champion of honor

Champion of Honor

richard larson.
fostern cliath fianna philodox.
guardian.

taken by the beloved horror.
possessed by none-no-what.
destroyed.

buried beneath the the cold crescent
with the rest of the guardians,
his pack,
who failed.

but it's been no bed of roses
no pleasure cruise
i consider it a challenge before
the whole human race
and i ain't gonna lose
and i just need to go on and on and on and on
-- queen

Calden White

Chances are the ceremony isn't very grand. There aren't many mourners. You can hardly blame anyone: the Sept is in chaos, in tatters, and Champion of Honor is to blame. At least, that's what some people think. That he was turned. That he became the worst sort of traitor. That he was rescued at great peril, and turned on his own kind at first opportunity.

That sort of betrayer deserves no honor in death. That sort of traitor deserves a posthumous loss of rank. A smear of shame on his grave. That sort of turncoat deserves worse than that, deserves to be forgotten, deserves to be spit up, deserves to have his name struck from the records and annals of history.

There are those that think like that. And you can't blame them.

He was Fianna, though. And the Fianna talk. God, do they talk, and god, do they love a story. Some say good things and some say bad, but word goes around and around and far and wide, and in the end words gets to one Stagsman living all the way at the northern border of the state. By then the story's mutated, blown out of proportion, turned into something fantastical and even more horrific than reality was. By then, the story turns Calden's stomach.

Still. He comes by the graves. He lays white roses over the headstones.

And over Champion's, one more tribute: the shed antler of some great stag, seven points branching from the shaft; the eight snapped off and left under the arch.

Éva

Caleb is not the only kin to visit the newly-dug graves of the never-washed and ever-shrouded dead.

Two days after 1999 Broadway is closed and reopened for fumigation. Fumigation. There are scars, mostly invisible. The things that can be covered. An elevator shaft or two, perhaps, remain closed. The swarm of tenants at 8:15 a.m. and 5:15 p.m. is denser in front of the elevator bays.

Still, the whole place feels disconnected, free-floating. Unmoored. She walks in shadow of the building, heels on pavement the sunlight cutting a bright swath all around and looks, see: up and up and up. Lets her gaze fall. What the hell can she see in the place that they cannot.

The shadow feels darker, though; this bleak chill crawls up the ladder of her spine, a resonant sense of disconnection.

--

The graves, underground. Hidden in the roots of the building. There are no guardians. If there are no guardians is there even a Sept?

She visits them all: all the freshly dead. Says nothing to the corpses entombed in concrete-and-earth.

And she leaves nothing behind.