Celeste ran through the bedlam of the banquet's aftermath, her boots striking stone with sharp purpose. The screams of nobles echoed behind her, mingling with the hollow groans of the dead. Ahead, Ser Hardron was already galloping away on horseback, cutting a panicked path through the chaos.
Her sharp eyes caught a carriage abandoned by its driver, and without hesitation, she dashed to its side. In one swift motion, she unhitched a single horse, vaulted onto its back, and kicked it into motion. Her gown whipped behind her in wild streamers, soaked in sweat and ash.
The city gates loomed in the distance, already crumbling under the pressure of the undead surge. Corpses clawed their way through the breach, some half-rotted, others unnaturally fast. Celeste saw Hardron and another knight, Ser Gaspard, slicing their way through the mass with desperate precision, their swords flashing with every cleave.
She trailed them closely, guiding her mount through the path they had carved. Around her, death reanimated: hands clawing from graves, crypts rupturing, and alleyways spilling out cadavers as if the city itself was purging centuries of decay.
It made sense now. Minerva, had claimed to have encountered a crawling death outside Adwini, an oddity at the time. But a lich's influence would explain such an anomaly. Its necrotic aura could rot through veil and stone, spreading like mold beyond even city limits.
Ser Gaspard glanced over his shoulder and spotted her. He sneered, yanked his reins, and turned his horse toward her in a sudden charge, sword drawn to sever her from the saddle.
He underestimated her.
She met his approach head-on, and just as he raised his blade, she let out a sound, something not born from lungs or throat, but soul. It was a scream to unmake the mind, a shriek so piercing, so unearthly, it fractured the air.
Gaspard's horse reared. He toppled. His ears bled, eyes rolled back in his skull, and he hit the ground like a bag of meat, very much dead.
Hardron saw his companion collapse, but didn't slow. He spurred his horse harder, riding as if hell itself chased him.
And hell did.
Celeste pressed her heels into her horse, narrowing the distance quickly. When he realized he couldn't outrun her, Hardron finally halted near a narrow glade beyond the city. He dismounted, tossing aside his cloak, and turned to face her.
She was already sliding off her horse when she spoke, eyes gleaming with contempt.
"Tired of running from a girl ten years your junior?" she called, voice dry with amusement.
Hardron's jaw flexed. "Your cousin is fighting the lich, isn't he?" His voice was low, but firm. He already knew the answer. It was obvious now, two prodigies, too young, too skilled, too secretive. That kind of power didn't go unnoticed.
"You're trying to cover your tracks," he muttered. "Hiding your identities. But why go this far? Who are you two?"
Celeste smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I'll tell you," she rasped, "when you're dead."
Hardron exhaled slowly, drew his sword, and inhaled deeply, not air, but Breath. The glint of metal along his blade pulsed with raw current, veins of lightning snaking along its edge.
"Pleasure isn't something we're encouraged to feel in the Sanctuary," he said. "But this… this will bring me joy."
Then he moved, a thunderclap of motion, blade raised, lightning dancing down his arms.
Celeste didn't flinch. Her body contorted with a wet series of pops and cracks. Bone reshaped beneath flesh, arms elongating grotesquely, her fingers sharpening into pale, sickle-like blades. Two long bone scythes attached to whiplike arms, serrated and gleaming. Her face split in a manic grin as she laughed, high and shrill, eyes wild.
"Dance for me!" she shrieked, and the forest rang with hysteria.
Hardron cursed and ducked the first sweep of her scythe. It tore through the air inches above his head, cutting a branch clean from its trunk. He twisted and rolled, barely avoiding the second blade that came whistling up from below.
But Celeste was not done. She moved like a marionette unhinged, unnatural angles, erratic strikes, full of speed and madness. He was forced to move faster, leaping, dodging, slipping through her slashes by the narrowest margins.
Dancing, just as she'd called it.
Sweat beaded his brow as the pressure mounted. Each strike was designed not just to kill, but to humiliate. She was toying with him, and he knew it.
But the Breath inside him still burned. And a knight of the Sanctuary did not fall easily.
Hardron realized brute force wouldn't be enough. Celeste was too fast, too wild. So he turned to the land itself, sprinting toward a nearby boulder, hoping to bait her into overreaching.
She took it. With a shriek, Celeste slashed at him, only for her scythe-arm to bury deep into the stone, wedged fast.
He didn't hesitate. With a cry and a blur of motion, his lightning-infused blade severed her trapped arm. Celeste howled in fury and pain, staggering back, just enough for him to close in and cleave her other arm clean off as she reeled.
She dropped to her knees, armless and bleeding dark steam. The hiss of cauterized flesh was barely audible over the thundering of his pulse.
