HERE IS A FORT on the north border of the wilderness. We manned it in the old times. It was a raw wound in the earth, a jagged outcrop of dark wood and black stone. From its walls one could see a hundred leagues to the north, but the view was as blank as the open sea, an impassable mass of trees. The clouded sun glowered.

Every few months our commander, Otto, received letters. These were often excuses from a distant superior to not make the long journey of weeks to the place they called ‘The Mistake’. They said a crazed general had built the fort with the blood of countless men, like a chess piece for his own ambition. Afterwards, our crumbling empire, unimaginative but not completely inefficient, sent men and material to the cold rock to languish. Few of us were replaced, and we often feared that the world had forgotten.

You could see bony peaks over the blood-dark green of the wilderness. We didn’t venture far. The savages were fierce, and no one knew their tongue save Otto. They were like shadows, lighting distant fires in cold glens; tattooed and tall with black hair, speaking guttural words that suited the land.

Occasionally someone would walk out of the endless north. I recall standing on the wall, looking blankly on the road that turned to mud and grass a hundred yards away when I spied a pedlar in red and brown. His bells tinkled lightly in the cold silence; his face grinning like a mask as his ragged limbs shambled.

We waited and watched, unsure of our eyes.

As he came within earshot, someone called, “What news from the north, old man?”

But he never breathed a word, only walked. I glanced at his wagon as he passed—there was nothing inside.

ONTHS WENT BY and the tension grew like the drawing of a bow or the silence before thunder. It felt as if nothing could change or stay the same. And then came the last night.

The cook rang for supper at the usual time—brick-like biscuits and stale jerky. We chewed so hard that no one spoke. The ale had run out. With it went a large measure of our spirit. All that was left was bitter well water. It hadn’t always tasted like wormwood, but something had happened to it in the last three days.

“This will sober you up, boys!” came a loud voice. It was Commander Otto, all two hundred libra of him. None called him a fat man—there was too much muscle mixed into the corpulence—but his mouth couldn’t open without looking voracious.

Otto laughed at his half-joke and took a seat at the head of the mess hall. Out came his personal flask; he poured a shot of brandy we would have given our right hand to imbibe. The fort was too rough-hewn for a commander’s quarters, but it wouldn’t have mattered—Otto relished eating his finer fare before us. I can still hear the crack of his chicken bones and the slurping of his wine. But no one dared cross the man called the Ogre. As for him, his eyes were too cunning to miss a bad apple.

“Come here, Henri!” he yelled, and I obeyed, standing at attention in my worn uniform. The room was oppressively quiet.

“It’s foul weather we’re having,” he said, glancing at me.

“Seems much the same to me, Commander,” I replied.

This wasn’t true—the clouds had been gathering a whole week for what could only be a black storm, but no one ever tried to meet Otto in real conversation. His was a one man show.

“You have no imagination, Henri. I walk each day in a square along the top of the wall over and over and over again, and each time I see something new, even if I have to make it myself by throwing some poor slave over the rampart to his death. You know I never lie.”

The chicken thigh split like lightning on wood, and Otto chomped. After a moment, he whispered without looking at me, “Are you nervous, Henri?”

My shoulders tightened. He had never spoken to me like this, but I said, “No, Commander. Why would I be nervous?”

“Because we haven’t had a letter in six months.”

Another bone snapped.

“...Or fresh supplies in six weeks.”

His teeth tore.

“...And the water went bad three days ago.” Otto looked at his dinner knife and then drove it into the de-fleshed carcass.

“I confess…I’m on edge.” His cat’s eyes looked up at me.

Surprised at his openness, I did the same.

He leaned forward. “Do you think it could have anything to do with…that man…the one in the dungeon?”

He looked surprisingly angry and sincere, and I felt a pang of sympathy for the prisoner.

“Surely he’s only a madman, Commander. Just like the pedlar that passed by.”

“No, something is wrong.” Otto’s eyes found the rafters. “I have a good mind to gut him and spill all his blood over a makeshift altar to Zeus tonight…or would that be too much?”

“You have never been religious, sir.”

“There you are wrong, Henri. I am devout.” He stood. “I want you to go talk to that man—he disgusts me so I won’t do it myself. Ask him what he knows.”

“He hasn’t said a word since our men brought him in.”

“Then fix it.”

