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Chapter 3 - Chapter 3. The Grim Baron: The Massacre

The second black coat crouched in his own warded chamber, blind to what was happening elsewhere. That ignorance was driving him insane. He wanted to leap from the window, saddle a horse in the stable, and ride anywhere—anywhere at all—so long as it was far from the horrors and their night-born spawn. But reason held him. Even if he landed the jump without breaking his legs, he would not make it more than a few steps before the Grim Baron seized him. And if his legs shattered, he would not make a single step at all.

He risked a glance outside. Moonlight flooded the yard. The stable stood just ahead, neat and harmless, beckoning him.

The window burst in a spray of glass. Long arms dragged him out into the night. Black smoke forced itself through his nostrils, filling his lungs. His scream froze on pale lips. No breath left to cry out.

A whirlwind of shadow carried him above the trees, then dropped him. He struck the ground hard, bones snapping, legs and more besides. The Grim Baron seemed to read his very thoughts, mocking him.

Through fading vision, slipping into the dark of death, he saw them swarm: black wraiths with burning eyes tearing him apart.

"That's five," counted a stranger with short black hair and a heavy beard. "The innkeeper makes six. But there was a seventh he never mentioned."

He stood cloaked and hooded, pressed to the wall of a chamber, listening. Still. Focused. The shroud made him invisible to the night-spawn, though not always. There were exceptions. Time ticked down to the next clash.

In another warded room, a gaunt figure in a tattered robe held fast. A sorcerer, resisting the doom that had chased him his whole short life—and now cornered him here, in this forgotten inn of the Twilight Forest. Every omen, every spirit had whispered the same: tonight he would die. Yet he fought, as he had fought before.

The wards melted and sagged, but he wove his fingers, raised high, and the glyphs blazed back to strength. Again and again. Until thin threads of black smoke seeped through the cracks of the room, winding themselves tight around his fingers. Casting grew harder. The meaning was clear: his art, and his future, were finished.

Then came the crack of breaking joints and bones. His hands, his only weapon, hung useless. The magic stopped. Now he was entirely in the grip of his tormentor. The tyrant. Destroyed by the cursed entity itself.

The wards dripped down the walls. His mouth twisted, forcing out a final incantation.

A tall figure in a tricorn hat rose beside him, lips curling into a grin that revealed sharp teeth. One clawed hand tore his head from his shoulders and lifted it high. Blood poured onto the floor.

The Grim Baron brought the severed head close, his own face twisted with silent rage. Then the dead mage's lips moved, echoing the tyrant's curse in a low, monstrous voice that shook the tavern walls. Black cracks spread across the timber. The old inn groaned.

The innkeeper crawled across the floor, trembling. Never in his life had he known such shame— to crawl across the floor before someone, here, in his own house—his fortress, his refuge and source of life for so many years—was humiliation beyond anything he had ever endured. But the Baron followed, relentless, eyes burning with void-darkness.

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