Heir of the Fog

The Forgotten Ones

Sharn was merely the first they found. My corrupted mist thickened, spreading outward like veins of frost through stone, and soon it began swallowing the other followers of Sjakthar.

I felt them before I saw them. Each time one of the disembodied brushed against me, a chill threaded down my spine, leaving a cold trail. Their press was relentless, like crowds forcing through a narrow gate, and their whispers rose thin as knives.

Where they passed, the world itself took notice. Shapes pressed into stone, and ice gathered into bestial outlines, as if the air had been forced to remember their form. Mana obeyed their passage even without cores or bodies, etching monuments of their presence. Those frozen effigies stood as proof, a silent testimony that the disembodied walked among us.

Sjakthar answered in kind. His shadow aura surged outward in a crushing tide, a distortion of light so total that the air itself seemed to bend under its weight. Darkness moved as substance, condensing and expanding, pressing against the corrupted mist like an endless sea. It was the power of a Devourer of Gods — vast, suffocating, undeniable. But this time the mist was not mine to command. I was not its bridge. The grey came unchained, free to seep and spread, and no leash remained to bind it.

The rift bled without pause. Each second poured through another host of things that had once belonged to the living Abyss, including beasts, demigods, and perhaps even echoes of Gods themselves, reduced now to warped silhouettes. They slipped across, faceless and hungry.

And among them came an aura I knew all too well: Winged Death. The foe I had once trembled before, the one I had come here intending to kill, now returned through the rift. My stomach lurched at the sight, the certainty that I had loosed a terror into the world again. My voice came hoarse, stripped of triumph. "Look at it, Sjakthar. I cut its leash. Now it comes for you again."

I felt fear and accepted it. If Sjakthar won, he would seal me into the long sleep; if Winged Death won, the end was the same. That was guile's only sane play, and I expected it from the Abyss's perfect creation, and from its lord.

Knowing the end hovered close brought an unfamiliar clarity. A strange freedom spread through me as the mist curled around my frame, embracing me with the same cold devotion it gave the Frostkin. Even corrupted, it still carried a taste of belonging.

Sjakthar moved, decisive and merciless. The ground quaked as he raised his will. A boulder the size of a citadel tore free from the crater's lip and came down in a single stroke upon the faithful still kneeling in worship. Warlocks, priests, nameless followers; it did not matter. Their screams barely lasted until the rock struck. The Abyss shuddered with the impact, stone splitting, bones splintering like twigs beneath the weight.

Some followers broke and ran. Others bowed lower, waiting for the hand of their God to fall. It made no difference. The shockwave reached them seconds later, shattering ribs and pulping flesh into the dirt.

And still the mist grew. The pace of it was obscene, the grey rushing outward like floodwater released from a dam. Behind it Winged Death advanced, and more things crowded the breach. Territory fell in great swathes, claimed by no will but the grey's.

Through the spreading fog I felt them, countless demigods staggering as corruption found them. Convulsions rippled across their bodies as wills pressed too many commands at once. Some ruptured outright, cores extinguished in spasms. But in rare moments, some endured, surviving the trial, and those were worse: abominations that carried every voice inside them, moving with the violence of crowds rather than a single soul.

Rarer still, some wills came so dense and powerful they brushed aside every rival, a clean rebirth. They seized a vessel whole, not as a swarm but as one mind, and anchored themselves to the core within. Even when corruption spared them its quarrels, they still sought that center point, a habit learned in life, perhaps, a shape the soul could not forget.

One of those rose next. A titanic beast that had once held its ground even against the Frostkin convulsed, great cords of muscle knotting and releasing as it thrashed. The earth for miles cracked and jumped with each blow of its body. Its cry tore the air open, too loud for a throat, and I felt the pressure of it. It had worn Sjakthar's mark; mana clung to it like a second hide. Warlock, I thought. A favored one.

Swelling began along its flanks. Bulbs of yellow liquid ballooned under the skin, translucent enough to show vague shapes drifting inside. Threads of fungus stitched outward from each orb, knitting a greasy lattice across hide and sinew. "What is this…" I muttered, useless words in the face of the change, as more sacs swelled and merged, creeping over the whole body until the beast looked quilted in disease. Then every seam cinched tight at once. The form folded inward, ribs cracking like kindling, then imploded.

Silence lasted the length of a single heartbeat. Then the wound became a door. From it poured spiders, not the hybrid horrors I had learned to expect, but tiny, countless, no larger than regular spiders. They swarmed in rivers and waves, a spill of legs and eyes so dense the ground turned black beneath them. Millions by simple counting. Uncontested.

