Chapter 39: Echoes of the Holy War
The victory over the great red dragon had been... satisfying. The heat of its primordial heart, now consumed and assimilated, burned faintly in the depths of Canis Lykaon's essence, an echo of the monumental battle. But satisfaction, like all prey, was quickly devoured. The mountain lair, now empty of gold and life, no longer held any interest.
He had left. He had dissolved into the shadow of his enemy's corpse and flowed back into the world, a predator without a kingdom and without a purpose.
For weeks, or perhaps months—mortal time was a fluid concept to him—he wandered. His absolute freedom was a vast ocean of boredom. The mythical beasts remaining in the world had learned to sense his presence, to smell the nothingness that announced his arrival. Griffins fled from his shadows. Chimeras retreated to deeper caves. The world cowered before him.
'An empty territory,' he thought, his colossal wolf form standing atop a mist-shrouded hill, his ember eyes sweeping a silent valley. 'I have killed or scared away all worthy prey. The gods are noisy children. The earth is boring. Is this all freedom offers?'
He was about to retreat to his sanctuary in the lake, to sink into the warm darkness and wait a century for the world to become interesting again, when a new scent hit his senses.
It was not the sulfur smell of a dragon, nor the ambrosia perfume of a god. It was something much rawer, more visceral.
It was the sour, metallic stench of terror.
It was not the clean fear of a single prey fleeing for its life; this was different. It was a concentrated cloud, a miasma of mass panic. It was the smell of an entire herd being slaughtered, a cacophony of despair so dense it almost had a taste.
'Noise,' he thought at first. 'An emotional noise. Weak, but... piercing.'
His indifference was replaced by a cold curiosity. What creatures could produce such a pure and concentrated emotion in such quantity? It was not hunger that drove him, but the same innate curiosity that leads a wolf to investigate the sound of a dying animal in the distance.
He followed the trail, a tide of night flowing between the trees, silent as the grave. The scent intensified with every kilometer, now mixed with the acrid smoke of burning wood and the unmistakable, thick coppery aroma of fresh blood spilled on the earth.
The sounds came later. Screams. Not the roars of battle, but the high-pitched shrieks of despair. Pleas. The weeping of the weak.
He emerged at the edge of a forest, his colossal form perfectly hidden in the deep shadow cast by an ancient oak. His ember eyes observed the valley below.
It was a mortal village. A small, pathetic collection of wood and thatch huts clustered by a quiet river. Or it had been. Now, it was in flames.
A dozen humanoid figures moved through the village. They were not beasts. They were twisted, with ashen skin, bone claws, and small horns sprouting from their foreheads. Demons.
Canis Lykaon watched, motionless. His bestial face showed no compassion, nor anger, nor interest. He was witnessing a unilateral massacre. He saw a rogue demon, laughing with a voice that sounded like broken glass, impale a man against the wall of his own house. He saw another drag a screaming woman by her hair toward a burning barn.
'Noisy insects playing with their food.'
They were not his pack. It was not his problem. The fate of this mortal flesh was as indifferent to him as that of ants under a boot. The spectacle was cruel, yes, but it was also boring.
He would have left. He would have turned around and sought more worthy entertainment.
But then, the massacre crossed into his territory.
A villager, a young man running with a limp, had managed to escape the carnage. He ran desperately toward the only darkness that promised refuge: the forest. He ran directly toward the shadow where Canis Lykaon was hidden.
'No. Do not bring your noise to my silence.'
The man didn't make it. A demon, faster, caught up to him. With a cry of triumph, the demon sank its claws into the man's back.
The villager fell forward, his final momentum carrying him to crash against the base of the oak. He fell directly into Lykaon's shadow. His body convulsed, and a final, hot stream of blood spurted from his mouth, splattering Canis Lykaon's very essence.
Silence.
The demon laughed, wiping its claws on the grass.
Lykaon slowly lowered his head. He looked at the hot blood steaming on his own shadow, a sticky red stain on his pure blackness.
