The first cultist moved like a ghost.
He glided across the ground, feet never touching the soil, arms spread like wings of shadow. His face was pale and sunken, eyes twin violet pits that bled a faint shimmer into the air. Runes covered every inch of his skin, burned there, not inked. They pulsed with magic that stank of rotted fruit and old meat.
Queen Serenya stepped between the cart and the road.
Kael whimpered behind her. Keira held the reins taut, blade drawn, eyes flicking left and right as more shapes moved in the trees. They weren't a warband. They weren't even a raiding party. This was something more precise.
Surgical.
Planned.
Serenya raised her sword, its silver flame catching the cultist's eye.
He smiled.
Then he raised a hand, and the forest exploded.
Vines surged from the ground like snakes on fire, spitting acid and clawing at hooves. The trees themselves groaned and bent, forming crude cages around the path. Shadows coalesced into chains of smoke and bone, wrapping around the wheels of the cart and wrenching it sideways. Kael screamed as it tipped, flinging him into the dirt. Keira leapt after him, slashing at shadowy tendrils.
Serenya was already moving.
She struck the first cultist across the face. Her blade didn't just cut flesh, it severed magic, cleaving through his rune-burned jaw and out the back of his skull in a single swing. His body turned to ash mid-fall.
"Ride! Run!" she shouted to the guards, but there were no horses left. The one pulling the cart had been bisected by black roots now twitching like nerves. Aldryn stood over its corpse, drenched in gore, his left arm barely hanging from the socket.
Keira had Kael in her arms, but the forest wouldn't let her go.
A wall of thorns erupted in front of her. One branch jabbed through her thigh, she screamed, staggering, but held onto Kael like a lifeline.
Another cultist dropped from the canopy, daggers flashing, mouth wide in a warcry.
Serenya hurled her sword.
It pinned him to a tree with a wet crunch, flames flaring through his torso, charring the bark behind him.
She sprinted after Keira, grabbing Kael just as three more figures emerged from the left. One of them muttered a curse, and the earth itself shifted, a massive slab of stone heaving upward to block their retreat.
Aldryn bellowed behind them.
When Serenya turned, she saw why.
The trees had birthed something.
It stood twelve feet tall, stitched from bone, hide, and grief-magic. A golem, maybe. Or a vessel. It dragged a chain of severed heads behind it, each one still mouthing silent screams. One of the heads was a knight of Velmora. Another was a merchant from the festival. Another, a child.
It roared.
The sound shattered one of Keira's eardrums. Blood poured from her nose. She staggered, dropped to one knee, and still reached for her sword.
Serenya pushed Kael into her arms.
"Run. Get him out. Now."
"I won't-"
"That is an order, Dame Keira!"
Keira ran.
The golem charged.
Serenya met it head-on.
The clash shook the ground.
Steel met cursed bone. Fire met rot. Serenya's sword ignited the monster's ribcage, and it retaliated with a hammer-fist that sent her flying into a tree. Bark shattered behind her. Blood sprayed from her mouth. She didn't slow down.
She was a queen.
A general.
A mother.
She tore through two more cultists, using one as a human shield to block a blood-spike hurled from the woods. Her blade burned white-hot now, humming with royal sigils etched by her ancestors, sigils meant to cut through magic.
But there were too many.
Every time she felled one, two more emerged. From the trees. From the dirt. From the goddamn air. The Blackwood was birthing them. Spitting them out like parasites. She was bleeding from a dozen cuts. Her lungs burned. Her magic reserves were draining too fast.
And the worst part?
They weren't trying to kill her.
They were herding her. Distracting her.
They were after Kael.
Thankfully Keira had snatched Kael up and made a break for it.
Keira ran like a woman possessed.
Kael bounced against her chest, half-sobbing, half-calling out for his mother, his voice cracking with each jolt of her boots over root and stone. Behind them, the forest howled with unnatural fury, metal on bone, spells detonating, trees cracking like ribs under the weight of violence. She didn't look back. She couldn't.
A branch lashed across her face, slicing a line down to her jaw. Blood filled her mouth. She bit down, used the pain to stay upright. Her wounded leg screamed with every step, the thorn still embedded deep, but she ran anyway.
Kael was her mission now.
And she would not fail her Queen.
But the Blackwood wasn't done.
The trees ahead twisted, closing in like a snare. The very ground rose up, pushing back at her boots. Vines reached like skeletal hands. The air turned thick, soupy with illusion magic. The path ahead fractured into six false roads, each flickering like mirages. Each identical. Each wrong.
"Stay with me," Keira whispered through gritted teeth. "We're almost-"
A blade punched through her back.
Steel erupted from her chest.
Her breath hitched. She didn't scream. Her grip didn't loosen.
Kael froze.
There was a sound behind her, a whisper of robes, the smell of hot iron and burnt marrow. A man's voice, gentle, almost regretful: "You fought well, Dame Keira."
He wrenched the blade free.
Keira fell to her knees. Her arms loosened. Kael tumbled to the ground with a cry, rolled, and stared up at the man who had killed the only thing between him and the abyss.
The cultist didn't look like a monster.
