2.

The women of the inn pitied the boy, and they whispered among themselves that he was a wee fallen angel that their Lord God must've let slip through his enormous fingers, for the boy was small, and lost, and fair, and also because he had an odd way about him that was not of their humble village world.
The innkeeper himself was quite another story. He despised the boy - for the free bowls of stew his wife snuck him, for the way the boy sat in the corner like a premature shadow, for the way his teenage daughter Samantha doted over him - but mostly because of the way the flames flickered in the boy's eyes when he warmed himself by the fire, and that strange ringing in the his quaint little voice when he spoke.
"There's something not right with that'un," the innkeeper grumbled to his wife. " 'E'll bring naught but trouble to us."
But the boy remained, sitting in his quiet corner of the inn. He did not pay for board (he slept in the barn), and he ate only what charity deigned to favor him with.
For a while.

13, Nurse had taught the boy, was an unlucky omen. 13, she had whispered, rosary beads tingling with superstition, smelled of the end of things.
The boy was 13.

This night was cool; the sky stained purple and pink, each cloud bleeding into the next, as the sky around those parts had a habit of doing. It had been many months since the boy had seen the blue over Lea Monde. The memory of the willow traced vague gray paths in the backs of his retinas, but in the fronts of his eyes was always pressed the image of high-rising mountains, of hills and of walls. This town was a self-contained valley. This valley was a purgatory.
The boy arose from his bed in the barn, brushed the hay from his flaxen hair, and ventured out into the courtyard. He looked to his right, to his left, to the barricade before him, and he tiptoed. He twisted a halfway wistful smile. "Someday," he said to the blue sky.
It did not hear him, but it was his.

The boy returned to the inn and hid his dubious form in the nook of a corner, sat in his usual spot at the table. The dark draped over him and he pulled it close about him like a hood, like a cloak. The drab hue that sat in a cloak of dust about the inn washed away the painful blue of the faraway sky. The boy's attention turned to trace the footsteps of men, to listen to their conversations, to learn of their evils through the clack of heel and the shuffle of toe. He saw the judgment hanging upon the men even as the dark whispered apocalyptic fairy tales to him from between his bangs.
"What are you looking at?"
The boy looked up abruptly.
Smiling down at him between twin blonde braids was the innkeeper's daughter, Samantha.
The boy opened his mouth to tell her of the ending tide, and the willows, and the wide-spreading wings, but the room seemed to tremble as if to warn no, and the thick crowded air choked in his throat like a stopper.
"Shadows," he said.
The girl laughed as only a budding woman of 16 can laugh. "Plenty of those," she said, rumpling the boy's hair fondly. "What about them?"
The boy looked down at the table he was sitting at, ran a finger up and down the grooves of the wood.
"If your soul be forsaken," he said in a prophetic mumble, still shrill with the tremors of childhood, "or rejected or wounded, it will drag on the heels of men so that their shadows lengthen. In this way I can tell the good from the evildoing. In this way I can know the nature of a man. I can sense the doom."
"And I?" Samantha teased, scowling her pretty face in an attempt to impersonate evil. "Does the dark drag at my shadow?"
The boy looked at her. Her flaxen braid teased her neck like a noose.
She'll die, the voices said. She'll die she'll fall her back will break will split, will splinter. They almost laughed as Sydney winced. Her justice will be to be stabbed in the back for love. The virtuous don't rise to heavenly heights; they crumble in the ruins of naivete. They bury, blind by the image of an angel. Tell her Losstarot, tell her her fate... tell her his name... it's on the tip of your tongue: Guildenster-
"You are a good girl," the boy said finally.
Satisfied, she gave a laugh and flounced off. Then the boy was yet again alone, and the whispers, the coldness, the tingling blackness, crept back up his neck in fingers and caressed the line of his jaw like an old friend.
She is a good girl, the voices hissed from behind his ear. But even the most devout can meet their ends in the Dark.
"Hsst," shushed Sydney, banishing them back into the feathery recesses of his hair. He blinked to rid himself of the cacophonous notes of their words. "I have no use for you."
He saw, but he did not wish to know.

Soon, the food the innkeeper's wife had snuck him sat heavily and contentedly upon the boy's stomach. The fire rose up from the hearth to his belly and the clamor of voices and ale mugs dulled to a single constant pressure upon his skull. The boy's eyes closed. The dreams began:
The blood sang. "only to me, only to me," the boy found himself whispering. The blood sang and it vibrated as it came pouring in through the door and the windows. The men were swept up by it. They drowned in it. They all whispered her name when they died; it was stamped upon their lips. Only the boy, only he rose above it, pale and clean as always. As the blood washed up upon his feet and recoiled, as if frightened, he saw her: a figure in the door. She was robed; he could not see her face; she beckoned to him with a finger and all the Dark came galloping around her in a cyclone. She motioned with a graceful sweep of her arm out the door and the boy saw that the world was on fire. There was a man outside, stern, strong, and his eyes scorched the very ground black. Then she closed the door, and opened her mouth to sing once more. The room splintered. the blood shattered. The boy screamed.
"FIRE!"

