Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

The pallid man tilted his head to one side, studying our group. He reminded me of little more than a huge, bloated grub — now I got a better look, he had a pattern of thin depressions from ankle to neck, like circular seams in his milk-white skin. He wore a cheshire grin, baring teeth too large for the stretched flesh containing them. He giggled again, his whole body quivering with it.

I steadied my breathing, and then blew a soft breath into the faerie alloy of Faen Orgis. It flickered with amber fire, lighting the hall, and—

The fire died immediately. I blinked, taken off guard.

I didn’t even have enough strength to summon aureflame.

“Oh, ho!” The naked man strode forward, his gait drunken. His flesh, bloated and stretched like a drowned corpse, quivered and made soft sloshing sounds with every step.

“Pretty light," he said. "Show me again.”

He tilted in our direction, skidding to one side and then the other, advancing nearly a third of the distance with uncanny speed. His big teeth began to click together. Once, twice, three times. It became a chattering rhythm.

“Show me!” He yelped. “Show me!”

Perhaps I couldn’t summon the soul flame, but I felt its warmth in me. Fine then.

I’d do this the hard way. I had strength enough to lift the axe. It was enough.

I took the Axe of Hithlen in both hands, dropping it low so the crescent-moon blade glided a hair’s width over the stone floor, then shot forward.

At my advance, the creature, the Woed, grinned wider and quickened his own stumbling gate. He spread arms too thin for his bloated body out wide, as though to embrace me. Our bare feet slapped wet stone, disturbing small pools of water and echoing overloud in the corridor.

At the last moment, I hurled myself forward with a sudden sprinting lunge. I brought the axe up onto one shoulder, then swung in a quick, economical cut with all my momentum behind it.

The woed’s flesh parted easily. I slid under his grab, moving several feet past him, and his left arm went flopping down to the floor.

I skidded to a halt, spun, and delivered my second cut into the back of his bony knee. Milky flesh splattered apart, like it were made of half-solid slime, and the bone cracked. The creature fell to one knee, its considerable mass leaning heavily to one side as it lost its support.

I had a perfect shot then. I lifted Faen Orgis above my head, aiming for the back of the damned thing’s skull.

But it didn’t seem concerned with me. Its eyes fixed down the hall, on Lisette and Parn. It shuddered grotesquely, and its flesh bubbled.

Lisette had tied her lantern to her belt, opening its hood so she could see, and had started to weave her threads of pale golden aura. To help me, no doubt.

“Lisette, no!” I shouted, and swung.

Too late. The demonscorched man threw himself bodily forward, and my axe skidded off stone in a flash of sparks.

“Preeetttyyy liiiiiIIIGGHT!” He wailed.

Lisette’s eyes widened, and she cast. Golden threads matching the pattern she’d made between her fingers burst to life in the hall, and the Woed went straight into them. He got himself tangled, like a fish — or a worm — in a net.

Lisette bared her teeth and rearranged the pattern, binding the naked man more firmly. “I’ve got him!” She said.

Idiot. Only, she wasn’t. She just didn’t know.

The Woed twisted and writhed, getting itself even more hopelessly tangled. It struggled until it had suspended itself in the air, its arms and legs twisting at painful angles. Lisette’s Art dug into its malleable flesh like razor wire, slicing. Rotten, viscous looking blood spilled onto the floor. A horrible stench filled the dungeon.

The blood had scuttling red beetles in it.

With a wheezing gasp, the woed deflated like a popped sack freed of air. More reeking blood and scuttling insects spilled out, hundreds of them.

But they weren’t the real threat. What emerged from the corpse's open mouth was.

It resembled an enormous bloody millipede. Segmented, long as a tree was tall with countless sharp scuttling legs. It had a human face, wrinkled and scrunched into an angry expression, disturbingly like a newborn baby’s.

It wasn’t bound in the threads. It hurled itself at Lisette, who only stared in disbelieving horror.

Gritting my teeth, I leapt forward, planted a boot on what was left of the flesh sack that had contained the demon, and drove the butt of Faen Orgis’s handle down into its spine before it had fully left its host’s body. The handle had remained elongated and sharp after it had transformed during my fight with the Priorguard, even after weeks.

The sharp spike of wood sank into the millipede’s carapace like a brutish spear. Instead of blood, a stinging gas burst forth from the wound. I ignored its reek, the sudden itching on my skin, and forced my improvised spear down deeper, impaling the creature and ramming its midsection down onto the floor.

