The red moon rose once more, bleeding its light over the land. Wherever its rays fell, the void hissed and recoiled, slithering away into the cracks of the earth.
As the darkness retreated, it unveiled a great, solitary structure atop a lone hill, its stone walls facing southward like a sentinel that had been watching for centuries.
The crimson light cut through shattered panes and splintered cracks, spilling into the heart of the cathedral's hollow chamber. There, lying amid a heap of gleaming fragments, was the man who had fought to hold his ground against nothingness itself.
His eyes fluttered open. The silence inside felt heavy, sacred, and wrong.
When he tried to rise, a sharp memory struck him—his foot, broken by the brutal fall hours before. But when he looked down, his breath caught. The mangled flesh was… mending. Ligaments reknit. Bone aligning. Skin sealing.
Yet the healing was unnatural. Where the wound closed, black threads wormed beneath his flesh like veins of shadow.
The hole in his torso, once a gaping wound, had nearly sealed as well—exposing pale skin laced with those same writhing strands.
He flexed his foot, testing it, then limped toward a towering pillar at the cathedral's center. There, scattered at its base, lay scraps of cloth—tattered, stiff, and foul.
He stooped to pick one up.
As his fingers closed around the fabric, thick black ichor seeped from its folds, spilling tiny centipedes that skittered into the cracks between the stones. He shook it violently, casting off the filth, then wound the cloth around his midsection. The sting in his stomach had returned—strange, for until now, pain had been a stranger to him since his awakening.
He tilted his head back, staring into the vaulted dark above, as if the shadows themselves might whisper where he was meant to go.
But instead, he drifted into sleep.
---
The world shifted.
A voice thundered from beyond the veil of dreams: "Advance! Advance!"
The vision tore into being—a battlefield drenched in blood and fire. Wretches in tattered flesh clawed at warriors in full plate, each side straining for dominance.
Amid the chaos, the knight was there—running through the carnage, blade in hand. His sword cleaved through an abomination of rotting limbs and twisting tendrils, spraying dark ichor into the air.
He slid down into a valley, his voice carrying over the din of war:
"Riders of the realm! By steel and by blood, let no fiend cross our lines—strike as though this dawn were the last the world shall ever see!"
The words had scarcely left his lips before something massive slammed into him. He crashed into another armored man, both tumbling to the ground in a heap of steel and mud.
"Cassian!" the man barked, dragging him to his feet. "We are but men! This slaughter is without end—should we prevail this day, what of the tomorrow? And the tomorrow after that? Let us flee, find our kin, and meet death with their arms about us!"
Cassian's gaze burned, his breath heavy through his helm. He ignored the storm of arrows slicing the air, ignored the void-born monstrosities hammering at their second line of defense after shattering the first.
"I will not trade steel for a coward's grave," he snarled. "Better my bones lie upon this field than see these wre—"
The earth lurched. A giant tremor rolled beneath his boots, a low thunder climbing through greaves to spine. Mail chimed upon mail; lances rattled in their rests; banners snapped though no wind blew. His words died in his throat as the very soil gave a grinding groan, deep as a cathedral bell.
Cracks shot outward in jagged veins, splitting the ground as if some titanic ribcage pressed from below. The valley swelled—heaved—rising in a slow, terrible convulsion. Dust poured from the wounds in the earth. The sound deepened into a bestial bellow, the breath of a thing long-buried and wrathful.
The incline steepened. Men stumbled, slid, and fell screaming. Shields skittered away into the widening dark; horses reared and toppled; the field itself tipped like a capsizing ship, casting soldiers and monsters alike down the yawning slope.
---
Cassian's eyes snapped open.
The cathedral loomed around him once more. The crimson rays had faded. Darkness was coming—not as a slow dusk, but as a living, stalking thing.
He forced himself to stand.
Across the vast, broken hall, through the shattered openings in the stone, he saw it.
And for the first time since he awoke in this cursed land… he felt fear.