They stopped running when the stars began to disappear.
Not because clouds obscured them. The sky above the canopy of black pines was still wide open, cloudless, yet one by one the points of light in the night dome dimmed and vanished as if something was swallowing their glow. Kael looked up, and his stomach twisted. The remaining sky wasn't black. It was greenish, like a festering bruise on a corpse's skin.
"We're inside its radius," Reva whispered. She knelt behind a giant pine root, her fingers brushing the earth. The moss beneath her palm was gray and crumbled to dust at her touch. "This soil is dead. Advanced Aetheric Blight."
Gareth lightly kicked a clod of dirt near his boot. The rock shattered like a brittle bone, and from the cracks wafted a thin green vapor.
"Lovely place," he muttered, but there was no humor in his voice.
Aldric raised a hand, signaling a full stop. He crouched between two dead tree trunks leaning against each other to form a natural arch, his eyes scanning the darkness ahead.
"Thornwood is a mile from here," Aldric said quietly. "From now on, no sound. No light. Kael, especially you." He turned his head. "If your Light Aether reacts accidentally, even the smallest spark, every demon within a kilometer radius will know exactly where we are."
"I understand," Kael replied.
"Reva, you lead. Gareth, rear guard. Kael, in the middle with me." Aldric removed his leather gloves and gripped the hilt of the Ironforge Blade bare-handed. "From this point, we are ghosts. If one of us is caught, the others don't stop. The mission is more important than our lives."
No one replied. No one needed to.
Reva moved first, her body melting into the shadows of the dead trees so seamlessly that Kael nearly lost track of her in just three steps.
They crawled for forty minutes.
Every step was calculated. Every breath was held. The air grew heavier with each meter they crossed, as if the atmosphere itself rejected the presence of living beings. Kael felt a strange pressure at his temples, a dull, rhythmic throbbing like a giant heartbeat underground.
Then the forest ended.
Not gradually. There was no transition. The black pines grew up to a specific line, then stopped entirely, as if something had drawn a border and declared: here, nothing is allowed to live.
Beyond that line, Thornwood sprawled.
Kael had imagined a ruined fortress. Cracked walls, collapsed towers, piles of stone overgrown with moss. Something pitiful, perhaps. Something comprehensible.
This was not that.
Thornwood Fortress hadn't just fallen. It had mutated. The stone walls that once protected Valdoria's borders were now entirely encased in a dark-purple organic tissue, pulsing faintly like blood vessels beneath the skin. A wet, slithering sound echoed from within the walls, as if the stones themselves were breathing. The watchtowers had melted and congealed into wrong shapes, thrusting into the sky like crooked, skeletal fingers. Among these distorted structures stood six obsidian pillars, twenty meters high, forming a circle. Their surfaces were carved with runes that emitted a pulsing green light while producing a low hum that set their teeth on edge.
Every pulse sent a wave of pressure that Kael could feel in his ribs.
"Good gods," Gareth whispered. For the first time since Kael had met him, the man's voice trembled.
Reva said nothing. Her eyes narrowed, darting rapidly from point to point, calculating and analyzing. Her lips pressed into an ever-thinning line.
Inside the circle of pillars, dozens of figures moved. Not Blight-callers. Not demon soldiers. It took Kael a few seconds to process what he was seeing, and when the realization hit, bitter bile rose in his throat.
Hundreds of corpses. Valdorian soldiers who had fallen in battle were now forced back to their feet, their bodies animated by threads of Dark Aether embedded in their spines. They lifted stones, dragged obsidian blocks, and carved runes into the earth. Their movements were stiff, jerky. Their mouths hung open in an endless, silent scream, while their empty eye sockets emitted a dim green glow.
These weren't merely zombies. They were hollow shells enslaved by the residual energy extracted from their own souls.
Kael counted. Thirty. Forty. More than fifty undead laborers.