The inn collapsed on itself into silence.
"Where, boy?" drawled a nearby man with cheeks reddened by ale. "There's only fire in the hearth in here, and if that scares ye, then you're better off living in the Ruins."
His companions laughed heartily. The boy lowered his head and said nothing, was interrupted in his persistence to say nothing by a youth who burst through the doors of the inn at that moment hollering. "Fire! In the Graylands, fire! If it isn't put out, it'll burn straight towards us. The Manor is in flames!"
Judgment is a room full of eyes and mouths gargling wordless accusations.
"The boy was here the entire time. There's no way he could've known about the Manor," a voice hissed from the back of the room.
"He must've started it," snarled another.
"Fools," said the innkeeper. And the room hushed for him. "Fools, how could he start a fire without moving? Nay, the boy did not cause the fire by his own two hands, unless he majicked it. His yell was by divination, lads."
"But how? Why?" said the people of the inn, in cacophonous unison.
"I'll tell you why," hissed the innkeeper, and his wife had no power to stop him. "The boy's a demon. He speaks to devils."
The crowd roared in bloodthirsty approval.
The boy whirled. He fell backwards. The people's eyes, swarms of wasps, bore into him. "I didn't-- I'm not-- I don't know what you're talking about, I..."
Torches came from closets, storybook pitchforks. They drove the boy out of inn and valley and kept on chasing. If he had had time to stop running and think, the boy might have been a bit flattered that a mob had gathered for him. For him. A regular boy but for the occasional voices and the way he slept in fits. For him, the townspeople snarled; they hissed the name of the devil from between their teeth. Panting up the hill as he fled, kicking up slim ragged heels, Sydney laughed uneasily. It wasn't the devil they had to fear.


"It is time," the Duke said to the statue of Mullenkamp.
Smiling wolfishly, she agreed.


With the pitchforks grazing his bony spine, the boy did all that he could do- he ran straight into the maelstrom of the townspeople's fear, charged headlong into the manor and the fire and left them standing at the smoky edges yelling curses into a hell they would not, could not, understand. The boy was but young, and his small lungs tore at the air to claim something clean from amidst the plumes of smog. The tears that stung in his eyes were not a result merely of the heat or the smoke, but also of the familiar tracing of lines in the tiles that the boy crawled on. Because when his empty ashy body finally collapsed onto the cold alabaster tile, his cheek touched something like a red star-shaped tile, and the boy knew with a start that he was home.

"Only for you, my prophet, only for you," said a voice. Her voice.
The robed woman, the beautiful woman of Sydney's dreams walked through the fire with the poise of a true goddess and gathered the boy's small frail form in her arms. "So small, so sweet, so young." She brushed his hair from his eyes, the Dark dripping from her fingers. "I would not have picked you, and yet-" She sighed. She placed him on the ground at her feet. Disrobed. She danced for him and the boy saw the yellow flames lick at her body and yet she did not burn. Then she reached out a hand and touched his back and then the burn came. How it came. He opened his mouth to yell but the Dark came flooding in through his mouth and eyes and ears and then he suddenly knew nothing.

The fire whirled and consumed its own fiery arms and then suddenly gasped and died. All that was left of it in the Manor were the ankle-deep ashes and the strange set of woman's footsteps that traced from the base of the statue to nowhere at all. And the pale body of a boy, curled like a crescent moon about its feet. The boy slept fitfully. For a while.

When the moon shines bright upon the pale skin of your hand and alights the blood upon it with frightful florescence (hiss: phosphorescence), one can't help wondering what's been lost. Sydney awoke and discovered that he'd lost the skin upon his back.
It burned, oh it burned it burned. It burned as a little boy should never burn, it hurt with a pain that dug obscenely, perversely into his innocent white flesh. When he first pulled his lashes open, twilight melting cautiously into dawn, he was paralyzed by the pain that greeted him; his body automatically contorted into the fetal position, he pulled his slender legs to his stomach and tried to force a scream to let it out. At first his jaw locked, twitched with the shock of it all, and he could utter nothing. The screams came later, and in rapid succession.

In some inner chamber of the manor that had been untouched by the fire, the infant Joshua slept. Beside him, solemn as tears, his father the Duke rocked in a chair, and read from a bible to block the sound of his brother's screams from the babe's ears.

If you've ever wondered what sin sounds like, these screams were it.

"And Jesus said I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. but if it dies, it produces many seeds."

The boy would scream for his mother, but he never had one.

"The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life."

He would scream for his father, but he had forsaken him.

"Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you."

He would scream for his God, but knew not what world he haunted.

"The man who walks in the dark does not know where he is going."

For what kind of God would leave a boy of 13 to flail on the cold concrete ground of a home that is no longer his, his curse branded upon his back, the proof, the print of blood upon his twisted fingertips?

"Put your trust in the light while you have it, so that you may become sons of light."

So the boy called out to another...

"For god so loved the world that he gave his only son..."

To the only one he had left...

"but no longer my only son, Joshua..."

Though he didn't even know her,

"no longer..."

Her name slipped naturally from his lips:

"MULLENKAAAAMP!"

tbc.