He had been touched.
He had been... soiled.
An intruder. A noisy insect. It had hunted in his territory. And in its stupidity, it had marked the alpha predator with its prey.
A low growl, a sound that was not of this world, but the rumble of an offended void, began to vibrate in the air. The laughing demon froze. The smell of terror in the valley was suddenly eclipsed by a new emotion.
A cold, absolute, and infinite killing intent.
The demon's hunt was over. Lykaon's had just begun.
Canis Lykaon remained motionless, a statue of living night hidden in the shadow of the oak. He watched, with an indifference as cold as the void of his realm, as the villager's life spilled onto the grass.
The rogue demon laughed, a sharp, screeching sound, and shook the blood from its claws. It turned to look for its next victim, its back to the tree.
But the mortal's blood... had not stayed on the grass.
It had splattered the tree's shadow. And in that act, it had touched Canis Lykaon's very essence.
A humid, sticky heat clung to his being. It was not his blood. It was not his prey. It was the refuse of a noisy insect, staining his domain, marking his conceptual skin.
Silence.
The demon's laughter cut off. The air in the valley, previously charged with the smell of smoke and fear, changed. It became heavy, dense, and an unnatural cold began to radiate from the edge of the forest, a cold that extinguished the flames of the nearby huts.
The demon turned slowly, its animal instinct screaming that something was terribly wrong. The other demons felt it too. They stopped playing with their prey. The villagers' panic was replaced by a new and absolute terror, a terror that came from the darkness itself.
'Defiled,' Lykaon's thought was not of anger. It was of a cold and absolute offense. 'An insect. It has put its filthy hands on my territory. And it has wiped its food on my fur.'
The shadow beneath the great oak ceased to be a shadow. It swirled, thickened, and began to rise.
The nearest demon took a step back, its yellow eyes widening. It watched as the darkness peeled off the ground like tar, taking shape.
Canis Lykaon emerged. Not with a flash, but with a silent finality. His colossal wolf form solidified, a mountain of night and contained fury, his eyes two red embers burning with the cold light of a dead star.
The rogue demons froze. They were remnants of the Great War, veterans of battles against angels, but this... this was not an angel. This was not an enemy they could understand. Its power was not of fire or lightning. It was the crushing power of nothingness itself.
The demon that had killed the villager was the first to react, its fear overcome by arrogant stupidity. "A shadow beast! A prize for the Duke!" it roared, raising its claws to charge.
It didn't take a second step.
Lykaon didn't move. He simply existed in front of it. He had crossed the clearing in an instant that didn't happen, moving between the folds of shadow.
Lykaon's jaws, an abyss of night teeth, closed around the upper half of the demon.
There was no scream. Only a wet, final CRUNCH!, the sound of bones and chitin armor being pulverized. Canis Lykaon lifted his head, and the demon's lower half fell to the ground with a dull thud, a geyser of black blood spurting from its severed torso.
The rest of the squad watched, paralyzed by horror.
'Noisy,' thought Lykaon, as the demon's soul was absorbed by his darkness.
And then, he turned toward the others.
It was a massacre. It was not a battle. It was a purge.
He became a blur of darkness, a tide of death. A demon raised a hellfire sword, only for a shadow tentacle to sprout from the ground and pierce its chest, snuffing out its flame. Another tried to flee, but Lykaon's shadow spread faster, becoming a wall of solid darkness that crushed it against a burning house.
Two demons attacked him together. Lykaon split. His shadow echo materialized, a perfect replica that intercepted one, its claws tearing out its throat, while the real Lykaon crushed the other's skull with a single paw.
He wasn't just killing them. He was consuming them.
With every demon that fell, a silent scream resonated on the psychic plane as its soul was ripped out, stripped of its memories, and absorbed by Lykaon's essence. It was the ultimate cleansing. He would leave not even the echo of their plague in his territory.