The millipede halted, whirled, and directed its wrinkled face at me. Its puckered mouth opened, like a gasping fish, then split wide to reveal serrated mandibles. It came at me, then.

It moved fast for its size, quick as a viper through grass. It went for my throat, and with my axe still stuck into its body I couldn’t use the weapon to defend myself.

So I punched it instead. I acted on reflex, curling the fingers of my left hand into a fist and driving it up into the human-faced millipede’s triple chin a heartbeat before it would have ripped into me. I forced its head up, its black mandibles clicking together inches from my eyes.

A lance of pain shot through my left hand, spiking into the wrist. Lisette had warned me the fingers weren’t truly healed.

I buried the discomfort and grabbed the monster around its head with both hands. It hissed, snapping its mandibles together. More horribly, it tried to say something, but with the protrusions forcing its lips apart it only managed to gurgle.

“Where’s Yith?” I snarled.

Its hundreds of tiny, scuttling legs quivered down the whole length of its body. The part of it beneath me lashed and writhed, trying to dislodge the axe, but I planted a foot down on it. Then, wrapping one arm fully around what passed for its neck, I brought it down on the sharpened spear-point of wood above Faen Orgis’s blade.

It hissed, screeched, and bucked. It wailed like a newborn, and snarled vile curses like a man. It splattered me with dark blood and vapor that stung my skin and made me want to retch, but I kept forcing it down with brutal pressure, using my whole mass as a vice and the axe as a skewer.

Eventually, something gave. The creature’s struggles ceased. It went limp, and only then did I collapse to one knee under its weight. The giant millipede hung off my shoulder, until I let it slip down to the floor.

It was several minutes before I managed to catch my breath. When I climbed to my feet, the whole world spun and I had to press a hand to the corridor’s wall to keep upright.

Too much exertion on too little food and water. If not for Lisette’s healing Art, I suspected I’d be unconscious.

Even still, I’d won. Against this enemy, anyway.

“What…” Lisette stared at the gruesome scene in horror. “What was…”

“Woed,” I told her, ripping my axe free of the deflating creature’s mass with a soft pop. More stinking gas emerged. I forced myself to take shallow breaths.

“That’s a demon,” she said, on the verge of hysteria. She caught the reek then, and brought a sleeve up to her face. “A Thing of Darkness. Why is it here?”

I managed to get my breathing under control. “Not a true demon,” I said. “He was human not long ago.”

“That thing used to be human?” Parn said, looking nearly as horrified as Lisette. He hung back, reluctant to approach.

I stared down at the bubbling, gory mass of the creature. I knelt, coughing, and managed to keep down my gorge. Lucky there wasn’t anything in my stomach, or I might not have.

There wasn’t much of the bloated man who’d appeared at first left, other than an empty skin. The millipede looked smaller in death. They always looked smaller dead, the fear they generated passing.

“The man was Woed,” I said, pointing to the skin. “The creature inside him might have been him, a lesser fiend, or another mutated human who’d been in the demon’s clutches longer. Hard to say, after a while.”

The red beetles had scuttled away into cracks in the wall. I felt certain, then — they were Yith’s Demon Mark. This was the work of the same spirit I’d encountered in Caelfall.

I met Lisette’s eyes. “They don’t respond well to being bound. Their form is constantly changing, and if they take non-lethal wounds or get trapped, they change quicker. Best way is to kill them quick. Let me handle it next time.” I showed her the axe, with its brassy finish and gold inlays. “This is sanctified. It hurts them.”

She swallowed, looking very pale, and nodded.

“There are more of them?” The old changeling said quietly, staring nervously at the stairs ahead.

I used my axe to lift myself up and turned. “Probably. Abgrûdai like to use these as fodder. Keep close.”

I glanced at Lisette then, and considered leaving her behind. I didn’t know where she led me, and I could slip away from all of this with Parn, return to the slums and away from the Inquisition’s clutches, or whoever the former novice worked for.

As though sensing my thoughts, she steadied herself and spoke. “If you want to see your companion again, you will let me guide you out of here.”

Emma. “Where is she?” I snapped.

“Safe,” Lisette insisted. “Please. The commotion upstairs may draw attention from the King’s knights. We need to go.”

Cursing, I spun and started walking. “Fine. Keep up.”

We ascended, passing into another winding series of halls. The architecture changed, the leaks vanishing and the filthy stone transitioning to something smoother and — to my surprise — older. Strange statuary and murals began to dominate a widening path.

I recognized the style. “The undercity?” I asked, slowing.

