But with every drunkenness then came the boredom. That wet, yawning beast, that coiled out of his inner chest to stretch, an ugly cat for an uglier heart, that he nursed with genocide and horror wherever, whenever needed.

He grew bored so often. It was always a question of time, of trickling violent time, inconsequential to him when it turned so shallow so easily, and without much thought. He killed a world and then moved on and then got bored with the next and the next and the next. And in those teeth boredom was a dangerous thing.

He stands from the rubble he was sitting on, licking sticky sweetness of blood off his fingers. Someone moans by his feet, disfigured by a cleaving blow that's split the face, tongue to eye. The flesh with a gaze and three quarters tugs on the edge of his boots and again makes a noise that must have been human speech before most of the tongue was lost. Under the blood and the soot, the colour of a city guard uniform crumpled inside an open wound along the spine. Rudin Filaro looks down at the thing that was human before and lifts his foot.

The skull caves and makes a noise: a branch split by the cold. He wipes the blood and brains off the heel of his boots in the dirt, like getting rid of shit stuck to the bottom of them.

He walks slowly with his hands in his pockets and ambles upwards towards the citadel turning red in the fire and sunset. What's left of the city has charred itself to the bones of the hill: he picks at it with delight, leaves the tender morsels for last, licks his fingers clean of the sweet juices of despair, of rot, of the slow sluggish stench of burned human flesh. Sweeter than any pork roast the useless cook Hax could have dreamt of.

The beamquake tore through the orchards and the winding road that leads to the heart of the citadel: the handiwork of chaos reverberating through the skull of the world in jubilant bell tolls. Jubilant. Bludgeoning.

He wants to walk the streets he walked as Marten o' the Broadcloak. Walk them and know them for the filth they are. Walk them with all the rot exposed, and the dead bodies festooning the marrow that's leaking. Walking's what he does best.

He's the Walkin' Dude.

The crows peck at the eyes of a deadchild. He feels the jelly leak down his chin and breathes deep the barrier between him and the birds that grows dim. Perhaps he'll fly just a little: drink it all in to make the head spin.

What use is all the hard work if you can't bask in the fruits of your labor?

He leaves his Shape with the crack, the sound of blood broken and bone: the boots to claws, the face elongated beyond recognition, and the form that grows small and the eyes beady.

The hot wind lifts him up. Above the spires and the spine of the quake and the overturned hierarchies. He sees men take great fistfuls of silks and of gold in their hands and stain them red. Women gorge themselves on sweet cakes and honey, more food than they could ever see alive. He sees them drag the courtiers by the hair in the mud and the little boy catatonic by the body of his decapitated brother. He sees the barracks quartered and the children in them slaughtered. He sees the threaded horses butchered to make meat for the feast tonight. He sees it all, and his cawing is a laugh.

His heels hit the cobblestone of the inner courtyard. Edoacer Grissom, who was cleaning a sledgehammer, winces at the unannounced arrival.

"I hate it when you do that, char-walker. It gives me the heebie-jeebies."

He does not dignify that with an answer. 

“Who’s this?”

“This?”

Grissom bends down to lift the woman lying by his feet up to her knees so Rudin can see her. The right side of her face is puffy, her eye reduced to a slit. Her dark hair sticks to her forehead: not by sweat but by blood. She’s gagged, she’s bound, and the ropes have left deep red indents on her cheeks and wrists. Grissom shakes her by the shoulder, to punctuate the words:

“This, be an old friend of yours. Rosalie James.”

His hands are back in his pockets. He walks with his long legs to the doors of what was once the House of Deschain (one torn off its hinges, one crooked, burned) and picks up an apple that had rolled to the ground dropped by a dead hand. He bites into it: its sweetness forbidden to him.

"Big Man's upstairs in the office, if you're looking for him," Grissom says, hands still in Rose’s hair. 

"And the brat?"

"Gone. By now they'll have lost our trackers, sure as the day is long and Gilead shines.”

Rudin spits on the cracked tile floor. Half-chewed apple. He takes a second bite and swallows this one.

“Gilead ain’t shining no more.”

He says it softly. With not much shape to the words that he speaks. 

“Shall I bring the girl, then?”

“Yes,” Rudin squares her up and down, and remembers the times they played Castles together, “I’m sure we’ve such sights to show her.”

Grissom smiles and shoves the hammer into his belt. On this they can always agree, he and the necromancer: on the carnage.

Rose tries to fight him, but with her broken shoulder and the traces of his hammer having shattered her leg in three different pieces, there’s not much fighting she can do. He grabs her by the hair to follow him up the right staircase that meets the one on the left in the middle and then turns upwards to the second floor. The white-painted walls of the hallway are splattered red: a great wave. The light comes through the thin tall windows all wrong, drowned in crimson. As they pass Rudin taps the eye-shaped stain with two knuckles, three times, meets the old friend halfway down to Hell. 

They walk up the hallway, Rose stumbling behind them with her wounded leg gushing blood. The door to what was the Deschain’s office was torn off its hinges. Edovacar Grissom and one of his men lean on the wall beside it, though they quickly stand when Edoacer and Filaro walk up to them. 

John Farson sits at the desk, with his feet on the desk, with his hands behind his head. At the great ancient mahogany desk of the king he had sworn to destroy he takes stock of this victory. 

The body has not been moved. The eyes have not been closed.

He stands when his right and left hand enter and grins that sick rotten grin of his. Grissom pushes Rose to the floor again. She falls with a thud. She refuses to look at Farson or at the body. Her breathing presses her ribs to her muscle, muscle to her skin: the trapped rabbit of her heart unconcealed.

Rudin walks to the body. He presses his boot to the face and moves the head with it. Peers at the pale blue emptied of fire and the chin splattered with drying blood.

