The iron gates groaned open, and Yübeel led them out first. The air hit cold and sharp, the grey sky sagging low over the landscape.
Behind them, the Stroheim prison stretched like a rotten sanctuary, its towers cracked and leaking thin trails of black steam. The earth around it was colorless, a pit of stone and ruin. Lining the walls were the Stroheim knights: motionless, unblinking, their helms veined with rust and curse. Some bore armor fused directly into their flesh, metal melted into skin, pulsing faintly where veins met steel. The eyes behind their visors glowed with a black-green haze that churned like smoke in a sealed jar.
Cainan watched it all closely, seeing the horrid relics they considered trophies fused brutally in their bodies. Some even looked fresh, with the blood still glistening and wet,
Noov growled deep in his throat, a guttural vibration, claws flexing, but the knights didn't flinch. Their heads turned slightly as he passed, like statues pretending to breathe.
Yübeel stopped in a clearing of broken flagstones and raised her hand. "Come." Her voice cut through the cold like a command from another world.
Cainan took a step forward, but Park was already beside him, voice low and steady.
"No."
Cainan clicked his tongue, frustrated. "Tsk. This is our chance to fuck off."
Noov shook his head, muttering with a grin, "Better ways."
Vert glanced at Cainan, eyes narrowing with a spark of doubt. 'He's reckless. He won't get us killed, will he? I have things to do, I need to survive. If he's gonna be a hinderance…'
Beside her, Chess was trembling. His heart thumped hard enough to shake his ribs.
'I don't belong here, he thought. I don't. I don't even use magic.'
He saw himself as a boy again; heavyset, cheeks round, sitting in the back of a dim pub. The smell of ale and sweat. Drunken laughter. His job was to eat the leftovers customers left behind so the food wouldn't be tossed outside so the smell wouldn't attract animals that scared off paying guests.
'All I wanted was a few silver pieces to help my mother pay for food. Everything was expensive.'
The memory curdled in his chest. He muttered under his breath, "Should I run..?" But his eyes flicked to the knights and froze. I can't.
A sudden thunder split the air. The sky rippled, and from the haze descended a massive griffon, wings stretching wide enough to shadow the clearing. Three heads. Each with empty eyes inked black, leaking trails like dried paint. Its body was a graveyard of metal and bone, patches of cursed relics fused into its ribcage and limbs. The wings flapped heavy enough to send shockwaves of dust spiraling. The air howled around it.
Cainan shielded his face, glaring upward. "What is that?!"
Vert gritted her teeth. "It's supposed to be a griffon! Stroheim and their Primarchs ruined it! Piss-ants!" She flipped her middle finger up at Yübeel.
Yübeel didn't blink. "Fodder."
Cainan stared at her, disgust crawling in his tone. "They even fuse beasts with their relics and control them?"
Chess's voice shook. "Y-Yeah. The relics Stroheim and their king stole from the witches were really strong—rumored to be crafted by the god of darkness."
"Gods?" Cainan asked, incredulous. "Here?"
Vert sighed, folding her arms. "Used to be. The most faithful talked to them daily. But not anymore, not since the Brain."
Cainan's jaw tightened. "Yeah, I noticed. Pretty sure if they were still walking around, they'd do something about all this."
Noov tugged on Chess's sleeve, pointing at the griffon. "Monster!"
"Y-Yeah, monster." Chess responded.
The beast landed with a quake that made the ground ripple. Yübeel gestured toward it, eyes dull. "Approach the beast, and sit."
Cainan gave her a side-eye, brushing past. "I think I know how to sit."
He leapt up onto the griffon's back. Vert used her hammer as leverage, vaulting herself up in one clean motion. Noov bounded up like a wolf chasing prey. Park climbed gracefully, his movement effortless, almost divine.
Chess struggled, fumbling for grip before Vert yanked him by the wrist to pull him on.
"Up you go!" Vert laughed.
"Thanks..I had it though."
"Nahhh you didn't."
The moment they were all seated, the magic collars around their necks cracked and shattered—each link snapping in sequence like glass breaking underwater. Their power returned. The air around Cainan rippled faintly with it.
He tightened his grip on the reins, body tense again. Every instinct screamed to strike.
'I could take her now. I could finally—' But that same thought gnawed in his head: 'If I live through this… I could still be king. 'But I always survive. What's really stopping me?'
