would be solid, real, and warm. Magic was a living thing, the lifeblood of the world and the universe, golden and shining. Those that worked too closely with death were in the shadow of the light it made, and any living man’s eyes would perceive it as such, perceive them as half in this world and half in the next, but they weren’t, not truly.

“Does he speak to you in your dreams?” Orco asked. His eyes were closed, and Godfrey knew that his head was there, resting on the pillow, but he couldn’t see it, couldn’t even imagine his features any longer. He could only make out a concentration of thick shadow wrapped in blankets. “Halloran?”

“No,” Godfrey said, then hesitated. It wasn’t private because it was confidential – most priests, clerics, paladins, godphones, very few of them were ever sworn to secrecy. Gods thrived, after all, in being talked of, their messages shared far and wide.

It was difficult to talk about only because it was… intimate.

Some people could easily talk about how their divinities spoke with them, through them, but then again, some people could have sex in front of an audience, on a stage. Some people could strip off their clothes in front of… women.

“Sometimes,” Godfrey said, his voice halting, “he just… sits with me. I know that he’s here, watching me sl— or not, not watching. He’s often still working, I expect. But present, anyway, and sitting at my bedside.”

He was horrified at how loud his nervous gulp was in the quiet of the room, and he saw the flicker of Orco’s eyes as they opened and he turned his head, two glints of emerald in the midst of a shadowy mass, before he closed them again. “That sounds nice,” he said softly. “Does that comfort you?”

“When he bothers, yes,” Godfrey said, which sounded spiteful and ungrateful, and he felt a smidgen of guilt for that – ever since he felt Halloran’s choice cuff him, marking his wrists in permanent magical chain, he always felt as if he was about to see him in the corner of his eye, or at his shoulder. He almost never felt the latter, but once or twice a month, he woke from bed understanding that Halloran had been watching over him, sitting with him.

His nannies had done that, when he was a very young boy, and when he was a little older, if he was ill. Halloran was a far more comforting presence.

“Does she watch over you, when you’re sleeping?”

“Always,” said Orco. “She’s always with me.”

It wasn’t meant to be a horrible thing, that – Godfrey could hear the earnestness in the other man’s voice, the softness to his tone, the sweetness. Nonetheless, it sounded nightmarish to him, a death god with you every moment of the day.

Godfrey closed his eyes and turned away from Orco, facing the wall – it was somehow worse, knowing that the priest’s shadow was behind him, and he wished Halloran would come tonight, sit between them, but he never came if Godfrey wanted it, expected it.

He wasn’t meant to want things of him. Ask things.

It was the wrong way around, that, wasn’t it? To ask that his god serve him, when he did so much already, and it was Godfrey who was meant to be doing service?

(Nonetheless, when he slept that night, Godfrey slipped toward the nightmarish – he dreamt of the lilac-tinged taint of necromancy on the air, the sweet-rot scent of death and decay, felt as if he was falling into it, pulled toward it, unable to escape… and then a firm hand was on his shoulder.

It was a big hand, strong, heavy.

It stopped him fast, keeping him from sliding forward into that inexorable violent haze, into the stench of death and the dead and the dying, and he almost cried with gratitude in his dreams, and leaned his cheek into the hand and wrist holding him still.)

When Godfrey woke, Orco was still asleep, snoring softly beneath his tangled blankets his cheek on the pillow. With his breaths, quiet inhales and soft exhales, the dark mists shifted around him, drawing closer to his body and then expanding outward again.

Godfrey dressed hurriedly and went downstairs.

* * *

It was a elvish temple deep in the valley, scarcely touched for centuries – there was little here by way of treasure or valuables, and the majority of its books and scrolls were recovered half a millennium ago. Godfrey’s task, today, was replicating the music that the temple once played to priests and visitors.

These sorts of halls weren’t common at all any longer – there was a great deal of architectural design that went into it, lots of enchantment, a high cost altogether in materials and labour – but Godfrey had stepped into one or two. Never a temple, though – it had only been at the entrance to entertainment clubs.

