The Wargon trembled beneath them, ironwood sinews creaking from strain, as the shrieking tides of malformed beasts pressed in from every quarter. Above, the dark canopy of the fen seemed to clutch at the moonlight, weaving a cage of gnarled limbs and sallow fog that clung to every breath. The smell was rancid rot—stagnant water, split bowels, the coppery lash of fresh blood misting underfoot.
Vivy stood near the monstrous severed arm that barred their escape, her boots half-sunken into the mire. Her face was drawn tight, the jaw muscles visibly working as she ground her teeth. Sweat rolled down her temple, catching on the thin white scar that tracked across her cheek like a pale worm. She raised a hand—slim fingers shaking slightly—and with that simple gesture, the mass of corpses she commanded lurched as if yanked by unseen chains.
Bones cracked, bloated hides folded. The dead monsters twisted upon one another, forming a grotesque pillar of muscle, sinew, and splintered ivory. The sheer thickness of it—like watching a living wall of timber being assembled—drew a sardonic breath from her lips.
"If this was wood, even a mountain of it, I'd split it in two with the right rot," she muttered under her breath, her voice rasped by concentration. "But this... this is a tangle of both wood and flesh. Better to shove it aside than waste time pulverizing it."
Her eyes—a cold, steely umber—flickered sharply. They snagged on something half-buried in the folds of putrid muscle: an edge, ragged and cruel, glittering with a soft, otherworldly red glow. It didn't belong there. It didn't belong anywhere.
A serrated blade—massive, obscene, forged for hands that could never have been human. Shaped like a surgeon's scalpel grotesquely stretched into the girth of a greatsword. The light it shed wasn't bright—no, it was worse. It was the hush of blood pulsing under skin, a muted glow that seemed to breathe, promising incision, division, ruin.
Vivy shivered. "Don't look at it," she whispered to herself, voice so faint it was little more than vapor in the cold. She snapped her gaze away, forcibly rethreading her mind through the intricate sigils of her necromantic control. "Ignore it. We're too close now to get haunted by some blade."
The corpses obeyed her renewed will, clawed limbs scrabbling and hooking into the monster's severed arm. With grinding, liquid squelches, they began to haul it sideways—inch by laborious inch.
Meanwhile, the rest fought like cornered animals.
Kairo danced at the brink of the Wargon's hull, his dagger weaving intricate arcs that barely kept the lunging jaws at bay. His breath came harsh and hot, fogging the chilled air, his eyes wide with hyper-vigilance. Now and then he'd pivot, kicking a twisted hound-thing square in the chest to send it tumbling back. The weight at his waist—Lalula—shivered with delight, whispering through his mind.
"Bleed them, pretty boy. Feel how their ichor sings. Let it dance on your skin."
"Shut up," Kairo hissed through clenched teeth, driving his dagger up beneath the chin of a wretch with twisted deer antlers. Its skull burst with a wet pop.
Beside him,
Luke's blade—a curved thing forged from some dark, unrecognizable metal—flashed in quick, brutal chops. It wasn't elegant like a knight's saber, nor brutal like a cleaver. It was something in-between, something that suggested knowledge of a very specific kind of violence. There was no artistry in how he wielded it, only savage pragmatism. His face was set in a snarl, eyes narrowed to slits as he struck again and again, each cut deliberate, measured for effect. Inside his chest, his heart thundered—not from fear, but from a feverish edge of exhilaration.
We're almost out. Almost.
Liora was a different sight entirely.
She stood slightly ahead of them, spear dancing with a venomous grace. Crimson thorns curled around her forearms like living bracelets, barbs glistening with a slick poison that seemed to breathe on its own. Each thrust of her spear opened new fountains of black blood. Each wide sweep laid monsters low, their bodies convulsing as unhealable rents chewed through muscle and nerve.
But her breath was faltering. Her movements, once as fluid as dark water, now carried tiny breaks—stutters in her wrists, a half-second longer to pull back. Sweat matted her hair to her forehead, and her shoulders drooped under invisible weight.
Kairo noticed first. A tightening of his lips, a flick of his eyes to Luke. Both men understood without speaking.
Vivy. Hurry up.
Above the groans of the shifting dead, Vivy's voice finally sliced through the din. "Just a little more... come on you bloated fuckers, Move it!"
The corpses strained, veins and tendons cracking audibly. The massive arm lurched, slid, then teetered. Slowly, painfully, it began to roll out of the narrow gorge-like pass—revealing, beyond, the sliver of freedom they all so desperately clawed toward.
But even as their hopes surged, Vivy's mind wouldn't quiet.
That sword....
That aberration.
