"Did the stars shine like this before The Deadlands came to be?"

Jespar looked up from the well-roasted tunnel rat that he had been snacking on by their small campfire.

"Some nights," he replied, taking a nonchalant look at the expanse of light that painted the black depths of the sky. "Though we didn't look at them much."

Rain-Born had been preoccupied with the star-filled sky since they had set outside and constructed their bonfire next to the withered old statue that dominated the suburb"s center. She knew that, soon, the skies would be shadowed by the uniform grey bark of the Iron Forest's trees and be lost to her. So, she was taking the opportunity to gaze at the stars while she could, and Jespar, quite surprised by the notion, had obliged.

But she frowned as she realized their newest companion was not here to share this simple joy. So, after they had finished their meal for the night, Rain-Born asked Jespar if he knew where he was.

"Oh, you mean Mr life-and-soul of the party?" Jespar scoffed.

"Jespar," she cautioned. "He has endured much. His wife was taken by the Chainmen, too."

"That I didn't know," he said, biting into some leftover yet stubborn tunnel-rat ear and stripping the tough flesh from bone. "He hasn't said a word to me. Won't talk to a spirit. A "thing not of this earth," whatever the hell that means."

"Do you know where he is?"

"Yeah," Jespar replied. "He goes to see them."

Rain-Born cocked her eyebrow. "Them?"

He nodded towards the house where the horrors of The Chainmen had been brought to an end.

"I don't know what he does there," Jespar continued. "But he goes to see them every day for an hour or so. Far be it from me to intrude on his Tribal business."

She smirked. "That has never stopped you from questioning my beliefs."

He smirked back. "You're different. You're young. There's still hope for you."

She rolled her eyes and rose, throwing him some extra meat that he caught effortlessly in his mouth and began to tear into with abandon.

"I will talk with him," she said. "One "Tribal" to another."

She left him eating by the fireside, wondering what she planned to say or do. Typically planning an attack before a raid or border skirmish with the Guthra was a task she was well-equipped for. Still, she found it increasingly difficult to reconcile her training with the reality spread out before her, compounded by Jespar's strange speech and the knowledge he had of this place out of time and the minds of the people who walked the wastes.

As she walked, however, something snapped her out of her reverie for a moment. Jespar had begun singing by the fireside:

"Oh, there ain't no rest for The Wicked!

Money don't grow on trees.

We got bills to pay

We got mouths to feed

There ain't nothin' in this world for freeeee!"

It was a tune she hadn't heard him sing before, and as he belched its almost nervous, anarchic melody out into the starry night, she felt somewhat comforted. His voice was like that of Song-Born, who sang not with her words but with her soul. When she sang, it was said that it flew to the skies and bathed among the stars themselves.

She missed that voice and wondered if her sister was singing on this night, back across the Changeling's Tunnel and the Swamp-of-Many-Eyes. She consoled herself with the thought that, if she tried hard enough, she might hear Song-Born"s voice again and sleep soundly under the sea of stars once more.

...

Returning to the house was like trudging through an oozing mire of painful memories. Rain-Born felt a cold-sweat cling to her cheeks as she approached the broken door dangling from its hinge where the bullet hole formed by the rattling Deathspitter could be seen. She recalled Martha's playful barks as she and Jespar first entered the house and how those barks had welcomed her vile mistress back home. The Chainman had been right about one thing: the loyalty of a dog was truly without question.

Stepping over the ruined precipice, she saw the outline of the bodies she had made: all of them were arrayed together like some grisly mosaic before the bloodied chair that had held Weeping-Ash. She gulped down her fear – the lump in her throat forming in reaction to the woman's severed limbs and mutilated form. She suppressed the urge to vomit just looking at the dead mixture of dried blood and exposed bone and tissue that now comprised her face.

Had she, Rain-Born, truly done this? Had she unceremoniously hacked away at this woman and left her like this? She had never committed such atrocity, even in the most dangerous raids against her Guthra rivals. Her hand gripped her chest, for her heart would not stop its incessant beating.