Yübeel rose, wings unfurling, lifting her effortlessly to the griffon's height. Her hair swayed like silk under the wind.
"I will follow the beast," she said without feeling. "The Witch Queen has been apprehended under the temple of a forgotten god of light."
The griffon let out a guttural roar, three voices merging into one distorted cry as it launched upward. The wind slammed into them, like a drunkard slapping them scares the face.
Cainan, Vert, Chess, Noov, and Park stood on the griffon's back as it soared higher, the ruined world unfolding beneath them like a map painted in ash and ruin.
Wind tore through the air like a living thing, whipping across their faces as the griffon soared higher above Myrrvindraal. The sky was a bruised gray, streaked with pale veins of light that struggled to break through.
Beneath them sprawled a jagged country of pale valleys and iron-colored hills and forests that looked sick, rivers running dark and slow like veins full of tar.
Yet in between all that ruin, life still crawled. Down below, dozens of dwarves who were short, stocky, and broad as anvils, that moved in long lines through a valley. Each dragged wagons of ore and blackened timber behind great oxen with silver horns. Sparks danced off their tools as they hammered loose wheels or tightened bolts on the moving caravans.
Cainan leaned over the side of the griffon, eyes narrowing. "Dwarves too?!" he shouted over the wind.
Chess, sitting near the front and holding on for dear life, called back, "Dwarves aren't as rare to see as elves, but that's because they live underground! They still serve the God of the Forge, the Dwarven Song, is what they call him."
Cainan smirked. "So I'm guessing there's some big forge underground, isn't it? Just taking a wild guess."
Vert spun her hammer in hand, grinning. "Yep! I've been there, and it's super hot! I almost melted! Didn't stay long."
Chess nodded nervously. "Yeah, the skin of dwarves is made to withstand all levels of heat. The forges they build underground aren't meant for humans like us to survive for long periods. It protects them too."
Yübeel sneered, "To a certain extent."
Cainan jutted his eyes at her, "Excuse me, your not in this conversation."
Vert pointed at her too, "Haha! You have no one to talk to!"
Noov was crouched behind them, sniffing Park's arm like a hound testing prey. Park didn't even look down, he just pressed one gloved finger to Noov's forehead and pushed him back slowly, unmoving, the gesture calm and unbothered.
Far below, the landscape shifted with fields of ash giving way to a canyon trail where a pack of armored Beast-Kin rode great carriages of dark wood, the insides lined with iron bars. Humans sat inside, heads hung low, wrists bound.
Cainan's eyes hardened. "Are they capturing humans?"
Yübeel's voice drifted coldly through the air, barely louder than the wind. "Their practices aren't our concern."
Cainan glanced at her sharply. "I'm not concerned, woman. Just asking a question." Then he said under his breath, "So mean…"
Chess adjusted his cloak, grimacing. "It's Myrrvindraal for you—the most racist kingdom in the world."
Cainan grunted, looking back down. "Yeah. I can see that."
But then something else caught his eye, a figure in the distance so large it made mountains look small. A slow-moving colossus made entirely of twisted rope, its form towering and fragile at once. Its steps thundered softly through the air, each movement shaking the forests below. Even its head was knotted cord, blank and eyeless, yet somehow… alive.
Cainan leaned forward with boyish awe. "What are they?!" He caught himself, coughed, and asked again with forced composure, "What are they?"
'Gross, I jumped up like an excited kid. I'd have to keep my shock and awe to myself from now on. They'll think I'm soft or something.'
Park's voice came through the helmet's speaker that was calm and tranquil. "Those are the Ropefolk. Formed by the God of Utility and Crafting. They wander where floods have swallowed villages, lay themselves across the water, and soak it into their bodies. When they have taken too much, they burst and die, watering the lands they saved."
Noov pointed eagerly. "Ride!"
Vert laughed, hands on her hips. "We're not riding that thing! What if it accidentally sucks us up inside of it?! Nope!"
Cainan thought, 'Rope creatures that sacrifice themselves just like that? How… do they mate—?'
Cainan gasped at himself, disappointed in himself for even thinking something so absurd, slightly hitting his own head with both hands. "What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me?"
Noov pointed at Cainan, "Haha! Psycho!"
Vert covered his eyes, "Avert your eyes, don't start copying him."