Hardron exhaled, this was it. He would finish this, end the cursed girl, ride back to his chapter and return with his company. His blade rose for the killing stroke—
Then she smiled.
It was not the smile of a cornered woman, not even a desperate one, it was wide and mad, stretching unnaturally, chin pulled taut as if something inside her was breaking free.
Her body convulsed, flickering like a stuttering candle. Then she fragmented, splitting into a blur of forms, each a different expression of her: some howling, some grinning, some silent, all surging toward him with supernatural speed.
The first reached him, he struck it down.
It shattered like glass, fragments scattering in a thousand hues. The second came, and the third. Each one he cut down dissolved into radiant shards, and still more came.
His breath grew heavier. His arms ached from the endless motions. And suddenly, he understood.
These were illusions, he realized. Constructs.
Brother Lome's words echoed in his mind. The girl's a vitalist, the other's an augur. Promising, yes, but not dangerous.
But this was more than promise. This was duality. She had walked two paths. Vitalism and Enchantment.
That frightened him. Most mages never dared split their study across disciplines, it was risky and diluted progress even if done.
As he staggered through the last of the mirages, Celeste—armless no more—stood whole again, breath steady, eyes luminous with power. The spectral swarm vanished at her will.
She brought her palms together in a prayer-like motion and whispered words that he would not forget. "Hideform. Six-Armed Asura."
Her body shivered. Then changed.
With a sound like flesh tearing and bone blooming, two new pairs of arms erupted from her sides, each ending in brutal, clawed fingers. Her frame swelled, not monstrously, but powerfully, her limbs growing denser, her muscles tightening like drawn ropes. Her gown split at the seams, half-slipping down her mutated frame. She stood a head taller now, surrounded by the heat of raw Breath, her six arms flexing in unison.
Hardron froze. He had seen hideforms before, vitalists mimicking bears, hawks. Even a few daring fools had assumed lycanthropic shapes in battle.
But this…
This was not animal. This was not natural. This was something crafted. Sculpted. A war-form born of dread arts.
Horns curled from Celeste's forehead, black and ridged like those of a crowned beast. Her eyes split and multiplied, six pairs glowing with cold brilliance, arranged with three on each side.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice came layered, like three versions of herself speaking at once. "This has been thrilling."
Hardron's breath caught. His grip on his sword tightened until his knuckles bled white. He said nothing. There was no time for prayers or curses. Only one chance.
He inhaled sharply and let the Breath within him surge into his blade. The air screamed around the metal as it blazed with crackling arcs, lightning dancing up and down its length like an angry god caged in steel.
He lowered into a stance, spine straight, sword raised behind him. Then he yelled, and his warcry echoed like thunder. "Thunderlash!"
The world streaked around him, everything dissolving into the blur of his charge. His blade cut across the field like a white comet, blazing toward her heart.
And then—he forgot.
Forgot why he had drawn his sword.
Forgot what he was doing.
No—not forgot.
It had been stolen.
His thoughts collapsed into a whirlpool of static. What was he—?
Three arms struck him at once, an upward hammer-blow that lifted him off his feet, launching him skyward like a broken doll. The force should've sent him flying across the valley. But another hand caught him by the ankle mid-flight.
And slammed him down.
Crack.
Then lifted him again.
Crack.
And again.
Crack.
The earth trembled with each impact, a crater forming beneath his body, lined with fractured stone and blood-slicked grass.
By the time she stopped, Hardron was barely alive. Armor shattered, breath ragged, bones broken in too many places to count. He lay there twitching, eyes wet with pain, staring into the stars above.
"Please…" He wheezed, not nothing to whom he pleaded.
Celeste stepped forward, her monstrous shape already melting away. The extra arms retracted with a sucking sound, vanishing beneath torn flesh. Her horns dissolved into ash. Her eyes reformed into two.
She stood over him, silent for a moment, hair wild and white, skin obsidian and luminous beneath the pale cast of the moonlight. Her once-elegant gown now hung in ribbons, barely clinging to her frame, her feet stained with mud and blood.
To the knight's ruined gaze, she looked like something out of scripture, a war goddess in her ruinous prime, cloaked in death and radiance.
But he knew better.
She was a demon.
It struck him that she had been toying with him all along, an enchanter of her strength could have stripped him of his will ages ago, even now he felt horrified to find that he loved her. A twisted love that was not his own, and yet he felt it deeply.
She knelt beside him and took a fistful of his matted hair, yanking his head up.
Hardron's vision swam as he stared into her eyes, inhuman still, even in their simplified form.
"Your god won't save you from me," she said, her voice soft, almost intimate.
Then, with a brutal jerk, she twisted.
His neck snapped with a sound like dry twigs and and he was still.