"Do not reject the image of death, sister," a voice intoned from the dark that gathered at the center of the room, below the chair. "It comes to greet us all."

She stepped closer and let her eyes resolve the thing that she had dared not even try to see: Weeping-Ash sat in the center of the corpses. He had arrayed them around himself – the man, the woman, and the girl Rain-Born had never seen – and sat cross-legged and bowed like a monk in prayer.

Then, Rain-Born realized with disgust that that was precisely what he was doing. His lips moved and quietly mouthed the Death-dirge of the Hanakh Ash-callers, rising in tone and intonation every few seconds before cascading back down into the low depths of a barely whispered melody. It was a song that was said to speed the spirits of the departed on to the Grounds of the Great Spirit, where they would hunt and feast with him for the rest of their eternal lives. It was not a song meant for outsiders.

"Brother!" She cried, grabbing his arm – whether to add weight to her words or to steady herself, she did not know. "Why do you sing for these Evil Ones?"

His eyelids opened slowly, and Rain-Born was struck again by the grey globes that shone within his aged skull, even in the falling dark of night.

"I sing for the dead, sister," was all he said.

"But these creatures do not deserve your pity. They bound you. They took your wife, they meant to consume you like –"

"Do you mean to tell me of my pain, Rain-Born?" he interrupted, clenching her arm so that they both gripped the other in a vice-like stranglehold. She felt the muscles in her good arm react to his strength. Where it came from, she did not know.

"I know of my pain, for it is mine, and mine alone," he said, breaking his song and speaking through a voice hoarse with thirst. "But do you wish to know these things you speak of as though they are already known to you? Were you there when this woman came to my farm and broke my wife's back before my eyes? Were you there when this man shot the knife from her hand and tore a gash in her chest where her heart bled for me? Did you see this girl lick her lips as they roasted her upon a spit and threw me scraps of her still-burning flesh? Did you watch them laugh like feasting jackals around the fire where my wife's body burned? I ask you Rain-Born, did you see these things?"

She felt her arm drop and knelt with him. "No."

He closed his eyes again.

"No, Rain-Born," he repeated. "These things you have not seen. But I see them even now. When I close my eyes to the waking world, I do not pass into the deep dark of the dream realm. Instead, I return to my withered farm and see these people torture my bonded before me. I feel the touch of this woman whose life you ended upon me. I feel the absence of what she took from me. I feel it even now. Perhaps I will feel it forever more."

A moment after he said this, he fell silent, and Rain-Born felt that perhaps he had said all he would say. Yet, something compelled her to stay by his side and lean forward to touch her forehead to his. At first, he gasped and then inclined his head too. Words did not have to be spoken among brothers and sisters of the Tribe to offer comfort to each other.

"You pray for those who have done these things, Weeping-Ash?"

He smiled, but it was a numb slit that spread across his face. It told her nothing.

"Rain-Born, you are sworn to the hunting house of the Snake. You deal in death. That is your burden which I see you bear. But I am born to the house of Ash. What comes after death is my domain."

"The Hunting Grounds," Rain-Born nodded. "Where those of the Tribe shall walk beside the Great Spirit. But without a shepherd to guide them up the path of stars, their spirits cannot make the journey."

He opened his mouth as though about to rebuke her for something but closed it again with the same sad smile.

"Child, now you know my true pain," he said. "In this Old World of cold steel, where no songs of our people are sung on the winds, I cannot guide my bonded to the afterlife."

The final statement caught in his throat like the chain that had once collared him.

"I pray for my bonded, for she exists now within each of these beings that lie before us. They took her within themselves and trapped her spirit upon this sad earth. She knows the passage but cannot walk. And I am powerless to be her guide."

Now she understood, and she cursed herself for her ignorance. Of course, he wished only to speed his wife on her journey to the next world, and the Chainmen's savagery denied him even this simple thing.

