All the Poor Bastards

by electroshite

Summary:

A long war between two lesser kingdoms was a mere triviality to the ancient forces, an irrelevant thread in the tangled weave of their incomprehensible schemes. Until it snapped, causing the intricate pattern to break.
A story of failed gods, loathful witches, and a woman, who should have died.

Notes:

My first attempt of a long work. I let this story boil in my mind for too long, so it's time to let it spill. English is not my first language, so I use it as an indulgence for weirdly constructed sentences and missing/excessive articles. I really wish I put just as much effort in my assignments as I did in this stuff. Enjoy!!!

Chapter 1

She was getting too old for this shit. This thought graced Dagmar as she woke up in the middle of the night, her sleep routinely brief and disturbed. She left the wall she was resting her head against and wandered about the ruin before stumbling upon a bucket filled with water, left by someone near a well. Freezing murky water was almost warm to Dagmar’s numbed fingers, as she gathered handfuls of it to splatter on her face, praying for it to bring a hint of rest to her worn senses. She shut her eyes tightly, chasing that phantom of clarity while crouching over the water bucket, only to find the headache, that persisted on assaulting her senses ever since she crossed the liberally drawn border of Izeck.

Due the fate’s ironic nature, the ache was most manageable during battles. It dulled at the clanking of colliding blades and rains of arrows; it was soothed by the screams and shouts. But during rest, it came back at full strength, trampling any attempt at calmness and clarity with pulsing pain in her temples. Dagmar tried to cure it somehow. Herbs, traditional concoctions of strange nature, rotgut, prayers - all became a weapon against the malady and each time it came back stronger, as offended that she dared to struggle against it. So, she had to accept it, reluctantly. There was something in the air of this thrice damnable land, she believed, causing strange sickness in her and her men. It seeped inside once one set a foot on this cursed soil; it settled on one’s clothes like dust and was inhaled with each breath. It poisoned one’s mind, soul, word, and ate one from inside. It did not exquisitely savour the leftovers of sanity and hope but devoured each crumb as a starving dog would devour a corpse. And Dagmar was afraid, that her mind will soon be consumed, too.

Perhaps, it was the land, or perhaps it was the toll, that years of being on the road, retreating and advancing, celebrating and mourning, took on her. It carved deep lines in her face, it rendered her expressions furrowed and harsh, it turned her hair grey all to early and long time ago. But it was also the only thing she had ever had and ever been. Battered and worn, with a heavy weight on her back and callouses on her hands was the state she claimed to be her natural. The weariness and the fight were her own, at least. And so, she fought, and she spent hours with Varchian generals and commanders, thinking of attacks and defences. She was not a proper noble, but after decades of good payment, her free company just became a constant unit in the hands of Varchia.
But Dagmar was not born in a household with a long-lasting history of battles and feasts, neither was she given a lengthy and soundly title besides a dismissive “mercenary”, despite the years of her persistent and outwardly stubborn presence. She had to earn the trust slowly and heavily to be even let to the meetings, and after several fruitful victories brought by her strategies, she was, at last, allowed to speak in the ever-changing makeshift meeting rooms. Alas, the distrust returned lately.

She reflected: it was clear the last time a meeting was called in, urgently, after Izeck had first time shown, that they now had new magicians among their units. They were not the usual Izeckian battlemages and healers, but different entities entirely. Their robes were that of ochre, and they were very few amongst the myriads of steel armour and purple brigandines. But the force they brought was more terrifying than anything Izeck could conjure themselves.

The memory was all too clear. Dagmar saw them once, as the faint light of morning sun peeked above the burnt line of the horizon. They moved along the Izeckian infantry. Moved was the only right way to describe it - they neither marched nor strode nor ran nor even floated, but shifted, changed their position in space, and betrayed no other movement, beside that of their twitchy hands. These abnormally tall figures kept even distances between themselves, and towered even above some of the large, strongly built warriors of Izeck. Nothing, besides the stains of mud on their sickly coloured garments, tied them to the mortal world.

With abrupt gestures, they called sickness upon Varchians, stirred nausea and raised acid burning up their throats. But the worst of it all was the terror, unexplainable and sudden, that they felt merely seeing the figures. Dagmar felt it, too: sudden tremble of lips and hands, an animalistic fear being born deep in her insides as she looked at the streaks of yellow in the enemy’s crowd. Their magic wasn’t that of a physical destruction. The Yellow Mages were a tool of spiritual warfare. They conjured nausea, which could be avoided with certain concoctions, but the corruption of mind that they brought was beyond any remedy. It stuck with the soldiers long after, and the insane were more numerous then the injured.

After the encounter, Dagmar woke up frequently in the middle of an anxious short sleep, cold sweat running down her ribs, her heart attempting to fracture her ribs from within, and nightmare’s visions fading in front of her eyes. Rivers of gall, vomit, and urine; a throne of rotting flesh, gauzing puss and strangest fluids; a figure on the throne, ever shifting. She was glad she had never screamed upon waking up.

At last, it was weariness and deep rooted, nearly habitual hate that kept her sane. A weariness of the nights unslept, a hate of a person, who had to lose costly equipment and decent people’s minds to the thrice cursed bastards in stupid clothes.

During that last meeting, Dagmar had appealed to the council to stay camped in Recha until the units recover, no matter the ambitions of the Cenek the Second. The others stared at her blankly, as one would stare at a fat loud fly that refused to figure out how to fly out of the window. Then they looked at each other - the Knight Commander, the Lord General, and the Sergeant - and dismissed her “to converse among themselves”. Bewildered but helpless, Dagmar left the meeting room. ‘Bastards’, she muttered over the muddy water, her mind restless since then. All the respect she had torn from the wicked hands of prejudice was now crumbling. It turned all her previous triumphs into a pile of horseshit.