In less than a minute, the valley fell silent. The fires of the huts still burned, but the screams had ceased. Where there had once been a dozen rogue demons, now only stains of black blood and pieces of broken armor remained, slowly dissolving.
Canis Lykaon stood in the center of the burning village, smoke swirling around his motionless form. The surviving villagers, peeking from their hiding places in cellars and the woods, watched with an even deeper terror.
The monster that had saved them was infinitely more terrifying than the monsters that had attacked them.
Lykaon sniffed the air. The smell of mortal blood and demonic sulfur was thick. He had cleaned the stain. His territory was clean.
He turned, his ember gaze passing over the trembling villagers without seeing them. They were irrelevant. They were merely the scenery of the offense.
But just as he prepared to dissolve back into the shadows, a new sensation hit him. A new scent. Ozone. And the stench of burnt feathers.
He raised his head to the sky. More insects.
Canis Lykaon stood amidst the carnage, a mountain of silent night surrounded by the smoking remains of the demon horde. The air was thick, a foul broth of sulfur, burnt flesh, and the metallic taste of terror.
His colossal form showed no signs of battle. The purge had been so unilateral that it was less combat and more extermination. He was absorbing the last wisps of the demons' souls, an act of conceptual cleansing, erasing their stain from his territory.
'Noisy. Fragile. And their taste is bitter,' he thought, a cold indifference in his essence. 'A plague of insects. Now, the valley is clean.'
He was about to dissolve, to sink back into the web of shadows and continue his wandering hunt, when a new disturbance tore the sky above him.
It was not a sound. It was a vibration. A tear in the fabric of reality.
He lifted his huge head. His ember eyes fixed on a point in the lead-gray sky. The air there swirled, glowing with a sickly purple light before opening like a wound. A teleportation circle.
From the portal, six figures descended.
Wings. Not of pure light like the angels of Olympus, nor of fire like those of his distant memories of Heaven. They were raven wings, black as night, but lacking the purity of his own darkness. Fallen Angels.
The small squad descended in military formation, their dark bronze armor shining with the light of the burning huts. They landed in a semicircle at the edge of the village, their boots splashing in the mud and blood. They carried spears that crackled with corrupt light energy, purple and silver.
They saw the scene before them. The destroyed village. The corpses of the villagers. The dissolving remains of the dozen rogue demons. And in the center of it all, the colossal shadow beast dripping darkness, still smoking with the power of annihilation it had just unleashed.
The squad leader, a Fallen with four wings and a scar crossing his face, raised his spear. His soldier's logic, forged in the Great War, offered him only one conclusion.
"A Duke-class Demon! He has turned on his own!" he shouted to his men. "He must be the one we were tracking! End this abomination!"
'More insects,' was Canis Lykaon's only thought. The level of his irritation was almost palpable. He had just cleaned his territory, and now a new infestation had arrived. 'Noisy. And now... they fly.'
The six Fallen Angels attacked in unison, a display of military discipline. They leaped into the air, their black wings beating as they launched themselves from six different vectors. Their spears of corrupt light materialized, six beams of purple energy shooting toward him, designed to impale and purge.
Canis Lykaon did not move.
He stood there, a statue of primordial arrogance, and let the attacks come.
Just as the spears were about to impact his form, his shadow on the ground exploded.
It was not a defense. It was a counterattack.
Dozens of solid darkness tentacles, sharp as obsidian needles, sprouted from his shadow and his back. They moved faster than thought, a storm of liquid night.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The tentacles didn't block the light spears; they whipped them. Pure darkness collided with corrupt light, and the spears shattered in the air, their purple fragments extinguishing with a hiss.
The Fallen stopped in mid-air, their faces a mask of shock. Their combined attack had been nullified with casual disdain.
They had no time to react.
'My turn.'
The tentacles, now free, became weapons. Two of them shot upward, wrapping like whips around the ankles of the two lowest Fallen. With a pull that would have uprooted a tree, Lykaon dragged them down.
CRUNCH!