Lisette padded up beside me. “Yes. You were brought here about a week back, don’t you remember? We aren’t under Rose Malin or the Bell Ward anymore. Oraise likes to move his prisoners around like that, keep them from remembering where they were held if they escape, or are freed.”

I didn’t remember. The last three weeks had been a surreal haze of misery. I’d barely been aware of the waking world.

“The Priory has been using these for years now,” Lisette added. “The whole Church did for centuries, for crypts. The College started forbidding it generations ago. The souls of the dead never seemed able to find their way to the Underworld. They just got lost down here.”

Parn blinked, and then pulled closer to me, staring nervously around at the shadows.

“Where are we going?” I asked her, changing the subject.

Lisette studied the corridor ahead. “We’re beneath a Priory safehouse. There’s an exit two levels above us, leads into one of the harborside neighborhoods.”

Parn crouched low to the ground, sniffing. He looked less human in that moment, his glamour slipping off to reveal webbed fingers and a slightly elongated face. Lisette sidled away from the changeling.

“You smell something?” I asked him, unafraid. I sensed nothing predatory in this old man.

He nodded, narrowing his huge eyes. “Blood, and worse. There are bodies ahead.”

I tightened my grip on my weapon and advanced.

Ahead, we found a set of rooms the Priory had been using for storage. Crates of varying kinds of supply, from tools to foodstuffs, lay in disorganized stacks. Smaller rooms contained more of the same, and a few had been converted into bunks.

Moving further, the hall widened into a larger room. No telling what the ancient builders had made it for originally, but it had been converted into a training ground. I saw mats and piles of straw, wooden dummies, and racks full of weapons along the walls, most of them the iron-reinforced bludgeoning instruments the Priorguard seemed to prefer.

Corpses lay scattered across the room. I counted at least a dozen, though some had been dismembered so completely there might have been more. They’d been torn limb from limb, shredded, smashed to pulp, eaten — any kind of physical violence I could think of seemed to be represented in those bodies.

The smell was almost worse than the sight. Parn let out a hacking cough, and Lisette paused at the end of the hall, muttering a prayer.

I could hear the sound of many scuttling insects.

“We need to—” Lisette began, only to stop and vomit messily. I didn’t rush her. I’d seen grizzled veterans twice her age lose their stomach at less.

When she’d finished, she wiped her mouth with a black sleeve and pointed to one of the side passages. “That way,” she croaked. “There are stairs, and a slab you can move by putting pressure on two of the stones… it leads out to the street. There will be a carriage waiting.”

A carriage? I thought of Lias. Had the wizard found out where I was being held, and somehow recruited Lisette?

Time to find out once we’d escaped alive.

“Stay back,” I told my companions. I began to walk out into the room, letting my eyes run over everything. Lisette and Parn waited at the hall’s mouth, silent.

I’d gone about ten steps when three of the bodies, all of which had fallen together in a heap, shifted and fell apart. Something terrible rose out of the gore and leapt. Parn let out a cry of alarm, and Lisette screamed a warning.

“Alken, watch—”

My scars had been burning, and the Alder fire in me had been broiling discontentedly, so it didn’t catch me off guard. I spun and ducked into a swing. The Woed’s head split from cranium to collarbone, and it rolled over me to strike one of the ancient pilasters with a meaty crack before collapsing limp to the floor.

Not without scoring a point of its own in revenge, though. Fire flashed across the back of my left shoulder as its claws raked me in the pass. I grit my teeth at the flash of heat in my nerves. A hazard of fighting without armor.

I studied the smoking corpse of the Woed who’d tried to tear out my throat. She — no telling her original age — had been altered into something like a hairless dog with filthy gray hair, sickly yellow skin clinging to malformed bones, and double jointed hind legs. The change even included extra teats like a canine. Her hungry grin remained in death, bruised gums stretching nearly down to the base of her neck.

Her glassy eyes stared at me. They were full of pain, and seemed to be asking for help.

I turned my gaze away and studied the rest of the bodies. How many of them hid more monsters? Any? I lifted my axe, narrowing my eyes to slits and focusing on my more supernatural senses.

This is what my powers were for, the reason the elves had sewn the Alder Table’s fire into my aura.

I dislike killing men. When it comes to demons, I have no such hesitation.

Beetles scuttled beneath the corpses, in them.

In the shadows between the columns, larger shapes moved. I counted two — no, three sets of limbs.

Blood trickled down my back, soaking through my shirt.

