Disclaimer: The Old Kingdom Trilogy belongs to Garth Nix. The Nine Bright Shiners, certain place names that will be used in this story, and the Old Kingdom itself belong to him. I own but a few characters of my own creation.

Night was the worst time, reflected Oliffer. With his sword, he hacked at the surrounding brush, though his movements seemed almost false. "Vernis? Vernis, I swear on the King's royal shit I will throttle you! This is a two-man patrol! You can't wander off, you ass-pated rat!" He smacked again, this time at a tree branch with half-hearted ire. He couldn't blame Vernis, really. The man was probably on his way back to the garrison, where there wasn't all this infernal wilderness. Fort Calys was in the middle of nowhere, and he had been on his way up through the ranks before this dead-end posting. Soldiers stationed at Fort Calys, for the most part, stayed at Fort Calys. They idled their time away between patrols, drinking themselves to death on cheap native wine, entangling themselves with the plain native girls, sleeping away the hours and dreaming of a place that seemed more like civilization and less like a cold, mountainous hell.

The forest, a previous dampener of all sound, rustled suddenly somewhere ahead of him. "Vernis? Vernis! Stop wasting time!" Oliffer charged on ahead, crashing through the undergrowth before stumbling, like a bewildered lamb, into a clearing. "Vernis?" he yelled again, and the darkness swallowed up his question. "Vernis?" Oliffer felt the hair on the back of his neck prick uneasily, and he took a reluctant step forward into the surrounding pitch. The ground felt solid, reassuring. Another step. He was fine. He could do this. "Vernis?" One step here, one step there―and then:

His foot caught on something. Oliffer emitted a soft groan: he was now aware that he had entered a timeless, almost comical situation. He felt his spirit leave him, and bent down to examine what he already knew was Vernis' body. His hands groped in the darkness with a blind surety―he had the bravery of a man suddenly intimate with his own mortality. He felt a hand, and then an arm, and then an oozing warmth. He lifted his own probing appendage, and smelled blood. "Vernis," he said simply, without compassion. Oliffer would have felt it strange that he wasn't frowning at the apparent death of his companion, but emotion seemed to strenuous at the moment. He stood up, grasping his sword in both hands, preparing to perform his people's ritual for the dead. "Vernis abh Joranth," he began in impromptu eulogy. His sword inched closer and closer to the body's already-torn neck―for some reason Oliffer could not summon an ounce of swiftness. He was moving inexorably slow in time, becoming a dead weight in its swirling current. Absently, he noted that his sword was catching a glimmer of light, though the moon and stars were invisible behind the clouds. It looked warm, a gentle and epicurean ochre glow. He adjusted the angle of his weapon, and in the reflection he saw behind him Vernis' end.

Oliffer turned slowly to meet his fate. "Crata," he named the creature. Every month a patrol or two was lost to these creatures of the wild places. They were by no means indigenous to the mountains―he remembered his childhood, his grandmother warning him not to play outside some evenings as Crata had been spotted on the outskirts of their small farming town. He blinked stoically at the thing. So far, it remained in its current form, a whorl of organic light, a faint outline that was ever shifting and yet perfectly still. He fancied that the creature was regarding him just as coolly, and they stayed like that for a few heartbeats, two civil individuals. Not even the tree branches swayed, not even the stag grass moved. The breeze, which had been blowing gently across his face mere moments before, had choked.

And then Oliffer felt the world change. The wind picked up fiercely, an angry gale descending from the north. Oliffer's hand lost its sensation, and his sword fell, noiseless, to the earth. The Crata glided, the light of its form taking on a pulsing, agitated red. Before he had felt his death and accepted it, but now Oliffer leapt to action, his heart assuming a frenzied pace, his pupils thinning to the merest of specks. Ancient wards and chants flung themselves through his mind, and at the same time he forget he was not a wielder of magic. "Erzen Crata venta du―" he began wildly, but the Crata exploded in size, and he was enveloped in a brilliant burst of red.

