The Masked Shadow moved through the pitch-black tunnels like a phantom of death. Clad in tattered, dust-covered garments that billowed silently around a frame of pure muscle, he held two dual-wielded blades that hummed with a suppressed, crimson frequency.
Ahead of him, scuttling along the stalactite-encrusted ceiling, was a pack of skin-walkers—horrific, pale humanoids with elongated limbs and stretched, grinning faces that mimicked human speech to lure prey.
"Help us... please..." one of the skin-walkers rasped from the dark, its voice echoing mockingly off the wet stone walls.
The Masked Shadow didn't break stride. He didn't offer a single word in response.
With a sudden, explosive burst of speed, he leaped vertically off the cave wall, spinning mid-air. His crimson-hued blades slashed through the darkness in a brilliant, lethal arc. The first skin-walker was split cleanly down the middle before it could finish its mocking phrase. As he landed smoothly on the stone floor, his blade swept backward in a razor-sharp reverse grip, decapitating a second beast that lunged blindly from the shadows.
Thick, dark ichor splattered across the cavern floor as the remaining skin-walkers screeched in sudden, unadulterated terror, realizing that *they* were not the hunters in this dark labyrinth. The Masked Shadow stood amidst the carnage, his shadow blades dripping with blood, his breathing calm and steady
A MONTH EARLIER
The escape out of the soul words mayhem had left Bani fractured, his physical form bruised and his internal reserves scraped dangerously thin. When the spatial tear spat him out into the quiet desolation of the desert of mordo. He had not expect himself to land here, was it the effect of two worlds clashing that disrupted his spell and sent him here, but still he have never been here before.
He straightened up and looked around him. Several meters away a cohort of adventures were conversing. A young man saw him and came close.
The young man had been sitting near a low-burning hearth remnant, his appearance disarmingly pleasant. A mop of soft brown hair framed a face set in an easy, welcoming smile, and his clothes were clean, belying the harshness of the surrounding wilderness. Noticing Bani clutching his bleeding side and favoring a shattered leg, the stranger immediately bent.
"Hey, friend, you look like you've been through a war," the young man called out, stepping forward with his hands open and empty, offering assistance. "Let me help you with those wounds. I have salves—"
"Stay back," Bani rasped, his voice rough. He swiped a blood-stained hand outward, rudely rejecting the offer as he leaned heavily against a weathered boulder.
The young man didn't back away. Instead, he took another step closer, his smile uncomfortably fixed, and persisted with a sickeningly sweet hospitality that set every nerve in Bani's body on edge.
That was when his shadow caught Bani's eye.
Cast against the ground by the fading twilight, the stranger's shadow did not match the silhouette of a normal human. It was horrifyingly elongated, stretching across the dirt like a pool of spilled ink, and impossibly, inhumanly skinny—a cluster of jagged, needle-like appendages that writhed independently of the boy's actual movements.
Sensing that his true nature had been unmasked, the stranger stopped mid-sentence. The pleasant warmth vanished from his features in an instant.
With a sickening pop of joints, the young man's body suddenly began to warp, growing terrifyingly thinner and longer, stretching upward until he loomed like a emaciated specter. When he spoke again, the voice that issued from his throat was no longer human; it was an eerie, abstract layering of overlapping frequencies, like grinding stones and whispers in an empty hall. Simultaneously, his vibrant skin drained of all color, turning a dead, ash-gray.
Bani didn't hesitate. Even with his vision blurring and his core burning with the agonizing emptiness of drained mana, instinct took over. His fingers curled tightly around the hilts of his twin daggers, though he knew deep down that he stood only a slim, desperate chance of surviving what stood before him.
He dissolved into a wisp of smoke, utilizing the last shreds of his shadow-step. In a fraction of a second, he materialized directly behind the towering monstrosity, his blade flashing in the dim light. With a swift, practiced arc, he severed the head of the entity's distorted shadow from its source.
The monster let out a piercing, glass-shattering shriek before cutting off abruptly, falling into a dead silence.
But the silence lasted only a heartbeat.
From the treeline, from behind the rocks, and from the very shadows of the clearing, other figures began to emerge. Dozens of ordinary-looking travelers, merchants, and wayfarers stepped into the open, surrounding Bani in a suffocating ring.
Before Bani could draw another breath, the illusion melted away. One by one, the humans transformed into gray, elongated abominations identical to the first.
Lashing out, Bani formed various onyx tendrils from the shadows, whipping them forward to parry the initial wave of attacks. He fought with brutal, calculated efficiency, slicing through thin, gray limbs and dodging the blindingly fast lunges of the horde. But there were too many, and his strength was rapidly fading.
To let them capture him meant death, but to stay and fight meant exhaustion. He had to run.
Throwing caution to the wind, Bani detonated a burst of residual dark energy, creating a chaotic smokescreen of pure shadow. He broke through the eastern perimeter of the circle, tearing into the dense, untamed undergrowth.
Behind him, the skin walkers kept up their relentless pursuit. They hunted him not merely to kill, but to silence him—ensuring that the terrifying secret of their infiltration across the realms would never be revealed to the living world.
Branch-whips lashed at his face, and gray, needle-thin limbs speared the earth mere inches from his boots every time he tried to slip through the shadows. The desert floor beneath him began to shudder, responding to the malice of the trailing horde, growing unstable and treacherous underfoot.
Bani pushed his battered body past its absolute limits, leaping across jagged ravines and sliding down steep embankments, the howling pack of monsters hot on his heels.
Without warning, the earth beneath his boots vanished.
A massive section of the overgrown terrain collapsed into a subterranean void. Caught in the sudden avalanche of loose rock, and suffocating dust, Bani tumbled uncontrollably down a steep, dark slope. The echoing screeches of the skin walkers faded away into a distant murmur far above him.
With a bone-jarring crash, he hit the bottom, rolling hard across cold stone and coming to a dead stop in total darkness.
As he groaned, pushing himself up from the debris and tasting the copper tang of blood in his mouth, he took in his surroundings. Towering, ivy-choked pillars stretched up into a dim, vaulted ceiling, and colossal basalt gates carved with the grim visages of forgotten demons loomed in the gloom.
He had fallen directly into the forbidden, long-lost ruins of the Gorgoroth Kingdom.