205) The Salvation of Eden, Chapter 37 -- The Sole Survivor

The smell was nose-wrinklingly sharp, like vinegar, rotting fruit, and sweaty socks. They hesitantly picked their way through bits of garbage and broken glass, up to the barn-house-dump. Kohra wasn’t sure what to call it. It had originally been a barn; that was clear. Now, it was evidently a house, in that someone lived in it.  But.… She gazed around at the piles of junk littering the yard, the broken furniture piled against one wall, the bags of refuse spilling out of an open window, and decided to go with “dump.” 

The front door hung askew on its hinges. Dominic knocked. Nothing. “Hello? Anybody home? We’re looking for Kylryvyn!”

“Lift up the door when you swing it!” a gravelly voice called from somewhere inside, promptly cut off by a furious round of phlegmatic coughing. 

Dominic tried, but the door still scraped loudly against the floor as he dragged it open. The voice cursed something incomprehensible as they entered.

They walked carefully, stepping over…things…on the floor.  The place hadn’t been cleaned for…never? Out of the corner of her eye, Kohra noticed Arrowhead’s little black head popping down into Dominic’s shirt. This place was even too gross for a snake. 

They edged their way into the oozy confines of what apparently was a kitchen.

Kylryvyn was sitting on the floor, sipping ladles of a foul-smelling brown liquid from a pot sitting atop a small metal coal-stove that also sat on the floor. His greying, dank brown hair clung to his head, and his clothes hung limp on his thin frame, weighted down by grime. He didn’t get up to greet them, just glanced up at them momentarily.

“Welcome to my castle,” he rasped, then continued stirring.

Kohra and Dom stood close, facing him. Lenny seemed preoccupied in a corner of the room, examining some extensive patterns of mold on the walls and ceiling.

“Hi!” Dominic nodded, trying to sound casual and friendly, while Kohra gave an awkward half-wave, smiling like a little girl tagging along with her father to a business meeting. “Thanks for, um, inviting us in! I’m Dominic. This is Kohra, and that’s Lenny over there.”

“Hi, nice to meet you,” Kohra added.

“Howdy!” Lenny chirped from her tour of Mold-land. 

He looked up again, squinting, examining these newcomers with resigned suspicion, as though he knew that they were trouble, but also knew that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He had seen the End. 

He grinned, for no reason they could discern, revealing his teeth to be about as clean as his walls, with wide gaps between them like he was missing as many as he had left.

“We heard you were the best person in town to talk to about the, the Reaper?” Dominic didn’t want to be so abrupt, but he also didn’t want to stay here longer than necessary, wrinkling his nose against the smell. He could feel Arrowhead coiling himself tightly inside his shirt. 

Anyway, Dominic was prepared for this conversation. He’d gone to see Captain Klardynne, the man who had sent Kylryvyn’s crew on the mission that had gotten them all killed; the Captain had given him some advice on how to get the old soldier talking. 

“You heard that, did you? And who’d you hear that from?” Kylryvyn grimaced, blowing steam off the next ladle. 

“A man who respects you a great deal,” Dominic replied confidently. 

The old soldier cackled. “That old bastard Klardynne; he’s a fool. Thinks he’s gonna save this town. All he does is get more people to throw away their lives.”

“Well, we’re not going to throw away our lives; don’t worry friend,” Dominic assured him. “I’m an, ahem.” He cleared his throat. “I study exotic and rare beasts, and —”

Kylryvyn interrupted him with a strangled “Ha! That thing ain’t no beast. It’s the ‘Fernal Lord himself.” He inhaled deeply, arching back like he was about to break into more coughing, but then sipped from the ladle, and it seemed to settle him down. 

“We’re all in the Hells now.” His next bitter cackle overwhelmed the healing power of his concoction, and his skinny frame was wracked by hacking spasms until he spit a thick black gob of mucus into the impressive colony of mold on the nearest wall; it slowly oozed down, mingling with the brown-black already-congealed slime. 

Dominic brought out Gorb’s pipe, ignoring Kohra’s look of surprise, and packed it how the Light-Singer had showed him. Bending down to light Gorb’s spill from the small fire inside the stove, Dominic straightened up, lighting the pipe and puffing awkwardly, coughing a little while he exhaled a small poof of blue smoke. It smelled like peat moss.

He passed the pipe to Kylryvyn. “So you fought it?”

