Was the black companion Death? Was this his passage to the nether realm? His mind wouldn't function well enough to examine the proposition.

He hadn't been religious. He'd believed that death was it. When you died you were dead, like a squished bug or drowned rat, and your immortality was in the minds of those you left behind.

He slept far more than he was awake. Thus time eluded him.

He experienced a moment of profound deja vu as he passed beneath a solitary half-dead tree, shortly before entering a dark wood. That tree had been important somehow, sometime.

He drifted through the wood, out, across a clearing, in through the entrance of a building. It was dark inside.

A lamp found life at the edge of his vision. He descended. A flat surface pressed against his back.

The figure in black came, bent over him. A hand concealed in a black glove touched him. Consciousness fled.

He awakened ravenous. A lance of agony bored through his chest, throbbed. He was drenched in his own sweat. His head ached, felt as though it was stuffed with sodden cotton. He was running a fever. His mind worked well enough to catalog symptoms and conclude that he had been wounded and was suffering from a severe cold. That could be a lethal combination.

Memories came tumbling back like a rowdy litter of kittens, all over one another, not making much sense.

He'd led forty thousand men into battle outside Dejagore. It hadn't gone well. He'd been trying to rally the troops. An arrow out of nowhere had driven through his breastplate and chest, miraculously finding nothing vital. He'd fallen. His standardbearer had donned his armor, trying to turn the tide with a valiant fiction.

Obviously Murgen had failed.