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Hi Everyone!

Here's a new chapter of Furry Dead. It's got all the gruesome awfulness you're expecting to see by this point. But if you're new to the story, please be warned - This series is dark, and has its very awful moments.

Please turn back if you don't want to read something suitable only for adults. Also, if you're a kid, come back when you're 18.

Chapter III - The Lion Tree, and The Walker in Winter

Toryen Casso's slender, wiry body squirmed in Tomasj's lap, as the tiger made a whining sound of frustrated petulance low in his throat.

"But I don't WANT to go look at trees! I want to stay right here until you feel better, master!"

With a rumbling, gritty, phlegmy growl, Tomasj anchored himself in the saddle with his thighs, then grabbed the whining snot of a noble by the scruff of his stripey neck, wrenching it before snapping his head forward to bite down on the gathered skin. Toryen let out a loud, high-pitched rowl that echoed out over the eerily-silent frosty plain, and won them both an icy-eyed glare from Cel. From the back of her mountainous destrier, some few paces to their side on the trail that was slowly forming from the trackless hills and plains, her glacier-blue eyes stared arrows at Toryen, only to meet the grinning, welcoming wall of Tomasj's red-rimmed madness.

He seemed pleased by her anger, she saw, and the roiling of her gut could have come either from that realization or the nascent life growing with it. The Slaughtered Knight growled and shook her head, and turned her eyes away from the debauched pair as the wolf chewed his tiger-toy. To her right, Timid rode gingerly in his saddle, giving her a forced but nonetheless well-meant grin, to which she smiled back, though her ruined, scarred face pulled uncomfortably still.

For the first week of their journey away from Amarthane's smoldering wreck, he'd been so saddle sore that she'd had to lance blisters all over his legs every night. Now, though, he had gained a good understanding of a horse's cadence, shifting his body as she'd taught him to keep his body in the proper sort of contact with his saddle. He even looked more confident, gripping reins and using his knees both for steering.

Thus, the concerned and agitated look that peeked around his smile made the snow leopard furrow her brows in question.

"Timid?"

He knew what she was asking, and by the downward shift of his shoulders, she knew he was about to share his concern.

"The prophecy gets pretty vague from here...We're to search for the Lion Tree, then give name to a foe we know nothing about...But this countryside is massive, Cel. I only hope some other signpost will be awaiting us."

The woman knight suppressed a shiver at remembering that strange and eldritch being, baneful in countenance, freezing cold and with laughter like crackling ice.

"I...Suppose there will have to be, won't there? Otherwise, we will not be able to continue much farther on this road we've been set upon."

She watched, as the slender cat closed his eyes, trusting his horse to stick to the trail as his lips slowly moved. He'd made such motions before many times, as they sat together, bundled up under the same blanket for warmth in the mountain passes. Either he was praying or, more likely, recalling the prophecies spoken to and through him. A warmth in her belly and chest made her shiver near as much as the chill of the biting air, though pleasurably this time, recalling the nights they had spent together wrapped in thick wool and one another.

By hook or crook or frozen world you will travel West, to the Plain of Jackals.

There, you will find war and unrest. Old feuds given new fuel by a fear with no name.

Give them a name by which to know their fear and they will fight to defeat it.

She shivered again, as those words whispered from his lips, accompanied by a soft puff of cool breath-mist that put her again in mind of the terrible, frozen god beneath the Temple of One in Amarthane. The strange and ancient Thing that had once served the god Timid served, whose very phylactery thumped softly against the cat's chest in time with his horse's trot. A beautiful golden, silver, and copper star, aged and ancient and untouched by the ravages of fire and conflict thorugh which they had ridden and fought.

His eyes opened again, gentle and distant, weighted with the sorrows they had witnessed together. Cel leaned over in the saddle, despite the shock of pain from her bad right knee, and took his outstretched paw for a moment, squeezing it before letting go and sitting straight in her own saddle again, ignoring the throbbing of heart and joints.

"It seems to me," the leopardess spoke, "That we will know the Plain of Jackals when we see jackals upon a plain. They're quite distinctive creatures, I am told. Once we find them, perhaps we should just simply ask what the feud is about...And use that to discover what 'fuels' their fear?"

Timid nodded to her, and raised a brow as a wan, bemused smile lit his features in a way the sun never could.

"Cel, you have a remarkable skill of turning complexity into simplicity. Thank you."

She felt warm again, this time from her chest, and snorted out a laugh that sounded hoarse and raspy even to her own ears. Her tail would have flicked, was it still attached.

"And you are entirely too quick to praise a simple knight, good priest."

He stuck his tongue out at her, and snorted right back.

"And you are entirely too quick to denigrate your own talents, sir Cel."