A claw scraped against stone.

Above.

I rolled aside just as a Woed dropped down from the ceiling to land on the spot I’d occupied a second before. I came to my feet, seeing something with four two-toed feet and four arms, each tipped in a spike of bone. It had no head — only a bulbous mass where shoulders met with its torso, shapes bulging out beneath. A soft, muffled moan came from within, an almost erotic sound.

It shivered and collapsed to balance on all eight limbs, scuttling forward like a spider. I heard the other Woed moving in the darkness, their furtive steps quickening.

Steeling myself, I squeezed tighter on Faen Orgis’s grip, pouring my will into it. Though my own aura was depleted, the weapon had its own inner life, and it hungered.

Small branches burst from the gnarled oak, punching through my right hand. Every vein on my arm stood out as I grit through the pain, letting it fuel my hate. The weapon grew with a series of sharp cracks, becoming as tall as me as it drank my blood.

I used it as a halberd, ramming the point of wood above the handle into the scuttling Woed as it leapt at me. Its muffled moaning turned distressed, its bony limbs scrabbling at me.

Solid steps clattered rhythmically through the room. I whirled, throwing the spider-thing off my weapon with the motion. It slammed into the Demonscorched who’d tried to take advantage of my distraction.

This next one looked like some cross between something equine and a raptor — its wiry legs ended in single-toed hooves, its limbs half fused to its torso. It still had the remnants of fine clothing, a noble or high-class servant, and its head lolled on a broken neck. Its face, beneath a mane of filthy hair, was still almost perfectly human and wild-eyed with terror.

It ran directly into the one I threw, knocked it aside in a bull rush, and kept going at me without so much as slowing a step. The handsome young face lolling over the twisted body let out a whimper.

I sidestepped, swung low, and took one of his legs off below the knee. He rolled into a bad fall, getting tangled into a mass of dead priorguard.

The next two attacked together. I heard them, turning to see a very mismatched pair of nightmares. One was huge, legless, supporting itself instead on caricatures of muscular arms. A shriveled head, blank-eyed and balding, rested between those two bulging appendages. Beneath a bloated stomach, his legs and genitals had been fused into a lashing scorpion's tail.

The second rode atop the first, its talons dug into the larger monster’s flesh. It looked something like a bird which might have once been an old woman, small, with a cloak-like mass of lank gray hair. No face within the veil of hair, only a hollow crawling with something foul.

The spider-thing twitched on the ground nearby. I couldn’t tell if I’d dealt a lethal blow — sometimes the demon who made Woed liked to rearrange their internal organs. I also heard the mule-raptor behind me, trying to stand with one leg and gibbering incoherently to itself. Both could still be dangerous.

I focused on the immediate threat.

The bird-woman with the hollow skull leaned down to the shriveled head of the old man. I heard many small voices whispering. The blank eyes of the old man suddenly widened, veins popping with rage and focusing on me.

“Shit,” I muttered, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

One arm with nearly as much mass as I had in my whole body reached out, grabbed a dead priorguard, and hurled it at me. The move took me off guard, and I barely managed to step aside in time to avoid getting plowed to the ground. It grazed me instead, spinning me and making the world go out of focus in a dizzying moment.

The floor rumbled as the hulk charged.

“Alken!” Lisette screamed. “Watch out!”

She’d followed my orders, keeping out of the way and not trying to use her magic.

I know, I thought dizzily, managing to keep my feet under me and stop just before I spun right into the floor from the force of impact.

Too slow. Where were my reflexes? My strength?

I needed to be faster. Crueler. This enemy had no honor, no grace.

Shed it all. Push it all away. Your grief, your pain, your weariness. These things make a mockery of everything.

All I needed here was my hate.

I whirled and struck with Faen Orgis, still in its “poleaxe” length. The crescent blade sliced through the hulk’s wrist in the instant it would have closed on me, half-severing it, just before it would have backhanded me with enough force to pulp my skull. The shriveled head of the old man wailed, barreling past me. It had to keep its momentum, knuckling along like an ape, or risk collapsing under its own mass.

It skidded to a stop, crushing dead priorguard as it did, and spun to face me. The old man’s teeth bared in a rictus, savage expression. The scorpion tail below his bloated belly lashed once to one side, then directly at me.

The spur of dripping bone at the end nearly punched through my neck. I dodged it, hissing with adrenaline, before it came again with serpent speed. This time it tore through the tattered material of my shirt at one shoulder, shredding it and barely avoiding grazing skin.

