Zevekhan Bastion stood under a flat gray sky, its volcanic walls slick with sea mist and its harbor loud with war drums. Triremes rocked in formation while reef barges were packed and locked for open waters. Down at the docks, the 4th Marine Legion—Sea Iron March—stood in orderly columns, armed and silent. There were no flags flying. No speeches. Just orders and discipline.
Admiral Caeron Vessai stood on the overlook, one gloved hand resting against the black stone as he read the sealed scroll again. Orders from the War Council. One legion. Full authorization. Immediate deployment. No delay.
Commander Ishar approached behind him. "Message confirmed," he said. "Imperial Command has approved your request. One full legion. Zevekhan holds the gate."
Caeron didn't look away from the sea. "Acknowledged."
Two months earlier, a team of arcane researchers had been dispatched to a forgotten island east of the southern continent. Orûn-Mal. It was supposed to be nothing, another ruin buried beneath forest, just far enough from the Empire's shipping lanes to avoid attention. But they had found something. Beneath the stone. Beneath the roots.
A gate.
Circular. Massive. Carved in a language no one could read. It had no known magical pulse, but the senior scholars felt something inside it. Like pressure in the air before a storm. A marine cohort was sent to protect the excavation team.
Two weeks ago, they vanished.
Now there were reports of League ships passing through the eastern sea lanes. Possibly a rival expedition. Possibly a military force. The Empire wasn't about to let a discovery like this slip into foreign hands.
The reply from the capital was brief.
"Send a legion. Establish a base. Secure the research. Hold the site."
Caeron turned from the sea and looked toward the docks. "No delays. We launch within the hour."
Commander Vireas Korrel, commander of the 4th, met him beside the boarding ramp. "Final orders?" Korrel asked.
"You've seen the last signal?"
"I have. Cut out mid-transmission. No signs of conflict. Just silence."
"Silence doesn't happen by accident," Caeron said. "You're to establish a base. Hold the gate. If the League arrives, you'll handle it. If something else is there, you'll handle that too."
Korrel nodded. "We'll send word when it's secure."
"Good," Caeron said. "Because if it's not secure, you'll be the last ones to see it."
Thirty-two ships left Zevekhan under a low, clouded sky. Triremes formed the forward line. Reef-treader transports and supply barges filled out the wings. Orders were carried by echo horns and glyph scrolls. Marines stood in silent rows. The water was calm. The sky was not.
Three days later, Orûn-Mal came into view.
The island was colder than expected, covered in pine forests and high cliffs. Mist curled through the hills, masking the ruined city that had once stood along the southern coast. The port was half-collapsed and swallowed by the sea, but enough structure remained for landing. No resistance. No movement.
They disembarked quickly. Korrel had a war camp built from the ruins in less than a day. Watchtowers went up. Outer palisades reinforced with salvaged stone and timber. Rune barriers etched at each approach. By nightfall, the 4th Marine Legion had dug in.
Three days passed. Scouts patrolled the inner ruins and forest fringe.
Then the first team went dark.
A second followed. No rune signals. No flares. Not even blood trails. They had simply stopped existing.
Korrel gathered his command staff. "We march at first light. One-third of the legion. The rest stay behind and hold the port."
The forward detachment moved out in full kit, seventeen hundred marines, supported by scouts, supply carriers, and ward scribes. The road north curved through broken stonework and into heavy forest. The further they moved, the stranger the island felt.
The trees grew taller. Their trunks wider. Old statues leaned in the brush, faces missing. The roads were cracked and uneven, overgrown with moss. Something about the air felt wrong, too quiet. Too still.
Then the smell hit. Not death, not exactly, something like rust and stagnant water. Behind them, the sky darkened.
The first shapes dropped from the trees without warning, long-limbed, pale things that moved too fast to track. They hit the forward line hard, tearing into the vanguard with claws and teeth. From beneath the dirt, others burst out, jointed creatures with armored backs and clicking limbs, dragging marines into the brush.
The second line formed a shield wedge. For a moment, it held.
Then came the heavier forms.
Towering shapes of fused bone and sinew, too large to be human. They charged like siege beasts, breaking through the formation with sheer mass. Shields snapped. Steel bent.
Then a figure emerged from the fog. It didn't charge. It walked. Tall, thin, draped in cloth that seemed to hang from nothing. Its face was blank. Its arms too long. It raised both hands. Sigils flickered across the marines' armor, then died. Rune-lit blades dulled. Defensive wards collapsed like wet paper.
Korrel shouted for retreat.
Flamecasters lit the pitch lines. Fire drove the enemy back, but only by seconds. They didn't scream. They didn't bleed. They just kept coming.
Somehow, Korrel got them out. A few hundred survivors, dragging the wounded. Among them, one of the scouts, barely conscious, bleeding from the shoulder. He had been one of the Velites Umbrae, trained in stealth and sensory fields.
