Draka braced himself when he saw where he was. The familiar trees, with the vines and their wide leaves snaking up them, the pathway at his feet, and the hut he had built just ahead. It was exactly as he remembered it. No corruption dripping off of the branches, staining the ground around them like a black disease. No boar. He had his sword, but not his armor.

  He looked up to the sky, begging. He didn’t want this now. This nightmare, this horrible moment in his memory that had broken everything he ever loved, ever hoped for, ever dreamed of. He didn’t want to relive this tonight, of all nights. Or any other night.

  Why did he have to be in this dream…why couldn’t it be any other? Something pleasant, something nice, something that might ease the doubt, ease the anger, ease the dread gripping his heart.

  The rage, he knew, was gaining control. It was rising within him, spilling and spilling as the days went on. In the real world, he was at the edge of a precipice with all the weapons and armor he needed to commit slaughter, to take anyone’s life he wanted. But no matter how much he tried, they never seemed to be the weapons he needed to save anyone’s life, and that was all he really wanted. Just once, the hut loomed at him, he would like to be able to save someone he loved or cared about or who deserved it. Truly save them.

  Aurie appeared from the forest in that same dress she wore the first day Balor introduced them, when she had Alden and Maud at her sides, looking annoyed while they looked curious and hesitant. But she didn’t look annoyed like she did then. Nor did she look irritated or afraid, like all the other times she appeared in his dreams.

  He took in a breath. The hut was there, further than he could reach but closer than he liked. Closer than it had been in a very long time.

  “The people are starving,” Draka said in his native tongue. He didn’t look, but he knew Aurie had come to his side and was looking at the hut with him. “Children. More than I can count. I don’t have enough food for all of them. Even after the first shipment comes from the villages, there might not be enough to feed them all. And what will happen after that? I can’t starve villages to feed a city. Because of me, farms were destroyed. I know it was God who did it, who decided it was meant to be, but had I not…if I had just…it would never have happened. Now, a woman is suffering, rotting in a dungeon for touching my hand and I wasn’t good enough to free her. I couldn’t save her, either.”

  “Draka,” Aurie put a hand on his shoulder. She spoke in his language as if it were her own, “You didn’t cause the farms to be destroyed, they did.”

  “No,” Draka shook his head. “If I hadn’t gone to Talkro, if I had turned Balor away when he wanted to stay with me…Ever since this day, no matter where I go, bad things happen to the people who I call friend. I should’ve known better than to make another one. At first, I tried, you know, I tried to send him away, but I couldn’t say it and I—didn’t want him to.” His eyes began to fill with water, “Everywhere I went since the moment I walked into that hut, I swear I have been hunted by the Enemy. People, like who you look like, who have never even heard of demons, are suddenly so embattled against them that they become another casualty.

  “There was a village we came to, deep in the pagan Steppes. It was like Talkro, only the opposite. A Christian village surrounded by pagan ones we had been fighting. But they weren’t part of the fighting. Had never been affected by it, if you can believe that. It was such a peaceful place.”

  He paused for a moment, sucking down the tears to make way for the anger burning within him, “And then we came. We slept in their little church. It was so small and simple, only a priest and his wife and children, none of the politics or complications. I could have lived the rest of my life there. They were so welcoming, everyone. They treated us like family. We hid our weapons and armor so that we could have one day, one week, a year—if we could manage—of peace before moving on. When we told them about the crusade, about the wars, about the demons and the devils, the Unsainted, and the Enemy with his monsters, they thought we were just telling stories,” He smiled at that. Only for a moment, as he watched the flickering of the firelight glowing through the cracks of the simple door he had made for that hut waiting for him down the path, “The demons came within the week. Wave after wave—each one bigger, stronger—we held them off with everything we had. We fought. I had never fought so hard before. Because these people, these people were the type of people who made you glad you were Christian, made you remember what being Godly and kind and good really means, and THEY DIED! Every last one of them died and we could do nothing.”

  Her hand on his shoulder was joined by another on his back, rubbing him as if that could make it go away. But he was already wading through the tide of the memories, standing there, looking at that hut ahead of him.

