Snap.
Crack.
Thud.
His boots hit the ground in a rhythm that was more panic than plan. Each step sent fresh fire through his chest, his ribs grinding against each other in ways they were never meant to. His breath came in wet gasps, each one bringing the taste of iron flooding his mouth.
He spat. Blood splattered across the moss.
The forest was a blur around him—dark trunks, low branches, roots that seemed to reach up and grab at his feet. He didn't know where he was going. North. He thought it was north. Away from the wreckage. Away from the blood. Away from—
Click.
He stumbled, caught himself against a tree, kept moving.
His hand pressed against his side, feeling something wrong. Something sharp. He didn't look down. Didn't want to know. His flight suit was soaked through, the leather sticking to his skin. Oil. Blood. Both.
Keep moving.
His vision swam. The trees tilted, spun, righted themselves. His legs felt distant, like they belonged to someone else. But they kept moving. One foot. Then the other. Again. Again.
Click-click.
Closer.
He risked a glance back.
Movement. Low to the ground. Fast. Multiple shapes weaving between the trees.
His heart slammed against his broken ribs.
He turned forward and ran harder.
The pocket of his flight suit felt wrong. Hot. Too hot. He'd grabbed them without thinking—training, instinct, protocol. Secure the power source. His hands had moved on autopilot, pulling the crystals from the shattered housing, shoving them into his pocket as he'd dragged himself from the cockpit.
Now that pocket was burning.
At first it had been warmth. Uncomfortable. Now it was heat. Real heat. He could smell it—fabric scorching.
He didn't stop.
The heat grew.
His leg buckled slightly. Not from exhaustion. From pain. A different pain. Focused. Sharp. Like something was pressing into his thigh, pushing deeper with every step.
He glanced down as he ran.
Smoke. Thin grey wisps rising from his thigh.
The fabric was blackening, the edges glowing faintly orange.
Oh god.
The heat intensified. He felt the first touch against his skin—like a needle of molten metal pressing into his flesh. He gasped, his stride faltering, but he kept moving.
Click-click-click.
They were right behind him.
The fabric gave way entirely. He felt it—the crystals pressing directly against his skin now. The pain was immediate. His flesh sizzled. He could smell it. Burnt meat. His own body cooking.
He bit down on a scream, his teeth grinding. His hand pressed against the pocket, trying to create distance, trying to—
It didn't work.
The crystals sank deeper. Not just against his skin. Into his skin. The heat was so intense it was melting through. He could feel it—layers of skin blistering, rupturing, the fat beneath liquefying. The crystals, impossibly hot, were burning a path straight through his thigh.
His vision blurred with tears.
The pain was beyond anything he'd ever experienced. It wasn't just burning. It was cooking. The heat penetrated deep, searing through muscle, cauterizing as it went. He could feel one of the crystals—small, no larger than his pinky finger—pushing deeper, boring a hole through his flesh like a white-hot drill.
He stumbled, his leg barely responding. The muscle was being destroyed from the inside out.
Click-click-click-click.
His leg gave out.
He crashed hard, shoulder slamming into the base of a tree. Pain exploded through his body, but it was nothing compared to the fire in his thigh. He rolled onto his back, gasping, his hand clawing at the pocket—
The pocket was gone. Burned away completely.
And where his thigh should have been—where muscle and skin should have protected bone—there was a hole.
A perfect, cauterized hole.
He could see inside his own leg. The edges of the wound were black, charred, the flesh cooked hard like overcooked meat. And deep inside, nestled against the pale white of his femur, he could see it—a faint, violet glow. The crystal. Lodged inside him.
The pain was so intense he couldn't scream. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Only a wet, rattling gasp.
The clicking stopped.
Silence.
He froze.
Then he heard it. Breathing. Wet. Close.
He turned his head.
It was five feet away.
The thing was the size of a wolf, but wrong. Its body was low, limbs bent at angles that didn't make sense—too many joints, bulging and flexing. The skin hung loose in places, sagging like an ill-fitting suit, and where it pulled tight, he could see red underneath. Muscle. Glistening and wet.
Its mouth was closed, but he could see the outline of teeth pressing against the thin lips. Too many teeth. Far too many.
Its eyes were small. Black. Empty.
It tilted its head. Something in its neck popped audibly.
Click.
From the shadows, more emerged. Four. Five. Six. They circled him slowly, their movements synchronized, coordinated. Pack hunters.
His hand found a rock. Small. Pathetic. But it was something.