"And you are both going to make me vomit," drawled Tomasj. A quick glance that direction showed Cel in no uncertain terms that the youthful tiger was going nowhere. His pink, spiny cock was out of his pants in the cool wintry air, being stroked and teased in the black wolf's leather-gloved paw, as its owner squirmed helplessly against its master.

The last time she'd seen that cock closely, it had been used for things she would rather forget. When she had met Toryen Casso again, what seemed an eternity after he and his brother had raped her under their father's mad orders, she had wanted to kill the disgusting little tiger. Her rage, at seeing him free and alive, had been so great only Timid had been able to calm her, and then only because of the awful necessity of prophecy.

Then, he had helped them destroy the demoniac creature that had led the host against Amarthane, and somehow bonded himself against all logic and reason to Tomasj, the single most detestable member of their entourage. For, to her mind, while Toryen Casso was a monster, he had never been given a choice but to be one. Tomasj had chosen to be a monstrous, heartless bastard, obsessed with slaying the dead and with an utter disregard for the precious treasure that was life.

Smooth movement from Vanyal pulled Cel from her thoughts, even as Toryen's shaft jerked and jetted whiteness onto Tomasj's saddle. The fox spoke, evidently unaware of what was happening close, in light of having his eyes settled much farther away.

"Smoke. At least a few leagues ahead."

Timid stood up in the saddle, gingerly despite all the recent practice, and peered off into the gloom with a paw over his eyes against the late-day glare of sun off snow.

"I don't see anything...Where?"

Vanyal slowed up, as Timid's maree trotted over, rubbing up against Van's roan gelding. The fox reached over and turned Timid's shoulder with a gentle touch, pointing off toward what Cel assumed was the west.

"There. A discoloration in the higher clouds. Look above the mist."

Cel peered that direction, but saw nothing, nothing other than thin white mists of snow that flurried about them, every gust of wind blowing more and deeper darkness over their heads from behind. The storm was coming, she knew, the very one that had followed them ever since Amarthane and against all reason managed to climb the great World Spine mountains.

She feared the dead could not be far behind, though she knew there was nothing in those barely-passable mountains that could call to their unholy hunger.

Timid had stood up tall in the saddle then, peering into the distance. The Finder's Star, on its silver chain, hung low and heavy as he leaned forward in the saddle.

"What could it mean, Van?"

"Too much smoke to be a chimney. So nothing good. Let us go find out!"

The fox shook his head and tapped his mount's flanks, encouraging the others to speed. Cel immediately followed, by seamless instinct of her years as a cavalier, and in moments the companions were all at a fast canter, chewing up the rocky, snowy plain as they raced toward the growing scent of charcoal in the air.

Nallak struggling to yell, to call out to the unmoving Johan, as he was dragged backward by the noose around his throat, choking and thrashing weakly as his half-drowned muscles spasmed and failed to do as commanded. All around him, yammering, cackling cacophony followed him, as his back was dragged through the pebbly dirt, over rocks that tore at his fine vestments and quickly through them.

"Hrgk! Gkk!" he forced out, world swimming and blackening at the edges as he kicked, struggled, desperately grabbing with weak paws at the rough hemp that bit into his throat. His head felt swollen, as if it were about to burst like an overripe melon, his eyes trying to force their way out of his head.

Something struck his back, something cold and hard and smooth, and the noose around his neck felt as if it were going to wrench his head clean off as he was dragged up atop it. Then iron-hard paws, mangy-furred and scraggly-clawed, descended upon him in a wave that only failed to draw a horrified boyish scream by the simple expedient that Nallak wouldn't allow it. Instead, he tried to ball up, to defend himself, only to find his efforts in vain as searing pain shot through him from a dozen places, claw-tipped paws tearing at his clothes in a cackling, shrieking orgy of theft and disrobement.

Finally, the howling horde of his foes began to thin, and the silently sobbing boy king managed to curl over on his side, huddling with knees pressed to his chest and shaking in the freezing cold. Stone, he realized, was what he'd been laid out upon. A flat-topped boulder, covered in knicks and bloody splotches, tufts of fur, some of them his, others not. With a sick wrenching of his gut, he knew that this stone was for stripping and gutting the dead, a butcher's block for the cannibal Hyenas.

Then the rope around his neck pulled taut, as the warrior who'd dragged him to that place of death and suffering yanked on it, and Nallak's thoughts were dispersed by the sudden, desperate, choking need to breathe. His eyes, wild and whirling to and fro, caught sight of the laughing creature, it's manged and furless face horrible and full of teeth peeking out yellow from a smile that spoke of mayhem and murder.

Paws grabbed him, by the hips, by the mane, two sets of grimy clawed appendages, and he threw every bit of his will toward lashing out, striking with claw and footpaw, only to have his body utterly disobey, as it struggled against the icy water freezing his flesh beneath the fur, against the shivers that seemed as if they were going to tear his body in half.