She looked upon him and saw shame. It was incredible: one who had endured as much pain as he had at the hands of the vicious and the evil, who had seen them commit atrocities beyond which her mind could conceive human beings were capable of – this man sat amongst their bodies. He felt not rage or contempt building in his gut but shame. Perhaps his mind truly did exist in the afterlife, and the trials of this physical plane meant nothing to one who treads on the path to the world beyond.

At that moment, her quest for Callisto faded from her mind, and her purpose was renewed: she would give him this thing, this gift. Perhaps he could not inter his wife's remains in the ground of this evil earth as was tradition, but there was another way she could still reach the stars above.

She took his hands in hers and gripped them tight.

"We shall guide her, Weeping-Ash," she said with renewed confidence. "See these things of the Old World around us – things which should have left this earth long ago. These things we shall burn and create a bonfire with a stair of smoke that will connect our world to the sea of stars above. Then we shall confer the bodies of these ones to the flame and let it chew away their dirtied flesh and free the spirit of your bonded, trapped within. She will fly, Weeping-Ash. She will dance among the stars on this night and settle in the Hunting Grounds forever."

He looked up at her as she spoke, his jaw widening with every sentence, then every word, and it seemed as though he meant to rebuke her again – to stop her talking of things that were not her domain. She was a huntress. The snake coiled around her arm and marked her as its own. Yet here she was, proclaiming that she could make his wife fly upon wings of smoke and crimson.

He bowed his head again. Then, unbeknownst to her, he chuckled. It was an odd, guttural sound. One that he hadn't made in a long, long time. Maybe she could do it. Perhaps that was enough if this child kneeled before him and truly believed her words.

His bonded would smile if she sat before this one and stroked her hair while humming a song of her creation. He imagined her alive momentarily as he looked into Rain-Born's eyes. That was enough of a gift by itself.

"Thank you, Rain-Born," he said, squeezing her hands back and trying not to let his voice break. "If you help me do this thing tonight, I will owe you more than just my life."

He turned to face one body that Rain-Born had not noticed. This one lay outside the circle of the departed Chainmen, wearing a simple woolen sweater and beige fatigues that did not mark him as one of the Tribe. Looking at him in the dark, Rain-Born was unsure what had ended his life. But she remembered Jespar's solemn words and anxious face as he had relayed his attempts to save him.

"I shall burn my brother in captivity with them," Weeping-Ash declared, more to the corpse than Rain-Born. "I did not know him. We did not converse. But he suffered in their grip as much as I. He did not deserve his fate. So I will also offer his spirit to the Hunting Grounds and let the Great Spirit judge if his soul is worthy to walk among our ancestors. Prepare the pyre, Rain-Born. I shall prepare these souls for their ascendance. And this one requires feeding."

Rain-Born cocked an eyebrow at him as he turned to reveal Martha sleeping soundly with her pups at his back. She looked at the very picture of tranquility.

"So much for the loyalty of dogs," Rain-Born stifled a laugh. "You would feed this creature who belonged to your enemies?"

Again, Weeping-Ash only smiled. "Rain-Born, what crime have these little ones committed? They were served by Evil spirits but did not have a voice by which to refuse their offerings. These little ones are pure and untouched by our ways. They seek only to survive. In time, I believe they will learn to brave The Deadlands as we do. They are so unlike your companion."

She did not pay much heed to this statement in her surprise at seeing him care for the dogs, but she detected a slight hint of contempt in his reference to Jespar.

Putting it from her mind for the moment, Rain-Born nodded and left him to his prayers. It would take some time to gather enough for a sizable bonfire to be completed, but the ceremonial words had to be spoken before the spirits were set free from their bodies. She walked back outside and felt the cool air of night touch her brow, along with the tail-end of Jespar's strange song:

"Oh no, we can't slow down

We can't hold back

Don'tcha know, we wish we coooould

Oh, but there ain't no rest for The Wicked!

Until we close our eyes for good."