Dust, smoke and the metallic tang of blood explode outward. The shoulder of the grove disintegrates into a grey cloud. Lilia rolls and coughs, lungs burning with acrid smoke. Ethan slams into a broad root and the roots themselves crack like bones under his weight.
When the world settles to a slow, shaking silence, the demons nearest to Nox lie shredded like weeping puppets, scattered shards of dark flesh and mana like erupted star matter.
Leona is on her back a heartbeat later, hair wild, breath kicked out of her. She scrambles up, hand groping for Nox — but he is not the same.
He is on his feet.
The blood that ran in lines from his eyes has dried into black rivulets that glitter with an oil-sheen. His pupils are elongated and golden now; not human, not beast, but something carved between them. A low, oppressive aura hangs about him — a gravity that tastes like doom.
Above the broken canopy, the sky thickens further. The storm that Zakaros called down has its own heartbeat. The clouds boil and spool; thunder roars and then goes silent, like lungs that forgot something.
Ethan spits, tastes dust and iron, and staggers to his feet. "What— what did you do?" he demands, voice raw. His sword sweeps, creating a line of silver between his friends and any stray demons.
Lilia is already moving, not with fear but with focused alarm. "Stay away!" she yells. Her mana arrows flare between them and the corpse-clotted grass. "Back!" she commands. Each arrow is a clear order, a living wire that she snaps into place between the beasts and the four of them.
Nox's voice is not his.
It comes from some deeper chamber, resonant and layered. When he speaks, his consonants are sanded to claws.
"I am not lost," the voice says, and somewhere behind the words a darker undertone answers, a twin voice like another throat.
Leona wants to close her eyes and scrape Nox from the world like a splinter. Her muscles shake with the ache of betrayal and fear. She stands and steps forward anyway, because she is Leona and she will not turn away.
"Nox," she says. Her name is a blade and a plea. "Fight it. Fight me. Speak."
Nox's hand raises — not to Leona but to the air — and the very ground responds. Black filaments of corrupt mana crawl through the earth, seeking. A sour, choking miasma rises like steam from a coffin. The smell is of rot, of coal burned down to dust, of old wounds reopened to singe.
The circle of demons that had been harrying them convulses and begins to retreat, voices high with terror. They scent the new power like prey scenting a wolf pack. Even the demonic swarm knows when a greater hunter is present.
But the air itself has been poisoned. The twilight falls in a heavy cloak. Rain, when it comes, is not clean; it carries a sting.
Ethan lunges, but a tremor of the ground throws off his balance. He tastes metal in his throat and is pushed to one knee as if a hand had shoved the world. The sky rips open and more black lightning fingers arcing down. The island shrieks. Birds scatter into the dark.
Leona grabs for Nox's arm, desperate fingers finding fur and bone where palm should be. She feels the pulse there — not an erratic human heartbeat but something broader and slow like a drum in the chest of the earth.
"Stop," she pleads. "Stop whatever you are doing. Listen to me — we'll get you help." Her words are a net cast and snapped. They tremble.
Nox tilts his head and, for a second, something like recognition flickers through the golden pupils. A tiny ache of the old private boy you could call by name, a sliver of the kid who had once eaten frostberries by the riverbank. It is a pin-prick of light in a room of smoke.
"Leona," he says. The voice is softer, a memory of him and then not. "You smell like metal and moon."
Her body remembers everything about him. She remembers the boy he had been, the brother she loved — the mundane, the silly, the human. Her tears are long and slow and she tastes the ash in her mouth.
"Please," she says, "come back."
Nox ISN'T the only one listening. Something in the victorious hush of the demons gives a low, eager rumble as if an audience anticipating a feast. The forest holds its breath. The island seems to tilt.
Ethan grits a curse between his teeth. Rage blazes then is put away like a torch because there is thinking to do. "We can't burn the whole thing down," he says to no one and everyone, "we can't call down the big thralls or we'll kill our own. We need a… a targeted seal. A bind. Something to hold him while we pull Zakaros out."
"But how?" Lilia snaps. "You've seen what he can do already. The mana that came off him — it burned through wards."
