The antlers drove into the Howler's ribs and did not stop.
The impact rang through bone and muscle, a shock so violent it rippled up the Howler's frame and down into its digitigrade legs. Its clawed feet carved trenches through the snow as it fought the charge.
The Stag did not slow. Momentum carried it forward, merciless. Antlers split muscle and bone with a wet crack, plunging deep into the Howler's ribcage and crushing the breath from its lungs.
A growl shuddered loose from the Howler's throat as blood spilled across the already stained glade. Its hands, sheathed in thick, crimson-tipped claws, lashed out in retaliation. Talons buried themselves in the Stag's shoulders, tearing through hide and sinew to scrape bone.
They locked together face to face in raw brutality. Since the Howler had shattered the Stag's mask, the creature seemed transformed, less an animal than a force of nature.
The Stag drove forward again, heedless of the claws rending its shoulders, heedless of azure lifeblood streaming down its torso. Antlers ground, then cracked through ribs as the second charge forced the Howler back.
Snarling, the Howler staggered and wrenched itself free, shoving the antlers from its body before heaving the Stag aside. The creature skidded several feet, snow fanning upward in a pale spray as its hooves gouged the earth before it halted.
The Howler hunched, warm blood pouring from the wound in its abdomen. For a single breath they stood apart, poised to charge again.
Because they both understood.
Only one would leave the clearing alive.
The Howler lowered its stance.
The Stag scraped its feet at the blood-soaked snow preparing its charge once again.
They moved.
Thunder was the truest answer as hooves and claws tore through the tainted snow, each creature wholly committed to the kill. Neither faltered. Neither saw anything beyond the other.
The world split anyway.
Reality tore open between them, indifferent to their battle—a vertical wound bleeding red light across the snowy glade. The icy blanket hissed where that terrible radiance touched, melting into a quiet steam as though the realm itself rejected whatever was coming through.
Still they charged.
The Howler lunged through the spilling crimson light, jaws wide, claws drawn back for a devastating strike. The stag lowered its antlers and drove forward, unstoppable momentum carrying it straight toward the Howler on the far side of the rupture.
Then there was an echoing clash—but within the crimson light, nothing could be seen.
Not until the door closed.
Everly blinked.
With the blinding crimson gone, sight returned in fragments. She found herself on her side in the snow, staring upward at a wolfish beast suspended in the air, bound by writhing crimson tendrils. Following the source of these tendrils were red figures shaped from something that looked like living blood as they held the creature fast.
A gasp tore from her throat, her heart hammering wildly, before she forced herself upright. Turning, she found another beast—equally monstrous—and equally restrained by four more of those blood-formed figures.
Panic spiked.
Everly scrambled toward the open space between them, skidding across the snow—then her footing gave way, and she tumbled into another yawning red tear.
The crimson door seized her at once. Reality folded inward, and a heartbeat later she emerged far from the struggling beasts.
This time she stood at a distance, the clearing stretched wide between them.
Beside her waited the Blood Wraith, cloaked in darkened fabric that smelled of impure iron, its form concealed except for the steady crimson glow of eyes burning beneath the hood.
"Whe—where am I?"
Everly turned toward the Veinborne but it did not spare her a glance. Its fixed, lifeless focus unsettled her enough that she followed its gaze instead.
The Howler and the Stag were tearing themselves free, tearing through the blood-forged figures restraining them before crashing together once more in a brutal clash.
Everly shook her head, backing away. "You have to take me somewhere else. I can't—"
She turned back to plead with the Wraith, only to find it had left.
The glade stood silent around her, leaving her alone with the violence.
Yet even amid the violence, something uneven pulled at her attention—a sound barely audible beneath the distant thunder of the resuming battle. At first Everly dismissed it as another echo of the clash, until it broke apart into a desperate, choking gag.
She turned, startled.
A figure writhed in the snow several paces away, movements frantic but already weakening, boots kicking uselessly as hands clawed at his throat. Even from that distance she saw darkness creeping beneath the skin of his neck, veins tightening like a snare.
Her senses sharpened with urgency. Everly ran to him and dropped to her knees as his breath hitched soundlessly, eyes wide with a terror they both understood without words.
The Affliction.
***
"...like I said, that very mark is fleeting," Ivan stated.
The words followed Zerin out of the room, pursuing him, as though they refused to remain confined in that room of purgatory.
