The dirt road stretched before Lark like a pale scar across the overgrown landscape. He stood at an uncertain nexus, where the main track split into two shadowed paths, one bending sharply north, the other dissolving into the dense western woods.
Lark, now inhabited by his hulking in-game avatar, Alabaster Woe, looked left and right. His nearly eight-foot frame, a jarring sculpture of marble-white flesh veined with faintly pulsing gold, cast a long, unsettling shadow. Dozens of sapphire eyes, usually closed and hidden beneath the smooth expanse of his featureless face, were currently open, tracing the faint marks on the ground with horrifying, panoramic precision.
"Where should I go?"
He lowered his head, the crude, vine-bound wooden garments rustling softly. He investigated the road, his elegant, elongated fingers hovering just above the dust. He needed direction, any direction, that led toward civilization.
There. Faint indentations, unevenly spaced, and a deeper rut suggesting a wheeled vehicle. The tracks were not hours old, perhaps one or two, certainly recent enough to imply travelers. The main path, the one that veered west, held the clearest sign of traffic.
West, then.
Lark adjusted the raw wood armor across his broad shoulders. He knew the tracks were heading west, so west he went, the unnatural symmetry of his lean, statue-like body carrying him forward with a quiet, humming resonance.
He started to think again, the internal monologue of a twenty-one-year-old gamer trapped inside a celestial nightmare. Will this road lead to a human civilization? Or a nonhuman one? The medieval world he found himself in was rife with both, often existing in brutal proximity.
If it's human, would they accept me with my current appearance?
Probably not, Lark thought to himself, the certainty of immediate panic and likely mob violence chilling his core. His form, while undeniably graceful, was the definition of 'other.' He hoped desperately for a cosmopolitan hub, a civilization that accepted multiple races, or whatever the local equivalent of 'freaks' was. Even if the civilization was non-human, the chances of acceptance were still slim; he probably wouldn't look like their monsters either.
Lark sighed deeply. The sound that emanated from him was not a simple expulsion of breath, but a multi-toned, echoing chord—half human melancholy, half celestial drone.
Whatever, I still need to check this civilization.
After what felt like three hours of determined, relentless walking, Lark's stamina felt boundless in this marble shell, then he heard a commotion. It was a distant, frantic sound, a clatter of hooves, shouting, and a sharp, whipping wind. It was coming from the opposite direction, catching up to him quickly.
Instinct, honed by years of digital survival games, took over. Lark melted into the roadside brush, seeking the nearest vertical sanctuary. He found a particularly tall, ancient tree and, with surprising agility for his height, scaled it until the lower branches masked his white form against the dark bark. He settled, sapphire eyes tracking the road.
A couple of minutes later, the scene roared into view.
A luxurious, high-sprung carriage, emblazoned with an intricate, gold-plated crest, was hurtling down the road, its horses straining. Flanking it were perhaps a dozen dedicated knights, all women clad in polished steel, their faces grim with desperate resolve.
Behind them, a pack of horrors. A crude assembly of perhaps thirty riders: leather-clad barbarians reeking of dirt and malice, interspersed with unsettling figures in deep, blood-red hoods. They were gaining.
Then the sky delivered the final insult.
Three winged shadows descended with unnerving speed. Wyverns, not the truly ginormous monsters that occasionally flew in the upper atmosphere, but large, vicious, saddle-laden beasts, piloted by dark, armored raiders.
The wyverns banked low. One of the riders raised a hand, and a sickly green bolt of energy erupted, striking the carriage's rear axle.
The carriage spun violently, the horses screaming, and it careened off the road with a splintering crash, coming to rest against a thick cluster of elder-wood trees.
The knights stopped instantly, forming a tight, steel-walled semicircle around the wreck. The bandits and hooded men arrived moments later, surrounding the defenders, their horses snorting with anticipation.
The bandits began to laugh, high-pitched, crude sounds.
"Well, well! Looks like we've bagged the queen bee!" shouted a man with a thick, braided beard, his voice hoarse with lust. "Hope you knights haven't tired yourselves out, ladies. We'll have fun tonight!"
