Chapter 6: Chapter 5: Into the Throat of Orn
The gully was a throat of shadows and smoke. The drum was louder now, a deep, unsettling thump-thump-thump that vibrated in the chest more than the ears. The smell of cooked meat and unwashed bodies, of forge-smoke and tallow, was a physical barrier.
They moved like wraiths down a steep scree slope, scattering loose stones with agonizing slowness. Ghosts, Rook had said. Seraphina felt anything but insubstantial. Every step sent a jarring ache through her bound wings. The whispers from the frozen moon had receded to a dull buzz, a divine migraine, leaving behind only the throbbing visual echo of her fractured halo in her mind’s eye. She felt cut adrift, unmoored, a satellite with a broken tether tumbling through hostile space.
Vesper kept her void-hand tucked into the fold of her cloak. It was colder than the mountain air, a null spot against her hip that seemed to leach warmth from the rest of her. She could feel its hunger, a slight, gravitational pull towards things, towards the living pulse of the orc camp, towards the faint, strange stillness in Rook’s corrupted shoulder. She clenched her other fist, nails biting into her palm, using the clean, mortal pain as an anchor.
Rook led, Ash a silent partner. The wolf’s movements were stiff, lacking their usual fluid cohesion. A gash on his flank, earned in the altar chamber, was scabbed over an ugly, greyish colour. The connection between them was a faded, staticky line. It was like trying to hear a whisper through a thick wall. He could sense Ash’s pain, his confusion, the deep chill, but he couldn’t share it, couldn’t shoulder it as he once had. The numbness in his own shoulder was a constant, isolating reminder.
They reached the gully floor, a frozen stream bed cluttered with boulders. Peering around a massive, moss-covered rock, the orc outpost unveiled itself.
It wasn’t a camp. It was the fist of a larger beast, hammered into the mountain pass.
A palisade of sharpened, whole tree trunks formed a semicircular barrier against the cliff face. At its centre, a massive war-banner of coarse, blackened hide hung from an iron crossbeam. Its edges were frayed by centuries of wind and battle. The sigil was a jagged white fanged maw, painted in ash and bone-dust so it seemed to snarl from the dark fabric. The lower half was streaked with crimson handprints, dozens of them, layered and overlapping. Heavy chains, links the size of a man’s fist, draped the top bar and clinked with a dull, metallic rhythm in the bitter wind. A single, yellowed wolf-tooth talisman swung from the bottom, a solitary, swinging omen.
Beyond the wall, the stronghold proper rose, a monstrous growth of basalt and iron. Orn Stronghold. It wasn’t built; it was extruded, as if the mountain had once vomited up a fortress and let it cool. Jagged battlements crowned walls that gleamed with a faint, internal heat where magma veins pulsed just beneath the stone. Spire-towers, twisted and sharp, pierced the bloody twilight. Smoke drifted in slow, ponderous sheets from unseen forges below, weaving around the towers like funeral shrouds. The frozen Blood Moon hung above it all, painting every metal edge a dull, awful red.
“So much for going around,” Seraphina whispered, her voice hoarse.
But it was the sight along the inner palisade that stole their breath.
Chained to the blackened wood, spaced at intervals of ten feet, were vampires.
Maybe two dozen. They were in various states of wretchedness. Some hung limply, their pale skin blistering where the chains, silver, or some magicked iron, touched them. Others stirred, eyes glowing with a feverish, hopeless hunger. Their finery was torn, their hair matted with frost and filth. They made no sound, but the air around them thrummed with a silent, collective anguish. This wasn’t a prison. It was a display. A promise.
“Execution ground,” Rook murmured, his golden eyes narrowed.
A formation of orc warriors, a hundred strong, marched through the central yard. They were not the disorganized brutes of tavern tales. These moved in a grim, lockstep unison. They were massive, their armour a mix of darkened plate and thick hides, faces set in expressions of disciplined ferocity. Their eyes, as they passed the chained vampires, held no mockery, only a cold, judicial contempt. This was a sentencing, not a sport.
“We don’t walk through that,” Vesper stated, the obvious truth chilling.
“We don’t have the strength to climb back up and find another way,” Rook countered, his voice low. “And Darian’s trail leads east. Right through their front door.”
As if summoned by their dilemma, a door within the stronghold gate, a massive slab of banded iron and blackwood, groaned open. A lone figure emerged, and the marching orcs halted as one, the thud of their final step echoing off the stones.
He was an orc, but he wore his authority like another layer of armour. His shoulders were a topography of old scars and muscle beneath a fur-trimmed, spaulder. A single, polished ram’s horn formed one pauldron. In his hand was a broad-bladed axe, its haft wound with leather stained dark from grip. He didn’t shout. He simply stood, and the sheer force of his presence demanded the silence he received.
“Hear me, clans of Orn!” His voice was a boulder rolling downhill, deep and unavoidable. It carried over the frozen air, over the clinking chains, the crackle of distant forges. “The vampire creed spits in the face of the world’s law.”
Seraphina felt a strange twinge. It was the tone of a celestial decree, but grounded in stone and blood, not light and spirit.
“They drink life yet give none. They twist the balance our ancestors bled to keep.” He raised the axe, not in anger, but in declaration. The frozen moonlight caught the edge, a red slit in the world. “Such creatures stand outside honor, outside nature, outside the right to draw breath.”
Vesper shivered, her void-hand giving a faint, sympathetic throb. Outside nature. The words resonated with the cold nothing in her palm.
“By the will of the mountain and the oath of our blood, they are condemned.” The General swept his gaze across his warriors, then to the chained figures on the wall. His next words fell like stones into a still pond. “At dawn’s first light, if dawn still comes, they will be executed.”
A collective, guttural thump of axe hafts on the hard ground answered him. No cheer. An affirmation.
The General turned and strode back into the stronghold, the door groaning shut behind him. The formation of orcs broke, moving with purposeful efficiency.
“Dawn’s not coming,” Seraphina said, staring at the eternally frozen crimson moon. “That’s the point. He’s creating his own terms. No sunrise, no reprieve.”
“They’re making an example,” Rook said, his mind racing. “They’re not just killing vampires. They’re proving a point to every kingdom watching this bloody sky. That they are the law here.”
“We can’t stay here,” Vesper said. Her eyes were fixed on the chained vampires. A terrible, pragmatic thought formed. “A distraction. If they’re focused on an execution at dawn… that’s when movements get chaotic. That’s when gates might open.”
