The rain fell in sheets of iron, turning the courtyard to a mire of blood and ash. Each drop hissed upon stone that remembered older gods.
Luther stood amidst the storm — his eyes two lanterns of molten green, his breath a furnace of frost and hate. The veins along his neck pulsed with light, and steam rolled off his fur like the breath of some buried god clawing toward the surface.
Grimm faced him, silent and still, his posture a monument carved against the storm. Feet set shoulder-wide, boots sinking into the sludge, his gloved hands rose to guard the hollow of his brow. The brim of his hat dripped black water. The Wraith-breaker hung at his hip, but he made no move for it.
"Warrior!" Luther's voice thundered, rattling the rusted gates. "You square as a soldier, yet bear no crest. Tell me—" the words broke into a growl, teeth bared beneath rainlight, "—whom do you serve?"
He paused, nostrils flaring. "Or what do you serve?"
Grimm's silence was a curse.
Luther sneered, spittle mingling with rain. "Then die without a name."
He drew back, arms spreading wide — the gesture half ritual, half mockery. "I will grind your bones to chalk, dark rider! Don't blink!"
"Shut up and fight," Grimm said, voice low and cold as a tomb.
The sky answered with lightning.
Luther lunged — a blur of muscle and ruin. Grimm met him halfway, boots detonating mud and stone beneath his charge. Their bodies collided with a sound like mountains breaking, the shockwave bursting puddles into vapor.
They locked — titan to titan — fingers interlaced, veins bulging, shoulders trembling. The storm dimmed around them, as though the heavens held their breath.
Luther's strength was obscene, veins flaring with Wendigo fire. Grimm sank an inch, then two, boots grinding through fractured stone. His teeth clenched; a low sound crawled from his throat, part snarl, part prayer.
"You are strong," Luther roared, pressing down. "But not strong enough, rider!"
Cracks spidered beneath Grimm's stance. Blood slicked his gloves. He could feel the old ache of his failures stirring — the dying boy, the family swallowed by the fire. Their screams rose with the thunder.
He roared.
The sound wasn't human.
Dark veins coiled beneath his skin, lightless as the void. His arms surged upward like the pillars of some buried titan, and Luther's wrists began to twist backward with a wet, crunching sound. Bone split.
Luther's roar turned to a shriek as Grimm's head snapped up — eyes alight with white fire. He wrenched the beast closer, skull to skull, and drove his brow forward with the weight of a god's wrath.
The crack echoed across the valley.
Luther reeled backward, blood gouting from his crown. His massive body struck the gates, shattering stone, sending iron hinges screaming into the storm.
For a heartbeat, he knelt there, blood and rain cascading down his ruined face. The world quaked with thunder.
Grimm advanced, each step deliberate, each breath ragged through clenched teeth.
Luther staggered to his feet, one hand clutching his split skull. His teeth gleamed like a graveyard under lightning. "How?!" he bellowed.
Grimm's gaze was all shadow and fury.
"You blinked," he said — and the storm swallowed the rest.
Within the blighted halls of Naboth's palace, Anabel hung above the throne like a marionette severed from mercy. Her back lurched in convulsions, arching toward the vaulted ceiling as if some unseen hand were pulling her spine from within. Beneath the thin pale of her flesh, black veins pulsed and coiled, feeding the swelling mass of her womb. It was not the burden of life she carried, but a curse — a pregnancy of the damned.
Below her sprawled Jack, nude and hollow, his skin charred to ashen black. The runes carved across his frame burned with a sickly green, each sigil alive, feeding on the last warmth of his blood. His eyes rolled backward, the whites gone milked and blind, his breath shallow and reverent. He no longer fought the hunger that devoured him. To Jack, her torment was divine. Her suffering, holy.
The throne room convulsed as the portal widened — a black star blooming at its heart. From its abyssal light spilled tendrils of shadow, tethering to Anabel's form, drawing her into its pulse. The air hummed with the sound of a thousand whispering tongues, chanting in a language that no living throat could utter.
She screamed, her voice splitting the silence into ribbons. Her belly writhed. Beneath her skin, antlers pressed outward — small and pale, scraping the flesh that dared contain them. Her legs trembled as a bloom of ivory tendrils spilled from her loins, slithering in serpent coils around her thighs, climbing her body in an obscene embrace.
Jack's head tilted back, mouth agape, his eyes glistening with a fevered awe. The more she changed, the more beautiful she became. The creature that took shape within her was no abomination to him, but revelation — a god born of her ruin. His body quivered, not from terror, but from yearning.
