The Battle of the Bloody Stream. So this is my brother’s resting place.

Ana leaned on her staff, taking the weight off her aching leg, and looked out over the field to the forest line, hazy in the distance. Long yellow grass waved over the gentle rolling rise, and stands of trees clustered together here and there. The silver glint of a stream ran through the middle of the meadow and entered a culvert under the dusty road. The sun was settling toward the horizon.

She studied the field, trying to see that long-ago day again in her mind’s eye. The armies met there in the middle— right there at the Bloody Stream—the Flying Horse came out of those trees—and there were the Fire Eaters, the cannon, positioned on the top of that rise.

She could almost see the massed armies; the distantly remembered battle-din echoed again in her ears. She slipped one hand down to touch the stock of the sidearm she carried with her, had been carrying ever since the war; half of a brace given to her and her brother by their parents, and now one of the few reminiscences she had left of him. How many fell that day? Hundreds? Thousands?

Her gaze was drawn to a slight bend in the stream that cut the field, with a low hill on the lee side. There she had hacked away with her surgical unit, sawing mangled limbs; there she had first met the young enemy prisoner who had become her friend, who had shared with her the news of her brother.

The stump of her right leg ached where it rested on the peg she had been given after a Dragon ball had shattered her lower limb. She had been lucky that it hadn’t struck higher up; she’d kept the knee and even a bit of the shin. Still, there were times she could feel the old leg, aching with horrible pain, as if ants were running up and down inside her calf. She clenched her fist on the staff and, setting her teeth, started down the hill.

It was rough going. The waving grass covered a multitude of sins. She found the first right away; her foot slipped and she looked down to see the gleaming white of an armbone. By the scraps of green cloth still around the wrist, she could tell it had been from the Central’s forces. Yes, the Fifteenth Infantry was stationed here, wasn’t it? she mused.

She pressed her hand to her breast where the prisoner’s letter now rested. Her brother had fallen here, he’d said, fighting for the other side, the Centralists. I was in his company, the man had written. Right by his side that day.

She looked down at the arm, scuffed it with her foot, turned it over. Something metal glinted—a gold ring. She suspected this field had been pretty nearly picked over, but the ring was still something. She remembered the vultures that had crawled over the field after the battle, prizing fillings out of mouths, removing watches, taking whatever they could find.

Not my brother, she thought. But someone’s.

She hesitated, torn, over whether to just leave the ring where it was or whether to take it—she might be able to pay a finder to learn who it belonged to, so she could tell their wife, mother, sister.

Finders are expensive; why should I spend my coin on someone else’s pain?

She started to move on, then stopped. Someone had to care about that person, and if she didn’t, then who? If the man who had seen her brother fall had thought the same way, then she would never know what had become of him.

I will remember you, if no one else does. She stooped to claim the glint of gold. It took on a strange warmth as she closed it in her hand, and she tucked it away in her satchel.

The dead had lain in heaps like piles of rags or drifts of old leaves, so many that they couldn’t be counted. She remembered too the appalling stench, the harsh cries of crows and buzzards, the rats creeping out of the very ground itself. Once she had seen one bone, she saw them everywhere: femurs, ribs, vertebrae, peeking slyly at her from tufts of grass, hillocks, roots of bushes or wedged between stones. She stepped over rusted bits of metal—swords, muskets, rifles. The blue sky shone down in incongruous beauty; an air of quiet seemed to lie over all, as if the battle five years gone had used up all the sound this place was allotted for a lifetime.

I am trespassing, she thought, on taboo ground—sacred, or profane. She had an overwhelming sense that she shouldn’t be here; that she did not belong, that the dead did not want her here. Leave us in peace, they seemed to say. We have done our time, we have passed our suffering and now want only to rest.

“I’ve only come for my brother,” she said out loud, in response to that unspoken reproach. “Only what’s mine. No more than that.”

She took out the letter and studied it. The young man had described the place clearly. Stefan put his head right up and a dragon ball blew it clean off. He didn’t suffer none, ma’am, believe you that. And Ana hoped he was telling the truth, but she had written the same phrase herself, so many times that the words had become meaningless, and she was all too familiar with the reality it so often concealed.

All the tears, Stefan, Stefan—all the arguments, all the anger – and for what? So that you could break our hearts by dying alone on a distant battlefield? A brief, terrible rage at the sheer waste of it all gripped her.

She crested a small rise, glanced up from the letter, and that was when she saw it: a small, neat cottage, walls cleanly white-washed, surrounded by a split-rail fence, and with a carefully tended patch of garden. It was so perfect, smoke even rose from the chimney.

Ana stared. That can’t be what it looks like. There had been no cottage here five years ago, when she had lost a limb on this battlefield operating under shellfire; she was sure of it. Yet the cottage looked as if it had been there for decades; the clean whitewash was cracked in places, and the logs had an air of weathering that could only have come from years out in the rain and wind.



She shook her head, wondering for a moment if she were hallucinating. It was so wrong, sitting there, pristine in the middle of the battlefield—yet its very wrongness drew her. Slowly she approached the house, over ground she had seen churned to bits with shells and soaked with blood.

Up close, the cottage looked just as old, if not older—as if it had weathered itself out of the soil of the earth.

I don’t understand. Did I misremember or ... ?

The world had gone silent. Her skin tingled in a way she remembered well, and the hair on the back of her neck rose. Her eyes went to the long low ridge across the field, where the cannon had been stationed five years ago, and a chill came over her; her memories whispered it would be an excellent spot for a sniper....

She shook it off. Nothing looked overtly sinister or threatening about the house; she just didn’t remember it having been there five years ago. And she hadn’t exactly been paying attention back then.

She looked up at the smoking chimney. Someone is in there.

Go ahead, she thought. Knock. Perhaps—perhaps they can help you find your brother. And if they can’t—then maybe they can at least tell you what is going on.

Ana raised her fist and pounded on the weatherbeaten door.

The door swung open to reveal a perfectly ordinary-looking man.

He was perhaps in his late sixties or even early seventies. His hair was gray, his face deeply lined and weathered, his hands gnarled and twisted. Yet his eyes were a bright, keen blue that bespoke a clear, unclouded mind with a touch of humor and warmth.

“Well? May I help you, young miss?” And he smiled, almost paternally.

Ana faltered. “Why—Grandfather, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I—I was passing by your cottage and—Well, I was looking for my brother.”

“Your brother.” A faint frown creased his brow. “I’m sorry, miss but I haven’t seen any young men around here.”

“No, it’s not like that— “ She stammered, taken aback. “I—you see, he’s dead. He was killed in the fighting here five years ago.”

“Fighting?” The furrows on his brow deepened. “I’m sorry but you must be mistaken. There’s been no fighting here. Not in all the years I’ve lived here.”

Ana stared at him. “No. No, there was. I was there. I lost my leg—“ She indicated her wooden leg, struck with an irrational fear that her limb would suddenly be whole. Yet the peg was still there, concrete evidence that the battle had occurred. “The Battle of the Bloody Stream, between the Grassland and the Centralists?" she tried. “I was with the medical corps, and I was wounded right over there—“ She pointed.

The man’s frown deepened further and a trace of concern entered his gaze. “Miss, I don’t know what to tell you, except that I’ve lived here all my life, and my family before that, and there has never been a battle on this field for as long as we’ve known.” He paused. “Are you sure you’re all right? Would you like to come in, maybe get out of the sun?”

Ana was reeling. Her knees felt shaky. What is going on? Did I fall asleep for a hundred years, like in the tales? Either I’m crazy or he is— But the house, the weathered, ancient-looking house, belied her memory. She swayed and caught herself against the sunwarmed wall; it felt as solid and real as it looked. “No, no, I just— I need to sit down for a moment,” she said faintly. “Too much sun.”

“Of course,” he said and directed her to a plank bench, splintery with years, next to the door. She sank down on it and leaned back against the wall behind her. The warmth of the wood came through her clothing. It feels real enough.

“May I get you anything?” he asked. “A cup of water, perhaps?”

“No, I’ll be all right. I just need to get off my feet.” She paused, then corrected, “Foot, that is,” stretching out her wooden leg before her.

It was a feeble joke, but the old man obligingly chuckled. “Well, tell you what, young miss. You sit there as long as you want, and keep me company while I do some gardening, and if you need anything, just tell me.” He picked up a hoe that had been lying by the door and went to his garden patch. The concern was still in his eyes as he turned his attention to the neat ridges of earth hiding his root tuber crop.

“You know, you’re not the only one come by here, saying there was a battle years ago,” he said. “Had a few others over the years. Not often but every now an’ then. I tell ‘em all the same, they’re mistaken. Don’t know why. Maybe there was another battle a few fields over?” He shrugged, glancing back at her. “Wouldn’t know myself, I’ve never been more’n a dozen miles from home all my life.”

Ana scarcely heard him. He dug the hoe into the ground, raking up small piles of earth around each tuber stem; she recognized them as bloodroot, a crop her mother had grown in the family garden. He saw her looking and pulled one out of the ground.

“Hungry?” he asked, offering her the tuber. “Some food might sustain you, missy.” His eyes showed a gentle concern.

She waved it away. “No thanks.”

“Suit yaself,” he said, and bit into the dark red tuber, spilling juice down his chin. “My own are the best, sweetest in five counties,” he added with a wink.

“I’m sure they’re delicious,” she said faintly. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“You can call me Old Man Grady,” he said, shrugging. “Not too many people around these days who even know my name, let alone want to speak to me.”

“And you’re sure there’s never been a battle around here?” she asked. “Because I remember—I swear I remember—“ She looked out over the field, seeing in her mind’s eye the bodies, the shell craters.

“No ma’am,” Grady replied. “Been here as long as I lived. This house was here. You must have been mistaken,” he said again.

Ana was about to question him further when something caught her eye. Lying on top of a barrel near the door, half-hidden in a jumble of tools and junk, she’d seen the gleam of gunmetal.

“What’s that?”She leapt to her feet and pointed.

“This?” Grady looked confused. He reached into the pile and retrieved a pistol matching exactly the one she carried at her waist. As he held it up, her weapon in its holster seemed to burn. “B’longed to my great grandfather. He brought it with him when he settled these parts. I know I don’t care for it like I should, but ain’t got much call to use it these days—“

“No. That’s my brother’s pistol.” Proof—here was proof this was the right place. She swung toward him, demanding, “Where did you get it?”

A look of hurt offense came over Grady’s face. “Miss, I’m sorry, but I told you. ‘Twere my great grandpa’s. It’s been here for—“

“You’re lying.” Her voice rang off the walls of the house. “Tell me where you got it!”

Now the old man drew himself up, his expression hardening. “Ma’am,” he said coldly, “you don’t sit on my bench and call me a liar. Not on my own property.” He paused. “I think you’d better leave.”

Her own pistol burned at her side. Her entire body trembled with the effort it took to stop herself from drawing on him; her muscles locked so tight it hurt. Wrapped in anger, she stormed off. Behind her, the house waited.

*     *     *
It was his pistol. It had to be.

Ana stalked over the uneven ground, grinding her teeth in frustration.

She knew Grady was wrong, that there had been a battle here. She had lived it; her peg leg was proof. That’s real. That’s not my imagination.

As she gazed on the landscape, she knew in her bones that this was the exact site. She would remember it as long as she lived: a slanting field of waving grasses, trees crowding the edge thickly, a large creek running diagonally across it.

Suddenly she was there, hearing the shouts and cries, the echoing artillery fire ringing in her ears, and as she looked over the field, the setting sun washed it all red, as if the field ran with blood, the stream a river of gore. The Bloody Stream. The innocent-looking creek had taken on a distinctly reddish tint as the fighting continued, herself swathed in butcher’s leather, sawing and cutting and chopping frantically at a tide of shattered bodies that never seemed to lessen. She dreamed it sometimes, that she was surrounded by walls of bleeding, mangled flesh, trying to chop her way out with her simple butcher’s tools as the stench of blood filled her nostrils and her skin and hair clotted with it. Until the thud and whistle of an incoming mortar shell made her drop her weapons and look up, knowing without knowing how that in an instant there would be pain—

No! Ana wrenched herself out of the memory, driving her peg leg into the ground; the jolt helped her, centered her somehow. She staggered onward blindly, over uneven ground.

Then turned again and looked at the house behind her.

Night was coming on; the moon was rising. Moonlight washed the small cottage the hue of dry bone. The pale light accentuated the house’s weathered, aged appearance, as if it had indeed been there since the beginning of time—but Ana knew it had not been there before.

It could never have survived. She knew that coldly, plainly. Shot and shell would have reduced it to rubble.

Something tugged at her awareness. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Somehow, the cottage’s corners, lines, and angles seemed subtly wrong, as if they didn’t quite add up to being a house. Just for a second, the windows, the door, the thatched roof came together in a shape that resembled a giant crouching creature. A monster, ready to devour her alive ...

Ana shook her head at her own thoughts. A monster of memory, perhaps. But she couldn’t escape the impression there was some other, essential reality to that house that her eyes could not detect.

“Have you seen enough, young miss?”

Ana started. Grady was coming toward her, breasting his way through the high grass. His limbs were angular and long, his features seeming even more craggy and weathered in the moonlight. Ancient. As if he had indeed been here for decades.

“What?” Ana studied him warily, an eldritch tingle running down her spine.

“Well,” Grady smiled again and his teeth gleamed very white. “Seemed like you were looking for something, so I wondered if you’d seen enough. Have you found it?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for.” She took a cautious step back.

“You know as I’ve said before, others came through here looking for a battlefield. Men, women, the old, the young, from the Grasslands, from the Empire. And I told ‘em all what I told you: I’ve always been here.”

The lines and angles of his face seemed sharper, more pronounced; the hollows under his eyes deeper.

“You haven’t though.”

“I haven’t?” It was so false, the surprise in his voice. It jarred like metal on her back teeth. “Well, that’s news to me, child. Would you like to come in, to discuss it over dinner?”

Over his shoulder she saw the crouching, waiting house, windows like blank eyes, its open door a dark maw. And Grady, its angular occupant.

“What are you really?”

Teeth shone in the darkness. “What do you think?”

Ana shook her head. Her fingers opened and closed on her staff. Slowly she inched one hand to the sidearm she carried, the mate to her brother’s. Her fingers brushed the stock. Her lips were numb, cold. “Don’t tell me you’re human.”

“Do I not look it?”

“I was here. I was here at this battle five years ago and you weren’t.” Her voice shook with emotion.

There were far too many teeth in Grady’s smile. “Perhaps I was, and you didn’t know it.”

“No.” She glowered at him. “What are you?”

He laughed, a grinding sound, like stone on stone. “A cleaner, of sorts. A collector, you might say.”

“A collector?”

“So many things fall on a battlefield. So many good things waiting for someone to care for them, pick them up, keep them from going to waste. That’s why you came here, correct?” A cloud passed the moon, and Ana could not see his—its?—face, only the glint of eyes in the darkness. “You came here seeking one of the slain. Well—perhaps I came for the same thing. After all, not many come out this far to retrieve their dead. Someone has to look after them.”

Ana’s fingers were cold on her staff. She felt a chill down her spine but shook it off with an effort. “What do you seek? Bones?”

“Nothing so material.” The clouds whipped past; the moon emerged briefly to flash pale rays of silver just long enough to show Grady’s full face. Not human. Wrong.

“This place ... so much death. So much destruction. It’s all here, trapped within the soil, like the remains of shells and spells, waiting for harvest. Pain, grief, fear ... I was drawn here, and even if I hadn’t been ... perhaps the place would have spawned me anyway. It is like that sometimes, don’t you think?”

He seemed thinner now—taller too—his arms and legs spindly angles, his eyes unnaturally large and bright. Or was it only her eyes playing tricks on her in the shadows and darkness?

Ana edged backward. Ice gripped her. “What are you? Drawn from ... where?”

“There is a realm beyond the land of the living,” Grady said. He gestured, and to her overwrought perception, the moonlight shone strangely off his fingers, as if he were holding daggers. “Events like this can tear a hole in the barrier between the real world and the underworld. Pain and suffering on this scale calls us as honey calls flies. Here ... here will I live, and more of those like me will come. Here, the feasting is ... rich.”

Ana’s vision seemed to shift suddenly. She could almost see it: a pool of darkness, spreading from the house, from Grady, reaching tendrils out across the battlefield. It was a rotting sore, a canker, consuming everything it touched. She knew it would spread, and spread, and keep devouring all in its path.

Are there other places like this? Is he the only one?

“I can feel your fear,” Grady cooed. “Bright and gleaming, a delicious fresh morsel. The fears of the battlefield grow stale after a time.”

He advanced on spindly, almost stilt-like legs. She staggered away, almost falling over the edge of a crater. Grady stalked after her, sharp with menace. He moved with a calm, slow deliberation as if he knew—as did she—that there was no way she could escape him.

I can’t let him catch me!

Moon and shadows, shadows and moon. Ana heaved herself up over the lip of the crater on her one good leg. Bones gleamed whitely in the darkness; a femur, a skull, teeth. The soldiers who had fallen here so long ago, fighting for their army, and what did it matter now who had won and who had lost?

She drew her sidearm and risked a look back. Grady was bearing down on her with frightening speed, dark against dark.

“Let—me—feed!”

Grady’s eyes flashed bright, and the moon darted out from behind a cloud. Her blood ran thick with cold.

There was no longer anything human about his face. It was an abomination, its jaw opening wider than should have been possible, row upon row of needle-sharp teeth gleaming whitely within. With strength she didn’t know she had, Ana tore her gaze away and thumbed the catch of her weapon.

Grady was fast, so fast; he swiped at her with a claw and strands of her hair stirred in the breeze. Her pistol was warm in her hands. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her peg leg caught on something and she sprawled backward; the spike of Grady’s claw missed her head by inches. Another second and—

She raised her pistol and lined up the shot. Time had slowed to a crawl. She squinted, and then pulled the trigger.

The gun roared and kicked in her hands. She had aimed for right between Grady’s eyes, but he had moved at the last second and her shot hit him square in the throat. A fountain of blackish ichor exploded outward in a spray of flesh and bone, and Grady collapsed to the ground.

Ana was shaking and trembling. The memories of combat rushed into her; she had not heard a shot fired in anger since the end of the war. She crashed to her knees for a moment, breathing hard, willing the world around her to stay in focus. Is he dead? Is he really dead??? He has to be, right?

Slowly she got to her feet. She was a field surgeon, with instinct ingrained in her deeper than reason; she had to be sure. That strange weakness was still in her as she got to her feet, draining her limbs of strength. Reeling a bit, she staggered unevenly the few feet to the side of the fallen Grady creature.

His horrible, distorted features stared up at the sky above them, a second grinning maw splitting his throat where her shot had struck. White splinters of bone gleamed deep within the wound; she had seen wounds just like it right here, on this field, years ago.

That terrible sick lassitude overcame her and she sank to her knees beside Grady, unable to look away from that grotesque visage.

Yet as she watched—His features began to change somehow, to shift and run like wax.

What on earth—? She tried to scramble to her feet, to run, to flee, yet that horrible weakness clutched her in its grip. This was not simply nervous reaction; it felt like bleeding to death.

It felt like dying.

Icy fear swept her—and then drained away the next instant, pouring out of her like strength, like blood. Her vision was darkening, clouds crossing her sight, but not so much that she could not see the new face forming itself out of the wax of the Grady-thing’s features.

Her own face.

No—! She tried to raise the pistol again but it fell from her water-weak fingers. She gulped at the air around her like a fish removed from water. Huge flowers of darkness opened across her vision as the life force drained from her body; and the last thing she saw before her own sight left her forever, was her own eyes opening in another’s face.

*     *     *
Ahhh ... so nice. This body was younger, more fit too, though it was missing one of its limbs, and even better was the rush of emotions, memories, fears that had poured into her with the other’s demise. The spike of fear at the last moment—that was always the most delicious; the old terrors of the battlefield would do for sustenance and were satisfying enough in their own way, but there was nothing quite like the same fear fresh.

And such a pretty name as well....

Another’s memory stirred in her mind and she reached into the pack of the body at her feet, extracting the gold ring the other had taken from the battlefield. A small smile crossed her lips; it had been this very ring that the Grady-form had come looking for a year or so ago. She tucked the ring away in her own identical pack and then leaned down and took the fallen pistol from beside the empty husk.

“A fine piece,” she said. “It completes the set.” The new voice was a little rough at first, but settled out even as she spoke. She turned back to the bone lair that crouched in the moonlight—how beautiful it was, in the middle of the place where so much blood had been spilled.

“A fine place,” she said. “Such rich pickings. Others will come, looking for brothers, daughters, husbands, sons. And a nice young lady named Ana will be here to meet them. Perhaps she’ll ask them to step inside her cozy house. After all ... I’ve always been here.”