Rough hemp bit into his wrists, and he heard a terrible crunching sound as they were yanked up over his head, his face slamming into the rock hard enough to fill his maw with the coppery taste of his own blood. Then pain, dulled only enough by the cold to make it otherwordly rather than numb, shot down from his wrists, and all the will in the world was unable to stop him from yelling out, though the one warm place left in his chest jolted with pride that it sounded like a warrior's yell and not a crying boy's miserable and pathetic plea.

The pride lasted no longer than it took for the paws on his hips to yank him backward. As his wrists crackled and dislocated, an explosion of sound blew from his lungs, a volcano blast of hot agony and terrified anger, as his eyes stared up at the two hyenas holding tight to the ropes around his now-limp wrists.

Then something grabbed his tail, yanking it aside so hard his thought-emptied mind somehow still managed to register that it too was now injured, and something hot and unwelcome slammed painfully against the hole beneath his tail.

Against his face, something hot and slimy slapped, and before he could register what it was, a cacophonic explosion of violent sound blew up all around him like a sudden storm, the visceral noise of claws in flesh, drawn weapons, and that horrible howling cackle, as the hyenas wantonly fought over something his numbed heart told him was the right to his own body.

Distantly, he recalled a myth his father had once told him, that the hyena tribes believed that the method of one's death determined their place in the afterworld. A foe eaten would reappear as food in the afterlife. A foe raped before death, it went to reason in Nallak's head, would be their sex slave forevermore in their strange and awful afterworld.

Still, he could not control his limbs, through the shaking numbness that had gripped his body.

The frozen river. I am dying of the cold. Freezing water in my fur.

_ _

Finally, he was able to force his eyes open again. He lay upon a flat stone, which steamed from the hot blood that had spilled there. It lay in the midst of a field, frosty with dustings of snow pockmarked every few paces with rumpled heaps his bleary eyes told him, with gut-churned certainty, were corpses. The corpses of his people, the farmers, whose ruined and smoking village he now lay in. Unable to marshal his body, Nallak marshaled his mind, eyes jerkily shifting about in the attempt to discern where in the Kingdom he had emerged from that river.

He also searched for Johan, praying with silent fervor that his friend was alive. When a few sweeps of his eyes failed to find the wolf, his heart lurched, at the same moment his hips were yanked harshly backwards. A terrible, tearing pain surged from beneath his tail, and his throat made a weak croaking sound, constricted with cold and disoriented agony, while a paradoxically burning pain radiated from the torn flesh of his scalp.

At the same time, his two dislocated handpaws shrieked at him, screaming for surcease as the tug on his hips yanked them against the taut ropes. Quick motion of his pain-blurred eyes showed him that the two hyenas who had been holding him had looped the things and pulled them taut around thick iron rings that had been jammed into cracks in the rock.

Somewhere, deep beneath the gut-wrenching terror, the abiding sense of violation as his tail hole was stretched far beyond his ability to handle, a wan feel of bemused disappointment wormed its way through his body. No great and sophisticated torture device, no masterful plot, had brought him to this place. Somehow, he knew, Johan had gotten them away from the desert ambush and brought them to the easternmost part of his vast kingdom, the only place he knew such olive trees could be found that would not also smell of sea salt.

Somehow, they had fallen directly into the paws of the hyenas, who should not have been within a thousand leagues of this place. As something hot, hard, dry and searingly painful shoved its way into him with staccato thrusts, the boy king evaluated the situation. All about, some thirty or so hyena warriors, a large raiding band, were putting a destroyed village to the torch. Among their number, a half dozen or so of the walking dead wandered aimlessly, prodded about by the hyenas spears whenever their listless steps took them too far off. Somehow, a raiding force was in his eastern lands, which boded ill, for hyena raiders never strayed far from the females who ruled them, and those females never strayed from a force that would number at least in the thousands.

A shriek, and pleading in his own peoples' tongue, brought his sodden, shivering ears up and forward, even as the hyena behind him growled and thrusted and dug claws into his hips. Someone was screaming for help, and every instinct told him to get up, to fight, though he knew with a terrible weight in his chest that there was no chance of him doing so. Not in his current state.

He watched, eyes filling with tears, as the hyenas dragged several young, bedraggled, bloodied women from an already-smoldering barn, and threw them before the walking dead. He couldn't stop the tears any more, sliding down his face in hot acid trails, as the hyenas allowed their dead relatives to bite the girls, but forced them back before the screaming, struggling canines could be torn apart.

