The Death Hunter

Chapter 15: Soul of Gray

The mist was heavy and damp, clinging like icy fingers to Talij as he stood outside in the bleak and empty morning. With the fog, rolling slowly like lazy thoughts, came a strange smell. The smell of the unknown. The Outside.

Somehow he knew it was today, could taste it. The Outside traders would be in today, to trade their coins and trade children away to marriage. Despicable. Desperate. They had nothing, a motley band of fools wearing their garishly colored, patched clothing and their mirthless, feral grins.

Yes, he thought, shivering. Today was the Day of Outsiders. Once a year, maybe twice, they would come into town. And every time after he felt sickened. No wonder no one from his town left to the Outside; what a disgusting, filthy place it must be, to spawn such terrible beings as that. What horrid things they brought into town! Gaudy clothing, flashing necklaces and bracelets for women who suddenly turned to greed at the sight of them.

They brought disease with them wherever they went in the town - disease of the heart, blackening it, freezing it, until it lost all sense of morality.

Talij hated the Day of the Outsiders. He kept his children inside, to protect them from it.

Yet he and his wife and parents went every year, and in spite of himself he was always amazed by the metals that reflected his distorted, amazed image back to him, always intrigued by the light that seemed to come into his wife's eyes at the sight of the bracelets, and always, always mystified by the tales the Outsiders brought. Not that he believed them.

That's what he told himself, anyway.

They were merely tales for children, stories of faraway lands with streets always, always filled with people, and no one starved. Surely there weren't any places like that. There couldn't be.

He couldn't admit to himself that there were, not while his children starved and the ache in his own stomach grew every day. It was just too good of a tale to be true.

Yet he went and listened every year, and like all the other townspeople brought what meager food he had, because the Outsiders always told more tales on full stomachs.

There was a lilting, jingling sound drifting up almost playfully from what he guessed to be a few streets over. Voices with strange accents shouted and joked, gruff-mannered and uncouth but with such happiness Talij found himself almost envious.

His wife was suddenly at his side, looking up at him curiously.

"They're here today," he murmured, nodding in the direction of the noise. The town was so silent it was almost painful to hear their laughter echoing from the surrounding hills. He shivered slightly.

His wife, Linok, placed a hand on his arm. "It's only for today," she said in her quiet voice.

He nodded but knew that though the Outsiders would only stay that day - and perhaps spend the night camped outside their town - the effects would last on him for a week. A month. Maybe until the next time they came. Their stories would haunt him both in his sleep and while he was awake.

Linok sensed his unease but said nothing. Her husband was a strange man; or, at least, stranger than anyone else she'd ever met. Silent, Talij always seemed to be brooding, locked deep within himself and focused on some unidentifiable problem. He left their room almost every night. To do what, she wasn't sure.

But sometimes he would come back pale and shaking, beads of sweat sliding down his face and sometimes in the candlelight he held unsteadily in his hands she thought they were tears. He would place the candle on the dresser that was falling apart and get into bed next to her as quietly as possible, thinking she was sleeping as she watched him from mostly closed eyes. His breath would come in sobs that shook the bed slightly as he buried his face into his pillow to stifle himself.

Talij smelled like the Outside during the worst times.

She had to wonder what he saw, what horrors were locked up inside him that he would break down so completely. And the next day he would be solemn but not quite calm as he went about their daily routines.

Each night Linok couldn't bring herself to reach out to him, to let him unburden his terrors on her as well to lessen the horrible weight. She simply couldn't do it. Those nights made her realize she knew nothing about him, that he was worlds away and she was too afraid to build a bridge to him in fear of it crumbling beneath her.

He was a good man, though; she knew that much, with the way he somehow always found a way to feed their children even if he never fed himself.

So she sighed a little to herself and went to get their food, so her husband could listen to child's tales of faraway places with a look of wonder on his face. That night, Linok knew, he would be ashen-faced and trembling more violently than any other.

Inexplicably the thought pained her, that she could do nothing for him, but she turned and went inside hurriedly. All of this was too strange.

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Yahn stood at the window, looking out at the fog crouched on the hills. Her forehead was pressed against the glass and her fingers traced absent patterns in the mist caused by her breath, swirling lines that lifted and dove and spun quickly before plunging downwards again.