As one descended or ascended the staircases in the temple’s central atrium, each stair played a note or melody, and the four main staircases formed melodies that very easily overlapped and harmonised with one another, or created pleasant crossing melodies.

Godfrey made a note of the music as well as drawing a sketch of the temple’s atrium, then moved onto the main worship hall, where more melodic staircases created similar melodies – the pews would have played consistent tones based on how many were seated in them; even the candle holders had surviving notes they were enchanted to play when their wicks were lit, though the candles themselves were long gone.

“I often feel uncomfortable in places like this,” said Orco under his breath, standing over Godfrey, who was on his back on the floor and examining the hammers beneath what had been a sort of proto-piano beneath an altar. The many charms that aided cleanliness in the temple, prevented dust and pests, had aided largely in their preservation, although the tuning was of course quite off, and a third of the strings had snapped. “No rot or decay. The preservation, the artificial cleanliness, it’s disconcerting.”

“Well, it’s still a very holy place,” Godfrey said mildly, running his thumb over one of the hammers and feeling the slight charge of magic to it. “Can’t you feel it, the sense of sanctity? We no longer know the names of the gods that were worshiped here – the elves destroyed all record of them when they made their great abandonment – but their power lingers here. This is still their temple.”

Orco, when Godfrey lifted his head from under the altar and looked up at him, was wholly solid and still, and his sun-browned skin looked spot-lit and shining – it wasn’t just from the white stone walls and the amount of sunlight that poured in through the windows, but from the pure and overpowering magic that filled the place.

“Would you prefer to wait outside, old chap?” Godfrey asked. “If you’re not comfortable?”

“Mm,” Orco grunted, and swept from the room – the whole of this valley, cleft deep into the earth as it was, flowed richly with magic, but it was at least not so overpowering outside of the temple walls.

Godfrey continued with his work, kept playing, listening, transcribing.

It was… immense.

It was nice, in a way.

He’d always felt comfortable with the very ancient and the profound. Necromancy itself had always deterred him, but with enough exposure, you lost a sense of fear or anxiety about the very old. It no longer felt as if the ancient and the new must or ought be separate.

Necromancy aside, it was part of being from a family so concerned with one’s ancestors. When one knew one’s great-great-great-great-great-what-have-yous and whatevers and their stories as well as you knew your cousins and aunts and uncles, your ancestors ceased to feel so distant from you.

Godfrey worked for a few hours, moving through the temple halls, making his notes, his sketches. There was a priest in the city who made architectural models, and he had expressed interest in recreating the musical stairs.

Godfrey thought of it, at the idea of the music surrounding you during temple services – the overlapping and paralleling melodies as priests or dedicants walked in unison, the music rising through the room and up to the ceiling. It was beautifully complex, and he wondered how long it had first taken to work out the appropriate notes.

The temple was well-preserved – the main body was wholly intact but for some minor damage to the furniture, particularly in the hallways and nearer to the entrances. The annexes and outbuildings were another story – their gods and known the elves were leaving them by then, and there were retorts of violence, sky-splitting storms, bolts of lightning and burning fire.

Much of the valley had flooded – none of the water had gotten inside the temple proper, but you could see the staining on the outside stone where the water had reached. The outbuildings, on the other hand, were mostly rotted and destroyed, others little more than rubble, collapsed.

Orco was sitting at a fire in the remains of the courtyard, looking into the flames with his hands folded in his lap.

“I’m finished,” Godfrey said.

“Ah, good,” Orco replied. “Might I ask you to help me with my duties now?”

“Of course,” Godfrey said immediately, and then regretted it.

If Orco noticed his reticence, he made no mention of it – a swathe of disconcerting shadows in the afternoon light, he head Godfrey to one of the most destroyed of the outbuildings. The wooden scaffolding that had once supported it had all but rotted away, and its stone bricks were in a huge pile.