A knight near the center of the formation spat onto the ground. "We would rather be food for carrion beetles than be violated by scums like you."
The entire surrounding group, barbarians, bandits, and hooded figures roared with vulgar amusement.
The three Wyvern Raiders landed their beasts just outside the circle, the massive leathery wings folding back with a sound like tearing canvas. The leader dismounted, a man built like a siege engine, clad in jet-black scale armor, his face obscured by a cruel, spiked helm.
He walked slowly toward the tense line of knights.
"Just surrender the princess and all of this will end," the leader's voice grated, amplified by magic or machinery sewn into his helm.
The carriage door was thrown open. A young woman, regal even in the dirt and chaos, wearing a light traveling cloak over what appeared to be formal attire, stepped out. She ignored the filthy bandit laughter and fixed her gaze solely on the Wyvern Leader.
"Fuck you," she said, her voice clear and ringing with disdain.
The leader tilted his helmeted head. "Why resist, Princess Liana? This is the best outcome for your little kingdom. To be annexed, to be a small part of a larger symbol, and to be part of a better leader's dominion."
"And what?" Princess Liana snapped. "Do you truly think I'll surrender everything and give it to your Kingdom of Dravenholt? Once Lyra hears about this, Dravenholt will fall to the kingdom of Eldoria!"
The Wyvern Leader let out a dry, harsh chuckle. "Lyra will hear nothing because you and your women knights will now become the pleasure squad for the victorious legions of Dravenholt. Think of it as rehabilitation. Even if Lyra heard what happened to you, she will do nothing. Our Kingdom is stronger than ever before."
The surrounding bandits and hooded men cheered, stamping their feet and drawing crude weapons. The air thickened with predatory anticipation.
The Wyvern Leader turned, his massive gauntlet raised, ready to issue the command for the atrocity to begin.
"Are you all ready to have fun?!" he bellowed.
A massive, unified cheer erupted from the mob.
The leader turned back to the Princess and was about to shout "GO!" but the word caught in his throat, dissolving into a gurgle of confusion.
His head snapped up, not toward the princess, but directly beyond her, toward the shadowed treeline.
One by one, the bandits, the hooded men, and the two remaining Wyvern Raiders fell silent. The cheering died, replaced by a sudden, pervasive, sickening stillness. Every pair of eyes, human and wyvern locked onto a single point of unnatural light filtering through the woods.
The women knights and Princess Liana were baffled by the abrupt, terrifying silence. They turned around, expecting a sudden betrayal or a secondary attack, and gasped.
There, standing behind their formation, not twenty feet away, was something no one in their retinue had ever seen.
The figure was nearly eight feet tall, a gleaming, monumental presence made of marble and gold light. Lark had descended from the tree and stepped casually into the clearing. His face was a mirror of terrifying serenity, the dozens of sapphire eyes studding his flesh now fully open and pulsing with soft, blue light. He hadn't drawn a weapon, but the very symmetry of his being felt like an imminent threat to the laws of nature.
Lark looked at the stunned, filthy bandits, then at the terrified nobility, and finally settled his multiple gazes on the Wyvern Leader.
The silence stretched, so heavy it felt like a physical weight pressing the air down.
Lark, unsure of the correct protocol for interrupting a potentially massive inter-kingdom conflict and a pending sexual assault, decided to try a simple, diplomatic approach.
His voice resonated, a magnificent, terrifying sound that seemed to hum from the very ground, a chord of human confusion layered over the vibrating purity of something celestial.
"Excuse me," Lark said, finding that his voice was far too loud. "I'm looking for the nearest civilization that accepts non-human residents. Is this road conducive to that endeavor?"
The Wyvern Leader, despite his shock, was a professional killer. He recovered marginally faster than his subordinates, who were still mentally cataloging the monstrosity before them.
"What in the black hells are you?" the leader hissed, drawing a massive, serrated blade. He took a cautious step back. "This is not your fight, creature. Go back to your hole before I bury you in the mud!"
