The light filtered through a blanket of overcast clouds that hung low and brooding, broken here and there by fleeting gaps that allowed weak rays to pierce the gloom, painting the room in soft hues of muted gold and green.
I glanced over at Mara, still sprawled beside me, a thin trail of drool pooling on the lumpy mattress. She looked almost endearing in her sleep, cheeks flushed and horns peeking through her tousled black hair like forgotten accents.
A protective warmth flickered in my chest, brief and unbidden, but it dissolved under the rasp of my parched throat.
Water. I needed water, now.
I rose quietly, pulling on the few layers I had discarded. The fabric was stiff with dried sweat and grime from the night before.
The glaive leaned against the wall; I hefted it, feeling its weight drag at my arms. It was cumbersome to carry around, but leaving it behind felt wrong, like a part of me was missing.
As my fingers wrapped around the worn leather, a warmth spread through me, almost welcoming, but possessive.
It made my skin crawl, uncomfortable in its intensity. I shook it off, muttering, "Fine, you're coming with me. I'll call you... Nyx." The glaive shivered in my hand, a subtle tremor as if in recognition, acknowledging the name.
<
A wave of dread washed over me.
"So… you do understand me?"
No reply.
Gripping the weapon, a slight anxiety began to build. I could almost hear my own shrill laughter from last night. Focusing on myself, I thought, "This is my body. Leave me alone and be quiet."
Leaving the room, I entered the hall and stopped as soon as I felt a familiar chill in the air. My hands tightened around Nyx, and it began seeping back into my mind like a chemical haze.
Looking down the hall, I saw black wisps of fog whipping from under the door of the room where we had left the burned woman.
I eased the door open, the hinges groaning in protest. Her form lay unchanged on the bed, a brittle husk of carbon, but that single eye fixed on me from the skull-like head, dipping up and down in a silent greeting. The mist leaked from her, evaporating like dry ice in warm air.
A whisper brushed my mind, soft and insistent: Shh...
I backed away, closing the door with a soft click. The shadows resumed their slow seep as soon as the latch caught.
What was she? She should be dead…
Unsettling regardless, but I pushed it aside; thirst clawed at me harder.
Outside, the morning air was crisp and clean, carrying the faint scent of dew-soaked earth and pine from the encroaching woods.
I scanned the farm's ruins for a water source.
Every farm needed one, right? A stream, a well...
An anomaly presented itself, an odd marking scorched into the grass near the stables. It was a perfect circle etched with concentric rings, an intricate eye at its center, staring blankly skyward like a branded warning.
Looking up, I noticed the clouds above darkened abruptly, swelling into a swirling mass threatening to burst, and that familiar gnawing feeling tugged at the back of my mind. No longer a false alarm.
The world began shifting and decaying around me, colors leaching from the grass, the air thickening with rot like the farmhouse had during the intrusion.
The Revenant, in its slumber, woke. I felt its cold, dead eyes inside of me, gazing out.
Before I could process it, a bolt whistled through the air from the overgrown fields.
Nyx moved on its own, my arm jerking involuntarily to intercept it. The blade deflected the projectile with a sharp clang that sent vibrations up my limb.
A feminine voice hissed in my mind, sultry and eager compared to the raw hunger from before:
<
My heart dropped into my stomach, and I almost dropped the weapon. What in the actual hells are you?
An audible hum emanated from the glaive, low and resonant, like a predator's purr.
Sizing up my enemy, I watched as the clouds burst above us. A viscous black liquid that smelled faintly like tar rained down. The droplets sizzled as they hit me; they stung like acid. The drums of war began a serenade of undeath.
It staggered forward, wearing fresher clothing. Slashed, reinforced black leathers, as if a massive creature had shredded through it with raking claws. Its stomach was splayed open, entrails still dragging behind it.
Its pallid face was that of a fresh corpse: a bald head, glowing blue eyes with black sclera, a hole for a nose, and an exposed, lipless mouth.
A guttural hiss escaped it, and it leveled the crossbow again. My grip tightened on Nyx.
Instincts shot through me as I analyzed my enemy. Whispers of possible actions all pointed to one thing.
I obeyed, diving left as the bolt whistled past, embedding itself in the dirt with a thud.
Tendrils of raw, rushing emotions began to scrape through the synapses of my brain.
A small giggle escaped from me as terror began to grip my heart, crushing it like a vise.
A burning sensation prickled behind my eyes. Gripping Nyx with both hands, I twisted her blade, tip down behind me. Our dance had begun anew.
<
Sprinting through the black rain, heat was sapped from me… and any shred of brightness. The hot tendrils of Nyx claimed me as its sole property.
Yet we were one in this fight, and our ideology on the enemy. <
It fumbled to reload, rotting fingers, missing a few at that, struggling with the mechanism. The wood creaked under its awkward grip.
I closed the distance, swinging Nyx in a rising arc. The blade dug deep into exposed flesh for a split second before grating uselessly against something hard beneath. The shriek of metal on metal confirmed it: reinforced plating.
Momentum brought Nyx firmly overhead, yanking me back as I caught my balance.
It seethed, narrowing its ghoulish eyes, and fired a bolt.
It fired again. I moved to parry, but the force of the bolt meeting the glaive was immense, knocking my arm aside and letting the projectile tear a hot line of pain across my side.
A weight settled over my head, and my eyes burned as if staring into a large fire. Nyx became near weightless in my hands as I kicked her blade up into a thrust, slamming it into the body of this puppet of flesh.