The portal pulsed once more — a heartbeat that rattled the stones. The shadows of dead priests danced upon the walls, their hollow sockets ignited in green flame.
Anabel's voice broke through the storm — a cry of agony that melted into something else entirely. Pleasure. Transcendence. The two became one. Her body convulsed as the light swallowed her whole, her scream rising above the ruin like the birth cry of the new god.
Then silence.
Only the faint hiss of the dying runes remained, the air heavy with the scent of burnt iron and afterbirth.
Outside, the storm tore across the battlefield as Grimm and Luther collided, each strike detonating like a minor apocalypse. Stone cracked, earth splintered, and the air itself shivered beneath the fury of their blows.
Luther's claws raked across Grimm's cheek, a gush of crimson spraying the mud in wicked arcs. Grimm countered with a bone-crushing right cross, shattering fangs and sending the monstrosity staggering backward, his roar twisting into a rasp of disbelief.
They paused, chests heaving, muscles trembling, each measuring the other as if gauging the weight of death itself. Luther's maw was a jagged ruin of glassy teeth, flecked with his own blood, yet his eyes burned with perverse curiosity.
"You… you're something else," he rasped, voice ragged and guttural. "What… what are you?"
Grimm's ragged breath cut through the tempest, each exhale a plume of smoke and shadow. The blood-soaked bandana that once masked his face lay discarded, drifting in the black tide of mud and ichor. Slowly, deliberately, he turned. His eyes — white and unblinking — met Luther's. Lightning tore across the sky, illuminating the ruin of his visage.
Skin hung from his cheek like shredded parchment, teeth exposed in a jagged, blood-slick grin. His tongue, wet and serpentine, traced the torn line of flesh, probing, tasting, reclaiming.
Luther's eyes widened in awe and terror. Tiny black tendrils erupted from Grimm's mouth, coiling and knitting the shredded flesh with an unnatural precision. The maelstrom painted him in flashes of revelation: a visage of starvation and death, yet impossibly alive, monstrous, and relentless.
His eyes, hollowed by sleepless centuries, bore down like twin voids. The faintest whisper of bone and sinew cracking as his lips sealed, his face whole again in a display both grotesque and magnificent.
"Who… are you?" Luther breathed, voice shaking like a corpse in the wind.
Grimm's eyes flared with white fire. A scowl split his face, tearing across shadow and scar alike.
"I… am Grimm."
The palace shuddered beneath its own decay. Once the sanctified heart of Jarec's reign, the throne chamber now reeked of desecration. The white stone walls pulsed with veins of green light, runes carving themselves into the marble like the palace was being rewritten from within. Each line bled shadow, each symbol whispered hunger.
Around the throne, the cultists circled — wretches in torn robes, their yellowed eyes wide and glistening with madness. From their lips dripped the tongue of the dead, a cadence that scraped against the ear like rusted blades. The sound bled into the storm, a chorus of rot and worship.
At the center of it all was Anabel.
The Wendigo's tendrils coiled about her legs, spreading them in a cruel parody of birth. From the cradle of her flesh crowned a pallid mass, slick and writhing. Beneath the paper-thin skin of her belly, antlers pressed upward, their tips splitting through with the slow, deliberate cruelty of roots through stone.
She screamed — the sound not wholly human — as her eyes rolled white and the veins in her neck bulged. The air quivered with the sound of flesh tearing.
The cultists answered with elation, their chants rising in intensity, mimicking the thunder that clawed at the palace walls.
Then the portal behind the throne flared — a sun of voidlight — and the birthing reached its crescendo. A white abomination tore free, its emergence shredding what remained of the queen's body. A spray of blood and afterbirth hit the cultists like holy water. The thing stood, unfurling, a glistening silhouette that towered above them all.
The creature was monstrous, yet eerily feminine — eight feet tall from antler tip to hoof. Its chest split open to reveal a frozen heart, rimed in frost and crowned by shards of bone that jutted like spears. Its face bore no mouth, no nose — only two tiny, black eyes, twin wells of endless void. Above them, the antlers reached toward the ceiling like a forest of darkness.
The cultists fell to their knees in reverence. Tears streaked their filthy cheeks. Their god had come.
Jack rose from the base of the throne, his body trembling, his breath shallow. He stared up at the thing, transfixed — unable to turn away from the obscene majesty before him.
"It's… beautiful," he whispered. His words trembled like a prayer.
The Wendigo turned its eyeless gaze upon the worshippers. A pulse of viridian light erupted from its sockets. One cultist convulsed, frothing, his skin blistering as he lunged at his brethren. The others screamed as he tore into them, teeth and nails rending flesh. The creature made no sound — no cry, no command — only turned its back, allowing the frenzy to unfold like a ritual offering.