Orco gripped a large slab of stone, once a piece of plinth or perhaps a signpost, long hewn smooth by rainfall, and Godfrey helped him slide it over the pile, then helped him lever up a statue that had had its face caved in even before centuries of rain had erased the rest of its features.

“Do you know why they left, the elves?” Orco asked as they began to move the rest of the bricks to the side, Godfrey following Orco’s lead, doing as he was doing. “Why they left their gods in this valley, nameless, faceless, and fled?”

“They asked too much,” Godfrey answered. “So I’ve heard.”

“Asked too much?” Orco repeated quietly. White stone dust was clinging to his hands, interrupting the flow of shadows around his fingers.

“From what we can glean from archaeological records, orcs were the first people present here, on this world. Elves came later – man came later, too, to the Hourglass Continent, I’ve no doubt you know more tales of our origin than me. Some say that like man, the first elves came to Bio through some portal or other.

“Others dictate otherwise – the Dragon Temple preach that the old dragons took a man and an orc and found each of them wanting, so they melded the two together and added their own blood into the mix, making elves, although the old Draconic Order preached that dragons made elves from scratch.

“The old elven pantheon, though, is said to have been born when the elves first walked out of the trees and the waters and the stone quarries. Magic made sentient, in a way – the ancient elves, these tens of thousands of years ago, were certainly even more richly magical than elves are now.

“It’s hotly debated whether elves needed to live in these valleys and canyons, made all across the continent, to be closer to rich pools and flows of magic, or whether their gods decreed it, ordered that they live here. In any case, the elven settlements in places like these, these elves… They lived far, far longer than elves today.”

He watched Orco moving back and forth. He was a large man under those robes and shadows, muscular – he was hefting far bigger pieces of stone than Godfrey was capable of, and with obvious ease.

“They didn’t know death, those elves,” he said quietly. “Death was a foreigner to them.”

“Except in accidents, yes, or war,” Godfrey agreed. “One of the things they argued about.”

“The elves?”

“With their gods,” Godfrey said. “There’s this very old song, one of the oldest we have on record from the elves, and it’s about being trapped in a sort of twilit childhood, unable to live out a full life and die, as the flowers and animals and even the trees do.

“Undying, they felt they were forever children, in a way – forever unfinished, incomplete. Their gods, of course, said this immortality was a boon, a privilege. The elves that left the valleys and went farther afield – to the coasts, to the other islands, even to the next continent – were called cursed and tainted.

“The records as we have them then become a bit jumbled and unclear. Obviously, depending on the settlement, the timeline is a little different, although as far as we can grasp, most of the settlements were abandoned at about the same time. We don’t know if this was done through some sort of organisation or if it was a magical pull, instinct, shared between the elves through their magical sources – elven telepathy is very strong now, and there are some who theorise that during the time of the ancient elves, there was a capacity for something not dissimilar to a shared mind, or mental plane.

“In any case, some elves returned from their traels, and they were different. Older, or perhaps even different elves entirely – new elves that had been born and grown up, new generations of them. Scarred, recovered from injury or diseases, seasoned. And the elven gods either struck them down, exiled them, or in some cases, “healed” them – restored them to full elfhood. Ridded them of their scars and imperfections, their weaknesses, their new hungers and cravings. Restored their perfect and eternal youth.”

“Rendered them children again, where they had grown up,” Orco said, with a quiet grief that made Godfrey’s chest ache.

“Whatever it was,” Godfrey said, “over time, it turned the elves against their gods, and there was a quiet rebellion, cutting the apron strings, so to speak, before their exodus.”

He was horrified when he looked up and saw that there were tears on Orco’s cheeks and more welling in his eyes, making clear streaks of corporeal flesh show in the midst of shadow beneath his hood.

“Orco, old chap,” Godfrey said. “It’s not as bad as all that. They did leave, in the end – they did get away.”

“Not all of them,” Orco said, and gently moved aside a large piece of what was once the cornerstone of this outbuilding’s roof – beneath it was a body.