With that, Otto left the mess. With his departure the men scattered, leaving an empty room but for the old keeper who began cleaning up the wreckage.

WALKED INTO the courtyard. The evening air was cool, and the sky blood-red. I ascended the walls and stared over the ocean of dark trees. Like a great leviathan beneath endless waters, something stirred in the great beyond—a restless malice. I turned aside to the wooden steps that led down from the hilltop to the cave where we kept prisoners. There had been three such men in all my years at ‘The Mistake’—a deserter, a murderer, and now this holy fool who had wandered out of the forest.

He sat on a pile of straw, eyes lifted heavenward, but there was no fervor in his face, only bewilderment.

“The Commander wants to know why you are here,” I said.

His eyes slowly focused on me, but he said nothing.

“I have methods that could make you speak,” I continued. “Is that what you want?”

I knew the look of a martyr and thought I might have found one.

“Do you know the story of the prophet and the lion?” His voice was calm, more ethereal than his torn clothing and dirt-covered skin.

“No.”

“It is in the sacred writings. Long ago a prophet brought word from Heaven that God would destroy a wayward king. Chastened, the king begged him to break bread with him, but the prophet refused. ‘I have been commanded by God to eat no bread and drink no water but to return to my home by another path,’ he said. And so he set out for his home.

“But an old prophet—a false prophet of Satan—followed him and invited him to dinner. ‘An angel spoke to me,’ he said, ‘and you are to eat with me tonight.’ And so the first prophet followed him. Mid-way through the meal, the false prophet rose and prophesied, saying to the first man, ‘Because you defied the word of Heaven and have broken bread with apostates, you shall not rest in the grave of your fathers.’ And so it proved—a lion killed that prophet on the road and left his corpse for others to see.”

The man raised his eyes to mine.

“I am that prophet. I was told to bring the word of Heaven to these tribes of the north, but I have failed and broken the vow I made to Heaven. And now all of you shall die because of me.”

After that he turned his back, and I could get nothing else from him. So I returned to the courtyard, only to find Otto mounting his war-horse. His mood was mad—his eyes gleamed with heat.

“Where are you going?” My voice nearly faltered.

He pointed to a thin boy standing in sackcloth garments, a child of the northern folk. “This boy says the natives are sick with something. I’m going to see for myself.”

“Is that wise? A plague would cull our own numbers.”

“Don’t be so afraid!” he laughed. “There has never been a stronger constitution than that of Otto son of Draco. I’m more concerned that the entire thing is a trap. That is why I am leaving you to hold the fort against attack. I will chance that damnable forest and make it bend to me.”

“The paths are trackless,” I said.

“Not for the new Prometheus,” he said with a smile. He leaned closer. “By the way,” and now his voice fell to a whisper, “what did the fool have to say?”

I told him what I could recall, but it was gibberish in my mouth.

“Oh good,” he replied. “Kill him and save the rations.”

Then the gate opened and he rode away on his pale horse with the skeletal boy running at his stirrup.

Mechanically I told a soldier to behead the prophet and walked slowly to the top of the wall.

With Otto gone, there was time to think.

I didn’t have many friends among the men, but there were a few who had a head on their shoulders. One they called Mark. I found him standing guard at the gate, watching Otto’s horse disappear into the fog.

Mark’s face always seemed jovial. It struck me that while prophets and commanders might descend into delusion, it was the honest working men like Mark on which empires were built.

“Nice evening, sir,” he said with a nod. I looked around at the crimson sky, the storm clouds besieging us.

After a pause, I surprised myself by saying, “Do you really believe that?”

The comment seemed to almost break a spell or blaspheme an unspoken rule.

Mark looked surprised and seemed to see the haunted night for the first time.

“It does look like it’s going to storm,” he admitted. “But I’m sure it will be alright.”

We fell silent. The minutes stretched on as the sunlight faded. Soon the torches were lit. The men began to retire.

“Do you have family back home?”

“My Sylvie… I keep a locket of her hair in my belongings.”

“What color is her hair?”

“Gold as wheat chaff. Her freckles glow like the sun. I met her in Gaul.”

“How long have you been married?”

His face flickered and he laughed. “There’s no marriage between us. Sylvie works, you know. I dare say she has twenty men who love her as much. I did have a family back in Italy, but the wife hasn’t written to me in years other than to tell me she had taken up with someone else. But the boys are being raised by a relative last I heard.”

