When Souls Are Lost

      Silently gasping for breath, Father Cendric slogged to a halt in the bitingly cold muck. His mantle and cassock hung from his shoulders in soppy, muddy tatters, and he was covered from head to toe in rank bog mud from the many times he'd tripped over submerged roots during his escape. He'd been running for a long time. Now, he leaned heavily against a gnarled willow and stared cautiously through the damp, boggy night air at the sobbing old woman.
      What was she doing out here in the middle of this wretched bog? Perhaps the crazed Northman had kidnapped her too. Or perhaps she was simply lost. Even the natives of these parts were known to lose their way in this horrible quagmire.
      Oh, how he hated this place! It was filthy and ugly, and everywhere, the cries of lurking beasts filled the oppressive air with screams from the Tormented. If the Seven Saints and the One God had made the world in perfect, orderly harmony, then the bog was a blight upon that perfection where the Dark One's chaos reined.
      In the clearing, the willows loomed over the old woman as though ready to snatch her up and rend her limb from limb. The soggy glade they formed was roughly circular, and roofed with layers of thick, dark moss and vines; save for a single opening that allowed a pale shaft of moonlight to shine down through. The old woman sat cross-legged in that eerie glow. Her long, snarled hair hung down her back like moss from the treelimbs, and her shoulders thrust up beneath her threadbare shawl like two knobby boles. Her back was to him, so he couldn't tell if he knew her. Not, truth be told, that he would have otherwise. He knew few of the people in his Bho Càthar parish. Had made a point not to. In light of recent events, however, perhaps that hadn't been such a wise decision.
      "Can't take me sweetie," she crooned. A child slumped against her shoulder, its scraggled head the only part visible to him as she rocked it back and forth. "Oh, won't let him take me sweetie. Can't, can't, can't."
      So perhaps the Northman had kidnapped her after all.
      Stricken to his heart by her distress, Father Cendric was overcome with sudden strength and vigor. The pounding racket in his skull subsided, and feeling returned to his fatigue-numb limbs. He took it for a true blessing from the Saints and limped from behind the tree into the clearing.
      "St. Cuthbert shall protect us, mistress."
      The old woman straightened, though surprisingly showed no signs of alarm at having a stranger's voice suddenly at her back.
      "Give me yer word, ye do?" she said without looking at him.
      "Yes I do. Perhaps together all three of us can find a way out of this wretched place."
      She turned then. "But I don't want to leave me home, dearie."
      "Saints preserve me!" Father Cendric flung himself backwards, slamming into the unyielding trunk of a massive willow. Its treacherous roots snared his feet in deep, shadowed holes, trapping him like a hare in a wire.
      The hag snarled. Sharp, jagged teeth flashed in the moonlight like a wolf's. Almost tenderly she laid the child's body down on the turf, then stood and capered towards him, arms akimbo. Her horrid corpse's face twisted into a cackle, a rigid mask of white and purple-black splotches.
      "Don't want to leave me home, priestie!"
      "Get back, fiend!" Father Cendric yanked his small, silver hammer-cross of Cuthbert free of his cassock and thrust it at her. "Get back, abomination of Hell!"

by Fred Wellner © 1998. All rights reserved.

      But instead of cringing in righteous fear, the hag surged forward and snatched the cross in her long, pale fingers, crushing Father Cendric's hand along with it. He tried to jerk himself free, but the hag held him in an iron grip.
      "Saints protect my soul! Oh, Saints protect my soul from this undead spawn of Hell!"
      The hag's harsh cackle snapped off in a clack of splintered teeth. She drew close, her hot breath warm and fetid on his cheek, and he gagged on the stench of bog mud and spoiled meat.
      "Not dead, priestie," she cooed in his ear. "Not dead. And no spawn of the Hell. Alive like you. Creature of the God, I be. Wretched creature of the God, priestie, like you."
      "No! You lie! Begone, I say! Return to the Prince of Lies that created you! I command it."
      "Oh why, priestie? Why has the God given me such hunger? Such a wretched hunger, priestie. Why?"
      The word hunger clawed through Father Cendric as if the hag had raked him with her long, cracked fingernails. He fought for air, his attention suddenly drawn as though by the will of Cuthbert to the still form in the clearing. To the boy -- it was a boy -- lying deathly pale in the bog moon's eerie glow, his lower half completely obscured in a gauzy shroud of mist.
      "What have you done to him?"
      The hag snarled and leapt backwards as though scalded by his touch. Free of her crushing grip, Father Cendric released his hold on the twisted remains of the cross, which tugged open a gash in his palm as it fell. The hag's rigored brow contorted with hatred.
