The man waited for the rain to cease. A stalwart apparition, he stood grim and slit-eyed and wordless beneath the tattered awning of an abandoned barn with a small cloth bundle held up in one arm. The forest clearing was empty yet he kept glancing about furtively from side to side. Almost as if the motions had been ingrained into subconscious memory. Occasionally he put his free hand up to adjust the blankets layering whatever possessions he beheld, though not once did he look down into it.

When the downpour receded into a drizzle he ventured out from the creaking barn and followed the path into the woods. Mud squelched beneath his boots, with overhanging boughs of rain slick vegetation bobbing against his shirtsleeves like groping fingers as he cut through the brush. He walked the trail slowly, with a slight yet distinctive limp to his tread, until he emerged from the treeline. Here he broke off into the main road, a stretch of course gravel snaking up a swarded hillock. It was late afternoon now though one couldn't have hoped to judge from the sky as heavily clouded as it was. The rain had ceased entirely by now though occasional rumbles of thunder resonated from the far distance.

He stopped at the first house he came across - though it was more a hut than a house. Or perhaps the skeletal remains of one, with large swatches of its plywood walls rotted through completely and generous tufts of vegetation limply wattling the gaping holes. The lot was overgrown with sedgegrass, the surrounding fencing having long fallen away into ruin. He limped past the decomposing timbers and - perhaps out of a meaningless sense of obligation - rapped halfheartedly at the door before letting himself in. He limped around the single room to survey it - once, twice - then returned to the main table and wiped the dust off one decrepit chair and set the bundle down on the worn gray wooden board. The blanket stirred with a flutter of movement, soon to be followed by a thin, high pitched wail as the pink faced infant swaddled within blinked awake and began to squirm. The man glanced down at it then turned away, barely acknowledging its spirited howls. He unslung his rifle and stood it against the table. Removed his hat and coat and hung them up in a separate chair to dry. Finally he sat and removed his boots and shook them upside down to drain the rainwater out of them, before peeling off his socks and draping them over another empty chair. He moved his chair over to the nearest window and spent the better part of the next hour staring outside as he idly consumed a wedge of hardtack bread and drained what little water remained in his flask.

Night fell quickly and the baby eventually cried itself into another restless slumber. When it had fallen completely silent the man stood and went across the room to retrieve his rifle. Seating himself in the chair again, he laid the weapon crosswise over his lap and continued his wordless vigil. The clouds thinned, allowing a filmy sliver of the gaping black heavens to yawn over the silent wilderness. Coyotes wailed forlorn and unseen from beyond the hills over the hum of insects which simmered a harmony latent and nocturnal and organic beneath the stifling stillness.

He dreamt a fearsome dream. In it, he found himself and his little sister among a company of bedraggled pilgrims traversing a snowy mountain pass. Nameless and insignificant were they both among this multitude of outcasts, among this pitiful drove of groaning, filthy, disease-ridden pariahs who trudged with dogged desperation in the wake of some robed and mysterious prophet who led their ranks. Not once did he show their face to them; still, they followed him for he promised them an eternal reprieve from their afflictions at the end of their journey, wherever that may lie. In that dream a mighty gale came over the mountain and the sun was put out, leaving them blind and stranded and in the confusion several of the little ones were lost to the cliffs. The pilgrims cried out for mercy and the prophet with a voice ringing loud and terrible declared that sinners must surely be amongst their ranks, that the sun would only be restored should the heretics be found and cast out from their midst. The crowd began to shift and mutter and hiss amongst themselves. Since the descent of this most recent tribulation the man had been looking for his sister and it was only then that he caught sight of the back of her head from afar. In his desperation he called out her name and began to shove his way through the sea of gnarled heads and ragged-clothed limbs to reach her. Yet in that exact moment a clawed hand appeared from the writhing mass of bodies and clamped down over the sister's frail shoulder.

"Here she is!" a voice cried out. "Here is your sinner!"

Immediately the crowd was thrown into a frenzy. The brother shouted and thrashed and sought to do everything in his power to reach her but there were too many of them and they swarmed forth and shoved him back as they surged towards her like starved jackals sicced upon a carcass. The little sister said not a word; she merely looked at him pale faced with wide, fearful eyes as they laid their greedy hands upon her and dragged her away towards the ledge even as he reached out and screamed her name.

"Sinner!" they hollered in unison.

