These Hallowed Bones - [Monster Evolution, Dark Fantasy, Heroic Undead]

Thirty corpses cooled on the dust of the King's Road. The wind that stirred the bones tasted of nothing but endings.

Pan no longer strutted; he cowered, nervously twisting stolen rings around fingers too thick for them. His bravado had bled out with the last of his would-be executioners.

I watched him from the hollows of my sockets as he stepped around puddles of black ichor, as if death itself might rise and seize his ankles. The great Pretender Duke, now questioning the path his ambition had forged.

"They'll come for us," he muttered.

I said nothing. The corpses spoke plainly enough. Thirty sets of glassy, unseeing eyes. Thirty tongues that would never again boast or beg.

This road was older than demons, laid down when gods still walked among mortals. Now it carried only scavengers and the dead.

The horizon stretched empty, a wasteland of ash and the bones of some vast, serpentine thing half-buried in the dust. Somewhere beyond lay Acre, the ruined capital where the Demon King once held court, and where his Dukes now gathered to squabble over lingering power.

We walked on. The dead faded into the distance. The road drank their blood without ceremony.

Ahead, the shadows deepened.

The imp lord, for so he styled himself, cast glances back at the carnage, as if expecting the dead to rise. But the dead stay dead when I will it so.

"How far to Acre?" I asked, my voice holding no warmth.

Pan swallowed. "Two days, if we keep to the road. Three if we take the paths." He shuddered. "Nothing good walks the paths."

"We take the road," I decided. "The conclave expects Pan the Pretender, not Pan the Late."

He flinched at the title but did not protest. He had sought a champion; he had found a master.

Our silence was broken only by the scrape of my bone feet and the frantic, skittering steps of my new servant. He chattered nervously, a stream of warnings wrapped in babbling as he walked too close, as if my shadow might shield him from what hunted the wastes.

I already regretted sparing him.

"The conclave," I interrupted, my voice stopping him mid-sentence. "Who decides?"

Pan hesitated. The hesitation told me more than an answer ever could.

"It varies," he admitted. "Challenges are issued. Champions fight. But much is decided beforehand. Favors. Alliances." His eyes darted to my skeletal hands. "They won't respect you. Not at first."

The road sloped downward, guiding us between the undercarriage of a shattered bridge. I felt the echoes of the dead who made up this road, but I did not call to them.

From the cliffs, hunched shapes watched our passage. They did not approach.

Good.

The wasteland stretched before us, broken only by the jagged remains of fallen towers. The air tasted of ash and old violence.

Then we saw it.

A caravan, of a sort. Not merchants, but hulking brutes chained to sledges of bone and iron, their muscles straining against spiked collars as they dragged massive cages across the cracked earth. Inside, whimpering things that might have once been human curled against the bars, fingers raw from scratching at unyielding metal.

The slaver leading them was a creature of cracked leather and rusted ambition. His whip, a spinal column flayed to sinew, curled in his grip. His eyes, yellow and runny, fixed on us with the disinterest of a predator who only feared greater ones.

Beside me, Pan stilled. "Gris."

I did not ask. The name meant nothing.

"Pan," the slaver drawled. "Come to be measured for a cage?"

The cages groaned as the brutes halted. Inside, a child, pale and too thin, pressed its face against the bars. Its gaze locked onto mine.

Not pleading. Its gaze held a stillness that had forgotten hope.

I tilted my skull.

Gris chuckled. "Don't waste your pity, skeleton. They're already dead, just too stupid to lie down." He gestured with his whip to a figure slumped in the farthest cage. "That one lasted three days without water before it started chewing its own arms."

"Where did you get them?" Pan asked, his voice tight.

Gris grinned, yellowed teeth splitting his lips. "Village. High Hold."

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High Hold. The name was a stone sinking in black water. The Arkashoth fragment tested it against the balverine maps.

Not marked there. A new hunting ground.

My claws flexed, joints grinding. Gris misread the motion.

"Thinking of buying, dead thing?" His whip pointed at me. "They don't fight, but they scream prettier than most demons."

Pan stepped back. "We should—"

Gris interrupted. "Or do you want to watch them break first? Always save the children till last. Teaches the rest faster."

The Arkashoth fragment stirred. "Irrelevant. Your path lies forward."

The child blinked.

The old compulsion compels me forward.

Gris snapped his whip. "Not that it matters. Preserves fail." He grunted, jerking his chin toward me. "Yours?"

Pan hesitated. Gris mistook it for pride.

"Doesn't look like much," the slaver muttered. "But fresh bones fetch a price in Acre."

The nearest brute snarled. I stepped forward. Gris raised the whip.

I was faster.

My hand closed around the braided vertebrae. The whip went taut for a heartbeat before I yanked. Gris lurched forward, his eyes wide with the first flicker of fear.

My other fist met his face with the sound of breaking pottery. Bone crunched. Cartilage collapsed. Blood erupted from his flattened nose, spattering across my ribcage.

He staggered back, hands flying to his ruined face.

Within me, Sister Carida raged. Her voice was righteous fury.

I let it guide me.

"Wait, we can deal—" Gris began.

I grabbed his wrist, slowly, deliberately. My fingers closed around the joint. The first bone broke with a wet snap.