He forced himself to sit up, back against the tree, the rock gripped white-knuckled in his fist.
"Come on," he rasped. His voice didn't sound like his own. "Come on."
The lead one lunged.
It was fast. Too fast. A blur of loose skin and flexing joints.
He swung the rock.
It connected with the side of its skull. Thunk. The head snapped sideways, but the thing didn't stop.
Its jaws opened.
Wide. Too wide. The jaw unhinged, stretching impossibly, revealing rows upon rows of needle-like teeth that curved inward.
It clamped down on his calf.
The scream tore from his throat before he could stop it.
The teeth punched through the leather, through skin, through muscle, scraping bone. The thing shook its head violently, the way a dog shakes a toy, and he felt his leg tear. Not just flesh. The bone itself cracked. Snap.
He beat at its head with the rock, again and again, his vision going white. The thing released him, backing away, its muzzle dripping red. It clicked—a sound of satisfaction.
The others moved in.
Then the world went dark.
A shadow fell over the clearing. Massive. Absolute. Blotting out what little light filtered through the canopy.
The creatures scattered, their coordinated attack dissolving into panicked flight.
One wasn't fast enough.
The jaws closed around it. Gone. Swallowed whole in a single, effortless gulp.
The impact shook the ground. He looked up.
Black scales. Massive body. Wings folded tight. Eyes like burning jade.
The wyvern.
Relief flooded through him, so intense it was almost painful. Saved. He'd been—
The wyvern turned its head toward him.
Those green eyes locked onto his.
And he understood.
He hadn't been saved.
He'd just been claimed by a different predator.
The wyvern lowered its head, nostrils flaring as it scented him. Its tongue—long, forked, black as pitch—slithered out and tasted the air. It could smell the blood, the fear, the weakness.
Prey.
The wyvern's jaws opened.
His hand moved to his pocket—what was left of it. The crystals. He could see two of them, still glowing faintly, resting in the burnt remains of the fabric. He grabbed them with his right hand. The heat seared his palm instantly, blistering the skin, but he didn't care.
But there was a third.
The one inside his leg.
The wyvern's head descended, jaws wide.
His left hand—trembling, burnt, barely functional—reached down to his thigh. To the hole. His fingers found the edge of the wound. The flesh was hard, blackened, crispy like overcooked meat.
He dug his fingers in.
The scream that tore from his throat was inhuman. A sound of pure, unfiltered agony.
He felt his fingers push past the charred outer layer, into the cooked muscle beneath. It was hot. So hot. His fingertips blistered instantly, the skin peeling away. He felt the crystal, smooth and impossibly hot, embedded deep against the bone.
He grabbed it.
The heat was unbearable. His fingers were cooking, the flesh melting against the crystal's surface.
He pulled.
The crystal resisted, lodged tight in the cauterized wound. He pulled harder, his fingers slipping on the slick, burnt flesh.
It came free.
The sound was wet, tearing. Chunks of cooked muscle came with it, clinging to the crystal. Blood—what little hadn't been cauterized—poured from the wound, hot and thick.
He held three crystals now. Two in his right hand. One in his left. All glowing. All burning.
The wyvern's jaws were inches away. He could feel the heat of its breath, could see the rows of obsidian teeth, could smell the rot of previous kills.
He thought of the plane. The mission. The crash.
He thought of his brother.
Where is he? Where—
The image flashed—his brother's face. The same sharp jaw. The same nose. Laughing. Alive.
They'd been together. Side by side in the cockpit. They'd crashed together.
But when he'd woken, his brother was gone. Dragged away.
He'd heard the screams. Distant. Fading.
The wyvern's jaws began to close.
He looked up at those burning green eyes—intelligent, hungry, merciless.
And he screamed.
"AETHERION! TAKE ME TO YOUR LIGHT!"
He slammed the crystals together.
The moment they touched—crystal against crystal—hairline fractures spiderwebbed across their surfaces. The glow intensified, pulsing once, twice—
Then—
Light.
Pure. Blinding. White light that didn't just illuminate—it erased darkness. It was the light of stars being born, of suns collapsing. It burned shadows into the trees, into the earth, into the fabric of reality itself.
Then the heat.
Not fire. Not flame. This was the heat of creation and destruction fused into one. It expanded outward in a perfect sphere, a wall of absolute thermal energy that didn't burn—it erased.
The man was gone before his nerves could scream. His body converted to vapor, to ash, to atomic particles, in a fraction of a second. There was no pain. No final thought. Just instant, absolute cessation.
