Gideon took the seat saturated in the most darkness, furthest away from the overhead swaying light, and the loosely slatted Song's entrance. Stormholden sat opposite him, but not before undoing his belt and holster and setting both upon the table within reach.

"Now, Cap," the boy said, leaning into the soft leather back of the seat, "Must you threaten me so blatantly?" He tapped the table with two of his fingers. "When I only mean to engage you in idle chit chat?"

The captain was in no mood to play a devil's game. He went for his pistol, checked the rounds - the barrel still filled with the silver bullets he'd used to put down the werewolf tribe hidden in Lucifer's Reach. "If you can recognize my threats, you can take them seriously," he replied. "I know not what this is," Stormholden narrowed his gaze, "nor what you are," his voice stern, solid, unmoving, "But if given a reason to seek a path of violence, it is one I will gladly tread upon."

Gideon sighed and waved a hand. "Yes, yes. Typical heroes and their empty threats. Listen," he kicked up his boots and set both on the table, arms folded behind his head, "I get it. You'll kill me. But let's enjoy the time we have now. Share a drink, chat, laugh. Get to really know one another."

"And why's that?" Stormholden's brows knit over his eyes like gathering dark clouds.

"Because I'm lonely." Gideon smiled.

Stormholden released his pistol, letting it clamor to the table with a dulled thud. "Loneliness can make one desperate."

Gideon shook his head, hair shielding his face from Stormholden's gaze. "I'm not that lonely."

"I wouldn't believe you to be the type," Stormholden agreed. This musing seemed to amuse the boy as his lips parted into a half-grin that favored heavily the right side of his face. Back in the captain's world, such expressions had a name, a Cheshire's Grin, worn by those governed by mischief and deceit.

"Here ya go."

Barnabones placed a large skull on the table, causing the wood to bow. Stormholden had never seen its likes before. Gray as rat spit, scenting the air of rancid waste. Every so often it wheezed thin wisps of green smoke. Gideon smiled as he eyed the concoction, the fire raging on its surface reflected in his gaze. 

With greed and glee, the boy took the hulking skull with ease and brought the drink to his lips. The captain watched on, mesmerized, as so frail in appearance he'd taken Gideon to be, the boy finished his libation in two minutes. He showed no signs of illness, no sickly pallor or watery eyes, no distended stomach, or desperation for a nearby water closet.

Instead, Gideon frowned as he lugged the skull to his mouth one final time and tapped the bottom, the drink's brownish dregs dribbling down his shirt and onto the table.

Where the few drops landed, an immediate sizzle began as the liquid burrowed through the wood on contact. Stormholden watched in horror as the table took on the appearance of swiss cheese in a matter of blinks. If a few drops could obliterate something so completely, the captain wondered what it would do to a man's insides?

Barnabones, standing there with ink and parchment, ready to jot down a drink order should the need arise, turned his attentions to Stormholden, and asked if he too would like something to wet his whistle.

The captain responded, "I have no need of your caustic brews, mustachioed cadaver, though it is kind of you to inquire."

If the bartender still had eyebrows to raise, he would have done so now. But having his eyebrows long since eaten off by decay and worms, Barnabones did the only thing he could do - he shook his head, which wobbled back and forth precariously atop his vertebrae, dust shedding off him like a second skin, if he'd had his first skin still attached. "What a life ye've lived," he concluded.

The captain frowned. "It is nothing compared to—" A pair of women, both no larger than his hand, flitted around the bar's patrons like moths to lantern light. Some creatures swatted them away, while others engaged them for a bit, and it was only when they chatted that Stormholden noticed the exposed bone along their jawlines grinding against one another on every other syllable. "—to what I have come to experience recently."

Barnabones eyed Gideon and leaned in toward the captain. "I imagine it'll only get worse."

"Even without lips, Barney--" Alarm flashed in the skeleton's eye sockets at the boy's sudden address. "And you still manage to loose them." Gideon slapped the table. "Which of my ships are you trying to sink now?"

Barnabones rattled. His head threatened to topple. A humerus, finding nothing humorous about the current predicament, broke free and clattered to the floor.

Gideon leaned back, removing his hand to reveal a sliver of paper. "Your fee, Barney." He smiled as Barnabones fumbled with the piece of himself that had tried to escape. It continued to squirm in his hand, refusing to be set. "I believe," Gideon added, "you'll find that secret to be one for the ages."

The skeleton eyed the paper, and after a few seconds, scooped it up, bowed, and excused himself as more creatures lined up at the bar for the drinks Gideon called nooses.

"So," Gideon said, leaning on the table, head in both his hands, "you and I have something in common."

"You sail?"

Gideon fell back and cackled. "Do I sail?" He put his hand to his chest, feigning pain. "By all the layers, how absurd." His laughter abated, dried up faster than water in the desert. "Even now, Cap. You think the strangest things. Thoughts that aren't your own. Craving adventure, lamenting its absence, pining for a love that was never meant to be yours—"

Gideon gulped. "Nothing you are, nothing you've ever said or done has been by your own free will. You're absolutely pathetic." He reached across the table, grabbed at the captain's sleeve. Stormholden tore away and snarled. Gideon carried on, "A few words strung together that's all you are, and yet--" Gideon riffled through his pockets, pulled out two containers. Each a rusted tin of some strange fashion - labeled 'Altoids.' He opened the first revealing a mix of dried leaves and papers - tobacco, something that bred familiarity within the captain and supplied him with an odd sense of comfort, no matter how modest. "Yet you meant the world to her." Gideon opened the second, which held a myriad of colorful pills: greens, reds, purples, and blacks.

