The stalker emerged—shadow given flesh, moving like liquid midnight poured from a pitcher of nightmares. The thing moved like a leopard—if leopards had eyes that burned with stolen Aetheris-light and pelts woven from the spaces between stars. Every muscle flowed wrong, its shadow-fur twisting away from the eye like a half-remembered nightmare.
Krystof's gut clenched. Some things weren't meant to be seen, only survived.
"Hold fast," Krystof commanded as several men took involuntary steps backward. "It's just one creature. We've faced worse odds than this."
The words tasted like rust in his mouth. A soldier's lie—the kind you tell because the truth would crack your ribs open.
Dawnbreaker's edge caught the light of Luxora and Tenebris. Three generations of honor, and here he was, feeding them pretty lies with his last breaths. They'd never faced anything like this.
Then... gods preserve them... it rose.
The transformation defied every natural law Krystof knew, every principle of reality he'd built his worldview upon. Her body unmade itself—muscles sliding like butchered meat reforming, shadows writhing like oil on fire. Bones cracked and remembered new shapes, each wet snap echoing in Krystof's teeth.
Then—
She was naked and terrible. The kind of beauty that flays men alive.
Moonlight skin. Something moving beneath it—not tattoos. Not veins. Like rats under a rug, chewing at the seams.
Krystof tasted bile. Dawnbreaker felt like a child's toy in his grip.
Krystof's sword arm remembered how to tremble.
"Blessed light of Aetheris," someone whimpered—might have been Trommin, might have been any of them. "What manner of devil—"
"Silence!" Krystof's bark cut through rising panic like a blade through silk. "Hold formation! Do not break ranks!"
Her hair itched—not moving, but twitching, like spider legs testing a web. Black? No. The absence of black. The void where light goes to die.
That smile hit next. Not a smile. Her mouth split open—wrong—a fox's grin stretched over a butcher's blade. Those teeth. Gods, those teeth. Not white. Bone-white. Jagged as a broken wine jug, each edge gleaming wet with something that wasn't saliva.
Krystof's tongue found the gap where his left molar should be. Old brawling wound. Suddenly it ached.
Then her voice happened inside their skulls—gravedirt shifting, coffin nails screeching.
"This is no place for beings tied to time." She said with a soft voice.
Krystof's pendant went white-hot. The king's seal bubbled against his skin, the crowned stag now thrashing like a real beast under his collarbone. He didn't scream. "We came by storm, not choice. We seek only safe passage back to our waters."
She didn't walk. The ground flinched beneath her.
Grass shriveled mid-step—not dying. Trying to escape. Branches twisted back like broken fingers. Petals slapped shut like eyelids hiding from the sun.
Krystof's boot sole stuck to the earth. Sap or blood, he couldn't tell. Didn't matter. The forest was screaming without sound. "The storm was no accident, Krystof Morevain. The waters chose you, and they hunger for more than your charts."
The use of his full name sent ice through his veins. "How do you know my name? What are you?"
"I am Somara." Her lips peeled back—too wide, like skin splitting over a wound. The teeth beneath weren't teeth at all, but shards of something chewed into shape.
"I am the whisper that rots the noose before the hanging," she crooned, voice thick as infection. "The nail pried from the gallows beam. My master has waited seven generations for one such as you to wash upon our shores. He wishes... words."
"Your master?" Krystof stepped forward, placing himself between nightmare and his men, feeling their fear like a physical weight pressing against his back. "What does he want from soldiers of Croyton? We're not diplomats or scholars—we're fighting men with steel and little else to offer."
"Perhaps answers. Perhaps your lives. Perhaps something far more precious than either." Her eyes—molten and heavy as stolen bullion—weighed each man in turn. Krystof saw her pause at young Moldric. Saw how her pupils dilated at the boy's rabbit-quick pulse.
Somara raised her hands—palms empty, wrists marked with those strange, swirling tattoos that caught the twin moons' pallid glow. Luxora and Tenebris, watching like blind judges.
"I stand before you just a messenger," she said. Her voice was smooth. Too smooth. Like a blade sheathed in silk. "But if you want to see Aetheris light again?" A shrug, sharp as a knife twist. "You'll come with me."
Her smile stayed frozen. Eyes dead.