“We don’t have until dawn,” Seraphina hissed. “Every minute, Darian gets further, and my head feels like it’s full of broken stained glass. We need through now.”
Ash let out the softest whine. He was looking not at the stronghold, but down the gully, past their hiding spot. His ears swivelled.
Rook’s senses, dulled but still sharp, caught it a second later. The crunch of snow. The clink of gear. A patrol. Coming right for their position.
“Move,” he breathed.
But it was too late. Three orc sentries rounded the large boulder, their eyes, adapted to the gloom, locking instantly onto the three huddled figures and the wounded wolf.
For a heartbeat, there was only the whistling wind.
The lead orc, younger than the rest, his tusks still short, grunted in surprise. His hand went to the crude hand-axe at his belt. He shouted something in the guttural orc tongue.
Rook reacted. He stepped forward, putting himself between the orcs and the others. He didn’t snarl. Didn’t change. He just stood, a werewolf in human skin, radiating a predator’s tension. “We’re just passing through,” he said, his voice calm, low, a blade sheathed in courtesy. “We mean no trouble to the clans of Orn.”
The young orc bristled, but his older companion, a grizzled veteran with a notch missing from one tusk and eyes like chips of flint, placed a restraining hand on the youth’s arm. Those flinty eyes swept over Rook, noted the muscular build, the golden eyes. They flicked to Ash, the loyal wolf-companion, a symbol of legitimacy in many cultures. They passed over Vesper, lingering for a moment on her otherworldly stillness, and finally to Seraphina, with her strange bearing and the subtle, fractured glow barely visible in her dark hair.
“Passing through,” the veteran repeated in heavily accented Common. His voice was a dry rasp. “The pass is closed. By order of the General. All travellers are to be detained. Questioned.” His gaze went back to the chained vampires on the wall. The implication was clear.
The young orc gestured aggressively. “You come. Now.”
Vesper’s void-hand pulsed, a sudden, icy surge. She pressed it hard against her leg. Not now.
Seraphina’s wings ached with the instinct to flare, a show of celestial power that no longer existed. She felt the loss like a physical void.
Rook’s mind calculated odds, escape routes. They were tired, wounded, outnumbered. A fight here would bring the entire hundred-and-strong guard down on them. He exchanged a glance with Vesper, a silent conversation in a look. Compromise. Buy time.
“We submit to the General’s judgment,” Rook said, slowly raising his hands, palms out. A gesture of non-aggression. The numbness in his shoulder made the movement stiff, awkward.
The veteran orc’s eyes narrowed, missing nothing. He gave a sharp nod. The young orc stepped forward, pulling a loop of thick, coarse rope from his belt.
As they were bound, their hands tied in front with rough efficiency, Seraphina felt a hysterical laugh bubble in her throat. A fallen angel, a void-witch, and a corrupted werewolf, walked right into the one place in all the Nine Lands that had decided, tonight, to enforce order with an iron fist.
They were led through the gate, the fanged maw banner flapping above them. The chill of the frozen moon was replaced by the forge-heat of the stronghold, a dry, oppressive warmth that smelled of iron, sweat, and judgment. Eyes watched them from every dark corner and smoking archway.
Their path took them directly past the line of chained vampires. One, a female with elegant, pointed ears now crusted with frost, lifted her head as they passed. Her eyes, a drained crimson, met Vesper’s. There was no plea in them. Only a deep, fathomless understanding of the cold that was coming for them all.
Ash limped beside Rook, a low growl building in his chest. Rook could feel the wolf’s agitation, the primal fear of confinement, but the signal was faint, muffled by the same grey numbness that was claiming his own flesh.
They were inside the beast’s throat. And dawn, true or not, was on its way.
The war council chamber of Orn Stronghold wasn'tt a room. It was a geological event. They had been marched through corridors that echoed with the deep, rhythmic thud of immense forges, the air growing thicker, hotter, sweating iron and ambition. The door they entered was not wood, but a single slab of basalt, balanced on a pivot stone that groaned with a sound of waking earth as it swung inward.
Inside, the ceiling vanished into darkness high above. The walls were the naked mountain itself, raw, volcanic rock shot through with pulsating veins of molten gold and copper that illuminated the space with a shifting, fiery light. It was like standing inside a still-beating heart of stone.
In the center of the cavernous space sat a table. It wasn't carved. It was a single, colossal slice of a petrified magma flow, its surface a frozen storm of blacks, reds, and metallic glitters. Around it sat seven orcs.
They were old. Their green skin was crosshatched with scars that looked like maps of forgotten wars. Their armour was minimal but ancient, battered breastplates, pauldrons fashioned from the skulls of great beasts, tusks adorned with intricate metal bands etched with clan sigils. They did not look up as the prisoners were shoved forward. The only sound was the low crackle of the veins in the walls and the slow, measured drip of water somewhere in the dark.
At the head of the table sat the High Orc Leader. He was not the largest, but his presence had a density that warped the room. His hair was steel-grey, pulled into severe plaits that fell over shoulders corded with old muscle. One of his tusks was missing, the space a testament to some past negotiation turned violent. His eyes, the colour of wet slate, held a patience so deep it felt predatory.
General Krath stood stiffly to the side, his flinty gaze fixed ahead. The young sentry who had captured them announced their presence in a guttural bark, then fell silent.
The silence stretched. It was a test.
Vesper broke it. Not with words, but with a drop of silver.
The binding around her wrists was tight, chafing. The void-hand, pressed against her stomach, was a ball of cold, alien potential. But it was the wound on her other arm, the one from the spire where the corrupted ritual-magic had first invaded, that chose this moment to seep. A single, fat droplet of liquid silver, tinged with the faint star-dotted blackness of the altar, welled from the scab and fell.
It hit the stone floor with a hiss.
Not a steam hiss. A silencing hiss, as if the sound in that small spot was suddenly vacuumed away. The droplet didn't spread. It beaded, glowing with a sickly internal light, on the rock.
Every orc at the table went still. Then, as one, their hands went to weapons, axes, hammers, daggers of black iron. Their eyes, wide with a superstitious dread that went deeper than fear of any vampire, locked onto that tiny, wrong puddle of light.
“Witch,” the High Leader said, his voice a landslide of gravel. It wasn't a question. It was a diagnosis.
“You have no idea,” Seraphina muttered, swaying on her feet. The fractured whispers of the moon were loud in here, bounced and amplified by the stone. They spoke of deep earth, of the mountain's grudges. It was a static scream in her soul.
