Of all the truths in the world, one reigned over them all with a crown heavy and stained with rust. As inscrutable in its authority as it was certain in its inevitability. 

You could not outrun death.

This fact nipped at Eli’s heels as he rode off into the forest beyond the north gate. Behind him, the shadow ramp he had called forth from the wall had already fallen apart, dissolving into thin air, no more than a figment of imagination. Its construction had bought him minutes at most. But precious minutes they could be. 

He had intended to lure the group out of the south gate the following morning, building on the idea that he intended to push further away from the capital, all while arousing the least amount of suspicion he could when it came to his plans for evading them. Everything had hinged on the following morning, with the night his own to make of it as he needed and allowing him the time to lay down further groundwork around the city. Each action taken in the hope of driving his potential captors into a false sense of confidence regarding their chances of capturing him. It was flashing the fox’s tail before the hounds.

How could he have known the emperor would send the blood knight? 

Not once in all the years the man had been chained to the imperial court had he left the capital city without the prince or the emperor holding his leash. But from what Eli had been able to gather about his hunting party, neither the prince nor the emperor were present. The uniforms he had glimpsed through the tavern door bore the unmistakable green and gold of the emperor’s personal guard, but none of their faces matched any member of the royal family. Eli should know. He had seen them all on more than one occasion, and unless the emperor had a son unknown to the world, the men who sat at that table carried no imperial blood in their veins.

Perhaps that was all the emperor required of his presence now, a guardsman draped in his banner. A suggestion of his hold now more than enough to keep the beast tamed. 

 Had something changed regarding the knight? 

Why let him roam after all this time? For that matter, why had they kept him so close to the imperial family for all those years in the first place? 

Eli shook his head as his mount charged deeper into the forest. What did any of that matter at this moment? 

Situations changed. As much as the world preferred its predictable routines, most circumstances were but a stuttering breath away from changing their course. So thin a line did everyone walk, yet so many convinced they walked a wide, unwavering road. Eli understood how tenuous a position they all held in this world, how close to the razor’s edge they all danced. 

And right now, he was a hairsbreadth away from toppling over into the void. 

The blood knight’s wolf ran undaunted behind him. For every attempt Eli made to call to the shadows as he passed them, the wolf submerged itself into the darkness only to resurface, its jaws dripping with Eli’s thwarted efforts.

How many lives had he lost by simply asking the shadows for help? 

Could he afford to let his fear of losing more stay his hand? 

His heart thudded in his chest, its beat too loud as it reverberated up into his head like a church bell cut from its steeple and sent tumbling into an endless freefall. Clanging, clanging, crowding out his thoughts.

He had been hunted before, but none of his pursuers had ever had the full support of the dead. Even Eli knew not to touch that realm on his forays into the shadows. Whether out of fear or respect, some areas you simply gave a wide berth. If he wanted to be honest with himself, Eli would say he avoided those particular places out of a healthy dose of fear. The dead that roamed the shadows were not like the dead who settled into their forevers of the underworld. Whether bound by an unfinished duty, a gnawing regret, or a hunger for vengeance, the souls that insisted on haunting the darkness carried with them the capacity to overwhelm those who made contracts with them.

They were not beings to be trusted. Not if you loved your own life. 

And as reckless as Eli could be with his life, he only accepted the risks he settled on for himself. Even if death waited for him at the end of all he had chosen. But to have his life put in danger to achieve another soul’s desire, a soul that had nothing left to gain other than its own self-satisfaction, who would likely fall prey to the same disappointment and seek yet another way to fill that dreadful emptiness…how could he be content with that? 

Yet, he had witnessed this blood knight wield not one, not two, but three such contracts. The crow. The wolf. And just as he made his escape over the city’s wall, Eli had felt the way the shadows shuddered as the third death-bound creature slipped back into the realm of the living. 

Amongst blood knights, even that sat as a glaring anomaly. 