It was still there, embedded deep in the mangled flesh of the severed limb. Half-buried, yet impossibly vivid. The serrated edge, grotesquely shaped like some surgeon's vile fantasy of a scalpel, seemed to pulse, exhaling a hush of shimmering red light that made the surrounding air appear thinner, hungrier.
Its after-image had etched itself into Vivy's retinas. Every time she blinked, she saw it again — fine lines of crimson burning across the darkness, threading through her thoughts like parasitic veins. Her heart gave a small, traitorous flutter, a primal recoil from something that should not exist.
What manner of creature forges a blade that seems to drink the very breath of the world?What twisted hands had carved those serrations, knowing they would whisper hunger into the marrow of any who dared look?
She shuddered so violently her knees nearly buckled. A sharp gasp clawed out of her throat, almost a sob, before she bit it down. Her shoulders quaked.
Then she slapped a hand hard against her own cheek — a wet smack that echoed absurdly over the groaning carcasses.
"Focus," she snarled to herself, voice breaking, breath fogging in short, harsh gusts. Her eyes snapped wide open, pupils constricted into fierce pinpricks of amber light. "I have to get us out. Then maybe we'll survive long enough to be haunted by it later."
And behind them, the forest still boiled with monstrous bodies, the knight somewhere in that living avalanche, pressing ever closer with each ruinous stride.
This was the brink—the fragile breath before either salvation or utter consumption.
The ground behind the knight was a garden of corpses — a grotesque testament to his passage. Thousands of bodies lay shredded, broken, or simply reduced to dark, oily stains upon the mire. Chitinous limbs still twitched without owners, eyeless heads gaped toward the black canopy, jaws worked by phantom nerves. The very earth seemed to heave with the glut of offal soaking into its veins.
Above this silent charnel field, the knight stood immobile, the air around him vibrating faintly. His armor, that unnatural sinew-tight muscle plating, pulsed as if inhaling. The pale face-skin stretched across his hooded helm was blotched crimson, veins dancing in mad rivulets beneath it. He looked like a cathedral of butchery given hateful life — an idol to slaughter, momentarily at rest.
Nymei watched from the currents above, Vel'kyren form smoldering in slow drifts of ephemeral shadow. The thing's single gleaming eye curved in what might pass for a wry smile.
"So… who are you, then?" Nymei's voice slipped through the fetid air, airy yet soaked in contempt. It danced across the knight's shoulders like a playful hand. "Is it not rude to dance so beautifully without first knowing your partner's name?"
There was no reply.
But the knight's armor twitched — a series of subtle ripples, tightening along his ribs, shoulders, and neck. The pale face-flesh on his helm bloated suddenly, veins bulging in a frenzied lattice. The blood-red light that dwelled beneath his plating flared — bright enough to cast long, trembling shadows of the tangled trees.
A heartbeat later, he crouched.
Muscles coiled.The ground cratered underfoot.Then —
He exploded upward, a streak of scarlet malice, shattering the fog canopy like fragile glass. Splinters of mist and ragged clouds churned around him, swirling into dark gyres that crackled from the sheer violence of his ascent.
Nymei's eye curved again, delighted. It slipped through the cloud after him, the vapor parting around its form like a silk veil torn by claws.
Up here, the air was thin and cold, tasting of ice and iron. The moon bled pale across Nymei's shifting body. For an instant, it hovered right beside the knight. Their eyes met — or rather, Nymei's single, luminous eye met the quivering mask of stitched skin that stared without pupils.
The atmosphere tightened.Nymei shaped it, twisted it — with delicate, malicious expertise.
The very air began to coil and condense, collapsing inward into small, hard beads no larger than a fingertip. Dozens of them, hanging around the knight like a lethal halo. Each one was a clenched fist of atmospheric pressure, humming with pent force.
Nymei's voice was a sultry murmur."Catch…"
The beads flew, streaking through the sky, leaving contrails of warped vapor.
The knight did not dodge. His hands — grotesque, clad in gauntlets that writhed like living skin — clapped together with a deep, wet thud. Then he pulled them apart slightly and clapped again.
An invisible shockwave burst outward. The compressed spheres detonated prematurely, ripped apart by the roiling counter-pressure. Air screamed. Ribbons of torn fog lanced away, forming spiderweb fractures in the cloud cover.
Nymei hung back, observing with predatory calm.Machine. Corpse. Or some wretched crossbreed.It thought this with a chill amusement.He does not even breathe. That trick was wasted.
Far below, the ground awaited them both like a waiting maw.
The knight began to fall. His body was rigid, posture perfect — swordless hand slightly outstretched as if anticipating a gentle landing rather than a plummet from the heavens.
Nymei was not content to let gravity write the end of this beat. It gathered air again — massive volumes of it, snatching currents from a mile around. The gale howled, twisting into a spear long and jagged, its tip a blade of razored pressure that seemed to slice even the moonlight.