When the chamber fell silent but for the wet sound of feeding, the Wendigo ascended the throne. It sat where Anabel once ruled, the black portal roaring behind it. From that void, a white tendril slithered forth, attaching itself to the frozen heart with a sound like cracking ice.
Its head snapped back. A flood of light surged from the corpses below, spectral and green — the souls of the cultists devoured. Another light rose from deeper still — the pain and wrath of the world below the palace. It drank both.
As the light filled it, the creature's flesh began to change — whitening, hardening, sealing in places like plates of bone forming armor. The talons on its hands grew long and needle-thin, dripping frost instead of blood.
When it stilled, the storm outside began to quiet. The birth was complete.
And in the silence, only the sound of the heart remained — slow, eternal, frozen.
Outside, the storm of steel and fury showed no mercy. Luther and Grimm collided like titans of old, their blows shaking the courtyard stones slick with rivers of blood. Each strike echoed with the ruin of men; each breath was drawn through the smoke of slaughter. Luther's advance was a brutal ballet—savage, yet precise—met only by Grimm's unyielding will, cold and immovable as iron.
Then came the whisper.
G'norr's infernal voice slithered through Grimm's mind, syllables curling like serpents:
"Vanquish the beast and do your bidding… your master demands her soul for killing."
Grimm's boot struck deep into Luther's chest, sending the creature crashing through a pillar. Dust choked the air as Luther sprawled, his great body broken across the gravel. Grimm stood above him, breathing hard, the whispers gnawing louder within his skull—G'norr's command scraping like knives against bone.
"Enough!" Grimm roared, pressing his palms to his temples. "You will have your prize."
The closer he drew to his quarry, the stronger the voice became—a fever in his blood, a curse he could no longer silence.
Luther staggered to his feet, defiance flickering in his dying eyes. "You are mighty, rider," he rasped, spitting blood onto the stones. "No mortal bears such strength." His gaze fell to the faint gleam beneath Grimm's cloak—the blackened sigil of the Wraith Breaker. His eyes widened.
"That weapon... impossible," he gasped. "A Flame Spitter! Those were lost with the High Order—none but the anointed ever bore them!"
Grimm's only answer was his advance—slow, deliberate, inevitable.
Luther backed away, trembling, until the shadow of Grimm's fury filled his vision. The rider drew breath, stance wide, his right arm curling like a serpent ready to strike. Luther lunged one final time, a beast in denial of death—
—and Grimm vanished into motion. A blur of black smoke enveloped them both, and when it cleared, his fist had pierced Luther's chest.
The sound was hollow. Wet. Final.
Blood poured from Luther's mouth in a crimson torrent as Grimm withdrew his hand. The beast sank to his knees, his heart stilled, his eyes fixed forever upon the rider's pale glare.
Grimm turned without a word. To him, the battle had been but a delay—an obstacle crushed beneath inevitability. He strode toward the palace gates, shadows curling at his heels.
With one mighty kick, the great doors burst open, splintering against the walls. The echo of that strike rolled through the corridors like a herald's drum.
Inside, the castle reeked of ruin. Screams rose faintly from the lower halls—villagers torn apart by G'norr's spawn. The scent of death and rot thickened with every step, and the once-proud palace seemed to shrink beneath its own despair.
Along the marble corridor lay the ruin of devotion—a dying priest slumped beside a toppled candelabra. It was Latta. His eyes flickered open as Grimm approached, his breath rattling through blood.
"S-she seduced the prince," he gasped. "Th-the wendigo... it awakens... it hungers..."
His gaze fell upon the Wraith Breaker. "That weapon..." His head lolled forward, his final breath escaping into silence.
Grimm's eyes narrowed. He pressed onward, through the last of the corridor, and set his shoulder to the throne-room doors.
The gates yielded with a groan.
Inside, the world seemed to hold its breath.
Anabel sat upon the throne—an effigy of beauty defiled. The wendigo's curse had shaped her into something neither woman nor beast, her form swaying like a flame in still air. Beside her loomed Jack, no longer the prince—his flesh blackened and taut, his face devoid of mouth or nose, only white, glinting eyes and the crown of antlers that clawed toward the vaulting dark above.
Behind them, the portal blazed to life, a wound of light and shadow twisting in the air.
The wind that had carried Grimm north now rose within him, shrieking through his soul like the cry of the damned.
He leveled his gaze upon the queen.
"Reap her," G'norr hissed.
And Grimm obeyed.