The two fallen angels were slammed into the village ground with force so devastating their armor dented and their bones pulverized. A stifled groan was the only sound they made before going still.
Two more, flying higher, tried to ascend, their wings beating frantically.
'Slow.'
Two tentacles, now hardened like spearheads, shot from the ground. They crossed the distance in an instant. The Fallen screamed as the shadow spears impaled them through the back, piercing their chests in an explosion of black feathers and ichor.
They hung in the air for a moment, two macabre trophies on pikes of darkness, before their wings stopped beating.
The leader and his second-in-command watched from the sky, frozen in horror. They had lost four men in less than three seconds.
"Retreat!" shouted the leader, his voice now full of panic. "Retreat now! It's a primordial!"
They turned and flew toward the sky, a blur of black feathers beating desperately.
Canis Lykaon raised his head. His ember gaze fixed on the fleeing leader. "No."
He dissolved.
His colossal form collapsed into the shadow of the village well. The Fallen leader felt a momentary victory, believing the beast had given up the chase.
Then, he felt an unnatural cold. The gray sun above him seemed to flicker. He looked down. His own shadow, cast on a distant cloud, was... writhing.
Before he could scream, Canis Lykaon emerged from it.
It was not a chase. It was an arrival. He materialized in the air, above him.
The Fallen leader looked up, his face turning into a mask of absolute terror as he saw jaws the size of a carriage, full of night teeth, closing over him.
CRUNCH!
The sound was final.
The second-in-command watched, horrified, as his commander's head, shoulders, and wings were erased from existence. The Fallen's lower half fell aimlessly toward the forest below.
Canis Lykaon hung in the air for a moment, the dark blood of his prey dripping from his snout, before dissolving and reappearing on the village ground.
He absorbed their souls. They were an unsatisfying appetizer, with an aftertaste of fallen pride and despair.
He stood again in the center of the massacre. Silence returned, but the air was now even dirtier. The smell of sulfur had mixed with the stench of burnt feathers and the ozone of the Fallen's magic.
'Infestation,' he thought with deep disgust. 'This territory is ruined.'
He turned to leave, to find a place that wasn't so full of noisy insects.
But just as his paws began to sink into the shadows, a new scent reached his senses.
This time it wasn't sulfur. It wasn't ozone. It was the smell of cold iron, human sweat... and the faint, almost imperceptible, but unmistakable fragrance of faith.
He raised his head, his ember eyes narrowing. From the edge of the forest through which he had arrived, a new group of figures was emerging.
They wore steel plate armor and white tabards. They held longswords and wooden shields. And in the center, one of them held a banner with a golden cross symbol.
'More. Of them.'
Canis Lykaon's patience had run out.
Canis Lykaon remained motionless, a statue of night in a garden of carnage. The smell of burnt feathers and corrupt ozone now mixed with sulfur and blood, creating a stench that offended his primordial senses. He had cleared the demonic infestation only for a plague of Fallen to drop from the sky. He had exterminated that plague, and now, the air bristled with a new intrusion.
'More. They keep coming.'
His patience, a thin thread even in his best moments, had evaporated. Now only cold, absolute irritation remained.
From the edge of the forest, by the same path he had taken, emerged the third group. They were mortals. Humans. A dozen of them, moving with rigid discipline that contrasted with the chaos of the demons and the arrogance of the Fallen.
They were wrapped in steel plates that shone with a faint silver glow under the gray sky. Over their armor, they wore immaculate white tabards, emblazoned with the symbol of a golden cross. They held large wooden shields and long steel swords.
Canis Lykaon watched them with almost lazy curiosity. They were so fragile. Bodies of soft flesh and brittle bones, wrapped in metal. They were barely a threat.
But then, he felt their aura. It was not the raw power of a demon nor the corrupt energy of a Fallen. It was something different. A weak, but sharp and shrill power that felt vaguely familiar. It smelled of faith. Of a conviction so blind it had become a weapon. They were Church Knights.
