The white wall collapsed inward with a dull, hollow roar, throwing up dense curtains of chalky dust.
Dayne called out into the haze, but no voice answered.
A cold, suffocating dread settled over the threshold.
Then came a wet, sickening detonation.
Something ruptured within the chalky fog, staining the white powder a deep, arterial crimson.
The sapper.
The burly dwarf who had wielded the iron sledge had been torn apart from the rib cage outward.
Through the swirling gloom, Will could make out only a blurred, pale phantom hurtling through the breach.
The front rank of elven archers erupted into shrieks of sheer panic.
Crack!
Rrrp!
Crunch!
Elves were coming apart in the dust, one after another, their bodies bursting like overripe fruit under invisible claws.
The savagery of the butcher’s work sent a razor chill down Will’s spine.
Within his inner sight, a solitary, blinding emerald ember flickered erratically, appearing and disappearing as it tore through the rebel lines.
The shrieks echoing through the chamber carried the crushing weight of absolute slaughter.
A sharp chant cut through the screams.
The elven sorcerer raised his staff, casting a shimmering web of pale starlight across the vaulted ceiling.
The radiant filaments rained down over the flags, forcing the creature into view under a mantle of glittering motes.
“A bruxa!” the mage shrieked, his voice breaking.
“Will! Move your men! Steel, now!”
Dayne spat a curse, roaring over his shoulder as he kicked a dwarf’s severed torso toward the apparition, trying desperately to draw its yellowed gaze away from his center.
The creature wore the form of a slender maiden in a tattered white gown, raven hair spilling past her waist.
Yet her flesh was parchment-dry, shriveled and gray like a corpse that had starved in the dark for three hundred winters.
Most terrifying of all was the uncanny ease with which she dissolved into the air, crossing thirty paces between heartbeats.
Within seconds, six Scoia’tael fighters lay mangled in the dirt.
Had the sorcerer not pinned her with the starlight weave, the remaining commandos would have been slaughtered before their fingers could find their bowstrings.
The surviving archers loosed a frantic volley of iron-tipped shafts toward her throat.
The mage cast a handful of dried seeds onto the flagstones, chanting guttural syllables as thick, thorny brambles erupted from the silt, coiling around her pale ankles to pin her in place.
Two swordsmen charged the gap, thrusting steel into her flank.
Skreee-aaagh!
The wounded vampire threw her head back, unleashing an ear-splitting wail.
Her unique vocal chords channeled a focused cone of concussive sonic fury that hit the chamber like a battering ram, instantly turning every man’s balance to spinning jelly.
Yet the enchanted briars held fast, keeping her anchored to the flags.
Will stood deaf to Dayne’s bellowing.
The starving bruxa had already gorged on the blood of the fallen; her gray, desiccated skin was plumping, taking on an unnatural, flushed crimson hue.
Assessing the butcher’s yard in a heartbeat, Will and Salat came to the same unspoken conclusion: waiting meant feeding the beast.
“Petards!” Salat barked through locked teeth.
The knights struck the match-cords, hurling their Zerrikanian Grapeshot bombs straight into the tangled melee.
In the same motion, they dropped behind their interlocking pavises, bracing their iron rims against the stones to form a seamless tortoise shell.
Boom!
Boom!
Boooom!
The concussive blasts ripped the enclosed vault apart, spewing thousands of iron pellets and roaring sheets of orange fire that swallowed the Scoia’tael line whole.
Will watched through the slit of the shield; the bruxa’s emerald node remained fixed in the center of the inferno.
He cleared the White Widow from its sheath, muscles coiled, waiting for the smoke to clear.
When the sulfur haze drifted toward the ceiling, stray sparks hissed in pools of black blood.
The sight waiting beyond the pavises was carnage incarnate.
The elven commando was virtually erased.
Severed limbs lay scattered across the flags.
The elven sorcerer, Salat’s primary concern, had been shredded at the waist, his torso hurled against the archway.
The bruxa, metamorphosed into an enormous, leathery bat, flapped frantically on the stone, trying to drag its scorched wings from the incinerated root-cage.
In cramped quarters, the sheer lethality of Zerrikanian ordnance was unrivaled.
Will wasted no time.
Stepping across the rubble, he channeled Life Drain into the dying rebels as he passed, stripping their final sparks before they could draw breath to curse him.
Behind him, the five knights locked their grips and charged the floundering vampire.
Without warning, the bat arched its throat, unleashing a second concussive shriek.
Will drove the tip of his silver blade into the mortar, anchoring his weight against the roaring gale.
