Frolic limped laboriously, wheezing and sweating, and still finding enough breath in his lungs to despair of his situation with a constant fluent stream of curses. The phantom pain in his absent leg still haunted him after all these years. He looked down to stare at the iron spike that was in its place and groaned as he noticed movement in his peripheral vision. He turned around and looked the mountain goat in the eye, puffing his chest with an intention to berate it. The goat bleated questioningly. They stared at one another, until the man sighed, shrugged and said ‘On your own head then.’ He turned around and continued on his path, and the goat happily followed.
So they climbed, man and goat, one with purpose and a large heaving belly, and the other without either. Eventually Frolic decided to make the best of how things were, and struck up a lively conversation, finding the goat to be deeply insightful despite its lack of a spectacular vocabulary. He brought out his flask of mead, and sometime later he found himself singing a song he heard in the tavern recently, the goat joining in. ‘Well, my good fellow, I must say that you can keep a tune far better than I can,’ said Frolic, and the goat shook it’s head vigorously in agreement.
Upon reaching the hilltop Frolic shushed the goat. ‘Hey there Curly,’ he said to the tall, pale, hairless man sitting on a rock. He sat next to the man in silence. ‘Nice view,’ he said after a while, looking to the south. Smoke swirled in the air, moving this way and that, trying to escape a nightmare. They watched a city burn.
The fire danced in Curly’s jaded eyes, a parody of emotion. Curly and Frolic waited and watched. From another hilltop a watcher watched the watchers. Its golden mask glinted in the moonlight. Lidless eyes stared through the slits, the only marks that marred the otherwise featureless mask that was fused to the flesh of the creature. It could remember screams if it tried hard enough as the molten metal was cooled upon its face. Screams that were human. It could not remember the pain however. But the screams were enough. The blood-red cape writhed in the wind as though suffering the memory of torment that was lost to its wearer.
The creature watched as Curly, Frolic and the goat watched the flames, and the smoke that it caused as it carried the souls of the incinerated that tried to escape to a past where they had a home. Ever upwards the smoke went, towards the illuminating witnesses, the many eyes of heaven. The less distant eyes watched the pyre, the sacrifice to prophecy. One pair without emotion, one pair with sadness, and one pair lost in thoughts of how Frolic’s hair might taste.
Then it drizzled, from a sky unmarred by clouds. ‘Brother,’ Curly whispered as the rain grew into a torrent.
Half a dozen cities lay in ashes for this moment to be born.