…
Minutes passed in restless silence. Vert eventually lay back against the griffon's spine, flipping her weapon in hand, the sawed-off gun shifting back and forth into her spiked hammer with a quiet hum. She stared at the clouds. "I'll find you, dear…" she whispered.
Park sat cross-legged in the center of the griffon, both hands together in prayer. "Let us be victorious today, oh stars."
Noov, bored, began plucking feathers from the griffon's back one by one. Each time he yanked one free, the beast shrieked from one of its three heads, twisting its neck to glare at him. Noov just laughed harder.
Yübeel still flew beside them, wings gliding smoothly through the wind, her scythe gleaming faintly under the dim light.
Cainan stood near the edge, staring out at the vast, battered world below. His braided ponytail whipped wildly in the wind, his eyes steady but distant.
Chess approached him from behind, face pale, trembling, but his voice steady for once. "I want you to fight me."
Cainan turned, one brow raised. "Huh? You looking to die?"
The wind howled around them as the griffon soared higher, its three heads flaring and twisting in the thick air as if snarling at the heavens themselves.
Clouds scattered beneath its talons. Then, without warning—THWACK!—Cainan's fist cracked across Chess's face. Blood misted, and Chess's vision went white.
'Dammit! He hits like a drunk! And he's holding back…! I'm doomed!'
Before his brain caught up, Cainan was already in front of him, put his hand on his shoulder, and punched four strikes to the chest rapidly, ribs cracking like snapped wood.
Chess reeled and staggered, nearly tumbling off the griffon's spine, one foot hanging off. He caught himself, coughing blood that splattered across the beast's coarse feathers. When his eyes focused again, Cainan was walking toward him very calm and deliberate, eyes like sharp knives.
"Remember you asked for this," Cainan said, voice steady. "Give up yet?"
Vert whistled from her perch, half amused, half alarmed. "Damn, without hesitation! Don't kill him, Cainan!"
Noov barked a guttural laugh. "Fight!"
And Park, still kneeling in his silvered suit, pressed his palms together and whispered, "May the stars grant him the strength to endure."
Chess dragged himself upright, swaying, face swollen and bleeding. "N-No, but—" he managed to stand upright and swung his fist, blind and desperate. Cainan didn't flinch and he easily caught it with one hand.
"Before I got captured, I sacrificed myself to be as confident as you," Chess said through a trembling jaw. "To go without hesitation, because I know I'm strong…somwhere deep down inside of me. I have to be! Look at me, I even look like those people who are just unlucky, I'm destined to be great, right?"
Cainan tilted his head, almost entertained. "Haha! You're weird. Alright then."
Yübeel, flying beside the griffon, didn't so much as blink.
Chess rushed again. The griffon groaned beneath the weight of their movements. Then silence. When it returned, Cainan's arm was buried up to the wrist in Chess's chest, his hand clutching his heart like it was proof of victory. Blood ran down his forearm, pooling beneath his knuckles.
"Done yet? 'Cause I'm not," Cainan muttered. "But I'm not trying to kill you up here."
"Yeah," Chess breathed out, trembling. "Yeah, I'm done."
Cainan let go. Chess fell to his knees.
"If only I had that much courage you have right now when I was a brat," Cainan muttered to himself, wiping the blood from his knuckles.
Vert said, "You're still a brat. Everyone here is older than you. Well, I don't know about Noov."
Cainan scoffed back, "I'M NOT A BRAT!"
Noov pointed with a grin. "Bloody!"
"My face really hurts," Chess groaned, spitting red. "But I can tell he was holding back."
Vert leaned over, grinning. "I can't tell if you're a masochist or a superhero."
Chess asked, "What's a superhero?"
Park murmured a prayer, head bowed. "Oh stars, help him."
Cainan exhaled through his teeth. "What made you like this, anyway?"
Chess looked down, voice shaking. "All the jobs I had were cruel. I was paid to eat leftovers so tavern scraps wouldn't draw animals. Hit for fun by drunks. Used as a punching bag for men who needed to feel powerful. I thought pain made me strong. I kept thinking if I could live through it, I'd earn some kind of respect. But I just learned how to endure. If you really are gonna be king…please let me—"
"Nope."
Chess blinked. "What?"