Rook stepped forward, the movement causing Ash to stir at his heels. He kept his hands bound but raised his chin, meeting the Leader's slate-grey eyes. “I am Rook, son of Caldan, First Fang of the Lunareth Enforcers. Mage Wolf of the Silverwood Pact.” He let the titles hang. In the world of the Nine Lands, they carried weight. They were law. They were obligation.
The Leader’s eyes didn’t waver. “Lunareth is far. And you are in Orn. With a leaking witch and a…” His gaze flicked to Seraphina, to the faint, shattered ghost of a halo only those attuned to the divine might sense. “...a broken bird. Your titles are not passports here, wolf-son. They are curiosities.”
“We didn't come for a passport,” Rook said, his voice straining with the effort to keep it level. The numbness in his shoulder was a void, pulling at his strength. “We came down your mountain because we were on it. We were fighting the thing that cracked your sky.”
Another stretch of silence, broken only by the hiss of the cooling silver droplet.
“Define 'thing',” said another orc, a female with a bald head and a line of iron rings punched through one ear.
Vesper lifted her head. The fiery light gleamed on her death-pale skin, in her too-green eyes. “The Progenitor. Darian. The First Betrayer. He was imprisoned under the Omadic Seal at the summit. We interfered with his ritual. We broke it. He fled, wounded, but he took the keys with him.” She lifted her bound hands, gesturing vaguely upward. “The frozen moon? That's his work. A botched job. A held breath. And he's out there right now, healing, planning to finish it.”
The name 'Darian' did something in the room. It wasn't recognition of the individual, but of the category. A Progenitor. A myth. A foundational monster. The orcs looked at one another. The discipline held, but the air vibrated with new tension.
“You expect us to believe you battled an ancient horror on our peak and lived?” General Krath spoke now, his voice dripping with skepticism.
“No,” Vesper said, a tired, grim smile touching her lips. She nodded at the droplet on the floor. “I expect you to believe we were changed by it. That thing you see? That's a piece of the prison he corrupted. It's in me. It's in him.” She nodded at Rook. “The vampire you have chained outside are fledglings, strays. Darian is the source. And he is mobile. What do you think happens when an apex predator with a grudge and two world-breaking grimoires decides your stronghold is in his way? Or just… convenient?”
She let the question linger. The logical conclusion was written on the stony faces around the table. Orn Stronghold, for all its might, would not be a battlefield. It would be a larder.
The High Leader steepled his fingers, his eyes never leaving the silver bead. “You wish to pursue him.”
“Yes,” Rook said.
“Why? For justice? For your king?”
“For survival,” Vesper cut in, her voice sharp. “The magic in us is tied to his. It's a trail he can follow, or we can follow. This isn't altruism. It's a race. Either we find him and stop him for good, or he finishes what he started and unravels everything, starting with anything that carries a trace of his touch.” She lifted her void-hand slightly, the dark, star-dusted flesh a stark abyss against the fiery light. “Starting with us.”
The High Leader stared at that hand for a long, long time. Finally, he leaned back. “General Krath.”
“Sir.”
“You have heard. The threat is assessed. It is not a pack of vermin to be exterminated at dawn. It is a plague-carrier, moving east.” The Leader’s slate eyes found Rook again. “You will hunt this Progenitor. You will do it with the authority of Orn at your back, for the preservation of our walls and our people. Krath will accompany you. He knows the eastern passes, the old ways, the holdfasts of things that predate your kingdoms and ours. He is your guide, and my witness.”
He paused, and his next words were carved from iron. “From this moment, until the hunt is done or you are dead, Krath follows Rook's every order as if it were my own. You will treat him as a member of your… pack.”
The silence this time was electric with suppressed outrage, mostly from Krath himself. The General’s jaw clenched so hard the muscle bulged. But he gave a single, sharp nod. “By your will.”
“Release them,” the Leader said, waving a hand. “Give them supplies from our armouries. The witch’s… contamination will be contained by our metalsmiths. The angel’s wings will be splinted. Do it quickly. They leave before the false dawn.”
The bonds were cut. The sudden freedom made Vesper's arms ache. As orc guards moved forward to escort them, the High Leader spoke one last time, directly to Rook.
“Do not mistake this for alliance, wolf-son. This is pest control. You are the bait, the hound, and the trap. Succeed, and you will have Orn's neutrality in whatever comes after. Fail, and we will burn every trace of you and your corrupted magic from the face of the mountains. Understood?”
Rook met his gaze, the gold in his own eyes hardened by pain and necessity. “Understood.”
The “armoury” was a series of caves off the main forge-vents, hotter than a fever dream. They were given packs: tough, waxed hide stuffed with travel bread harder than stone, salted meat, water-skins, and small pots of pungent healing salve that smelled of pine tar and fire-root.
An aged orc metalsmith, her face a web of fine scars from flying sparks, approached Vesper. She held a length of supple, dull-grey metal mesh and a roll of dark leather.
“For the arm,” the smith grunted, not waiting for permission. She took Vesper's void-hand in her own gnarled, heat-calloused fingers. She didn't flinch at the cold, the nothingness. She examined it with a crafter's dispassion. “The Silver-Tell ore in our veins reacts to bad magic. This will dampen the… leakage. Contain the signature. Won't stop you using it, if you must. But it'll hide the shine.”
She worked with swift, efficient movements, wrapping the cool metal mesh around the void-hand and wrist, then binding it securely with the leather straps. When she was done, the hand was sheathed in a crude, dark gauntlet. The starving cold was muted, became a distant echo. The unsettling pull Vesper felt towards living things faded to a whisper.
“Thank you,” Vesper said, flexing the sheathed fingers. They still moved with perfect, silent precision.
The smith just nodded, her eyes lingering on the hidden horror with a mixture of dread and professional respect. “Don't thank me. Just point it at the enemy.”
Seraphina's treatment was less tidy. She was taken to a side alcove where two younger orcs, their faces set with the intense focus of those performing a sacred and dangerous task, waited beside a brazier. In it, they heated not a metal tool, but a crucible of molten silver.
“Your wings are… structural,” one of them said, avoiding her eyes. “We cannot mend feather and spirit. We can brace bone. The silver will hold. It will also… burn. The divine and the lunar do not welcome our craft.”
“Just get it over with,” Seraphina said, turning her back to them, presenting her ruined wings. She gripped a stone shelf until her knuckles turned white.
