The twins staggered from the dungeon the air outside hitting them like a physical weight—cold, stagnant, and smelling of old iron. Nalhada lowered her brother onto a broken pillar, her hands trembling as she pulled back his tattered tunic.
"You really shit the bed on this one, huh," the mutter came low. Dry and brittle, the voice served as a mask for the dread rising in Nalhada's throat.
Nalhado let out a wheeze that was supposed to be a laugh. He poked at the edges of the wound, his obsidian eyes tracking the way the flesh pulsed. A sharp, stabbing heat spiked through him, locking his jaw. "The bastard..." he rasped. "Really wanted my heart."
Nalhada's eyes narrowed as she stared at the hole in his chest. "I don't have my scrolls. We heal fast, but fuck... Nalhado, you have a hole inside you. I don't—" She stopped, the calculation hitting her.
If she stayed, he'd bleed out.
If she left, the things in the dark would find him.
"Fuck it."
She ripped the bow and quiver from her back, shoving them into his weak grip.
"The fuck are you doing?" he hissed, the haze of pain clouding his vision.
"They can smell you," she said, already turning toward the treeline. "Don't die before I get back."
Nalhado forced his fingers to close around the bowstring, the familiar weight of the kin-carved bone grounding him. "Ha. I'd never. Gotta be alive to whoop your ass for taking so long."
Nalhada ran. It wasn't just movement, it was a blur through the rot and cracked soil. This was the Land of Shadows, and its daughter felt the weight of the Master's eyes pressing down from the dark.
Nalhadas eyes scanned the terrain, finding the widowroot in a cluster of dead brush, its violet pulse the only light in the grey. Obsidian slid from leather, the blade slicing the root free. The bitter, metallic scent hit—the sharp, copper smell of a chance.
Breaking into a sprint for the amethyst rivers, her heart hammering a rhythm of not enough time.
Cresting a hill, the glowing water finally in sight, when the world simply gave way around her.
The earth groaned and collapsed.
Nalhada went down in a roar of shale and dust, slamming into the slope, tumbling until the horizon was a jagged smear.
Her boots didn't find purchase.
They claimed it.
Biting into the shale with a screech of sliding stone that rattled her teeth. She leaped mid-roll, a desperate, clawing vault through the air that ended with her slamming into a tree.
The tree groaned.
It's roots, shallow and starving, began to tear from the earth.
"Well, fuck me running backwards," she breathed. Her hand flew to her shoulder—reaching for a bow that wasn't there.
Below, three werebeasts waited.
Their bodies were low, tense, their yips sounding like wet glass breaking.
Nalhada didn't wait for the tree to finish falling. As the trunk tilted toward the snarling pack, she threw herself off.
Coming down like a falling star made of matte leather and bone.
The strike found its mark, obsidian driving through the first beast's skull with a wet, terminal thud.
She didn't linger. As the second beast lunged, its claws raked across her bone-inlay armor, the screech of bone on bone echoing in the clearing.
The strike snagged a leg, jerking her mid-stride, but the forward drive never faltered. Borrowing the beast's own weight, a boot planted hard against its skull, launching a vault just as the circle of teeth lunged for where her pulse had been a second before.
Hitting the ground and pivoting, Nalhada surged up a nearby trunk. The height providing the leverage for a backward plunge. Gravity carrying the drop, driving the blade deep into the third beast's spine. Obsidian met marrow tearing through muscle and vertebrae until the creature collapsed into a whimpering heap.
Nalhada stood, blood slicking obsidian. She looked at the last survivor, a dark, wicked smile cutting across her face. Licking the blood from her blade, her eyes locked onto the beast's.
"Coward!" she spat as it turned and fled into the mist.
She didn't watch it go. She was already at the riverbank, tearing the duskcap and gravebind moss from the dead wood.
"Maybe you won't die today," she whispered, her voice tight with a hope she hated.
"Maybe."
A howl ripped through the air from the direction of the dungeon.
The blood in her veins turned to ice.
She didn't think.
She just ran.
Nalhado watched the darkness swallow the last trace of his sister. The silence that followed was worse than the pain.
Every pore on his skin wept cold sweat, and the bow grew impossibly heavy, the kin-carved bone slipping from his numb fingers.
"Shit... this isn't—"
The thought died unfinished.
His eyes rolled back, and the world tilted.
Control vanished in an instant; his limbs seized into iron, rejecting his will. He hit the dirt with a sickening thud, his limbs jerking rhythmically against the stone.
Then came the mist.