They were small, and yet profoundly wrong. They moved in one rhythm, halting and turning like a hive, as if they all shared a single mind. A wet sheen spread as they ran. The tiny bodies exuded a clear gel that glued limb to limb, abdomen to thorax. They climbed one another without hesitation, weaving a frame from their own living bulk.

I watched the heap lift itself, rising into a singular shape that found balance on eight pillars made of thousands of twitching segments. At its center something brightened, not light but pressure. A core. Crimson. I felt it from where I stood, a clean, hard point in the noise, humming like a plucked wire.

"Wha… how?" The questions slipped out before I could stop them. "How can it have a crimson core when united? How does this work?" I was fascinated by it, but I had to push my wonderings aside as it was not the moment for it.

And the spider was only one of the births.

Sjakthar struck. From far beyond the crater's rim something uncoiled, a vine. Ore glittered along its ridges, edges honed thin by pressure and age, each scale set like a blade. It stretched for kilometers, arcing across distance as if the land were only water to skim. The first pass cleaved the titanic spider in a single, perfect line. Two halves slumped apart, spilling struggling clusters of small bodies that tried to remember themselves.

They remembered quickly. Each falling mass shuddered and drew inward. Filaments slicked from spider to spider, and two bodies reassembled from the wreck, smaller than the first but whole. They skittered opposite ways, smooth on broken stone.

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The vine chased. Another lash; the two became four. A third; four became eight. The cuts were precise, merciless. Each new spider reformed on landing, cores splitting with them like embers carried on a forked wind. By the time sixteen fled in a scatter of black legs, the formation broke. They abandoned the giant frames and burst into what they had been, a storm of small lives thrown in every direction at once. The ground writhed. In the next breath the carpet of them found seams in the rock and vanished into the Abyss, fanning outward, a million tiny mouths and a million tiny wills.

I saw horrors I had never imagined walking this earth, shapes that unstitched most of what I thought I knew about life. Creatures that had once reigned in the Abyss returned, beings of intricate design.

Another birth took hold nearby, and it pulled my attention as surely as a hand at the back of my neck. A follower of Sjakthar writhed the way the others had, every joint knocking against stone, every tendon standing out like cable. Blood poured from him, but not red. A black ooze seeped from eyes and nostrils and mouth, from pores and torn seams at the elbows, from new fissures that traced his ribs. Veins split open along his body as if something inside were prying them apart, and the ooze webbed across his chest in trembling ropes.

From that slick mass a hand tore free.

It was a single hand, small and delicate, almost human. Long nails, not claws but sharpened crescents, raked air. The hand caught a purchase in nothing and pulled. The chest tore down the middle, ribs peeling apart with a glistening crackle. Out of a titanic frame came a figure that was not titanic at all, but slight—no bigger than a normal person.

She slid into the world like a blade drawn from a sheath. A woman, or something close. Her ears rose to points sharp as spear-tips, the sort of detail that lived in children's tales told in the districts. "An elf," I muttered.

She was naked at first, skin the pale of frost lit from beneath, not truly white but touched with a slow grey like dawn through fog. A core pulsed inside her, low and steady. The black blood thickened as it ran, pulled by its own weight into sheets and threads. It climbed her limbs and ribs, gathered at her shoulders, spilled down again, then folded upon itself until cloth happened. In heartbeats the ooze became a robe, layered and falling in deep folds that ate the light, hiding the shape beneath. The veil covered her head entirely. Where a face should have been was only the suggestion of features swallowed by fabric.

Behind her, something formed. A circle of shadow rose and held itself in the air, a dark ring the size of a doorway. Parts of it were smooth as glass; other parts broke into jagged growths that reminded me of thorns or coral, spiking outward and then curling back like grasping roots made of night.

She turned and sat upon that ring as if it were a seat carved for her alone. One knee tucked beneath her, the other leg hung relaxed, a posture too composed for a battlefield. From within the sleeves a single hand showed, pale and almost skeletal, tendons like drawn threads. Despite the frailty of that hand I felt no fragility in her.

Hazeveil tugged at my wrist. Not a nudge this time, but a hard, urgent yank. The hooded cloak had never done that. Its entire weave bristled, the fabric roughening, weight shifting. Fear. I felt it shiver up my arm like an animal scenting a hunter it could not see. The robed head tilted toward me.

Can it see me? The thought came. Black silk veiled her head completely, yet her attention on me was unmistakable.

