I carried the boy into the temple, almost dragging him. The interior was completely dark, so much that it was impossible to see a hand's breadth in front of my face, and I was forced to place him on the threshold so as not to risk tripping and hurting us both even more.

I placed my sarcina on the ground and took out my bronze lamp. I poured in that strange black oil that they used in the East instead of olive oil, and inserted the wick into the spout. I took the flints and with them I managed to light the wick, which immediately began to give off light. And I was able to look around.

The room we had entered did not seem to be the main body of the temple, but rather the antechamber of a larger room. Heavy iron doors, or at least something that looked like iron to me, blocked our access to the next room leading deeper into the temple, and I found I was extremely relieved.

I lifted the boy again and helped him go further inside, where we were more sheltered from the cold. The floor was made of what looked like once-polished tiles, but due to the sinking of the building they had come loose, making the floor uneven. Luckily I had turned on the light before, otherwise it would have been impossible to move in that room. There were the remains of images carved on the walls, but nothing legible nor familiar. Looking more closely, however, I realized that it was not time that had erased them. It was as if whoever had built this place had purposely erased the scenes before abandoning it, even if I could not understand who could commit such a sacrilegious act towards their gods.

Eventually we stopped at a point further in where the tiles were more stable and I put the boy down.

The light was not enough, and the lamp couldn’t generate enough heat, so I formed a circle with the broken tile pieces nearby and took a rawhide bag from my sarcina. Very carefully I opened it and poured the dried dung into that improvised fireplace. I was no stranger to this practice—the bedouins of the Great Sand Sea did the same thing—but I knew that touching the boy's wound with filthy hands  could rot his flesh, and unlike his limbs, the torso couldn't be amputated.

That, and it disgusted me.

After pouring it into the makeshift basin, I took the bottle that contained the oil for the lamp and poured some on it, then used the flame to light it. The fire that sputtered to life gave off an unpleasant smell, but the heat was pleasant, and I finally felt my frozen limbs thaw.

"Take off your clothes, I need to see the wound," I told him.

The boy obeyed, but his movements were clumsy and it was clear that despite his attitude, it must hurt terribly.

Reluctantly I rinsed my hands with the wine from my skin, then when he was bare-chested I inspected the wound. The arrow had penetrated between the rib cage and the pelvis, but it didn't seem to have hit any organs from where the arrow had entered and exited.

"Do you have any idea who attacked us?" I asked as I poured water over his chest, to wash the blood from his wound.

"I have my suspicions," he said through his teeth.

"But our man in front said the flag was your father's," I said. "Do you think they counterfeited it?"

"Maybe, but I think it's more likely they just took it."

"What do you mean?"

The boy didn't answer, just looked me straight in the eyes. After a while, I lowered my head and started cleaning the wound on his back.

"What can we do now? We can't wander aimlessly in the middle of nowhere," I said, a little ashamed to have to ask someone so young for advice. The problem was that out here in this inhospitable land, I needed him if I wanted to have a chance of getting home.

"My father had friends and relatives, but they were the ones who could make an attempt on my life. I need to recover before I do anything," he said.

After cleaning the wound as best I could, I poured some wine over it, then took a roll of bandages and wrapped them around the boy's abdomen. Once done, he put his clothes back on and approached the fire.

I touched my ear where the arrow had hit me, soaking my fingers in blood and feeling a terrible burning sensation. I rinsed it with water, then found the spot of the wound and poured some wine over it. I wrapped my ear with more bandages, drank a little from the wineskin and went back to the fire too.

"Listen... if that really happened, do you think there's a chance that-"

"No," he replied dryly.

I looked down at the fire and there was a long, awkward silence for a while, then I took a few slices of salted meat and a biscuit.

"Let's eat something and then try to sleep," I said, passing him the food.

We ate and drank in silence, and when we were finished we both lay down to rest.

…

The sky was red.

Not the red of dawn or dusk. No, the sky was a bright, unnatural red, the likes of which I had never seen before. The few trees were ablaze, and at their feet lay who knows how many thousands of people, all dead. There were soldiers of the empire with torn chain mail, cataphracts crushed by their horses, barbarians from the north with broken shields, desert Bedouins drowned in pools of blood, and horsemen from the steppes with their bellies torn open, staring motionlessly at the sky.

