Arthur tore his gaze away from the strange man stood before him, looking down at the snow beneath his boots. A bitter-sounding chuckle slipped past his lips, rough with emotion and the cold, echoing strangely in the eerie, snow-dampened silence.
“I think you’ll be mighty disappointed,” scoffed Arthur, dragging one hand down the side of his face, the trembling fingers lingering over his mouth. He tried to keep his gaze ahead, to look anywhere but the grave sitting beside him, yet his eyes were pulled inexorably towards it. He wanted to look away, to forget, but his heart, weak as it was, wouldn't let him. “You said it yourself—you know me. You know what I am. I’m a bad man. S’all I ever was.”
But the strange man in the black top hat just shook his head.
“Make no mistake, Arthur. I am not here to coddle you, to comfort you with empty platitudes about the power of redemption, of forgiveness, of love. Time and sin has worn away at your humanity. You believe in nothing, speak nothing. You’re a dead man walking. And yet, you have been given the opportunity to start anew. To leave your bloody past behind, and make something of yourself. Already you have garnered the notice of the Arbiters, have gone toe to toe with gods,” the strange man shook his head, letting an incredulous note seep into his tone of voice. “And all for what? For sacrificing yourself for your fellow liars and killers? For returning to your most base nature, and taking lives in the Abyss? Surely a good and holy man such as Thomas Downes would have deserved a second chance just as much, if not more? Not a man such as yourself, a bad man, a man without piety!
“These questions are not unfamiliar to you—I know that you have felt them yourself. That the blasphemy of your continued existence troubles you. That it keeps you awake at night. Just like your friend the General, and all others who are brought to these Crossroads after death, or exile, or some other immense disgrace."
The man barked a laugh, short and without any true humor in it. His black eyes glittered as they studied Arthur's face.
“Has it not occurred to you, then, that the powers that led to your resurrection do not care about morality? About your foolish little life prior to this existence? Perhaps, like myself, they are only curious. But that would be too simple of an answer for you, I suppose. Your lot are all the same, always searching for meaning where none exists, or creating one that is utterly false, better suited to your moral designs.
“But here, I will tell you a secret: the universe is made of checks and balances. Good, evil, and everything that exists in between—the divine and the wicked, seated upon a grand scale that very few can perceive. This, this is the truth. The single, immutable truth that no human impunity can alter. And where do you fall on that scale? Believe it or not… somewhere in between!”
Arthur glanced up from Davey’s grave. When he next spoke, it was with a careful slowness that belied his lack of trust, a cynical frown twisting his mouth. “I thought I understood what you meant when you said I owe a debt to you. But now you're talkin' about the universe, and I don’t understand what it has to do with me. What debt am I really paying? Why the hell are you talking about some… ‘grand scale?’ Explain it to me, real slow, 'cause I don't understand.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” the man replied, coy, mustache twitching with his grim, thin-lipped smile. “Not yet, and likely not for a very long time. Although your will is strong, your mind is still young. The point is this: you could lie down right now and die again, for all I care—not that I believe the Arbiters would let you—and all would be just as it was. Oh, your friends would weep for you, but there would be others to take your place in the balance. You must understand, although you are a perfect reflection of mankind’s many faults, you were never meant to be… special. And yet…”
The strange man’s voice trailed off into silence. He tipped his head back to take in the sky above them, the wind howling as it scoured across Ambarino’s highest ice-covered peak. A few dainty flakes of snow drifted down to settle upon the brim of his hat, his shoulders, swiftly melting upon contact with the black fabric.
“And yet…” the man in the top hat turned his head back toward Arthur, dark eyes glinting with a strange malice that matched the frigid desolation of the world around them. “I am here.”
Arthur’s eyes narrowed, his mouth pursing into a thin line—his hands balling up into brittle, trembling fists. “You’ve done nothin’ but talk in circles, feller. Matter of fact, I don’t reckon you’ve given me a single straight answer this whole time. What’s your game?”
“No game,” the man replied. His expression flattened, his tone once more devoid of all emotion. “No game. Like I said, I am only curious.”
Arthur shook his head, eyebrows furrowing. He opened his mouth, primed to ask another question, but as he gazed upon the strange man, the words got all caught up in his throat, like he was choking on them. Curious, huh?
Both men stilled, staring at each other for a long moment in silence, a hundred unspoken words swirling in the air between them. Both intrigued and, apparently, uncomfortable with the way things stood. For vastly differing reasons, of course.
Arthur’s curiosity warred with his wariness—he didn’t trust the man, didn’t like him, and felt an instinctive revulsion for the way he spoke to him, like he was an errant child in need of... what? Guidance? A firm hand? But the more he studied the stranger’s pale face, his dark manner, the more he felt an odd sense of recognition, of knowing—as though they had met before. But that was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
Arthur racked his brain, frustrated. Afraid, too, he realized. Real afraid.