Godfrey went quiet, slowly putting aside the brick he’d been holding in his hands.

She might have died only yesterday, and not however many millennia ago.

“Poor girl,” Godfrey murmured, shaking his head. She was an elf alright, and she was even taller than elves today – if there were any doubt, thought, that she were an ancient elf, he could see the striations and apparent texture of her skin, a natural camouflage that matched local tree barks.

Most elves didn’t have that sort of natural marking any longer, and those that did were likely to hide it with some cosmetic or other.

Moving very carefully, the two of them gently unbury her body, and Godfrey could see the unpleasant crush injuries – if she didn’t die immediately, it was hopefully quick enough.

“Modern elvish custom is to bury the dead, as men do in these kingdoms,” Orco said as they gently lifted her body and then laid it aside. “I’ve already dug a grave for her and her sister – she’s under here too.”

“Dea Tacita told you?”

“No, she… I see the last minutes of the dead. A sense of they were, how they died, what they were thinking…” He trailed off, and Godfrey worked with him to move some more of the stones and broken bricks aside. The elf’s sister was a plumper, slightly smaller young woman, and Godfrey was horribly reminded of the defaced statue as he saw what the falling stone had made of her head, but at least this was a quick death.

“The skies were thundering overheard,” Orco, gently touching her hair. Dried blood flaked off on his fingers, and Godfrey had to look away. “The very trees were screaming, the wind howling. Water was already bubbling about their ankles when a bolt of lightning struck a barrel of powder.” Gesturing to what remained of the stone shed, he said, “This hosted supplies for the quarry – explosive powders, stonemason’s tools, picks, stone drills. They just wanted their father’s tools to bring with them. Precious things, but not so precious to the man as his daughters, I wouldn’t wager.”

“Do you know their names?” Godfrey asked as they lifted the second girl free and laid her alongside her sister.

“No,” Orco murmured. “There was a strange blankness in their names – usually in my borrowed recollections, I do glean them, but my lady must have censored them. They were likely named for—” Stopping abruptly, he makes a broad gesture, and Godfrey nodded his head.

“Most of the elves that abandoned their pantheon changed their names when they left,” he said. “Some forewent names and titles entirely, in aid of erasing what had come before them – noble and understandable, I’m sure, but an historian’s nightmare.”

Orco laughed faintly. It was a weak sound, but it was genuine, and Godfrey handed him his handkerchief, watching the priest daub at his eyes.

“This is the duty she calls you to, your goddess?” he asked. “Burying the dead?”

“The forgotten and the lost dead, yes. With no one elft to bury or inter them.”

“Let me fetch a ground sheet from my pack, and we’ll use it to carry each of them to the gravesite,” Godfrey said. “I’ll help you fill in the graves.”

* * *

Two hours later, the two of them washed the earth from their hands, and set their spades aside.

“Most of the dead floated away, were brought downstream,” Orco said. “These two were pinned by the weight of the stone.”

He’d read last rites for the girls in smooth, easy elvish – an ancient dialect Godfrey didn’t know and couldn’t speak himself, but he’d recognised the rhythm and some of the words of the funerary rites.

“This is all you do?” Godfrey asked. “You travel between lost corpses?”

“Mm.”

“Dashed hard work.”

“Sometimes.”

As they traipsed up and out of the valley again, Orco said, “You don’t like necromancy. It unsettles you.”

Godfrey adjusted his pack on his shoulders. Orco didn’t seem so frightening now – in all honesty, he felt a sense of guilt for having judged him so easily, having found him so unnerving.

“Yes,” he said. “My family are all necromancers – my mother and father, my aunt and uncle, my cousins. I never understood the draw, myself. It always set my teeth on edge.”

“Oh, you’re named for Godfrey Digbett, are you?”

Godfrey looked down at the ground, laughing quietly. “I’m the third of his name,” he said. “My several-greats grandfather.”

“Ah,” said Orco. “Mother Effily was right – you come from a very noble line indeed.”