The man nodded, eyes eagerly fixed on the pipe. “Me and eleven others, good people all.” He inhaled expertly, blowing a veritable cloud into the air. “I’m gonna pay for that.” The next solid minute was taken up with violent spasms of coughing. “Don’t worry,” he finally gasped. “Nothing like a good smoke to loosen the tongue.” He grimaced through another wracking cough, and spat more black-brown mucus onto the nearby wall. 

“Yep, a dozen, and I’m the sole survivor. The one who got away.” He looked back at his pot, as if there was nothing more to say. 

Then, like he was talking to himself, he added, “We didn’t even fight it. We was shooting arrows at the air, waving our swords around at nothin’. The ’fernal demon just mowed us down, like it was the scythe and we was the hay. Whoever was left standing, we ran. We all ran and left the dying behind us. But it cut us down anyway, one right after the other. I got to my horse first, and I guess that saved me. I don’t know….” He trailed off, stirring his pot. Silence hung in the room like a yet-to-be-used burial shroud.

“Or it wanted me to live. Just to torment me.” His sad old eyes looked up for a moment. 

Dominic shook his head in sympathy. “I’m so sorry for…your mates. They died heroes, you know. Trying to protect their loved ones. That’s the way the town sees them. Everybody says that.”

The old man didn’t respond, just stared into his pot. 

  “Can you,” Dominic pressed on, “can you tell us anything more about when you were fighting it? It’s like, a mystery, isn’t it? That nobody has even hit this demon? This is what we’re hoping you can help us with. Can you remember anything, did you notice anything at all, when you were attacking it?” 

“You ask too many questions!” the old man growled. “I’d rather forget. You’d best do the same.”

“We’re just —”

“It’s a Demon from the Hells!” Kylryvn yelled. “It messes with your mind! You’re looking right at it, you stab it right in the neck or the head or the heart, and somehow, it ain’t there. And then, you die.” 

Another spasm of coughing; another ladle. 

“Why’re you askin’ all this?” 

Dominic hesitated. This was not going how he’d planned.

“Cuz we’re gonna kill it,” Lenny replied from her mold-corner. 

Kylryvyn spat his entire mouthful of steaming liquid right back into the pot.  “You?” He looked each of them up and down, laughing and coughing so hard they thought he might die on the spot. Finally, he wheezed, “Go home to Mommy and Daddy and leave me alone!” 

He started to laugh again, a high-pitched wheezing squeal, but was silenced immediately as a blast of frost shot from Lenny’s hands, extinguishing his fire in a cloud of steam.  

“Hey!!” he screeched, grabbing another ladle out of the pot as he started to cough. 

Lenny opened her hands, spreading her fingers wide, and the fire burst back to life. “You should show more respect when you’re talking to a Slayer.” 

Then she ambled slowly across the room to him, squatted down, leaned in close, pointed at Kohra, and murmured in his ear. “You think that’s something? You should see what she can do. Now, answer his questions, soldier.”

She stepped back again, face set, looking very serious. Kohra was stunned. Where did THAT come from?

But it worked. Kylryvyn told them the whole story — who his comrades were, where they stood, how they fought, and how they died. He knew all their names, their families, even their last words. He repeated that point several times, like the one significant and worthwhile thing about his life was that he was the only one who could honour his comrades by at least remembering their final moments. 

“How’d you lure it to you in the first place?” Dominic asked.

“All right, so me and the others, we went to this field. We had some sheep for bait, and we set an ambush.”

“Why didn’t you set traps?”

Kylryvyn spat again into the mold corner. “Never works. Lots of people have set traps, some of them real complicated. Then it waits and kills whoever comes along to check them. Like it’s mocking them.”

“How’s that possible?” Kohra wondered. “How could any beast be that smart?”

“Lots of beasts are smart, girl. Especially when someone’s trying to kill ’em.” He spat again. “But I told ya, it ain’t no beast.”

“What did you have for armour?” Dominic asked. 

He nodded. “We thought we were ok. We had mail shirts, breastplates, most of us had shields, I remember. One o’the fellows, Darrin, we teased him somethin’ fierce, all decked out like a damn knight. Full plate, even a bloody helm. Poor bugger, stumblin’ around like a metal scarecrow.” He laughed again, livelier this time, as though for a moment anyway, he was happy to be back there, with his mates, in their heroic charge into what they believed would be glory.  

He sipped another ladle. “None of it made any difference. When it came it just….”