“I…” he began, haltingly. “I’ve… seen your face before, ain't I? Somewhere... somewhere else. Somewhere… before.”
“You have,” the strange man replied. “Do you think it mere chance that I have sought you out, Arthur Morgan?”
Arthur considered this, his eyes narrowing. He tried to match the man’s face to a name, time, or place, but couldn’t muster up enough coherence to do so. As such, much like a candle, the brief moment of recognition was snuffed out quite soundly. Arthur suppressed the urge to groan in frustration.
“No,” the man continued, seemingly reading Arthur’s mind. “It is not chance. It never was. Have you ever wondered, Arthur—after every person you have met, every man or woman you’ve killed, every dollar you stole—‘What if?’ What if I had chosen to do things differently? What if I did not leave? What if I had spoken up? What if I had been gentler, more kind from the very start? What if, what if, what if… And now, after everything you have done in the past, the choices you have made and the lives you have taken, what if you had been a better man? What if you had made other choices, and sooner? What if you had been, quite simply… more?”
Arthur looked away, desperate to escape the man’s searching look. He had a suspicion of who this man was, now, but he weren't ready to face it. His gaze caught on the nearby mountainside, tracing the rugged slope, the skeletal trees half-submerged in the snow.
“What are we doing here?” he asked, voice hoarse. “Why have you brought me here, really?”
“Well, I don’t know about you,” the strange man said, and Arthur could hear the crunch of ice under his fancy dress shoes as he shifted, “But as for myself… I’m simply enjoying a beautiful night.”
Arthur turned back. There was the faintest hint of a smile on the man’s face now, and an unreadable look in his eyes, as though he knew something that Arthur didn’t. He half-expected the man to disappear into thin air any second now, like some kind of magician or phantom, but instead he gestured to the landscape before them.
“Look around you, Arthur— it's a sight worth seeing.”
And so Arthur looked. He looked out across a vast, snow-covered plain that stretched out towards the distant mountains, a sea of shimmering white and silver, glittering under the cold light of the pale winter sky. But as his gaze lingered on his surroundings, a surreal transformation began— the blanket of snow melted away until the ground beneath him turned into the murky, earthy brown of a marshland, the sky above him shifting, darkening, until the very stars seemed to be engulfed by a curtain of inky black shadows.
Arthur startled and took an involuntary step back, thick mud and silt oozing up to his ankles, the cold water lapping around his boots, as if trying to swallow him into its depths. Gaze darting around, the former outlaw’s eyes traced the surface of the marsh, the entirety of which was dotted with thousands of tiny glowing embers—fireflies, he realized, as his gaze drew upward to the sky overhead, which was flecked with several large, greenish streaks, which he recognized as shooting stars. Only the occasional tree broke through the thick film of the mud-covered plain, patches of grass sprouting around their roots and Spanish moss hanging in dewy drapes from their branches. It was—
“Beautiful,” the strange man said from behind him. Glancing back, Arthur could see that his gaze was fixed on the stars above—decidedly not on the wild land around them. “Isn’t it?”
Arthur frowned, crouching down in the muck to get a closer look. He recognized this place, knew it about as well as he knew the bitter cold and desolation of Ambarino, but…
“I… I never seen anything like this,” Arthur replied, sifting a few beads of mud between his fingers, watching as it clung to the pads of his index finger and thumb. “What’s happening?”
Moving to stand beside him, the strange man sighed, shaking his head. Like Arthur was a particularly poor student, disappointingly slow on the uptake.
“This is your story, Arthur. And out of all the paths that could have been taken, you chose to take this one—the one that led to a life of violence and death, mire and mud. You were born into a world, into a life, where men like you work, live, breathe, and bleed suffering. And you decided that, as a man, it was up to you to survive… at any cost. Because that’s what men do. They fight, they struggle, they kill. Men are like this marsh, Arthur.”
The strange man laid his hand upon the marshy ground, his fingers sinking into the mud. Claw-like, gnarled. Tearing the good earth asunder.
“A man is mired in this thick, viscous sludge. And you have done nothing but wallow in it, feeding on the worms and grubs that dwell beneath its surface. And you have done so gladly,” the man said, withdrawing his hand and scowling distastefully at the mud that clung to it. “You’re so willingly mired in this filth. No wonder we've found ourselves here.”
Arthur paused, frowning. He didn’t know what to say to that, didn’t know what to think, what to do. What's more, he didn’t like the tone of the man’s voice—or rather, the words he was saying. It almost sounded like he was mocking him. But now wasn’t the time to get offended at the man’s harshness, not yet, not when he was so... so fascinated by what he was saying.
“I… I ain't been perfect,” Arthur muttered. “I ain't ever claimed to be that. I ain't… I'm not even sure I know what a good man does, I've only ever had an idea of it. I guess…”
He grit his teeth, sucking in a deep, steadying breath as he continued to stare at the strange man through the darkness.
“I guess I ain't never been much of a man at all,” he finished, shrugging one shoulder.