She raised to her feet, finally finishing pondering over the water bucket. There were always matters to attend and there was never enough time. She went down the alley that was neatly placed between the rows of abandoned and ruined buildings. Upon entering the main street, Dagmar was met with sounds of preparation.

There was a methodical screeching of blades in the process of sharpening, a low buzz of words shared amongst soldiers, and an occasional murmur of prayer, one of the few graceful things in Recha. Despite the late hour, the camp was barely at rest, muffled but persistent in its work. The presence of Izeckian forces at the enter to the field, that earlier bore plenty of rye and now was stripped to the soil, was as pending as a shadow from a dark heavy cloud. The storm was about to break out, and Varchian units waited, unable to rest.

Dagmar stopped in front of a church, by irony of fate untouched by the ruin, besides one beheaded statue. It stood serene in the chaos, the eye of the storm, beautiful in the gentle moonlight, but the inside was as clamorous as the rest of the world.

Inside, amongst high walls, adorned with paintings and stained glass, under the pitying eyes of numerous saints and virtues, the voices of the injured in flesh and mind alike mingled together with soothing words, spoken by sisters of mercy. Some carried bloody wounds and bandages, but the most rocked back and forward while hugging their knees, spoke softly to themselves or argued with an unseen opponent, tended to invisible injuries with urgency. One had tightly cradled a pillow and reassured it in an inevitable, but quick end, offering it a sip from their flask. Dagmar clenched her jaw, uneasy. It was not a place for her to enter rightfully - some of the poor fools went to the battlefield under her command and under her lead, and even if she herself did not drew a sword through their body nor she casted a spell, the guilt stirred up in her chest. But she searched for a particular face and found it.

Adelheid carefully applied a salve to a gnarly looking wound, that looked like an infection itself. She did not even frown, calmly tending to the gash all while speaking to the injured of home landscapes and a healing, that will, she was sure, come as rapidly as it only can. Her voice was warm, and her movements were exact and sharp, and as she looked up only after ensuring a tight bandage. When Adelheid looked up, Dagmar’s heart sunk - the young girl’s face was terribly tired and lined with emaciated dark shadows.

‘Madness...’ Adelheid muttered, worrying the edge of the rolled-up sleeve of her Merciful Crimson office. She stared past Dagmar and chewed the corner of her lips; a habit she carried from the time she was just a little girl Dagmar had found at the destroyed outskirts of Varchia a decade ago. Since then, she grew up and changed, of course, but in many ways, she stayed loyal to many of her behaviours. The woman was unmeasurably proud of Adelheid's persistent work, as she was part of the very scarce medical forces Varchia had at hands. But how Dagmar wished that she stayed behind, safely tucked in a far-away unimportant town, living a silent peaceful life... Albeit, she also knew, that Adelheid would never be happy that way.

‘It is, it truly is.’ the woman noted a pair of lines forming under Adelheid’s lively eyes and her expression softened ever so slightly, ‘I wonder if they even heard me. It seems there is no place for me among the decision-makers anymore, even if I’m a much lesser ass.’

Adelheid ran a hand over her face, closing her eyes with a sigh, ‘But can’t you see? It’s... I don’t even know anymore what that is! What kind of person can even-...’

‘Heidi, they are not people.’

‘This is no time for loathing talk,’ she cut her off and met her eyes, ‘Don’t call me that, I’m no child.’

‘No, I did not mean it figuratively.’ Dagmar averted her gaze, and it fell on one of the many ruined buildings. A home? A bakery? No-one knew anymore, it stayed a ruin since the first taking of Recha. ‘I don’t think all of this...’ she made a vague gesture, ‘...is just about Varchia and Izeck anymore. Not after the Yellow Mages joined. Damn it, I believe even the Crimson ones are... something. I hate that I cannot put a word to it, to all of it...’

‘Dagmar,’ Adelheid cut her off, disrespectful mentions of the Crimson Hand always angering her, ‘You are... You are just terribly tired.’

‘Aren’t you too? My mind won’t change even after a month of an uninterrupted sleep, if we would even still be here by that time.’

‘You always said we were one leg in the grave, ever since I was ten. But we are still standing alive.’

‘Then it was just us. Varchia, Izeck, and their petty fights. Now... Now we are certainly doomed. Woe is us, Heidi. You actually can’t see the difference, can you?’ she raised her voice and regretted it the very next second, as Adelheid’s mouth tightened into a thin line and she averted her gaze.

‘You have been here for too long.’ She turned around to walk back inside the church, but paused right before the entrance, “And you smell like death more then anything.’

‘Heidi, we all do, from our very birth. It’s just how it is and how it had always been.’ the heavy doors closed behind her back. Dagmar was left to stand alone.

Sunrise neared, painting the east in sick shade of yellow.

Chapter 2: Messengers, prophets, and old friends.

Notes:

Yes, there is a back-back-background character called Didoslav. No, I will NOT call this fic "All the poor decisions in character names" however tempting it may be. Yes, I am waiting for someone to notice my fleeting but amazing super-duper-cool niche sophisticated wonderful did i already say amazing reference. Shout out to my superstitious besties out there.
Enjoy!!