"They're building an altar," Aldric murmured, his voice barely audible. His eyes were locked on the structure at the center of the pillars. A black stone platform, three meters high, its surface scored with shallow trenches forming a complex circular pattern. The trenches were filled with a dark glowing green liquid flowing slowly toward the center.
"Not just an altar," Reva corrected from her position atop a flat rock. Her eyes followed the liquid's flow in the trenches. "Look at the pattern. Concentric circles, six connection points, unidirectional flow to the center. It's a gathering formation. They're drawing energy from the entire area and focusing it into a single point."
"For what?" Gareth asked.
"A portal," Aldric answered.
From atop her rock, Reva swallowed hard. Her usually calm face had paled beneath the green glow. "If that thing activates... we're all dead."
The silence that followed was colder than the night air.
On the eastern edge of the pillar circle, separated from the main altar, Kael spotted them.
The prisoners.
Forty, perhaps more, living human bodies bound to the stone wall that used to be the inner fortress barricade. Chains of Dark Aether—far thicker than the ones Kael had severed in the ravine—wrapped around their wrists, ankles, and necks. Each chain connected to one of the obsidian pillars via energy cables that flickered like veins.
They were still alive. Kael could see their chests rising and falling, slow and shallow, like the breathing of drowning men. Their mouths opened and closed silently. A few still wore the tattered remnants of the Third Battalion's uniform.
Kael scanned every face. His heart hammered in his ears.
First row. Not Erik. Second row. Not Erik. Third row, far right corner, half-hidden behind a pillar.
Messy brown hair. A jawline sharper and gaunter than the last time Kael had seen him. A fresh scar slashed from his left temple to his cheekbone. But his posture, the distinct angle of his hunched shoulders, the way his head lolled to the right.
Erik.
Kael gripped the dirt beneath his palms. His fingers dug into the dead mud until his fingernails ached. His entire body screamed at him to jump down, run, sever those chains, and pull Erik out of this hell immediately.
He didn't move.
Erik's carving knife felt like a hot iron in his pocket, burning his skin through the fabric. I'll return it, Kael had promised. The promise had felt so simple when he made it. Now, separated by a hundred paces swarming with walking corpses and dark magic, that promise felt like a mountain that had to be scaled without ropes.
"Kael." Aldric's voice, quiet but firm. "I know."
Kael swallowed hard. "Erik is down there. Third row, far right."
Aldric didn't reply immediately. He scanned the area himself, verifying Kael's information, then gave a single nod.
"We will get him out," Aldric said. "But not now. Not like this."
"Captain, if we wait too long..."
"Then we all die, and no one saves anybody." Aldric looked at him. Those gray eyes weren't angry, nor cold. Just incredibly, profoundly exhausted. "Trust me, Kael. I won't leave them behind. But I need you thinking clearly."
Kael closed his eyes. One second. Two seconds. Then he opened them again.
"Understood."
The air changed.
Kael felt it before he saw it. The pressure at his temples suddenly doubled, as if someone were crushing the sides of his head with iron palms. His breath hitched. Beside him, Gareth gritted his teeth and clutched his head. Even Reva took a half-step back, her brown eyes widening for a fraction of a second before narrowing again.
Only Aldric remained motionless. But Kael saw his captain's knuckles turn white around the hilt of the Ironforge Blade.
Down below, the undead laborers stopped moving simultaneously. Their heads snapped in a single direction, their empty sockets staring at the exact same point. Then, one by one, they fell to their knees. Not kneeling like humans. They collapsed into a prostrate position with identical, synchronized movements, like wheat flattened by the wind.
From the darkness behind the altar, the figure stepped out.
He stood nearly three meters tall. Pitch-black steel armor encased his body from neck to toe, the plates carved with runes that slithered and shifted beneath the metal's surface. A pair of sharp obsidian horns curved back from his shoulders. As his dark crimson cape swept the earth, the ground beneath it instantly froze.
His face was hidden behind a horned helm. Only his eyes were visible: two orbs of purplish fire burning coldly from the visor's slit. The eternal eyes of a predator that never lost its prey.