They worked quickly, speaking in low, technical murmurs. They straightened the main spar of her good wing with firm pops that made her gasp. Then, using heavy tongs, they lifted the crucible. They didn't pour. They painted. With brushes of heat-resistant stone-wool, they laid molten silver along the fractures in her wing-bones.
The smell was the worst part. Not burning flesh, but burning essence. A coppery, ozone stench of violated grace. Seraphina threw her head back, a silent scream locked in her throat. Her damaged halo flared invisibly, a phantom pain ringing through the cavern. Tears cut clean tracks through the grime on her face.
When it was done, the silver cooled to a dull, matte finish, forming ugly, functional braces riveted to the bone beneath. The wings were hideous now, one a tattered mess of feathers and silver scar-tissue, the other a skeletal frame held together by metallic straps. But they were solid. They would hold.
She slumped forward, panting, sweat-drenched. “Next time,” she spat, her voice raw, “I'm just getting a sling.”
Rook watched it all, leaning against Ash for support. He had been given a fresh tunic and a coat of thick, oiled wer-ox hide. A crescent moon of dark-grey, corrupted flesh was now visible at his shoulder where the fabric was cut away to avoid irritation. The orcs had seen it, said nothing, but their silence was eloquent.
Krath approached as the others were finishing. He had shed his ceremonial spaulder for a practical harness of leather and black steel. A double-bladed axe was across his back, and a set of brutal-looking throwing hatchets hung at his hip. He looked at Rook with an expression that could curdle milk.
“The Leader’s word is law,” Krath stated, his voice flat. “But understand this, wolf. I am not your friend. I am not your soldier. I am a scalpel sent to cut out a disease. You are the hand that wields me. Do not think that makes us partners.”
Rook just looked at him, the exhaustion and the cold spot in his soul making it easy to match the orc’s bluntness. “I don't need a partner. I need a guide who won't get us lost. Can you do that?”
A muscle twitched in Krath's jaw. “I know every stone, every stream, every memory in these mountains. I can lead you to the edge of the world and back. What you do when we find your monster is your concern. Keeping you alive long enough to do it… is now, regrettably, mine.”
He tossed a small, heavy pouch to Rook. It clinked. “Silver dust. Iron shavings. Salt from the Bloodstone Falls. For vampire signs, or for containing further… spills.” His eyes flicked to Vesper's gauntleted hand.
Seraphina stood, testing her weight on her braced wings with a wince. They wouldn't fly, but they were no longer agony. Vesper shouldered her pack, the weight of the metal on her arm both strange and grounding. Rook gave Ash a gentle pat; the wolf leaned into it, a flicker of the old warmth surviving the chill in their bond.
They stood together in the forge-glow, a fractured werewolf, a witch with a void for a hand, an angel soldered together with stolen silver, and an orc general who looked at them like they were a walking blasphemy.
Krath strode towards a low arch on the far side of the armoury cave, one that smelled of cold air and frozen stone. “We go east. Through the Bones of the Old Man. If your Progenitor is seeking deep earth and ancient power, that is where the trail leads. Move. The moon does not set, but I prefer to travel while the world is at its quietest.”
He didn't look back to see if they followed.
Outside, the frozen Blood Moon hung, a permanent, cracked stain. The stronghold gates closed behind them with a final, echoing thud. They were not prisoners anymore.
They were something worse: a hope. A desperate, ragged, monstrous hope, walking into the endless crimson twilight with an orc for a compass and corruption in their blood.
The air in the pass wasn't just cold; it was crystallized malice. It stole the breath from their lungs and left a rime of frost on their eyelashes within minutes. The Bones of the Old Man weren't a poetic name. They were a description. The path wound between towering, wind-sculpted spires of granite that leaned against each other like the collapsed ribs of some primordial giant. The ground underfoot was a treacherous mix of scree and ancient, compacted ice that glinted a sickly red under the unmoving moon.
Krath moved like the mountain itself had decided to go for a walk. He didn't fight the terrain; he anticipated it, his boots finding solid purchase where Vesper saw only slick rock. He didn't speak. His silence was a louder command than any shout.
Seraphina came next, each step a calculated agony. The silver braces on her wings were already freezing cold, leaching the warmth from her back. She’d tried to flex them once, a testing shudder, and a bolt of white-hot, metallic pain had shot up her spine, making her vision swim. She’d bitten her tongue to keep from crying out. Now she just hunched, letting the ruined limbs drag, her focus narrowed to the next three feet of ground. The divine echo she’d felt earlier was still there, a faint, discordant pull eastward, but it was drowned out by the more immediate symphony of her own broken body.
Rook walked beside Ash, the wolf’s limp pronounced. The connection between them was a muted, staticky hum. He could feel Ash’s pain as a distant, cold ache in his own leg, and the wolf’s confusion as a fog in his own mind. But beneath that, running like a hidden current, was something else. A vibration. Faint, rhythmic, wrong. It wasn't a scent or a sound. It was a resonance in the lunar part of his soul, a dissonant heartbeat that wasn't his own.
“Darian,” he murmured, more to himself than anyone. “He's moving. East. Faster than we are.”
“Your wolf-sense is sure?” Krath asked from ahead, not turning.
“It's not the wolf,” Rook said, his voice tight. “It's the… contamination. It resonates. Like a plucked string.”
Ash growled, a low, continuous rumble in his chest. His golden eyes weren't fixed on the path, but on the deep shadows between the stone ribs. The shadows here were too deep, too still. They didn't shift with the non-existent wind.
“The endless night wakes things,” Krath said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Things that remember the dark before the first dawn. They are stirring. The wolf is wise to watch the shadows. You would be wise to do the same.”
As if on cue, something scuttled high up on one of the granite spires. A sound like dry claws on stone, too fast, too many legs. It was gone before any of them could focus on it.
Vesper’s left hand, the one still flesh, went to the crude leather gauntlet covering her right. The metal mesh beneath seemed to throb, not with warmth, but with a hungry, anticipatory cold. It was pulling her too, a magnetic drag toward the same eastern horizon. But it wasn't seeking Darian. It was seeking… potential. Places where the fabric of the world was thin, where magic pooled and stagnated. Places perfect for a wounded vampire lord to recuperate and amplify his power.
“His trail and the gauntlet's pull are aligned,” she said, her breath a cloud. “He's heading for a confluence. A wound in the world.”
“Then we are on the right path to a grave,” Krath stated. “Either his or ours. The distinction matters less to the mountain.”