Then, as he felt steam-hot wetness jetting into his abused gut, as the noose around his neck was roughly grabbed again, as someone reached around him with a knife and cut the bonds holding him steady on the stone table, he watched in helpless agony as the girls were driven away from the camp, told in cackling falsettos to run free. They went toward the north, clutching their bite-marked wounds, and he marked their passage, even as he was dragged by the noose, toward a tree hanging ripe with rotting, dead and entrail-dripping fruit.

His last thought, as the blackness closed in, was to wonder why the hyenas didn't seem to be shivering.

Barahan, lord of Greenfold Town, rode his midnight-black gelding with all the grace, poise, and grandeur expected of a nobleman on all but the most private of occasions. To do otherwise, combined with his lupine heritage, could risk courtly consequences from the conservative, xenophobic lions who ruled above him, descendants of the leonine invaders who had, many generations ago, taken and unified the many diverse and fractious lupine baronies.

Today, he rode as if Hell were burning at the tip of his tail, without a whit of care for what some powder-maned aristocrat thought. He rode hard, and his escort did as well, their heavy woolen cloaks and leather armor creaking in the force of a growing, blustery wind filled with stinging flakes of ice that bit at his dry, chapped snout.

Behind him, with his arms wrapped firmly around Barahan's slender, bookish midriff, were the bandage-wrapped limbs of the Nameless One, whose cheek rested against the back of Barahan's shoulder. He wasn't sure the creature was capable of sleep, or of relishing closeness. Nonetheless, the sense that this poor, mysterious traveler had seen little friendly contact was obvious enough, even if he hadn't known no one else there was capable of sensing his presence.

"My lord!" yelled one rider, as he ducked reflexively beneath an icicle-crusted olive tree's gnarled, claw-like branch, "We must return to the manor! This devilish ice storm grows too thick!"

"Not until we find the last town and order them to evacuate!" he responded, turning his head as a gale-like bluster blasted his hood back and send a thud of howling, enraged wind-sound straight down his sensitive ear. Barahan winced, and flexed cold-numbed fingers, wishing he were back with his beloved books, in his warm study, or at the worst picking grapes with his steward while discussing finance and crop yield.

Nonetheless, he took his responsibilities seriously.

"Lord, even if we reach them, they can't evacuate in this!"

"Maybe not, Sivrik, but they will need time to pack their things...And when the storm fully breaks, it will be too late!"

His sword bounced again, as the gelding trampled through a growing snow drift, and hit him in the hip. Barahan winced, knowing he'd bruise purple over the next few days, and cursing himself for never taking his swordsmanship lessons seriously as a boy. Next to his ear, the strange windy voice of the creature with whom he shared a saddle issued forth, drawing crystals of ice up the young lord's spine.

The dead do not grow tired...They are only slowed because the storm freezes them...Your man is right. These people will not survive. You have saved who you can. Now return to your fort.

_ _

With a scowl, Barahan wordlessly tapped his horse's flanks, urging it on to greater speed. Whether there was hope or not, he had to warn them. At least then, they would have some slight vestige of a chance, and not be slain and eaten in their very beds.

An interminable time later, covered in dumping snow, teeth chattering, he finally sighted the dark, squarish shapes of his outermost farming village. A tiny cluster of plaster and mud brick buildings, they were surrounded by open fields he and his armsfurs now rode through at a slowing pace, letting their shaking horses cool down or warm up, he wasn't certain which.

The arms around his chest tightened, and some instinct screamed at him, a strange tense sense of sudden and impending danger. He ducked, and an arrow hissed through the space his head had occupied a moment before, fired from somewhere to his right. It had passed so close, he felt the shifting of his fur in a line across his temple.

Stunned momentarily, the bookish noble turned in his saddle, staring into the snow toward that which had nearly snuffed him like a weak and wind-blown candle. From behind him, as his heart thundered fit to explode, another sound, a meaty thwack that turned his stomach with sickened knowledge of what that noise meant, presaged a roar from his bodyguards.

"AMBUSH!" roared Farhad, as the grizzled badger grabbed the arrow protruding from his left shoulder and snapped the haft off with a mighty twist of his thick, gnarled fingers. He whirled, horse spinning, and drew his khopesh with a brutal yank as a dozen other swords and axes whipped free of their sheathes.

Just as Barahan was grabbing hold of his frightened wits, half a moment after the drawing of blades, a thundering, yammering, giggling howl exploded from all around them. Then the red and orange and black tide of his foes came crashing in from all directions, bursting from snow drifts in their loincloths and with far more weapons than he had ever imagined possible brandished.

They came on in a roiling mangy-red torrent, as his bodyguards yelled and tried to form a circle that would take far too long to realize.

Someone slammed into his side, and his horse spun, lashing out with hooves in terror. Something was hit, a horrid crunching-splattering sound filling the young lupine lord's ears as the world rushed at him, while he himself felt like he was trapped, immobile, stuck in a wall of frozen honey, struggling to move his limbs even a fraction of an inch.