Her words still rung in her head. She couldn't stop thinking about them, how strange it was for her to yell yet how familiar it was to be so cold as the fire burned at her fingers, telling her to hurt him for what he did to Maerin, to her.

Sighing and pushing away from the wall, Yahn walked over to her door and stared at it for a few seconds. Her blue eyes traced the decorative engravings, elegant and seeming to be a representation of the wood carver's heart.

She wondered absently, absurdly, if when she opened the door a shadow would be outside and a dead body would be behind it.

It was a nightmare except she was awake, the strange and impossible image passing in front of her eyes briefly before it left again. She shook her head. Lanith wouldn't do that again. Not now.

Would he?

And somehow she knew it was that doubt that had made her say those things to him, that lack of surety that made the sparks in her fingers ignite and her blood turn to icy calmness. It was because he haunted her dreams when she slept and her thoughts when she was awake, because he had taken care of her when she was unconscious, because he had stopped fighting Jinam.

Because she wasn't sure if Lanith was human, because she wasn't sure if she was human.

And a part of her asked if he wasn't human, why did she care?

So the fire had come back, the burning in her fingers of a suppressed rage that always scared her and made her feel hollow and empty.

Shaking her head, she opened the door, smiling ruefully to herself that there was no shadow lurking behind it, no dead body to discover. She turned down the hallway, her white robes billowing behind her slightly like doubt.

She had a feeling she knew where he'd be.

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Talij sat amid flickering candles, the light casting strange, moving shadows on the walls which seemed to grin at him. Dozens of other people sat around him, people he had glimpsed briefly on the day he was chosen for Linok but never seen again. Their faces had only been misty memories that drifted in and out of hazy, gray dreams.

He always believed the constant fog of the town suited it. Tones of grayness and sameness and nothingness spread its fingers out and covered the empty-hearted town. Sometimes, he wondered if it was just a painting of his own soul.

Now, however, he saw their eager faces half lit by the candle, the other half submerged in careless, dancing darkness. Talij's hands firmly grasped his parcel of food, the last they had but it didn't seem to matter as the man dressed in garish clothes slouched on the counter of the bar and began to speak.

The bar was the one place one could go during night that wasn't taboo, unheard of; rarely it was lit with these candles, leaving its customers submerged in black anonymity as they lost themselves in their brew. It was said strange shadows lurked around the bar, and some of those who went to it never came back home.

Sometimes their bodies were found against a backdrop of blood, the red fluid dotting the walls of the outside of the bar and staining the ground as if trying to imitate tears, or rain, the bodies soaked to the bone with their own grim life. It didn't happen often and those who were lost were ones already mourned for.

They were the ones who had lost the will to live, with their broken houses built around floors made of shattered dreams, and walls made of shadows that stared blankly back with a sickly grin. So their families had already begun the long process of mourning for the loss of their husband or wife or daughter or son even as the lost one was alive.

Tonight it wouldn't happen. It never did on the Day of the Outsiders, when the bar was lit with warm candles glowing with false cheerfulness, and those without hope greedily drank from the Outsiders' tales.

"Way up in the north," the man said, blowing long, unkempt, dark hair out of his eyes with a huff that sounded like laughter, "towns three times the size of this one stretch for miles and miles. But they're nestled right on the other sides of hills under the big, old pine trees, so you can rarely see 'em. But you can always hear the people, people in the streets laughin' and talkin', people travelin' from one town to the other, always hearin' people."

He paused, stroking the stubble on his face absently. His clear eyes glanced around the dank room and at the crowd of attentive faces. Laughing like carefree wind, he slapped his knee lightly. "Towns up in the north aren't so gray as this one. You're all so pale, thin!" He rested his hand on his large stomach and grinned. "Up in the north, there are farms right in the valleys, with workers harvestin' and plantin' all year 'round, except for the snow season. There's always plenty of food." He patted his stomach and winked at the crowd, which laughed shakily and automatically in response.

His dark skin the color of night gleamed in the light of candles, a grin of a young, mischievous boy and not one of an adult. The yellow and orange and green of his patched clothing seemed to shimmer with the same glow in his eyes.

Words danced and sang around the room as the Outsider told his tales, his false tales, his fairy tales. Tales of legends and lands far away that can't possibly be true, except for the bright man with eyes pale like dreams sitting there or the strange beasts that tossed their heads as they pulled the Outsiders' cart into the town.