Contracts with the dead were as rare as color during a Lumeittian snowstorm. For this one man to wield several, all without loss of himself, made him a terror as frightening as death itself.

And it was the empire that had brought such a man to heel. 

The wolf howled behind him, its voice slicing into the quiet of the night around them. Beneath him, his mount shivered. 

“Steady now, Ähtviarn,” Eli murmured. He placed his hand against the horse’s left shoulder, a solid promise to stay with him. “They don’t have us yet, and you and I both know the darkness, don’t we? We have nothing to be afraid of.”

Spoken as much for himself as for the horse galloping in full effort through the dark on his behalf. 

Eli could hear hooves thundering behind him. The wolf yipped excitedly, its greeting infused with warmth. In another time, at another place, Eli would have loved to have learned how such a creature, steeped in the dreams of the dead, could have sounded so happy to be in service of another. All he had ever learned of the heräkuom painted them as a group existing solely for the fulfillment of their own desires. Opportunistic, with a distinct lack of concern for those who bartered for their abilities.

To engage with the heräkuom was to live with a knife point set forever against your heart.

And even a wolf could feel regret or a longing so deep it drove its soul from its final sleep. There was little in their world that could not become heräkuom.

That they could, or would, feel affection of any sort for those they entered into contracts with defied all known knowledge of them. 

Perhaps Eli had imagined it, though. That undertone of softness in the wolf’s greeting. 

He glanced under his arm as his mount swerved around two large cedars. The blood knight galloped after him, maybe seven horse-lengths behind. His mount bore all the known characteristics of the heräkuom: the flashing violet eyes devoid of any sort of pupil, rendering them sightless in the ways known to the living; bodies draped in all black, lending them the idea of a figure yet supposedly remaining as solid as cloud-cover; coat rippling and muscles contracting with effort only for those subtle signs of life to disappear and reappear like a ship sailing through dense fog. 

It was amazing how much truth there was to the stories when, in reality, so little was actually known about the creatures. Few had ventured into that field of magic before the empire. None dared it now if they cared to keep their life. Those who knew the heräkuom well enough to speak of them guarded their secrets more fiercely than an eagle its first winter's kill.

Eli had not expected the solidness of their forms, though. They had always been painted as beings without any real body, held together only by the contractor’s will and the memory they held of their prior forms, and while some contractors held more power than most and could give their heräkuom a better sense of the corporeal, most existed in this world as vague shadows, playing at their previous lives rather than fully embodying them again. That the blood knight’s horse had substance enough for him to ride it as though it were a living, breathing animal, more like his Ähtviarn than the ghost it should have been, made him all the more frightening in his abilities. 

Was he afraid? 

Maybe. 

Yes. 

His heart pounded in his chest. His knuckles blanched white as they griped his horse’s dark mane. Every thought threatened to careen around another corner and crash. Ähtviarn grunted.

Something else was coming.

Eli could feel the shadows trembling around him, beneath him. 

Ähtviarn shied suddenly, nearly throwing Eli from his back. The blood knight’s wolf shot up through the shadows in front of them, baring its glistening teeth in a savage snarl as it landed on its feet. It lunged forward, holding the ground it had claimed. Already Ähtviarn had turned on his haunches, and now, he took off in the opposite direction, cutting a line between the wolf on his right and the blood knight still galloping on his left. Closer now, but not close enough.

“Ithíofan, call to them now!”

The blood knight’s voice rang through the forest.

So, the wolf was named Ithíofan. Fanged Beast.  Eli let out a laugh. 

“You have no imagination, knight!” he shouted over his shoulder. 

Another howl erupted from the blood knight’s wolf. Seconds later, more howls rose up around him, echoes of Ithíofan’s call. A pack. The knight had sway over an entire damn pack of heräkuom wolves. 

Eli bent his head low over Ähtviarn’s shoulder, the corner of his mouth curved with a wry smirk, and whispered to the shadows at his feet, “Would you all be up for a fight?”