They marched for hours, time measured only by the deepening cold and the growing ache in their bodies. The crimson moonlight cast no helpful shadows, only flattened the landscape into a two-dimensional nightmare of red and black. The silence was a weight. No birds, no insects, not even the sigh of wind through the peaks. It was the silence of a world holding its breath, waiting to see if the sun was ever coming back.
Then the pass ended.
It didn't open into a valley. It simply stopped at a wall of featureless basalt, smooth as glass and twice as tall as the surrounding spires. A dead end.
Krath didn't hesitate. He walked straight up to the wall and placed his palm flat against it. He didn't push. He listened. After a moment, he gave a grunt of satisfaction. “Here.”
He began feeling along the seam where the wall met the ground, his fingers probing the ice and dirt. With a sharp scrape, he pried up a slab of stone so perfectly fitted it had been invisible. Beneath it was not earth, but a yawning black hole, exhaling air that was significantly warmer and carried a damp, mineral smell.
“A back door,” Seraphina said, her voice cracking from disuse. “Of course. Because the front door is for suckers.”
“The Old Man does not welcome visitors,” Krath said, swinging his legs into the hole. “He tolerates them. There is a difference. Follow closely. Do not touch the walls. Do not speak unless spoken to. The stones have ears, and the Old Man is the stone.”
He dropped down, vanishing into the dark.
Rook went next, lowering himself down. Ash whined, then followed, his form disappearing. Vesper looked at Seraphina. The angel gave a tired, “after you” wave.
The drop was about ten feet, into a narrow, downward-sloping tunnel. The walls here were smooth, worn by water or something else over millennia. The warm, damp air was thick, and the red moonlight was gone, replaced by a faint, phosphorescent green glow from patches of fungus clinging to the ceiling. It was like descending into the lung of a living mountain.
Krath led them downward for what felt like another hour, the tunnel widening gradually. The sound came next, a low, pervasive hum, not mechanical, but organic, like the world's deepest root vibrating.
Then the tunnel opened, and they stopped, stunned.
The cavern was a cathedral carved not by hands, but by patient, dripping water over eons. It was colossal, its ceiling lost in darkness far above. Stalactites and stalagmites of pure black basalt met in the center, forming colossal pillars that held up the weight of the mountain. But it was the light that stole their reason.
From a crack in the cavern floor, a wide, slow river of molten stone flowed, glowing a serene, hellish orange. Its light reflected off thousands of crystals growing from every surface, amethyst, citrine, clear quartz, casting fractured, dancing rainbows across the vast space. The air shimmered with heat haze and latent magic. It was beautiful, and it felt profoundly, dangerously old.
In the center of the cavern, on a natural dais of rock that overlooked the lava river, sat the Old Man.
He was less a man and more a geological formation that had decided to mimic one. His skin was the colour and texture of dried river mud, cracked and fissured. He wore only a loincloth of woven lichen. His hair and beard were long, white, and thin as crystal filaments, stirring in the warm updrafts. His eyes, when he opened them, were milky white, devoid of pupil, but they seemed to see everything at once.
He sat cross-legged, perfectly still, a part of the dais itself. At his feet was a wide, shallow basin carved into the rock, filled with perfectly still water that reflected the crystal rainbows.
Krath approached, stopping ten feet from the dais. He knelt, not in submission, but in a kind of pragmatic respect. “Oracle. We come as fate has wounded us. We seek the path of the wound-maker.”
The Old Man’s head turned slowly. The movement made a sound like grinding pebbles. His milky eyes passed over Krath, dismissed him, and settled on the others.
He looked at Seraphina first. “Little broken song,” he whispered, his voice the sound of a rockslide heard from far away. “You traded your chorus for a single, stubborn note. Now the note is cracked. The silence it leaves behind is… interesting.”
Seraphina stiffened. She said nothing.
His gaze shifted to Rook and Ash. “Two hearts, one chill. You offered a piece to the fire, and the fire took it, but left its cold behind. You are no longer a bridge. You are a fault line.” He tilted his head. “The wolf remembers being whole. It is a memory that will ache forever.”
Ash let out a soft whimper. Rook’s hand found the fur on the wolf’s neck, a silent apology.
Finally, the Oracle’s sightless eyes found Vesper. They lingered on the gauntlet. “Ah,” he breathed, a sigh of dust. “You hold the nothing. The cup that was meant to be filled. You poured yourself into the wrong vessel, and it drank you, and kept the shape of your hand.” He leaned forward slightly. “Does it hunger, little void?”
Vesper felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cavern’s heat. “Yes.”
“It will always hunger. That is its nature. You must decide what to feed it.” He settled back. “You hunt the First Thirst. He passed this way. He drank from the memory of the river.” The Oracle gestured to the lava flow. “He is wounded. The wolf's bite, the broken ritual… they fester. He seeks the Black Grail to mend his soul and complete his moon.”
“The Black Grail?” Vesper asked.
“A metaphor that is also a place,” the Oracle said, as if it were obvious. “A chalice of stone, filled with the first darkness. It lies in the Sunless Citadel, in the belly of the dead god, east beyond the Myrr. It is a place of ending. For him, or for all.”
Krath spoke, his voice cutting through the Oracle's cryptic tone. “A location. Can you guide us?”
The Oracle smiled, a fissure cracking across his lower face. “I guide nothing. I describe. The path is yours to walk. But I will tell you this: the Progenitor does not travel alone now. The silent ones, the chained ones you saw… their pain is a song he hears. He calls, and they answer. He is gathering his scattered children. Your hunt is now a race against a rising tide.”
The news landed like a stone in Vesper's gut. Not just Darian. A coven.
“What do you want in return for this… description?” Rook asked, his voice wary. Nothing this old gave anything freely.
The Oracle’s milky eyes seemed to gleam. “A truth. One from each of you. A true thing, buried deep. Not for me. For the water.” He gestured to the still basin at his feet. “The mountain drinks truths to remember the world above.”
He pointed a gnarled finger at Seraphina. “You first, broken song. What do you miss most about the silence of Heaven?”
Seraphina flinched. She stared at the old seer, her jaw tight. The others looked at her. The question was a violation. She opened her mouth, closed it. Finally, she spat the words out like poison. “The certainty. Knowing what was right. Even when I hated it, I knew what it was. Now… there's just the noise.” Her voice dropped. “And I miss the quiet.”
