The cave mouth was grey with early light when Thal moved to the entrance, arms crossed, watching the path ahead — the vines, the warped trees, the unnatural stillness of the forest around them. Something about it still itched against his senses. This place had already claimed too much.
Behind him the others began to stir. Tar was already on his feet, rolling his shoulders with a rumble deep in his chest. Nyra stepped out second, her fingers flexing as she adjusted the strap on her axe, her silver hair tied messily back. She looked tired but her steps were sure. Stronger. Whatever the night had done to her, it hadn't broken her. It had sharpened her.
Valen trudged out behind her, chewing on a piece of dried meat and grimacing with every bite like it offended him personally. "I swear this stuff's made of bark."
"I gave you bark yesterday," Luken mumbled as he followed, dragging his staff lazily along the cave wall. His illusion spell shimmered briefly as he cleared the entrance, settling back into place over his Kruul features.
Thal said nothing. He gave a small nod when he saw they were all moving. That was enough.
"Where to now?" Nyra asked, falling in beside him, her tone clipped but clear.
"Following the edge of the black river," he said. "It'll lead us past the worst of the Fern's growth. After that, the lowlands." A pause. "We'll find the Archon there."
Valen scoffed. "Still a great name. The Archon of Rot. Really gets the blood pumping."
"Too much of it," Luken murmured.
Thal moved first, stepping into the brush, his massive form parting the foliage like water around stone. The group fell in without another word — Tar at the rear, Luken near the centre, Valen to the flanks, Nyra just behind Thal. They knew better than to question it now.
The path wound through old roots and marshy bends, dead leaves crunching underfoot. Far off in the distance something let out a low gurgling moan, like the forest was remembering something ancient and angry.
"Do you think the Threshen was the only one here?" Nyra asked quietly, stepping over a half-sunken root.
"No," Thal replied.
That was enough to keep them alert.
The morning sun filtered weakly through the trees, little warmth making it through the dense canopy. The forest still felt wrong, its quiet not the kind that brought peace but the kind that came before a scream.
They had been walking for some time.
The blackened dirt, twisted roots, and strange fungal blooms no longer drew comment — the forest had a way of numbing you to its horrors after the first few miles. Yet the group had found a kind of rhythm. Tar at the back, occasionally glancing behind as if expecting the forest itself to rear up and follow. Luken near the centre, his eyes scanning the treeline with quiet caution. Nyra close to Thal, silent, with the lingering sharpness of someone not quite done thinking.
It was Valen who broke the quiet, of course. "I'm still not over that thing being called a Threshen," he said, his voice bouncing between the branches like it didn't care how dangerous it was to speak out loud in cursed land.
Nyra gave a slow blink. "You mean the thing that tried to rip out my spine and wear it like a scarf?"
"Yes. That." He gestured with one hand, tone casual. "Doesn't the name feel too polite? Threshen. Sounds like a wheat demon. Something that lives in a barn."
Luken, walking just ahead of him, muttered, "It's short for something worse, probably."
"It felt worse," Nyra said grimly.
"Still. Threshen. Not exactly nightmare fuel in name alone."
Nyra looked over her shoulder at him, one brow raised. "Would you prefer something like Soul Eater? Bone Harvester? Flesh Walker?"
Valen held up a finger. "Now you're just making stuff up."
"Pretty sure I've heard some of those in stories," Luken said, not turning around. "The kind they use to keep children in their beds."
"Perfect," Valen said. "We fought one of those. I hope you're proud."
Nyra tilted her head, a hint of mischief tugging at her lips. "I am. Especially after the way you reacted when it grabbed your leg. Very heroic."
"I did not scream," he said flatly. "I expressed urgency."
Thal said nothing. One hand shifted slightly at his side, fingers curling once before relaxing. He walked at the front, his long strides steady and unfaltering, but Nyra could tell he was listening. She always could.
The Shadowfern thinned as they walked, the twisted canopy loosening overhead until pale morning light fell through in actual shafts rather than suggestions. The blackened dirt gave way to old petrified stone, the roots growing sparse, retreating like fingers withdrawing from a wound. The forest's particular hum—that subsurface wrongness that had been sitting beneath every sound since they entered—began to fade, replaced by something closer to silence, but not the silence of peace. It was the silence of a held breath, of a storm pausing between thunderclaps.
Thal walked point, his bare feet silent on the stone, but his pace had slowed almost imperceptibly. The air here tasted different—cleaner, but with a metallic edge that had nothing to do with the Shadowfern's rot. Nyra noticed the shift in his shoulders first, the way the massive muscles beneath his skin seemed to coil tighter with each step, as if the path ahead were narrowing to a blade's edge.
They climbed without speaking, the ground rising beneath them in old, cracked steps of limestone. The trees fell away behind them, and the wind picked up—real wind, not the stagnant air of the Fern, but cutting and cold from the north. It carried sounds. Distant. Metallic.
Valen's hand drifted to his blade. He didn't draw it, but his thumb tested the edge.
Then the ground leveled, and they stood at the lip of the world.
The ridge broke open without warning, a sudden high point that dropped away into a view stretching for miles. They all stopped, the wind pushing against their faces, carrying the smoke and the screaming.