He watched in dumbstruck battle terror as one of his guardsman struck down a hyena with a brutal slash of his khopesh, cleaving the slavering thing's skull in a spray of pinkish gore, only to be leapt upon by a half-dozen of the things, who clawed him off the saddle and beneath their savaging, laughing mass. The world twisted slowly to the right again, and he saw another guard throw himself from his dying horse, a long spear having sprouted messily from its throat. Four arrows found the old hound's face and chest before he could even get fully upright.

Fight you fool!

_ _

Gasping, his heart feeling near to explosion, the Nameless One's words wrenched Barahan from his terror-fugue, and with a shriek of pants-pissing fear, he yanked his saber from its sheathe and slashed downward in a clumsy chop that nonetheless forced back a hyena that had come at him, spear seeking and stabbing forward with wild abandon.

Terrified beyond rational thought, Barahan twisted the reins of his screaming horse, spinning the creature and dashing aside foes that had begun packing close around him. Somehow, he knew, to be immobile was to die. He lashed out with boot and saber, screaming out his mingled fear and rage, as the chaotic beast beneath him roiled like a flooding river, bucking and kicking, spinning and biting, a whirlwind of savagery.

Then something jolted him, hard, blowing the wind from his lungs and slapping him from the horse's back like a fly dashed by a hammer. The chaos and motion stopped, frozen in a glittering moment, as he slammed to the earth, head bashing off a rock in an explosion of stars and redness, his saber clattering from nerveless fingers.

He looked down, eyes widening at the sight. From his gut protruded a spear unlike any he'd ever seen. His paw shaking, he wrapped fingers around it, feeling the permeating cold that emanated from it, even as blood rushed to fill his maw.

The spar of solid ice was thick enough he could barely get his paw around it. As the chill of the thing began suffusing him, as the urge to lay his head back and sleep away the fear grew too strong to resist, a single tear rolled down his cheek, for the people he had failed to save.

The Nameless One looked down at the frost-covered ground, as misery washed over him like the waves of a bleak, black tide. He sat just where he had fallen, when Barahan's brave, furious steed had kicked and bucked him free. All around him, hyena warriors slavered and struck, shrieked and laughed their giggling chortle, striving against the young lord's few remaining bodyguards with furious abandon, utterly uncaring of their own lives.

Again, he knew, he had failed. Just as he had failed in Amarthane, in that one snippet of memory he could recall from the life where he had once owned a Name of his own. He remembered opening the gate, letting the dead swarm into the city he had once loved. He remembered feeling terrified and maddeningly joyous, filled with bilious spite and relief turned to agonized horror when that attempt to end his shattered existence had failed.

He remembered the moment in which his Name finally broke and wrenched away. His identity had shattered and fallen away like the cocoon of a moth in that moment, when the Singing Child had giggled and hugged him, and spoken praise for his damning act.

And now, again, he had failed. The young lord who had shown him kindness, the first to acknowledge his presence since he had spoken to the Frozen Soul back in Amarthane's smouldering, frozen wreckage, lay bleeding in the ever-deepening snow, in a trap the Nameless One had inadvertently led him to.

He gathered the young lord's gentle head into his lap, and stared into his closed, already-frosting eyes, watching as the wolf's chest shuddered and struggled to breathe, fighting even now, with his paws feebly clutched around the four foot spar of hoary blue ice that jutted from his gut. With a bandage-wrapped paw, he brushed a stray lock of fur from the handsome young creature's face, wishing above anything that he could help the kind young male, save him from this ignominious and terrible death.

Then a chill slithered through his all but numb body, and the Nameless One raised his head to stare off into the gloaming darkness, into the swirling snow that seemed to glow, to his eyes, with a malevolent viciousness he was shocked to not have noticed before.

Out there, in the dark, past the struggling warriors who fought with all their might to survive and retreat, past the swarming ranks of undead and living hyenas, a pair of lights clutched at the Nameless One's attention. Two lights, the color of glacier ice, glimmering maliciously with a terrible azure-white radiance that seemed to somehow grow the shadows around them. In his gut, the Nameless One felt a strange sensation he'd somehow forgotten only now to remember. The bilious, acidic sensation grew, grew until he felt sick with hatred and rage, as every moment of his self-loathing curdled and grew into something other.

Gently lowering Lord Barahan's head to the pinking snow, the Nameless One unfolded his legs and stood, ignoring utterly the meaningless dead that swirled senseless around him, irrelevancies now that one of his true foes had come into sight. Without need for thought, driven by some strange and otherworldly instinct, the Nameless One closed his eyes a moment, and remembered.

