Dead, you say? Dead? As in the only sensible state of existence? The great return to mulch and maggots and other marvelous matter? Hah.

Uri the Chosen One, the Man with Much Purpose and a Single Extraordinary Fate, and the Fourteenth Hero of the all-knowing prophecies of the Empire was, in fact, alive. 

“He might as well be dead,” Sinas said. “Look at him. Have you ever seen a squishier face? He’s pointless.”

He prodded the child’s cheek, the skin there bouncy and paper smooth. Sinas withdrew his hand and scowled. He hastily wiped it on his slacks, wincing at the nasty swelling purpling his thigh. A few hours ago, he’d nearly lost the damn limb. As if he could spare another! All this terror and trouble no thanks to Uri’s oh-so-courageous gallivanting and that dumb, oversized horse of his.

“Don’t touch him, you’ll catch a conscience,” Sinas warned Ezra, his fingers already tingling.

Ezra stucked her head into a crate. They were haphazardly stacked all over in the spellroom, each filled to the brim with items of questionable use, and procured a pair of shiny elbow-length gloves. She stalked toward the unsuspecting Uri, who was happily ensconced on Ezra’s workbench and sucking on a stirring spoon. Sinas did not interfere with the spoon-sucking. It seemed like important toddler business. He’d seen Ezra use the utensil to mix a few unmarked vials, but that was neither here nor there.

“You don’t need to tell me,” Ezra said, slipping on the gloves. “I can feel the good in him.” She stuck out her forked tongue, testing the air, and wrinkled her nose. “Tastes like... lemon tart. And chamomile.”

“So a tea party,” Sinas said with a snort. “He does give off scone energy.” He crossed his arms. “I do hate scones.”

Ezra stopped in front of Uri and steadied herself with a deep breath. She moved slowly, on the tipiest tips of her toes, and with the sort of caution one ought to have when rounding a Corrupted beast. She ripped the rusted silverware out of Uri’s mouth. The child blinked. His eyes were big for his head, like two copper saucers on a round milktray.

Sinas went to stand at Ezra’s side. He was brave like that. They hovered over Uri, quietly inspecting his nauseating radiance. Ezra was more the pioneer than he, however, and when she went to sniff the spit-slick spoon, Sinas braced himself for something vaguely terrible, like spontaneous decapitation. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I just want to say that I’ve really valued our time together,” he said.

Ezra stiffened when he placed a hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll shed a fat tear for you and then I’m taking your forge and the lakeside cottage.”

Ezra pushed him off with a violent shrug.

“Get away from me with all that stupidity. I’m concentrating.” She side-eyed him. “And I’ll sooner grow a heart than give you anything of mine.”

“By the Late Queen’s tit, don’t even joke like that,” Sinas said, clutching his chest.

Ezra angled Uri’s head to the side and stared into his nostrils. The little idiot giggled.

“You never told me you knew the Century Hero,” she said.

“It was a long time ago.”

She hummed. “Was this before or after you were in Hollowspeak for murdering your father?”

He checked the length of his nails. “Before. Back in my Academy days at Kilburn. We were coursemates.”

Sinas was human, and as a fleshy sack of no grand purpose, he had regrets. The death of his father was not one of them.

“Did you say you found him in a pond?” Ezra asked, grabbing Uri under his arms and lifting him off the table.

He kicked at the air and babbled, a snot-bubble bursting with an emphatic pop. Ezra put him back down. The disgust was plain on her pointy face. Once upon a time, Sinas thought her young and elvish.

“No, I said a pond was involved. He was chasing a wyvern, waving around that silly sword,” Sinas gestured at the glittering sheath propped against a barrel of hard cider, “and it fell into a time pool.”

“So he tried getting it back.”

Sinas nodded. “With a stick.” And because it was Ezra, and she too understood the allure of the dark and trampled flowerbeds for their crunch, he clarified. “Then I pushed him.”

“Ah.”

Uri wiggled in his blanket cocoon. They would have to find smallcloths for him to wear. It wouldn’t do to have him running around in the nude. He was soft and grotesque, like the pink underbelly of a cave snail.