The decision came in the morning, delivered by the one man Dagmar despised most in the humble Varchian council. The General Commander, Frederius the Falcon of Varchia, had spoken of advances and inevitable success of the weary people of Varchia and the ever-helpful mercenaries. He, this overdressed leech with a constant whiff of expensive wine about him, spoke of honour of death in the battle and disgrace of escape, and it could be laughable if he didn’t believe it himself, did not treat his own words as the outmost truth carved in stone. With all the faults and needlessly pompous polemics, Frederius did fight alongside his vassals and his vassals’ vassals from the times of Varchian conquest of its eastern neighbours, so Dagmar couldn’t condemn him of cowardice. Only of blind foolishness.

The dismissive attitude that the council had attained towards her came so easy and quick, it was insulting. Since that meeting, she wasn’t called for again. As much of loss as it was for her strategically and personally, it just had returned her several years back to where she stood. She was never promised permanence, couldn’t be promised. But she still had her free company. And so, she attempted to switch her thoughts from what she viewed as a certain doom to her personal concerns.

She crossed to the western quarter of Recha, its remains turned into a disorganised camp of her free company. Bedrolls and piles of cloth that replaced them were scattered in uneven rows. Some of them had their owners, sleeping or restlessly tossing. Smell of a water-diluted stew, pork for which was sourced from somebody’s abandoned house on the outskirts of Recha, stood in the air, mingling with sweat, smoke, and wet earth, that stuck to the boots. There was a rain a day ago.

The free company existed for two decades by then. The initiative was born of Dagmar’s exhaustion with the generational habit of saving. Its trace was noticed in everything: food, that was stored in excess and often became too mouldy for any use; familiar jewels, hidden away and waiting for the better or harsher times, to be worn or sold; money, saved by several generations of families lied stashed and untouchable. Anything of value was somehow kept under a lock, and at the end never once used. It did not matter, that the savings became excessive and harder to hide away in the corners and under floorboards.

This habit was cultivated by earlier and darker ages, of course. Rational at that moment and just as vital for survival, it was engraved deeply into the minds of not only singular families, but nations, some more than the others. But those times seemed to be replaced with a conflicting, but promising epoch, where the mercenary kind could prosper. The sum, sourced from conspiratory selling of some of the familial goods and some other affairs, allowed them to hire an equip a humble routier army, that mostly consisted of paid off prisoners, dismissed soldiers, and more noble volunteers in need of governmental independency.

Dagmar walked up to one of the few scarce campfires. Two familiar figures crouched by the feeble warmth and shared a worn flask, a wiry man, with sigils tattooed over his hands and the bald top of his head, and a tall woman with an overly expressive face, that was engraved with scars. Matej and Ptashka, or old bastards how Dagmar would fondly call them time to time, the founding members of the free company and the only ones from the original formation that were neither retired, nor wed, nor dead.

She met them by whimsy of accident in a tavern in the far East of Varchia, reluctant and untrusting at first. They were just slightly less battered and slightly more hopeful then, just as Dagmar was. Several evenings of lengthy talks and a plentiful of drinks, and an alliance was formed based on common ideas and ideals. Other members came and went, but the three of them stayed, now bound by a cynical friendship.

‘So, the council career is over, I figure?’ inquired Matej. He polished a looted Izeckian gauntlet with the sleeve of his gambeson.

‘You think it'd ever began?’ Dagmar scoffed and toom a place by them. She fixed her eyes of the fires, that lazily dined with the firewood.

‘Well, you are no politician, Dagmar, and never were.’ Ptashka passed the flask to Dagmar, ‘Don’t know what you hoped for, had to stay in your lane, if you ask me. No good in that society.’

‘I’ve only ever hoped for sensibility.’ She accepted the offer and downed what turned out to be a gut rotting liquor, wincing as it burnt down her throat, then wiped her mouth with her sleeve and passed the flask, ‘Sensibility, damn it! And Frederius... If you put our dear drunkard Didoslav in his stead we’d have better situation.’

‘Ye searched for sensibility in Varchian council? Well, that’s on ye,’ Matej laughed, baring uneven yellow teeth. Dagmar shook her head; he was right. But she still caught herself on naivety time to time, so unsuitable for the leader of mercenary group notoriously filled with refugees, prisoners, and dismissed soldiers. Dagmar comprehended, of course, that hers was the company of occasional arsonists, thieves, burglars, and all the abandoned throwaways, there were no romantical ideas about noble and dignified knights there. They were just another leech on the body of the war between Varchia and Izeck, sucking out as much blood as they could before its veins turned dry and shrank, and then they would wait for another to spark, earning by the means of plunder in times of brief peace. She knew that and accepted that knowledge as an unwanted guest.

‘Everything’s not that bad.’ Ptashka shrugged, taking a sip from the flask.

‘Ye mighty negative, Dagmar. I figure we will have us some earning, as usual, and then move on. Although, ye know, all those... them...’ Matej furrowed his thin brow in an uncharacteristically unnerved expression and spat on the ground. Oh, Dagmar knew exactly who he was referring to.

‘The Yellow mages scare the living shite of me,' she said, 'They're going to be a much bigger problem than any malady we've had around so far, mark my word. And that’s exactly what I was trying to tell the council. I saw a dream recently...'

Ptashka and Matej shared a look, and Dagmar did not like it at all.

‘...What’s that for?’

‘Just feeling nostalgic.’ Ptashka shrugged, shaking the last drop out of the flask, ‘Cassandra...’

‘That’s different,’ Dagmar cut her off.

‘...Cassandra always said that she will certainly die at the end of the day because she had dreams about it. Don’t remember, who convinced her that she’s some kind of prophet, though. Probably her own hands' deed.’

‘Well, she did die,’ Matej added and was painfully nudged in the side by the taller woman.

‘Yes, but she died in the morning, which is the direct opposite of the "end of the day", and she lived more years than any of us will. If you always say that it’ll be raining tomorrow you are bound to be right for once.’

