The wind was colder here.
Not sharp, but heavy thick enough that each breath felt like swallowing water.
Seris rode at the front of the column, her armour slick with mist, her horse's hooves sinking into the soft, grey soil that marked the end of Lydia and the beginning of Wyre. Behind her, two dozen soldiers trudged in silence.
They didn't sing marching songs anymore.
For three days, they'd passed through fields stripped bare once fertile plains, now nothing but pale grass and cracked stone. The air reeked faintly of iron and decay.
At first, she'd thought it was her imagination. But by the second night, even the soldiers noticed.
"It's like the air's… dying," one muttered.
Seris didn't answer. She could feel it too the hum of something ancient beneath the surface, faint but constant, like a second heartbeat beneath her feet.
"Keep formation," she said. "We make camp by dusk."
Her voice was steady, practiced. The tone of someone who couldn't afford fear.
If they saw how hard she clenched her hands to keep them from trembling, they didn't mention it.
By the fourth day, they reached the border marshes. The trees were warped, bending toward the ground like they'd been pressed down by invisible hands.
The fog moved differently here not drifting, but circling.
Seris felt her Star pulse on her neck faint light flickering in her veins. Her senses sharpened; the world glowed faintly around her. The air was alive with reflections too many, too fast, bending the wrong way.
Something is here.
She stopped and dismounted, her boots sinking into the wet soil.
"Hold," she whispered.
The column froze.
Seris crouched, pressing her hand against the mud. "Lumen Veil."
Light flared from her skin, threading through the mist in thin lines that mapped the world around her soldiers glowing faint gold, trees shimmering like glass. But beneath it all, a single massive outline carved across the horizon, faint but endless.
The light trembled.
The shape was too large to comprehend.
She exhaled sharply and broke the connection.
"Captain?" one soldier asked.
Seris looked up, forcing calm into her voice. "We make camp here. Double perimeter. No fires."
Her hand still shook as she mounted again. The Lumen glow in her eyes dimmed, but her heart wouldn't slow down.
Whatever walked through these lands… it wasn't walking anymore.
It was waiting.
By dawn, the fog had thickened to the point of blindness.
Sound itself seemed to die here. Even the birds had vanished.
Seris hadn't slept. She couldn't. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Kael's face before she entered her first scenario. He'd been shouting something to her, but the noise had been swallowed by light and screams. Then he was gone, and the world had ended around her.
She'd thought coming back would fix the guilt. It hadn't.
Now, as she looked at the tired faces of the soldiers, she realized she was doing it again leading people into death.
"Eat something," she told them softly as they broke camp. "We move soon."
They obeyed quietly. Some smiled at her, grateful for her composure. She wished she could tell them the truth that she was terrified, too.
The first attack came by mid-morning.
The fog split apart with a sound like tearing cloth, and shapes emerged human shapes. Soldiers of Wyre, their armour dull and mud-caked, eyes empty.
They charged without formation, screaming words that didn't sound like language anymore.
"Hold the line!" Seris shouted, drawing her sword.
The first clash was brutal. Steel struck steel, boots sank into mud, and screams tore through the silence.
Seris fought without hesitation, her sword flashing arcs of silver light. Each swing was efficient, trained, fatal. A man lunged she sidestepped, parried, and thrust through his chest. Another came from behind she pivoted, slicing through his throat.
It was over in less than a minute.
When the last body fell, the fog rolled back in.
Seris stood among them, chest heaving, sword dripping red.
For a moment, the world was silent again.
Then the weight hit her.
Her breath caught in her throat. She sank to her knees, staring at her hands at the blood that wasn't hers.
They were just people. Soldiers. Defending their home.
The tears came before she could stop them. She pressed a shaking hand to her mouth to stifle the sound.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, voice cracking. "I'm so sorry."
One of her men a young boy approached, hesitant. "Captain?"
She forced herself upright, wiping her face quickly. "It's fine," she said, her voice hollow. "They would have killed us if we didn't."
The lie hurt worse than the truth.
By nightfall, the stench of blood was unbearable. The marsh seemed to drink it, turning the soil black and slick.
The fog swirled unnaturally now, like it was circling something unseen.
Seris stood at the edge of camp, unable to sleep. Her hands still trembled, her thoughts circling the faces of the dead.
She whispered, "Lumen Veil."
Light spilled out around her again a faint halo painting the marsh in luminous threads.
The ground glowed faintly beneath her feet.
Then it moved.
The light shifted, bending down into the soil as if drawn to something deeper. The reflection stretched and, in that moment, she saw it.
A shadow. A body thicker and longer than any creature she'd ever encountered, sliding through the earth like a serpent under glass.
She followed its outline, counting.
One hundred seventy-two meters.
The earth trembled.
The light broke.
And the silence returned.
___________________________________________________________________
The screams started at dawn.
Seris was already awake when the first sound tore through camp a wet, guttural roar followed by a chorus of shouts.
She burst from her tent, sword drawn, just as the ground split open.
The marsh exploded upward in a wave of mud and debris, hurling soldiers into the air. From the rift came a sound like thunder made of bone deep, grinding, alive.
"Form up!" she shouted, but half the men were already running.
Something massive shifted beneath the surface, and then she saw it a ridge of scale, a ripple of movement the size of a fortress wall.
"Captain!" someone screamed. "It's under us!"
Then the ground heaved, and the world erupted.
A mouth tore through the earth not like a jaw, but a chasm lined with hundreds of jagged, glass-white teeth. Each one longer than a spear, spinning and twitching as if alive.
For one terrible moment, the world went still.
Then the teeth shot outward.
They screamed through the air in a storm of bone and blood, ripping through the camp like a thousand blades.
Seris barely raised her arm before one struck a soldier beside her. He vanished one instant a man, the next a mist of red and torn steel.
She froze. Another soldier fell. Then another. In seconds, half the camp was gone just puddles where men had stood seconds before.
Her ears rang. The smell of blood and iron filled the air.
One of the teeth struck her side tearing through armour, grazing deep. Pain shot through her ribs, stealing her breath.
She stumbled, falling to one knee. The ground beneath her pulsed, as if the earth itself were breathing.
The thing below shifted again. The shadow rose, blotting out the sunless sky, its form impossible to see only the glimmer of endless teeth and the faint shimmer of reflected light outlining its colossal shape.
Seris gritted her teeth, forcing herself to stand. Her legs trembled, her vision blurred, but she lifted her sword anyway.
Her blood dripped into the mud.
For a moment, everything went silent again.
Then she whispered, barely loud enough for herself to hear
"Come on, then."
The shadow above her opened wider, and the world went dark.