“Noble sometimes,” Godfrey said. “Godfrey Digbett I, funnily enough, he pursued some aspects of the work I do now, reconstructing music and folklore. He learned songs from the dead.”

Orco nodded his head. “My wife played the lute,” he said. “Not so well as you do, she was a more casual musician, but it always made her very happy to practice.”

“What was her name?”

“Maruna.”

“Maruna,” Godfrey repeated. “You must miss her terribly.”

“I do,” Orco said. “Every day. Every moment.”

“And it was through her you were called to Tacita’s service?”

“I was very ill, laid up in bed,” Orco said. “It was some manner of awful influenza, and my fever just wouldn’t break. It was winter time, and the climate in the Tigris planes, even in the valleys around the river… We typically have mild winters, but that year, it was very, very cold. No snow – it’s generally too dry for that, we get very little rainfall – but horribly cold. She ventured out toward the city, to bring a healer back… She didn’t come back. My fever broke. I managed to rise. And still…” Orco exhaled, shaking his head, the wisps of darkness around him lingering on the air before they followed after the movement of his body.

“A day passed. Two days. I was still too weak to go out on my own, but her mother and sister came by to check in, and I asked, had they seen her? No. I had never felt so awfully powerful. I didn’t even know how long she’d been missing, because when I was in the grip of the fever, my sense of time was so muddled, I had been sleeping poorly, in strange snatches. And even then, I was awake, conscious, and still couldn’t help look for her – I was too weak.

“Our family organised a search party – there really wasn’t so far she might have gone. She might have fallen into the river, been taken by some predator or other, a river-walker or some crocodilian thing, but ordinarily, there would still be some track, you know? Blood, torn clothing, something… But no. Weeks passed. Months.

“I couldn’t sleep at nights. The idea of her disappearance, the not-knowing, the obsession it evoked in me… I fasted for some days, praying first to Jupiter, but I was dizzy the third morning I walked to the temple and turned down an alleyway in the temple square. Came to Dea Tacita’s shrine.

“She had a larger temple in the city proper, adjoining the great mausoleum – this was little more than a stone shed, her statuette sheltered from too much sun, but with barely even a roof.

“Her voice, when I heard it, was like… Like ripples over still water. I felt it more than I heard it, delicate susurrations of rot-sweet breath.

“I will lead thee to thy wife, Orco of Dunan, in return for thy farm and holdings, which thou wilt give over to My temple. Even if thou wilt not accept My offer here, have this gift of certainty: thy wife lies dead, and she died without pain or suffering.”

Geoffrey held his breath.

“That was… kind,” he said. “Wasn’t it? I’ve heard the Varnan pantheon can be, ah… Less so.”

“Oh, yes,” Orco said. “Dea Tacita is the kindest of the gods, as I see it. She is not warm, perhaps – she offers not a mother’s breast or a lover’s embrace, but nor a mother’s fury or a lover’s jealousy. Her concerns are entirely selfless: she wishes respect for the dead and their remains. A grave marker, a final resting place, words said in their memory. I wanted these things for Maruna. She who loved me, cared for me – I had kissed her, bathed her, laughed with her. We had shared so much – a homestead, work, money, our trials and tribulations, our joys and delights. We had shared our bodies – kisses, touches, breaths. Drank from the same cups, breathed the same air. How could I leave her remains to mystery? How could I sleep at night, not knowing where she slept?

“Dea Tacita led me away from the temple square, down toward the river proper, to a copse of trees. As I grew close, despite her assurances, I felt a greater anxiety – had she been set upon by some brigand, snatched up by a beast? No. As I grew closer, I realised my thoughts were not wholly my own.

“I felt a chill that was no longer on the air, as the season had warmed somewhat by this time. I felt my skirts and cloak snag, even though I was wearing shorter spring clothes. I worried for my husband at home in bed. Maruna had slipped into the copse to relieve herself, stood, made to walk on.