She stepped forward and, following the Oracle's slight nod, spat into the basin. The water rippled, and for a second, the reflection showed not crystals, but a vast, empty plain of white marble under a silent, starless sky. Then it was gone.
The Oracle turned to Rook. “Wolf with a fault line. When you look at your witch, what is the fear your pack-bond howls against?”
Rook went very still. He didn't look at Vesper. His golden eyes were fixed on the seer, burning with a mixture of shame and defiance. The truth was a barbed hook in his chest. He spoke through clenched teeth. “That she is a choice I can't undo. And that one day, choosing her will mean watching my pack die. And I don't know if I can live with that.”
He strode to the basin, slashed his thumb across a sharp edge of the dais, and let a single drop of his blood, shimmering with faint grey streaks, fall into the water. It swirled, and the reflection showed a blurred image of Vesper standing alone on a hill, her back turned, while distant, familiar wolf-howls were cut short by a wave of swallowing shadow.
The Oracle finally looked at Vesper. “Little void. Your hand hungers. What will you feed it when the time comes? Be specific.”
Vesper’s green eyes were glacial. She saw the trap. A truth declared here, to this ancient thing, would become a commitment. A destiny. She thought of the void-hand’s cold hunger, its ability to unmake. She thought of Darian, of his smug, ancient face. The answer came, cold and clear and terrifying in its simplicity.
“Him,” she said, her voice echoing in the vast cavern. “I will feed it him. Piece by piece. Until there's nothing left to remember the thirst.”
She walked to the basin. With her left hand, she unstrapped a section of the gauntlet, exposing the dark, star-dotted void-flesh of her fingertips. She didn't spit or bleed. She simply touched the water.
Where her void-fingers met the surface, the water didn't ripple. It vanished. A tiny, perfect scoop of liquid ceased to exist, leaving a permanent, dry indentation in the stone basin. The reflections in the water shattered and reformed, showing for a fleeting instant a vision of Darian’s scarlet eyes wide with an impossible, consuming negation, before fading to nothing.
The Oracle stared at the dry scar in his basin. For the first time, his ancient face showed something like surprise, then a deep, unsettling appreciation. “A truth that eats,” he murmured. “The mountain will remember that one.”
He leaned back, his transaction complete. “Your path lies east. Through the Satyr Myrr. But the forest is… dreaming. The endless moon has woven nightmares into its roots. The Satyrs themselves may be lost to the melody. The Progenitor will be ahead of you, seeking the Citadel. You are wounded. He is wounded. The race is even.” His milky eyes seemed to pin them all. “But he knows the finish line. You are still reading the map.”
He closed his eyes, the audience clearly over. “Go. The mountain is tired of your noise.”
Krath rose, turning without a word. The others followed, shaken, their truths hanging in the warm, crystalline air like ghosts.
As they filed back into the tunnel, the Oracle’s final whisper chased them, a dry rustle in the dark.
“Remember, hunters. To kill a god, you must first believe you can. And then you must be willing to become something even the darkness fears.”
The tunnel mouth swallowed them, leaving only the hum of the river of fire and the slow, patient drip of water in the cavern of truths, where a small, dry patch in a stone basin marked a promise of absolute, hungry vengeance.
The warm, damp breath of the mountain’s belly vanished the moment they crawled back into the pass. The cold wasn't a temperature; it was a judgment, slamming into them with the force of a physical blow. The frozen Blood Moon hung exactly where they’d left it, a cracked and bleeding eye.
No one spoke. The truths they’d spilled in the cavern felt like open wounds, bleeding into the silence between them.
Krath took the lead again, his movements precise and disconnected, as if he were navigating a map only he could see. He didn't look back to see if they followed. He didn't need to. The High Leader’s decree was a chain, and they were all shackled to it.
Vesper walked, her left hand unconsciously rubbing the crude leather of the gauntlet covering her right. The orc-smith’s metal mesh muted the void-hand’s hungry pull, but it couldn’t erase the sensation. It was like carrying a sliver of absolute zero, a place where nothing could exist. The Oracle’s question echoed. What will you feed it? The answer she’d given felt less like a vow and more like a premonition. A dark destiny clicking into place.
Beside her, Rook’s breathing was a steady, strained rhythm. He kept his gaze forward, but his golden eyes were distant. She could almost hear the echo of his truth, the fear of his pack’s howls being silenced. It sat between them now, a third presence. Ash limped at his side, and the wolf’s distress was a cold, fuzzy static in Rook’s mind where once there had been a clear, warm song.
Seraphina brought up the rear, each step a calculated misery. The silver braces on her wings were agony in the cold, contracting and pulling at the shattered bones beneath. The Oracle’s words, broken song, itched in her mind. She missed the silence of Heaven. The admission felt like a betrayal of every rebellious choice she’d ever made. She focused on the pain instead. It was cleaner.
They traveled for hours, the Bones of the Old Man giving way to a steep, pine-clad slope. The trees here were wrong. Their needles weren't the deep green of healthy evergreens, but a dull, bruised black, and they didn't sway. They were still as painted props against the crimson sky. The silence of the high pass was replaced by another silence, the thick, woolly quiet of a world holding its breath.
“Sylfaen Myrr,” Krath announced, stopping at the crest of the slope. He didn’t sound impressed.
The forest sprawled below them, a vast, rolling sea of darkness. From this height, they could see it was not one forest, but layers of them, with mist clinging to the valleys like dirty gauze. No lights. No smoke from hearths. Just an endless, sleeping expanse.
“The Satyrs?” Rook asked, his voice rough.
“The Myrr dreams,” Krath said, repeating the Oracle’s words without inflection. “It has always been a place of visions and melodies. Now, with a moon that does not move…” He shrugged, a gesture that said the outcome is obvious and dire. “The dreams have nowhere to go. They pool. They curdle. We will see what we see.”
“Fantastic,” Seraphina muttered, flexing her stiff shoulders. A lance of pain made her suck in a sharp breath. “A forest of bad trips. Just what we needed.”
Vesper’s void-hand gave a sudden, violent thrum.
It wasn’t a pull. It was a twang, like a massive, foul guitar string being plucked deep in the earth. The sensation shot up her arm, a shock of cold so intense it felt like burning. She gasped, stumbling to a halt.
“What is it?” Rook was at her side instantly.
She held up the gauntlet. The dull metal mesh was vibrating faintly. “He’s here. Or… he was. Recently. The trail is fresh.” She pointed down into the Myrr, towards a particularly dense knot of shadow between two sloping hills. “There.”