      "He brought ye! Brought ye to take me sweet, didn't he!"
      "What? I...Yes! The God. The God has brought me here to save this boy from you. You cannot deny his will! By the holy Seven Saints, I command you to relinquish him to me and leave us!"
      "Now who lies, priestie?! Hmmm? Now who lies! The God made me. The God gave me this wretched, wretched hunger. Why send his priestie to take it away? Why deny it? I know who brought ye. I know why he brought ye!" The hag launched herself at him. "Can't take me sweetie!"
      Father Cendric shrank back against the willow, unable even to utter a prayer to the Saints; only seeing her iron nails driving for his throat. And the surprisingly distinct anguish on her face.
      The steely blue arc of a warhammer struck the hag in mid-flight with a bone-jarring crunch that snapped her up backwards and sent her flying across the clearing. Screaming and flailing, she slammed into a willow and slumped to the ground like a meal sack.
      For what seemed long moments afterwards, Father Cendric simply stared at the hag, his heart still racing, still seeing the flash of her long claws driving for his throat. It was stunning, that sudden rescue. And then, at last, there came a flood of relief that made him downright giddy, and he wanted to shout his praise to the Saints.
      But before he could even clasp his hands together in prayer, his heart thunked into the cold pit of his belly as the hag shook her head and stumbled up to her feet.
      Showing no physical signs of injury at all, she leapt to the boy's body and snatched its arm.
      "Can't have me sweetie!" she hissed. And if he'd ever had any doubts about the Hellish nature of this place, they were banished forever when he caught a glimpse of the boy's corpse as she dragged it into the night. Free of its misty shroud, he saw that it was gone from the waist down, the chest cavity nothing but an empty hollow.
      The clearing swam, and Father Cendric reached a shaky hand up to grip the twisted remnants of his cross.
      "Saint Cuthbert preserve me."
      A loud belch sounded from his forgotten rescuer, and, with sudden suspicion that did nothing to ease the churning in his bowels, he turned in that direction.
      Eyelids drooping in a stupor, the Northman swayed several times before at last leaning heavily against his planted warhammer.
      "Cuthbert be damned," he slurred.
      Father Cendric feinted.

      He woke to a hard shove and a blast of bitter stench up his nose.
      "Wake!"
      The steady throb of St. Cuthbert's hammer pounded his skull, and that growl shredded it into a thousand tiny thorns that jabbed his eyes. As a result, it was with some effort that he finally opened them -- effort, and another blast of that bitter stench.
      "I'm awake, by the Saints! Leave off!" He tried to bat away the shadow-hands that held the offensive leaf under his nose, but the Northman had bound his arms and legs, so the gesture was useless. "I'm awake, I said! Get that thing away from me!"
      The Northman grunted, disgorging a waft of rank, mead-smelling breath, then reached into a leather pouch at his belt and retrieved a dark-colored root that he shoved at Father Cendric's mouth.
      "Chew."
      "No! Get it away from me! What do you want?!" He might have screamed more, but his head suddenly felt as if the hag had indeed speared her claws up through his eyes into his skull.
      He groaned. A hand lifted his head up by his tonsured hair. A pulpy root tasting of bog mud slipped past his lips. Another hand took hold of his chin and worked his jaw up and down. After an initial weak struggle, he realized the root tasted rather sweet and not altogether unpleasant. After a while more the pain diminished, thank the Holy Saints, and he could chew the root on his own. Even lift his head.
      "Feel better now."
      "Thank you," he said, not knowing if that had been a question or a command. The Northman belched again in response, staggered up from his crouch, and plodded to the center of the clearing; where he plopped down on the spongy peat and slouched against the shaft of his planted warhammer. His long shaggy hair and bristling beard; the thick pelts he wore as clothes, rising and falling with each deep breath; all made him appear more bear than man. And as dangerous and unpredictable.
      A blow and stomp on Father Cendric's left drew his attention to the two horses tethered inside the ring of willows. The larger horse was saddled and adorned in what he imagined to be the Northern way: with furs and bells and feathers tied in the animal's mane and tail. The second was the packhorse upon which he'd awakened earlier in the evening; awakened face to face with the wolf's carcass that even now draped over the placid animal's back. Its glazed eyes were full of a horrid menace, it's muzzle stiffened in a vicious snarl. Presented with that sight alone, he'd cried out for the Saint's protection, pitched from the horse's back, and run. And had kept right on running until he'd come upon this clearing and the hag.