“Strange for a time pool to appear so early in the year,” Ezra said, glancing at the window.

Outside, the lily willows swayed in the breeze, dispensing seedling pods assuring their noble lineage. Wetcreek was lovely at the tail-end of bloom. There was something satisfying about watching the decay of bright, beautiful things.

The pools manifested in colder seasons when the temperature was low enough to ice the surface of lakes in a thin glaze. The pools themselves never frosted over or hardened. No one understood their existence. They simply were, like air and dirt and foot bunions. Sinas had only encountered them once before.

Many yesteryears ago, when he was a boy and still tickled by the natural world, he’d stuck his pinky into a shiny puddle in the outskirts of the Gulain estate. He spent the next three months with a twig for a finger, all withered and brittle, and nearly snapped it during a game of toss ball. That was the thing with time pools. They came in all sizes and potencies. Larger ones, like the one Uri had the utter misfortune of slipping into, were uncommon. One could even call it special.

“In season or not, look at him, the fat pebble. That pool was a thrice-damned scam. Not a wrinkle on him. I want my coin back.”
No actual coin had been involved. Instead, Sinas had tossed in an orange beetle’s turd pellet for the theater of it.

Uri bathed the room in a wet, brilliant smile. Sinas curled away, stomach revolting. A decent time pool would have reduced him into a husk and not—not whatever this was. The face of hope, perhaps? Hideous. It was a good thing the Empire’s Champion always hulked around in a helmet and armor.

“I was really looking forward to seeing him shrivel up like Old Jovie’s ballsack,” Sinas said. Old Jovie was the local butcher, half-deaf in one ear and with a body like a pickled plum. “I shouldn’t have fished him out. Think, Ezra, think. The Chosen One, a decrepit little prune.”

Ezra rolled her eyes. “Stop being an idiot if you can manage it. Even I know better than to meddle with the prophecy.”

“I wasn’t meddling. It’s the duty of us Lower Evils to give the Champion a difficult time. It’s how they become useful. Honestly, one would think you’d never raised a hero. Didn’t they have those in your sad straw-hut village?”

By the lantern light, Uri looked otherworldly. He had a beautiful sheen to him and seemed to carry all the dewy freshness of a mountain meadow. Sinas wanted to smack him. Right there. Right on his reasonably-proportioned forehead. It was like every bit of him was calculated to arouse delight. Too bad for him, Sinas was only familiar with delight’s ugly step-cousins: dread and disdain.

“We had adventurers pass from time to time,” Ezra said. “We couldn’t justify having our own minor hero, not without a Tragedy. And this,” she pointed at Uri, the rosiness of his tiny and objectively adorable face, “is not the work of a Lower Evil.”

“I’m an ambitious man.”

“If the Empire scribes come knocking at my door, I will stuff you into a seeing orb and sell you for a sandwich.”

“Naughty,” Sinas purred.

“You know how the people in Kara-Gin kill themselves whenever they bring shame to their ancestors' name? I think you should take up the practice.”

“Please. I’d make a terrible corpse," he said with a wave. "Trust me, I’ve seen my father.” Sinas sighed. ”I knew a Kara-Gin man once who had dinner with a Baron King and accidentally used a spoon to butter a biscuit. Morning after, the scullery maids found him in the pantry with a bread loaf for a head.”

“Poetic,” Ezra said.

“They are a creative people.”

In a fit of diligence, Ezra went on to yank Uri’s ear. Testing his hardiness, Sinas supposed, of which there was limited evidence. Not with all that babyish plump. The boy squealed and latched his mouth onto her wrist.

Cursing, Ezra pried him off and ran to the nearest bucket for a rag doused in mineral oil. She scrubbed her sleeve, speaking in that strange, guttural language that told Sinas to cup his groin and keep his distance. Uri rolled onto his belly and bared a peachy, hairless rump.

“I suppose we’ll have to keep it,” Ezra said, slapping the rag down.

“Of course we should keep it. A fancy sword like that would fetch a good chunk.”