A laughing, Singing boy, a small cat leading by the paw an army of the dead. The same Singing boy who shrieked and blew open gates, who blurred with otherworldly speed and smashed down Amarthane's noble defenders. The child whose Singing voice threw furs into helpless stupor or blasted their ears til they bled and died, skulls shattered by the soul-scouring sound.

The Singing Child, who had done battle with the strange companions he had followed through their days of battle. Those companions who had saved the city he had failed to protect, in spite of the crippling injuries and sicknesses that plagued them.

He remembered how they had lured the Singing Child into battle, wounded it, destroyed its mortal body despite terrible injury. He remembered their courage, their conviction, the utter knowledge that what they were doing was right and necessary.

He remembered the strange, delicious and horrible sensation, as he had devoured the Singing Child's essence, rendering it back to the Nothing from whence its evil had been spawned. The delectable, delicate taste of its soul slithering over his tongue, as he had sucked in that black cloud of smoke only he had been able to see. The crunch, as he had broken off its pleas for mercy, chewing its immaterial power between his teeth.

The Nameless One's eyes snapped open, and when they did, they glowed with a sick greenish light that caught the sudden attention of those who attacked his only friend in the dying world.

_No more! _ He roared, with his mind, and saw the living hyenas react as if they had been slapped in the ears, falling back and yelping, grabbing at their skulls. The undead ones simply turned toward him, heads tilted as if listening to some sound only they could hear, even after the echoes of his roared mental voice had gone silent.

Then, from the darkness, he saw the eyes again as they flicked and fixed upon him. He'd drawn its attention, he knew, and in that moment knew it had not been able to see him before that moment. As if curious, one glowing white-blue eye grew slightly larger, as if it had raised an eyebrow in confusion. Then it began to approach, and as it did, the ice storm intensified, turning from snow to chilling splatterings of hail that bounced off the Nameless One's barely-sensate bandaged flesh.

From the darkness, it came, and as it did the fighting seemed to die away like the suddenly-becalmed wind. The hyenas were backing away, ears down, tails dipped, fangs bared in signs of fear and deference. Barahan's guards, all three that yet lived, stood startled by their sudden reprieve, bleeding and back-to-back. The Nameless One beckoned to them, waving harshly for them to approach, and to hurry about it, and for but a moment, he saw a light of attention in the eyes of the badger with the white fur and splatters of blood up both puissant and muscular arms.

The bodyguards broke into a run towards him, or more accurately toward the impaled youth at his feet. When they arrived, two turned away from him, brandishing their blades as the hyenas who were still nearby, though backing away into the storm they seemed strangely immune to.

"Gods!" the badger Farhad gasped, as he knelt down by his lord's side. A wise old veteran, the Nameless One observed, he didn't try to pull the spear from the wound. Instead, wasting not a moment, the old fur yanked a dagger free of his boot and began cutting at his own layered clothing, making bandage strips that he began tying around the spear's base, to hold Barahan's blood in.

Meanwhile, the terrible frost wraith continued its approach, and the Nameless One stepped past its once more unaware friends, walking a slow arc around them with his paws balled into angry, stolid fists at his sides.

When his enemy emerged from the mist, the Nameless One knew for a certainty that he faced another of his true foes. Like the Singing Child, it was followed by a black mist, of death and corruption, decay and malevolence, that made his scorched teeth ache and empty gut rumble with a strange mixture of horror and hunger, rage and anticipation.

It was tall, taller than any fur he'd ever met, and beyond that sat upon a horse larger than any he'd heard tell of in even the greatest of fish stories. White as the driven snow but for streaks of blue and black, the mighty steed stood tall enough that the Nameless One's head would barely have reached its shoulder. Where its hooves touched what little bare earth was left, he saw circles of hard-frozen ice, well past the stage of frost, so cold the air rising from them steamed and billowed in freezing fog.

Atop the beast's back sat a rider, almost twice the Nameless One's not-diminutive height, limned in a strange darkling glow that seemed to both eat the light and yet pick out its own features with incredible clarity to his eyes. It was dressed in a black funerary shroud, tattered yet covered in intricate silvery-black runes that swam before the Nameless One's eyes, slithering from one phrase of ancient language to another in a way that would have made his head ache, were he not so furiously angry and yet so completely calm.

It's face was barely visible, blotted out by the glare of its cruel and laughing eyes, eyes that seemed to occupy far more of the face than on any mortal creature. It's mouth, as well, was thick, running from jaw joint to jaw joint, and from it licked a tongue of frozen-flesh purple blue, barbed and icy. Hanging from its right paw, he saw a great spear of purest ice, clear like glass, six paces long if it was an inch, and smeared with frozen blood in stark crimson at its steaming tip.