The group leader, a man with a graying beard and a scar crossing one eye, stopped at the entrance to the village. His fanatic gaze swept the scene.
He saw the surviving villagers, huddled and crying. He saw the charred remains of the demons. He saw the shattered bodies and black feathers of the Fallen Angels. And then, he saw Canis Lykaon, the colossal shadow beast standing in the center of it all, his ember eyes burning in the gloom.
The knight's dogma offered him only one conclusion.
"Heresy!" he roared, his voice full of righteous fury. "We have found the source! A Primordial Satanic Beast! An archdemon that consumes its own!"
He raised his sword, the blade glowing with a faint holy light. "Brothers! Do not fear this creature of darkness! Our Lord is dead, but his light protects us! This is our holy judgment! Purge this abomination in the name of Heaven!"
With a unified war cry, the twelve knights charged.
'Noisy. And now... religious.' Canis Lykaon didn't even bother to move. He felt a pang of something almost akin to amusement. 'Their god is dead. And his orphans have come to play war with the night itself.'
The group's priest, a robed man running behind the knights, was the first to attack. He uncorked a silver vial and threw it, scattering a shower of holy water.
HISSSTTTT!
The holy water, imbued with the faith of a dead god, hit Lykaon's shadow fur. And it evaporated instantly. There was no pain. No hiss of acid. Lykaon's conceptual darkness, anchored to an infinite void, simply treated the holy water like any other liquid: an irrelevant annoyance.
The priest stopped dead, his face a mask of horror and disbelief. "Impossible! It doesn't affect him!"
The knights did not stop. They reached Lykaon, their holy swords raised, glowing with the power of their prayers.
"Die, beast of hell!"
The swords fell.
And passed through.
They met no resistance. The blades of holy steel, designed to cut demonic flesh, passed through Canis Lykaon's form as if it were smoke, cutting nothing but cold air. The knights stumbled, their momentum carrying them through him, their attacks failing completely.
They turned, confused, only to see him there, motionless, his form as solid as before.
"It's an illusion!" shouted the captain. "Do not be deceived! Use the Holy Light!"
The knights sheathed their useless swords and clasped their hands. They began to chant, their voices joining in a chorus of fanatical faith. A faint golden light, a pale echo of the power the Biblical God had wielded, began to form between their hands.
'Light. Their only answer,' thought Lykaon, feeling deep boredom. 'They hurt me with the sun. And now they think they can harm me with a candle.'
He let them finish their spell.
"Purge!" they shouted in unison, and a dozen beams of holy light shot out, converging on his chest.
The impact was... lukewarm.
He felt a slight sting, like an insect bite. The holy light, filtered through the faith of these mortals, was a mockery of the conceptual fire that had wounded him. It splashed uselessly against his darkness, dissipating with a pathetic hiss. It left no mark. It caused no pain. It simply irritated him.
The silence that followed was absolute. The knights watched, their faces pale with terror. They had used their three greatest weapons: holy water, holy steel, and the Divine Light itself.
And none had worked. Their faith was useless. Their god was dead. And the monster in front of them was very, very real.
'Pathetic,' was Lykaon's final thought. The game was over.
The silence that fell over the valley was heavier than any thunder. It was a silence of broken faith.
The twelve Church Knights stood motionless, their hands still extended from the failed light spell. Their faces, previously flushed with fanatical fervor, were now pale masks of a horror their scriptures had never described.
Holy water, useless. Holy steel, useless. Their God's Light, a simple candle against a hurricane. Their entire belief system, the pillar upon which they had built their lives, had crumbled in less than a minute.
They were defenseless. Twelve fragile men, wrapped in metal, facing a concept.
Canis Lykaon watched them, his colossal form motionless. The heat of his irritation had cooled, replaced by a deep, lazy contempt. He had proven his superiority. Now, only the cleanup remained.
'Noisy. Fragile. And now, broken,' he thought. 'A boring game. It is time to end it.'