Gideon prodded at the pills. They each seemed repelled by his touch, recoiling and rolling away whenever his finger was upon them. Stormholden could relate.

"You speak as though you despise me," Stormholden said as Gideon sprinkled a pinch of tobacco onto the paper. He rolled it and placed the cigarette between his lips. "Though our acquaintance has been of brief duration. Despite my better judgment, I am curious of your reasoning, if hatred for me is indeed what you feel."

Gideon propped up the box of pills. "You know all the magic in the world, and I can't get my color to stick?" He shrugged, sticking the cigarette between his lips. The tip ignited without the assistance of a match. Stormholden's grip tightened around his pistol. "Though I guess that's just another thing those council bastards took from me. Suppose splitting me in two wasn't enough for them." He grabbed one of the blue pills, held it up so the light caught inside it. "Want to know how I do it?"

"How you do what?"

"Keep my color."

Stormholden shook his head.

Gideon exhaled. Slivers of a shapeless, formless black encircled his head like a flock of gulls. "I have to collect the right shades," Gideon said. "I've taken these from across the layers. Plucked the forests of Reflection for the green, captured the blizzards of this layer for blue. Sandstorms, of course, from the Reverse need special tempering to achieve this shade of violet. And these," his hand hovered over the black pills. "These had to be made from the voids found in the Refracted." He slapped the table, put the lid back on the containers, and downed the blue pill. In seconds, Gideon's eyes drained of the current hue, before filling up with another. "All us magical folk," he sneered, "those of us you perceive as devils, have color. It's in our blood and it's where our connection with magic is forged. Drain that color, and well," he raised both his arms, "here we are, Cap. You and I sharing drinks and miseries at the Song."

The captain gripped his sword hilt. "Your words are nothing but the ravings of a loon, a man possessed." Stormholden stood, brandishing his saber, and leveling its point at Gideon's throat. In his other hand, he gripped his pistol, hammer cocked, barrel aimed at Gideon's chest. "Take me back where I came, devil. Post haste. I have suffered your villainy long enough."

Gideon nodded. "'Always 'act first, think later,' with you folk, isn't it? How boringly predictable." Gideon's eyes darkened, the blue chased from them and replaced by an impenetrable black, the tip of his cigarette erupting into flames.

The fingers of his gloved hand rapped the table as ash rained down. The Song's crowd quieted their manner of speech. Not a word whispered, nor stanza sung. Not even a breath taken as they eyed Stormholden's companion. The black that had been hovering over Gideon spread, like a net cast to ensnare its next victim.

Stormholden watched the cloud with macabre interest, remembering the days when the Red blight had peaked and the skies became an endless, tumultuous gray as smoke from all the pyres rose, blotting out the sun for days on end. The dead's remains rained down on them for months.

Dread rose inside him. He shook. His sword arm grew heavy, his muscles aching from exertion, though he'd only held it for mere seconds. His other arm was thrown to his side. One after another, all his fingers pried themselves off his pistol's grip, though the captain pleaded with them to hold on. His gun clattered to the ground, followed by his sword, his body no longer his own. A rush of horror overwhelmed him at this realization and then, as things often did, they got worse. The captain's airway constricted.

"What—"

Gideon flashed him a smile of unnaturally white fang. The captain tried to think, tried to surmise what was happening, what Gideon was doing to him. He tried to speak but only wet garbles escaped his lips.

Gideon smeared a fleck of ash between his forefinger and thumb. "It's rude to threaten me, when I've been nothing but attentive."

The choking continued, harder now. Stormholden's hands shot to his neck, fingers frantically scratching and clawing at his unseen attacker. His skin ruptured, blood trickling down his flesh, the feeling red-hot and searing. His fear, his abject terror threatening to drown him.

Gideon's smile became scythe-like, a weapon perfectly suited to the boy who proclaimed himself death.

Pressure crashed down on the captain's windpipe. Pain slashed through muscle and skin until it reverberated in every space of the captain's being. Saliva frothed at his mouth, ran down his chin, drenching his tunic.

Gideon chuckled.

"St-st-" His tongue felt fat and swollen, unwilling to relent to the captain's will. With every ounce of effort, Stormholden tried again. "St-st-stop."

Vision growing blurrier, head throbbing, hands harder to move, Stormholden sensed it; his grasp on life ebbing away.

"All I wanted to do," came Gideon's voice, low and somewhat regretful, "was talk."

Stormholden crumpled on to the ground as the hands released him. He felt like a tattered sail, all his wind gone, eyes watering, chest concave, and emptied as a fire raged on his insides. He gulped the Song's air, each fiery inhale providing him the minuscule comfort that he was, in fact, still alive.

Gideon knelt before him, hands on his knees, bird skull dangling before Stormholden's face, the curved beak mocking the captain's distress. "Now, now, I know it's how you're written, but don't you think you're being overly dramatic?" Taking a fistful of Stormholden's tunic, Gideon raised him to his feet. "Up we go, Cap," he said, patting the dust from Stormholden's trousers. "Even the best of friends have their share of quarrels." He straightened the captain, squared his shoulders. "And trust me, Cap. You and I, we're going to be the best of friends."