The moment Vivy finally felt the last weight of the monstrous arm give under her thrall, she clenched her hand into a clawed fist, her pupils narrowing into razor slits of exertion. With a grunt, she flung the tangled mass of sinew and barked muscle aside. It tumbled and cracked against the marshstone earth with a mountainous rumble, snapping trees and flattening smaller creatures beneath its ruinous heft.
Her chest heaved—her breath shallow but alive with exhilaration and dread. Then her voice tore through the din, high and sharp, bright with urgency yet crackling with raw relief
"Hurry up! It's open—we can leave now!"
Her words punched through the oppressive fog, slicing the cord that bound them to this accursed mire.
Kairo's head snapped toward her, his blue eyes widening, veins in his neck standing taut as hope surged through his weary frame. His hand tightened around the dagger, then slackened, knuckles blanching with startled reprieve. A strangled laugh broke past his grit teeth, half a sob of elation, half a hysteric gasp.
Liora's shoulders sagged for a breath, her spear lowering as her breath stuttered, skin flushed. Her crimson-wrapped arms shivered under adrenaline's aftershock, the savage glee that had danced in her eyes moments ago replaced by something close to awe-stricken relief. Her lips trembled with a half-formed grin that died in an exhausted exhale.
Meanwhile, Luke was already in motion before their bodies could fully process the news. His instincts flared with the precise bite of a trader's urgency—no crate could be left to rot here, no investment turned to mulch. He snapped his head forward, dark strands of hair whipping past narrowed eyes as he barked something guttural and low to the great beast. His hand slammed against the side of its hide in three sharp beats—a coded pulse. The creature's musculature quivered under the command, its spines rattling like spears in a gale as it began to pivot, claws gouging deep rivulets through sodden earth.
"Move! Move now—get your worthless ass ready!" Luke hissed under his breath, both plea and order to his lumbering mount. His heart hammered a savage rhythm, an arrhythmic war drum that thudded against his ribs.
Behind them, Nymei's smoke-slick form twisted back from the chaos. The knight was already a monstrous silhouette reeling to regain his forward lunge, sinew armor pulsating with frenetic crimson. The hordes still clawed and slithered toward them, a living carpet of horror.
Nymei did not wait. The Vel'kyren's eye narrowed into a sliver of cruel amusement as it dissolved into shadow once more, splitting through the air like ink poured into water. In a blink, it reformed atop the wagon's back. Its voice spilled out like dusk itself:
"You mortals take far too long to rejoice. Allow me."
Nymei's arms stretched outward, smoky wisps spider-webbing into the air before condensing in a thunderous instant. A maelstrom of pressured atmosphere detonated outward from its form. The blast was so dense it flattened trees for hundreds of strides, monsters turning to pulp under the invisible sledgehammer. Even the distant knight—who had just begun to brace his monstrous calves for another charge—was wrenched off his path, flung back through the fen like a broken doll. The very ground fractured, mists unraveling as if terrified to remain.
Liora stared, pupils contracting to pinpricks, the corners of her lips quirking into something feral. A whisper escaped her, laced with equal parts terror and exhilaration
"By the thorns... that's what true dread commands."
Kairo exhaled a long breath that stank of copper and spit, muttering almost reverently under his breath to the blooms coiled about his limbs:
"Be still. We're nearly free."
Vivy sagged, hands falling to her sides, sweat running in rivulets down her dirt-streaked face. She let out a weak huff of a laugh, voice cracking under strain:
"This must earn me a month's sleep..."
Luke, eyes trained dead ahead, refused to look back—one hand gripping the bridle-rope with near-violent ferocity. His breath fogged the night air as he ground out between clenched teeth:
"Hold tight. No looking back. We're done with this graveyard."
The wagon lurched forward. Its momentum built into a headlong sprint, each stride a quake through the cavernous ribs of the earth.
The forest finally began to thin. The mists peeled away in long ghostly tendrils, the smell of rot and stagnant water slowly giving way to crisp night air, stars winking through rents in the canopy like cautious eyes.