      One of the Northman's back-breaking arms swung around and put what Father Cendric assumed was a plug of the sweet tasting root into his mouth.
      "You make him live, Fader," the Northman growled.
      Which was exactly what the drunken barbarian had been shouting when he'd burst into Father Cendric's drafty church shortly after vespers and clubbed him over the head with a heavy wooden flagon.
      Father Cendric glanced up again at the dead wolf, at the glazed eyes that stared menacingly down at him, at the lolling tongue. He shuddered.
      "I...I can't. It would be sacrilegious. And St. Cuthbert said unto them: 'Thou shalt watch over all beasts great and small, but only thee, who the One God has fashioned in His image shall rise again unto His Glory.'
      The Northman slumped to his hands and knees and crawled toward Father Cendric, dragging the warhammer along behind him. Bathed in the pale moonlight, his face seemed much like the hag's: deathly white, and with the same anguish storming his brow.
      "You not understand, Fader. My fault he die, not his. Mine."
      Father Cendric tried not to gag on the blast of warm, vomit-smelling breath. "I'm sorry to hear that. Truly I am."
      The Northman grunted and shoved himself to his feet, then shambled toward the packhorse.
      "I come from homeland with invaders four years ago to get riches. To win glory."
      Father Cendric stared at the man's hulking back, taken unaware by this sudden change of topic. What was that supposed to mean? To win glory. Was that the man's plan, then? To kidnap a priest of the Holy Saints and take him back to Daängard so he might reclaim his glory?
      "I'm no good to you, Northman. My superiors won't pay a stitch of coin for me. I was banished to this desolate wilderness because I displeased them." Oh, he'd done more than displease them. He'd infuriated the Archbishop by pointing out several mistakes during the Mass for Saint Llwylin. His own superior, the Bishop of Ashbourne, had been similarly unable to accept constructive criticism. Together, the two had conspired to send Father Cendric to his wretched Bho Càthar parish in the wilds above the Dale. "Won't be worth much at all..."
      The barbarian said nothing, only reached up and began to pet the wolf's lolling head.
      "Northman, did you --"
      "Glory, phah!" He spat to one side. "No glory here. Chieftains tell of riches and wealth...No glory here. Only death. Only murder and lusting of women. Not make me proud. Make me sick." He pounded his chest with a fist. "Here sick. Stench of blood fill my nose. Never get rid of it...I run away from blood. Wander long time. End up in highlands." He made a distracted motion toward what Father Cendric assumed was the north, where the bog bordered rugged, snow-swept mountains. "He find me there. Made friends. He have no family, like me. Living on his own. Not easy at first, oh no...He not trust man from north any more than you, Fader."
      Father Cendric glanced at the wolf. It didn't make any sense. How odd to speak of the beast as if it had had a personality. All this trouble for a pet?
      The Northman continued to stroke its head and back. "We long time friends after that. Travel this area around the loch. Trade with Nè-picts in highlands. Not easy life, but good. Better than I left. But things change here. Things change last fall when we come down from highlands for winter. Strange creatures in forest now."
      It was true, what he said about the strange creatures. As much as Father Cendric despised the wilderness surrounding Loch Tay, it had always been a relatively safe place. Granted, there were always dangers: hungry beasts, or getting lost, or even sinking into the bog. But such dangers had been natural. This past Fall, however, all that had changed. Travelers passing through Bho Càthar to the Dale had spoken, like this Northman, of strange creatures in the woods. Vile, godless faeries of the Unseelie Court. Creatures of the Dark One, no matter that the hag professed otherwise.
      "Strange creatures like the hag," he said.
      "Like hag," the Northman growled deep in his throat, ragged with sorrow. He hefted a large sack off the packhorse and tossed it down in front of Father Cendric. It's contents clanked of metal. "Only she not come out of...ah, how you say...hibernation till after winter snow start to melt. We not know. I leave him alone. But I not like strange silence in bog and come back. She already kill him. I beat her away. Save body. My fault, Fader. My fault." He hauled on the bottom of the sack, dumping out onto the soggy ground what Father Cendric instantly recognized as altar relics from his church.
      "Now, you make him live, Fader."
      At any other time, Father Cendric would have been incensed by that theft of his chapel's most holiest of objects, would have been outraged to see the painstakingly polished vessels cast onto the muddy turf. But it was hard to get angry when the Northman's guilt was such a palpable presence in the thick, bog air.