It wasn't fog, it was a living, bruised-blue haze that crawled along the ground like a predator. It found the hole in his chest and poured inside, turning his blood to ice and dragging his consciousness into the Master's realm.
The pain in his chest vanished, replaced by a vacuum.
Nalhado stood on soil so white it looked like powdered bone. Bleached trees surrounded him, their branches shivering—then glitching.
One moment they were there; the next, they were jagged tears in the fabric of the world.
A sharp, tectonic pressure exploded behind his eyes. Thousands of voices flooded his skull, a pandemonium of the dead.
...the soil...
...drinks from dust...
Nalhado collapsed, clutching his head as the world-tree, Thargun, flickered into existence. It was a skeletal, bleached husk.
...kings fall...
...corruption takes hold...
Behind the dead tree, a blue-grey mist swirled into a towering shape. Six arms, long and multi-jointed, reached out from the murk. The mist ripped Thargun in two with the sound of a thousand snapping ribs. From the wreckage, the mysterious figure rose.
A hand clamped around Nalhado's throat, lifting him until he was eye-to-eye with a face that refused to stay solid—a bloody, twisted mask that glitched between a corpse and a hollow void.
"Tell her," the voice vibrated in his marrow, the words fractured and wet.
"The gate has crumbled... the debt is due."
Back in the waking world, the air shattered.
Nalhada burst from the treeline, her chest heaving, her eyes no longer dark elf onyx.
The mythril streaks in her irises were glowing a hot, blinding white, bleeding light like twin stars.
She saw them, four werebeasts, their muzzles wet, encroaching on her brother's rigid, seizing body.
"NO!"
The scream was more than just a sound, it was a concussive wave.
The ground beneath her boots cracked.
The werebeasts recoiled, their ears bleeding from the sheer force of her voice.
Launching mid-stride, she blurred across the clearing—a streak of white light and matte-black shadow that slammed down between the beasts and her brother.
Dagger drawn, she braced herself over him, her eyes fixed on the pack with a murderous, unwavering focus that turned the clearing cold.
The beasts froze in their tracks.
They had come for a meal.
Unknowingly becoming the feast.
The first beast lunged, a mass of foul breath and matted fur. Nalhada didn't flinch. Swinging her obsidian blade in a tight, punishing arc, the edge shearing through the creature's claws like dry parchment.
Blood, dark and hot, sprayed across her face, but she was already moving.
In one fluid, predatory spin, she released her dagger. It hissed through the air, burying itself hilt-deep into the second beast's eye socket.
The creature didn't even scream; it just folded, hitting the dirt with a heavy, final thud.
The third beast leaped, its shadow falling over her. Nalhada vaulted away from it, her movements blurred by the white-hot light in her eyes.
She landed, ripped her blade from the corpse of the second beast, and turned—just a fraction of a second too slow.
The first beast's jaws clamped onto her shoulder.
Nalhada's scream was raw. The bone slats in her armor groaned, snapping under the pressure and driving shards of bone into her own flesh. The pain was a white-hot spike. Leaning into the bite, driving her dagger deep into the beast's eye.
"Let. Go," she snarled.
Grabbing its snout, her fingers digging into its nostrils, and ripped the dying creature off her shoulder. She winced, blood soaking her matte leather, and turned her gaze to the fourth beast—the one that had fled before.
"You're the coward who ran," she spat, her voice a low, dangerous rasp.
Behind her, the third beast charged. Nalhada didn't need to see it; she heard the weight of its paws on the cracked soil. She leaped, flipping through the air to land squarely on its arched back. With a guttural snarl, she drove her blade into the nape of its neck and sliced across.
The spinal column severed with a sickening pop, and the beast collapsed into a whimpering heap.
The fourth beast howled—a sound of pure terror—and turned to bolt.
"You will not run from me again, you fucking worthless coward!"
Nalhada caught the blood dripping from her shredded shoulder in her palm. Smearing it across the obsidian blade, reciting a jagged, ancient spell that tasted like copper.
She threw the dagger. As it struck the beast's hindquarters, the blood-link snapped taut, pulling her body through the air like a shadow.
She landed hard on its back. The impact of her boots shattered the beast's spine.
The creature thrashed, swiping a desperate claw at her face. Nalhada caught its wrist in a grip that shouldn't have been possible for her size. The veins in her horns hummed with a deep red light. Slowly, with a cold, terrifying focus, she began to bend each finger back.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
The beast's howls filled the land. When it tried to strike with its other hand, Nalhada didn't even look. She stomped down, her boot crushing the beast's remaining hand into the dirt, the sound of grinding bone echoing in the silence of the riverbank.