“She stopped to smooth out her skirts, felt a strange snag in her awareness – suddenly she felt very warm, instead of cold, like she was blushing – and then blackness. She fell. I found her body had fallen down the bank, and she was upright against a tree, her chin on her breast.

“No injuries, no bruises, even – she was dead before she even hit the ground. A stroke or heart attack, a sudden palsy. No pain, no suffering, as my lady had promised. Just a stroke of bad luck that death struck her where she did, out of sight – the search party had even tracked through that copse and never seen her hidden in the ferns.”

“I’m so very sorry,” Godfrey whispers. “To have found her like that…”

“No, it was a relief,” Orco says. “I wrapped her in a sheet from my pack and carried her back over the bridge and directly to the mausoleum, said I was going to donate everything I had to the Tacitans, including myself.” Orco sighs, shaking his head. “My side of the family and hers each thought I was mad – they weren’t angry at me, there was no fighting for what had been our property, it wasn’t that, as sometimes occurs. They simply couldn’t understand that I could no longer see the purpose in working there without her.

“I sheared sheep and helped other farmers, and mainly, helped her weave – we’d card the wool together, she’d weave rugs, shawls, and I would finish and enchant them. It was perfect, the two of us. A partnership. I had no partner left – it was all meaningless. My purpose there was done.”

“I wished to leave home, be a bard, when I was a young man,” Godfrey said quietly. “I studied music and magic, rudimentary defence skills, in secret, because I knew my family would never allow for it. This was some years ago, of course – I was younger, untested, clumsier, but I wasn’t unfit for the calling. Merely that they wished I should marry, learn the family magic, stay at home instead. It was Halloran who freed me frm that expectation.”

“Freed you?”

“By taking me into his service,” Godfrey explained. “My desires were nothing to my family – my will was easily overcome, and apart from being easily overcome, it was overcome quite rightfully. The best thing for me and the best thing for the family and our reputation had to be one and the same, you see – I was a fool for even considering otherwise. I had never learned the way, as some young men do, of disagreeing with or rebelling against my family’s wishes. I was trapped, old thing, and they knew it.

“But my will and the will of a god, even a minor one, are very different things indeed. I was made something of a spectacle when he brought me into his service, publicly marked before a crowd – but that only meant it was doubly impossible that my family should attempt to go against his will, if they had thought to try.”

“You chose it, then,” Orco said quietly. “I wasn’t certain, what with the chains on your wrists.”

“I didn’t choose it, exactly – I asked for escape, relief… and was given it.” Godfrey tugged up his sleeves so that Orco could see the silver chains magically tattooed about each of his wrists in full.

Coming closer, Orco looked more closely at them, and Godfrey could feel the field of his magic, feel it touching Godfrey’s own, warm air feeling as though it was suddenly sliding over his skin, under his clothes.

“May I?” Orco asked, and Godfrey nodded, the two of them stopping on the path together.

He let out a low, quiet sound, involuntary, when Orco’s thumb touched the inside of his wrist and traced Halloran’s symbol there: ordinarily, it shone silver, but where Orco’s thumb delicately traced the line, it glowed momentarily gold, and they looked down together at the symbol of the servant kneeling.

Godfrey was aware he was holding his breath.

“Halloran’s worship has not yet made its way to the Hourglass Continent, or if it has, I don’t know that it has left the cities where travellers come from the Bright Kingdoms. I’m little familiar with his symbols.”

“This is the main one,” Godfrey said. “The same one I wear on my signet ring.”

“Yes,” Orco said, and drew away.

Godfrey breathed in, and he felt a rush in his veins as he realised that the other man was still so close to him that when he did, when Godfrey inhaled and expanded his lungs, he actually drew some of Orco’s wisps of magic on the air toward him, purple-dark not-smoke approaching him before it dissipated.

“Mine is a sacred duty,” Orco said. “Strangely enough, Godfrey, I share your distaste for necromancy as a broad field of magic – certainly, I used to avoid it entirely. Some young adventurers and mercenaries, they see the visible signs of my necromantic energies, and they thrill.

