Milky white moonlight filtered through the stained-glass window, casting eerily discoloured patterns across the room within. The centre pane, which depicted the gleaming sword of a triumphant warrior, threw its pale light like a beacon upon the face of a man. He lay motionless across an assortment of heavy furs, eyes fixed on the decorative ceiling. Just below, rendered a murky green by the glass field above, protruded the hilt of a knife.
Not two feet from the body was a small nest of blankets and furs, vacant now, and still warm to the touch. Embers burned low amongst the charred logs and ash of the fireplace across the room, radiating a gentle heat. They popped intermittently, breaking the silence of the otherwise quiet, still room. The heavy oaken door stood slightly ajar, like a held breath, the first hint at the tragedy to be found within.
A number of twisting passageways away an old woman stood in the pitch darkness of her small room. In her fingers she clutched a small leather drawstring bag, its contents lumpy and cold. She needn’t open it to know what her parting gift had been; she had heard the quiet scrape of metal on metal as it had been passed over.
Hours away the sun rose slow and reluctant over a barren landscape that stretched for leagues in every direction, broken only by the distant visage of white-tipped mountains reaching to the sky. The ground was dyed blood red by the drying autumn grass and dotted by the occasional skeleton tree. A lone horse crossed the empty expanse at a steady pace, its rider hunching against the cold of a vicious wind and the first snowfall of what would become a long winter.
Somewhere behind them the slumbering city began to slowly wake.
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