Remembrance

“Grandpa, what’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Scariest thing, hey? That might be too much for you—sure you’re old enough?”

“Grandpa! I’ve already kissed a girl!”

“Oh, well, in that case—

“Let’s see. Well, when I was still an unmasked apprentice—maybe 210, 220 odd years ago—my master and I were in the Fuligin marshes. I was young, but I’d thought I’d seen everything, you know? I was a Pariah’s apprentice, as wise as the hills—”

“Grandpa?”

“Wool-gathering. Sorry. That’s what old age does to you.

“We were hunting zoëleiche, the two of us in a small boat, rowing in the shadows of those black, weeping trees. The zoëleiche had gathered in small groups, mining the muds for I can’t remember what occulted thing. We killed the zoëleiche as we found them, set them aflame.”

“Did they attack?”

“Hells, no. Zoëleiche are mindless—but the lore-wise who raised them, now they were dangerous. We discovered them on an unlit barge, coloured black as pitch, as night. Can you picture that? A ship as dark as death? The smell of corpses and embalming fluids lingering behind it, like the smell of your mother’s cooking?”

“You’re spoiling it!”

“Yes yes. Now, we followed that ship to a village built on stilts at the Fuligin’s peaty heart. A village full of corpses and lore-wise creating zoëleiche polyptych out of severed limbs.”

“What did you do?”

“Burnt it. All of it. I’d never seen Master Gabriel so—wrathful. He turned the air itself into an ocean of flame. The waters boiled, the trees were torn, shredded, ashed, and the ashes consumed.”

“So you won?”

“—my bladder’s killing me. Help me up.”