PROLOGUE

He watches the painted flames licking the grey and hopeless heavens like a witness of a scorched stake curious and child-like. The castle crowned in the infernal elements and sparks floating aimless and scattered in the air like lost specters. A childhood doted by privilege and plenty. Dreams of attaining knighthood. He’d paged for his parents and his uncles serving and cooking and learning and swinging wooden imitations of swords and maces and shields. At the age of eighteen he was raised to the rank of squire and he squired for a knight of honorable but temperamental renown. The years as a young adult plagued by verbal abuse and familial pressures and increasing solitude. Every mistake belittled and thwacked by hand or wood. He longed to escape the stone walls. The dream bisected by disappointment and failures.

One late night he crept into the chambers of the knight and passed a baselard dagger along the throat and jabbing the windpipe. The knight choked and gurgled in bubbled sanguine and streaming from the throat and pooling on the silken bedding and he lied motionless in his unending sleep. When Oysntein emerged from the front portcullis and crossing the wooden bridge across the moat a fire was sparked in the knight’s room and it spread along the halls and the chambers and everything inside was soon blanketed by smoke.

He stands in his linen clothes and gambeson and hauberk and mail chausses and hounskull bascinet and armed with a shortsword and packed with scant accoutrements in a sack strapped on his back and he carries silvers in a belt pouch. He watches the infernal dance from the plains and he could hear neither screams nor the roars of the flames and when he has his fill with the spectacle he turns and disappears beyond the horizon of the castle grounds. A four-winged avian and an antideer gaze at the orange glow puzzled and uncaring and they move on deeper into the sightless dark within the country of pines and wilted petals and bulbous fungal caps.