Father-Mother sat on a carpet at the summit of the hill, clothed in their ancient robe and scarves, which made their face more akin to a blackened void than the familiar wrinkled sight Rain-Born knew. Though she studied their face, Rain-Born could not quite make out any features that could have belonged to her Elder. She sat cross-kneed before Father-Mother, and from the faceless shadow that looked into her, Rain-Born heard their voice:

"Rain-Born," Father-Mother said, and their voice shook the hill and the battered corpses beneath. "Look upon our victory."

Rain-Born still quivered at the thought of what she had been forced to see and would not turn to look upon her fallen family again.

"No, Father-Mother," she said. "I cannot."

"Have you grown soft as a kitten?" Father-Mother asked, their voice becoming the swirling rage of an impending storm that boomed in the sky above. "Have the Deadlands made a coward of you?"

Rain-Born could not look at the Elder. She felt her knuckles clench but refused to show weakness before the Great One.

Father-Mother's voice boomed again. "You wrought this thing that you have seen. This place is the fruit of your quest, Rain-Born."

At this, her eyes flew to the dark within the hooded figure of the Elder. "No," she said again, and her entire being shook with fright.

"Do you defy your eyes, child?" Father-Mother laughed. "Does the chick defy the warmth of its Mother? You brought us Callisto; with it, we brought deliverance upon the unclean."

From around her, cloaked in shadow, Rain-Born heard other voices scream in a cacophonous echo of Father-Mother's words: "Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!"

"Father-Mother," Rain-Born said, fighting to suppress the evil voices that assailed her senses. "You would not do this. You told Rain-Born that Callisto would save us –"

"You dare accuse us of deceit?" The voice of the Elder screamed with lungs greater than any human. "We are not as you: a mere mewling chick burning in the sun of the Deadlands. We are above lies. We are above the Guthra. Many fell in the war that had to be fought. But we remain. When the evil of the Deadlands is cleansed, we shall remain."

Rain-Born prostrated herself before Father-Mother, and she felt her cheeks burn with the strength of their rebuke. "Father-Mother," she cried. "Rain-Born is only your servant. Rain-Born does not doubt your wisdom. Rain-Born wishes only to serve you."

And through the swirling vortex of red death surrounding them on all sides, Rain-Born felt Father-Mother's smile grace her and fill her with some semblance of peace.

"We would have you serve us again, Rain-Born," the aged Elder said. "You will vanquish the final foe of the Hanakh, and we shall unleash Callisto's cleansing fire upon the rest of the Deadlands. The spirits will bow before us. And our names shall be etched in the skies above."

Rain-Born looked up and saw something else lay before her, tied to the ground between herself and Father-Mother.

Mere inches from her quivering face, Jespar's tiny eyes looked into her own.

...

Jespar's mind navigated the darkness of his memory, wreathed in a shadow darker than his eyes could comprehend. He felt pulled by force more potent than his own will, but admittedly he realized he was barely offering any resistance to the power. Perhaps, he realized, he just had to see her again.

He was back in the lab, running on his treadmill under the harsh strobe lights while the lab coats watched him behind opaque glass. He imagined their bulbous eyes and sweat-encrusted bald skulls knocking together as they tried vainly to understand him.

Then he found himself strapped to an operating table, snarling through his bound snout as they fiddled with his skin and extracted their samples. He murmured every insult he could under his breath before he remembered Nicole's request. He stopped scrabbling feebly against the table and tried to ignore the syringe that filled his veins with whatever vile toxin they were testing his resistance to this time. His eyes flew to the ceiling, and he dug his claws into the soft pads of his paws. His head filled with pain and then clouded his eyes shut.

He raced through shadows and emerged, running in a synthetic grass field. One soldier clad in pillows and padding threatened him with a pellet gun. He dodged, took cover, and howled at his would-be assailant as instructed. He assessed the trajectory of his foe, stalking him through the artificial field towards the tree his makeshift tire swing hung by. The poor sod thought he was hiding there. And as he flanked the lad and sank his teeth into his lightly padded arse, he smirked at the yelp that issued from the pillow-man. He turned towards the men watching him, tail wagging, expecting praise. But all they did was nod at each other and scribble in their notebooks.

