ORIGIN

Khloros was stalking quietly back from Canis, back into the dark, empty cave that had birthed him. He lowered his long, thin neck, his equally slender head--the cheekbones jutting, eye sockets hollow but for the pale glow of his eyes--nosing at the cool, damp floor. The mists seemed to drift, but nothing else; it was empty, as always.

As if nothing was meant to be here.

Yet even as that thought hit him, he realized that it was not true--not this time. There was something in the tunnel ahead; something small, perhaps, but the faint surge of power hit him, drifting to him with the mist. It echoed, it resonated; it was as he was, something sickly and twisting, something buzzing with the strange sense of life that brought death.

In his silent meditations throughout the cave, he had discerned much about the nature of the world, but he had not yet met another like himself. Perhaps this was one: or perhaps it was Origin itself, the tunnel, calling to him. Calling him... home?

Khloros moved forward, the quiet clicks of his hooves the only hint of his coming. His dull, dark coat was streaked with pus and sickness, his ribs and hips jutting out from a nearly skeletal body. He looked as if he were dead, or undead, a walking amalgamation of rot. Really, he simply carried a miasma of disease, of plague. And as he approached, he found himself wondering if this strange, small white bird was the same.

He extended his senses out, like a spider reaching legs into the darkness, toward the stranger that perched on the ground ahead. But he was not close enough, his magic did not entwine with the bird, did not touch it.

Was it sentient? Was it casting this magic, or merely ill? Had the cave cast upon it? Were those caws of joy, or strangled pain? Perhaps she was a Gembound like himself, practicing--or perhaps the cave had caught its prey, and Khloros was witnessing the walls about to feed.

Khloros simply stood, watching in silence at the edge of the darkness, waiting to see what would happen.

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BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

So the bird was not only not the cave's meal, but she could speak. Her caws came to his ears like soft but raucous music, and she pecked at his foreleg. He gazed down at her indifferently.

"I have not heard that name," he replied, his words slow and measured as he observed her.

Then she was asking for his plague--his friends...? A strange, brief wave of possessiveness overcame him; it was his plague, not hers. Then, close on its heels, came malice. He could infect her. It might kill her, even. But if she asked for it...? He pushed that thought away, and instead turned, striding quietly to the cavern wall. There he lifted his head, high on the rock, and drew his magic within him like a gathering storm, to exhale some trace of his plague there, for her to see.

She will see the black death. I wonder what she will make of it?

His gift, his disease, came willingly; the bacteria surged forth, coating the wall of the cave, flickering there. They would not last long--if the raven did not take them into herself, he would take them back. They could not survive on stone alone.

He turned his empty, glowing gaze on the white raven, his voice equally hollow as he spoke.

"This is what I bear. I am Khloros."

A flicker of meaning ran through him again at the sound of his own name, the words he had heard whispered in a dozen voices just previous to his birth. A sickly horse, a shadowy steed astride it.

But would the raven know the name? She knew another name, one he hadn't heard, yet somehow, it seemed familiar. Perhaps she would recognize his, as well.

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BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

The horse simply stared, empty eyes watching the white raven. Something about her name fluttered about in his mind again, something that he liked; he let the thought linger, tasting it there. It was sweet and rich, cloying on the tongue, rancid to some, perhaps, but it was something that belonged to him.

And she wanted his plague. Of course. It was hers to spread; just as she was his, in some sense.

"You may keep it. And spread it. Spread it; it is a gift, to all. It is death." Khloros said this softly, for he knew it was true, and for a moment, the beauty of it danced within his thoughts. Everything rose, and fell, everything a kaleidoscope of color and life and vibrancy and a silent end, and he stood waiting as the darkness fell upon it.

It was a gift.

And then they could return.

He lowered his head to sniff at the floor, thinking. Memories drifted through his mind unbidden: Booker laughing brightly at something just out of his sight, a memory of a whirling wind where the rock was still and silent, a white calf struggling in the mud, bleating in terror at Khloros's approach.

Yes.

"Just don't let it kill you," he added at last, raising his head again to watch the bird.

He simply stood there, staring at her, his empty eyes not even flickering: just a dull, pale glow in the darkness, bereft of anything even remotely resembling the spark of life. Silent, he waited: waited for her to take up his gift, and spread it on ivory wings.

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BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

Khloros watched, feeling the faint hum and buzz of magic as the raven called forth her own "friends." Her own disease.

Her own plague.

He watched her, silent too, as she took his own, coaxing it into the shell she had created for it: just another egg, ready to grow, to develop.

And, some day, to hatch.

Slowly he clicked forward, then, one hoof tapping and then another. He was going to ask for mercy for one, or for two: specific ones, friends. He lowered his head to gaze into the raven's pale pink eyes, and he stared, ready to ask his question.

But then he remembered the pain that wracked them, from time to time, and he paused. Still he stared at her, but he was thinking: was this not a potential release? Perhaps when Booker was at his worst, the pain in his eye and in his heart destroying him, maybe this would be a release. Perhaps when the strong fire that was Nemesis faltered and failed, and lay wallowing in her own pain--she had fallen once, and died, had she not? And come back.

Perhaps this was a gift to them, too.

And so rather than ask his favor, the black horse left it all up to fate. To chance. That was what he was: fate. But then, was it his place to judge who was to receive it, and who not? To his knowledge, even the small bird ought to be tested. Perhaps this was already her time, though she seemed young, somehow, to him. He tried to gently nudge her, the softest of touches, his pus-smeared muzzle to her pristine ivory feathers. Either she would fall ill, or she would not.

Fate.

He lifted his long thin neck once more, and looked down on the raven, nostrils flaring wide.

"Use it well," was all he rasped, gazing vacantly down at her.

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BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

Khloros stood silent, watching the little bird scamper away.

Had he plagued her?

...Yes. But she seemed to have figured that out easily enough on her own.

He tapped along more slowly--hooves clicking against the rock. He was making his way toward Orion. There was little more to do in the situation. She was touched by his disease, his bacteria; either she would die, or she would not.

Fate would decide.

The black horse stepped further along, lowering his head to gently brush his muzzle against a shard of pus-colored stone. Pale green-yellow, like his name.

Khloros.

It was his hatching stone: his egg-shell, shards of a chrysalis long-abandoned, yet he came back, now and again, to visit it.

And now it seemed to speak to him: something about the white raven's presence sparked something within him, something that seemed to echo from the egg.

From all the tunnel around him.

It is time.

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BRING OUT YOUR DEAD