His wound was black.
No pus. No blood. Just rot under the skin.
They reached the port at dusk. The main camp was on full alert. Engineers scrambled to reinforce the walls. Medics dragged the wounded below. The scout didn't speak. He just stared.
That night, they were hit again.
From the sea caves. From the sewer lines. From the tree line beyond the barricades.
Korrel stood at the eastern gate with the last thirty shield bearers, holding the line while the rest of the survivors escaped to the triremes.
He was the last to fall.
The ships left at first light.
Two days later, one of them returned to Zevekhan Bastion, its sails torn, hull scorched, fewer than two hundred marines still aboard, no commander, no standard, and no clear report. The survivors were placed in isolation, and among them was the scout, his wound cold and dry, veins blackened up to the collarbone, yet he hadn't lost consciousness, hadn't seized like the others, he simply waited. The healers avoided him; he never asked for water, never slept. By the third day, the fever had spread, starting in the infirmary with seizures, vomiting, and loss of motor function, but when the seizures stopped, the patients stood again, silent, wrong, moving like their bones didn't fit right. A scribe tried to run but never reached the stairs.
The lower barracks were sealed. Seal teams deployed flame lines. The infection was no longer passive. It was spreading in patterns, hitting weak points in the defenses. Power junctions. Stairwells. Patrol overlaps. Ambushes.
In the command ring, Caeron received a final status flare from the lower tier.
"Movement is coordinated. We are no longer facing disease."
In the tunnel systems beneath the southern cliff, something else was happening.
The scout was gone, no broken door, no blood, just an empty cot and a black stain on the wall.
By nightfall, southern patrols reported sightings, humanoid figures moving in formation. Cutting light lines. Coordinating from the shadows. One shape stood apart from the others, taller, lean, wrapped in a marine cloak scorched at the edges.
Survivors described it giving signals, and after that the attacks changed, smarter, faster, calculated; it wasn't a swarm anymore, it was a command structure. He hadn't died from the bite, he had adapted, the infection turning into intent, and now, somewhere beneath the black stone of Zevekhan, the rot had a mind of its own, a commander, one of theirs, turned, reborn, and organizing.
In the lower district of Zevekhan, tucked between the lava-split foundations and the weathered cisterns of the old harbor quarter, a group of ten men and women moved with purpose through narrow alleys. Their gear was plain. Their steps unhurried. None bore imperial insignias.
They were Veilguard.
An embedded Stormguard intelligence cell, planted months ago under orders from high command, tasked with observing Dazhum legion movements, reporting anomalies, and staying out of sight. Their presence on Zevekhan had never been acknowledged. Not even by the island's ranking officers.
Now the island was burning.
Screams echoed from the sealed infirmary tunnels. The sky had turned to smoke. Rune wards across the southern cliffs flickered and failed. But the cell remained intact, hidden in a reinforced storage vault below the forge district, deep enough to survive a siege, and forgotten by most of the surface command.
Their captain, a worn man with sharp features and a soldier's poise, lit a small signal lamp and spoke quietly.
"Full report. Detail everything. Infection patterns, combat behavior, response failure. Keep it clear and neutral. No guesses."
One of the agents stepped forward, a younger operative with a Qorjin-ke beastbinding mark etched into his forearm. He reached into a bone-latched satchel and drew out a scaled message courier, a winged reptile bred for range and survivability, trained to avoid scry traps and arcane wards. He whispered an old command phrase. The creature accepted the encoded strip and launched into the upper ductway.
They waited.
Nearly three hours later, it returned, wings trembling with effort, its eyes clouded from smoke exposure. The message was intact.
The captain unsealed the scroll, read once, then again in silence. His face remained unreadable.
He read aloud.
"Survive. Rescue will come to you soon. Do not get bitten. Fire is the only confirmed method of full neutralization. Do not use shadow-aligned magic. They can sense it. They will hunt it. Warn the island commander, subtly. Do not reveal who advised."
He burned the message on a copper plate. No one spoke.
He looked to his team. "Prep fallback point three. Same protocol. No open channels. If anyone asks where the warning came from, you say you overheard it from a wounded scribe during the withdrawal. Keep it vague. Don't get clever."
One of the agents shifted her satchel. "What if the commander doesn't believe it?"
"Then he dies not believing it," the captain said. "We're not here to save him. We're here to make sure someone knows how this started."
They moved out in pairs.
Above, Zevekhan continued to unravel, flames cutting across barricades, creatures swarming through broken rune lines, cries for help unanswered from the cliffs to the harbor. Entire regiments lost contact by the hour. The bastion's structure held, but the chain of command was splintered.
But ten operatives moved through the chaos without drawing notice.
They weren't there to save Zevekhan.
Only to record how it fell and survive long enough to tell the story.