  “We only lost a handful—six, I will never forget—out of our forty,” Draka continued, “But all eighty-two of them…and the attacks stopped when it was done. The town had been burned to the ground, the church was a ruin. We buried them. And our six with them, as if they were part of the village all along. We didn’t know all their names, so left their graves marked only by crosses we made out of stones and that was it. Even our own. And I was—a stranger in the cohort again because the only men we lost were the only men I ever spoke to.”

  He turned to her, softening as he looked into her beautiful sky-blue eyes over that pert nose and those thick lips that were more common among the people on her side of the Rhine.

  She grinned up at him sympathetically as he brushed a bit of her blonde hair from her forehead, from over her wide cheekbones. And he swallowed dryly as his gaze fell past her chin to her thin neck and the scar across it.

  “What is the cost supposed to be for a life? How many should die and I survive? How many lives is an innocent life worth? How many of those lives are innocent, themselves? I do as I’m commanded, I trust what I am commanded, but I have no commands for what I’m about to do. For the lives I’m to decide if they perish or not. But I know,” her eyes were piercing into his, “that if I don’t do anything, she will die. And this time, I know that the one holding her is hunting me. He wants me dead.” In a much darker tone, “And I want to kill him.”

  Then, again moving her hair, this time to behind her ear, while his other hand moved to the hilt of his sword, “How ironic is it that the many who I would be sending to die for her are the ones I’m trying to save from starvation? And how long will it be before the demons come again? Stronger than when they did this to you? When they killed the closest friend I’ve had since Phillip and Isa? How many more children do I have to see die because I happened to walk past their home and they welcome me as a friend?”

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. Draka turned from her toward the hut and drew his sword with a calming breath.

  “I found Lilith in there, Draka,” Aurie said when he took his first few steps, stopping him. “I burned it to the ground after God commanded me in battle against her. The baby, Hans, has returned to Him. You don’t have to go. You can just stay. Let this dream finish with us sitting here, enjoying each other’s company for once.”

  Draka hesitated. Then, his voice was deep with intention. “This isn’t a dream anymore. This. Is. My. Memory. My wife is in there and my son’s name was Lasse.” With a cock of his head as if it were a side-thought, Draka said harshly, “And I would much prefer to spend time with the real Aurie next time. My Aurie doesn’t speak my language.”

  And he went to the hut, bracing himself for what he will find the moment he opens that door, the moment his memory takes over and he becomes nothing more than an observer floating through it, unable to do more than exactly what was said, what was done, exactly how it was said and done. Just as it had before he met Aurie, just as it will be after he does what he always does; what he must do. Because he never truly has a choice, not since the moment he was willingly approaching. Every village he sleeps in becomes infested, each friend becomes a memory, and every battle harder fought than the one before it. He merely flowed with the winds, tossed like a seedling from place to place, battle to battle, always followed by the Enemy, always just long enough for him to forget, just long enough for whatever he starts to care about to be ripped from him again.

  He opened the door to the hut and the sword faded from his hands.

  “DRAKA!” Aurie ran after him.

  His Aurie.

  That struck her as suddenly and as hard as a punch to the face, like the possessed Monastic Knight’s blade that stabbed her chest, like when Lilith had cut her throat, but also like when Draka laid his hands on her and begged permission over and over, moving from one wound to the next right before her eyes and shut those wounds with the power God had given him…instead of rushing to protect Balor and Alden in the moment when they needed him. But, that was how she once saw it, too. Like Draka, she once thought that it was him who decided that she should live and her son and husband die instead. But it wasn’t for him or her to decide.