In the sky above, the moon finally emerged from its hiding place. That night it was the palest of whites, a gorgeous and unreal sliver hanging just above the tree line. The tips of the pines caught the light of the moon, and echoed back with a faint green. Though the hour was late, the first of the stars finally broke through the cloud cover. One by one, they rendered the pitchy sky into a serene pointillism. At Fort Calys, a few soldiers were still up. Marnet, playing dice by candlelight, looked up from his game to glance at the door. He wondered what Oliffer and Vernis were up to. An hour before, someone had made a joke, a raunchy suggestion about an illicit affair, and the soldiers who were still awake laughed heartily at that one. But that had been an hour ago, and even then Oliffer and Vernis were late. Marnet was friends with many of his fellows, but Oliffer and Vernis were from his own town. They stuck together. Just the week before, it had been he and Vernis that were the ones on the patrol, though he doubted they had given Oliffer any cause to worry about their whereabouts.

"Oi," grunted Marnet's playing partner, prodding him sharply. "Your turn, farmboy."

Marnet shook his head. It was probably nothing. Knowing Vernis, he had probably had a little liaison with one of the local girls, and Oliffer, ever the same, was fishing him out of trouble. Everything was fine. Marnet grinned. He couldn't wait to hear the stories those two would tell, once they got back. "Prepare to be slain," he shot back at his opponent. "And when I'm through with you, they'll dig your head up and collect your ashes just to laugh at you." He rolled the crude dice, cut from scraps of wood and marked with poorly-drawn symbols of festivity and defeat. Marnet released them, and they clattered to the table. "Aha! That's a crown and a fool! Pay up!"

As his fellow cursed and rummaged in his pockets, Marnet leaned over the table to close the window. He fastened the animal skin tightly over the port to keep the candle from guttering out, as the flame was currently spinning crazily, threatening to leap from the wick and onto the table. "Wind really picked up," he noted with annoyance. Outside, beyond the hide and in the sky above, the moon was once more shrouded by cloud cover. An enormous shadow fell over the mountain, and a crow, far from its usual southern haunts, shot into the darkness, cawing and reeling crazily.

On the earth below, Oliffer bled.

Author's Note: I keep coming back! This is at least the third version of my Shiners fic. Night Child (two years ago? one?) was a project that I began impulsively without planning. I loved the story and wanted to do it justice, but it got out of hand. I had gotten too far in it to make the changes that would have saved it from itself, so I ended it and removed it from the site. More importantly, I had then entered a period of my high school career that necessitated a lot of time studying and doing various things for college acceptance, and significantly less time writing my little-turned-behemoth fanfic. I know, I know, excuses excuses, but there you have it. As much as I loved Night Child, I think removing it was the best option. Best to give a swift and respectable death than drag it out, ruining it for myself and whoever was reading it.

On that note, welcome to Sam's Shiner Fic 3.0! This is an abrupt sort of prologue. I originally wanted to call it An Interruption, if only to let you guys know it was a very deliberate decision to make it so brief, but it wasn't interrupting anything. Logic ruins everything! Another prologue of sorts will be following it (I call it a prologue for the exposition), and it feels more like a real introduction to the story , more so than what this is. But I'm not just throwing this "prologue" out there. The events detailed in The Two-Man Patrol are relevant to the plot, and there is a teensy bit of exposition if you squint. More than anything, I guess, it is an immersion. I hope you like it enough to continue reading! And I've done a lot of planning and pre-writing on this baby, and I'm pretty much done with high school now (only AP exams, and then I'm home free!). I'll have plenty of time in the school year that remains, and then the whole summer to complete this story. I am NOT going to delete this. x3

To those who had been reading my previous fic, I apologize! DX I love you guys so much! I'm trying my best with this story (not to say I didn't try my best with the last one, but I'd like to think I improved in writing...) It should be a lot better than my last one, and definitely not as rambling.

Until next time!
Sam ;3