- TMK -

Katakos lay Sedryc’s pale, rigid body against the porch. He folded little arms against the boy’s chest and smoothed back black hair. Though nature told him to check the boy’s pulse, Katakos knew he would not find any. Sedryc’s breath stopped long before they ever reached Adela’s home. The boy’s face had the peace of death on it.

           

And Katakos knew better than anyone what the end looked like.

           

With that, Katakos took the metal horn digging into his side and placed it beside the tiny body. He stared at the metal for a long time.

           

He had time now.

           

He studied the ridges, the reticulations of black against the tungsten. His eyes came to the hoarfrost crimson at the base of the metal. The place where he’d broken the horn from the beast.

           

He knew despite surviving, the mountains had won all the same.

           

He took the boy’s revolver and curled purple fingers over the handle. Circling around, he walked back the way he came. When Katakos was a hundred paces from the home, he picked up a stone and hurled it at the wall. As he heard the thud of rock against wood, Katakos continued into the night.

           

A muffled door creak filled his ears. Yet there was no mournful wail, no shriek over the plains. There was only one more gunshot cracking over an indifferent land.

           

Katakos did not look back. There was no reason to. Here, at the end of the world, life was more than hard.

           

It wasn’t a life at all.

           

And he belonged here.

​

 

THE END