Talij knew they were true.

But it didn't matter. His hands gripped the food tightly and he felt a vegetable snap. It didn't matter, because for him it would never be true; for him the towns nestled in hills many times larger than the ones here, the hidden towns full of laughter and people who weren't starving and who weren't afraid of the fog and the dreams and the hunger which stopped them from breathing -

The places where the bright colors matched the souls of the careless, happy people would always, always be just a story to him. Just a dream, a thought whispering in the back of his mind.

Because he was stuck in the shadows of gray and fog of his own soul.

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Lanith sat with Fenyar, gazing at row upon row of sleeping Children. Neither spoke a word, only the flickering of a candle for noise. The light seemed far away in this huge room and he wondered how far underground they were.

He wondered if that was how far he'd have to dig to reach his own soul.

Leaning against the wall, he observed the shaking man next to him who had stopped his weeping. Darkness consumed the far corners of the room and he wondered if they were watching.

Lanith wondered about the strange world he had infected, cursed. He wondered and thought in his confusion about many things but could never find answers.

Fenyar's hand was lightly touching the bed frame he was next to, tracing patterns in the sheets and looking more whole than he'd ever had before. The pale figure on the bed was chillingly cold, like stone buried underground for thousands of years, old and solid and deathly unmoving.

"When a Child chooses an Advocate," the man second only to Jinam whispered, the sort of whisper of a man who'd just woken after a long, long sleep, "it is the best thing that happens to either of them. That Advocate becomes the Child's only way of willingly being able to walk this land. Perhaps they miss it," his hand touched his Child's briefly, "or perhaps they have other reasons. They can only come through darkness. Is that why the Advocates, those stuck in between two worlds, continue to exist?"

Standing, Fenyar gazed across at the shadows in the corners, staring as if waiting for them to come to life.

"So many fear darkness. So many say that the light of the Children of the Gods is the only pure thing in this world...and yet, don't you call its monsters to life?" His blue eyes glazed over thoughtfully. Lanith sat without sound, still chilled to the bone by Yahn and still unsure of what truly was to be feared and what wasn't. Was Lanith to be feared? Or the other gods of death? Or the one who threw him from his place as Death Lord?

"But if darkness isn't to be feared," the Advocate continued, "and light won't protect, why did the Powerless Ones and the Children fight? Did the Powerless Ones blame the Children for not protecting them from the shadows?"

Suddenly Lanith laughed and it was the sound of a thousand words tumbling and breaking, of the world crumbling in bitterness. "Protect? The darkness only takes those willing and those already lost." Like Maerin. Like the family without love who sheltered him out of pity. Was he to be blamed for having the shadows kill them?

Nothing made sense.

Fenyar shook a little, his hand clutching the bed sheets. "The darkness only takes those willing..." He smiled without humor. "And it only allows the light to defeat it, control it, and-"

"The light can only travel through darkness to the world of gray."

Nodding to Lanith, Fenyar smiled up at the ceiling of the huge room and to a world neither could see. "A Child is always aware of what's going on here, with or without an Advocate. They choose an Advocate to be their median between worlds, their other Half because theirs lie here in sleep, after observing for long hours. Still, only briefly do they completely contact Advocates, and that's usually in the dark, during the Choosing." His eyes became thoughtful again. "Why was Jaylik chosen?"

"Perhaps," said another voice from the huge opening that led into the room, "because darkness only allows light to complete it."

Lanith stood quickly, staring down the wall at a tiredly smiling Yahn. Her blue eyes were weary and a thin hand leaned against the ornately decorated wood.

"Maybe the light can fill the missing tones of gray, but it longs most to become the dark's other half," she continued, taking a step forward.

It was unclear who was darkness and who was light, between the fallen Death Lord and the emptied nurse. As Yahn's barely recovered strength began to waver with guilt and she slid to the ground, it didn't matter. She covered her face with a trembling hand.

Another hand that left a familiar iciness blistering through her touched her arm, pulling her up. "Come," the voice of stones said, "You have not recovered."

And light and dark went together into the world of gray. For now, the grayness was enough.

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A/N: Well...I hope that wasn't too confusing. And that the metaphor made sense.