At point-blank range, the ultrasonic vibrations rattled his teeth and scrambled his balance; warm ribbons of blood began trickling from his ears.
Behind him, the five knights collapsed onto the flags, clutched their helms in agony.
Salat, biting through his own lip to stave off unconsciousness, snatched a fallen recurve bow from the slush, knocked a loose shaft, and loosed directly into the bat’s distended maw.
Thwack!
The broadhead sheared through the creature’s palate, choking the scream into a wet, gurgling rasp.
Enraged past reason, the bruxa ripped free of the charred roots, morphing back into her female form as six-inch talons erupted from her knuckles.
An icy, suffocating pressure washed over the room.
Your blood…
hiss…
it smells like a sacred spring.
The voice scraped directly against the inside of Will’s skull, intimate and predatory.
It seemed the divine vitality radiating from his marrow had drawn her absolute attention.
In the flurry of violence, he had momentarily forgotten that despite her terrifying tricks, she remained a lesser vampire bound by blood hunger.
Will closed his eyes, surrendering his senses entirely to his life perception.
The bruxa’s elongated fangs gleamed like daggers as she blurred through the starlight, aiming straight for the base of his neck.
The instant her emerald node closed within striking reach, Will twisted his waist, the White Widow rising in a fluid, circular parry that turned her raking claws aside.
Clang!
Clang!
Clack!
Her rhythm was erratic, but months of live-steel sparring against Geralt’s blinding forms paid their dividends.
Sustaining the tight, defensive guard allowed him to feel the subtle shift in air currents that preceded every pounce.
Gripping the silver hilt with both palms, Will waited for her center to dip.
As the creature lunged once more, his point shot forward like an adder, piercing the meat of her left shoulder.
A choked, mournful wail tore from her throat, human in its despair.
The bite of refined silver scorched her flesh like lye.
Hissing with fury, she lashed out with a heavy kick that sent Will tumbling across the wet stones.
Yet as he scrambled to his feet, he noted the slight lag in her recovery.
The silver was poisoning her reserves.
Will pressed the attack, driving two sharp thrusts into her chest, only to freeze when he saw the cruel, mocking smirk curling her blackened lips.
She was baiting me.
Curse these thinking beasts.
Spotting the overextension in his recovery, the bruxa flickered out of sight.
A fraction of a second later, her icy frame materialized flush against his spine, locking his arms in an iron vice.
Her razor talons punched through his leather doublet, burying themselves deep into his pectoral muscles as her fangs sank into his carotid artery.
She began to gorge.
Yet the moment that rich, sweet essence flooded across her tongue, an agonizing, corrosive fire erupted through her digestive tract.
The arachnomorph venom and necrophage toxins Will had painstakingly absorbed and bound to his vitality flared into virulent action.
Her mouth burned as if she had swallowed molten iron, the skin across her cheeks blistering and rotting away in black, weeping lesions.
A shriek of unadulterated horror tore from her throat.
She released her grip, tumbling backward onto the flags, rolling frantically across the slurry as her claws gouged deep, hysterical furrows into the limestone.
Aaaagh! Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
I will flay you alive!
The frantic wailing hammered his thoughts.
Will blinked, shaking the numbness from his shoulders.
He had been preparing to carve his own flesh to break the grapple; he never anticipated the creature would collapse under the potency of his own poisoned marrow.
A clean opening.
Wasting not a heartbeat on curiosity, Will stepped forward.
The White Widow flared with a pale, cold sheen as he brought thirty inches of silver down through the crown of her skull, pinning her head to the subterranean bedrock.
[Experience +50]
[Experience: 414/500]
Quiet settled over the ancient corridor once more, broken only by the steady, hollow trickle of drainage water.
Will blew out a long breath, wiping cold sweat from his brow.
He had come within an inch of upending his cart.
He had expected a territorial guard dog, not a starving tiger.
The original scheme had been simple: let the Scoia’tael trigger the crypt defenses, soften the guardians with Zerrikanian petards, and sweep the spoils.
Nobody could have predicted that sixteen hardened woodland fighters would be dismantled in ninety seconds.
Had they hesitated to throw the bombs into the thicket, the bruxa would have picked them off one by one in the dark.
Will turned to the aftermath.
Kneeling beside Salat, he channeled a thin thread of vitality into the knight’s chest.
Salat’s frame was robust and his injuries were superficial, while the other four took slightly longer to steady their footing.
The surviving knights went to work with short blades, harvesting the ears of the drowners and severing the heads of the fallen Squirrels for the chapter bounty.
Will wrapped the bruxa’s head and severed tongue in greased linen; