Drums in the Night

The campfire crackled and popped, casting bits of incinerated tinder into the air above it. The tongues of flame flickered and skipped about their glowing stage of wooden debris. Brilliant, but confined orange light played across Ignatius' travel weary face as he basked in its warmth. The three -stone high rock barrier ring around it prevented the fire's growth beyond the prescribed area.

Cold was the nighttime air with a brisk, biting wind rushing across the open clearing where the lone Ordinator had chosen to make camp. The stiff breeze dispersed the gathered flames and sent a chill down Ignatius' spine. Smoldering Embers flared with the heavy air flow and sparked back to life with the dying of the wind.

The solitude burned in him, brighter even than the flames before him. As his eyes stared into the fire, his mind reflected on all the battles and horror stories of his life. Gruesome recollections of all the men he had killed in his service to the crown and the unspeakable atrocities those men had wrought upon the land. The reality of his life was that of a cold killer. Colder than, perhaps, even the very men he was sent to kill.

More than an assassin, an Ordinator is an investigator, a detective of sorts whose authority is granted and controlled by none other than the King of Grudmash himself. To be an Ordinator is to live a life of duty and discipline, devoid of material and emotional comforts. One must be willing to lay down their life at a moment's notice in service of the crown.

The evening turned to night as the fire became dull embers. With declining interest, Ignatius stoked them, stirring up the remains of the blaze in hope of keeping it alight. Once his make-shift poker became nothing more than kindling itself, he tossed it into the fire atop the rest of the burning wood.

Over the quiet roar and crackling of his campfire, the Ordinator could hear the sounds of the night. The vocalizations of owls and wolves were common, accompanied by the chorus of crickets and cicadas. He found something peaceful in their communique, some measure of beauty and simplicity. It was in their world that he felt at home.

Ignatius closed his eyes as he lay on his side. His head rested on his rucksack for a small measure of comfort. In the gaugeless blackness of his restless sleep came the beating of drums. A slow menacing staccato that seemed to grow louder the longer he ignored it. When at last, the Ordinator could no longer discount it as a dream, he shot his eyes open to find its source. What he found was a pair of eyes staring back at him. They were not human eyes, nor those of any animal that has ever roamed the planet. Before him looked a pair of Black, dead eyes set into a face that mirrored his own in every detail.

Indeed the creature before him, for surely it wasn't any person, looked to be his doppelganger down to the smallest detail of his well-traveled clothing.

“We must speak, Ignatius.”

Its voice was dark, unearthly. The creature resounded with malice and evil with every fiber of its being. Behind its words, partially hidden by the ambient noise of the forest at night, was the sound of whispers. The same ghostly voices gibbering in the same alien and unfamiliar language he had first heard at the crazed lumberjack's cottage in Lyire. The same voices that haunted his lonely moments and memories like an infection in his soul.

The mirror image of himself sat opposite him at the fire and waited patiently for the true Ignatius' attention. Alert and on the defensive, the Ordinator pulled himself into a sitting position. As frightening as the situation was, there was a strange, morbid comfort in knowing that if this creature had wanted him dead, it would have already snuffed him out.

“What do you want creature?” Ignatius asked.

The thing sneered with an evil-looking grin. “The same thing you do, Ordinator.”

“Which is?”

“The culling of the cult's herds around these lands.” It replied. “They've grown too numerous and will attract undue attention. It is not yet time to be revealed.”

Ignatius shook his head in disbelief at what he had heard from the creature. He shifted, uncomfortably from one sitting position to another.

There was a long stretch of time where Ignatius and the creature sat in silence. Each was quietly contemplating where they stood with the other.

“If you don't mean to kill me, Demon, then leave me,” Ignatius said, tired of their little stand-off.

It nodded as it made its way to its feet. “Indeed I shall. We will speak again soon.”

“I'm sure we will.” Ignatius said with a return nod.

As the strange doppelganger turned to leave he stopped short as if something had occurred to him.

“We've been watching you a long time, Ordinator. Remember well the adage of looking into the abyss before you choose to pursue the Wolf's associates.”

The creature again took up his casual pace as he resumed walking out of the range of the fire. An eerie tune escaped his whistling lips as he disappeared into the cold night. For a long time, Ignatius sat, shaken by the conversation he had just finished with the creature, whatever it was. There were many questions that circled back and forth in his mind, so many that they eventually overloaded his mind and forced him off into an unfit sleep plagued with troubling dreams of what was to come.

All the while, the sound of drums echoed through his sleeping mind...