The wyvern roared.
A single, defiant sound that echoed for a microsecond before being swallowed by the explosion.
Then the heat wave struck.
Its scales—black, massive, designed to withstand dragonfire and the friction of supersonic flight—held for a microsecond. Then they began to glow. To soften. To run like wax down the creature's body.
The wyvern's massive form was lifted off the ground by the sheer force of the expanding energy, hurled backward like a toy. Its wings snapped like paper, the membranes vaporizing, the bones shattering. Its roar was cut short as the heat consumed it, turning scale and muscle and bone into ash.
Then the sound.
It wasn't a sound. It was the end of sound. A roar so deep, so powerful, it didn't travel through air—it traveled through ground, through stone, through bone, through the very atoms of existence. It was a frequency that shattered eardrums, that stopped hearts, that made the ancient trees of the Wicked Forest groan and crack under the pressure.
The shockwave followed.
A physical wall of compressed air moving faster than thought, faster than sound itself.
It hit the trees first.
The shadowpines and blackthorns—giants that had stood for centuries, their trunks thick as factory smokestacks—were uprooted in an instant. Trunks snapped like toothpicks. Branches were stripped away, turned to splinters, to sawdust, to nothing. The forest was flattened in a perfect circle radiating outward from the epicenter, the trees falling like dominoes in a wave of destruction.
The ground buckled. A crater formed, deep and wide, the earth liquefied by the heat and then blown outward by the force. Rocks were vaporized. Soil was turned to glass, fused by temperatures that exceeded any forge, any furnace.
The crater glowed. Molten. Angry. A wound carved into the flesh of the world.
The fireball rose.
A towering column of flame and smoke, climbing into the sky with terrifying speed, mushrooming outward at the top, casting hellish, orange-red light across the landscape. The heat was so intense that trees a mile away began to smolder, their leaves curling and blackening, their sap boiling inside the trunks.
Animals fled in terror, their instincts screaming at them to run from the unnatural fire, from the wrongness that had been unleashed.
The shockwave continued outward, losing strength but still devastating.
At two miles, windows shattered in the few scattered homesteads on the forest's edge. Glass exploded inward, cutting those unlucky enough to be standing near.
At three miles, people were knocked off their feet by the sudden, violent gust of wind that followed the shockwave. They fell, confused, terrified, not understanding what had just happened.
At five miles, they felt the ground shake—a deep, rolling tremor that rattled dishes and made lanterns swing. They looked up to see the distant glow on the horizon, the pillar of smoke rising into the sky like a monument to destruction.
Then, slowly, the roar faded.
The light dimmed.
The heat dissipated.
Silence.
But it was a different silence now. The silence of a graveyard. The silence of a place where life had been extinguished, where the natural order had been violated.
Where the clearing had been, there was now only a crater. The earth was scorched black, fused into a glassy surface that reflected the pale moonlight. Nothing remained of the man. Nothing remained of the wyvern. Nothing remained of the trees, the moss, the insects, the life that had existed there moments before.
The forest was gone. For a mile in every direction, there was only devastation. Blackened stumps jutting from the ground like broken teeth. Ash. Smoke curling upward in thin, lazy spirals.
And in the distance, barely visible in the dim light, a figure lay sprawled on the ground.
He was younger. His face—the same sharp jaw, the same nose, the same bone structure—was pale, drained of color. His flight suit was in tatters, soaked through with blood. His left arm was gone. Not cut cleanly. Torn. The stump was a ragged mess, the bone visible through the shredded muscle, the flesh hanging in strips.
One of them crouched over him. Its jaws buried deep in his abdomen, its throat working as it swallowed chunks of flesh and organ. Blood pooled beneath him, soaking into the moss.
Another approached, its movements slow, deliberate. Click-click. Its mouth opening in anticipation, revealing those rows of needle teeth.
A third circled, waiting its turn.
The man's hand twitched. His fingers curled slightly, grasping at nothing, at air, at hope that had long since fled.
His lips moved, forming words too quiet to hear. A name, perhaps. A prayer. A final thought.
Then his fingers went still.
The creatures continued their feast, unbothered by the distant glow on the horizon. Unbothered by the pillar of smoke rising into the sky. Unbothered by the devastation that had consumed the forest.
They had found their meal.
And they were hungry.
The Wicked Forest swallowed the scene whole once more.
But the blood remained.
The crater remained.