“I meant this,” Ezra said. She grabbed one of Uri’s arms, this time minding his wandering mouth.

“But… he’s goopy.” Sinas sat up, snapping his fingers. “Wait. Are we putting him through the grinder?”

Ezra blinked at him. “Those are for my herbs.”

He scoffed. “Well, I’m not using my carving knives. I just had those sharpened.”

They looked at each other. They couldn’t actually kill the Century Hero. But even serpents dreamed.

“You’re on shit duty,” Sinas said.

Ezra walked toward a shelf, climbed up a wobbly ladder, and grabbed a jar. This had a remarkable effect. Sinas jerked upright, swaying on his stool, and clapped his hands.

“Did I say you’re on shit duty? I’m on shit duty. I love shit. Didn’t you know? I’m just full of it.”

She set the jar down and quietly rejoined him.

He frowned. “I hate when you threaten me with mysterious jelly.”

Ezra ignored him. She squinted at Uri, inspecting him like a sack of cheap grain.

“What does the prophecy say about Champions who die before their time?”

Much of the prophecy was word-of-mouth and bard fodder. Some things were simply known by virtue of repetition, like the Great Six Acts, or that dangerous rope bridge in Huggernaut Valley every heroic imbecile had to cross to get into the Kingdom of Masks. In official capacity, only the Empire scholars could lay eyes on the golden texts and parse the details. Even the Champion was forbidden from learning the prophecy as it was fully writ and understood. Sinas always thought it suspicious, but he left that kind of complicated, noble thinking to the Anti-Pires and revolutionaries. Otherwise known as people who cared.

“We’ve only ever had Companions die,” he told Ezra. “You know how those heroes get toward the middle, a bit lazy and the like. Sometimes all you need in life to get going is a dead friend.”

A knock came at the door. Sinas and Ezra stared at one another.

“A sandwich,” Ezra reminded him.

“You answer it.”

She began to unroll her glove. “Can’t. I’ve been tainted. Cursed. Ruined. I shall never marry now.” She disposed of the glove in a bowl and snapped her fingers over it. A small, convenient fire crackled into existence.

"I thought you were widowed," Sinas said.

Ezra seemed surprised by his thoughtfulness. It wasn't often he remembered such insignificant details.

"Yes," she answered. The glove in the bowl continued to burn. "He died in a fire. Terrible incident. So sad."

The unwanted visitor knocked three more times and the old door rattled on its hinges. With all that pounding, it was almost as if they were compensating for something. Like money or good conversation. Yes. That must be it. But company at this time? Company ever?

Sinas blew a strand of hair from his forehead. They were in the backwoods of Wetcreek, separated by a plot of viper thorns and stinging nettles, and still not safe from the keyhole-peepers. Queen’s Arse, he hoped it wasn’t that dreadful cheesemaker again. The pungent smell lingered for weeks. And it hadn’t even been decent cheese.

“Fiends! Designated scum! By decree of her Eternal Ladyship and the forces of Goodkind, we demand entry and a cup of hot tea.”

“And sweet bread. Say you want sweet bread,” a stern voice murmured.

Charming.

“Do they have to be so rude?” Sinas grumbled. He approached the door and called out. “We don’t want your cheese. Go away. This is a retirement home and we can't stomach it.”

Silence.

“I’m not—” the voice began and tripped over spit.

Sinas cocked his head at the frantic whispering and shuffling of feet. What a nuisance.

“He thinks we’re selling—”

“Of course he does. That was terrible. You have to be clear with these things or they won’t take you seriously.”

“I’m trying, sir. This doesn’t come naturally to a shy fellow.” The man cleared his throat. “Hear us now, darkbringers. As elected officials of the Ministry of Narrative Complaints, we hereby call upon our rights to an audience—ow!”

“Narrative Compliance. Where did you get complaints from? Did you even read the codex I gave you?” the stern voice chastised.

“Yes. No. Well, I watched you read it. So, yes. I read it by proxy. Ah. Sir Quail, sir.”

