The bridge loomed ahead, a cracked, weeping thing of rusted iron and sagging stone. Halfway through, it disappeared into the shroud, like being eaten by it. Selene sat behind Lucian on the bike, her arms wrapped around his waist. But he could sense the hesitation in her tiny hands as if she still did not fully trust him. Lucian knew very well that her trust would be built slowly, gradually. After all, she seemed to have been devoid of human relationships and feelings.
Across the shroud, laid Crimson Bastion. Lucian stared at it for a moment. A single path back.
But he knew better. He could almost feel them waiting on the other side, the Umbral Blades. Waiting for him to make the obvious choice.
They'd cut him down before his boots even touched stone, if he refused to hand Selene over. And they would drag her or cut her then and there. No matter what she was, no matter what she might become, would be nothing but another erased name.
"Not today," Lucian thought grimly.
Selene shifted weakly against his back.
That path was death. There was only one way left. Deeper, into the gut of the Shroud. Into places even the Dominion's strongest mages didn't dare tread.
"You will have to hold very tight." He said, to which Selene nodded.
Lucian inhaled, tasting the heavy ash on the back of his tongue. Every instinct rebelled at what he was about to do.
But he had never been one to flinch from impossible roads.
He revved the bike sharply, and with a guttural roar, he went straight for the bridge, and plunged into the shroud. The darkness engulfed them, and the map and the Mourner's name stirred in his satchel. This time, he would not go straight, but he would turn and go through the shroud until he had reached the obsidian wastes. That was the only way he could have a chance to ensure his and Selene's safety.
The darkness embraced him like an old, terrible friend. And Lucian rode on.
The deeper Lucian rode, the heavier the world became. The Shroud here was no longer a mist.
It was a living thing, thick, coiling around him in ribbons of gray-black smoke that hissed softly against the bike's magitech shell. His deerhorns flickered fitfully, struggling to cut a path ahead. The magelights pulsed like a heartbeat fighting to stay alive.
Stone skeletons loomed in the fog, shattered ruins of forgotten outposts, half-swallowed by the ash. Rusted signposts pointed to nowhere. Crumbling fences curled like dead spiders around empty lots. The ground beneath the bike was more dust than earth, and...bone... of the forgotten who had gotten lost in here. Dying without salvation. Their souls turned into things no one dared to face.
Every mile deeper, the air grew colder, heavier, thinner, until it felt like Lucian was breathing through a wet cloth.
Ashlan and the death map started their work. One carved the path, and the other lighted it. The bike, like an obedient student, followed.
Selene stirred against him, her fingers clenching in the worn fabric of his coat. She whimpered softly, a sound too sharp, too raw, to be simple fear.
Something was wrong. Something was waking inside her.
Lucian adjusted his grip on the handlebars, scanning the shifting dark ahead. His mind burned, cataloging paths, mapping blind, while the satchel against his side pulsed faintly with Viktor's relics: the Mourner's Name whispering protection, the Ashlan Light barely holding the worst at bay.
They came as he knew they would, crawling out of the ash like worms from a drowned corpse.
Wraiths.
Dozens of them, some barely human-shaped, others little more than smears of memory clinging to the fog. Their eyes -- if they had any -- glowed faint blue or white, flickering like half-dead stars.
They clustered at the edges of Lucian's vision, shuddering and seething, pulling against an invisible leash.
But none dared cross the thin silver hum that radiated from his satchel.
The Mourner's Name, Viktor's grim little charm, held them back. Bound by oath, by death, or something older.
Lucian spared them no more than a glance. Pity, maybe.
These weren't hunters. Not the usual type of shroud, though they could have shredded them to pieces if not for the protection. They felt more like echoes. Trapped. Hungering for something they would never again taste.
He throttled forward, leaving them writhing in the ash. But the deeper he drove, the stranger the world became.
All of a sudden, a roar tore through the fog, low, guttural, and full of something ancient.
Lucian jerked the bike sharply to the side just in time as something massive lunged from a collapsed underpass.