Lark tilted his head, the motion unsettlingly smooth. His blue eyes scanned the leader's armor, mentally calculating stress points and kinetic vulnerability, a habit left over from his gaming days.
"A hole," Lark repeated, the internal thought process of 'Gosh, now I have to fight these guys? I just wanted directions... and maybe stop this group of people' layered over the booming, otherworldly tone. "I don't have a hole. Just a general anxiety about finding food and shelter. And frankly, this conversation about violating these women feels incredibly rude, distracting and disgusting."
The leader roared, mistaking the creature's deliberation for hesitation. "Kill the freak! He's just a construct! Get him!"
The leader swung his massive blade in a wide, horizontal arc, aiming to cleave Lark at the waist.
Lark moved. He didn't run or dodge; he simply shifted his center of mass with impossible speed. The blade sliced through the air where his midsection had been a microsecond before.
In the next moment, Lark had closed the distance. His elongated fingers, which looked designed for playing a celestial harp, wrapped around the Wyvern Leader's helmeted head.
The leader didn't have time to scream.
Lark squeezed.
The sound was shockingly, graphically moist. The pressurized armor around the neck and head crumpled inward, bone and steel grinding together like coarse sand. Blood, thick, dark, and hot shot out from the gaps in the scale armor. Lark didn't let go; he didn't even flinch at the spray that coated his shoulder. He lifted the dying leader effortlessly high into the air.
With a rapid, sickening snap, Lark tore the leader's spine and head clean out of the armor. He held the mess aloft, a dangling, limp body still attached to a pulverized skull and then dropped the remains into the dirt with a casual thud.
The sudden, brutal reality check froze the entire mob. The sheer speed and casual violence of the act transformed the beautiful marble figure into a true nightmare.
The knights collectively gasped. Princess Liana covered her mouth, her defiance momentarily replaced by raw horror.
Lark looked down at the mess on the ground, then back at the surviving two Wyvern Raiders.
"See, that's what I mean about rudeness," Lark boomed, shaking the blood from his hand. "Now, can we restart this? I need to go west. Are you people going to be an issue for my passage?"
One of the remaining Wyvern Raiders, terrified and enraged, shrieked a word in a tongue Lark didn't recognize and urged his beast forward. The wyvern lunged, aiming its massive jaws at Lark.
Lark didn't wait. His featureless face suddenly split open, stretching horizontally and vertically far beyond the limits of human anatomy. The gaping maw revealed rows upon rows of needle-sharp, interlocking teeth, dark crimson and impossible. From this horrific depth, a tongue, long, black, and slick shot out with the force of a battering ram.
It struck the wyvern's chest with a wet thwack, penetrating the thick hide and finding the soft tissue of the lungs. Lark retracted the tongue instantly, pulling with enough force that the wyvern was yanked off balance, landing heavily on its rider, crushing the man beneath its weight with a wet crunch of breaking ribs. The beast thrashed, gargling on its own blood.
The hooded men and barbarians, who had been expecting a chaotic skirmish of swords and shields, were confronted with a being that employed physics-defying, biological horror. They broke.
"Run! It's a abyssal!" cried one of the hooded figures, a shout of deep-seated legendary fear overriding his greed.
Panic erupted. Horses bucked. The bandits, who had moments ago been full of bravado and lust, now knew only the primal urge to flee. They turned and raced back up the road, leaving their collapsed comrades and the knights' terrified relief behind.
Lark watched them go, his mouth slowly returning to its closed, featureless state.
He sighed again, the long, multi-toned note of frustration filling the air. He looked at the wreckage, the dead leader, the crushed wyvern, and the horrified princess.
Well, that was certainly a violent introduction to the local customs, Lark thought. Lark also thought that he barely felt anything when he killed the man. He looked toward the west, finally clear of immediate obstruction. He still needed directions.
He turned his full, terrifying attention back to Princess Liana and the knights, who were now staring at him with a mixture of awe, terror, and sickened gratitude.
"So," Lark said, trying to soften his booming voice. "West. Is that a good choice? Also, how far to the nearest place with decent food and a low probability of being burned alive by the locals?"