Nymei flicked a hand —and the spear shot downward, screaming toward the knight.
For a moment, the knight tried the same simple trick — arms moved to clap again. But Nymei pressed behind the spear, a cyclone pushing at its haunches. The force doubled, tripled.
There was a delicate instant — no longer than a blink — when it seemed inevitable the spear would bore clean through him.
But inevitability was a lie in the hands of monsters.
The knight's hand shot out. Fingers splayed.
The spear slammed into his palm — and stopped.
Veins bulged grotesquely under his armor. The muscles along his shoulders spasmed, twitching as though they might burst through his plating. A tremor rolled down his legs, into his knees, cratering the air beneath his boots.
The knight gripped the spear of air as if it were solid. Slowly, impossibly, he closed his hand around it, crushing the constructed pressure like foam, until it burst in silent streams that coiled around his wrist and dissipated.
Nymei's single eye narrowed, a long ripple of shadow passing over its dark form.
"Oh… now that's simply unfair."
And down below, the forest — already carpeted in ruin — seemed to hush for one breathless second, waiting to see which abomination would carve its next requiem into the world.
The air itself seemed to recoil from Nymei's will, shrinking away from the knight in shrinking, trembling ripples before it was seized, wrung, and crushed. In a heartbeat, Nymei clenched down upon all that surrounded the knight — atmosphere buckling, compounding into a vice of force. A shriek of tortured wind rattled the shattered trees. Leaves and shards of bark were sucked inward as though by an invisible throat.
The knight slammed into the earth, his body cracking the damp ground in a spiderweb of ruptures. Black mud jetted up around him. For an instant, his back arched grotesquely, his limbs splaying under the immense, compacted weight of Nymei's atmospheric snare.
His hooded helm — grotesque already with that pallid, veined human face stretched across it — shuddered. A fissure raced across the silver mask, cutting through an eye-socket. Then another. Tiny splinters of metal and skin flaked off. A single chunk fell, revealing dark tissue pulsing beneath.
And then, with an almost delicate sigh, the entire facade of his helm burst apart. Pieces clanged against the ruined ground. Strips of dried, blood-mottled flesh slapped wetly against the stones. For a heartbeat Nymei hovered above, eye narrowed with avid expectation — almost hunger — to see what lay beneath the masquerade.
But its anticipation twisted into startled ire.
The fragments that had broken away slithered back together, snapping into place as though rewinding time. Veins stitched across the silver and skin in lightning filaments, and in less than a breath, the knight's visage was whole once more — unblemished, unbroken.
Even Nymei, whose body barely acknowledged mortal rhythms, felt a cold crawl through its insubstantial spine.
"Ah..." It voice dropped low, a dark velvet amusement tinged by wary awe. "That is...unexpected."
Then the knight screamed.
It was no mere bellow. The very concept of sound seemed to fracture. His roar split the barrier of air, shattering it into violent shockwaves. Mist ripped away in concentric rings. The trees swayed — then cracked — then simply exploded into splinters under the sonic force.
Nymei's Vel'kyren form trembled. For the briefest flicker of time, Its body shivered, cohesion faltering, as though some primal instinct of every living thing in this cursed fen was compelled to cower.
The knight did not squander the opening. His muscles twitched — sinew-plates convulsing — and then he launched himself forward, mud bursting behind his feet.
By the time Nymei's instincts reasserted themselves, it was nearly upon him. Reflex alone saved it. Its form fractured, dissolved into a scatter of shadows that zipped away, reappearing yards to the side.
The knight landed where it had hovered, dirt geysering under his boots. He straightened, slow, deliberate, as if the entire forest should bear witness. His hood pivoted upward, the stitched skin flexing grotesquely.
His voice when it came was dry, scraping across the throat like rusted iron. "Monster. You are not what I'm after. Go. On. Your. Way."
His tone was so calm it was monstrous — as if death was simply a tedious diversion.
Nymei's form wavered, then condensed again into a rippling silhouette. Its single luminous eye curved like a sly grin.
"And what — pray tell — are you after, knight? Speak it, that perhaps we may have peace."
The knight did not hesitate. He simply lifted one hand and pointed.
Straight at Luke atop the Wargon, reins clutched, eyes wide.
"That Ruka."
For a moment, Nymei was silent. Then its shoulders shook in a ripple of amused disgust.
"Heh... peace? No. Death for you, then."
It clenched the air again — this time with a savage snarl.
Dozens of chains erupted around the knight, sculpted from sheer compressed atmosphere. They looped, writhed, then struck, coiling around his arms, chest, legs. The ground cratered under his feet from the pressure of so many bindings constricting at once.