A Hollowborn.
Twice the size of a man, its body stitched from blackened sinew and bone, its mouth nothing but a vertical slash dripping smoke.
It had once been human, maybe. Or maybe worse.
Now it was little more than a weapon carved by the Shroud itself.
It crashed onto the ruined road, cracking the stone, and swung a clawed arm toward them with the slow, terrible certainty of something that had forgotten pain.
"Shit!" Lucian cursed and spun the bike hard, tires screaming against the broken ground.
But another movement, a second Hollowborn rising from the broken earth ahead, cut off his escape route.
Trapped.
The Mourner's Name might keep the Wraiths at bay, but it wouldn't stop these.
These things remembered blood. And they would have his.
It struck without warning.
A hulking thing of shattered limbs and glistening, tar-black flesh slammed into his path, sending the bike into a screaming skid.
Lucian threw his body over Selene's, shielding her from the crash as they tumbled across the cracked stone.
Pain lit his ribs, his knees.
He rolled to his feet, drawing his blade in a single smooth motion.
The creature shrieked, a sound like metal grinding against bone, and advanced.
Its face was a melted ruin.
Its arms split into clawed whips of sinew.
Lucian planted his feet, trying to steady his breathing.
The Hollowborn struck again. It was not the usual solid hitting them but more like a pressure. A pressure from decayed bones and a blur of black sinew, slamming into Lucian from the side.
He barely twisted in time.
Mourne flashed up in his hand, too slow. The blow hurled him from the bike.
Pain flared sharply through his side as he hit the ground hard, skidding across the broken ash and shattered stone. The world twisted, doubled, the sharp taste of blood flooding his mouth.
He rolled to his knees, vision swimming.
Ahead, Selene lay where she had fallen from the bike, a pale scrap of life against the endless gray. The small figure barely moved.
The second Hollowborn lumbered towards her. It was massive, inevitable. Claws gleaming wet in the dim magelight of the bike.
Lucian tried to stand. His wounded leg buckled.
"Move," he snarled at himself."Move, damn you—"
The Hollowborn raised one jagged hand, a strike that would cut Selene in two without even slowing.
And Selene…
She opened her eyes.
For one terrible, impossible moment, time itself shuddered.
It didn't look like power. It didn't roar or crack the air like ether. It was quiet. Terrifyingly quiet.
The world seemed to fold around her. It was like an unseen hand pressing gently but irrevocably against the shape of things. The Shroud's heavy ash paused in the air, frozen in tiny shimmering motes.
And the Hollowborn, that thing of stitched death and rage,stopped mid-lunge.
Stopped.
Hung there, claw mid-air, as if it had forgotten how to move.
Selene sat up slowly, blinking, her small face fevered but oddly clear.
Around her, faint arcs of silver light began to ripple outward, It was not flame, not lightning. But something deeper.
Resonance?
Lucian had seen mages before. Seen arcana rip cities open. But this, this was something else.
The Hollowborn began to tremble, its limbs spasming, cracks blooming along its body like shattering porcelain.
A low, keening whine rose from it. It was not rage. It wasn't pain either, but fear.
And then, with a sound like a mirror breaking underwater. The creature collapsed inward.
Imploded.
It was gone.
Reduced to ash and scattered bone before it even hit the ground.
Selene stared at her hands, dazed.
Lucian, breathing ragged, forced himself upright, stumbling toward her.
He reached her, dropping to one knee, Mourne still in his hand.
"Selene," he rasped.
She turned her silver-bright eyes up to him. And for a heartbeat, Lucian saw something vast and ancient staring back at him.
Not malevolent or cruel. He could not tell what.
Selene blinked once, twice, and then whatever had surfaced sank again beneath her small, human confusion.
She sagged forward, collapsing against him.
Lucian caught her, cradling her to his chest as he stared out across the ashen wasteland.
The world around them remained unnaturally still. Even the Wraiths dared not approach now. Whatever Selene had done, whatever she had awakened, it was only the beginning.