He screamed. I held him upright by the broken wrist as his knees buckled. The second bone followed.

Then the third. Wrist. Forearm. Elbow.

Each break was a note in his escalating shriek.

I released his mangled arm. He collapsed, cradling the ruin of blood and bone splinters.

The brutes strained against their chains, bellowing. They were trapped as surely as their cargo, chains anchored through their flesh. I approached the first.

It swung a fist that would pulverize stone. My hand caught the massive knuckles. Bone met bone.

My grip tightened. Cartilage popped. Tendons snapped.

The creature roared as I began to squeeze. Its hand collapsed inward. It tried to headbutt me.

I released its ruined fist and caught its skull.

I pulled.

A massive head came free, trailing spinal cord. The headless body stood for a moment, then toppled backward. The second brute whimpered as I approached.

I reached for its neck. I choked the life from it. The massive body went limp, slumping against its harness.

Behind me, Gris had dragged himself upright. The prisoners watched with hollow eyes. The child had not moved.

I turned to Pan, who had retreated a hundred yards down the road.

"COME."

He stood frozen.

"COME," I repeated, louder.

He stumbled forward, avoiding the sight of the carnage. I turned back to Gris. He had crawled several feet, leaving a trail of blood.

I seized his ankles and dragged him back. His fingernails scraped grooves in the stone.

I lifted him. The harness system that held the brutes had meat hooks dangling from its crossbeams. Gris saw where I was looking.

His eyes widened.

I positioned him beneath the largest hook. One quick motion drove the metal through his shoulder blade. Bone cracked.

His scream echoed across the empty road.

I stepped back. Gris hung, feet barely touching the ground, impaled on his own slaving equipment. His blood dripped onto the stone.

The cages stood silent. The child, a girl, cradled her mother's body, one dead arm thrust through the bars in a final reach. The girl had not let go.

The Arkashoth fragment was cold. "Leave them. Acre awaits."

But Sister Carida burned within my ribs. Pan shifted behind me. "We should go."

I ignored him. I knew what must be done.

"There must be another way," Carida's essence resisted.

"You have the divine forging," I told her. "You are closer to divinity than any fragment I carry."

I knelt beside the cage and placed my hand on the mother's cold forehead. I called upon Lethe. The power flowed through me, not to raise a corpse, but to give new meaning to what was lost.

Carida's essence fought the demand. Then, it tore free from my ribs. A sudden absence where mercy once burned.

Her essence flowed into the corpse. The dead flesh knit itself back together. The woman's face smoothed.

Her eyes opened, not human, but wells of gentle radiance. She sat up, divinity settling around her like a mantle.

"Hello, little one," Sister Carida said. Her touch dissolved the cage locks. The prisoners stumbled out, blinking in disbelief.

She was mercy incarnate, the light that would guard this world when I walked paths too dark for any radiance to follow.

She looked at me with ancient understanding. "There is an ending. A place where you must go alone."

I nodded. "Guard them."

Carida turned her gaze upon me. "Will you return?"

The truth was bitter on my bones. "No."

She did not flinch. She knew what I was: a weapon, final and fading. The child in her arms peered at me, unafraid, perhaps seeing the hollow where divine mercy once tempered judgment.

She knew, as I knew, some duties require walking beyond redemption.

Carida exhaled. "Then I will keep Haven."

She looked at me one last time.

"You will be the mercy that does not wait to be begged for."

The words settled. A final charge given. I turned from the light before she could witness the way worn warriors do not say farewell.

Behind me, Carida's voice rose in gentle comfort. Pan hurried to match my stride.

Darkness returned. Within me, there was silence where once there burned a voice to temper fury. Dragon bones whispered of fire and vengeance.

The Arkashoth fragment stirred with knowledge too old for mercy. The scraps of nameless soldiers clung to my frame, loyal to their last oath.

None of them mourned.

Neither did I.

Light has no place where we're going.

Pan stumbled ahead, fear now seasoned with a darker understanding. He sensed the change in me. The demon in him recognized kinship with what I had become.

"How much further?" My voice carried no warmth.

"Still a day," he rasped.

Acre. Where Dukes gather to spill blood for the amusement of creatures that feast on suffering. I flexed my claws.

The Arkashoth fragment stirred, hungry for the violence to come. I no longer carried the restraint of the Vigilant Sister.

This final path belongs to monsters.

To war.

To vengeance stripped of mercy.

Pan glanced back, his yellow eyes wide. He saw what walked behind him was no longer Haven's guardian. That mantle had passed.

I am become judgment without compassion, wrath without temperance.

I listened to the whispers crawling up my spine, the dragon bones aching for fire, the Arkashoth fragment hungering for deeper dark. None spoke of mercy.

Ahead, Pan whimpered like a beaten dog. Good. He would serve his purpose.

Two days to Acre. Two days until I stand before the conclave and make them answer for every corpse they have stacked between their thrones and ruin. Let them come.

I will meet them with the truth carved into every bone of my being:

No king reigns forever.

The road narrowed. The wind tasted of sulfur and old screams. I walked onward.

Pan followed. Behind us, Gris's screams finally stopped.

Ahead, only silence.