Ahead of them, the Shadowfern ended, its black roots clawing out into the lowlands like fingers sinking into dying flesh. Beyond that, scarred dead earth—fields that had been fertile once, now overrun with massive gnarled roots twisting like serpents across furrows and roads. And farther still, on the horizon, Lion's Gate.
Tall stone walls. Silver-gilded towers catching the morning sun, their banners snapping in the wind. The morning light caught the gilt and turned it to blood-colored gold. And smoke—not the thin columns of cooking fires, but thick, black billows that spoke of gates broken, of temples burning.
Thal's reaction was subtle, but Nyra saw it. His chest expanded—a single, deeper breath than she'd ever seen him take. For a man who barely seemed to breathe at all, who could sit for hours without his chest moving, the motion was stark. His jaw tightened, not in assessment of the tactical situation, but in recognition. His gaze locked on those silver towers with a particular fixedness, tracking the flags, the architecture of the walls. Something settled in his shoulders, old and heavy.
"The outer wall's holding," Luken said, voice tight.
"Not for long," Valen muttered.
Between the ridge and the city, chaos sprawled across the valley like a wound opened to the air.
Hundreds of shapes moved across the battlefield. Human soldiers in Lion's Gate steel and red, their formation lines broken into desperate clusters, fighting in pockets that grew smaller by the minute. And pressing against them, the others.
Threshen—but wrong in their smallness. Not the towering Brood Mother they had faced in the clearing, not that impossible height that had blocked out the trees, but dozens of lesser versions, child-sized by comparison though still twice the height of a man. They moved with jerking, insectile speed, their limbs too thin, their spines curved like scythes. They darted rather than strode, leaping across the broken earth with a lightness that seemed almost playful until you saw what they landed on.
And among them, worse things.
Kruul—but hollowed out. Their spines had separated from their backs entirely, floating in the air a few inches clear of the flesh, the white bone visible in the gap. The connection held only at the neck where the vertebrae fused back into meat, and at one or two points along the upper back where black, root-like tendrils kept the spine tethered. Everything below hung free, disconnected, swaying. Their tails trailed behind, disconnected from the body entirely, swaying with each movement a half-second behind the torso, as if reality couldn't quite sync their parts. They fought with the skill of trained warriors but the wrongness of puppets whose strings had been cut and rewired by something that didn't understand anatomy.
The eye kept returning to it. Kept trying to resolve the floating spine into something that made sense. It couldn't.
"They're fighting the city," Nyra said, her voice low. "They're trying to push past the outer wall."
Luken took a step forward. "Lion's Gate…"
Valen squinted down, his expression shuttering. "Looks like hell either way."
Nyra turned toward him. "They're our allies, Valen. We fight for them."
"You fight for them," Valen said, not looking at her. "I didn't sign up to die for someone else's walls."
"Don't do this now," Luken muttered.
Nyra stepped closer to Valen, voice dropping to something quieter but sharper. "You think I don't see it? The way you look at all of them—like they're already lost. Maybe they are. But that doesn't mean we leave them behind." She took another step, close enough that only he could hear the edge in her voice. "You were called Skill, remember? Not cowardice."
Valen's mouth tightened. He looked at the battlefield, then back at her. Something complex moved behind his eyes—shame, perhaps, or stubbornness—but he didn't answer.
Thal stepped between them, positioning himself at the ridge's edge. His eyes swept the chaos below—the Threshen darting through the smoke, the collapsing outer wall, the Kruul-shapes moving with their disconnected spines swaying—but when he spoke, his voice carried a specific flatness that settled over the word city like a hand pressed flat.
"We shouldn't go down there," he said. Not we shouldn't help. Not we shouldn't fight. We shouldn't go down there. As if the direction itself were the offense, as if the city drew something from him he wasn't willing to give.
"The Archon is the priority," he continued, his gaze not on the battle but on those silver towers, distant and bright, his jaw still tight with that recognition. "Getting drawn into this costs us the only advantage we have."
"We can help," Luken said.
Thal's chest expanded again—that deeper breath, visible now, controlled but present. He looked away from Lion's Gate then, toward the east where the Archon waited, and there was something in the motion—not relief, but a deliberate turning of the shoulder. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, almost to himself: "But the longer we delay—"
Nyra was already moving.
She broke into a run without asking, boots hitting dry stone, eyes locked on the chaos below. At the ridge's edge she didn't slow. She launched herself off, silver hair catching the sun for a single suspended moment, axe in both hands, and dropped into the canopy below.
"Nyra!" Luken shouted, then ran after her, vaulting the ridge, a protective spell already leaving his fingers before he'd finished the word.
Valen exhaled hard. Raked a hand through his hair. "Every. Single. Time." He crouched, calculated, and dropped.
Thal and Tar stood alone at the ridge's edge. Below, the screaming hadn't stopped. Tar's heavy gaze settled on him, patient, saying nothing.
Thal looked at Lion's Gate one last time. The silver towers. The flags moving in the wind. His fingers flexed once at his side—not indecision, but something older. Resignation, perhaps. Or memory.
"Damn it," he said quietly. Then he stepped off the ridge toward the city below.
Tar followed, landing hard enough that the earth cracked beneath his hooves.