The dawn of June 28, 1098, did not arrive with the gentle touch of a summer morning. Instead, it rose like a pale, sickly eye over the jagged peaks of the Syrian mountains. Beneath it, the city of Antioch held its breath.
Inside the gates, the Crusader army was a collection of walking shadows. They were six divisions of starving men, their armor tied together with strips of leather, their stomachs hollowed out by months of famine. Yet, as the heavy iron bolts of the Bridge Gate were drawn back, a strange energy rippled through the ranks. It wasn't the frantic, brittle energy of the desperate. It was something deeper—a cold, buzzing vibration that seemed to rise from the very stones of the city.
The mist began to roll off the Orontes River. It was not a natural fog. It was thick, heavy, and shot through with threads of a faint, violet luminescence. As it swept through the ranks of the kneeling soldiers, they didn't cough or sputter. They inhaled deeply. To a human, the mist smelled of ancient forests and ozone. To Alaric, standing at the head of the vanguard, it smelled like home.
"The spores are active," Alaric whispered, his voice barely a hum beneath his closed visor.
Beside him, his twelve knights sat on horses that no longer looked like horses. Their manes were thick and matted with a dark, sticky resin, and their eyes held a dull, reddish glow. They didn't stomp or neigh; they stood with a terrifying, statuesque stillness, their breathing synchronized with the rhythmic pulse of the Vilevine beneath the city.
"The humans are... changing," Godfrey noted, his amber eyes scanning the line of foot soldiers behind them.
Alaric looked back. The starving peasants and knights were no longer slouching. Their faces were flushed, their pupils dilated until their eyes were almost entirely black. The spores of the Vilevine, carried by the mist, were acting as a biological stimulant. They were numbing the pain of their wounds, suppressing the pangs of hunger, and heightening their aggression to a fever pitch. In their minds, they felt the touch of God. In reality, they were being fueled by the desperation of a parasite.
The Charge of the False Saints
The gates groaned open, and the first division, led by the Count of Flanders, surged out.
The Turkish army of Kerbogha, spread across the plains in a vast, shimmering crescent of silk and steel, watched in disbelief. They had expected a surrender or a desperate, pathetic crawl. They did not expect a wall of iron and fury.
"Deus Vult!" the cry went up, but it was ragged and deep, vibrating with a primal hunger.
Alaric lowered his lance—a shaft of black, petrified wood he had fashioned from a branch of the Mother Tree. "Now," he commanded.
The Vanguard didn't charge with the frantic gallop of the human knights. They moved with a predatory, accelerating glide. As they hit the sunlight, the golden mist clung to them, forming a protective shroud that kept their resin-blood from thickening under the heat. To the Turks watching from the ridges, it looked as though a group of shining, white-clad saints were descending from the heavens.
The collision was a symphony of violence.
Alaric hit the Turkish vanguard like a falling mountain. His lance didn't just pierce; it shattered shields and mail with a force that sent riders flying twenty feet into the air. He didn't use a shield. He didn't need one. He moved through the storm of arrows and scimitars with a terrifying, fluid grace. When an arrow struck his surcoat, it didn't draw blood. It hit his resin-hardened skin with a dull thwack and fell to the ground, its head blunted.
Behind him, the twelve worked in a perfect, lethal formation. They were the "roots" of the battlefield. They didn't just kill; they harvested. Every time a member of the Vanguard struck a killing blow, a faint, violet spark jumped from the victim to the knight. They were siphoning the final, frantic life-force of the dying and feeding it directly back into the network.
The battle was no longer a matter of tactics. It was a massacre of the living by the eternal.
The Duel of the Crescent and the Vine
As the battle raged into the afternoon, the center of Kerbogha's line began to buckle. The Atabeg of Mosul, seeing his elite Janissaries being torn apart by a handful of "ghost knights," sent his personal guard to stem the tide. At their head was a commander named Arslan, a man of legendary strength who believed he was fighting demons.
Arslan charged Alaric, his massive mace swinging in a deadly arc. "Shaitan!" he roared, the word lost in the din of the slaughter.
Alaric saw the blow coming in slow motion. To his heightened senses, the world had slowed to a crawl. He could see the individual grains of sand kicked up by Arslan's horse. He could hear the whistle of the mace as it cut the air.
He didn't dodge. He raised his left arm.
The mace struck Alaric's forearm with a sound like a hammer hitting a cedar trunk. The iron rings of his mail shattered, and the bone beneath cracked—but it didn't snap. Instead, thick, dark amber resin erupted from the wound, instantly wrapping around the head of the mace like a living vine.
