When Josep was a young man and lay awake at night beneath the folded velvet sky, he thought of waging war, sabatons heavy with mud and blade slick with life. 

 

“Ser Josep the Just,” he fancied aloud to himself, sleepy thoughts full of thrusts and parries and helpless damsels cowering at the sight of fearsome beasts. At first light, he would be halfway to the bluewheat fields, sickle on his hip and sieve dangling from unmotivated fingertips. But at duskfall?

 

The moon knighted him at duskfall. 

 

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War with another continent broke out as Josep reached his third decade. He could not place his finger on the map where the tides broke on the enemy’s shores, but he easily found his way to the arrayer and placed his name among the fyrd. Pride swelled in his chest to see Josep of Kiralt beneath a lord’s insignia. He imagined the colors streaming behind him on a cape as he galloped across a battlefield. This was everything he had dreamed of in his lifetime.

 

When the call came to leave the village, he tucked his few belongings into a threadbare sack. As he did, she limped to the threshold, twisted fingers untangling the knot that held her bluewheat talisman on the handle of her cane. Her only child brushed the wisps of white hair from her brow before he pressed his lips to it. His mother pushed her talisman into his palm, her voice low and thin as she muttered prayers under her breath.

 

Josep did not look back at the old woman in the doorway as he crossed the village square to join the regiment. He felt it best to make a clean cut. Outfitted with an oversized gambeson and an undersized longsword, Josep trudged in formation away from Kiralt, fronds of bluewheat waving farewell to their keeper. 

 

His dreams as a young man always began after his knighting. His soul was woefully unprepared for the horrors of military training. Hands worn by the grip of a sickle had callouses in all of the wrong places for the hilt of a sword. Arms accustomed to grain in a sieve struggled with the weight of a buckler. Thoughts shaped by a storybook understanding of battle failed to manifest in thrusts and parries. 

 

The men he trained with were not kind to those who could not tell the pommel from the point. It was not long before more capable warriors singled him out to hone their own blades against something that could barely strike back. Josep spent more time in infirmary beds than in drills, staring up at the harsh sun and swallowing regret. His hopes of becoming a knight of the continent felt farther away there in the military camp than they ever had on his straw mattress back in Kiralt.

 

After several weeks, a captain took pity on the farmer and assigned him to duties away from the battlefield. Josep scrubbed pans and inventoried perishables for the regiment’s scullery. He mended pinnets, emptied pails, and oiled pauldrons.

 

In the moments between cleaning and counting, Josep climbed the ramparts and surveyed the grounds. Sad eyes traced the path of muddy steps, the arc of drying blood from a swung blade. The fibers of his heart thrummed with the ache of the unattainable, but Josep stood tall atop the rampart until the sun dipped towards the horizon. 

 

Slowly, he would ease his way back down between the trees, hiding his shame beneath the duskfall. 

 

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Josep sat unnoticed among warriors as they ate the purple potatoes he’d counted, which had been boiled in the pans he’d washed. He listened to their shared stories of battle, grimacing into his mug of watered-down ale as they regaled one another with the victories of each day. Josep also heard the failures; quieter, but more common. A ranger disappearing here, a forward line shrinking there. 

 

Those with gilded placards and flowing capes spent far less time in the mess hall, but Josep encountered them often enough at requisition and in the armory to recognize them by more than just their arms. Ser Feshen of Rhwall seemed to have aged a decade in mere days. Lord Berk of the Fens lost his heir in a skirmish along the Alltren River. Their accounts of the war were raw and brutal. And it was here, among the knights, that Josep first learned of the monster. 

 

Those who lived to tell the tales swore that it appeared out of thin air in the middle of battlefields, shredding warriors with a single swipe of its razorclaws and feasting on the scattered remains. 

 

“A nightmare,” they claimed, eyes vacant. 

 

There one terrifying moment, gone the next.

 

The vestiges of dynasties left in its wake.

 

No two recollections held the same details. Over time, Josep pieced enough stories together to determine that the beast was a weapon of the enemy from the south. A creature larger than a wagon, enveloped in darkness, coated in bloodlust. No army was a match for death incarnate. Regiments returned thinner and thinner. Fear drove the sword desperate. 

 

Messengers drew lines in sand closer to the camp than ever before. The enemy was encroaching. Soon, a heavy curfew hung over the camp like a guillotine. If one preferred their head, they did not venture far after duskfall.

 

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Southerners invaded the camp when the moon hung low in the sky. 

 

Slowly, the enemy prowled between canopies. Blades slid along relaxed necks and slack wrists, silent and final. As the cloaked warriors moved beneath the softening night, they discarded their torches against the fabrics of tents they did not enter.

 

By the time the first barracks erupted in flame, the Southerners had disappeared beyond the ramparts.

 

All but one. 

