Seraphina stepped toward him, shivering.
“It’s more than not knowing who I am. It’s that I don’t know if I am at all. My name...” His shoulders slumped, his arms falling at his sides, where they hung uselessly. “My name isn’t Rune. I don’t know what it is, but Rune came to me when I needed it. I’m not sure it even came to me, truly. I made a sound in my throat, and someone thought that was what they heard.”
“Rune...” She was aware of how wrong it was to call him that after what he’d just confessed. “You are... you. And you are the man I know, the man I–”
“Help me unravel this, Seraphina,” he cut her off. “You promised.”
“Are you sure you want to know?” She said it in a small, wavering voice.
It was starting to dawn on her that she was so close to finding the answers to all her questions, but if she went down this path, there was no going back.
“I must,” he said.
Seraphina nodded and turned toward the men shivering in the snow.
“You...” She felt the power of the relic course through her body like a smoldering fire. “Tell us what you know about revenants.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
It wouldn’t change what they had.
The soldiers started talking, and Seraphina felt her being splinter in the middle. One half wanted them to stop, the other needed to know.
“Project Prometheus,” the first, whose name was Huber, said.
“That’s what we heard people call it,” the second continued. “The Lord Harvester wanted to create soldiers that would not fall. Stronger than any beast alive, fast beyond comprehension, capable of ending lives with their bare hands, these creatures are supposed to end the war without the High Harvester needing to use his most prized relics in battle. The bones are valuable, the men he loses cannot be brought back, and these revenants are the answer to both hurdles.”
“Project Prometheus started two years ago,” Huber said. “The Lord Harvester gathered the most brilliant minds at Schloss Ewigheim near Freising: naturalists, chemists, physicians, mathematicians, and philosophers. They did experiments... I heard from people who worked at the schloss that the floors were bathed in blood, the miasma of death permeated the walls, day and night, graves were dug and rotten parts were buried. The Lord Harvester sent his loyal men to collect the corpses that littered the battlefields. His surgeons hacked them and mashed them together, stitched them up and built bodies that were twice as big.”
“They reanimated them,” the second one said. “That’s why they are called revenants. But that is all we know.”
“Yes, that is all we know,” the first soldier confirmed.
Seraphina’s head hung low and her hands were pressed to her ears. She heard every word all the same. She couldn’t turn toward Rune, and she despised herself for it.
“I remember a fire,” Rune said. His voice was lower than ever, defeated. He sounded like he was far away, not in this world. Not of this world.
“The schloss burned two months ago,” the second soldier said. “No one knows how the fire started. The people who worked there, servants and men of science, tried to put it out but the more they tried, the bigger the flames grew, until they swallowed everything and burned them alive. Not a single soul escaped.”
“Except for the revenants in the dungeons,” Huber said. “The Lord Harvester had taken some of the revenants to Munich to train, but had left a few in the dungeons, locked in the cells, where they did things for him.”
“What things?” Rune asked.
“We don’t know. Those creatures didn’t burn, so they found their way out. The Lord Harvester has tasked men with finding them and bringing them back.”
“If we bring you back,” the other soldier said, “We will be rewarded.”
The men fell silent, which meant that was how far their knowledge went, or that Seraphina would have to ask more specific questions. She felt ill, and was it her imagination, or was she swaying on her feet? She stumbled to the side and caught herself on a tree, her fingers digging into the bark.
The forest whispered around them, the branches cracking under the weight of snow. A cold wind blew from the east, mercilessly biting her cheeks.
“I want to see it,” Rune said. “Schloss Ewigheim. It was night when I escaped the flames and stumbled into the rain. It’s true that the fire couldn’t be put out, because it was pouring and the rain did nothing. It was all so bright under the night sky, I was blinded, could barely see where I was going. I just kept walking, trying to get away from the sudden vastness of it all, but themore I ran, the more the sky and the forest seemed to open before me and swallow me whole.”
The way he talked reminded Seraphina of who he was. Rune. He said he didn’t know, but she did. He was the man who was afraid to be alone under the endless sky, the man who’d never seen the sea, the man who’d needed her to hold him by the sleeve of his cloak and lead him through a crowded city.
He was the man whose touch she craved, whose hands had explored every inch of her body, whose essence she’d drunk. They’d lain on the grass near a lake, and she’d told him what four monsters had done to her. They’d shared a bed, their limbs entangled, he’d sworn to spill their blood, she’d promised to help him find himself.
She hadn’t known then, and she’d told herself it didn’t matter anyway. Now she knew. He was made up of disparate body parts, taken from dead people, he was sewn together, stitched up...