Cainan crossed his arms. "You were gonna say you want to join me. Fight on my side. Die on my side. Whatever. For what? To be more confident? Why step into a field of death just to feel like you belong there? Maybe that's not your calling or whatever the saying is. I already hate working for people unless it's survival. But volunteering to die? That's pathetic. You can't get stronger because of the brain, right? I can see you're desperate. I get it. I'll let people fight by me who I see I will actually benefit from, people who are meant for that life of violence. Not people who fight out of desperation."
'Not my calling…?' Chess thought.
Vert smirked. "See? I knew there was a good side to Cainan!"
"The stars see him as tranquil as I," Park said. "Perhaps I misjudged his spirit."
Noov continued plucking griffon feathers, oblivious.
Chess raised a shaky grin. "So… that means you'll make sure I don't die, right?"
Cainan's stare flattened. "Absolutely not. I don't care if you die."
Vert gasped. "What?!"
Park sighed. "Never mind. He's the same."
Chess's voice broke into comedic despair. "I thought we were becoming friends! Brothers after that whole speech!"
"Bond? Gross." Cainan leaned back against the griffon's feathers. "Any of you fall off this cursed bird, I'll go right back to dreaming about killing that Yübeel lady." He pointed right at Yübeel.
Vert rolled her eyes. "You're hopeless."
Park's hands pressed together again. "Intriguing, at least."
Then Yübeel's voice cut through the wind. "Down below. We are here."
The griffon's three heads tilted as the clouds parted. Beneath them stretched endless stone ruins, pale and ancient, half-devoured by moss and silence. In the middle stood a glassy white and gold temple, immense and half-buried, its spires cracked but still gleaming as though sunlight obeyed only it.
Then Cainan froze. A voice echoed in his skull and it was deep, ancient, and holy:
"The Rune of Heaven is divine for all who follow the god of light and radiance! Praise be to Lancelotis!"
Blood spilled from his nose.
"Cainan! You're bleeding!" Chess shouted. "That means there's a rune nearby; a full one or a shard!"
"Does this usually happen?" Cainan asked, wiping his nose.
"When runes of separate power come close," Yübeel said coolly, "their bearers bleed from within."
Park added softly, "And if two rune holders of different power touch, they both perish under the stars."
Cainan's eyes narrowed. "And Valor still sent me here? What if I die before I kill that witch?"
"You won't," Yübeel replied.
The air around them thickened with unseen force. Chess trembled, fists clenched. Noov crouched low, beast-like. Vert gripped her sawed-off, smirking. Park's hands were folded in prayer, eyes hidden behind the reflection of the sky.
Cainan stood at the edge, wind in his hair, grinning like a madman trying to hide his fear. "Let's kill a witch then. I'm not scared of anything."
He swallowed, staring down at the vast golden ruin below.
'Right…?'
The griffon folded its wings and fell like a falling tower, wind screaming past their ears as the ruined spires of the forgotten temple swam up to meet them. Dust and ash billowed; broken statues tumbled in the wake. A mile out the griffon dropped them into a waist-high field of cracked stone and toppled columns, the temple's glass-and-gold façade visible beyond: a half-buried sanctuary whose doors were sealed like a wound.
Around that façade crawled a living tide: warped humans, hundreds of them, pale flesh mashed together with glistening patches of brain-matter, their eyes hollow or milky or oozing, veins thrumming black with leftover magic. They moved like a single corrupted herd, knuckles clawing at stone, hands tearing at one another, mouths working useless prayers into the wind.
They made sound as a choir of the last breaths which were heartbreakingly small, in the form of a chorus of whispers:
"I love you."
"Don't—please—"
"Back from the hunt—"
"No, don't—"
"I'll get you…"
"When I get back, I'll bring you flowers, dear—."
"How could you do this—?!"
A couple hundred more loud whispered voices layered and overlapped: a dying oath, a half-finished confession, a last crude joke, a strangled apology, someone's last whisper in a lover's ear, and a warped human moaning with intimacy, his last moments on top of his wife.
The words tumbled and repeated, sometimes shouted in terrible syncopation, sometimes thin as threads. Sections of flesh were fused with exposed cortex like fungus over bone; one man's jaw hung as a slab of grey matter clung to throat and cheek. They were still human-shaped, but their motions were wrong and feral, hungry, and full of the brain's obscene craftsmanship.