Then he materialized in a darker room, dimly lit by a single bulb hanging loosely above a tattered, dust-caked map of the world outside. The new world. Several men stood around him, smoke from their cigarettes filling the small room and overpowering Jespar's every sense. He coughed several times to agitate them and make them think he was doing something significant. Idiots.

But there was one of them that never took the bait. One of them never got angry, never smiled, and showed neither the apprehensive fear nor perverted curiosity that the lab coats did. At first appearance, he didn't seem incredibly unique. He wore the same ugly bulky camouflage and cloaks as the other soldiers in the base. His face was wrinkled and scarred – resulting from a battle with the outside world. His one definable feature was a claw-shaped birthmark that branded the left side of his face and ended at the lid of his eye. Apart from this, he seemed like just another soldier. He stood against the wall with his arms crossed, seemingly absent-mindedly puffing away on his cigarette.

But his eyes – those were what Jespar had really noticed the first day he had entered the map room and saw him standing there. He had felt those eyes bore into him. And he felt something tremble deep within his tiny bones.

Those eyes were more a mask than the one-sided window was for Jespar's observers. Jespar had seen some of the soldiers living in the bunker before – they smelled, leered at the female lab coats, and got drunk on cheap booze. They were just boys, really. Brutish thugs, idiotic sacks of meat, sure, but boys nonetheless. But this one – the marked one – you saw he was cut from a different stone when you looked into those eyes. Jespar perceived nothing in them that could be attributed to a genuinely empathetic human. They were dark, sunken, and precise. More akin to the eyes of a vulture. And when those eyes fixed on Jespar, they cut through every joke he made like the sharp talons of that bird of prey. Jespar felt himself nothing more than a corpse being prospected by this man, who circled him, considered him, and then struck when he could in this place where the wind never blew, and the hunter could gnaw at his prey, unmolested.

He slung his long-barreled weapon against the wall and walked calmly over to Jespar, illuminated only by the dangling light bulb.

"Where is it?" he said.

Jespar snorted and looked from one "X" on the map to another in as exaggerated a fashion as he could. "Heh, you know, hmmm. Are you boys sure you checked round here?" he asked with an innocent smile, pawing at a random spot on the map already marked. "Some of those lads last week weren't the sharpest tools in the box, know what I mean?"

The marked man said nothing but slowly walked round the table to Jespar, never breaking eye contact once. When he reached the dog, he stared down at him and took one cursory glance at the spot Jespar had pawed while the dog decided to sniff at his posterior.

Jespar felt the heavy hand grab the scruff of his neck and push his snout down onto the table in one swift, fluid motion that might have taken only a millisecond. Before he even had time to react or try and bite back, he felt pinned, being pushed painfully into the scruffy map so much that he could smell his own dried blood that had stained the paper last week when Nicole wasn't present in the room.

He heard a minor yelp issue from the back of the room.

"Restrain her," the marked man said, holding Jespar down effortlessly as the dog tried, in vain, to kick out and strike at the man's torso, foaming at the mouth.

Jespar felt the man's mouth move closer to him. His breath was musky and cold, like a mist that seeped into his acute ears.

"Don't waste my time," he said. He was always a man of few words, simply stated. "Where is it?"

"I've told you I can't be sure!" Jespar barked back, no longer resisting. "I don't remember half of my fucking dreams. I'm trying – I've told you I'm –"

He heard a scream. He knew it was Nicole, and his snarling mouth opened into a screech of fury.

He was promptly silenced by the feeling of the cold, hard snub of the man's pistol being wedged against his temple.

"Here," Jespar said, pointing his snout at an unmarked location.

"There," the man said. It sounded like more of a threat than a request for clarification.

"To a certainty," Jespar whispered.

The man threw him against the wall with no more effort than a child chucking a toy across a play-pen. He slid to the floor with a pathetic yelp, and only then was Nicole allowed to come to him, bleeding from her nose. He knew she was trying not to cry – to not show weakness.

Without looking at either of them, the marked man and his retinue picked up their weapons and made to leave. The marked one let the others go and then walked over to them both and knelt, looking at Nicole with a face that betrayed nothing but a vacant expression of calm disdain.

"If that thing's lied to me, Nicole," he said. "You'll both learn more about pain than you ever wanted to know."