      Which also made it that much harder to say, "You don't understand. I've been trying to tell you. Not only would it be sacrilegious, but the Saints would never grant me --"
      The Northman yanked an antler-handled hunting knife from his belt and advanced.
      Father Cendric shrank back against the willow. "I can't! If I could... You must believe me...It's sacrilegious!" But the Northman kept right on coming, and Father Cendric squeezed his eyes shut. "By the Saints, it's only a wolf!"
      Which must have given the Northman pause, because the rake of cold steel across his throat was not immediately forthcoming.
      "Not wolf, Fader. Wolf is pet. I bring you for boy. Evan."
      Father Cendric's eyes flew open of their own accord just as the Northman sliced through the bindings on his ankles.
      "Boy..." By the God! It couldn't be true!
      "Ah, but he safe, priest. I keep him safe. Put him in grave up on knoll and say prayer." He waved to the left side of the soggy glen near the horses, where the ground canted abruptly up into the mist and dark. Next, he cut the rope around Father Cendric's wrists, then gabbed a chalice from the pile of altar relics and held it out. "Now, you make ready. I go get Evan and then you make him live."
      "But --"
      "No time for argue! You make him live! My fault he dead, not his. Mine!"
      "But -- the boy -- don't you remember? When you saved me from the hag...I should have pieced it together, but I was too addle-witted from the blow to my head. I thought he was one of the local boys...I thought you saw!"
      The Northman grunted. "I not in condition to see much then, Fader."
      "By the God, man! She had the boy's corpse!" And then, with sudden gruesome understanding. "She was eating it!!"
      It was as if he'd dealt his own hammerblow to the bearish Northman, such was the way the man lurched up from his crouch. Such was the sudden look of anguish on his face. The chalice slipped from his fingers.
      "No. I say prayer."
      "It doesn't work that way. I'm sure you meant well, but only a priest...It wasn't holy ground."
      "I say prayer!!"
      "He wasn't shriven! The ground wasn't sanctified! I'm sorry, but it couldn't have stopped her!"
      The Northman roared and kicked the pile of artifacts, pyxs and chalices and censers clattering against the willows, then leapt from the clearing and charged up the knoll.
      "Wait! Don't leave me!"
      Father Cendric shot up from the ground and started to follow, but hesitated as he caught sight of the warhammer lying discarded beneath a silver chalice. With the distinct feeling of the bog closing in around him, he snatched up the weapon, staggered momentarily with its deceptive weight, then raced up after the Northman.
      A grave of peat and sod had been built at the top of the knoll. The Northman knelt beside it, ripping clumps of mud and turf from the mound and flinging them into the night. "I say prayer! I say prayer!"
      But even before Father Cendric huffed to the top, he could see the grave was empty. He ventured a hand on the Northman's shoulder.
      "He's gone. There's nothing you could have done. It's not your fault." His palm began to throb, the one that the hag had bent around his cross. "Perhaps there was nothing even a priest could've done. She touched my hammer without being harmed. Even my prayers might not have kept her away."
      The Northman buried his face in his muddy hands. His shoulders quaked with sobs.
      "He lost then."
      More than lost. Without a body to bless, Father Cendric couldn't even assure that the boy's soul would pass on to heaven. It would be trapped in limbo for all eternity. But he couldn't tell the Northman that. Wouldn't.
      "At least the hag can't trouble him any longer. He's safe from her at last."
      The Northman looked up from his hands, his face streaked with mud and tears.
      "No, Fader. Not safe. He lost. Not safe at all."
      "What are you saying? I don't understand."
      The Northman opened his mouth as if to respond, then closed it and growled in frustration.
      "How I explain..." He walked his hand on two fingers around the black pit of Evan's grave, then flopped it over on one side. "Hag kill victim, but not need flesh to survive." He wiggled the fingers on his right hand over his 'dead' left. "Death releases soul. Hag eats soul. I kill wolf so his spirit protect Evan while I find priest. Now she get them both, Fader. Now he lost."
      Father Cendric staggered and would have fallen but for support from the planted warhammer. Such an abomination let loose in this wretched place! Suddenly, his encounter with the hag came crashing in, her purple-black face screaming about her hunger, asking why the God had cursed her so. And he'd assumed that insatiable appetite to be for flesh and bone.
      His stomach churned with nausea. By the Saints! A creature that consumed the very soul, the God's most precious gift! He was going to be ill, felt his gorge rising.
      Before it could, however, an echo of deep, ferocious growls and snarling lunged up the hill at them from somewhere down below. Accompanied by a horribly familiar cackle. The Northman shot up from his crouch.