"cowards don't deserve a swift death" grabbing the beasts arm with both hands snapping the arm in half releasing the limp extremity. She didn't waste another breath. Every second she spent here was a second her brother's blood watered the dirt.
She stepped on the beast's throat to stifle its howl and grabbed a handful of fur at the base of its skull. With a jagged, lightning-fast arc of her dagger, she ringed the neck—slicing through the thick pelt in one wet, circular motion.
She didn't tease the skin away.
she forced it.
Planting her boot on the beast's sternum, she gripped the loose edge of the hide and heaved.
The sound was horrific—like heavy wet canvas being ripped apart by a gale.
The blade worked in a blurring frenzy, clearing the tension points at the shoulders with three savage strokes.
She stripped the pelt down to the mid-back in a single, visceral surge of strength, leaving the creature a raw, steaming mass of exposed nerves and twitching red muscle.
The beast didn't even have the breath to scream; it just wheezed as the cold air hit its bared anatomy.
Nalhada didn't look back. She wiped the gore from her blade onto the beast's own exposed ribcage, turned, and sprinted toward her brother.
Nalhado stared into the hollow void of the figure's face, a darkness so absolute it felt like a physical weight.
Gaze turned to gravity, pulling him headlong into the abyss.
The air roared past him as he tumbled through the nothingness, a clear, resonant voice rattling inside his skull like a marble in a jar.
"There is nothing left to give but the rot. The soil... is hungry... for its own."
The void swallowed him.
Suddenly, a blinding, agonizing light erupted from the center of his chest.
He screamed—a sound that started in the Master's realm and tore its way out of his physical throat.
Through the white-hot haze of pain, a silhouette rushed toward him.
Nalhada didn't stop; she slammed into the ground, sliding on her knees until she reached his rigid, seizing body.
Hauling him onto his back, her hands shaking as she gripped his shoulders.
"Come back!" she hissed, her voice cracking.
"NALHADO!"
Slamming a fist into his chest. "Come back, you asshole!"
Desperate, she reached into her pouch and tore out the Widowroot.
She didn't have time for a mortar and pestle, she pinned the root against the stone pillar and pulverized it with the butt of her dagger. Once it was a jagged paste, she scooped it up and smeared it into the raw edges of his gaping wound.
The reaction was instant.
The Widowroot hissed, foam bubbling up as it hit his blood.
Nalhado's eyes flew open, his back arching off the ground in a final, jagged scream.
Nalhada slumped back, sitting in the blood-stained dirt with a ragged breath of relief.
Nalhado gasped, his chest heaving as he stared at the sky. "The soil..."
"Shut up," Nalhada snapped, wipeing sweat and gore from her forehead. "You're alive, you idiot."
"No... Nalhada... it's hungry."
"What isn't hungry?" she spat. "This whole fucking land wants to eat us. Now shut up, you dick."
She pulled the Gravebind Moss and Duskcap fungus from her pouch.
With a steady hand, she sliced the fungus in half, tossing the excess into the shadows.
Mashing them together, using the milky, viscous sap of the Duskcap to bind the moss into a thick poultice.
She worked the poultice into the frayed rim of the puncture.
The moss immediately began to web across the flesh, knitting the vessels shut to stop the bleeding, while the sap dulled the fire in his nerves.
Nalhado watched her as she began to wrap the bandages.
"The Master... he's going after Thargun. He showed me."
Nalhada paused for a fraction of a second, her jaw tightening. She reached down, hauled his arm over her shoulder, and hoisted him up.
"The fuck you mean, 'he showed you'?"
"I don't know," Nalhado grunted, leaning his weight into her. "When I passed out... I saw him rip Thargun in half. He gave me warnings. I can't make sense of them yet."
Nalhada began to lead him away from the pillar, her eyes fixed on the horizon. "Well, looks like we finally have a target. I've been itching for something worthwhile to kill."
"Sis, this is something else entirely. This wasn't just a beast."
Nalhada scoffed, adjusting her grip on him. "No fucking way. Are you scared of it? I call bullshit. I'm not having a little hallucination turn you into a coward. I don't associate with whiny cunts, Nalhado. Get better so you can stop being a bitch."
Nalhado felt the familiar, sharp sting of her affection. A weak smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"You fucking bitch," he whispered.
Nalhada grinned, playfully knocking her head-horn against his as they turned their backs on the dungeon, heading home toward the heart of the land—toward Thargun.