I didn’t know how to phrase it so I practiced the monologue in my tent, walking wall to wall and gesturing with my hands and then trying to un-gesture, to be stoic. And whichever way it sounded I couldn’t quite make it out right. This wasn’t the first time I was making this kind of speech, this wouldn’t be the last. But this time it was for a friend for what was now a pair of years. I paced, I scratched my neck and stretched it. My armor was off and my weapons were on a table and yet I felt heavy. Just raising my feet felt like walking through the quagmire. The fogged swamp with nothing but the buzz of blood sucking flying bugs, the bubbling of something close to the surface. Hidden nostrils of a predator in wait, sliding gentle through the black waters.

I slapped my forehead. My tent covers parted.

“Lowell.” I said.

It was Vincent.

“God damnit.” I said. “Scared me.”

“I’m sorry.” Vincent stepped in. I looked behind him to the sunny morning (as it is in the desert, most days of the year). Rays of light passed him and lit his pale figure to something more divine, ephemeral, a transient soul bound for higher heavens. Hyperbole, of course. There are no angels and if there were, it would not be us. We were unfit for that kind of sinless existence.

The flaps closed behind Vincent and once again the tent was in shade. Nothing but bags of clothes and a table and some wrapped belongings acting as cushion.

“It’s painful to have to deal with them, isn’t it?” He asked.

“They’re brothers and someone has to tell them.”

“Then let it be me. It is my burden to see through every soldier. If Lowell is to be bitter, let him be bitter to me.”

“No.” I said. “Sylas gave me this same talk.”

“There’s no reason to view this as your responsibility. There isn’t a nobility or toughness into doing that.”

“I know.” I said.

“Then?” He asked.

“Then what?” I said. “The facts are that I took him with me and he got hurt because of that decision. The fact is that there were an indefinite number of circumstances that lead to us going through this path in the way it did. And those circumstances were predicated on me and what I did.”

“So you do blame yourself.”

“And I’m not going to let anyone take that away.” I said. “I don’t need to go through life needing closure on everything. I lost that in me, the need for closure. I just live with consequences. Like all of us do.”

Vincent sat down and breathed. He took the only chair upon the only table. A gas lamp set that was off, and my knives set that were partly out of their sheath. He took one and then the other. A green one Sylas had given me. A bruised, broken one.

“This is the one you took from Gabralto, isn’t it?” He asked. “When he bullied you in your sleep.”

I laughed.

“Bully? He wanted to stab me.”

“And you fought back. Kept his knife all this time?”

“It’s a good blade. Doesn’t do much stabbing, but it can shred flesh. Good enough for me.”

“Liar. It’s a shitty blade.” He said. “Why handicap yourself with such a thing?”

I breathed in and out. Heavy breaths, with air so dry it pulled at moisture in my throat.

“You forget, almost, where you came from in a desperation to get to where you want to go.” I said. “Here I am playing at Captain with the self-pity and woe of some prestigious, noble soul. But I was never noble. I was brown face, man with shit on my face. I was a spoiled rich kid. I am Virgil. That’s all I am.”

“And now you are a messenger of doom.” Vincent put the blade down. It slid a bit on the table.

“My Kingdom was sieged when I was an infant. Far up north, further than those lands the Rose Knights hail from. On snowy mountains. We were done in by civil war. Not like any other nation in this wasn’t glad it happened that way - some of them even supported it, I figure.”

Vincent’s eyes darted to the side, he looked at the corner of the room with a blank stare as he searched the confines of his gray matter for that particular wrinkle in his brain where the truth of his past was hidden in the crack. A synapse gone unfired for a decade.

“Savages at the door, this is what Soveros told me. Father was dead by then. Mother carried me, apparently I was crying too much and she was panicked too much. And she decided to get a toy for me, to ease me and certainly to ease herself. Well, a back track can decide a whole mans fate, can’t it? She went back into the room. Ceiling collapse and she was frozen for a bit behind the rubble as Soveros tried and tried. A stupid delay for a stupid toy. The savages caught up. She was caught with an arrow in the shoulder. Soveros took me - he couldn’t take both of us.”