Behind them lay a world of shrieking monstrosities and a knight whose pursuit was only temporarily arrested.
But before them—before them was open land. The promise of survival. The cruel, sweet taste of fleeting freedom.
They had escaped the Bleakroot fen.
Silence.
An unholy, cavernous silence that swallowed the screams of the Fen whole.
No more shrieks. No more wails. No more slick tearing of flesh or the mournful hiss of rotting things dragged through the mire.
All that remained were the carcasses — thousands of them — strewn in grotesque heaps across the sodden expanse. Mangled remnants of horrors that once clawed and gnashed. Now nothing but twitching piles of refuse, leaking ichor that steamed upon touching the stagnant pools of water. The fen itself seemed to hold its breath, as if terrified of awakening its own nightmare again.
Amidst this grisly tableau, the knight stood alone.
Still as a monument to slaughter.
His towering form was bathed in a trembling half-light where the fog parted only slightly, allowing wan star-shine to drip through in reluctant rivulets. Wisps of mist curled about his limbs like ghostly serpents paying homage to their sovereign butcher.
His head tilted, almost delicately, as he regarded the monstrous greatsword still clutched in his gauntleted hand. The blade was slick with old blood and fresh filth — the serrated edge clogged with tattered scraps of sinew and unidentifiable gristle. A faint, dreadful glow still pulsed along its spine, beating like a malignant heart.
Slowly — with a deliberate patience that belied the massacre just wrought — his armor began to change.
The grotesque sinew that wrapped his limbs writhed, veins tightening as if in pain. The crimson sheen dulled, darkening to a charred, brittle hue. His hooded helm, the human skin cruelly stretched across its mask, loosened — stitches popping with tiny snaps that echoed far too loud in the silent fen.
Then, like a carcass too long in the sun, it began to crack.
Fissures raced across the silver visage. Pieces fell away in dusty flakes, catching faint motes of star-light as they drifted to the swamp below.
The transformation wasn't violent. It was mournful.
As though the very malice had drained from him, abandoning the vessel that once harbored it.
And there, unveiled, stood not a monstrous warlord of flesh and dread — but a skeleton.
A hollow, ivory ruin draped in the tattered remains of his blackened surcoat. Vertebrae exposed, ribcage yawning open where once a heart might have beat. Fingers — long and clawed — clutching the hilt of a sword far too heavy for mortal strength, yet held with a ghastly familiarity.
He stared at it for a long, lingering breath that he could no longer take.
Empty sockets fixed on the weapon as though seeking something in its cruel reflection. A memory. A promise. Perhaps a curse.
Then the inevitable happened.
His arm, so thin and brittle beneath the pretense of armor, cracked under the weight. With a muted splintering, it simply snapped at the humerus — the greatsword dragging it down, severed bone grinding against rotting metal. The hand, still wrapped tight about the hilt, struck the marshy ground with a muffled thunk, sending a small shockwave through stagnant puddles.
The knight's skeletal body swayed.
His remaining arm twitched, almost reaching for where his limb had been — an instinct leftover from another life.
Then, quietly, with all ceremony stripped away, he collapsed.
Bones clattered against the blood-wet earth. His spine twisted at an awkward angle, ribs jutting into the air like a cruel parody of wings. His skull struck the mud with a hollow resonance, sockets turned upward.
Where the moon should have been, there was only a ceiling of roiling grey.
Thick, greedy fog swallowing starlight, denying him even the smallest mercy of illumination. Still, he stared. As if hoping — foolishly, stubbornly — that beyond that veil, something waited for him.
A sigh.
Dry, rasping. More the exhalation of memory than breath. It rattled through his teeth like a prayer that had long since lost its sanctity.
"...I fail."
The words dripped out in a brittle cascade, cracking through the oppressive quiet of the Fen like shards of black ice.
Not roared. Not proclaimed.
Just spoken.
With all the ruined weight of a knight who had carried too many battles on marrow that should have long since crumbled to dust.