I did not want whatever dripped from that stinger in my system.

A sound from behind me. My hackles rose, and I ducked. The hulk’s tail shot out.

The spider Woed, who’d tried to leap onto my back, went directly into the tail instead. It punched through, releasing a spray of blood and stinking gas. Half the moaning I’d heard inside the sack of flesh abruptly ceased. A second voice within let out a different sound, one of grief.

The tail coiled back, dragging the spider with it. The shriveled head between the enormous arms bulged with hateful veins.

The bird woman on his shoulder spread wings of hair and flesh and leapt directly at me from no more than ten paces away, talons stretching out like a hawk taking prey.

Still crouched, I rose, lifted the axe above my head and then brought it down in a savage chop. I tried to shout, but barely managed a gasp.

I caught the bird woman with the blade, the alloy of Hithlenic bronze slicing clean as a beam of light. I bisected her from skull to pelvis, and her two halves fell to either side of me. The resulting wash of blood drenched me from head to waist.

The old man let out a tired sigh, seeming to deflate. He slammed the spider-thing impaled on his tail into the ground, dislodged it by pressing one fist down onto its body and pulling, then began to plod forward in a slow charge, quickly building speed.

I stood, using the axe to lift myself up.

He was too close. I wouldn’t be able to dodge again. Even if I cut him, he’d smash me flat with sheer weight and momentum.

I crouched, stepped forward, and jumped.

The hulk closed, a battering ram of muscle.

I slammed the bottom of Faen Orgis’s handle into the Woed, just beneath the shriveled head where bulbous shoulder met chin. The sharpened point of the branch sunk in, lodged on something hard — bone, perhaps, and jammed.

As I’d hoped. I used the elongated axe like an athlete, levering myself up. I planted a bare foot against the malformed head, riding the charge.

We snarled at one another, both lost in the want to kill the other. The hulk swiped out with a hand, trying to grab me, but it had no legs to support itself — it fell, toppling hard with all its mass.

And slammed us both directly into a column. The stone cracked from base to ceiling, a lightning bolt splitting up its center. Dust rained down. I struck the column hard, bruising my ribs, and barely managed to keep hold of my weapon.

I pulled with all my strength. This monster didn’t have paper thin flesh or soft organs — it was nearly solid, and I used that to my advantage. The haft of the ancient weapon bent, creaked as I pulled on it, and finally snapped, leaving a length of twisted oak long as my arm in the creature.

It fell, and I rolled aside, spattering myself with more gore as I slid through the mess on the floor.

It took me a moment to catch my breath. I coughed, tried to wipe filth from my face and only managed to smear it. I staggered to my feet. I still had my weapon. My heart pounded in my ears, a dull rhythm of violence. I turned, eyes wide so the fullness of the golden aura in them fell on the collapsed Woed.

It was trying to get to its feet, but its body wasn’t made for doing anything but moving forward. It struggled, trying to get a fist under it and slipping in the blood. The wrist I’d wounded suddenly snapped, and the creature let out a pained wail.

I walked toward it, lifting what was left of the axe. Its length was near to what I normally kept it at now — good for this sort of work.

The small head atop the hulk couldn’t move well, between all the muscle and the length of oak jammed into where its neck would be. It caught me advancing out of the corner of its eye though, and let out a keening noise. Again it tried to stand, and again slipped. The scorpion tale lashed, trying to reach everywhere, to keep me away.

My eyes tracked the tail. I judged my moment, tensed, then swung.

The stinger fell to the ground, spurting rancid, steaming blood stinking of rot.

The hulk managed to get its fists beneath it and rise. It turned to me, and the very human face contorted. His milky eyes widened as he saw me, then winced as he caught the light in my gaze.

“Anya,” he breathed, his voice hoarse and otherwise very normal.

I swung the axe down into his skull, splitting it. The entire mass of warped bone and tumorous muscle fell to the floor, going still.

I waited a beat, wary of tricks, then planted a foot on the thing’s chest and ripped the axe out. I stumbled back, inspecting my handiwork. I remembered something then, and turned.

The one whose leg I’d cut off was trying to crawl away, back into the depths of the complex. It caught my gaze and let out a panicked noise.

I threw the axe. It went through the air with a whistling note, end over end, and sank into the final Woed’s back. It fell prone, shuddered once, then went still.

I let out a long, slow breath. There was no amber mist of aura in that sigh. I’d used no powers here, no magic. Just hatred.

“Alken?”