The knight struggled. His torso heaved, muscles under the sinew-armor squirming like serpents trapped beneath skin. He took one step forward — only to be yanked back, dragged against the muck by the force of Nymei's art.
Nymei drifted higher, eye narrowing to a slit.
Then it split — a small portion of her breaking off, condensing into a lithe, smoky figure no larger than a human woman. This new, miniature Nymei drifted down, its smoky feet never quite touching earth, until it hovered beside Vivy.
Vivy was drenched in sweat, eyes glazed with intensity as she directed corpse after corpse, monstrous sinew and bone twisting under her command. The mass of rotting bodies shoved and clawed at the titanic arm, slowly levering it from their path. Her mouth worked silently, lips cracking with dryness.
Nymei tilted its tiny head, studying her with a glint of satisfaction.
"Nearly there, little girl. Finish this so we can leave this wretched place."
Then the shadow-body twirled, dissolving in a dance of curling black petals, racing back to rejoin its greater self still floating above the knight.
Below, Luke, Kairo, and Liora fought on — though now their movements had grown sharp, breathless, edged with desperation. Liora's crimson thorns left smoldering lesions in every beast she struck, but her face was drawn, sweat beading down her jaw, breath hitching raggedly. Kairo's flower paths hissed and laughed in his mind, even as he moved on muscle memory alone. Luke still clung to the Wargon's tack, knuckles white, glancing back at the knight every few seconds — each look a prayer the chains would hold.
They all knewIt was now only a matter of moments. Either Vivy would clear the way and they would flee with what little life remained — or the knight, in his unstoppable, silent horror, would tear through Nymei's grasp and reach them at last.
The stillness that Nymei perched in — that subtle, watchful coil of black tendrils suspended above the shackled knight — cracked open in an instant.
She felt it before she saw it. A violent ripple, a hunger that didn't belong in the air but instead moved through it, like something sentient. Vivy's breath caught, a strangled half-gasp, as her eyes — sunken yet burning with her necrotic art — snapped wide.
The sword.
It had been half-buried, grotesquely wedged in the monster's amputated arm. Its serrated edge still dripped with sluggish black gore, pulses of faint ruby luminescence rolling down its cruel grooves. For all its monstrous scale — it had been inert, almost forgotten, like some vile relic discarded among rot.
But now it tremored.
With a grating shriek, bone and sinew within the dead giant's arm split. The enormous limb spasmed, jerking violently as though possessed by some internal seizure. Vivy stumbled back, her mind shrieking as the network of control she had over the corpses began to fray.
Then the sword tore free.
It ripped itself from the carcass with a grotesque lurch, carving a deep canyon of cloven tissue in its wake. Shards of monstrous bone clattered down. The blade hovered, quivering — almost as if tasting the air, or scenting the one who had beckoned it.
Then it flew.
It didn't simply arc through space. It hurtled like a bloodstained comet, its red light flaring to a vile brilliance, carving a shrieking line through the fog-heavy gloom.
Nymei's tiny aspect, the smaller wisp-like humanoid shape still drifting near Vivy, barely had time to register the danger.
Its eye dilated.
"—Wait—"
Then the sword was there, slashing through its ephemeral body with the sound of rending silk. Nymei's form burst apart in a spray of shredded shadow. Wisps of smoke twisted, convulsed — then evaporated into nothing.
Vivy flinched back, her heart hammering. The scream she had swallowed down lodged instead as a harsh sob that clawed up her throat. Her eyes tracked the blade as it finished its arc, slicing through the last remnants of Nymei's chains. Each chain shattered like brittle glass, fragments spiraling away into the churning wind.
And then — impossibly smoothly — the sword found its home.
The knight's hand closed around the hilt with a noise like meat slapping against marble. His fingers flexed, sinew crawling across the back of his gauntlet, and the sword throbbed, its eerie glow pulsing in perfect rhythm with the grotesque veins writhing along his helm.
He wasted no breath.
His body lunged forward with horrific celerity, legs hammering into the muck so hard the earth burst beneath his feet. A shockwave rolled out from each step, blowing corpses aside like rotting paper. The greatsword, that monstrous scalpel, carved the air beside him with a soft whine of displaced wind.
Nymei — above in its true Vel'kyren form — narrowed its singular eye, shadows shivering around it. Its voice leaked out, slow and tinged with a dark glee that masked a tightening disquiet.
"So eager... You must think me fragile prey, knight."
But even as it spoke, it compacted, pulling all the drifting wisps of its smoke-body inward, denser, sharper, a coiling storm prepared to explode outward in vicious spears.
The knight came on like an avalanche of sinew and steel — unstoppable, remorseless, eager to rend.