"Sinner. Outcast!"

"Heresy!"

"Out with the heretic!"

"Cast her down!"

"Cast her down!"

"CAST HER DOWN -"

It was here the brother finally startled awake. It was but an hour or so before dawn and the baby had started crying again. With weakened limbs he tottered to his feet and slung his rifle back over one gaunt shoulder and limped painstakingly back to the table. Through the wan dark he peered down at the infant's shriveled face, the curled pink fists which bobbed helplessly about in the air as it howled as if in grievous and mindless protestation against whatever forces had transpired in prolonging its abandonment. He let out a deep, troubled sigh before wordlessly hefting it up in its bundle of pathetic rags and limping carefully to the door.

By high noon he was wending slowly along the main road again, a stern and solitary figure hunched slightly over the precious human cargo he held aloft in the crook of his free arm. The child woke periodically, always wailing heartily when it did, yet not once did the man acknowledge its lonesome clamorings. By the time he came upon the next settlement it had lapsed into another uneasy dormant. He forged ahead tirelessly past several rickety storefronts, his footsteps plodding faint and uneven through the dust. The road was empty save one elderly and leather faced beggar woman squatting beneath a raised walkway who eyed him suspiciously from beneath the dilapidated brim of her hat. He ignored her as he passed, walking with a distinct purpose to his bearings as if he knew exactly where he was supposed to go. Eventually he reached a small cluster of houses and let himself into the yard of one, limping through the weeds up the clay dappled path to the ramshackled entrance. He knocked once.

"Who is it?" a female voice presently called.

"It's me. Amai."

The door opened to a crack, revealing a young towheaded woman wearing a simple cotton dress and no shoes.

"Papa," she called over her shoulder, "it's the huntsman from last month."

"Huntsman?"

The young woman opened the door wider, and the father emerged behind her slender figure - a balding old man in a brown gingham shirt and overalls.

"I'm afraid we ain't got no money to pay this time round," he said, frowning.

"Never mind that," the brother replied. "I'm looking for a nursemaid. You know of any in these parts?"

"Nursemaid...?"

"For this fella here."

The woman gathered her skirts and stepped barefoot off the flagstone slab which served for a makeshift landing. The man lowered the bundle for her to see. The baby startled awake at the slight motion and resumed its piteous bleating. She squinted down at it through the scant sunlight and her face worked in shock.

"Oh my God," she said. "If it ain't a lil baby!"

"Baby?" the father repeated blankly.

"Yes. Here. Papa, hold the door open for me. Come, let me bring him in."

The man wordlessly handed the squirming bundle over. In a barrage of squeaking floorboards and muffled footsteps they crowded into the kitchen single file where the woman sat down on a chair with the fussing infant cradled in her arms.

"Oh the poor lil chap," she cooed, rocking her arms. "Poor baby. He must be starvin."

"He needs be changed, that's for sure," the father said, wrinkling his nose.

"That and fed."

"That's why I said I was looking for a nursemaid," the man said, removing his hat. "I've got a little money with me to pay if I need to."

"Oh but he don't look no more than a week old," the woman said anxiously.

The man paused and looked at her keenly from the corner of his eyes. "A week and a half, yes."

"Good God!" the father petitioned.

"What he needs is to be with his mama, more than anythin else!"

"A shame it hasn't got one anymore," the man said bitterly.

"Hasn't... " the old man stopped short and narrowed his eyes. "Where'd you find him?"

"I didn't find it. It came to me."

"That don't make no sense."

"Came to be in my possession, then," the man elaborated shortly. "It's my sister's. Was my sister's. She died giving birth."

"Oh..." The daughter stared down at the baby, then up at the man with sympathetic eyes. "Oh I'm so sorry, sir."

The old man frowned. "Well, then what about the father?"

The man scowled. "Confound the father. He's nothing but a scoundrel. It'd be better off dead than in the care of the likes of him."

"Law's mercy."

"I told my sister he was no good. Over and over again. Warned her just like our mama used to warn her when she was still alive. But she didn't listen. After she come back with this here thing in her belly I told her that I'd washed my hands of her affairs. Meant it then, too. But after she was gone there wasn't anyone else to take it in ceptin me."

"It's a sign I tell ye," the old man said grimly, his face darkening. "A sign of things t'come if I do say so m'self."

"Yes sir."