Sinas slowly drew back from the entrance. To answer or not to answer? Avoiding the summons of an Empire scholar was grounds for treason. He considered the rusty knob, then the rest of the dank cottage. Ezra’s incense still burned in a corner, filling the room in a smoky and ominous haze.

“I have to say, Ezra, that’s a remarkably convenient backdoor you have there,” he said, motioning past her shoulder.

Not a moment to be spared, Ezra turned, grabbing a satchel and scooping up a few scrolls and vials from her writing desk.

“Grab the piglet,” she said.

"We can hear you cavorting," the man shouted. "Cease your foul designs. There is no dark the light cannot scatter. Reveal yourselves, o'dreaded entities." The voice slipped into a murmur. "How was that? Was I good?"

"That was lovely, Diggory. I surely regret nothing of this venture or plucking your name out of the partnering hat."

"Sir."

"Is this not the home of one Ezra Green and Sinas Han, Once-of-Gulain?" the insincere Quail asked.

"We don't know those terrible people," Ezra said.

"Oh, I don't live with her," Sinas added.

Someone hammered on the door. "Sir Quail has no time for such egregious lies," Diggory said. 

Ignoring the ruckus on the other side of the wall, Sinas walked up to the Champion and glared at Uri’s tiny, wriggling form.
“Defecate on me and I will sew your little arsehole shut.”

Uri pressed his hands together and smiled wide, a single baby tooth peeking through his gums. It was like being blessed by a hundred holy springs. The sparkle in Uri’s eye was especially violent.

“What’s your damage, star spawn?” Sinas hissed. He angrily yanked the blanket over Uri’s perfectly shaped head and bopped him on his crown. “You’re going to make me feel something.”

“Surely not,” Ezra said as she plucked her walking stick from a rack. “I’m afraid not even the Champion can move that fossil you call for a heart.”

 

---

 

They slipped into the woods, their feet a light whisper against the underbrush.

“They must have a tracker on him,” Sinas said, swaddling Uri against his chest, mindful of touching any bare skin. Even with a barrier of wool between them, a sickening warmth invaded his body.

“Mm. The sword, likely. He can’t go anywhere without it, I hear.”

Ezra stepped over a fallen log. Though she was a quarter his size and had near stumps for legs, she was spry and swift, and Uri giggled every time she hacked a wayward branch mere seconds before it smacked her forehead. The audacity of some forests. After one precise and vicious cut with her dagger, a spray of dark sap blasted Sinas on the face. He grimaced.

“Damn you,” he cursed at the foliage. “Never an easy stroll, is it? Who trims your weeds and feeds the man-eating moss, huh? Ungrateful lot of bark.”

“Never mind them,” Ezra said. Another branch flung her way and she sliced it neatly. “Can’t reason with masochism.”

“You know, I never did understand that.”

“It’s beyond understanding,” Ezra said. “But Nature must love pain. Why else keep us around? All we ever do is pillage and burn and ruin.”

“Have some self-respect,” Sinas yelled at the trees. “What will your mother think?”

Ezra twitched.

Drat. Sinas bit his cheek. He’d said the forbidden word.

Fortunately, Ezra didn’t address the slip-up and continued her business of dismembering the greenery. Sinas was grateful. Last time he made that little blunder, she’d spelled him silly with four sleepless nights. He’d had been so desperate for shut-eye, he found sanctuary in a brothel of fur-kin three towns over. Peace had come in the form of a handsome striped chest and a wet snout.

It took sundown for the trees to finally stop their fussing and keep their leafy limbs to their trunks, clearing the path. This was why Sinas never bothered with walks in the forest before evening. Ezra might have been happy to cut up a woodland salad, but Sinas had long vowed to never raise a blade unless he was carving clay or chopping logs for the winter season.

“Have you any idea where we’re going?” he asked.

Ezra stopped near a patch of poisonous blue-velvet shrooms. When dried, two teaspoons of the fungus would give the cheapest liquor a hearty kick. It was a house staple.

“Forward,” she said, turning to face him.

Sinas nodded. “I was hoping for something less abominably reductive, but thank you kindly, witch.”