The griffon's talons struck stone. Cainan slid down into the rubble and crouched, blade in both hands.
"Are those the warped humans?" he asked, voice low.
"Yeah," Vert said, breath catching in a sound like hurt metal. She watched the tide and thought of the face of her husband, gone into the wars, a laugh that used to cut the air. She feared, for an instant, that the next distorted body would be his. That fear knotted down into a tight animal bone in her throat; she tightened her grip on the sawed-off and the hammer-tip, jaw hard, and forced herself to say aloud, steady, "Yeah, yeah— that's them. The Brain did this." The words were hot and empty and true. "Killing them would be a blessing to them all."
Noov crouched low, teeth showing. "Monsters!" he growled.
Park folded his hands and murmured like a prayer. "Monsters indeed. Stars guide them to true death, use us as instruments of war."
Chess's palms dampened as he watched the tide. He kept his distance, his place was not in the front; but in his head, his place was to not fall. But his eye caught a gleam half-buried in rubble: a short sword of white-and-gold, its pommel carved with a fading sun sigil, abandoned and pristine among the filth. He stared, and a small, brutal question scraped his mind: 'Am I a fraud if I don't pick it up? Not my calling…Cainan said. So I'm supposed to just stand here? Am I really okay with that?'
Cainan asked, "Why are they all huddled up here?!"
Yübeel's voice came without heat. "Warped humans are attracted to large concentrations of magic and power. Most kingdoms put up magic wards to hide the scent of magic, but it's not permanent. It needs to be recast every few days."
"Then there's definitely something in the temple," Vert said.
Yübeel stepped closer to Cainan, wings barely shifting, and said in a tone too neutral to care but sharp enough to cut steel: "Before we go, I need to have a word with—"
Cainan didn't wait. He lurched forward in a single predatory motion, the red-and-black greatsword hissing as the barbed wire along its edge caught a ghost of air. In his head the order was merciless and simple: Strike first before they notice you… kill them all… He blasted into the mass, boots throwing sparks from crushed stone. For one heartbeat the horde seemed to move as slow meat, then every face snapped toward him at once in the blink of an eye which caught Cainan off guard.
They didn't charge forward the way anything sane would. They peeled back like a tide withdrawing; the ground split under their feet as they riven apart and then raced away in a simultaneous, impossible speed, leaving a thick red-pink gas steaming up from the stones where they had been.
The gas smelled of copper and old incense; it coiled and crawled outward like a living bruise. Without breaking rhythm, the warped humans vaulted high, hundreds of them lifting into the air in a screaming cloud that eclipsed the sky.
Above Cainan they hung for a fraction of a second, limbs akimbo, faces contorted into the last words of their lives, and then they dropped in a single, howling rain.
Cainan looked up, sword raised, throat tight. 'What…?!' He thought, as the scream of that choir crashed down.
The first gunshot split the field open. Vert's sawed-off thundered, a red electric charge screaming from the barrel as pellets tore through the air and painted the sky in scarlet. The blast scattered half the warped horde mid-fall, their bodies shredding into pulp and smoke, blood bursting into a grotesque rain that hissed as it fell.
The droplets streaked down toward Cainan like burning comets; he twisted and rolled through them with animal grace, every motion raw and honed. His shoulders brushed against stray streams of blood that steamed on contact with the ground. He rose out of the dive with his greatsword in one hand, teeth bared, his eyes alive with the heat of battle, as the surviving warped humans hit the earth around him in a storm of claws and howls. He twisted towards a horde of warped humans, black and red flames spiraling from his body as the creatures were ripped apart, their blood spraying outward from their wounds, the ground cracking from Cainan's attack.
Vert charged through that madness with fire in her breath, closing her eyes between strikes as if refusing to see what faces lay beneath the monstrous rot.
Her weapon shifted with fluid magic, shotgun to hammer, hammer to shotgun: each swing exploding with red electricity. She crushed a warped human's head into paste with a downward swing, kicked off the collapsing corpse, spun the hammer, and let it melt back into the shotgun to fire point-blank into another creature's ribcage, carving a smoking hole straight through. She prayed as she fought, each murmur a desperate plea that her husband's voice wouldn't echo among the dying. But the screams were everyone and every warped throat crying the last words of a thousand lost souls as they tore themselves apart trying to reach her.