 

Acrid smoke curled along the packed dirt of the barracks. When it finally roused Josep, half of his bunkmates were scrambling into chain and plate, fastenings and straps still loose as the Northern warriors surged out through the tent flaps. Josep stumbled to his feet, fingers grasping beneath his thin pillow for the bluewheat talisman.

 

Screams echoed through the darkness beyond the tent, dying as abruptly as they began. A deep rumble shook his bones, sending shivers along the ground beneath him. Josep watched in horror as the edges of the barracks caught fire, flame sneaking along seams and devouring the fabric. A silhouette engulfed the front of the tent, menacing by sheer size alone. Josep tried to swallow, choking on the thick smoke billowing around him.

 

A snout pushed through the charred tent flaps, nostrils flaring with such force that sheets and pillows tumbled from nearby cots. Palpable heat radiated from the nightmare creature’s flesh. Josep made himself small against the center pole, willing his eyes to remain open lest death find him blind with cowardice. He felt the pole begin to splinter and crack behind him, losing integrity beneath the heat pouring into the space and the dead weight of the crumbling canopy. 

 

He clutched the bluewheat to his chest, palms slick. Something cold snaked up Josep’s spine, and he knew that the camp must be ravaged. It was just him and the nightmare now. 

 

The monster tilted its nose, sniffing twice. A rumble echoed again, softer around the edges. 

 

Longing, Josep wondered underneath the fear spreading along his body. That felt like longing.

 

That was an ache that Josep knew all too well. 

 

Something urged him to step forward. Before his head could intervene, his heart pulled him toward the beast.

 

Josep picked his way along the split earth, pausing several strides from the snout hovering in the opening of the barracks. At this distance, its fur shimmered in the light cast by the smoldering tent. His own skin began to stretch tight and blister against the heat emanating from the monster.

 

The monster released a heavy breath, the exhale thick with the smell of sulfur. His feet moved of their own accord, carrying Josep closer to the maw of the beast. As he approached, Josep’s wary gaze traced the length of the snout, following it up into the waking sky that now stretched above.

 

Two eyes stared back at Josep, a deep violet like the horizon at duskfall. He blinked rapidly, surprised by the sincerity behind the expression carved into the monster’s brow. It reminded him of the barn cats back home. How they would twist and turn against his legs when he held something they wanted. 

 

Something they wanted. He shook his head. Could it be?

 

Josep kept his eyes trained on the beast, on the expanse of muscle rippling beneath the fur of the paw that emerged from the shadows. His quivering fingers lifted the dried bluewheat from where he had buried it against his tunic. He waved the flaking sprigs through the clouds of smoke.

 

He made an offering to death. 

 

And death purred. 

 

The nightmare from the southern continent lowered itself to the ground in front of Josep, plumes of ash lifting like a curtain where it lay among the remains of the barracks tent. It narrowed its eyes at the farmer, watching him intently. The power behind the monster’s observation was unnerving, and Josep found himself kneeling among the ash as well. 

 

Violet eyes flicked towards the bundle of bluewheat, then back at Josep. 

 

Josep hesitated. With a flash of brilliant claws against the barren ground, the monster extended a murderous paw forward through the ash. Shuddering, Josep tossed the talisman across the space.

 

A long, sharp point pinned the bundle to the dirt. The monster dipped its head, fur shining in the morning’s first light, and sniffed the bluewheat. 

 

Contented hums reverberated along the ground between Josep and the beast as it rubbed against the bundle. The beast squeezed its eyes shut, gently nipping the bluewheat between teeth longer than Josep’s arm and flopping onto its side. Josep watched it closely, amazed at how normal it seemed for a monster to find joy in something so simple.

 

The nightmare rolled onto its back, the thin fur of its belly stretched out in the warmth of the rising sun. Pleasure seeped from the creature, a moment of otherworldly balance where death was domesticated. 

 

It was then that Josep struck, the broken tent center pole thrust deep into the monster’s gut. It howled, leaping to its feet, claws fully unsheathed, but the momentum of its turn ripped the pole from one side of its body to the other. Black blood poured onto the ash beneath its paws. 

 

Violet eyes landed on Josep, something akin to betrayal spreading across the pupils as they glazed over. The beast’s body quivered and collapsed. He had to look away, his mind and his heart at war with one another. A low, weak keening from the creature echoed in Josep’s soul. 

 

Death did not move again. 

 

When the King’s retinue arrived at the destroyed camp later that day, they found Josep of Kiralt kneeling in a rock garden. The farmer had spent the morning building cairns for any of the fallen he could pull from the rubble. 

 

It had taken the entire afternoon to collect enough stones to bury the monster. As the sun stretched toward the horizon, Josep knelt before its grave and placed the bluewheat talisman among the rocks.

 

It was here the King’s men found him. 

 

Ser Josep the Callous was knighted at duskfall.

 

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