‘Cassandra also talked about the times of the Witches returning,’ Dagmar received Ptashka’s glare. The Four Humor Witches were heroines of legends older than concepts of Varchia and Izeck, and so were the superstitions about mentioning them out loud. Especially before a major event, ‘Sorry.’ she proceeded to spit over her shoulder and knock on the wooden barrel nearby, and the taller woman’s expression softened slightly. The silence thickened around the campfire.

Dagmar left soon to find her own bedroll, her possessions piled on top of it. She attempted to focus on the equipping, but the foul taste of the rotgut that she accepted from Ptashka returned her to the earlier conversation. Usually, a comparison to a madwoman would not affect her in the slightest. One could not go far without humour and not go insane during hardships, and Cassandra, had a good soul, although it was buried under unintelligible words and unreasonable greed. But at the time when from the council to the company stared at her with that same expression, when even Heidi - ever loyal and understanding Heidi - dismissed her worries and gave her a pitying look, she couldn’t laugh.

There was something undeniably and clearly wrong, and if it wasn’t around them, then could it be something inside them? Inside her? No. As the blade of her hunting knife sliced through her hair, hardly, unevenly, and dangerously close to her scalp, she thought to herself, that she refused to go mad just yet. As she shed the outgrown strands, her hands quick with practice of years of sporting the same cut, she decided, that she refused to become another prophet of misery. But decisions one makes in one’s mind rarely do impact the march of history. And the woe? The woe had been upon them long before they could care to think of it.

Chapter 3: The field and the fleeing.

It began with the whistle of arrows. They crossed the sky above them as a flock of spooked birds would. They were lucky to notice the enemy’s flanks first and greeted them warmly. From the first glance it seemed that fate was on the side of Varchia. A few fell, mostly the less armoured infantry, when the arrows rained down on them. Unintelligible words and exclamations rose amongst the Varchian militarium - the morale, earlier improved by a pre-battle prayer and a morning drink, had now risen, fuelled by the spilled Izeckian blood.
Dagmar heard, mostly from Adelheid and sometimes from her own unfortunate encounters with bards and their like, that battle was often described as a “dance of steel”. There was nothing dance-like between the forces of Varchia and Izeck. Under the clear sky and bright sun of late morning, obscured by no shadow, bloodshed proceeded.

The flanks of spears and swords, like the sides of two enormous centipedes, collided and mingled, the enemy stepping in the place of friend. Some threw themselves forward, blinded rather by urge or by fear of punishment for escaping; some froze, their fear turning into shackles rather than force, trampled the next moment in the chaotic movement; some, witnessing the opponent face to face and their blood curled by the screams of pain of their next comrade writhing on the ground with their limbs and faces deformed as the others stepped on them, tried to run, just to be pushed back first into the blades.

Dagmar fought. She did not have a choice not to. Of course, it’s not like their company had never deserted a surely losing fight, as no principle tied them to an honourable loss. However there was nowhere to run in the dead land between Varchia and Izeck. There were only stretches of trampled black soil - except for the forest closer to the Izeckian border, where a line of yet unburnt trees remained near its pre-frontal villages. She had nowhere to come back if she ran either way, Varchia nor Izeck. The only way was forward. So forward she went.

The primal fear of death did not leave her since the first fight. Neither did the lump in her throat and the nauseous stickiness in her guts when she heard screams and saw innards spilling after a slicing strike of her two-hander. She learned to deal with it, to swallow the lump, ignore the nausea that followed her through the battle. She learned not to look into the faces, not to feel disgust or pity, to treat blood that seeped into the cloth of her gambeson as another kind of dirt, just a warmer and more copper smelling one. She learned that fear and innards and nausea - all would hunt her down the moment she left the clamorous lands and rode to the places quiet and calm. They would get to her the moment she would lay down in a tavern’s soft bed. They would come back as they always did - only more absurd and exaggerated than she remembered, with her fantasy adding to the parts she refused to look at.

It would hunt her down later, but she was not in a warm bed now. The wind blew in her weathered face, the sword weighted on her calloused hands, cuts, the ones she missed somehow, burned on her skin and bloomed in crimson. She was hurt, she was afraid, and she was alive and had to keep it that way.

The fight went smoothly, and it concerned Dagmar more than the back pain she obtained with an unfortunately angled swing of a two-hander. She did not complain about lack of opponents, shouts, or clanking, but it seemed just almost offensively easy to go forward. The blade of her sword went through cleanly, and the assault from the enemy was somehow weaker, somehow less enthusiastic. Was it a rapidly subsiding morale of Izeckians or did she become just so good? First was questionable due to notorious Izeckian vigour for fight, born from tradition of their ancestors from times so old, they could be heard about only in fairytales and legends, but were enough for them to thrive on. And the second was just not true.

The last fights with Izeckians were mostly victorious but not easy, not like this. She came out with a nasty gash last time and was exhausted to the point of losing her consciousness the time before. For them to suddenly lose the skill and the big part of their bragging about equipment was strange, to say the least.

It was the moment when she broke one of her rules, that is not to look too closely. She looked at the face of the man she thrusted the blade through. His cheeks were deeply sunken despite a seemingly young age, the shadows under his eyes nearly black on skin that had a shade of green to it. Something seeped from the corners of his eyes, something sickly looking. She flinched, pushed him off the blade with a kick of her leg. The more she looked the clearer she saw - they all shared these features. The emaciation, deeply carved into their faces, some drainage oozing from their eyes, ears, and mouths. Izeckians did not look this way before, did they? But she did not look before, oh, she just did not look too closely.