“They wish to learn from me, engage with what they perceive as power over the dead. It’s easy for a young person travelling the world to consider the dead as… as objects, if not obstacles to overcome, and power over the death feels as if it may be the same as power over life.”

Godfrey exhaled, shaking his head. “Yes.”

“I have no power over the dead, and no wish to have any, or exert any. I am connected to the dead, that’s all.”

“My family has corpses as servants – animated skeletons, typically. Less mess, when they’re only bones, no smell, no flakes of flesh or hair. The work Godfrey Digbett I engaged in, communication with the dead for the purposes of research, for learning… it still deterred me, the idea of, gosh. I mean, have you ever laid down for a well-needed rest, and everyone keeps shaking you awake to ask stupid questions?”

Orco laughed.

“But that connection with the dead, at least it is… mutual, in a way. Those dead do ask questions, demand respect, have souls. They aren’t just mindless puppets, animated only with someone else’s magic. And what you do, gleaning their final moments, you don’t disturb their spiritual rest at all, do you? Only their remains as you relocate them.”

“Quite,” Orco murmured. “It differs from mage to mage, but care ought be paramount.”

They set their packs down in the clearing off the side of the path – it hadn’t been used for some years, overgrown at its edges, but there were two benches and some posts for hanging tent sheets, and when they passed into it, Godfrey could feel the enchantment field beneath them, warding off pests.

That night, sleeping beneath the same tent sheets in separate bedrolls, Godfrey had the sense of a third presence in the tent with them, a hand touching his hair, a body overlooking him.

“You told me once I ought to ask for things of you,” he said, though his mouth didn’t move. The tent was silent, an extension of the quiet night outside.

Orco slept, a mass of shadows, beside him, but the sight was no longer chilling as it had been. The other figure in the darkness was truly invisible, on account of not being there at all. None of this was happening: Godfrey was fast asleep.

“I don’t always remember,” Godfrey said. “But I’m meant to.”

There was no reply.

“If I have need of things, from you, if I need them, I’m to ask,” Godfrey said again, more quietly this time.

The hand touching his hair was warm, and large, calloused fingers carded through his hair. He’d never had a man’s hands in his hair like this before, let alone such rough hands. It was comforting.

“I would like not to be lost somewhere when I die, where only a cleric like Orco might find me. I would like always to be found.”

“You will never be lost,” said a deep, rich voice that came from everywhere at once, and rang not only in his ears, but through his chest and his heart, through every part of him. “Good servants are not in the habit of losing things.”

“I’m not a very good servant, then, am I?” Godfrey asked.

The laugher he heard in response was soft and sort of reserved, a sensible little chuckle. Godfrey felt very warm at hearing it, proud. Safe. “You are an adequate servant,” came the cool reply following that laughter, but he could hear the slight smile, the amusement, in it. “But you were chosen for a reason.”

“And I’ll never be lost?”

“You will never, ever be lost. There is nowhere I would allow you to tread where I would not find you.”

“Thank you,” he whispered.

When Godfrey woke, he didn’t really remember his dreams, but he felt a sense of warmth, comfort, felt as if he’d been wrapped in more than just his warm blankets.

Orco was cooking breakfast. “You have a contented glow about you,” he said. “Were you watched over, in your sleep?”

“I’m always watched over,” Godfrey murmured, and laughed in a mildly self-deprecating way. “I’m not as good a servant as one might hope – I’m the sort, I think, that requires a lot of oversight.”

“You’ll never be alone, then,” Orco observed, and Godfrey laughed, although he wasn’t sure why.

They ate breakfast together as the sun rose, light pouring into the valley from over the crest, and for no reason at all, Godfrey wondered if the other man was going to touch him, squeeze his shoulder, sit too close to him on the bench. The idea gripped him tightly, made him anxious, anticipant.

No such touch came.

Orco kept a polite distance, and there remained a companionable gap between them all the way back to the temple.

All things as they ought be, each man an island, but not alone.

FIN.