Krath followed her gesture, his flinty eyes narrowing. “That is the old pilgrim’s route. It leads to the heartwood. And beyond that, to the dead plains that border the Sunless Citadel.” He looked at Vesper’s hand, his expression unreadable. “Your magic is a useful divining rod. And a loud one. If you can feel him, he may sense the echo.”
“Let him,” Vesper said, the cold from her hand seeping into her voice.
They began the descent into the Myrr. The air changed as soon as they passed the first line of trees. It became thick, sweet, and cloying, like rotting honeysuckle and damp moss. The crimson moonlight, which had been so stark on the slopes, fractured and died in the dense canopy, leaving them in a deep, perpetual twilight. The only light came from bioluminescent fungi that clung to the trunks in malignant blue and green swirls, casting long, moving shadows.
And then there was the sound.
It was music, but music that had forgotten its tune. A faint, dissonant piping, sometimes like a flute, sometimes like a child’s whimper, drifted from no discernible direction. It wove through the trees, syncopated with the throbbing in Vesper’s hand and the cold, wrong resonance in Rook’s soul. It was the sound of the forest dreaming, and the dream was a fever dream.
They hadn’t gone half a mile when they found the first body.
It was a stag, or had been. Its magnificent body lay sprawled across the path, but it was utterly desiccated. Not a drop of moisture remained. Its hide was stretched tight over bone, its eyes were shriveled raisins, and its antlers, once proud, were coated in a brittle, white fungus. The cause of death was clear: two punctures at the throat, clean and precise.
No blood on the ground. Not a drop.
“Vampire,” Krath stated, kneeling to examine the marks. “Not a Progenitor. This is… messy. Hurried. A fledgling, feeding on animal life. Desperate.”
Ash growled, the sound low and wary. He sniffed the air, then took a step back, his hackles raised. He wasn’t looking at the stag. He was staring into the swirling mist between the trees to their left.
Rook felt it too. A ripple in the corrupted resonance. Not Darian. Something weaker, hungrier, and closer. “We’re not alone.”
The attack came from the right.
A figure launched itself from a thicket of thorny vines. It was once a Satyr. The graceful humanoid torso was now gaunt, the skin a sickly grey. The goat legs were skeletal. Its eyes glowed with a faint, mindless red. It held a crude wooden flute like a club, and its mouth was smeared with dark sap, or something worse. It didn’t hiss. It let out a distorted, piping shriek that matched the forest’s discordant music and charged.
Krath moved. He didn’t draw his great axe. In one fluid motion, he pulled a hatchet from his belt and threw it. It spun once in the thick air and buried itself in the Satyr-vampire’s chest with a wet thunk. The creature stumbled, looked down in confusion, and collapsed.
Before the body hit the moss, two more emerged from the mist ahead. Then another from behind. Their movements were jerky, uncoordinated, driven by a base hunger that had overwritten all their Satyr grace.
“They’re everywhere,” Seraphina spat, backing up to put her back against a wide tree trunk. She had no weapon, no grace. Just her fists and a profound sense of uselessness.
Rook and Ash moved as one, the command silent and instinctive despite the corruption in their bond. The merge was impossible, too volatile, but they didn’t need it for this. Rook shifted just his hands, claws erupting from his fingertips as he met the first attacker, ripping out its throat with a spray of ancient, clotted dust. Ash harried the second, his teeth snapping at its legs, going for the tendons.
Vesper stood her ground. A third vampire-Satyr, drawn by the living heat of her blood, scuttled towards her on all fours, its head twitching. Her mind raced for a spell, but her magical reserves were ashes. All she had was the void.
As the creature leaped, she didn’t raise her left hand in defense. She raised her right, the gauntleted one, and opened her palm.
The thing slammed into her. Its weight drove her back a step. Its claws scrabbled at her cloak. Its fanged mouth snapped inches from her face, breath like spoiled wine and grave dirt.
She pressed her void-hand against its chest.
There was no drama. No flash of light. The creature simply… stopped. Where the dark, star-dusted palm made contact, a hole appeared. A perfect, silent, empty circle about the size of an apple, going straight through its torso. No blood, no bone, no organ matter. Just nothingness.
The vampire looked down, its red eyes blinking. It tried to shriek, but it had no lungs left to make sound. It dissolved into a pile of fine, grey ash that cascaded over Vesper’s boots.
She stared at her hand, then at the ash. The hunger in the void had quieted for a moment, sated by a minuscule fraction of negation. A cold, deep satisfaction washed through her, followed immediately by a wave of nausea. What will you feed it?
Krath finished the last one with a brutal axe stroke that cleaved its skull. He yanked his weapon free and scanned the trees, his chest heaving slightly. The discordant piping had faded, leaving a ringing silence.
“Scouts,” he grunted, wiping black fluid from his axe. “Or stragglers. His children, as the Oracle said. He is turning the Myrr’s nightmares into his army. Corrupting the dream.”
Rook let his claws retract, his breath fogging in the cold, thick air. Ash returned to his side, licking a shallow cut on his foreleg. The connection between them buzzed with agitated static. “They have no strategy. Just hunger.”
“That makes them more dangerous, not less,” Seraphina said, pushing off the tree. She looked at the pile of ash at Vesper’s feet, her expression unreadable. “Nice trick. Efficient.”
Vesper didn’t reply. She was listening. Not with her ears, but with the void-hand. The thrum was back, a steady, deep pulse leading east, deeper into the heartwood. But underneath it, she felt something new. A thinner, more numerous web of vibrations. Dozens of them. Hundreds maybe. All moving, converging.
“He’s calling them,” she whispered. “To the Citadel. They’re answering.”
Krath nodded grimly. “Then we walk into a gathering storm. The race is no longer just against him. It is against his tide.” He looked at each of them, his slate eyes assessing their weariness, their wounds, their strange, corrupted power. “We cannot fight an army. We must reach the Citadel before it fully forms. We move faster. No more stops.”
He turned and started down the path at a ground-eating lope, a pace that demanded everything they had left.
They ran. Through the haunted, piping dark, past trees that seemed to lean in to listen, over streams that flowed with water black as ink. Vesper’s void-hand was a compass needle of cold fire. Rook’s every muscle protested, the grey stain in his shoulder a deep ache, his bond with Ash a strained thread threatening to snap. Seraphina’s braced wings were pure torture, each jolting step sending silver needles up her spine.