She wondered now, how they fought at all. Their clothes and armour hung on them strangely, they tumbled from slightest pushes and bled from the slightest scratch. They flung themselves on Varchian flanks like ragdolls rather than warriors. And as she looked, they became increasingly exaggerated, a comical parody of battle. They were all of her gore-filled quick-paced nightmares of peaceful times manifested in flesh, as they burst at the prickle of spear and their bowels flew across the field. And the bright sun did not wish to hide behind a cloud, to cover the mocking horror that littered the trampled grass. Instead, it watched with a silent detachment.

The acrid taste of vomit burnt up Dagmar’s throat, she tightened her grip on the hilt, attempting to calm the tremor in her hands. It was a surrealistic joke, it made her question her own clarity of mind, but damn her if it was not terrifying to see this parody of Izeckians running and stumbling, their limbs swaying as if they were boneless, their mouths agape and oozing. And there they came.

They seemed to stand still on the crumpled grass and yet moved along it. They were much, much closer than during the previous battle. What she thought to be the shade of dirty ochre was a vivid, bright yellow, webbed with words and sigils of a darker shade. Their garments were neither robes nor dresses nor coats and the yellow cloth clang to their overly prominent ribs and to their thin arms with unnervingly long fingers and their legs seemed to be many and none and obscured by the widening of their garments. The Yellow mages stepped, flowed, shifted forward slowly. They were tall, and they had no shadow to follow them, and the sky seemed to darken against their bright forms.

They gestured simultaneously with their hands and their long fingers that had too many joints on them, and Dagmar felt the taste of vomit on her tongue and tears welling up in her eyes. They had no faces, except for a headachingly blurry space where their heads must have resided. And they were beautiful somehow, as a vivid spider or a wasp is. For a moment she thought that the Yellow mages were horrifyingly beautiful things.

The next moment she threw up.

The fear she spent decades caging and pushing down broke free and devoured her as a starved abused beast would. She was reminded at once of every instance she had felt so humanly afraid, beginning with childish fear of darkness to the fear of what could ambush her in it. It paralysed her, held her trembling hands down and her feet planted on the ground. And she watched, unable to look away, as the mages, unfazed by the army of exploding ragdolls around them, untouched by the smallest drop of blood, weaved an unseen web with their hands, their gestures complicated and fluid. The air seemed to shift and reek of something between vinegar and bile.

She watched helplessly as the figures of Varchian soldiers around her, some familiar, some complete strangers, blurred and swayed ever so slightly and then tumbled, as those flesh ragdolls did. She caught the sight of Matej at her right, his long face frozen in a wide-eyed expression of disbelief for a moment before his eyes bulged and he... He...

Dagmar did not understand what happened to him. He stood there one moment, the old bastard with shitty sense of humour, and then there was some mingled deformed mass instead of his head, stuck in the moment of explosion, the drops hanging in the air. Then he - it - turned, and Dagmar could see one eyeball still present in a barely identifiable socket. Then he fell.

And they dropped, all around her, in myriads of grotesque explosions, and turning inside out, and paused in ripping and she heard her own scream somewhere far away, evidence of it only in coppery taste in her raw throat. She tried to move and couldn’t, even breathing came in erratic rare inhales, bringing the reek with it.
There in her eyesight came another scene. The group of women, dressed in crimson offices, armoured very scarcely or not at all, approached. The Crimson Order.

They tried to mend someone’s gruesome deaths, those poor scared sparrows, with tears in their eyes and terror on their faces. Dagmar caught the familiar face among them - Adelheid tried to reach to Ptashka, who lay farther away, her leg detached. She stumbled amongst the many deforming and changing bodies, covering her terrified face from the splattering, a short sword, the sword that Dagmar taught her to wield when she was much shorter and had less shadows about her face. And the woman managed to move, to tighten the grip, to make a step. If they couldn’t fight, they would save the rest, they would run to safe paces from these... those... They would run and they would mend their wounds and maybe their mind and never come back to this land of nothingness again, right?

‘Heidi!’ Dagmar called, and the girl glanced at her over her shoulder.
Right?

She could see her expression ease slightly, how the tears rolled down her soft cheeks as she recognised someone, she could confine her horror to. Dagmar nodded, sheathing her sword. They just had to pick up Ptashka and reach the forest; it was not that far; it would be their sure escape. Almost like the old times, just a lot stranger. They will push through, they always did.

Right.
They ran, threaded the soil littered with gore, stumbling at times. She looked over her shoulder, checking if Heidi still followed, and she did. She grew up to be so brave, much braver than Dagmar herself had ever been. Perhaps it was for better that she left the company, she had more honour than any of them ever had. They had almost reached Ptashka.

...Right?

Dagmar glanced over her shoulder one more time and saw that Heidi had stopped. She turned around, calling out for her, asking, what was wrong and whether she was injured. Heidi didn’t answer. She stood there, tears flowing from her eyes. She opened her mouth, and it seemed that she tried to say something.

A tall yellow figure shifted near her. Its hands reached, the tips of its long fingers grazed Heidi’s shoulder. Her mouth opened wider, a silent scream. Then, she turned inside out, like a crimson wet shirt.

Dagmar ran, the landscape in front of her eyes rendered a burning blur. She ran, and she stumbled over the dead and the writhing living, and shoving sway the ones that still stood, and falling, and standing up. She ran until her vision was stolen by sudden darkness. She fell face first into grass. Untrampled forest grass.

Chapter 4: The forest and the wandering.

