3.

From where he lay the boy thought he saw the hand of his father descend to brush back an ash-singed lock of hair from his forehead. In between cloaked visions, he imagined that the spectre of the Duke, in shades of fatherly brown and gray, had bent over him to plant a kiss upon the boy's cheek. And he remembered what it was like to have a home and a name, and he thought, here, maybe, there was something that would make this existence tangible. He thought he heard a baby crying.

Then the sun seared whitehot and bleached his pupils dry and the boy realized his eyes were finally open.
"...Hello?"
Boots. Leather boots. The boy tried to say something in response but it came out a croak. Before he had time to rearrange his world, a pair of strong, capable hands were roughly sitting him upright and sloshing water down his throat. The excess dribbled down his chin and onto his shirtless chest.
He looked straight in front of him with a dogged animal stare. The young man who stared back grinned broadly and took a knee. Bowed his head. "My Lord."
The boy did not question his title. "And you are...?"
"My name," the man said, an awed sort of joy in his voice, "is John Hardin."

The boy rose, attempted to stand, wavered, but found support in the cold stone of the statue behind him. He examined Hardin, trying to spit out the acute sting of bitterness in his mouth. Because deep down inside, the boy had expected his savior to be his father. Instead he had a young man who still looked like a boy despite his beard and stature because of the shattering idealism in his features.
"And whose Lord am I? Did the Duke send you?"
Hardin laughed. "Oh, nay, no such man."
The boy looked at the ground. "I thought not. Then whose?"
"We call ourselves the followers of Mullenkamp."
The boy looked up sharply. "That woman?"
"The Goddess, yes. She sent me to find you here."
"Ah, then you must be a prophet," said the boy softly.
"Nay, I..." he blushed. "I hold no such great power. I know only what the others read from the scrolls. They sent me to find you here."
"Why you?"
Hardin looked slightly crestfallen. "Because it was destined."
The boy composedly wiped away the tears that were rolling in clear streams down his cheeks for reasons he could not explain. "Strange sir, do you know my destiny?"
"I do. The Goddess knows and tells all."
The boy squared his shoulders and stood straight. "Then tell me this. Who is this Goddess, and what does she want with me and," he demanded regally, "what is this pain in my back?"
Sharp intake of breath, "So it is true..." Hardin wistfully examined the boy's back, the bloody mark, almost looking to touch it, but stopped at the boy's savage glare, one like that of a small animal, claws out, teeth, hsst. So he said, "All shall be revealed in time. Come."

Suspiciously, but readily, the boy followed him. Together, they walked towards somewhere else.
The boy reached out in the tall grass to let the swaying blades tickle his fingertips. He was truly leaving now, leaving the trees and the hill and the willows behind. He was going to find the blue sky.
"Hardin?"
"Yes?"
"That city...with the blue sky over it and the ancient smoke leaking from its rooftops...what is it called?"
"Ah," said Hardin, with a knowing, destined smile. "LeaMonde."
And the sky had a name.

*****************

"Father, tell the story, the story of the city and the goddess and the cultists. The one with the undead and the Kildean sacrifice and the..."
"Alright my son, alright. I will tell it."

Once upon a time there was a fair city and she was called Lea Monde: the world. She had 4 walls and they were hewn of the cleanest alabaster stone. The architects cut the stone to perfection; workers made churches and palaces and marketplaces of such gleaming artistry to stop your breath in your throat. All the most beautiful maids resided in Lea Monde. They waved their kerchiefs of satin and silk out their windows to blow their heroes' colors (tea rose, burgundy, malachite) in the cool wind while they hummed songs from the old world. The city tasted of the faraway sea.

But in the soil of Lea Monde was the blood of a great and ancient power. For a thousand years the city had slept undisturbed, unsated. In the dark days, the Kildeans had sacrificed their bodies to her, their young, their limbs. She drank their blood thirstily and they worshiped her, calling her Goddess, keeper of the Dark, their Mullenkamp. Then, one day, the Kildeans: their people, their city, their intricate rites.... simply.... disappeared. And the city was left alone and slumbering until the people of Lea Monde came and built upon her ruins.

Then one day, someone awoke the angry soils. Cross-bearing armies of men, men foreign to the gentle people of Lea Monde, men who knew how to swear their allegiances to names like "The Parliament" and "The Cardinal" came. They spilt fresh red blood upon the earth and the ancient city awoke, its appetite aroused. It was hungry. But the people of Lea Monde did not know sacrifice, they were no Kildean cultists. Nay, and the name Mullenkamp as strange to their lips as the garbled sounds of babes. The city was hungry; no one fed the Dark; so it took its own homage. Ravenous, the very ground of the city opened up and swallowed its people alive, taking corpse after unwilling corpse in a gluttonous sacrifice to itself. And the Parliament called this "an earthquake."

After the earthquake Lea Monde fell silent. No one sang songs, no one bothered to cultivate beauty. Alabaster walls fell under the shaded sway of grit and rot. The Cardinal's men came and left, taking their sullied banners with them. Then, under the cover of Dark, like a swarm of ants, they came pouring over the land, reclaiming it. The Kildeans. For centuries the cultists had hidden deep in the underbowels of the city, whispering the name of Mullenkamp into dark corridors and basements just to hear the echo. And now, now the Dark was stronger than ever. Now was Her time. She had awoken and they needed only the prophet their scrolls had promised them to lead them. So in the shadows of Darkened LeaMonde the cultists still crouch; there they wait for their revelation, anticipating the prophet's day with the breathless hope that with him will come the Goddess and she will make their centuries of pain worth the bearing.


*************************

The boy and Hardin stopped at a hole in the ground. The boy sniffed distastefully, looking around him. The air was dry, the undead trees naked and crippled by neglect. The wine cellar below him stunk of decay. But the boy looked to the sky named LeaMonde with something akin to new hope reflecting strips of robinegg blue into his pale eyes.
Hardin said, "I am to take you underground."
And he did.
The Dark was overwhelming at first. It swooped at the boy's head ecstatically, frighteningly, like a plethora of boneless bats. The boy felt the familiar cling of shadows at his feet, fingers of inky black prying about his ankles and slim white calves. It took him a while to realize that half the hands he felt pulling at him were human. Then someone brought a lantern, and the boy saw a hundred glinting eyes in a hundred bowed heads, and they all of them wanted to touch him. And the dust was cool under his feet, and he suddenly turned to see Hardin's gold eyes gazing at him, looking proud-- the look exalted him. And though the lips of his new disciple were shrouded by the Dark, the boy felt the weight of his hand on his shoulder, and he could tell that he was smiling as he said,
"Welcome to your Kingdom, Sydney Losstarot, Prophet of the Kildean Goddess, Leader of the Cultists Mullenkampf."

TBC.
(anyone ever notice that LeaMonde mixed up is Lemonade?)