The tip of my glaive bounced off hard plates embedded in its chest armor. My frustration grew, and I became frantic. Thrust after thrust, I knocked it back.
It slid back, and the world began to react. The liquid stinging my skin became suspended and began flowing up. Instincts flooded me.
The liquid turned to an ash-like substance, and the air fell deathly still.
A deep blue light shifted through the clouds, settling above us. The clouds began to bubble, and eyes began to form.
A universal sense of trepidation gripped the land, the air, the sky. All of those eyes focused on one single point. Me.
The undead looked up at me, blood dripping through its exposed teeth. Its eyes were bright with intelligence and hatred. A voice spoke through it, "Why have you come? Interference is strictly against the concords… Your kind should not be here. Whom do you serve?"
Nyx leveled herself, point-first at our sacrifice.
The voice spoke through the living corpse again, "I suppose it doesn't matter. You've already been dealt with… It's clear that you will yield to that cursed weapon and join our side all the same. Let's speed it up and finish the harvest together…"
The suspended particles drifted lazily, coalescing into the shape of a blade, a longsword made of pure shadow. It leveled the weapon with clear skill.
Blowing out air, I wiped sweat from my brow.
"I don't know who you are or what you are…"
<
A quick touch to my lips; she had spoken with me, through me.
Baring my canines, my mask of bandages shifting with it, I snarled, "Stay in your place! This is my fight; I don't need your help."
Only a series of harsh laughs emanated from the glaive.
Taking a breath, I tried to clear my head; the haze of aggression clung to me. Experience, knowledge, instincts from those memories, that place, belonging to The Revenant, slid into my mind, filling the gap with a solid clink.
Surging forward, Nyx swung up again.
My enemy swung down to intercept, and I let go of Nyx. She flew, and the eyes that stared through the dead thing quickly darted between Nyx and myself, then refocused on me as I dropped into a slide.
He doubled down on his downward swing, the blade coming down towards my face. Staring past it, I was focused on Nyx.
His blade slammed down, missing the top of my head, chasing me through the earth as I slid through his legs. Coming out behind it, I stabilized myself on all fours, scratching my palms on loose rocks and dirt.
This is my chance.
Springing off the ground and using the dead thing's back as a stepping stone, I leaped up and caught Nyx. Those primal and savage instincts flooded through me once again.
It slowly turned around, blade coming up towards me as I was falling. Twisting Nyx in hand, I thrust forward.
Fear crossed its mask of undeath, and in its eyes, I could see myself reflected as the blue-black clouds roiled. My eyes were burning bright with a molten gold light, a mass of black hanging over my head, almost a disc.
Nyx emitted a shiver as we fell. A substance like pure shadow began to drip up and out of the blade, each drip faintly gilded in soft violet tones. The urge to push through, to roar in defiance, gripped me, and I let it out.
The roar came from both me and the blade, a hot streak of power, ebbing from my heart in pulses, surging through my arm and into Nyx.
<
The voice emitted one last time through exposed teeth. "How!? I took your mem-"
A beam of black-laced violet lanced through its face, slamming into the ground behind it, impaling it where it stood, and disappearing just as quickly. Nyx finished the job, pushing into its face and ripping through flesh and bone.
I landed, rolling back from the momentum.
Nyx burned in my hand and shook uncontrollably.
<
Crying out in pain, I felt white-hot nails seeping through my skin, coming from Nyx herself. "Stop! I swear I will throw you into a lake and walk away. I'll let you rust!"
A feeling of doubt crept from Nyx before the pain and aggression began to simmer and cool.
Breathing hard, I looked up with tears in my eyes.
I never wanted this life.
An angry black substance bubbled from the wounds on my re-dead enemy, catching my attention. I stood and watched, numb to the world, clutching the wound at my side as pain softly radiated from it.
The substance boiled away, leaving behind an inanimate corpse as color slowly began to fade back into the world. The wind blew softly, and the rustle of the trees beyond my little farm brought a sense of peace. The clouds broke but did not part.
Warily, I glanced at Nyx. I noticed more of the decay had flaked away, silver edges gleaming hungrily. It was silent now, but a raw hunger continued to emanate from it, pulsing like a quiet craving.
"Whatever you are… Thanks, Nyx. I would've died without your help," I whispered, clutching the glaive like a newly discovered treasure.
A familiar mist wrapped over the corpse and began to rise, leveling with me. It did not form into a marble like the others. So I hobbled over, my body suddenly very tired.
I inspected the dark cloud and poked it. My finger made contact and…
The world melted. Only sound existed.
"My name was Christian Schulz. I was a Knight of the Wayfinder's Union, contracted with finding the runaway heiress of a powerful family of The Holy Dravengard Empire. I entered the exclusion zone and was cut down by a man masquerading as a bear… Please, finish my task. Contact my comrades when they get here… Warn them of the druid."
My eyes opened, and a deep breath flooded into me. My hand was resting against my chest as black wisps curled out from under it. The fog was gone.
I looked down at the ruined corpse, and a pang of empathy flooded me. "Alright, Christian. If I see your friends, I'll tell them… Rest and stay dead this time."
A burning, itching feeling began to manifest itself where my wound had constantly throbbed. I looked down at it.
Was it infected now?
My mind reeled. A Wayfinder. A runaway heiress. A druid masquerading as a bear. This wasn't just a curse; it felt more like a conspiracy. The weight of his last words echoed through me; this was more than just survival.
A voice, familiar and grounding, pierced through the haze of my self-doubts.
"Bella! Are you okay? I heard shouting."