Fire and Prophecy

Horace is letting me recuperate in his home for a moment before we head out. I should consider buying extra munitions soon, maybe a rifle if it's within my means.
 
Threads of the past grew taut again today just as I was expecting them to slip away. This string I've followed through the dark maze has begun to tug on me in a way I don't yet understand.
 
I was standing in Kingsport again. Kingsport, and people were screaming and the sky was choked with smoke.
 
Except it wasn't. It was a disease-ridden desert warren and a single shack burning like a furnace, like it was meant to be ablaze. No one... would've really cared. It would pass. Another would be rebuilt. But I heard a mother crying out, and...
 
I hope this bodes well for me. That I chose to go in, chose to tear her sons out of the closet they'd been barred in. I hope I can bear the burn I received from the falling timbers as a mark of pride instead of one of stupidity. The two boys won't live much longer, anyway. Their mother even less. Decades, at the most. But something in their soot-stained faces spoke for an eternity of thanks. It did end up being fortuitous--but I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
I found my way to Old Man Atuum. The district reeked of death, the guards looked at me like I was sun-mad. I couldn't blame them. He didn't answer the door, didn't answer my initial call. I found him, sickly and weak, in his bed. His age already put him on the razor's edge between life and death. He would've been gone in a blink without the black pox. But when he spoke to me, his words seemed unburdened by time:
 
"You scion of Metal and Bone, you will never rest, but walk this earth in a sleepless nightmare. Your goal lies in front of you in Leobrough but should you seize it, it will as quickly slip through your fingers like water through a sieve. Look north, take your first step--you will find what you need in the carcass of the titans."
 
Metal and bone... he knew before he saw me. I've been witness to plenty of strange things, but that? Perhaps he scried me--but I don't believe I've seen him before. A changeling? Not impossible--but the sickness would limit his ability to maintain another form.
 
And what am I the scion of? Metal and bone, certainly, but a scion? Of what lineage? Of what inheritance? I've heard nothing of my patron in a little while, beyond the rumbling of my hex-shot as I invoked it this morning. I have no desire to be scion for my own tool's designs. That wasn't part of the bargain. I've many days left I must yet wander. And north... what is north? Miscop? Trojinheim? Oxford? Those places hold no wonders for me beyond the outlaws I've hunted down for their guard. "The carcass of the titans"... Meaning eludes me. I'm almost left wondering if I ought to drop the whole affair and just pull the next bounty off the board.
 
I didn't get much of a chance to consider my prospects after I left Atuum's ("old man," my damned ears. Old Man, maybe). Apparently the McCallum gang was incensed by my rescuing the children they attempted to murder, because four of their thugs cornered me in an alley as I was on my way to healthier streets. Well, they thought they cornered me.
 
Hours before, I might've tried to simply shoot as many as I could before they slew me. What a worthless last stand that would've been. But... for whatever reason, I could feel my heart race. My blood throbbed in my chest against the cold metal of my arm. And I felt a tug on the string...
 
The boys I'd saved earlier were watching me from a sewer. There was a way. And to not take it would, now, be a waste. Asa's still alive somewhere. It can't be anyone other than Asa pulling me like this from the other end of that thread.
 
The magic of my ancestors is only capable of producing dim light, to my understanding, but it was enough on that dark night to surprise those thugs and send their shots wide. I escaped into the sewers. And when they followed me, I killed them. Autumn leaves. Even bright cinders which fly on a breeze will fall and fade to ashes.
 
He didn't know he was playing with fire.
 
I thanked the boys and shook myself off. I realized I'd never gotten their names. Or their mother's, I don't think. Nothing to anchor them to time. But I hope... I hope they have more left. Time. I don't have the means to combat a gang, especially not with the useless Zadian guard. But it would be...
 
Hm. It would be nice to see them grow old. And fade. Peaceful.
 
I stayed in a nice inn that night, walked in smelling like shit. Hardly matters. In a few decades, someone else will own the place. Maybe those boys. Atuum had asked me to deliver a parcel to his friend, along with the message "the post is yours now." The next day, I bought a new horse and went to find him.
 
It feels perverse of me to set another creature beneath me like that and burden it with my own weight. To make it reliant on me even as it carries me. Organic creatures--animals, people--they're so vulnerable, roiling messes of flesh and bone and some fragile spark of life. That I must be responsible for my own delicate balance is concerning enough. I felt almost guilty purchasing this poor, warm-eyed creature from the stablehand, as I had poor Ajax.
 
I named him--her?--Mercury. May they speed our endeavors so that I might leave them soon with some fellow warm-hearted creature who doesn't live in the desert.
 
Horace was quick to trust me, when I said Atuum sent me. I didn't quite catch what was in the parcel, but he offered me a a job as I went north, help defend a convoy headed that direction. Said he was moving weapons and supplies to "friends" of his and Atuum's. Coin is coin. He said nothing of their organization or their business, only that they're "the good guys." As if.
 
If he saw in the darkness as I do, he'd realize it's only so many shades of grey.