Two weeks earlier
Warden Kael selected twenty of his finest. Once Stormblade Legion, black operatives forged under the Ferrum Noctis program, now reformed under the secretive command of the Veilguard. They had once served as blunt instruments of state, striking unseen across borderlines and centuries-old treaties. Now they moved with sharper purpose and no oversight.
Each was trained for deep-field operations and isolation strikes. When missions failed, there were no retrievals. No names, no records. Only results.
Kael's team was built around dual kill cells, supported by warmages and Hospitallers trained in extraction triage, memory-seal rituals, and battlefield cleansing. Every operative could lead, and if cut off from the rest, could shift into solo strike doctrine without losing rhythm or function.
Their doctrine was simple: approach unseen, strike without echo, vanish without trace. Kill swiftly or not at all.
They carried no banners. Their blades were collapsible, toxin-edged, or forged from silent alloy. Dart-thorns were coated with sleep agents or nerve disruptors, applied in layered precision. Cloaks folded light around their movements, warping outlines and footfall. Every step they took left less behind than the one before.
Null-field disruptors hung from their belts, small hexbound nodes that severed local energy patterns. Shadowstep talismans were keyed to elemental frequencies, allowing rapid vanish across short distances. Dream-breach sigils were worn only by those trained to interrogate across the mind-thread. Those who wore them rarely slept soundly again.
They carried no insignias. Only Kael knew each of their names.
Their destination was Orûn-Mal, the Forgotten Isle. Forbidden by most imperial charts, it was spoken of only in myth. Even the Dazhum feared it.
The island's interior bristled with towering trees, ancient pines and oaks twisted by centuries of wind and silence. Moss hung like death-shrouds from their limbs. Roots coiled like ribs beneath the soil, rising and falling beneath the feet. Paths once walked by old civilizations had long since been eaten by time and rot.
Ruins stood scattered across the inland. Crumbled temples, sunken courts, the shattered remains of towers long consumed by creeping vine and ash. Their mission led them toward the heart of the isle, the Veiled Spiral. Once a high acropolis, now little more than jagged silhouettes buried in the cold breath of the forest.
The objective was simple: infiltrate a rumored Dazhum facility, confirm the existence of biological experiments, and extract all possible intelligence.
The ruins greeted them with silence.
No patrols. No lanternlight. No trace of movement across the shattered archways and half-collapsed battlements. The site looked dead.
And that was what unsettled them most.
Kael motioned the unit forward. They advanced in formation, eyes sharp, each angle cleared in sequence. The deeper they went, the more wrong it felt.
Everything was still.
Stone halls opened into collapsed vaults. The wind passed through columns like breath through ribs. No birds. No insects. No voices.
Then came the sound.
A shriek, not human, not beast. Not anything made to be heard. It didn't come from a single direction. It echoed from the stone itself, like something buried screaming through the veins of the ruin.
The Veilguard froze.
From beneath fractured slabs and hollowed altars, something moved. Heavy limbs scraped against broken masonry. Figures shifted behind the fallen columns, massive, uneven shapes crawling free from buried holes and split stone.
Then came the mist.
It poured across the ruins in a slow advance, thick and low, swallowing color and form. Vision dropped to mere feet. Their breathing grew shallow. Even light bent strangely inside the fog.
Kael raised a hand to signal a fallback.
Too late.
One of the operatives vanished, ripped backward into the haze, no sound but a breath and a blur. Just gone.
The formation broke into defensive spread. Blades drawn. Talismans triggered. But the mist bent sound and direction. Footsteps felt distant even when near. Every shadow moved. Every breath felt watched.
Kael activated his domain.
The wind around him shifted, drawing in the shadows, bending them to his outline. He disappeared into movement. His thoughts slowed, sharpened. The Whisper Veil spread, distorting the lines of perception.
Around him, the ruin came alive with hunters.
Nerathil. Ruinborn.