His boots scraped stone as he staggered into the hall that had previously been storming with hags. The silence now felt wrong. His stomach twisted his body demanding some form of release from a truth he couldn't process all at once.
He swallowed it down.
Forced it back where it could fester.
The Affliction being a marker?
Bodies as Templates?
The search for Divinity?
Ivan claimed that the hags are suffering madness—as if it were not their natural state. As if they were more than just Nightmare Creatures. Zerin shook his head. Everything that proceeded from his mouth felt dead.
And it was the worst kind of dead. It carried no promise of satiation and no sense of continuation. There was only an ending already decided.
The Captive's Conclusion.
Zerin needed no time to connect the den of corpses left rotting in the wilderness to the mound waiting in that room. Yet his reaction was different.
The bodies in the pit had been discarded, abandoned once their use had expired—ruined, but still whole.
These were not.
These had been harvested.
Stripped of whatever had once made them worthy in the eyes of the creatures that took them. Flesh reduced to inventory. Lives reduced to yield.
The scope had changed; but the same smear of blood spattered both scenes.
"Where is she?" Zerin asked.
He didn't turn. His back remained to Ivan as footsteps approached from behind, stopping at the threshold of that dreadful room.
Ivan's presence was lukewarm. Indifferent.
"I led them down this hall," Ivan said.
The words tightened around Zerin's chest, coiling inward.
"You…did what?"
He turned slowly. When his eyes found the man, they burned crimson.
The revulsion he had forced down moments earlier had nowhere left to go. It hardened. Compressed. Then spilled forth.
"Then what the hell are you doing here?" Zerin snapped.
The Astral Blade answered the rise in his voice, bleeding into reality, manifesting through red runes with its edge aimed at the man.
Ivan didn't flinch. Didn't shift. Didn't even acknowledge the blade's presence.
"Why are you here," Zerin said, "and they are not?"
His grip tightened. "Start explaining before I shove your corpse back into that room."
At last, the man exhaled—slowly, patiently. As though indulging a child's tantrum rather than facing a threat.
"You think this is a game?" Zerin pressed, the question, fueled entirely by Ivan's composure.
Ivan offered a slight smile, a revolting gesture after what he had just revealed. "I'd call it chess."
That was it.
Zerin crossed the distance in a few sharp strides. The Astral Blade swayed once at his side before he steadied it, the tip rising to hover a breath from Ivan's throat.
"You're going to start speaking clearly," Zerin said, his voice leveled low, "because right now I am one thought away from cutting you down."
For the first time, something shifted.
Calculation.
"I helped them," Ivan said.
The first clean confession, and still nothing could have prepared Zerin for the weight hidden inside it.
"They're afraid," Ivan continued. "Uniquely so. Madness, to them, is extinction."
Zerin's brow furrowed, his head tilting slightly. Was he hearing sympathy?
"They become primitive," Ivan went on. "Descendants of Repose who cannot even hear the voice of their god."
Then he paused.
"So, I helped them select—"
Zerin didn't let him finish.
The blade answered before thought did. Its blackened edge kissed flesh and opened Ivan's throat in a single, efficient motion. He collapsed to his knees.
Traitor.
He listened to the wet struggle of air through a throat no longer capable of bearing it.
Then the smell reached him.
Foul. Rotting. Familiar.
Zerin looked down and stepped back in the same instant.
There was a great deal of blood—but that wasn't the wrongness.
It was the color.
Black as spilled ink, it poured from the wound in thick heaps, pooling for barely a heartbeat before it began to hiss, thinning into oily, noxious vapors that burned.
"Ack—" Zerin turned sharply, coughing into his fist. He retreated another step as the body continued to decay.
Could it have been a Flaw?
Zerin watched flesh darken and the corpse slacken, collapsing inward as though something inverse to a soul had been removed. Skin sloughed from bone; muscle decayed into muck before it could strike the floor.
It had to be…
He stared at the filth, at the ruin that had once held the shape of a man, and felt nothing. No recoil. No horror. No tremor in the hands that ended him.
It could have been the residue of his anger, muting the part of him that ought to have felt the weight of it.
Because who kills so easily and remains untouched?
Or perhaps it was simpler than that.
Perhaps Ivan's choices had stripped him of any claim to humanity in Zerin's mind.