A Shadow Knight.
Kael had felt the pressure of Dark Aether before. From the Vesper in the Simulation Forest. From the Gore-weavers in the Whispering Pines. From the Blight-callers in the ravine.
They were all like candles compared to a sun.
This creature's aura didn't just suppress. It erased. Every step he took left a scorched footprint on the stone, and the air around him vibrated at a frequency that made Kael's teeth chatter. The Dark Aether instinct that had guided Kael until now roared in his head, no longer giving warnings but screaming a single word over and over.
Run. Run. Run.
The Shadow Knight walked past the row of prisoners. He stopped in front of a young soldier bound at the edge of the first row. The soldier was shaking violently, his remaining eye wide with pure terror. His mouth moved, forming soundless words. Perhaps a prayer. Perhaps a plea.
The Shadow Knight tilted his head, as if considering an insect that had caught his attention.
Then he raised one armored hand and touched the soldier's forehead with his index finger.
The soldier convulsed. His mouth opened wide, and this time, sound came out. Not a scream. Not a shout. The sound torn from the man's throat was something human vocal cords were never meant to produce. A long, low, despairing roar that made the hairs on Kael's neck stand straight up.
The dim light from the soldier's eye was siphoned smoothly into the Shadow Knight's fingertip. The trembling body instantly stiffened, then slumped forward—held up only by the chains at its wrists. Its skin wrinkled and withered into gray dust within seconds, leaving behind a fragile skeleton drained of all its life.
The Shadow Knight withdrew his hand. Sparks of greenish energy danced across his armored fingertips for a moment before being absorbed into the metal.
"Not enough," the creature said.
Human language. Spoken with a flawless accent, without hesitation, without impediment. His voice was deep and resonant, like heavy metal dragging across stone.
"Their souls are too thin. I need something stronger."
The Shadow Knight turned back toward the altar. He took a single step before his foot abruptly stopped.
Silence.
The creature stood motionless for several seconds that felt like an eternity. He tilted his face slightly upward, as if sniffing the tainted night air. Then, slowly and with lethal certainty, his head turned.
Exactly toward the cliff where Kael and the others were hiding.
Kael's heart stopped beating for a full second.
Those purplish eyes stared directly at their position, piercing through the darkness, the fog, and the stone. There was no hesitation in that gaze. No searching. The creature knew.
"The blood of Valdoria," the Shadow Knight said, and his voice carried the weight of a thousand years of unquenchable hatred. "It always smells the same. Iron, sweat, and the fear you try to hide behind false courage."
Aldric stood up. There was no point in hiding anymore.
"Reva, take the nearest high ground. Gareth, left flank. Kael, behind me." Aldric's voice had changed. It was no longer the voice of a captain planning a strategy. It was the voice of a warrior who knew the planning was over. "Defensive formation. Priority: survive."
Not attack. Not win.
Survive.
The Ironforge Blade was drawn from its scabbard with a hiss of steel that cleaved the night. Aldric stepped out from the cover of the rocks, his back straight, his sword raised in a high guard.
Down below, the Shadow Knight raised his hand. The six obsidian pillars pulsed once, violently, and a wave of green energy spread across the ruins. The undead laborers rose back to their feet and began moving toward the cliff.
"Four soldiers," the Shadow Knight murmured, and there was something resembling amusement in his gravestone-cold voice. "You come to my nest with four."
Kael drew his sword. The plain steel didn't glow, didn't hum, didn't emit anything. In his left hand, he felt the shape of Erik's carving knife inside his pocket. Against his left chest, the Healing Crystal from Elara beat warmly, the only warmth left in this freezing world.
Gareth raised the Stonecleaver with both hands, his arm muscles taut. From atop the rocks, Reva had already nocked her first arrow, her eyes narrowed to slits.
Four against one.
And everyone on that cliff knew the numbers meant absolutely nothing.
— To be continued in Chapter 24 —