Harvest
by Noah Isherwood
His sword is a sword no more, but a scythe.
He rises and washes, dresses and feeds, busies himself with the toil of stone and flesh. The sharp scent of decay hangs in his nose, even as he tends beds of nasturtium and violet, refracted through bitter ages in the very meat of his sinuses. Iron and ammonia, vinegar of the dead and dying, they clog his tongueless mouth through hot hours and into the tepid night.
Why did he go? It cannot have been glory that called him, for those that would have feted him were driven from the earth by his own hand. Nor wealth, for he yet strangled his fodder from the dust of dry crevices and heaps of ruined soil, meager feasts of creeping things and sour roots. Love and hate were the only evident motives, for an indifferent man at war is another monster entirely. Yes, love and hate, hate and love, twinned horseman and heartstring, they had driven him to kill for the first time. But the last will be different, if ever it comes.
She was known to him before She learned to wield the power of blood, but it is unlikely She knew him. It cannot be told either way. He served Her once in the halls of his youth, when his father bent the knee to Her compelling cause, a cause not yet tested. Her stern grace, Her raven hair and quarry-deep eyes, they held him in thrall.
When it came time to prosecute Her hopeless war, he led the levee of men that was sent, and did so with the tender heart of a poet, not a rebel. Her promises were on his lips and his deeds were benedictions of Her grace, vicious and woeful in their sincerity. He bore witness to the death of his house one man at a time, was callous to their anguished howls, which petered out as the months drug on.
Breathing seemed a privilege in those wan, red days, and yet, by night, wrapped in damp canvas under the roar of shells, he quivered with loathing to feel the weight of his own hide on his bones. All his pasts were forgotten to the growl of the war machines and the screech of eviscerated horses. Still, he loved Her, in spite of her grueling campaign.
Word came from on high that the final battle had begun in the dark hours, and who could deny it? The living were torn from their rest by a thunderous rending of worlds, and the dead rose in the wastes, baying like hounds. Under a bruised morning sky, fell heralds whispered that She had need of him, and he heeded Her word even as his comrades quailed in their ditches.
He rode to the appointed place, and waiting atop that grim tor was She, naked as the dawn and seated on the piled pelts of her enemies. If She knew him, She did not show it, but then, he was just one of the drab, haunted throng that had answered Her ultimate call. 39 was their number and their names are forgotten.
“Lakes of blood shall you spill,” She crooned to them, weaving an incantation. “The ravens of hell will feed at your very hands and devils will bear your arms as squires.”
And it was so.
Hidden trumpets shook the stones of the hill and rang in the heads of the troop he had joined. Veils were torn from between the points of the compass, between blood and sky, and new battlefields were opened. The 39 were transformed, renewed with an eerie benediction from below the foundations of the hills. He carried a new blade, forged in the pit for some penultimate era long since passed, and it sang in his hand.
He fought for a fortnight or more without sleep, far outstripping his comrades on their purgatorial careen through ditches of bile and clouds of flies. Red was his flesh, sticky with the juices of a thousand martyred legionnaires, and yet, Her enemy eluded him.
Their charge was plain: the Tyrant’s head, or an escort to his bared neck, ready for Her to unseam. He had come close twice, but not close enough. And still, the soon-to-be-dead came to meet him. Neither hunger nor thirst could compel him, only the weary chain of his duty, minded by a score of gibbering ghouls. He chased the Tyrant over land and through the places of spirits, even as She consolidated Her victory over routed enemy regulars in their trenches and towers.
At last, he cornered the enemy of his goddess at the cost of a hundred young princes of the pit, pressing him into a gorge of scorched birch and ashen granite. The Tyrant fell to his knees.
“Mercy,” he croaked.
Our man had long since gnawed off his tongue, but at any rate could think of no appropriate response in any language of men or beasts. Off came the head with a gristly slice and gout of gore.
The ever-watching heralds carried the news of it to Her and She met him there in the smoldering vale, reclining on a litter borne by a dozen giants. When She saw his dripping prize, She laughed a high, cruel laugh.
“Cast him to the dogs!” She cried, and it was done. Shreds of Tyrant were spread over an acre of ground by her hounds, seeding the woeful muck beneath the dancing feet of her mad courtiers.
“What shall We give you, you who has sealed Our great victory?” She asked him.
Voiceless, he had no request beyond what the miming of mangled hands could tell. At a loss, he gestured to the razed expanse over which they looked, and She smiled.
“You are released, and your bounty is the care of Our victory field, wrought by your hands in the flesh of the dead. May it be so forever.”
In a moment, his blade was twisted into a sickle, bent for reaping crops unimaginable in that land of bones. Her entourage rode on to the care of Her new realm, and he never heard Her subtle voice again save for fevered dreams.
It is a quiet field he tends, shaded by the dark leaves of forsaken trees. From the blood-drenched ground before his stone hovel a new crop rises steadily, and each day he mows it back. The whistle of the sickle cuts short the whispers of the crimson weeds, flowers sprung from dog-bitten Tyrant’s flesh.
“Mercy,” the flowers moan, but there is none to be had from the reaper.
Noah Isherwood is an aspiring scavenger whose speculative fiction appears or is forthcoming in HAD, Uncharted, Penumbric, and Bewildering Stories. You can find him several places at once, but most reliably @nershwood.bsky.social.
COLD SIGNAL 