The trees stood tall and still, their leaves barely quivering with the blow of wind. She wandered in their shadow, crumpling the stretches of untouched grass and moss. She followed no thought, only the instinctual call for survival that, strangely enough, persisted. She breathed the clear wet air and remembered her way around a campfire. She found the black carcasses of houses of a village on one of the clearings and a dozen of corpses there. She looked at them, their empty eyes and grey faces, devoured by insects and animals, and she rummaged through their pockets, collected their mouldy bread and arrows. She took a bow off one of them, as it was still intact and she sure couldn’t go on eating roots and berries. She walked away from the village and did not turn around hearing a mingling of words in the language she understood once.

She walked, and her hands and her brigandine covered with dried blood and dirt, her thoughts, once so numerous and loud, turned silent. Except for one, that one quiet, but clear thought that was in absolute opposition to her actions. It stood against all her hard work of living through. Against her exhaustive hunting and cooking, cutting mould off the chunks of bread, and religiously avoiding the muddy water of the river that flowed from the field. Against her tedious scavenging for anything that resembled medicine. Against her fights with and hiding from other lost survivors, Varchians and Izeckians alike. That thought was a wish, and she wished to die.

Before she thought lowly of those who joined the free company just for the sake of risk, of probability of death. She thought it to be cowardice and stupidity and nothing more, but each time they would receive the payment and go on spending it in one of the taverns in peaceful cities she would inevitably think about it. The freedom of absolute nothingness, the liberty from clamour of thoughts... All the things that she could only briefly reach by passing out on the said tavern’s floor. She contemplated it in the manner of dissolving in the fog one cold morning, a passive act rather than an active decision.

The mercenary took an arrow out, squinting her eyes ever so slightly to bring the animal into focus. A doe strode out in the clearing along with its restless sisters, then paused its step and bowed to the ground, proceeded to graze a patch of grass, oblivious to the gaze that carefully followed its movements from distance. It was a beautiful animal, this doe, with its silky coat and anxious grace. She kept as quiet as she could not to disturb its sensitive hearing as she levelled the bow, aiming for the slender neck. Heidi always liked deer. ‘They are just so lovely and have kind eyes.’ was one of the first things she said out loud, week after they found her hiding in that empty house, cleaned out by other, less merciful marauders. She was very silent then, when she was ten or so, but found that thought important enough to tell Dagmar. And Dagmar remembered.

The arrow’s whistle sliced through the air and went past the animal, getting lost in bushes and trees. The doe raised her head, alerted, and ran away.

Heidi kept her from those thoughts somehow. Despite Matej and Ptashka being the decisionmakers in the child’s strange adoption, Dagmar gradually took the caregiver’s responsibility on herself. She tried to give and teach her as much as she herself had and knew and more so, bringing whatever books or scrolls to their ever-changing camps and stays. She taught her how to use a short sword efficiently but failed to promote it in a way that the girl would choose it as a profession. Dagmar gave her the life of hardened characters and dubious morals, but Heidi learned gentleness and compassion. She learned that strange idealistic hope that Dagmar did not feel herself since childhood, but Heidi managed to foster and carry it in her youth. Dagmar would call her foolish for that and Heidi would only smile bitterly. She guessed who Dagmar really was too early in her life, and it wasn’t a stone-cold figure she sometimes tried to carve out, but Dagmar could not stomach that compassion. It was so easy to mistake for pity.

She did not think of Heidi’s death all the time. Quite the opposite, she seemed to forget about it repeatedly and wonder at that strange pit that opened in her guts. Her dreams remembered it but did not memorise it correctly. They always tried to chase the image but failed and turned it into another scenario that never happened. Earth opening to swallow her, fire bursting from the soil, hanging, drowning, rains of arrows or daggers. Once she just wasn’t there and Dagmar stood on the field opposite of the Yellow mage and wanted - needed - to ask why it didn’t take her instead. But she couldn’t, the words never left her throat. And in each dream, in each rendition of Heidi’s death she could not run to her, to push her out of the way of harm and hold her. She could only stand and witness her demise, again, and again, and again, and...

...She stopped near a house. It stood in the middle of a clearing, no village to relate to. A solitary house, a well to its left, an overgrown field before it, a coop to its right. All had the unkept, abandoned look, but the chickens walked about and there was a man sitting by the opened door. Dagmar curtly asked if she could drink from the well and the man nodded, lifting his unfocused gaze.

She downed the cold water, and it trickled down her chin. She took another glance at the man, noticing his utter dissociation. He was peeling a potato but did not look at it and cut nearly half of the vegetable off on the ground. Instead, his gaze was set on a little bump in the soil, that had a pile of dead flowers and a plate of spilled stew on it. He stared at that spot, rarely blinking. The angled potato slowly turned red in his uncoordinated hands.

Dagmar stepped closer to the strange man and fished out a couple of dirty copper coins she found days before.

‘Thanks,’ she spoke, her voice hoarse from a long while of silence.

The strange man did not even look at her, almost as she had never come there in the first place. Dagmar left the coins on the step he sat on and turned to walk away.

The man grabbed her wrist, switching his stare to her as his nails dug into her skin. Dagmar reached to her hunting knife rapidly with her free hand, but the expression on his face forced her to stop. Absolute and utter misery.

‘You won’t escape,’ he whispered, shaking his head, his mournful frown deepening. Tears welled up in his eyes and black snot crawled down his nose. He then raised the knife he peeled potato with, but Dagmar was faster. Strangely enough, his blood was pitch black.

She went through the house quickly, taking wine, stashed money, and a blanket she tore for the cloth. She also took two chickens, cooking one on the dead man’s stove and plucking and saving another for later. As Dagmar stepped out of the house, she was met with another unexpected habitant.