The strange man nodded slowly, his gaze shifting away from Arthur and towards the marsh ahead. As he did, Arthur followed his gaze and looked up—and what he saw made him suck in a sharp breath from shock. For at the edge of the marsh, where it met the still-dark sky above, stood a pair of graves beneath the lofty branches of a nearby tree.
They were freshly covered with mounds of dirt, these graves, but names had been carved into each of the wooden headstones, names that stood out to him clear as day, even under the cover of nightfall: Hosea Matthews. Lenny Summers.
Arthur's feet moved of their own accord, slowly clomping and sloshing through the damp terrain as he approached the pair of graves. He felt exhausted, his vision struggling to keep up with a thick grey mist that seemed to dance around him, shifting in and out of his awareness like a ghost. Yet, as he narrowed his eyes and squinted through the darkness, he was almost mesmerized by the strange blue-green light that shone from the stars overhead, casting the path before him in a soft, welcoming light.
It was almost calming in a way, yet Arthur still felt an undeniable sense of dread. He didn't deserve to visit nobody's grave.
He knelt down on his knees and rested his hand on one of the recently filled graves. The muck had begun to bake from the sun at this height, it seemed, and a biting chill crept through his fingers and into his skin at the touch, yet it didn't matter. He was too distracted by the strange man's presence, the words he had spoken. He wasn't sure how to respond.
"There any point in showin' me the graves of all my friends, mister?" Arthur whispered, finally, after a long beat of silence.
The man's footsteps crunched behind him, and he could almost feel the man's presence shifting through the air, a tangible pressure building just over his shoulder. Seconds later, the man appeared beside him, his outline blurry in the darkness.
"These men sacrificed their lives for a cause you believed in," the man said. "You feel that their blood is on your hands. That their lives were forfeited so that you might have a chance to be better."
Arthur's hand tightened on the mossy edge of the grave, and he closed his eyes as the feeling of guilt washed over him. In that moment, if he could have, he would have given anything to have his old life, to have those moments back that he'd lost, the moments that he would never get back. Moments that, for all intents and purposes, he'd wasted.
"You feel that their lives were wasted," the man continued, his voice hardening. Arthur opened his eyes, saw that the man was kneeling beside him, almost too close for comfort. "And yet you're so full of fear and doubt, you've come to hope that, maybe, if you just leave the mud that shapes all men behind, if you could only forget, everything will be perfect for you in the end. Is that right?"
“I ain't got much of a choice but to feel that way, now do I?” muttered Arthur bitterly. “Out of all of 'em... who knew that I'd be one of the ones that got to walk away, in the end. I didn’t want that, and I sure as hell didn’t deserve it.”
"And the guilt's eating you alive, isn't it?"
“Even if it is, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing at all, nothing at all. But you’re in grave danger, Arthur. You are in danger of forgetting yourself in the pursuit of something greater. You need to remember this,” the strange man nodded to the graves. “Remember them. That is the key.”
The man's voice sounded so strangely earnest and serious, so very different from the cold, mocking tone he'd maintained thus far, that Arthur's body tensed up. He swallowed a lump in his throat, and he pushed himself up on his feet, grimacing as the water splashed and the mud slipped between his fingers, his knees wet with cold silt.
“Ain’t no one can say for sure what’s gonna happen in the end,” he replied, glancing over his shoulder at the man. “I can’t spend my whole life wormin’ in this mud.”
Rising to match his height, the strange man faced him, a warning in his eyes.
“You’re in danger of giving up that which makes you human, Arthur. Your honor, your humility, your memories. Lose those, and you might as well shed your skin and decay, rot away in the muck and be forgotten by the world. No Spirit of Vengeance will save you from yourself; it will only burn away that which makes you weak. And this,” he gestured around them. “Is weakness.”
Arthur shook his head, his eyes shifting from the graves to the man.
“It ain’t gonna be like that,” he said. “I been there and done that, and I’m never going back to being anything less than who I am now. I'm set on being better, doing better. I’ll remember.”
“Is that right?” the man said, gaze intent upon him. “You truly believe that.”
“I do,” Arthur said, lifting his chin. “I won't let myself fall again.”
A brittle silence descended between them, only broken by the pounding of Arthur's heart. The man said nothing, and he reached up and ran his fingers along the brim of his hat. The brim tipped up slightly, partially obscuring his eyes and giving them a strange, haunting glimmering as he looked at Arthur.
“It’s a start,” he drawled, after a beat of silence. Abruptly, he tilted his head to the side, as if listening for some secret signal that Arthur could only hope to detect. “High time for a change of scenery, don’t you think, Arthur?”
With that, the man turned and began to walk away, his silhouette fading until he was swallowed up by the darkness.
For a long moment, Arthur hesitated, his feet feeling much like lead as he dragged himself away from the two graves. He glanced back one last time, taking in the silent wooden planks sitting upright among the muck, before slowly turning away. He forced himself to move forward.
Arthur followed.