“You’re welcome, you one-armed bastard.”

“You think those scribes are following us?”

“If they’re persistent, which they are,” Ezra said.

The scribes were notorious for their commitment to the prophecy. The lengths those floppy scholars went for their books and self-rolling scrolls… It was enough to make him shiver. Sinas had once heard of a scribe who cut the head of a princess to prevent the Champion from falling in love with her unimaginable beauty. Naturally, given this extreme and astute interference, the Champion was able to successfully bond with a person from the approved list of Romantic Interests and all was well with the realm.

(Meanwhile, back near Ezra’s cabin, the two traveling scribes took a moment to appreciate the natural elements. At the edge of the forest, a lone vine dropped from the canopy. Moving with snake-like lushness, the vine wrapped around one of Quail's fingers, and with its bulbous flowerhead, began to suckle on his pale thumb.

“Hmm. What’s it doing?”

“Shoo.” The smaller of the two men tugged on the vine, wrenching it loose and stopping its greedy slurping. “Nasty thing. Shoo. We’re not in need of your services here.”

“Diggory, I haven’t seen a nipple in a fortnight. Let the damn thing be.”

“But sir—”

“Hush. Take out your drawing pad and paint me like one of those imported royal concubines.”)

“I say we wait until they clear out and go back for our things,” Ezra said, prodding the mud with a stick and strategizing. “Then we leave for Santo Roso.”

“We’re going to your village?”

Ezra pushed the stick forcefully into the earth. She frowned. Sinas swore he saw a pout. “I can’t undo the pool’s magic, but I know someone who might.”

“Wait, Ezra, can’t we simply—I don’t know, drop him in a wicker basket and send him down a river? That’s a perfectly acceptable origin story, isn’t it? He’ll be snatched up by a happily married, childless pair of imbeciles, and they’ll raise him on a diet of roast ham and boiled grain.”

“You know it’s too late for that. By my count, he’s halfway into the hero’s journey. The Empire will notice his absence and we’ll be here to pay for it.”

Sinas groaned. He looked for a place to sit, then squatted over a suspicious mound and kicked it. A mass of ants burst through a crack. They quickly aimed for his boot and Ezra shot out a hand, dissolving them into ash with a burst of unscrupulous magic.

“That’ll cost you a few pints of blood,” she said. Ezra liked to use Sinas for her many bases and brine, often remarking he was—and quote—‘fantastically foul on the inside for paltry Lower scum.’ Sometimes she flattered him.

Sinas stared at the bone-white residue left by the bugs.

“His teeth,” he said, remembering the pearly nugget from before.

Sinas cupped a sleeping Uri’s chin and pulled down his chubby lower lip with a thumb. Uri roused awake and whined.

“Look, Ezra.”

He pushed Uri into her face, which earned him a fierce scowl, and poked around inside Uri’s mouth.

“There was one earlier, and now there’s three. He’s growing, see? It shouldn’t be long before he’s properly bipedal and saving damsels from bearded highwaymen and adopting mystical forest creatures.”

Not in the least bit impressed, Ezra pushed Uri’s cheek away with the tip of her cane.

“We can’t be sure if he’ll grow this steadily. At most, we have a week to right things, otherwise, you can start packing for a return trip to Hollowspeak.”

“Terrible customer service,” Sinas said. “And don’t get me started on the food. Nothing but unseasoned gruel. It’s like those people have never heard of salt or lime.”

“Sinas.”

He looked at her.

“What exactly did your time with the Century Hero look like?”

“Like I said, we were coursemates at Kilburn.”

Ezra eyed him suspiciously. “Kilburn is for spirit-blessed children. You don’t have an ounce of proper magic in you.”

“Arrangements were made,” he said. Sinas braced himself against a tree and slid down to his rump, kicking up dirt.

In his lap, Uri cooed and raised his wrinkly, pebble-sized fists, clenching and unclenching them in the air.

“Do you think he’s trying to summon something?” he asked. “Aw, you tiny fool.”

“Sinas,” Ezra said again. She crossed her arms and waited.