I had seen many battlefields in my life, but none compared to the one before me at that moment.

There was a loud sound that made me bend forward, then a gust of wind hit me like a club and I fell face first into the sea of ​​bloody mud. When I looked up, all I could see was a dark shadow, which had swooped down and spat flames onto the battlefield and then rose back up.

As I stared at the sky, my ears were filled with a heart-rending sound, so loud it made me bend forward. I tried to cover my ears with my hands, but it had no effect. It was like a thousand whispers, but together they were louder than anything I had ever heard before. Whoever was speaking seemed to be speaking in some strange, unknown language, but I seemed to understand in flashes things like "can", "promise", "only", "teach" and others. But mostly the voices were saying one word, repeated insistently.

"Kill".

I turned around and there was a whole mountain of dead bodies behind me, with a great black, sickly smoke rising from the top, spreading like an evil plague.

I wanted to leave, to get as far away as possible from whatever that black smoke and that hellish place was, but instead I found myself starting to climb that mountain, stepping on corpses and slipping on streams of blood. The smoke smelled unpleasant, like death, and I felt my throat closing up and not letting in air. And yet, even as I was suffocating and my head pounded from the terrible cacophony, I continued to climb to the edge of that mountain.

The smoke was getting thicker and thicker, my vision was getting more and more limited and the feeling of suffocation was getting more and more excruciating, and yet I could see a man in all of this, standing in the center of that deadly cloud, which was swirling around him like a horde on horseback.

No, he wasn't just standing in the center of it.

He was generating it.

Suddenly there was another gust of wind, so strong that it knocked me to the ground and swept away both the smoke and the voices. I tried to look at the man, but before I could see him the creature crashed to the ground, knocking over everything and everyone.

…

I woke up with a start, drenched in sweat as if I had taken a bath. The fire was still lit, even though a lot of its fuel had been consumed, but there was no light coming from outside, and I realized it was still night.

On my other side, however, the boy's bed was empty, and this made me sit up abruptly.

I looked around, already fearing that something terrible might have happened, but luckily I found him standing, with the lamp lit. For a moment I thought he was performing his physiological functions, before I realized that he was right in front of the temple gate.

I stood up, still feeling my legs weak from the nightmare, and approached him. I took another look at the door, thinking that perhaps he had seen something I had missed at first glance, but I continued to see only a huge double metal door, without any particular decoration.

It was then that I realized how strange this thing was. The city had been abandoned for a very long time, if it had been made of iron it would have corroded and even if it had been silver it would have had a patina. And yet it looked just like iron, even if I had no idea how it was possible to create two single blocks so large.

"Why are you here?" I asked the boy.

He didn't answer me, instead he moved even closer to the door, until he raised his hand and placed it on it. I placed my hand on his shoulder to get his attention, but as soon as I did it felt like I was being hit in the head by a hammer. My skull was pounding and my ears were ringing loudly. I didn't know if they were still the remnants of the nightmare, yet I thought I heard something in that whistle, something that reminded me of words.

When I raised my head I saw the young man looking at me, without being able to read any kind of emotion in his eyes.

"This place is giving me the creeps," I muttered.

The boy simply nodded, but said nothing.

"Maybe they're gone. They can't control every exit in this city anyway. Maybe we should use the little bit of darkness we have left before morning to get away, and maybe find someone who can help us," I continued.

The truth was that I wanted to get as far away from that place as possible. Over the years, I had begun to take the barbarians' stories with a pinch of salt, but there was something sinister about that city and I wanted to get away as soon as possible.

"It could be," the boy said, his tone flat and more mechanical than thoughtful.

"I'll go get our things, then."

"Okay."

I turned around faster than a calm person would have, but then a hand stopped me.

I was about to turn around again when a knife slashed my throat.

Instinctively I put my hands to the wound, but the cut poured out streams of blood that made me feel like I was drowning. I turned, in disbelief, and saw the boy, his chest bare and the bandage I had prepared for him, still holding the blood-soaked knife, who turned toward the door, ignoring me even as I fell at his feet.

"Teach me what you know," I heard him mutter, not knowing who he was talking to.

My consciousness began to rapidly fade, and the last thing I saw was the door, apparently moved by no one, starting to open.

Then it was oblivion.