Nymir sat on the floor facing the wall of the fishmonger's shop. The sinner's cathedral lay full of corpses in the north. The admiralty office had been torn apart by magic. The Watch knew his name and truth, and the Spymaster of the League Coalition had left him with plenty of threats. They'd left him alone, for now, but he trembled. Never had he walked so close to death, tiptoeing the precipice of hell.
He scratched at his arms and rubbed at his face. Bruises and scrapes colored him in shades of purple and red. There was an itch in his skin that he couldn't get to, splinters of terror like nails in his soul, and no part of him would ever be the same again. Night crowded into the shop and he didn't light a lamp. He didn't want to see light. It was a lie.
Fifteen years ago, the Redfall Sinners had moved into one of Pharaul's old temples, the ones where once soothsayers had sung of Wind and Sunfire. The Sinners had converted it into a cathedral to the Everliving's Blood. They'd knocked out its plain, clear windows and put stained glass up, angular portraits of tormented saints, their bodies in tatters. A great, central window portrayed skeletal figures shrieking in the sky. Once a week, the cathedral's Father would slip his hand into a glove of nails, drawing with blood-soaked fingers on the feet, hands, and heads of the saints. Then he would collapse of bloodloss on the steps and the devout would take the glove from his brutalized hand, letting him drink from a sanguine vial.
As a child, Nymir would sometimes crouch in shadows across the square and watch the Father drink, blood still dripping from the old man's fingertips. His black cassock was too thin for the brutal winds that fell out of the avalanches surrounding the city. Frost crusted on the man's clothes and hair. Where his blood fell on the steps, it froze, more of it week upon week until the steps glistened with a coppery shine.
Two months after the Sinners moved into Pharaul's cathedral, they were all dead. The screaming began in the morning. There was only one door in and out of the cathedral, and it was piled with bodies. Whatever carnage took place inside, none escaped it. A crowd of onlookers stood outside the cathedral, staring in horrified shock. Nymir had been among them, a scrawny street kid layered in salvaged furs, face red with frostburn beneath layers of dirt and ice. Nymir, who had just the night before decided that he'd one day speak to the Father while he rested on the steps, found a bitterness on the air and pulled it into himself. He made it part of the man he would become.
The crowd shouted in surprise, then, as the old Father vaulted the piled bodies in the doorway and fled into the square. The crowd surged back in fear, and Nymir was knocked to the ground. There, strewn in the snow, Nymir watched the Father shouting, "The Everliving will not be slain! No earthly carnage can hurt He whose wings are lifted on the currents of eternity!"
"Who said anything about the Everliving?" It was the callous mutter of a horror in the shape of an alpin man, casually kicking aside the piled bodies, stepping over and upon them as he moved into the square. Gray-armored like a soldier, sword drenched in blood, an aura of red light clung to this creature's shoulders and head. The light took the shape of some greater figure, of huge arms that leaned over the armor, seeming to ride upon it. The faceless voice beneath the helm said, "Hell is hungry for you, old man."
Pushing himself back across the ground, Nymir cast about, and there he saw the figures that would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life: the faceless crowd that gawked and backed away, yet watched with fascination; the pale-faced woman dressed in black and green, blue eyes brilliant and icy, who let out a flittering giggle when she heard the Father's desperate shout; on a building across the square, the bird-like Sgathaich perched like a statue upon the roof, watching it all play out beneath her as though it were an inconsequential scene; and the armored figure with the red aura, the wicked murderer.
Nymir had long struggled to remember the event properly. In all of the stories witnesses told of that day, the killer had said, Hell is hungry for you, and I am the very maw of Balberiel, but Nymir had somehow missed it. The icy woman whose haunting giggle Nymir remembered as something cruel had probably, in reality, been born of fear. Maybe Sgathaich had just been watching like everyone else, a resident of the city shocked numb by sudden violence. Maybe Nymir's presence had, like so much else, been just a coincidence.
But Nymir had never believed it to be just chance. In his memory, the killed had pinned the Father with a personal grudge. The icy woman had laughed with cruel amusement. Sgathaich had watched with impossible knowledge, perhaps even complicity. And Nymir himself had been fated to that day, and to the life of faithful devotion it inspired.
Now, fifteen years later, Nymir had that feeling of fate rush around him again. It was a horrible feeling, like the voice of God whispering, I created you for a special damnation, and you will soon meet it. When a shadow fell over Nymir, where he crouched in the dark, Nymir just shivered against his fear and muttered a resigned, "Is hell hungry for me?"
"I'm not here to hurt you." A large, angular metal figure stood just inside the fishmonger's shop. "Where is Amo?"
"It was you fifteen years ago, wasn't it? The cathedral in Gray Watch?"
"I don't remember leaving survivors."
"You didn't. I was in the crowd outside. I was a kid. Too young to see that kind of thing. It changed me." Nymir shifted to glance toward Phaeduin. "Fucked me up."
The old man discarded pieces of polished armor on the floor. Helm, pauldrons, gauntlets, various plates beneath which newly youthful white fur shone in the night. Phaeduin stood tall and strong. "Where is Amo?"
"Why do you hate the Redfall Sinners so much? Why would you do that to us?"
Phaeduin scoffed at the question, picking up his own old soldier's armor. But he paused to stare at the blood-crusted scars on his gauntlet. "I used to wonder why. The Judges of Redfall can sever someone's connection to Wind and Sunfire. I wasn't going to let that kind of evil..."
"The Everliving sees all that torments His followers. The Judges will know you're here. They'll come for you."
"I used to fear that they would find me one day, but I don't care about that anymore." Phaeduin eyed Nymir without pity. The age spots on Phaeduin's face were gone, the lines of stress and torment flattened. He looked almost young. "Nymir, you don't think your cult is actually going to help you, do you? You're nothing but fuel for the Everliving."
"Liar," Nymir snapped, turning away. "Blasphemer. Demon. Finish me off. Hell can't be much worse than this. Cut the thread."
Phaeduin snarled, "No. I condemn you to survive. Now get up, coward. Tell me. Where is Amo? Where are they?"