He scratched the back of his head. “I used to be somebody, you know. Back before—” Sinas waved with his false arm, the enchanted wood gleaming in the waning light. “I lost this.”

Ezra laughed. “You? Somebody worth knowing? I’d sooner believe you were guzzling cum in the City of Silk.”

There were times Ezra didn’t mind her words. Sinas’ chest seized up with a sudden, biting chill. It took him so viciously, he fisted his hands in Uri’s threadbare blanket and tucked the child beneath his chin. Uri allowed him the hypocrisy.

“We all have stories, witch. Hardly need to be a hero for that.”

“Is that so?” She smirked cruelly, tap-tapping the ground with her walking stick.

He paused. “I was at Kilburn because I had to be. It was my duty.” He cleared his throat and let the pollen settle before speaking. Above them, the skies turned a dusty magenta and the call of migrating birds could be heard from a distance. 

“I, Sinas Han, bastard whelp of Lord Bastion Bjorn of High House Gulain, was once a B-Class Antagonist, and Champion Urichek Malikov’s childhood nemesis.”

He watched for Ezra’s reaction while he spitefully squeezed the tip of Uri’s button nose. The dreadful child nuzzled against Sinas’ palm. Ezra tilted her head and slipped him a curious smile. It wasn’t the disdain he expected. For some inexplicable reason, the underwhelming response felt worse.

“Interesting,” she said, gaze sly.

He said nothing.

“You?” She tapped her mouth with the stick.

He nodded.

Behind him, the length of the tree shook, as if it were holding back laughter. Uri curled into his chest and dozed off again, tightly fisting Sinas’ shirt tunic and drooling on the fabric. He clung to him as if he’d be dropped at any second. The infant was keen.

“What happened? Not a good funding year for the Evils?” Ezra finally asked.

With his free hand, Sinas threw a palm-full of dirt in her direction.

“No,” he said. “I’m simply good, Ezra. Good at being very, very bad.”

She laughed so hard she whipped her head back, braids swinging, and cracked her skull against a pine. Sinas went to gather more dirt and stopped. Ezra wasn’t wrong to laugh. If anything, that was the appropriate reaction. In the end, it didn’t matter who or what Sinas had been long ago. These things were in the past, and everybody knew you only flaunted your past for two reasons: because your present was disappointing, and your future, hardly guaranteed.

“Don’t be mad,” Ezra said.

“I’m not,” he said.

She raised a brow.

“I’m not,” Sinas insisted.

“You can’t blame me for thinking so little of you.”

Deep into his slumber, Uri felt around Sinas’ chest and groped his right breast. He tugged on a nipple. This clearly made for a dignified picture.

“I don’t blame you,” Sinas told Ezra, and meant it.

After all, what was Sinas to the world at large? Surely not a person with a wealth of character or a remarkable destiny. There were people like Uri, who had songs and bar drinks in their name, and inspired festivals with flower crowns and bare-chested women chanting in the market squares—and then there was Sinas, who drank at dawn and pretended to forget his maths, and earned a right slapping from the pub wenches believing he was trying to short them. And he was trying, at least half the time.

“I’m being punished,” Sinas said at last, turning his nose at Uri.

Ezra cupped her chin and drew sigils on the damp earth. “Whatever for?”

“For not doing worse.”

But he kept his real answer small and quiet, tucked away like a cheating husband’s lurid letter in the cupboard of his mind.

For being me.

He didn’t get to mope for long. It grew quiet all around them. It was the kind of quiet that meant business, and the trees themselves seemed to stand a little taller, spreading their branches like wide-armed sentinels at the palace gates. A flock of birds sprung from their nests and took to the skies, squawking.

“Uri didn’t kill that wyvern, did he?” Ezra asked.

Sinas readjusted his right boot and snapped a clasp in place.

She shook her head. “How did it even break through my wards?”

A beastly roar came from the brown-speckled canopies. The forest shuddered. Sinas stood and dusted off his slacks. Uri hung on to his collar, whimpering, his lashes clumped with tears. 

"It sounds hungry," Sinas said. "And I know just what to feed it."