Callisto

A Kiss to Build a Dream On

Rain-Born held the smoking deathspitter in her shaking hands, watching the spot where the scarred warrior had fallen.

Slowly, her hands fell, and the evil weapon dropped to the ground – its metal innards emptied. She fell with it. She did not know, in her moment of mad frenzy, the kick that the device would make against her fragile arm. Now she let her whole body hang loose – her arms feeling like rubbery noodles devoid of bone structure. The stabbing pain of a broken shoulder bone ripped through her. But through her own impending demise, she had a head clear enough to focus on Jespar lying in a pool of blood by the window. The blood belonged to him.

She crawled through a blanket of agony towards his inert form.

She looked first on him in a weary wash of grim sorrow. Then, seeing his eye wink at her through tears and pulsing bruises, she felt her body command her to take him in her arms.

"N-nice shot...Chief," he said.

She felt his hair come away in her hands. She forced herself to smile down at him.

Together, they looked out towards the rising sun of a new day from the top of the Iron Forest's tallest tree.

Rain-Born could feel the wind on her face. She did not know how – and yet she knew that her friend she still held so tightly in her arms felt it playing across his face too. The wind gradually painted the sky full of ochre plumes and sheets of crystal, strange designs in rushing gold and red. High and warm, it broke against the city and their tower with fountains of dust, thrown by the shadow of the stretching crimson sun.

"Heh," Jespar scoffed suddenly. "When you look at it...like this...it really was a...beautiful world...that we killed..."

She could feel the fading warmth of his body against her. Momentarily, she lowered a curtain of forgetfulness across her vision. She wished this was nothing more than the most lucid dream, but time refused to stand still for her. She closed her eyes and inhaled darkness – starless, tearless. Once she had feared that same darkness that awaited her in her dreams. Now, she looked into the void and felt for his paw, his touch, his small heartbeats coming slower and slower under her hand.

Then she felt something wet and sloppy smear itself across her cheek.

She looked down at his smiling face, his tongue still lolling out and panting.

"Never...did that," he said. "Guess I'm a...dumb dog...after all."

She felt him take a sharp intake of breath, and then release it with a heavy sigh. It was not much, but his final smile had been more than just a jovial display of his old humor – it had been a secret he'd hidden from her for so long. In the wrinkles under his eyes, and his final act of animal simplicity, he had given her something he had never given a single being on this earth. She saw the base joy in his eyes as his head turned away from her, and those tiny eyes slowly rolled back into his forehead. He felt like a great weight had been lifted from him, and his body sagged for one final time in her arms before he lay still, his tail giving one tiny twitch before he fell away into the deep dark of the dawn that never comes.

The last star in the sky finally faded away in the morning sun – a single tear wept for a warrior departed.

She stayed with him in her arms, hearing nothing, seeing only his inert body and lifeless face. She pinched his nose between her thumb and forefinger. She rustled the fur on his belly like he'd so enjoyed. She cuddled him close to her and heaved a small, almost imperceptible cry into his back. But nothing she did would force him to draw breath again. She knew this. She knew that, after all, she was only human. But there was still a child within her who would not look upon the calamity of her greatest fears being realized. She knew The Deadlands to be a place of cruelty. She had seen it. She had doled out death herself.