Leona's hands are clenched so hard her knuckles are white. She imagines ripping the thing from her brother — like pulling a thorn from soft meat. But thorns can anchor into skin and make you bleed. She can imagine what Zakaros would do to be freed.
Nox's voice changes into a layered growl, and the black lightning that had struck him stands up like a crown and starts humming. The hum becomes a chord that vibrates in their teeth and in the roots beneath their boots.
"You are small," the voice intones. "You are warm and sweet and clumsy. Let me wear you again."
Outside the circle, the sky peels back and the air takes on a different color entirely — the color of an abused mirror. Above them, beyond the burning canopy, something vast shifts. A shadow moves that is not a cloud, something that crawls across the light itself like a slow hand.
Lilia fires arrow after arrow, and the arrows explode on the edges of the new aura in shimmering fractures of frost. Each one bites but does not halt the approach. She fires faster and faster, the rhythm of shots like a nervous heartbeat.
Then a roar splits the air — not from the demons this time, but from the sea. It is a low sound that vibrates like a drum that wants to split bone. On the horizon, something black lifts — something with angles that do not belong on any ship; a vast silhouette like a field of spikes and architecture that has no right to float.
Ethan's voice is thin. "Dammit. They're not just here for chaos. They're hunting. We need to—"
But he cannot finish. Because Nox, whose body holds two voices now, kneels with fluid motion and lifts both hands toward the sky. He breathes in, and the storm answers, and the crown of black lightning swells into a spiraling lance that points toward the approaching shadow.
The island tilts on some unseen fulcrum. A low, child-scorching wind picks up. The odor of ozone and copper fills their mouths. Grass goes still. The demons recoil wholly as the new power affirms its hunger.
Leona's scream is a raw, simple thing — not of pain but of loss — and in it everything hangs: her fear, her love, the brittle hope that Nox's eyes might go back to brown and human.
The mana that suffuses the clearing folds in on itself. The black lightning eddy spins faster, brighter, swallowing night and replacing it with a spectral, pulsing opacity. Then, and with a sound that is neither thunder nor song but both, the lightning splits.
The split is a question.
A new silhouette emerges from the heart of the curl — not fully formed, but suggestion enough. A shape that could be a man, could be a spear, could be a throne, could be death.
Ethan drops to one knee and forces his blade up. He can feel the edges of fate sharpening like cold glass. Lilia's arrows hang half-finished in the air like frozen thoughts.
"Brace!" she cries. "Hold him, Leona! Ethan— we draw it off — now!"
They do not know how. They do not know where the line will cut. They only know the little things: how to stand, how to buy seconds, how to make space for a moment to happen.
The moment arrives.
Nox's chest swells as if to let loose everything. His voice — no, their voice — folds into a single word that is not a word at all but a vow written in static.
The clearing lights up like the eye of a god.
And when the light fades, something moves at the edge of the grove — a figure stepping forward as if from the wound itself. Tall, cloaked in shadow, and with a crown of broken moons crowning its head. It is not entirely human. It is not entirely dragon. It is something older than that.
Leona shrieks and lunges, but the figure raises a hand, and a sound like a bell being wound backward folds the world again. The forest retreats into a hush. The demons, which moments ago were fleeing in terror, stare like animals at the returns of a master.
The new presence looks down at them all with eyes that do not blink. Then it inclines its head, almost politely, and a small, dry laugh slithers across the clearing.
"You have done well," it murmurs — a voice that eats syllables. "You have called me rightly. Now the game begins."
The clearing answers in a silence that is thicker than the smoke.
Leona's breath catches. Ethan's hands shake. Lilia's arrows fall from where they hung like dropped promises.
Nox — no, the thing in Nox — tilts its head. One golden pupil narrows. For a breathless instant the boy who once played by the river is a surface over an ocean.
And then the figure turns, and the forest shudders as the rest of the island breathes in unison.
Nox laughs a strange, crazy laugh, a monster laugh
! ! !
" THE GAME HAS BEGUN " He shouts
"HAHAHA " evil laugh
"_"
"_"
"_"
The three look at Nox.
.To be continued.
-------------------------
Heat: Thank you very much for reading.
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