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “The sheep gave us a few seconds’ warning. They knew it was comin’ before we did. Then it was there, and then, I don’t know how, but it wasn’t there, it was beside Johntyn. It just….” He held his head in his hands for several long seconds before looking back up, although he refused to meet anyone’s eyes, as though he couldn’t bear to have them look into his own.

“It looked like a cat, big and black. Bigger than even a giant mountain lion though. Much bigger. And it moved faster’n anything I’ve seen. It had a whip-tail, like a scorpion, ‘cept it was longer than your whole body, three times over.” He shook his head. “Tore through armour like it was nothin’.”

A respectful silence passed while Kylryvyn stirred his pot. Kohra couldn’t help but think about how futile it all was, all those lives thrown away.

Lenny finally broke the silence. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did everyone who survived, except you, of course, go crazy? Like, it’s normal for people who go through something terrible, to struggle afterward. But for people to totally snap, to the point that they kill their own families, and themselves…I can’t make sense of that. Can you?”

“We’re sorry to ask you these things,” Kohra added. But he waved the apology away.

“I tell everyone this, but nobody listens. They don’t wanna understand, is why. But the truth is usually the first enemy we destroy.”

For a moment, Kylryvyn, the old soldier, the only living soul to be able to say he fought the Reaper, looked out through clear eyes, eyes that hadn’t tuned into the reality of the present moment for a very long time, fixed as they were on a distantly receding point on the horizon of The Past. 

He looked somehow younger; Kohra felt she saw the real person in there, the one underneath the alcoholic haze and years of neglect. Kylryvyn looked around at the garbage heap his “home” had become, looked at the pot he was stirring, then as if he hadn’t seen them for a long time, looked at his hands, first the blackened fingernails, then the palms. 

“Why’d people all go crazy? You want to know, Slayer? Well, here’s the truth. If you fight this demon, you understand well, you ain’t fighting a body. You’re fighting a soul.” He took another sip.

“It comes from the lands of Death, the Hells, I don’t know…. It don’t obey the rules of our world. And you’ll see, when you see it move, it does something to you, to your mind. You see the Truth. And you can never un-see it again.” He kept his gaze locked with Kohra, his eyes glittering with madness and bitterness and resignation, and yet, also a tiny spark, like a hope that he was never quite willing to allow to die. 

“This world,” he spread his arms around to indicate everything around them, “it’s all just a bubble. We don’t even know! We don’t even know what’s real!” He broke into another fit of coughing. 

“I’ve just got one more question,” Dominic said after the coughing fit passed. “As far as you know, has anyone ever fought it in the rain?”

The man’s eyebrows raised. “Now there’s a question nobody’s asked….” He sipped from his ladle, pondering for a long time before answering. “You know, I can’t remember that it ever has. Who’s gonna want to fight in the rain anyway?”

“What about when it attacks?” Dominic pressed. “Like when it attacks farms? You ever hear of it attacking in the rain?”

He shook his head slowly, but said nothing more. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking, or if he had merely slipped back into his private fog. 

Dominic stood up. He caught Lenny and Kohra’s eyes and gave a slight nod. He had what he needed. 

Kylryvyn reached up suddenly, catching his arm in a surprisingly still-strong grip. “I wish it had got me too, you know. But it left me here.” He looked around his kitchen of trash and mold. “So I’d never forget leadin’ all them people to their deaths.”

Reaching down to put one hand on Kylryvyn’s shoulder, Dominic passed him a bottle with the other. “Juanita’s finest, friend. You have done your people a great service.”

Lenny spun on her heels and left without saying a word, as though it was beneath the dignity of Slayers to indulge such social niceties as “thank you” and “good bye.” 

Kohra sidled a little closer. The bubbling pot smelled much worse the closer she got. She tried not to wrinkle her nose, but couldn’t stop her eyes from watering. 

“Uh, thank you, sir.” He looked up at her. For just a moment, she saw his pain, but his kind heart too, his long-vanquished courage. She wondered whether he saw anything in her. 

Maybe more than I realize. Maybe I look exactly like he did, those years ago, optimistic and stupid as we go to fight this creature. Wait a minute. We are NOT going to fight this creature!

They were going to have to talk about this when they got back to Juanita’s. 

“Goodbye.” She stepped away, turning to leave. 

He waved, grinning his largely toothless grin.  “Whatever ya do, don’t go into the trees. Y’hear?”