"Feels like it's gettin worse and worse these days - stories followin this same beat. In fact just last week I hear a story up from Swallow Island bout a case not much dissim'lar from what you tell me here. One worthless man after another, playin god or Pirate King or whatever the devil that's in fashion. Women and children who follow em to the ends of this earth. Result's bout what you'd might expect, ain't it? Families ruined. Hordes of lil ones made orphans and beggars, strangers left uncaring, and the world just keeps goin round and round. More than enough misery to last a soul sev'ral lifetimes I tell ye."

"Yes sir."

"Oh, the cruelty of it!" the girl said, shaking her head. "Look at him, he's just starvin."

"Yes ma'am," the brother said. "I need to find it a nursemaid."

She looked beseechingly at the old man.

"Well, we can try callin Miss Yearney," he answered with a sigh. "She runs the children's ministry here in town; surely she'll know someone who can help. What's the lil chap's name?"

"Name?" the brother asked.

"Yes. Surely your sister must have picked out a name for him."

The brother went silent for a good few seconds, and the old man looked at him closely through the lamplight. His eyes were blue, he noticed for the first time. The color of polished cobalt dropped in a riverbed on a brisk spring morning - cold and dark and limpid beneath the swirling currents, and just about as impassive. Yet a strange primordial instinct betrayed to him that there was danger lurking within that gaze as well. Latent and inexplicable.

"No sir," the brother finally answered - slowly, distinctly. The expression on his face became almost thoughtful as he uttered the next words. "She never did give him a name."

♚

He alighted from the heavens at the earliest brindled auguries of sunset, setting foot upon unhallowed ground noiseless and minatory and beset, even perhaps, with an apocalyptic finality befitting the volitions of some terrible and vindictive deity. He stood alone in his perch atop a groaning heap of scrap metal and turned slowly in a full arc to glass the abscissae of material ruin which prevailed beneath the dying skies, as if in foul and putrefic defiance against all the anthropological forces keeping it at bay. A world sepulchral and awash in perpetual crimson - the jagged mountainscape of rubble to his north, a city languishing in its self-inflicted fumes to his south. He watched for some time, movements suspended in a rare divulgence of salient reflection. Thinking. Listening, too, perhaps, for whatever ghosts which might have been left stranded there ten years ago. Disembodied voices lingering in the aftermath of carnage long spent. But only he would ever know these things.

There was a small trail carved trenchlike between adjacent mounds of debris. Following this, he came down to a shallow clearing of dust and gravel painstakingly eked out of the surrounding milieu of rusted detritus, in the midst of which stood a shack so threadbare in its bearings as to surely reify the dire position of its inhabitants should it have any. He stepped past the stiles of the fence and surveyed with an air of lofty indignance the gaping black windows and unlatched door. He went up to the entrance, his tread slow and meandering but not without a distinct and frightful measure, and raised one wrist to the handle. He waited, as if to listen for something. Looked back around the jagged perimeter of this forsaken hollow. Drank in the emptiness of it. Then he opened the door and went in.

She was not there. She clearly had not been there for some time. He strode to the center of the main room and stopped and looked about. At the fluted wooden walls, the draperies which hung sagging and foliated and moth-eaten over the windowsills, the scattering of decrepit furniture over which a thin and translucent skin of dust had collected. Standing amidst this all he surely seemed an entity entirely foreign and unheimlich with all the jaunty black finery he now donned beneath his usual plumes of fuchsian extravagance. He glanced at the lone pipe stove crammed in one corner, the inert blackness gaping from the crannies between its rusted joints betraying the absence of a flame in its wrought iron belly - and likely in a long while at that. There was a cupboard and some cabinets, their respective doors cracked open to reveal some shelves stocked to questioning degrees. A table and two chairs. One broken stool laid sideways, the beginning of a cobweb trussing its creaking pegs. A bunch of withered narcissus drooping over a clay vase on a shelf. And next to it, a photograph. He stepped over the fallen stool and took up the worn wooden frame in one hand to study it closer. It appeared to be a family portrait in monochrome. Within it, a grim-faced woman sat poised in a chair holding an infant in her arms. Standing to her right was a young boy no more than twelve or thirteen, with one hand resting over the post of his mother's chair. The picture frame clearly had been damaged before - a large crack ran through the glass, obscuring the youth's face entirely. His lips curled into something akin to a sneer and he turned away as he set the photo back down on the shelf.