Krystof's grip shifted on his sword. The leather wrap creaked. The steel—once bright, now dulled by this endless dark—felt heavier than it should.
"Almost makes me curious," he said, voice steady as a executioner's block. The pendant at his chest hummed, a faint, feverish whisper against his skin. Lies, it seemed to say. Lies woven in pretty words.
His head cocked slightly. "Why trust a devil's shadow?"
Somara laughed—a sound like dry leaves scraping stone. "Look around, Second Sword." Her words slithered, too sweet, too soft. "The dark here hungers and it's not picky."
Something growled. Not wind. Not trees. Something alive.
Krystof didn't turn. Didn't need to. The shadows at the edge of his vision twitched. Eyes blinked. Yellow. Hungry.
"Choose," Somara murmured, stepping back into the gloom. "I'm to bring you willing. Master didn't say what happens if you're not."
The wind shook the branches, carrying the coppery tang of something freshly butchered.
His men stayed silent. Their faces said enough.
Trommin's breath hitched—the ragged, wet gasps of a man one heartbeat away from vomiting or fainting. Krystof didn't need to look. He knew the sound. Had heard it in the trenches at Veldross, right before the green boys either broke or bloodied their first blades.
The air curdled with the stink of terror - not just sweat, but the reek of emptied bladders and vomit. Harwik's sword calluses scraped against the grip as his mouth shaped old prayers. Useless words. The gods had abandoned this forest long before they entered it.
The line shuddered. Not breaking. Not yet. But Krystof saw it—the way young Taren's shield dipped, how Voss kept swallowing like his throat was full of bile.
Brex's whisper cut through the stench: "Just say it, Ser." Blade already half-drawn. "We'll carve a path through this bitch's guts."
Twenty men. Twenty terrified men. Krystof's tongue found the hole where his tooth had been.
Krystof considered it. They were soldiers, trained killers who'd faced death before. But something in Somara's casual confidence, in the way she stood utterly unafraid before twenty armed men, suggested that steel might not be enough.
"Sheath your weapons," Krystof commanded, his voice carrying authority earned through blood and brotherhood, though it cost him everything to give the order.
"Ser?" Harwik's voice cracked with disbelief.
"You heard me. Lower them. Now."
The men moved like rusted hinges—swords grudgingly sheathed, spearpoints dipping slow as dying men bowing. Shields settled at hips with the finality of gravedirt hitting pinewood.
Krystof tasted blood. He'd bitten his tongue.
Somara's laugh was a knife dragged along bone. "Clever men." Her body shivered—not a ripple, but the convulsion of something shaking off its skin. That smile kept spreading, teeth crowding her lips like a pit of starving eels. "My master appreciates wisdom. It makes the conversation so much more... civilized."
"This jungle may be your dominion, Somara—" Krystof's voice cut through the whispering trees, the cloying mist. He caught Moldric's glance, a boy too young to die here. Any of them deserved a chance at the Aetheris light. "Lead on, then."
Somara's laughter was the hiss of a snake slithering through leaves as she turned deeper into the shadows, her form oddly fluid, like a trick of the dark. Krystof exchanged a final glance with his closest men, sharing unspoken resolve and the chill of a dark presence in their bones. Together they followed, each footfall swallowed by the malevolent earth.
A path seemed to carve itself from the forest, trees bending aside under some invisible command of the specter ahead. A certainty settled over Krystof, dense and unyielding like the heels of her footfalls. The Aetheris' light felt an eternity away, a distant dream that shimmered just beyond his grasp.
As they followed her deeper into the breathing jungle, single file now like prisoners being led to execution, one thought clawed at Krystof's mind like a rat in a grain sack: if this creature served a master, what manner of entity commanded such loyalty? The question festered like an arrowhead left in flesh: Why us? Not warriors at their peak, but battered survivors stumbling through foreign hell.
Vines slithered across the path behind them. The jungle wasn't just watching now—it was digesting. Every step drove the heat deeper into Krystof's shoulders, twenty lives hanging from him like corpses on a gibbet. Not the clean weight of steel, but the slow crush of a landslide.
Somara's shadow became the path, black as a hanged man's last breath. The men walked it anyway. What choice did they have?