And above it all, the frozen Blood Moon watched through the ragged gaps in the canopy. As they ran, a faint, almost imperceptible shiver went through the world. High above, with a sound like a mountain cracking in the heart of a crystal, the jagged white scar in the moon’s surface widened another hairline fraction.
A single, thin shard of pure white light, no bigger than a needle, broke free from the crack and fell.
It streaked silently through the atmosphere, a dying spark of true moonlight, and vanished into the eastern horizon, somewhere in the direction of the dead plains and the Sunless Citadel.
The forest held its breath. The dissonant music halted for three full heartbeats.
Then, from deep in the heartwood, from the direction of the old pilgrim’s route, a new sound answered. Not a pipe. Not a whimper.
A low, resonant, commanding note that vibrated in the bones of the trees and the stones underfoot. A note of summons, of power reforged, of a wound beginning to knit itself back together with stolen life.
Darian’s voice.
The race was over. The hunt was on. And the Citadel awaited them all.
The forest didn't end. It crystallized.
One moment they were pushing through clutching brambles and hallucinogenic mist, the next the trees simply… turned to stone. Not petrified wood, but smooth, polished obsidian, grown in the same twisted, organic shapes as the pines they replaced. The air lost its cloying sweetness. Now it tasted of ozone and cold incense. The dissonant piping was gone, replaced by a low, harmonic hum that seemed to originate from the black ground itself.
The path underfoot became a bridge of the same glossy stone, arcing over a chasm from which a faint, crimson light pulsed upward, staining the undersides of the obsidian trees. This was the source of the Blood Moon crack’s glow, a fissure in the world, bleeding light from some deeper, hotter hell.
Vesper’s void-hand jerked in its gauntlet like a fish on a line. The hunger wasn’t a pull anymore; it was a demanding shriek, focused on the heart of the structure now looming ahead.
The Satyr Citadel, Sylfaen Myrr, wasn’t built. It was extruded. A single, monstrous shard of black glass thrust from the earth, its sides faceted and sheer, its peaks broken into jagged spires that clawed at the frozen sky. Windows, long and narrow like slitted eyes, glowed with the same internal, bloody luminescence. It was less a fortress and more a geode of nightmare, cracked open to the sky.
Krath halted, raising a clenched fist. He pointed with two fingers, then gestured flat, movement ahead, disciplined.
They melted into the shadow of a giant, stone petal that curved up from the ground. Seraphina leaned against it, her breath coming in short, pained gasps. The silver braces on her wings chimed softly against the obsidian. “Music’s changed,” she whispered. “No more mad piping. This is… organized.”
Rook closed his eyes, filtering out the hum. His ears, more wolf than man in that moment, caught what the others could not. Not the scrabble of feral hunger, but the crisp, synchronized tread of booted feet on stone. A cadence. “Soldiers,” he murmured. “Heavy armor. Lots of them.”
Ash pressed against his leg, a low, sub-audible growl vibrating through Rook’s bones. The wolf wasn’t sensing mindless hunger. He was recognizing predators who hunted in packs, with strategy. The kind that cornered and killed.
From the mist that clung to the citadel’s base, a line of figures resolved.
They were Satyrs, but utterly transformed. No longer gaunt, forest-wrecked things. These stood tall, their goat legs sheathed in polished black greaves, their torsos armored in overlapping plates of dark metal that seemed to drink the crimson light. They held long, wickedly barbed spears, tips aimed forward in a perfect, unbroken line. Their eyes glowed from within their helmets, not the frantic red of feral vampires, but a cool, controlled amethyst. There was intelligence there. Purpose.
The Oracle’s gravelly voice echoed in memory: “The tide gathers before the gate.”
A horn sounded, not a bone whistle, but a clear, resonant brass note that cut the harmonic hum. It was answered by another, and another, from higher up on the citadel walls. A sequence. A code.
The line of soldiers parted smoothly in the middle.
Through the gap walked another Satyr. His armor was filigreed with silver, and a great, curved horn rose from the side of his ornate helmet. He carried no spear, only a slender rod of black wood capped with a pulsating violet crystal. He stopped ten paces from their hiding place, though he hadn’t looked directly at them.
“You are not shades of the dreaming wood,” he announced, his voice melodic yet utterly without warmth. It was the voice of a court official reciting law. “You carry the stink of mortal strife, of broken seals, and of the Void That Gnaws. You will state your purpose at the gates of Sylfaen Myrr.”
Krath stepped out first, his own posture mirroring the Satyr’s unyielding formality. “We pass under the authority of Orn, by pact and by the necessity of the hunt. Our quarry is the Progenitor, Darian. His trail leads through your territory.”
The Satyr captain’s head tilted. The amethyst light in his eyes flickered, processing. “The Thirsting One has already passed. He paid the toll. He walks the Heartwood Path within. You are… subsequent.”
“We don’t pay tolls to nightmares,” Seraphina said, pushing off the stone, her voice ragged but clear.
The captain’s gaze swept over her, lingering on her shattered wings, the faint, tragic glitter in her hair. “Broken angel. Your currency is of no value here. You have only echoes.” He looked at Rook and Ash. “A fractured moon-child and his muted shadow. You carry a sickness he left behind.” Finally, he looked at Vesper. His rod dipped slightly, the crystal flaring. “And you. You hold a piece of the gate he forced open. You are either a key or a lockpick. Which are you?”
Vesper stepped forward, her green eyes meeting the amethyst glow. She lifted her gauntleted hand. “I’m the thing that’s going to break the key. Let us pass.”
“Demands are not currency,” the captain said, unfazed. “The Citadel is not a thoroughfare. It is a filter. The Thirsting One paid in blood not his own. He offered up a hundred of the forest’s dreaming children to our… revitalization.” He gestured with his rod, and the line of soldiers shifted, spears lowering to a direct angle of interception. “What do you offer?”
Krath’s hand drifted to his axe. “We offer you the chance to avoid being collateral damage.”
A faint, chiming laugh echoed from the citadel’s heights. It was a beautiful, terrible sound, like shattering crystal. The captain didn’t smile. “Violence is a transaction we understand. But the price for failure is permanent. You will join the dreamers in our sustenance.”
Rook felt the cold spot in his bond with Ash tighten. A fight here, on this narrow bridge, against disciplined, armored vampires who were not lost to madness… the odds were a silent scream in his tactical mind.
Vesper spoke before anyone could move. “What do you want? If not blood, what?”
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.