      "Wait --" Father Cendric said.
      "I kill you!" The Northman yanked his warhammer from Father Cendric's grip and barreled off down the knoll.
      His support suddenly gone, Father Cendric toppled over backwards and tumbled after, crashing through snaggy thickets of sheep laurel and leatherleaf and ferns. His head cracked against a tree trunk, and the bog and night suddenly hazed with that pain. But he fought against it and somehow staggered to his feet. Clutching his head with both hands, he stumbled into the clearing.
      The hag and Northman battled in the pale moonlight on a field strewn with shining altar relics, the barbarian's plummeting warhammer fiercest among them. A strange shadow-wolf -- the source of the snarls, and no doubt the dead wolf's spirit -- fought at the Northman's side, insubstantial mostly; save for a pair of glowing blue eyes. Instead of attacking the hag directly, however it simply snapped and growled impotently at the air. Set against the backdrop of the black bog, the entire battle seemed, aside from the screaming and bucking horses, as though it were taking place in the very heavens, St. Cuthbert himself storming against one of the Dark One's minions, newly ripped from its grave.
      But unfortunately, it wasn't taking place in the heavens, a battle between Holy and Vile. It was taking place in the earthly realm, and even as inexperienced as Father Cendric was in such matters, he knew that the Northman was going to lose.
      The hag leapt and flipped beneath the Northman's crushing blows with unnatural speed, scoring long gashes with her claws down his flanks and back and arms. Those times when the hammer did manage to connect, it was as before, momentarily stunning the hag but leaving her otherwise unharmed. And the shadow wolf, Evan's supposed protector, just lunged and snapped at ghosts in the mist.
      By the God! He had to do something! But what? His one weapon against the hag had already been proven worthless. He was utterly useless here, and that thought pained him more than his throbbing head. His vision blurred with frustrated tears, and he dropped to his knees, wrapping his hands around his ruined cross.
      "Holy Saints above, I beg of thee, grant me the strength to save this lost soul. Grant me --"
      The sudden explosion of color and light behind his eyelids made him reel from the intensity. Gasping in shock, Father Cendric fell forward onto his hands.
      The bog and everything in it had been transformed into a luminescent crowd of swirling colors and light. The Northman and the hag were gone. In their places a white blaze, pulsating with swirling eddies of red rage and purple despair, battled against a surging mass of black-green tentacles. The hag's monstrous soul lashed out at everything around her, but concentrated most of her efforts on Evan, whose soul huddled against the shimmering aura of a willow. The wolf was indeed protecting the boy after all, its steely blue hackles bunched and crackling as it snapped at any of the hag's inky tendrils that dared come close.
      Father Cendric opened his eyes, and thankfully the real world returned. For a brief moment, however, the netherworld's afterimage overlay his sight. For a brief moment, the clouds of biting insects were showers of glittering gold; the curtains of damp moss, gilded tapestries of silver and blue; and the once imposing willows were tall columns of azure marble. Instead of a black, dreary bog full of rot and death, it was a place coruscating with color.
      With life.
      It took his breath away, it was so absolutely beautiful and earth-shattering at the same time. And it contradicted everything he'd ever believed in: that the only true heavenly aspects of this world were order and law. The netherworld proved him wrong with a heavenly beauty he couldn't deny any more than the hag could, who partly lived in that realm every day. And he had no doubt, that she knew exactly what it was she destroyed. Her bitter pleas, asking him why the God had cursed her, were evidence enough of that. But also, he saw the guilt and self-loathing in her soul's black-green eddies. Which didn't make her blameless, oh no. But perhaps it made her worthy of compassion.
      Father Cendric stood, closing his eyes and returning his sight to the netherworld of souls.
      "Child," he said.
      The boy, Evan, turned to him. But it was the hag's black soul he'd addressed. Her squirming mass had no face, but somehow he knew he'd gained her attention. He held out his arms, as if to embrace her, and took a step forward.
      "I'm here to end your suffering, child."
      A thick, writhing tentacle shot out of that mass and drove for his chest, her face surfacing at the end of it like some dead carcass in a cesspool.
      "Can't have him!" she screamed. "Oh the hunger! The hunger! Can't take me sweetie!"
      Father Cendric stood his ground and flung his arms toward the heavens, and the horrid tendril with its slavering mouth and blood-red eyes slammed into his chest.
      "Cuthbert save her!"
      The impact wrenched him over at the knees. He gasped at the sudden burst of chill, bone-numbing hatred and loathing that washed over him. He fell over backwards, losing his grasp on the netherworld in a haze of agony. Gritting his teeth against the distinct pain of something gnawing away at his belly, he struggled back to his feet.