I looked again, and saw that Mark’s face was a blank, the generous jowls and glazed eyes respective of nothing. I turned to look at the road that faded away into the forest, the road Otto had taken minutes before. Empty…as empty as the soul of this soldier beside me.

Or was it?

I leaned on the parapet and saw a shape hurrying out of the darkness. It was Otto’s black charger, riderless.

No…not riderless! It turned and reared as a red glow appeared in the forest. Against the firelight upon its back loomed a silhouette—the skeletal boy rode bareback.

Then a chant began, a slow wail that made the hairs rise on my skin.

“To arms!” I cried, and instantly the fort was alive like a colony of ants.

Swords gleamed in the firelight, and I heard the creak of wagon wheels as loads of pitch were readied for flame.

ND THEN WE saw them. They tottered like something out of a nightmare. Surely these wild men were desperate to mount such an attack? Had we not slain their kind by the dozens before? There were women and children among the attackers. They rushed upon us with a madness I could not understand. I cried the command, half-crazed with fear for the savages had never appeared in such numbers.

Our arrows swarmed like mosquitos. Several of the natives gesticulated as if to tell us something—they were the first to fall. On and on we slew until the bodies piled high below the wall. And all at once, the attack was over as suddenly as it began. Death silenced the chant.

Against the flames, the skeletal boy still reared on his stallion. If he drew near enough, I would kill him myself, I decided, to avenge Otto.

Then I heard it—the roar. The truth of the matter swept over me—the natives had not come to attack, but to survive. The song they sang was not of war, but of sorrow. And the boy did not rear against us, but in his hand he held a spear that pointed back into the smoke.

An enormous shadow moved in the dark beyond.

I looked beside me, expecting to see Mark’s blank face. But there was no one there. I was alone on the wall.

For some reason I did not move. Dimly I understood that the men behind me had abandoned the fort. At least, no one was there when I turned to see. There were no screams or shouts—just the scuffling of animals, scrambling to live.

I turned back to the smoke. The shape grew clearer; a rumbling was his herald. Almost I ran myself, but then my eyes were caught by the eyes of the great worm.

His scales dripped with slime, his jaws gnashed black razors, but his eyes…his eyes were dead with malice. From such malevolence one could not look away. The fires of insanity caught you in the wonder of their ruin.

Slowly, slowly, but as surely as the wave attacks the shore, the worm advanced. I thought I ran with his every echoing step, but it was not until he halted before the very gate, his breath in my face, that I knew my nerves were dead.

“This is the end.”

The voice came from inside my head. The words were not so much spoken as their meaning was felt. Paralyzed I half formed a thought—I do not want to die.

“I am Death.”

Hope drained from me like pooling blood.

I hate you.

The thought was visceral and desperate.

The dragon eyes did not flinch. “You also are Death. You are all dead… like me.”

This I did not grasp except in a vague sense of guilt. My imagination flooded—the head of the dead prophet gaped; Mark’s face gaped; and Otto’s teeth gaped and tore a chicken vein.

You are. my enemy

The thought came as a strangled emotion as if I would have run a hundred leagues if the monster had let me go. For I perceived now that I was spellbound.

“We are lovers. You would eat of me, and I will eat of you."

Go away.

“You called to me. I have come.”

I…I did not call you.

“Your sins have called me. You and I will be one.”

We are not the same.

“We are the same. The fire makes everything the same. For this is the ruin when all have failed.”

His great jaws opened. I felt a wet muscle, strong as a snake, wrap itself around my waist, and darkness swallowed me. I remember nothing after that, only the gnashing of teeth, the dim screams outside the stomach walls and the thunder of roaring flames.

GAINST ALL HOPE or reason or memory, I found myself sometime later in a pool of vomit on the grass as the rain fell in torrents. Something enormous lumbered in the distance behind me and then fell, never to move again. I crawled to a tree by the stream and pulled myself to my feet. Though the wormwood water flowed close to hand, I dared not drink it. For the worm was dead, and I too felt sick.

Two days I stumbled on the road until I came upon a man pulling a wagon. Blindly, madly, I crawled into his empty cart, desperate for a rest. His back, brown and red, turned, and I saw him grin as I drifted into sleep.