These were nightmares that should never walk this land—the worst returning to a world that had likely forgotten them. Their return strengthened the mist and the grey spread thicker. Sjakthar had to divide himself to contain the mist and the newly corrupted.

Beyond all of it the will I recognized as Winged Death moved, slow and certain, through the grey. When the mist finally brushed Sjakthar's body, that will rushed to meet him, a dead God burning with the patience of vengeance. "We both lose, Sjakthar," I said under the noise. "You'll become food all the same." The words tasted steadier in my mind than they did in my mouth.

Doomcarver felt heavy in my palm. We were ringed by corrupted beings older and stronger than me, and beyond the pressure of two Gods testing each other made the Abyss itself creak. But corruption did not take hold of Sjakthar the way it had with the others.

No—he was no mortal on the threshold. He was a God. Winged Death pressed from within; countless horrors pressed from without; Sjakthar pushed back. The contest of wills inside him shook loose dust from cliffs and sent thin avalanches of rocks whispering down. Wills near him sputtered like candlefire pinched between wet fingers. I watched in horror at the prospect that Gods might be immune to corruption.

Cold touched my hand on the hilt. Not the cold of Hazeveil or the ordinary cold of my mist, but something clean and still. Gentle, almost polite. I looked down and saw the pale hand. The shadow being stood before me without crossing the space in between; one heartbeat there had been distance, the next there was none. Hazeveil hit my shoulder in a panic, trying to push me back.

"You are…" The word stuck. I tried again. "Elf?"

She did not answer with a voice. Her head inclined the smallest amount, then stilled. The long hem of her robe drifted as if breathed upon by a tide. The ring behind her hung steady, but the shadow along its edge began to stir. Symbols grew there, white upon black, as if written in chalk that belonged to another light. They were not letters I knew. They were shapes given motion, each one unfolding into the next, turning across the circle's inner rim and then spinning through its hollow.

And somehow I understood. Meaning landed in me with each change of angle. She spoke in intent honed to form. The words were simple and exact: "Bring pain. Make it suffer."

Winged Death needed a gate held open inside Sjakthar, needed his attention pulled outward. Hurt him so he looks away from the light in his bones.

Her hand left my sword and drifted to my shoulder. Then downward, slowly, until it rested on the seam where Hazeveil lay against my collarbone. The fabric flinched. The whole cloak went rigid, as if every thread held itself back from bolting. "Stop," I said, and heard the weakness in it. "Whatever you're doing, stop. We're on the same side."

The veil turned toward me a fraction. She did not retreat. The hand remained, cold as river stone, weightless and inexorable. Whatever mechanism had let her meaning pass into me did not run in the other direction; my words fell, useless, at our feet.

Her head cocked, as if listening elsewhere. The ring brightened. New symbols unspooled, sharper and faster, leaping across the arch. They appeared around and inside the circle both, a constellation learned in a single glance.

"Too many watching. Make them proud. Slay the God so we can be free."

The cloak's texture changed. It lost weight, then all weight. For a staggering instant my hood and mantle became liquid, a fall of shadow that slid off my shoulders and pooled around my bare feet like poured ink. I felt naked without it, breath scraping the cold. Then the liquid drew itself up, knit, remembered being cloth, and flowed back over me with new certainty. It climbed my arms and throat. It ran across my face, a thin translucent veil that let the world show but dimmed its edges. The air tasted like cave water, mineral and old.

The change did not stop at the skin. I felt the cloak inside me, not as a thing invading, but as a net extended and gently set. Threads ran along my ribs and spine, flickered behind my eyes, mapped the lines that mana and will liked to follow. The shadows of the world answered Hazeveil's motion the way a field of grass bends together in wind. Where I looked, darkness leaned. When I exhaled, it breathed with me.

I reached for the boundary of my domain by reflex and found it more quickly than ever. It was as if Hazeveil had stretched its sleeves to span the entire space. When I shifted my weight, the shadows at the edge shifted too, fractions of a span, no more, but I felt the give. The cloak was no longer merely worn; it was partnered. Not drawing only from the ambient mana anymore, but drinking straight from me.

Even the Isari noticed. They had been statues behind me, silent and lean, their eyes fixed on riddles of their own, but now their heads turned. Their sight slid over me and did not take hold.

The elf's hand lifted from my shoulder. For a heartbeat the cold remained, a ghost of touch, then went. She settled deeper on her ring, the long robe collapsing into heavier folds as if she had decided to weigh more. The symbols slowed. One last chain wrote itself along the inner rim, then folded down into the circle's throat and went dark.

At last, I realized what had happened as I muttered, "You've been blessed."