They stepped from holes and cracks like they belonged to the stone itself. Twisted forms of bone and blackened steel, their joints fused by rust and rot. The low-born among them moved on all fours, jaws split open in rows of hooked teeth. Others stood near eight feet tall, bearing fractured weapons fused into their limbs.
Their eyes held no light, only hunger.
One lunged. Kael spun beneath the strike, blade slicing through cartilage and cursed marrow. Another crashed from above, its body too heavy, too wrong. It landed in a burst of spores and dust, and two Veilguard were already there, blades striking in unison, silent, clean, practiced.
But they were outnumbered.
Dozens emerged. Then more. From the mist and the ruins, the rot-born came. There was no command, only instinct. These were not soldiers. They were the aftermath of something broken.
The Veilguard fought with precision, cutting them down in pairs and threes. But every bite carried risk. One wounded operative already staggered, breath ragged, eyes wide.
Kael moved to intercept, cleaving down the attacker and dragging the operative toward cover.
But the scent of blood was already in the mist.
This wasn't a stronghold.
It was a feeding ground.
They began the retreat.
It wasn't ordered. It simply became necessary. The ruins were swarming, there were too many of them. For every Nerathil they felled, more crawled free from tunnels, walls, pits. The mist thickened, cloaking the world in grey. Even shadow techniques offered no safety. Something in the rot could smell them, track them, even through their cloaks and disciplines.
The forest swallowed them as they fled, weaving through the gnarled oaks and skeletal undergrowth. They were struck from all sides, lunging beasts from the trees, snapping jaws from the fog. Their formation shattered and reformed again and again, blades flashing, voices tight with code-words and blood.
Kael moved at the front, cloak drawn tight, scanning ahead for anything, an outcrop, a clearing, a fallback position.
And then he saw it.
A ring of stone on the hillside, barely visible through the mist. An ancient gate stood in its center, marked by rune-etched monoliths. The wind shifted around it differently. The fog didn't pass its outer boundary.
He pointed.
"Circle. There. Push."
They ran for it. Every step a gamble.
They reached the rise, but just before the gate, something massive struck.
A shadow broke from the trees, one of the greater Nerathil. A ruinborn of the higher caste, nearly ten feet tall, bone-plated and wielding a fused blade that had once been part of its own arm. It moved faster than it should have. Its mouth opened with a guttural hiss, and it struck Kael full in the chest.
Its jaws locked in.
Kael staggered. Blood spilled from his armor. But even as the rot began to pulse into his flesh, he moved with wind-borne instinct. His blade twisted up, and the creature's throat opened in a hiss of molten bone. It collapsed with a sound like iron cracking.
Kael stepped back, breathing sharp and shallow.
From a pouch at his waist, he drew three small flame orbs, each no larger than a marble, etched with sigils that pulsed faint orange in his palm. He activated them with a flick of his fingers and cast them behind.
A pause. Five seconds.
Then came three hollow thumps in rapid succession.
The forest behind them bloomed with fire.
The ground cracked and hissed as molten flame spread outward in a twenty-meter radius, consuming root, stone, and ash in searing waves. Screams echoed from the mist, raw, not human. The Nerathil burned as if oil had soaked their flesh.
Kael turned and crossed the stone circle.
The mist clawed at the boundary but could not pass.
Inside, silence returned.
Kael fell to one knee, chest heaving. His hand trembled against the wound, black veins already threading beneath the skin.
He looked up once, eyes sharp.
"Seal the circle," he said.
He turned to the Qorjin-Ke operative beside him. His voice was fading, but his mind remained sharp with urgency.
"Send message… to Commander Altan."
He took the parchment. His fingers bled across the sigil-ink, but still he wrote, slow, precise, deliberate.
Destroy. Dazhum secret base. Experiment. Pursued by monsters. Can only be killed by fire. Slowed down by ice. Shadow skills useless, they absorb and grow stronger. Blades can't harm. Maybe our last message. Defending at stone circle. They can't enter yet. Wards may fall soon. May last a week… or less.
The ink smudged as he signed it.
And then he collapsed.