Sleepless Knight

Hoofbeats struck the silence like stones flung into armor, denting but unable to truly penetrate. The woods were thick and drank in sound. The rider did not make an excess of sound either. It was loud enough inside her head.

An unheard voice spoke of ambushes waiting in the shadows, of ghosts that haunted gnarled trees, of fairies within mushroom rings. The woman winced and snarled and grimaced against the words she heard without listening, but there was no silencing the unspoken. The man she heard was dead already.

The tenor of the corpse words changed. Now death spoke of the firewood picked clean from the forest floor, of the wagon ruts that deepened the trail, of the horse stool that festooned the path. A village was near, the wilderness worm eaten by men going in and out of civilization.

Ghita could not say she looked forward to sharing her malady with strangers –worstening her symptoms with their judgement. But isolation had not blunted the voice of death and movement had not left it behind. Perhaps a crowd might shout it down. She would try anything, try and retry, before she accepted her ears were given over to this Spectre.

The road curved and buildings emerged from the hypnotic haze of crooked trees and dead leaves. It was an old village, erected long enough for moss to grow on the houses, as if the wood slouched back to being the boughs and branches it had once been.

Ghita wrapped her reins in one hand. The other dipped to her sword’s hilt, protruding from a saddle bag. She needed no dead man to tell her the village was too shadowed for a time of sun. There were no people in evidence, no activity to speak of life. Smoke fled from chimneys, chickens patrolled their coops, but no human voice spoke except the voice of the dead man, which fairly screamed with warning.

“I know it's suspicious,” Ghita spoke, as though to make up for the silence that should not be. “I'm suspecting it, aren't I?”

The dead man was unconvinced. His warning continued to toll out, as though someone dead so long had much to speak on staying alive.

“Be silent and allow me thought. You died by thoughtlessness; I will not share your fate!”

But there was nothing to think on, no way to journey ‘cept forward. Ghita heeled her mount into a steady trot, with an even eye for what might change in the world she entered.

All around her, life seemed on the verge of speech, but unaccountably held its tongue. The smithy was cool but piled with wood. The inns sign beamed with welcome to an empty room. The church bell creaked as the wind tested it's fixture, but did not ring. Silence was too oppressive a Lord for rebellion to even be attempted.

Ghita dismounted. There was one thing to be said for this loneliness: it was no threat. She transferred her sword belt from her saddle to around her waist, then led her horse to the stable. Horses were still and silent within, cowed by the oppressive atmosphere. At her approach, they nickered and slashed the ground. 

Ghita kept her own horse saddled, but she took pity on those who went without care. Each she released to the corral to stretch their legs. The trough was almost full, with only a few fallen leaves dancing on the surface. Hay was baled in the corner, needing only to be flung into the corral to be fed on. Lastly she helped herself to a feedbag for her own mount. 

Already Ghita had resolved that if fate did not see fit to reveal this mystery to her, she would not linger until this evil was spoiled for opportunity to undo her. She would take this untended horseflesh and see if they could be changed to coin further down the road.

It was afternoon. The sun was almost directly overhead; Ghita’s shadow could barely even try to escape her. She did not want to be here after dark, but there was time yet to make a quick search and take any valuables that would benefit her more than a empty room.

She started in the smithy, and there the town surprised Ghita instead of simply mystifying her. The blacksmith laid against the bellows, hammer in hand, his only movement a bristling beard stirred by the wind.

Ghita could not see a wound on him. When she checked his pulse, it tapped as steadily as an impatient heel. She pulled up an eyelid and saw a vacant orb staring back at her, empty of even red lines.

“Wake up,” she told him. She slapped him across the face. “Wake!” she shouted. 

He did not respond. His flesh was warm, his breath even, but there was no more life to him than the merest fact.

Ghita left him to his sleep. She did not need the dead man in her ear to inform her that magic made him waking as impossible as him flying.

Further she searched. Much she found. Little did she discover. Each bed was filled, many chairs slumped in, a deep and inviolate sleep possessing all humanity save for her. It was as if last night, all had gone to bed or at least moved to rest their bones, but slumber did not refresh them. It only took them deeper and deeper into the deathliness that was part and parcel of sleep. As if sleep itself was tiring them too fully for the morning to break the night's hold.

Magic. A wizard had worked this. Ghita knew the anger of the magic men. It would not take such a slight for one to make these people sleep away their lives, waking only in the twilight of their span with no memories to cherish, only a lost youth to mourn. 

Ghita ended in the tavern, watching the sky purple as a bruise. It would be dark soon. She was even less enamored now with feeling the night self of this town. She could not think of how to counter this curse. It seemed her only choice was to move on and hope mercy occurred to the man who had done this. Yet would that not be one more whisper in her head? Speaking regret instead of threats and violence, but still stealing away her quiet.

She wondered if the keg shared in whatever sorcery covered this town.

The dead man spoke to her of high ground. Ghita went up the stairs to the second floor, then up a ladder to an attic where merchants and traders could store goods that were too many for their small rooms. She made her way to the slatted window that ventilated this narrow space, itself cramped and fit only for the cargo that was parked within chalked blocks on the floor.

The window let her out onto the slanted roof, which was not so steep that she couldn’t walk upright on it. Here she saw that the fog came up to the eaves of most of the buildings. Many small huts were swallowed up by it.

Clouds, thick and dark, blanketed the sky. They mobbed the sun, binding it and drowning it, and the light that managed to drip through such a thick roof was gray and inclined to shadow. Where the clouds cast their darkness upon the mist, it made the whole world something done by halves, incomplete, like a drawing done with only a few colors. So few that the Earth’s beauty could not be captured, nor hinted at, only assumed. It was a world where the shadow was a constant, the light an interruption of the natural.

It reminded Ghita of what the dead man had said about what he’d planted in life and the fruits that had been borne in the afterwards. God-General Ophierus Daen, who beat back the Shadow with the blackest of deeds. Who fought for the Light with anything but holiness. Was it any wonder that his reward was neither torture nor peace, but an eternity of gray?

When Ghita thought of things the dead man had said to her, his voice did not sound like the grave. His words were like those of a man still alive. As alive as her, in this sleeping gray world, on this Walpurgis Night.

The dead man spoke to her of flame and Ghita saw it on the outskirts of town. The unseen artist of this world had found a new color, a wan yellow that seemed mixed too heavily with the fog to possibly shine through. But it showed her man-shapes, tall and thin, deathly thin, walking the streets with a loping gait that did not belong on the paths of man.