A horse nudged the man’s head and huffed. It was an animal of imposing size, despite its clear emaciation and its dirty dark-grey coat. She took her steps carefully and quietly, not sure what to do. Had the horse been here before? It looked like a draught horse rather than well bred mounts that some Varchian nobility would use. A working horse, the likes of which she saw in fields in springs and autumns. It neighed and Dagmar shushed it as softly as she could, and attempted to walk away, but the horse followed her with an awkward tired step. It was calm, as ignorant to the death of its owner. It treated Dagmar as a common guest rather than another misery of the house, and it made her almost ashamed.

She spared a few vegetables she collected from its late owner’s house, the only substantial ‘sorry’ she could offer. The horse accepted the meal eagerly, nudged her satchel for more and Dagmar laughed quietly before cutting herself off.

After that they walked together.

Notes:

Peetah, the horse is here.......

Chapter 5: Involuntary acquaintances

The warm light from the tavern’s windows spilled on the mud of a broad road that led out of Rozdorizh, one of the few larger settlements still standing on the Varchian sorrowful soil. It proudly withstood centuries as one of the older towns and persisted through any surge of progress, keeping its tradition of hunting and trapping in its core, a stagnated manifestation of Varchia’s roots and vices. After the stretches of forest and empty villages it seemed as loud as some capital.

At the noon earlier that day this town of trappers and farmers met Dagmar with narrowed eyes and spitting over numerous shoulders. She did not blame them. After all, she did come seemingly out of nowhere, leading a tall black horse with a dead boar tied to its back. That was a vision as strange as it was ominous, and superstitions she respected and, despite herself, believed in. She at first stopped near a butcher and his humble stand, removing the animal from the horse’s back. The butcher, a balding man with a missing finger, glared at her blood caked gloves, a battered hide she used as a cloak, and her exhausted eyes, that burrowed a hole in his apron.

‘This ain’t cost much,’ he said with slight caution, glancing at the boar on the ground that had its mouth and its glassy eyes open. It was not the freshest but still could be used.

‘Fair enough,’ she croaked before clearing her throat, remembering the sound of her own voice, ‘I don’t expect much.’

The butcher nodded and paid a few rudely smithed coins.

By evening the townsfolk lost their interest in her. None in the tavern were particularly fascinated by the stranger from the forest, focusing rather on local gossip and political rumour, to Dagmar’s happiness. As she stared at the constellations of cracks, crumbles, and dried drips of beer on the table in front of her, she overheard parts of conversations from here and there.

‘...Zofeia, the butcher’s daughter, got pregnant with a bastard... Heard, Izeckian caravan got robbed on the way to the Eastern border... Poor girl, cried her soul out, swore, that it couldn’t be... After the war ended, that is... They said she tried to drown herself after she found out and have been in some sort of fever since then... Those, eh, the strange ones, in yellow clothes...’

Dagmar looked up from the table at the mention of ‘the strange ones’, but the group spoke again on the topic of poor Zofeia. To be earnest, Dagmar did not care for the woman or her bastard, but the notion of them passing through this town and leaving it seemingly untouched was enough to set a tremor to her hands and a sticky coldness to her guts. On the other side, now she knew that the war has ended. She returned to nursing her glass, filled up with something cheap and suspiciously close to a moonshine, and pondering on her own business.

‘You need a better drink,’ a voice sounded, curtly.

Dagmar raised her gaze to meet a figure, sitting next to her at the table. She did not hear her steps nor the screech of the chair being pulled out, but she couldn’t quite rely on herself. Not after then.

‘...What?’
‘I said, you need a better drink. You could go on drinking piss at that pace,’ the woman noted, before ordering two beers on her tab.

Well, if it wasn’t some exceptional charm. Dagmar narrowed her eyes, inspecting the stranger, who was a tall scrawny woman with angular face, mean eyes, ad slicked black hair, barely surpassing her neck. She was dressed in an arrangement of layered robes, richly embroidered, yet dirty and worn. A cane hung off the crook of her elbow.

‘What do you want with me?’ Dagmar muttered, downing the rest of the definitely-not-moonshine and wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her gambeson, a gesture that was met by the stranger with a raise of eyebrows.

‘Well, you are not a local, I assume. A new face is a rare occurrence on this soil, I must say. I remember this town to be much more lively and much less inbred...’

‘I’m happy for you and your memories. Why are we talking?’

The stranger narrowed her eyes. She was clearly not happy to address this nomad in the first place and Dagmar did nothing to support a nice conversation.

‘You are all business, I see. Very well...’ she briefly glanced over her shoulder and leaned forward in the chair, ‘My name is Terka, and I do have something you might be interested in. I mean, I am almost certain you will, you are quite the type. You see, I need a sword for hire, kind of. I have an... idea of a sort, a quest in a sense. A humble personal mission, if you will...’

Dagmar had met such type before. It is always a kind of a spellcaster, one can see it rather from strange garments, arrangements of rings and amulets, or that look of madness in their eyes. They never had the clarity of an order and a deal, that was the most frequent in her line of job, but a strange riddle for one to solve, a task. Usually, the former mercenary would just tell the woman to redirect her vague bullshit to some more naive poor soul, but the free drink and the absurdity of her recent life made her reconsider her habits.

‘Go on.’

The stranger grinned and rubbed her hands as preparing for an exceptionally good meal and Dagmar ultimately regretted that she agreed to listen. Terka began to talk, her voice assuming conspiratory tone.

‘You see, you won’t believe the story I will tell you. I do not need you to, it’s of no matter to me. What I need you is to understand what I’m saying so the deal is made on an even ground. Is that clear?’