At its hip, with careless guilt, hung a fur-wrapped javelin quiver, filled near to bursting wih hoary ice-darts, identical to that which sprouted from Barahan's chest. The Nameless One's eyes fixed on them for only an instant, as blood rushed and pounded in his ears for the first time since he could recall.

Then, instead of charging, attempting to crush the Nameless One beneath it's mighty steed's hooves, the Walker in Winter spoke, in a tone that shook the snow and blasted it aside as it rose, blowing the skirling wintry death away to make the air crystal clear and biting-cold.

_Who dares to stand in my path? _ It thundered, buffeting the Nameless One's ears with terrible force. Greater than the Singing Child, he judged, far older and more potent, it's words dripped with contemptuous amusement, as if this slaughter and unnatural winter were no more than a trifling diversion.

For a moment, he considered answering with words, demanding to know why he knew it's Name, how he knew it was the Walker in Winter, and why he was for some reason utterly unafraid of this horrible bogeyman. The pale rider of winter, he recalled, from some half-remembered nursery rhyme. Cold, cruel death in winter, given physical form.

Then, instead of answering with words, the Nameless One opened his cracked and burn-chapped lips, and let forth a sing-song melody older than words, a dulcet and velvet-soft sound that flowed from him like a river and suffused the air with a humming thrum of power and memory.

The Walker in Winter seemed about to speak, about to roar a challenge, or burst into laughter, for long moments, as the song swirled about it, nearly touchable as it gathered. Then he tilted his great, mighty, shadow-wreathed and brilliant head, and narrowed its terrible eyes at the Nameless One.

So it is true. A Nameless One has been born. This makes things...More interesting.

_ _

The Nameless One gathered his song, grabbing at tendrils of energy in the air he hadn't noticed before. Songs of old, things sung in the once-living village over a thousand years and more by hard-working peasants and travelers on the road, hummed hymns of mendicant priests and yelled ballads of warrior-poets, flowed through him in a slow but ever-growing wave, building toward a crescendo whose use the Nameless One knew nothing about.

Your little manor may live. I will bypass it. We will meet again, in the north. I look forward to it.

Then the Walker in Winter vanished without fanfare, as if he had never been, and with him went the storm, snow falling from the air as if tiny strings that had held it aloft simply snipped apart. The hyenas, now visible as the mist moved on to the north like a living thing, turned, broke, and fled, yelping and jabbering as they followed their terrible master toward whatever goal took him toward the heart of the Golden Lands.

The Nameless One turned as his enemy vanished, and saw as Farhad and one of the other guards lifted their young lord with every bit of care in their possession, onto a litter they had formed out of fallen branches and burnt timbers.

They forgot his presence, he realized, the moment he had ceased to speak to them about their master. The Nameless One, as he let the power of songs drain away, allowed the pit in his stomach from which he had drawn the power of song to go quiet, wondered at Lord Barahan's strange importance, and hoped he would somehow survive so severe an injury.

"Finder's grace!" Timid gasped, with horror in his gut and anger magma-hot in his chest, as he saw what they rode toward. Then he snarled, lips drawn back over his sharp little teeth, and grabbed at the Finder's Star, righteous wrath bubbling up in him as he yelled wordlessly and charged, snarling in his mind in anger and grief for what was before his eyes. Cel ripped her glowing, frosty blade free of the sheath on her back and yelled out "Charge!" to the others as her great destrier snarled out its pleasure at the heel-tapped order to engage.

The five companions dipped below a ridge line for a brief moment, and then exploded forth onto the flat, gore-splattered farm field, in a storm of vengeful fury.

Hyena warriors looked up, startled from their repast as they feasted on the flesh of slain farmers around their borrowed flat stone butcher's altar. Thirty and more, they were nonetheless startled by the sudden onslaught of charging cavalry and zipping arrows that flew in a stream of unerring death from Vanyal's forester's bow.

Timid was rapidly overtaken by Cel and Tomasj, with Toryen in tow, the three of whom blew past him and slammed straight into the thickest part of the hyena warriors with unspeakable, torrential wrath, sending yelping panicked enemies flying to the sides with the sheer force of horseflesh that struck them. Cel's blade slammed down to one side in wheeling arcs, sweeping aside limb and life, and Tomasj struck with his old, fire-scarred but beautiful longsword to her opposite, all quarrel and petty bickering gone in the moment of swirling combat.

From Tomasj's saddle, Toryen Casso pounced, the lithe and blood-lust-maddened tiger laughing as he landed on a hyena warrior's back, bore him to the ground, and stabbed, stabbed again and sprung away, slicing into another with his wicked knives and a giggling gleeful shimmying jig of slaughter.