Farson hunkers down beside Rose, pulled back up by Grissom and held in place with the handle of the hammer across her throat. She tries to stop herself from wincing but cannot, with him so close, with Josiah dead, with Roland gone, with the city drowning, in ruins. 

"Ain't that your dinh, girl? Ain't he the father of your flock?"

In the cadence of his speech all of the preacher's son he'd been to learn to become god to the men he commands. Behind her, Grissom snickers.  When she opens her eyes again all fear is gone from that dark iris and instead lies only a cold hate she does not bother hiding with nothing else left in the world. She spits past her gag and most of it drips down her chin. But some of it lands on Farson’s face. 

He blinks too slowly.

"Have it your way, then."

Filaro moves aside. Farson’s intention in the air hanging heavy, unbearable. Rudin takes a dagger from inside his black coat and hands it to him. Rose's eyes widen. If she could move her head she would shake it. Frantic. Frantically. She can only swallow against the wooden handle and have it hurt. Past the rope that gags her a pleading NO NO NO NO NO NO staring straight in the headlights. A begging. Muffled but no less desperate. 

“I’ll leave the heart for you, Filaro.”

“No need. I devoured it long ago.”

The knife is not made to cut through sinew or windpipe let alone bone. It takes longer than anything sane should: but sanity has deserted Gilead and all that’s left of her is dying. Breathing so slowly, bellowing, wheezing, left in the road with the truck that hit it nowhere to be seen.

John Farson turns with his sleeves bloodied and his hands bloodied and the front of his shirt covered in blood. He holds Steven Deschain’s head by the hair. He wipes his face with the back of his hand, leaves red in its wake. The head hits the desk with a low thud. Farson frowns and spits.

“Will you shut that bitch up, Edoacer?”

“With pleasure, Gilead-dinh.”

She screams at the affront of the Tongue in Grissom’s mouth almost louder than she screamed as Farson decapitated the corpse of her king. But then the screaming stops mid-way, and all that heralds her silence is a wet thunk. Farson grins and opens his arms as Rose's blood pools crimson-red and her body falls still with spasming wheezes. The brain feels no pain, nor can it feel the hot air that wafts upwards from the burning city. It can feel its broken skull, however, shattered barrier between a world of here and a world of simple dark, and she is blind, now, and she is frail dancing in the wind like paper cranes. The second hammerfall breaks the brain, too. 

She dies sometime between the third and fourth.

The quiet then returns, on the surface of the bloody chaos below them, in the city. With his stained mouth and red hands, Farson throws his head back to laugh a howl. Filaro watches the blood pool stop inching along the floor and then looks up to John Farson and his grin, his heaving chest, his eyes wild with triumph.  

"O ye sons of men, how a city shines!"

Filaro blinks slowly, at that. “A pity,” he says. “She may have been able to tell us where the brat and his mutts went.”

Farson’s expression crumbles. It moves jaggedly, like an animal lost in the woods it thought it knew, and he furrows his brow and looks down at the dead woman and then back at the wizard his advisor. Something that he always took as covenant now lies twisted upside-down inside his head, a splinter shoved between his pride and his authority. Steven Deschain stares expressionless and glassy-eyed. Edoacer Grissom leans against his hammer. His face is flecked with red: bone, brain matter, blood. He swallows hard and wants to wring the magis’ rotten neck for that calm, lifeless gaze. Filaro stares back, in his eyes all the knowledge that he needs. He will not. He will never dare.

Rudin o’ The Roads has killed men for less.

“Edovacar!” Grissom calls instead over his shoulder, and his son promptly appears in the doorway. Grissom gestures at the bodies on the ground with the mallet, “Take care of this mess.”

Filaro moves to let him and his man pass and reach what’s left of Steven Deschain. Farson seems deep in thought, still looking at Rose’s remains as they carry out Steven's first. The head is momentarily forgotten. Until it is remembered, the rot of a toothache, the throb of a dying molar, and Farson grabs it by the hair again.

“Grissom?”

“Yes?”

“Tell your men to fetch Johns’ head, too. And Allgood’s.”

"Allgood's been buried."

"Then break the fucking crypt if you have to! Get them to me! Now!"

He glares at Filaro after Edoacer scurries off.

Filaro says nothing but watches. Always watches. Always with eyes of the dead. Edovacar returns for Rose's body. Farson clenches his jaw and breaks the gaze. He licks his lips. The severed head trembles lightly in his grip.

"Tomorrow we meet to discuss the hunt for the Deschain brat. Tonight, enjoy the festivities."

He almost mumbles. He can barely bring himself to look Filaro in the eye. Farson does not have the intelligence to fully understand, but he can at least discern that tonight with one sentence Rudin Filaro has begun to claim something that was always his: power. Filaro extends a hand for Farson to return his dagger and Farson does. The feeling is sudden and clammy and unbearable, the thought that comes with it even more so. That he has been used. That all he has done, all the great acts of violence perpetuated by John Farson, all the terror and the fury, was nothing but in service of some greater power he cannot understand nor see nor ever be privy to. It comes now, in great waves. More terrible. Much worse. If he looks too long in Filaro's eyes he can catch glimpses of it: bloodied and sharp and agonising and carved into the flesh of the world like a thin blade, like a needle to the wound that's not been cauterized. It gnaws at him, because it wants, too, it wants and wants so bottomless and red.

He hands the dagger and he walks out. He takes the seat of Steven Deschain's soul with him.

Now in the quiet, with blood new and old seeping into the wood, R. F. of great and many names inhales. Drinks in agony and rust. Exhales. Makes power of black violence and terror.

His laughter is not a sound the human consciousness should hear. One of Farson's men hears it as he passes by the open office door.