‘The deal? There is not even a deal yet.’

‘Exactly, not yet. I take it as a yes though.’ The beer was brought in, but Terka didn’t even glance at hers, ‘I will be brief, for you are clearly not an arcane scholar. What is important for you to know is that the world is made of several layers: yours, the middle, and the high. Yours is just your normal world; the middle is a no man’s land between the mortal and the divine, mostly inhabited by being or low deities; the high plane is cosmos, the state of gods or god or whatever it is there. Despite the division, they do overlap in places and are also connected by a sort of a tunnel...’ She saw the frown on Dagmar’s face, ‘Do not imagine things, rather you will imagine it incorrectly or will get a nasty headache, a mortal cannot comprehend them.’

‘Very reassuring of you,’ the ‘mortal’ muttered.

‘However, what you should comprehend is that the Humor Witches... Well, the pitiful wreck that is left of them, are the beings of the middle plane. I mean, we did strive for much more, but alas-...’

‘We as in... Do you really say that you are one of them? You are a Humor Witch? You?’ Dagmar interrupted, taking a disbelieving sip of her drink, ‘I mean, I’m sure you are a...’ she gestured vaguely, ‘... master of some sort, a magician or whatever, but you can’t expect me to believe that you are a living fairytale.’

‘I did say you don’t have to believe me in the start, only to listen.’ She furrowed her eyebrows, ‘And what did you imply by emphasizing that ‘you’?’

‘...Just go on.’

The stranger contemplated for a moment and proceeded, ‘As I said, we did plan to reach the high plane. The plan - my plan - was great. I did a thought through exploration of the loopholes in that tunnel, but no-one ever listens to me, of course. Why should they, I’m just the most sensible, logical, and... Well, it has no matter to it now.

‘I was cast out due to unfortunate circumstances I wish not to lay out now, as it would be an embarrassment and you simply won’t understand half of what I’m telling. Well, I did not even know you could be devolved in such fashion, and I do know enough... The reason was not even that good.’

‘...Alright.’ Dagmar nodded briefly, processing the stranger’s story. The Humor Witches? Devolved to a human? That’s what you get for an evening in civilization. ‘Why are you telling me that?’

‘Because, you see...’ she glanced over her shoulder once again and lowered her voice, although clearly no soul in the tavern, including Dagmar, had no idea about her matters, ‘There is a way for me to return my power. Even better, I could reach what I planned to, I could do it the right way. The holes in the planes, the being slipping here, the influences you have no idea about, like the Yellow Mages, - if only I’d become a being of the divine plane I would remove them, fix them.’

Dagmar paused in her movements, her drink halfway set on the table, ‘You could destroy Yellow mages?’

‘I wouldn’t necessarily say destroy, but I could strip them of their power most efficiently, yes. Why?’

Dagmar ignored the question, ‘So, if you become that higher thing you can stop them? Absolutely?’

‘Sure.’ The stranger folded her hands.’

‘Could you...’ she paused, lowering her gaze for a moment, finding the words that so suddenly left her, hid behind the lump in her throat, ‘Can you undo their magic? Somehow?’

Terka looked at her, as if she was reading a book in a language she did not quite know but recognised a word here and there.

‘Not really. But, you know, necromancy could be possible. The true necromancy, with the dead’s consciousness intact. I would be able to do that.’ She tilted her head to the side slightly, ‘You are suddenly motivated. I guess that we figured out the payment then.’

‘Go on.’

‘Surely, I will. What I need of you is to destroy the other Humor Witches. You see, there is a system that can assure that, but there will be obstacles. We are not just fighting them but what is caused by them too. A few cults, maybe, some overly interested individuals, whoever is in their interest.
‘But you need to know of the forms. The others mostly use one, but after my descension each acclaimed one of mine. I was the only one to divide, and I must say...’

In all honesty, Dagmar did not listen to the large part of the speech. The stranger’s voice faded into the noise of tedious terming, and she began to think of the promise. She could return Heidi. The possibility of this strange individual being the actual Humor Witch and reaching godhood was small, terribly small. It could have been a wicked joke, and the mercenary would find her very few earnings missing, or she would get into a fight with Terka’s academic rivals who all just happen to share the delusion of being the legendary terrible deities.

Although, what really did she have to lose? Honour? There was none from the start. Friends? There were none left. Family? The feeble light of hope spilled in her soul. A tiny ray slicing the pit of hurt. If she went, if she believed for a moment that there was a chance, there could be a way, and of ways she was otherwise robbed.

‘So, you need me to fight your unsuccessful half-god friends for you to get you magic back, is that right?’

The stranger closed her eyes in defeat and pinched her nose bridge, ‘An hour of explanations and this is what you give me back? Truly a person unburdened by intellect.’ She looked at her again, ‘Speaking rudely, you are right.’

‘Then you’ve got yourself a sword hired.’

Terka’s eyes widened a fraction, ‘That’s it? You agree?’

‘Yes, if you keep the promise to do that necromancy, to return whoever I need returned.’

‘Ah, yes. Surely.’ She smiled and Dagmar understood that her decisions never stopped being regrettable. They shook hands, and Dagmar just happened to notice that Terka’s long slender fingers reminded her unnervingly of spider legs.

‘As the deal was made, well... There is the last thing.’ The stranger removed her hand and wiped it briefly on her robe, before delivering the statement in a perfectly bureaucratic ‘You will have to die.’

Notes:

I'm actually invested in Zofeia's story, what happeneddd???
I'm really glad you met Terka the Obnoxious Unemployed Nerd Woman on a Revenge Quest. See you in the next chapter!!