Deus Necros

“I’m not asking you to protect me,” Redd said, his voice rough around the edges as though wearied by repetition, by nights like these. He leaned back slowly, bones shifting with quiet aches beneath his bruised skin. The bowl of soup in his lap had cooled, steam thinning into the crisp night air, curling briefly before it was swallowed by the dark. “I’m asking you to let me walk in the same direction. You lot go to Tulmud. I need to disappear. That’s it.”

The campfire crackled, a knot in the wood splitting with a soft pop. The others sat in a loose circle around it, the flames flickering across tired faces and half-filled bowls. The scent of rabbit stew mingled with smoke and forest damp.

Timur shifted slightly where he sat, one leg tucked beneath him, the other resting against a flat stone still warm from sunlight long gone. He raised a brow, not in amusement but in a tired kind of challenge. “You make it sound easy.”

Redd didn’t even flinch. He gestured lazily with his spoon, a slow arc of tired defiance. “It is easy,” he said, letting the metal point toward Timur with casual weight. “You walk, I walk, we share fire and rations. I don’t bite, I don’t steal…” he paused, the corner of his mouth twitching, “well, not anymore. Hell, you’ve already seen my worst side. Naked, beaten, half-dead, and yelling at invisible ghosts. It doesn’t get uglier than that.”

His words tried for levity, but there was something hollow in the space they left behind.

Robin, half-reclined against the rear wheel of the carriage, adjusted the tilt of his hood with a dry flick of the wrist. His arms were crossed, boots kicked out toward the fire, but the way his fingers tensed against his forearms betrayed how awake he really was.

“You forgot the part where you’re carrying a Skinwalker,” he said. The words came without heat, but not without judgment. “Which makes you a giant glowing beacon for half the cursed forest.”

The silence that followed wasn’t heavy, but it settled. It curved around the fire and pressed into the gaps between flickering light and the dark of the underbrush beyond.

Redd exhaled, slowly, through his nose. He wiped his mouth with the side of his sleeve, more from ritual than need, then let his gaze pass across the faces before him. One by one. “Stop calling her that,” he said. His tone didn’t rise. It didn’t have to. “She is my sister.”

The spoon in his hand trembled slightly before he set it down atop his bowl.

“You think I chose this?” he continued. “You think this was part of my life plan?” His voice was steadier now, quieter. It didn’t try to command them. It just laid itself bare. “Hey, let’s grow up poor and have our sister kidnapped by a warlock and turned to a creature of the dark? I didn’t get a choice.”

He paused, not to measure them, but to give space to the memory. To the anger underneath it.

“But I am offering you one.”

Across the fire, Ludwig watched. He didn’t interrupt. Didn’t try to defuse the tension. The moment had weight, and Ludwig had grown careful with moments like that. His eyes moved between Redd and the others, and though his expression didn’t change, the thought crossed his mind like a whisper on cold wind:

‘Oh, so that’s how that… happened.’

None of them had known. He could tell by the way Melisande’s hands slowed against her bowl, how Gorak had looked off toward the trees, as if suddenly interested in the moonlight hitting the moss. The revelation hung in the air, raw and fragile.

Redd hadn’t dramatized it. Hadn’t begged. And maybe that was what made it land.

Ludwig leaned forward slightly, elbows to knees, then spoke for the first time since Redd had begun. “You’re offering us a guide,” he said. “A walking headache with a decent regeneration stat and the attention of everyone we’re trying to avoid.”

There was no cruelty in the words. Only clarity.

“Trust me, bud,” Ludwig continued, “I don’t like the Holy Order as much as the next person. But you’re making it hard to help you. With the Holy Order being the only thing after you, maybe we could deal with it. But if another one of those apostles comes looking…”

He stopped there, the firelight catching faintly on the hilt at his hip.

“Trust me. There aren’t enough words in a dictionary for me to convince yet another to let us go free again. Once was miracle enough. I know I’m not strong enough to make them leave a second time.”

For a long moment, Redd didn’t reply. The shadows under his eyes deepened. Then, he smiled. Tired, tilted, sardonic, but this time with the glimmer of sincerity behind it.

“The guide part, I agree with,” he said, raising both hands slightly in mock surrender. “I know the back roads, the checkpoints, who takes bribes and who prays too hard. I’m not deadweight. I’m leverage.”

He scratched absently at his jaw, eyes wandering toward the fire’s edge. “The other part?” he added, more quietly. “I have no idea why they’re after me. I’m just some random guy, man.” He breathed out through his nose. “So please… help a brother out.”

Timur met Redd’s gaze, his fingers drumming once on the sheath at his side. Then he asked, voice low, “And if we say no?”

Redd shrugged with exaggerated grace, like a merchant brushing off a poor deal. “Then at least let me walk behind you at a very respectful distance,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “And hope I don’t die. Or come close to it…Again.”

Gorak stretched, the motion deliberate and slow. The big man rolled his shoulders until his bones cracked, then settled back into place with a low grunt. “He’s got spirit,” he muttered. “I like him.”

Robin scoffed. “I don’t,” he said, his voice dry as old parchment, “but whatever. If he slows us down, I’ll shoot him in the leg and leave him to his ghost sister. At least he’ll have company.”

Redd tilted his head toward Robin, lifted his spoon in a lazy toast, and smiled. “Noted,” he said. “Guess I’m in, then.”

Ludwig didn’t say anything. But he didn’t say no.

The quiet that followed was its own kind of agreement.