  She burst through the opened door of the hut as the flames climbed the walls. Hans was a corpse beside Draka, who was hunched over in the center of the room, facing away from her. His hair, long and wavy, dark and flowing with hints of deep red, fell over thick furs that covered his shoulders and the tops of his arms. He was weeping over the human form of Lilith; the dark haired, striking emerald green-eyed, almost unnaturally beautiful, blood smeared woman in his arms struggling to say between half-breaths before she died, “I love you.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  A blink and he wasn’t hunched over a woman in his arms anymore. He wasn’t wearing furs. He didn’t have a scraggly beard or the face of someone who could barely call themselves a man, but was exactly as she remembered the day of her worst nightmare come true. The hut was replaced by the woods rimmed by the wind that carried the scent of the freshly tilled fields and the early rise of wheat sprouts. Beside him, in Hans’s place, in place of an infant, was Alden’s lifeless upper half.

  A scene of gore splashed across trees and foliage, a speared boar on the other side of him, and Balor in his arms as he wept. As he begged again and again. As he made the motions of laying his hands, again and again. As he begged more.

  Aurie had to clench her jaw shut, frozen. This was that moment. This was when it happened, how it happened. How it truly happened. How he killed his wife for what she did…how he failed to save Balor…how he failed to save Alden. This was that memory. That nightmare.

  “Draka…” Balor said as Draka’s frantic tears dripped over him. “Take care of my girls. They need you.” Balor’s last breath and she felt Draka’s strength go with it.

  It all darkened around him, hunched over her husband’s body as he screamed and cried and roared all at once—what he could not do outside of this dream because of his vow of silence—and Aurie’s feet moved before she realized.

  The darkness became filled with people, with mothers and children who grew with each leaping pace, with husbands, fathers, soldiers, farmers, fishermen, with faces she knew, with Eli and Sylvie, Esme, Senna, Eleanna, Soran, Morin, Alexandra, Leta, Maud, with strangers and people she only saw in her childhood but knew, deep down, were still alive. First, it began with a few, then, as quick as she sprinted, there were hundreds, then thousands, then millions—more and more, until the darkness was nothing but them.

  She leapt to him, pulled his cotton shirt into her fists and lifted his shoulders enough for her to use her palms to push him upward.

  His face, his normally golden eyes in a ring of green, were more brown and spilling over a look of absolute defeat, absolute destruction. Lethargy. Only, she knew that after this, he couldn’t climb into a bed and sleep in Balor’s scent for three months, he couldn’t hold Alden’s stuffed bear and pretend it was Alden in his arms, couldn’t fall into anyone’s arms and cry and be held and comforted and told that he did what he could, that he had made the choice God intended for him to make, that he had followed God’s plan, that it wasn’t his fault.

  His eyes looked through her. His hands were lifeless. She could feel the weight in his shoulders, the weight within him, crushing him beneath it. And she had added to that weight with her own blame, had made it plain the night she went to his house to kill him for it, not knowing what she knew now. She pushed harder, lifting his heavy shoulders as she pressed her forehead to lift his head up and force his eyes to look at her.

  “Draka, you’re falling,” Aurie struggled to hold him in this awkward way.

  Balor was no longer there. Alden and the boar were gone. It was only them, nothing else, no one else, though she could still feel those eyes upon them, those millions of eyes watching as she said to him in hushed whispers, “You didn’t kill Balor or Alden. You aren’t to blame for what happened to that village or to Talkro or the farms. You saved us. You saved my daughter, your Maud. You saved me.”

  His eyes still wouldn’t focus on her.

  She adjusted her grip on his shoulders and moved herself onto his lap, as if it were her he had been cradling against him instead of Balor, “I am alive because of you. I’m sorry, Draka, I’m so sorry I blamed you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…” His eyes began to focus on her, a deep emptiness in them that made her heart ache, “Forgive me. Please, forgive me. I didn’t mean to blame you, I didn’t know.”

  She watched his irises begin to focus on her. “Balor was right,” she said between snivels, “The little shit always was, but this one he knew better than anyone from the start: we need you. Maud needs you. Talkro needs you. This woman you talked about, these people, they need you. I need you. I need my Draka back. So, I don’t know, maybe you need to hear it, even if it really never needed to be, but I forgive you. I forgive you, Draka. For all the good and great things that you have done, for how you have saved my little girl. Do you hear me? Are you finally listening, because I’m not the only one who’s been trying to tell you this.”