I whirled, tensing, and Lisette flinched back. She'd stepped out into the room, regarding me warily. Parn remained in the hall, looking like a frightened animal.

The fight had covered me in filth from head to foot. My hair clung to my neck and shoulders, and my already filthy shirt had been soaked through with sweat and blood. I couldn’t close my eyes, couldn’t blink. I felt like a length of steel wire, unbending and sharp. Adrenaline, probably.

I managed to speak, my voice emerging as a croak. “Stay back,” I said. “It’s not—”

I’d meant to say over, but a sound filled the chamber and cut me off.

The sound of hundreds of tiny, scuttling legs.

From beneath the corpses, from within the bodies of the Woed, blood-red beetles emerged by the scores, the hundreds, then the thousands. Their numbers grew, massing together into writhing swarms. I backed away, my empty fingers flexing — could I reach my weapon in time?

Would it matter?

But the scarlbeetles didn’t attack me or my two companions. They condensed into a single point in the center of the room. Their numbers moved the corpses, and pieces of the corpses, adding to the gathering mound of organic material quickly rising up from where it all gathered. It grew tall, first to half my height, then exceeding it.

The scars over my left eye began to burn with a bitter intensity. Within the rising mound of flesh, something stirred. A terrible sense of awareness filled it, insects and broken corpses fusing together into something very like a cocoon. It throbbed once.

Inside, a serene voice spoke.

I remember you.

It sounded like many voices overlapping, some male and some female, some old and some young. Each whispered, but together they formed a foul chorus.

One of the old elf’s warriors.

I had thought them all

broken.

“Yith Golonac,” I said, naming the demon.

The Abgrûdai giggled in a child’s voice.

You know me?

I see…

…Shyora must have told you.

Naughty.

Reynard must chastise her, should she ever be

free of Hell.

My blood froze. “Reynard lives?”

The demon fell silent.

I suppose I shall also be chastised.

No matter.

We know you…

…Alder Knight.

You killed Raath El Kur.

A memory flashed through my mind, of a winged shadow crowned in a smoldering sky. A dread presence on the battlefields of Seydis during the Fall. A demon who’d reveled in war.

I had slain him. It had been a hollow glory, after everything else.

He was the wizard’s lieutenant.

You must be strong!

The mound of flesh shivered excitedly.

The Gorelion has sworn to slay you.

“Why not try it yourself?” I challenged it. My eyes went to the axe — three seconds, maybe four, and I could have it in my hand. Would I be fast enough?

I focused my senses, trying to discern more about the fell presence before me — I couldn’t be certain this was the thing’s real body. Even still, if I moved quickly enough, poured every last vestige of sacred fire into a smite…

The demon laughed. The sound made my skin crawl, literally. I felt its voice like one feels insects scuttling across their flesh.

Oh, I am no warrior.

You bested my disciples most ably...

…Besides, you are claimed by two of my brethren.

I shall not be greedy!

Behind me, Parn let out a whimper. Lisette was frantically murmuring a prayer of deliverance.

“Oh, Queen of Heaven, guard and guide us from evil, we your humble servants, your chosen, lead us to the Realm Beyond the Gate, open the road to Your kingdom and bless us with—”

She has abandoned you.

The voice in the mound had changed. Gone was the childish whimsy, replaced by something terribly old, sullen, and malignant.

The golden bitch hated you…

…nearly as much as she hated us.

Save your prayers, child.

No one is listening.

Lisette’s voice faltered.

“Where are you?” I demanded. “Your real body?”

Oh!

The mound shivered, its voice young and sweet again.

So clever.

I am near enough.

I am in the walls…

…In the hollow places.

I crawl in the dreams of this city.

“I’ll find you,” I promised it. “There is still one Knight of the Alder Table to hunt you, demon.”

Yith Golonac cackled, the entire mound quivering with it. Dead faces staring at me from the mass lolled on twisted necks, their lips spreading wide beneath empty eyes into ghastly smiles. They crawled with insects inside.

Find me if you can, paladin…

…I will be waiting.

It was interesting.

To meet the one who turned Pernicious Shyora’s head.

The mound went still. The darkness inside of it fled into the cracks, into the shadows. Wherever the demon’s true form hid, it withdrew its power from that place. The mound of bodies collapsed, dead flesh rolling apart.

Had it not been there to kill me? Had its target only been the Priory?

Why?

I couldn’t guess at its motivations, not without understanding the motivations of its masters. They lurked somewhere in all of this, I was certain.

I would find them, and take all their heads.