Arslan's eyes widened in horror. He tried to pull his weapon free, but it was fused to Alaric's flesh.
"Your god is a long way from here, Arslan," Alaric said, his voice sounding directly in the commander's mind.
With his right hand, Alaric drew a short, obsidian blade. He didn't aim for the heart. He aimed for the throat. As the blade slid home, Alaric felt the rush of Arslan's life—a hot, powerful surge of energy that made his amber eyes flare with a blinding intensity.
[Image: A dark knight in silver-grey armor holding a Turkish commander by the throat, the commander's weapon fused to the knight's arm by a glowing, wood-like sap.]
The Vilevine in the distant rift let out a psychic roar of triumph. This was the tribute it had waited for—the blood of a kingly man, spilled in the heat of a holy war.
The Route
The death of Arslan was the final straw. Kerbogha's army, seeing their most invincible warriors slaughtered by men who would not die, broke. The panic spread like a contagion. Thousands of Turkish soldiers turned and fled toward the mountains, leaving their tents, their gold, and their wounded behind.
The Crusaders, still high on the Vilevine's spores, pursued them with a ferocity that bordered on the demonic. They didn't stop to take prisoners. They didn't stop to loot. They killed until their arms were too tired to lift their swords, and then they killed with their hands.
By the time the sun began to set, the plains of Antioch were a sea of corpses. The smell was no longer that of a battlefield; it was the heavy, cloying scent of a blooming forest. The blood of fifty thousand men was soaking into the earth, and beneath the surface, the Vilevine was drinking.
Alaric stood on a small hill, his armor covered in a film of dust and hardened resin. He looked back toward the city. He could see the black, thorny vines already beginning to creep out from the sewers and over the walls, no longer hiding in the shadows. The city of Antioch was no longer a fortress; it was a hive.
The Aftermath: The Weight of the Crown
As the dust settled, the "Holy Frenzy" began to fade from the human soldiers. They collapsed where they stood, the exhaustion hitting them like a physical blow. Many of them would never wake up—the spores had pushed their bodies past the point of no recovery.
Peter Bartholomew and the other priests wandered the field, holding the Holy Lance high and shouting praises to the Lord. They walked past Alaric and his Vanguard, but they didn't look at them. They couldn't. Even in their religious ecstasy, there was a primal part of their brains that told them to look away—that Alaric was a thing that did not belong in the light of day.
"We won," Baldwin said, his voice trembling as he slid off his horse. The boy's skin was so pale it was almost translucent, and the black veins in his neck were pulsing visibly. "The Turks are gone. We saved them."
Alaric looked at the boy. He saw the cost of their "salvation." Baldwin was no longer a youth; he was a beautiful, terrifying thing, a creature that could never return to his village in France, never hold a child, never feel the warmth of a hearth without feeling the cold pull of the Sap.
"We didn't save them, Baldwin," Alaric said, his voice heavy with a sudden, human grief. "We claimed them. There is a difference."
Godfrey approached, his face a mask of cold logic. "The princes are calling for a council. They want to march on Jerusalem immediately. They think they are invincible now."
"They are not invincible," Alaric said. "They are merely infected. But we will let them march. The Vilevine needs to reach the center of the world. It needs the soil of the Temple Mount."
"And the survivors?" Godfrey asked, looking at the thousands of Crusaders who were now looking to Alaric with a terrifying, silent expectation.
"The Vanguard is no longer twelve," Alaric said, looking at a group of knights who had been wounded in the battle—men who should have died, but were instead looking at Alaric with amber-tinted eyes. The spores had done more than just stimulate them; they had begun the "Turning" in dozens more.
"The forest is growing," Alaric whispered.
The Legacy of the First Harvest
The chapter ends with a quiet, haunting image. The great army of the First Crusade, now a mixture of starving humans and silent, pale "Vined" warriors, begins to pack their meager belongings. They are moving south.
In their wake, the battlefield of Antioch undergoes a strange transformation. By the next morning, the bodies of the Turkish soldiers are gone, covered by a carpet of thick, black, thorny vines that have grown feet in a single night. The ground is no longer sand; it is a soft, dark loam.
Alaric leads the way, his shadow long and jagged. He is the First Origin, the General of the Vine. He is leading a crusade of the damned toward a city of gold, and he knows that by the time they reach the walls of Jerusalem, there will be very little "human" left in his army.
But the Vilevine is satisfied. Its roots are moving. The heart of the world is finally within its reach.
The "Bloodlust" is no longer a hunger. It is a destiny.