Above him, the fog churned on — unfeeling, unknowing.
And the Fen, at last, seemed content to return to silence.
At the very edge of oblivion, as his hollow sockets threatened to sink utterly into darkness, something fractured that final descent.
A glimmer.
Faint.
Subtle as a breath caught on winter air — barely there at all, yet unmistakable against the smothering grey.
His consciousness, such as it remained, seized upon it like a dying man clutching at reeds in a black tide. Somewhere in the decaying labyrinth of his marrow, vestigial will strained. He longed — desperately — to pry open his skeletal gaze for just a moment longer. To see.
But there was no muscle to obey. No nerves to fire. No blood to feed them.
The armor that had encased him — a grotesque shell of sinew, malice, and forgotten oaths — had been the only bulwark against the rot of time. Without it, he was simply a relic undone by his own decrepitude. Cracks split further along his ribs. Dust sifted from his jaw. He was moments from collapsing into a loose heap of bones and mud.
Still... he strained.
And then — a voice.
Soft. Mellifluous. Almost tender, as though it might cradle the very world in velvet hands. It floated to him through the oppressive fen like a clandestine hymn carried by a clandestine wind.
"Ah... such a lamentable end."
He did not see her, not truly. Only the fragile edges of a silhouette — dusk made flesh, shaped roughly in the form of womanhood, draped in drifting tatters of something that might have once been robes or might have been pure shadow.
The fog seemed to recoil from her presence. Pools of stagnant water quivered. Even the corpses littering the fen's expanse shuddered, as though in faint remembrance of a life once known.
"A knight bereft of his borrowed sinews. A king, perhaps, who once wore slaughter like a crown," she murmured, her words curling around the hollow of his skull, sinking into the porous marrow. Her lips were unseen, but the shape of them echoed with a dark, amused melancholy.
His mandible twitched — the final echo of a soul struggling to confess its failure. But no sound came.
"Everyone must greet the scythe's edge, dear wraith. This is the only unimpeachable truth stitched into the marrow of this cruel tapestry. Human, Eldrinox, Ruka, Kethran, Thornwret, Ghalderyn, Lythen... even the towering Savrax themselves — all have danced their dirge upon the world's stage, only to fall when their refrain soured."
As she spoke, her hand drifted out from the swirl of her silhouette — long, delicate fingers that seemed woven of dusk itself. They hovered above his broken sternum, as if to cradle the ruin of him, to grant him a comfort undeserved.
The fen seemed to lean closer, eager to eavesdrop.
"War... the inevitable convulsions of a world gnawing at its own entrails. How could one possibly elude death in such a theatre of rot?"
Her tone slid into something darker — a velvet blade pressed against the soft throat of irony.
"Some proclaim that those who dare defy this spiral — who stagger toward impossible triumphs over entropy — are nothing but usurpers of the divine seat. Apostates of natural order."
Her shoulders — or whatever semblance of shoulders her phantasmal form possessed — lifted in a delicate, almost girlish shrug.
"But to even whisper of gods... hah."
It was not a laugh, but a sound more brittle — like old silk tearing in the dark.
"Such a puerile scaffold to prop up one's own dread. A fragile farce to shelter under, when the abyss peers back with all its teeth bared. Truly, how pathetically ornate the lies mortals weave to veil themselves from the cold geometry of oblivion."
Her head tilted slightly, though her face was an enigma cloaked in gloom.
"Sleep now, knight of ash. Your vigil was long. Your dirges well earned. Let the worms pick your legacy clean — and know that even they too must someday perish."
And then, with a sigh soft as moth wings brushing candle flame, she simply dissolved.
The silhouette broke apart into filaments of shadow, curling away into the fog as though she had never existed at all.
The fen swallowed her greedily.
The knight's head sagged. His sockets dimmed utterly. His last thought — if it could be called such — was not of victory or defeat, nor of duty or sin.
But only of the vast, silent sky that had refused him its light.
Then — there was nothing.