THE LAWMAN

SCENE 1
~12 years ago

You’re barely out of training. Why are you here?

It’s a mess. The smell is terrible; it burns in your sensitive nose, like blood rotten a thousand times over. The scene is noisy, both literally and not. The other lawmen are all standing about, muttering to each other and trying not to look into the abyss of red just through the door. But you can’t help it; your gaze is drawn to the blood. Or, perhaps, not to the blood itself, but what lies among it.

Hanging in every shadow in the room, shadows of shadows. The light bends strangely about the empty space of the room, and it all feels heavy with the weight of something beyond. Tendrils of awareness seep into the periphery of your vision, but flitter away as soon as you dare to acknowledge them, their grasp on this plane as fragile as their bodies evidently were. They call to you, in words you cannot hear, in ways you cannot know.

When you come to, your captain is nudging you in the shoulders. The others have left, and he gives you a strange look.

SCENE 2
~8 years ago

They’re coming for you. Of course they are.

Of course they didn't believe you. You sounded insane.

Your horse’s hooves beat heavy against the path, your hands clutching desperate to the reigns. You can hear them. They are better navigators than you. Their horses slip deftly between the trees, and their shadows wind through the forest around you. They are threatening to gain on you; you can feel their hungry gazes trained on you. A pack of skilled hunters running down a pathetic animal.

You throw yourself and your horse across a brook. An arrow whizzes past your head, clipping an ear and making you flinch, cowering against the horse in terror. As you look around, you see more shadows filtering through the dense forest; but not those of men on horseback. Winding, spectral forms, barely visible but surely there. They pull inward all at once, and sweep you off of the horse, throwing you hard into the ground below.

You roll, coming to a harsh stop. Perhaps you have a broken arm. You curl up, cowering, in searing pain, from your unseen attacker.

The horse bounds off into the woods. After it, the shadows of those men. One of them nearly tramples you. He doesn’t notice you among the shadows that have gathered about you.

What… just happened?

SCENE 3
~1 year ago

You are dead. You think, anyway.

In a graveyard. Fitting.

A man stands over you, a pistol in his hand. A single hole through your chest, just shy of your still-beating heart, pouring your vital red into the sacred dirt below. He turns his back to you, and disappears down the path. What a terrible excuse for a lawman you are.

The shadows grow long, and the world around you starts to bleed into the blazing horizon of the dawn sky. The sun grows, and burns, burns, burns ever brighter, swallowing the loom of the trees and the gloom of the cemetery.

Yet, as you pass into that great beyond, you feel a hand. And another. And another. Ten, twenty, fifty hands. The spirits claw you from the grasp of the light, and pull you back down to Astra. When you awaken, it is as if you are shunted suddenly back into your body, opening your eyes with a wheezing gasp. The bleeding has stopped. There is a weakly wrapped, but functional, bandage tied about your heaving chest.

You can see them all around you, waiting, patient. They stand, unmoving pillars in a circle around you, like a council prepared to pass judgment. As soon as you are lucid enough to truly regard them, they have all but disappeared, leaving you to drag yourself to your feet against a tombstone.

You can see his footprints in the path ahead.

There is a long road ahead of you. But you can feel something at your back. Perhaps it is not a road you will walk alone.