      In the physical world, the battle had nearly reached its dire conclusion. The Northman had fallen to his knees, his face red with the strain, his arms shaking. The upthrust hammer was the only thing that kept him alive as the hag relentlessly pounded him with her fists, wailing, "Can't take him! Can't take him!" with each blow. Any one of which was going to crack open the Northman's skull when they finally did connect.
      Back in the netherworld, the hag had abandoned her attack on the boy, all her tendrils forming one leech-like black mass with the singular purpose of tearing Father Cendric free of his moorings.
      He groaned and threw his head back. "In the name of the God, I absolve you of your hunger, my child! I absolve you of your sins!"
      A piercing howl shattered both physical and nether worlds, and a shower of glittering white stars shot up through his fingers into the night. The hag's thick tendril bucked and jerked and tried to pull free, but she'd lodged herself inside his soul too well and now she was trapped. Like blood sluicing through his veins, he felt her being sucked inside him, then up and out through his outstretched fingers toward the heavens. Toward redemption. She fought desperately to free herself, clawing and ripping and shredding away at his soul's innards. But the pull from above was too strong, and eventually her struggles ceased. Until at last, there was nothing left at all but a small, flailing worm of a tentacle that sputtered out of his hands in one last fizzle of light.
      A black, inky darkness, like grief, descended down upon Father Cendric then. Like a stranger, displaced, he felt his body slump to the ground, where he joined it in unconsciousness. But not before first hearing one last gentle sigh in his ears. A sigh that was not his own.

      For the second time that night, he awoke in the clearing. But this time it was to the smell of smoke instead of the Northman's pungent leaf.
      The Northman looked up from a smoldering cookfire as Father Cendric managed to sit up. Barely. His head hurt ten times worse than it had after the Northman had clubbed him.
      He groaned. "I don't suppose you have any of that root left?"
      The Northman nodded and reached into his pouch.
      Father Cendric scanned the clearing while he waited. At first, he thought the shadow wolf was gone, then caught a sparkle of glowing blue eyes in the same spot it had been before. Dawn was coming fast and, like the stars, the wolf was simply fading into the daylight. The hag's body lay bent and broken against a willow on the clearing's far side.
      "In middle of battle, she just go stiff and start screaming," the Northman said, following the direction of Father Cendric's gaze as he handed over a plug of the brown root. Father Cendric devoured it greedily. "Then, she fall to ground. Limp. I make sure she dead."
      Several times at that, from the look of it, judging by the various angles contorting the hag's body.
      "She really dead, yes?"
      Father Cendric nodded. "Released."
      "And...and Evan?"
      He closed his eyes, somewhat surprised to find that he was still linked to the netherworld. He'd assumed the Saints had granted him only a temporary look into that realm. And perhaps they had. Perhaps this continued ability was due to some residual part of the hag still left inside him. Which would also explain the warm, homey feelings that suddenly welled up inside him as he took in his boggy surroundings.
      Past the Northman's guilt-ridden soul, Evan huddled at the edge of the campsite. He no longer seemed as frightened as before, but did look somewhat bewildered. The wolf sat quietly at the boy's feet, panting.
      "Still here."
      "Lost?"
      "I'm sorry...but nothing's changed in that regard...without his body..."
      The Northman groaned and buried his head in his hands. His soul churned with red-purple bands of sorrow and rage that threatened to overwhelm him. To consume him.
      Father Cendric clenched his fists in sudden frustration. The Northman was a good man. He didn't deserve to lose everyone he'd loved. Granted, it wasn't entirely true that the boy was lost. The netherworld was not an altogether unpleasant place. But it was certainly no place for a boy. No place for anyone who'd only known the realm of the physical.
      Before he knew it, Father Cendric found himself on his feet, wearily plodding toward the packhorse.
      It was not permitted, what he was about to do. Not in any way, shape, or form. But the circumstances demanded a solution beyond what was allowed. The circumstances were as messy and convoluted as the glorious bog all around him.
      The Northman did not look up until Father Cendric had laid the wolf's carcass out on the damp sod.
      "What you do?"
      "You shouldn't lose both of them."
      The Northman sucked in a quick breath. His glistening eyes widened with sudden joy. But despite that apparent excitement, he did not respond immediately, thought on it for a long while, which was only proper. And only when the bearish man at last gave a small, slight nod in agreement did Father Cendric take up the wolf's carcass in both hands. And pray.
      For Evan.