He was clean-shaven. His robes were blue and gold, not black. He wore a ring of the royal academy, twisted and reforged into something unholy. His eyes were silver, not mad, not wide, but certain. He knelt before Kael, pressing a blood-wet finger to the boy's forehead.
"You're far more important than they understand," he murmured.
Kael screamed.
He scrambled away, toward Keira's body, toward the only safety he'd ever known in his short life. But hands closed around him, thin, gnarled, and inhumanly strong. Another cultist dragged him up by the tunic. Kael thrashed, kicked, bit. A tooth snapped in his mouth, and he spat blood.
They laughed.
Like it was funny.
Like it was a game.
Meanwhile, Serenya fought like a demon.
She no longer knew how many wounds she'd taken. Her blade was cracked. Her magic was gone. Her arm was dislocated. Her vision pulsed red with each heartbeat.
But still she fought.
She fought until the last of her guards lay broken in the dirt. Until Aldryn, his throat half-torn out, managed to crawl between her and a pair of cultists long enough for her to drive her sword through both. Until her knees buckled beneath her, and she used the fall to slide beneath the golem's next strike and shove a dagger up through its jaw, igniting its skull in a burst of flame and bile.
She heard Kael scream.
Her head snapped toward the sound.
She saw him.
A hundred paces away. Struggling. Bleeding. Being dragged toward the treeline by a cloaked figure with ink-black skin and glowing eyes, a dark elf. Not a wildling, but a highborn. One of the old blood, ancient and cunning.
She ran.
Gods, she ran.
But the forest fought her.
Roots surged to trip her. Shadows clawed her legs. Cultists threw themselves at her like fodder. She killed every one of them.
"Kael!"
He looked back. Just once.
Their eyes met.
And then a blinding flash of purple flame erupted between them.
A teleportation glyph.
The cultist grinned, and together, he and Kael vanished into thin air, leaving only blood, silence, and smoke behind.
The world went still.
Serenya stood alone in the clearing, the stench of death and magic thick in her nostrils. Her sword dropped from her hand.
And for the first time in her reign, in her life, in all her years as queen of Velmora…
She fell to her knees and screamed.
Not in rage.
Not in fury.
But in despair.
Silence returned in broken pieces.
The forest no longer screamed. The wind no longer moved. The magic that had drenched the air like blood in water began to thin, leaving behind only the scent of charred flesh and wild rot.
Crows gathered above, circling the massacre with gleeful caws.
Queen Serenya did not move.
Her knees were in the mud. Her shoulders trembled, not from fear or weakness, but from the weight of what had just happened. Her sword lay in the dirt, flames extinguished. Her golden armor, once radiant, was now blackened, cracked, and soaked in blood. Her braid had come undone, strands of silver hair plastered to her face with sweat.
Kael was gone.
She had failed.
Every royal decree. Every ancient rite of protection. Every oath sworn by knight and mage alike. Torn to shreds in the course of minutes by a cult they had dismissed as fringe lunatics. And worse, they hadn't wanted to kill her. No. She was just a distraction.
They wanted the boy.
Her son.
Her heir.
Her child.
She didn't cry. Not yet. She didn't scream again. Not here. Not with the gods watching. Her mind screamed enough for a thousand voices. Visions of Kael being held down, carved into, turned into something else. Raised to hate her. Molded into a weapon meant to stab the very heart of the realm he was born to inherit.
A groan pulled her back.
Aldryn.
He hadn't died after all. The old knight was sprawled nearby, surrounded by corpses, blood leaking from his mouth like spilled ink. His left arm was useless, and his eyes had gone glassy.
But he was alive.
"Your Majesty," he rasped, coughing blood. "Did we… did we save the boy?"
Serenya swallowed the bile in her throat.
"No," she said. "They took him."
Aldryn tried to sit up. Failed. His body trembled. He looked down at the ruin of the clearing, the corpses of brave men and women, the shattered remnants of the cart, the twisted, vine-choked trees still weeping sap like blood.
Then he said, quietly, "Forgive me."
Serenya stood.
She limped to him, tore a strip from her cloak, and pressed it to his neck. Her hands didn't shake. They were steady as stone. Her eyes, however, her eyes had changed. Whatever kindness had once lingered there, whatever softness Kael had drawn from her like spring water from a well, it was gone.
"This was not your failure," she said, her voice like steel dragged across ice.
"This was mine. And I will never let them forget it."
By nightfall, the cleanup had begun.
Messenger hawks flew from the treeline. Knights rode out from distant barracks. Mages arrived to seal off the corrupted soil and purify the air. Priests burned the cultist corpses, but their smoke rose purple and did not dissipate. The Blackwood had been tainted. Scarred. Marked by some deeper evil.
It would never be safe again.
The Crown declared it a haunted zone by dawn.
Three royal funerals were planned. A fourth was left unspoken, because no body had been recovered.
No body.
No proof.
Just blood and silence and absence.
And so, across the realm of Velmora, whispers began.
That the prince had died.
That the prince had been taken.
That the Queen had failed.
That the old protections were crumbling.
But in the Queen's heart, there was only one truth:
Kael was alive.
And she would move heaven and hell, burn cities, sacrifice thrones, and drown kingdoms in blood if it meant seeing her son again. And when she did… when she found the ones who had done this…
No mercy would remain.