He went through the back room. It held no furniture except for a chest of drawers and a wireframe bed with its mattress stripped of its sheets. There was one makeshift window hacked through the timber walls in a crude triangular shape, and it was through here a faint ruddy hue of twilight managed to illuminate the room. The floor was bare save for a folded square of quilt resting unassuming at the head of the bed. Without sparing it a glance he went over to the chest and began opening the drawers one by one. The upper two were empty. The third held a leatherbound notebook which he removed without a moment's thought and dropped atop the mattress. Upon reaching the last drawer he stopped short, freezing in place, before slowly reaching down and running a hand over the carefully assorted items held within - the hand stitched blankets, the cotton crib bedding, the infant's garments. Absently, almost tentatively, as if he himself was still unsure of how to proceed. At one point he lifted one tiny sleeve between thumb and forefinger as if to feel for its weight before letting it fall. Eventually he shut the drawer and rose noiselessly to his feet. Retrieved the book from the bed and returned to the main room.

Back in the kitchen, he went over to one of the cabinets and opened it, rummaging through glass bottles of various sizes until coming upon an unopened liquor flask. He broke the seal and uncapped it and whiffed it before tilting it up to his lips. He sat at the table and continued to drink for some time, ruminating, looking on with unreadable eyes the darkening silhouette of a mouse as it scuttled diligently along the far wall. Full dark was quick to set in and when it did he did have a lamp going, a flame which quaked feeble and solitary within its tall glass prison. The flask now rested forgotten at his elbow and he had the leatherbound book flipped open before him. It did not take him long for him to read through the written entries but even after he was done he remained still for what seemed like another eternity, his jaw clenched and the usual faint smile he wore having long given away to a terrifying neutrality. He flipped back several pages and read them over repeatedly, the hand resting next to the flask slowly tensing into a clawed fist over several repetitions. When his Transponder Snail began ringing he still hadn't moved from his present position. A look of slight impatience crossing his features, he withdrew the droning creature from his coat and activated it. The snail unfurled its eyestalks and he recognized the face it assumed in an instant.

"Gladius. Did you find her?"

"Not yet, Waka-sama!" the boy's voice crackled over the line. "We're still looking but Giolla told me I should fill you in so I am. She hadn't gone back to the grave - went over there myself and the old geezer working there told me she hadn't been there all day. Plus, Senor Pink asked around near the hag's old place and there wasn't anybody who'd seen her there either."

"I see." His lips curled, assuming it's usual leering mask. He momentarily flicked his gaze to the framed photo resting on the shelf, then down at the open pages. "No sign of her at the house, either."

There was a muted clatter and an indignant exclamation. The snail's face rapidly morphed to effectuate yet another familiar face.

"Please don't worry, Waka-sama!" Giolla's voice trilled loudly past the creature's miming lips. "I do declare I am near at my wit's end but you can leave everything to us! I just had Senor Pink run down to check her parents' old store. If she isn't there, I can send Gladius here to check that old chapel near the town square she used to like to hang around. Oh, the factory where her papa used to work, too. Gladius, didn't you say she told you where that was? No? But I could have sworn -"

"No need to be so frantic, Giolla," he chuckled, setting the Transponder Snail on the table. He took the book up and carefully began to tear a select few pages off the spine, continuing to speak calmly as he did. "But very well. You, Pink, and Gladius can continue to look. But if you can't find her by daylight, call off the search. There would be no point in it."

"Call off the...? Waka-sama, surely you don't mean to say the poor dearie left the island!"

He chuckled again. "You could even say it's most likely, given the circumstances. In the meantime, inform the Executives to meet me at the ship."

He lifted the glass covering from the lamp and held the sheaf of torn papers up to the flame. With a sibilant hiss it veered upwards to devour the pages, racing over the makeshift torch and converting it to a shriveling black pistil in a brilliant wash of saffron. His eyes sharpened with unmistakable clarity as he watched the flames dwindle away into pale ashes. His teeth suddenly gleamed against the bitter dark as he bared them into a wolfish grin. His fists clenching into marbled fists atop the table, his gaze swung sharply upwards to the framed photograph resting on the shelf, to the pale streak of cracked glass obscuring one of the faces inscribed within.

"My first priority," Doflamingo continued, "is to deal with that treasonous wretch she has for a brother."