“You remember all this? As an infant?”

His eyes went wide open.

“I remember everything.” He said. “Soveros calls I the gift of the savant. More of a curse. I remember every word and every detail. Every move and every strike. These eagle eyes of mine never cease to recall. I was a year old when my parents were burned alive. My mother chopped to pieces by savage peasants. I remember the curl of the portraits as they burned. I remember the collapse of my great grandfathers statue outside the castle. Dragged from his neck and shoulder, brought down and broken into marble dirt upon the courtyard floor.”

“Where’s your nation now?”

“Split.” He said. “Little city-states that mean nothing. No one wants them. The trade routes are all in disarray, the lands were already hostile. We made our money through mining and fishing and exotic vanity goods; pelts and tusks and such. But the savages don’t know how to coordinate it, the economy is fractured and each demands high taxes from the others, such that nothing really leaves the mountain lands anymore. They ruined themselves.”

“And all this would have been different if your mother never delayed? If you did not cry?”

“I’m sure it would have been. For better or worse but different yet.” He said. “Sometimes I think about life with a mother. I think that maybe she wouldn’t have survived. Maybe she would have been sold to slavery. Maybe we would have reclaimed our lands. Who knows?”

I felt my both go still, my shoulders drooped.

“Edwin wanted to be an adventure writer.” I smiled. “Wanted to wander Xyra, noting every species and writing fantastical stories about them. Now he can’t walk.”

Vincent went quiet. He scratched at the surface of the table with his index finger. Outside the men shuffled and then we heard it, a bit like fate dusting itself off at the front of the camp. The polite entrance. Horses neighed at the front, carts rolled with goods and overall there was a cheer and celebration for the returning army. It was the rest of the Crows walking in, Lowell with them.

“No more delays. No more hesitation.” I walked to the tent. “We walk forward no matter the cost. Correct?”

Vincent looked up.

“No matter the cost.” He said.

I came up to Lowell who came in with the slow trod on his horse, he jumped at the sight of me. Some food hanging in chambered napsacks like giant sausage links by the leather saddle. Fruits like figs, little containers of honey breathing from their butcher paper-mouths. Some flat breads of varying colors, layered with some sweet brown sugar syrup. He started opening and showing me and went up smiling with some, asking where Edwin was. I looked about. The crowd wandering beyond me, everyone looking for their friend in the mess of a camp we had in the little valley in the stones. These were the old guard, mostly. All veterans of those long monster hunting excursions, all veterans of that pain. I looked about and rolled my foot down on the floor, crushing small stones with my heel. My face in that perpetual strained look. Eyebrows furrowed and my cheeks taut. Lowell stopped and looked up to me.

“He’s dead.” He said.

“He’s not dead.” I said.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“He lost his leg.”

Lowell dropped everything and grabbed my shoulders.

“Where is he?”

I pointed the direction and he started off. I grabbed his wrist and yanked him back.

“He’s not awake and he needs all the sleep he can get.” I said.

He pulled away and went. Weaving into the crowd, pushing them aside as he came to some shaded tents by the lip of one of the cliffs. Pointy cream colored large tents, stitched together, giant shadows wandering within the sections with a slow gait. I followed Lowell all the way there until we came to the doors. He lifted the flaps and poked his arm inside.

“He was with me.” I said. “He was stabbed with a poisoned dagger.”

Lowell said nothing. He paused with his neck stuck inside the shadow of the camp. He resolved to stay quiet, then let the door fall behind him as he made his way inside.

I did not follow him. To what use? Everything needed to be known was known. Everything to be known would be known. My argument for or against myself. That narcissism of self-pity, none of it would fix anything. To swing at myself for the lashes or to not, that type of masochism only exists for the individual in his sad attempt at absolving. Nothing ever gets absolved. Or fixed. Or changed, really.

I stood for a while before I realized my weapons needed sharpening. The armory needed inventory check. The men needed help building. And so I left with the pain making another notch in my stomach. One of many. A small little scar that ached. Something a boy would cut into a wall to measure his height. So my tenure was marked once more. Another growth spurt. Another cross on my back.