  Draka nodded. Like Alden or Maud would after they had finally crested a fit and were slowly calming themselves with faces full of tears, Draka’s face was drooping with hollowness. But his eyes now saw her.

  “What can I do? How can I save them? I can’t…I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make everything right, the way it should be.”

  Aurie thought for a moment. The people are starving. The woman is being held prisoner. He can’t free her without people dying to do it. The Baron wants to kill him. He can’t stop the Baron without killing. No matter which way he goes, there will be more dead, regardless. She let her arms slide down from his shoulders and wrap around him so that her chin rested on his shoulder. He leaned his head into her hair.

  In that moment, she remembered something and pulled herself back so he could see her smile, “How did you get Vigora to go into her stable?”

  “Maud bribed her with a pear,” Draka grinned through his tears. “I don’t think that will work with the Baron. And the people are already going to think he’s the one feeding them, if Nina’s right. She says she can help sway them, but I—I don’t know if it’ll matter. So long as they’re fed, I don’t care, really.”

  Aurie leaned back from him, still in his lap. “Who’s Nina?” Then, realizing where she was, that her legs were wrapped around him, that her arms were around him and their gazes were so close together, she quickly removed herself to sit beside him. “Nevermind that. I’m willing to bet,” she spoke through her train of thought, “If I remember correctly, that the Baron never runs out of food.”

  “I ordered him to give it to the people, but he didn’t. Neither did the Cardinal. I had to take over the Cathedral, practically by force, in order to make that hopefully happen tomorrow. As for the Baron, I have no control over him. And he’s the one holding the woman, using her as a way to rally the people against me. He’s making her suffer because of me. And the only way we have to save her will be…bloody.”

  “So?” Aurie shrugged at him. “The Baron wants the people to think he’s the one feeding them. Make an honest man out of him without him knowing it. Take his food and give it to the people.”

  “That’s stealing, where I come from.”

  “Not when the Prince commands it,” Aurie raised a brow at him. “You are a Prince, aren’t you?”

  “Everyone seems so intent on reminding me,” Draka huffed.

  “So, make him. The way you make Vigora do what you want even when she refuses to. Or, more like, when Maud gets her to do it.”

  Draka thinned his lips humorously at that. Hard to disprove that one. When he turned to meet Aurie’s gaze, they both laughed.

  “So, just go in there, take it without him knowing? That’s your idea?”

  Aurie shrugged. “Got a better one? It’ll help one problem so you can figure out what to do with the next. And, don’t worry about here. God just had me save Soran’s entire family by healing them. I think I might be able to get the rest of Talkro willing to put in the extra work to get all the fish you need to Berone in no time. Maybe even a few able bodied men at your side, too. They were brave enough to face you with spears, an army of nobodies should be nothing in comparison,” she playfully winked at him.

  The look Draka gave her made her beam with pride.

  “Oh, I can’t wait until you get home. But,” she slapped his knee before standing up. “It’ll have to wait for my Draka and—apparently—his Aurie to have their conversation. Until then, go feed your people and,” Aurie grinned warmly, “Try to be more like the man who told a husband to go home to his wife even if it meant being his enemy. The man who taught my daughter how to skin a deer and cure meat. The man who carried me home after I went there to kill him because I couldn’t admit that neither of us had any control of what happened. We need him to come home in one piece. We miss him.”

  Draka let out a long, loud breath. “I hope Maud is teaching her how to read, then.”

  Aurie stopped. “Is that why you had Maud taught? So that you could talk to her until your vow is finished?”

  Draka nodded with a half-hearted chuckle. “It was getting harder and harder to say how much I appreciated all that she does for me. She makes me feel like a father again—or, what I always thought was how a father felt. Hard to tell someone that you care for them as if they share your blood by pointing at things and making faces.”

  Aurie warmed to that more than she would have ever expected. “I s’pose it would be. I think she already knows, though. Now, I do too.”

  Draka didn’t stand up. His warm grin faded as he turned to look into some void, perhaps at something in his own dream that she couldn’t see.

  “You need to wake up. You have orders to give.”