But a simple bloodbath was inefficient. A massacre teaches fear. A lesson teaches terror.
The knight captain, recovering a shred of his broken courage, raised his sword again, his hands trembling so violently the metal rattled against his armor. "Retreat! Retreat! Regrou...!"
His order was drowned by a gasp.
He looked down. The shadow his own body cast on the blood-stained earth... was moving.
It was not a simple reflection. It writhed, thickened, a smear of black tar refusing to obey the laws of light. Canis Lykaon hadn't even moved, but his will had extended.
Before the captain could react, a tentacle of solid darkness sprouted from his own shadow and coiled around his ankle with the strength of a steel serpent. With a brutal yank, he was ripped from his feet.
"Heresy!" shouted another knight, raising his shield.
But it was too late. Their own shadows rebelled in unison.
From the base of each of the twelve knights, darkness came alive. Tendrils of liquid night shot up, wrapping their armored legs, climbing their torsos, pinning their arms to their sides.
They struggled. Cursed. Prayed. It was useless. They were flies trapped in a conceptual web. They were being attacked, immobilized, by the most fundamental part of their own existence.
"Release me, demon!" roared the captain, struggling against the shadow bonds that now covered him up to his chest.
Canis Lykaon took a single step forward, his colossal form absorbing what little light remained in the valley. He stopped in front of the immobilized captain and lowered his huge head. His ember eyes, two dying stars, locked onto the man's.
"Demon?" Lykaon's voice resonated in their minds, a vibration of pure, ancient contempt. "Demons are noisy insects. I consumed them. Your fallen angels were annoying flies. I crushed them."
He leaned closer, his snout almost grazing the captain's face. "Your light is an echo. The last whisper of a dead god. Your faith is a paper shield against an ocean."
'Now, the lesson.'
Canis Lykaon stood up and, without moving, closed his conceptual fist.
The shadow tentacles holding the knights did not crush. They absorbed.
The first knight screamed, a sharp, choked sound. His companions watched in horror as his plate armor began to darken, losing its shine. The metal, touched by pure darkness, turned brittle and crumbled, turning to dust.
And the flesh beneath... came undone. It was not devoured. It was erased. His shadow was eating him, reclaiming the man's matter, returning it to the void from which it came.
One by one, the screams resonated and died out. One knight tried to pray one last time, but his own shadow filled his mouth, choking his prayer. Another simply wept as he watched his hands dissolve into nothingness.
In less than thirty seconds, eleven of the twelve knights were gone. Their armor lay in piles of metallic dust on the grass.
Only one remained. The captain.
Lykaon had kept his bonds loose, forcing him to witness the annihilation of each of his men.
The captain trembled, not with anger, but with a mind-shattering madness. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, saliva dripping from his trembling lips. He had seen his brothers in faith, men he had fought alongside for decades, be consumed by their own shadows. His dogma, his reality, his sanity... everything had shattered.
Canis Lykaon approached him. The shadow tentacles withdrew, and the man collapsed onto his knees, his sword falling from his inert fingers. He babbled, incoherent words of terror and broken prayers.
Lykaon lowered his huge head until his ember eyes were inches from the man's face. He smelled the stench of his emptied bladder, the sour smell of a terror so deep it had broken his soul.
"Run."
The command was a simple whisper in his broken mind.
"Flee. Return to your blind jailers. Tell them what you have seen. Tell them their Light is dead. Tell them their Steel is useless."
The predator leaned in even closer, his voice becoming the finality of a grave.
"And tell them... that the Night is everything."
The captain froze for a second more, and then, the most basic survival instinct took over. With a shriek that wasn't human, he scrambled to his feet and ran. He ran toward the forest, stumbling, falling, screaming, his mind erased, leaving a trail of terror behind him.
Canis Lykaon watched him go. He didn't kill him. A corpse is an end. A survivor... a survivor is a message.
He had let an insect live. To warn the rest of the nest.
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