"You don't fight the Marduk. You run. And if you can't… You pray your screams don't last long."
----------------------------------------------------
"This is men's business. A dark elf shouldn't interfere with human affairs."
"You ungrateful little bastard," she snarled, her carefully maintained composure finally cracking. "I've spent forty years keeping this town alive, keeping people like you safe from the things that hunt in the darkness. And this is how you repay that? By bringing more curses down on us all?"
"Curses?" Kael laughed, but there was no humor in it. "The only curse on this town is cowardice. Fear of taking what's ours by right."
"You'll regret this boy," Nisheena warned, her voice dropping to a whisper that somehow carried more menace than any shout. "When the blood starts flowing, when you're watching good people die for your pride, you'll remember this conversation. But it'll be too late then."
For just a moment, she saw something flicker in his eyes, doubt, perhaps, or the ghost of the boy he had been that morning. But then his jaw set again, and the moment passed.
"Maybe I will," he said quietly. "But I'd rather regret trying than regret doing nothing."
Before she could respond, the inn door burst open with a crash that made them both jump. Adnir stumbled in, his young face flushed with excitement and his arms full of steel. Two swords, their blades catching the lamplight as he raised them triumphantly.
"Kael!" he called out, tossing one of the weapons through the air.
Kael caught it easily, his fingers wrapping around the leather-wrapped hilt with practiced familiarity. It wasn't a soldier's blade, probably scavenged from some merchant's caravan or taken from a dead bandit, but it was real steel, and it looked deadly enough in his hands.
"Thank you, brother," he said, and the warmth in his voice was a stark contrast to the coldness he had shown Nisheena moments before.
The two young men stood there grinning at each other like boys who had just discovered a new game, their faces bright with the terrible joy of impending violence. They looked so young, so alive, so utterly convinced of their own invincibility. In a few hours, Nisheena realized, they would likely be dead.
"This isn't a game," she said desperately, making one last attempt to reach whatever wisdom remained in them. "People are going to die. Good people, innocent people. Is your pride worth their lives?"
But she could see it was useless. The fire of revolution had taken hold of them completely, burning away doubt and caution and leaving only the pure certainty of the righteous. They were beyond her reach now, beyond anyone's reach except perhaps cold reality itself.
Kael tested the sword's weight, making a few practice swings that demonstrated more skill than she would have expected from a farmer's son. "Don't worry about us, Lady Nisheena," he said without looking at her.
"Worry about finding somewhere to hide when the fighting starts."
"When this is over," Adnir added with youthful arrogance, "you'll thank us for freeing you from their rule."
If you're still alive, Nisheena thought but didn't say. Instead, she turned away from them, unable to watch any longer as they prepared to march toward their own destruction.
That was when the sound reached them from outside, a sound like nothing she had ever heard in forty years of frontier life. It started as a low rumble, like distant thunder, but quickly resolved into something far more disturbing. A bark, but not from any natural creature. It was too deep, too resonant, carrying undertones that seemed to bypass the ears and strike directly at the primitive fear centers of the brain.
The inn fell silent as all three of them turned toward the front door. The sound came again, closer now, accompanied by the scrape of claws on cobblestone and a smell that drifted through the cracks, sulfur and burnt copper and something else, something that made every instinct scream danger.
"What the hell is that?" Kael asked, his revolutionary fervor suddenly forgotten in the face of genuine terror.
Before Nisheena could answer, the front door of her inn exploded inward in a shower of splinters and twisted iron. The heavy oak barrier, reinforced with metal bands and built to withstand bandit raids, disintegrated as if it had been made of paper.
Through the wreckage stepped something out of a nightmare.
The creature was massive, twice the size of any natural hound, with a body that seemed to blend muscle and shadow in equal measure. Its hide was black as midnight, stretched tight over a frame that radiated predatory power. Six amber eyes arranged in pairs along its skull tracked the three humans with inhuman intelligence, and when its jaws opened, they revealed rows of crystalline teeth that gleamed like fresh-cut diamonds.
Steam rose from its body in visible waves, carrying that overwhelming scent of sulfur and corruption. Each breath seemed to echo with sounds that had no place in the natural world, whispers in languages that predated human speech, the grinding of bones in darkness, the screams of the damned.
This was no natural predator. This was something summoned from the deepest pits of hell itself.
Nisheena's blood turned to ice as recognition hit her like a physical blow. She had read about these creatures in the forbidden texts she kept hidden beneath her floorboards, ancient tomes that detailed the horrors that served the Enki demons. The descriptions had seemed like fantasy, the fevered imaginings of mad scholars seeking to explain the inexplicable.
"Marduks," she whispered, the word barely audible over the creature's rumbling breath.
But that was impossible. The demon hounds of the Enki were bound by strict contracts, summoned only by those who had paid the ultimate price for power. Who in Baelur could have made such a bargain? Who would have been desperate enough, or powerful enough, to call forth something like this?
"Lords preserve us," Kael breathed, his sword suddenly looking like a child's toy in the face of supernatural horror. "What is that thing?"
Nisheena opened her mouth to answer, to warn them about what they faced, to explain the ancient evil that had somehow found its way to their cursed town. But before she could speak, Marduk's muscles bunched like steel springs.
The creature leaped...