As Vanyal fired arrow after lethal arrow, Timid stood up in his stirrups and swept downward with his long iron crook, smashing down an enemy spear-warrior with a brutal stroke of strong field-working muscle. The thing had been snarling at him, jaws wide with strings of viscous saliva trailing from fanged top to fanged bottom.

Then, abruptly, he was free of the press, galloping through the other side and toward the massive, gnarly-barked tree that rose towering to the sky, reaching up branches bare of leaves like clawing fingerbones, amidst the burning village whose smoke they had sighted that morning.

Timid choked to look upon it, for in the deep core of his being, he now knew they had found what they sought. 'Seek the Lion Tree,' the vision had said, and he had thought it to be some landmark, perhaps a great stone carved as a tree with lion imagery upon it. Perhaps, he had also mused, the Lion Tree referred to the royal family of the Golden Plains, of which he knew little, but enough to have heard of their royal house.

Instead, what the vision had led him toward was this monstrosity. For hanging from its many branches, rotting fruit dripping entrails and shit, offal and death, were dozens or perhaps a hundred lions, hung by the neck or arms or testicles with rough hempen rope, unbloated and frozen by the cold.

Some swung still, batted by the wind like the toys of a horrible cat, or else spinnng slowly as the undeath growing in them caused the bodies to twitch and groan, or try to groan, with throats cinched tight by the noose. Some instinct told him to look, to seek something among them, other than their more obvious message; that the hyenas were, knowingly or not, spreading the Walking Death to this kingdom.

Among the dangling corpses, blue and frost-rimed, he saw that most were women or children, or the very elderly, as if every warrior in the town had been drawn away for some unknown purpose. Not one was dressed for the wintry weather that had come. Many had been chewed upon, or had flesh hacked from them, carved as a butcher carves a slaughtered cow, and evidence of the hyenas' horrid meals lay strewn about, as if they had taken shelter and shade under that terrible tree, like summer lovers under a broad-limbed shade tree.

Then he had no more time for horrified analysis, as the shock of a cavalry charge broke under the roaring of a massive, wart and sore-covered hyena that stood head and shoulders above the others, swiping its long, muscular arms and bellowing for its warriors to counterattack.

For a black moment, he locked eyes with the thing, and saw the madness and death that clouded its blood-red rimmed black pupils. Its smile, unearthly and seemingly frozen on its face, drooled with spittle and foam, flecked with blood and the chunks of fur that were stuck between its crooked, chipped fangs.

As Tomasj and Cel broke free of a cluster of foes, trying to stay mobile, the thing pointed its long, claw-tipped fingers toward them, and issued a yappy, growling howl that hammered on Timid's ears, drawing a wince from him as his vision momentarily swam. Then he straightened up again, gripped his crosier and the Finder's Star, thrust both out before him, and began to speak Names.

"Na'haln na Sorian, Ka'Renna-Ari'Eliath!"

He shivered, and grunted as the power of his incantation hit him like a fist to the gut, as fulmination blossomed from his body in waves of crackling light. He only prayed the incantation was correct, that his knowledge of the ancient grammarye was right.

Abruptly, the sky went white, then black, then white again, and as the horde of the dead and corrupted living swept toward his companions in a howling tidal wave, a stroke of lightning wider around than his horse was long arched from the sky, burning and blinding all eyes turned its way with a streak of orange-blue and blobs of dancing light. The explosion was thunderous, beyond that of the thunder itself, which was sufficient to knock Timid entirely from his horse, slam him to the ground, and send stars dancing through his eyes as the corpses above him blew like windchimes.

For what he hoped was a short time, he stayed there on paws and knees in the icy mud, unmoving but for the shaking of his body as energy flowed through him, a channel of light and power drawing upon the potency of his invoked Names, and on the force of his own life energy. Finally, barely strong enough to lift his head, Timid nonetheless forced his eyes open when a paw landed gently on his shoulder.

Instead of some groping undead beast, when he turned, he saw Cel, using her sheathed blade as a walking staff to help with her ruined knee. She had dismounted, and was wearing a soft-faced expression that gleamed concern and bated anger from her eyes.

"They're dead, Tim. You wiped them out with that lightning strike. Are you all right?"

He managed a smile, breathless despite his rest, then wiped it from his face as he looked up toward the swinging, dangling dead above him. Abruptly, his vision shifted, to the Sarellas-sight he'd developed more than a month ago, in the tunnels under the old kingdom.

"One of them is still alive, Cel. Please...Get Van up there to cut him down!"

He pointed up, toward a naked, slowly spinning boy child, dripping with snow dampness and dribbles of blood. The golden and verdant green light that burned and suffused his being with a strangely radiant light, unlike what he'd seen in any fur before, was weak in his breast. Yet it burned still, though how the child could have survived such mangling, Timid knew not.

Cel wasted no time in yelling for Van, pointing up into the tree with urgency.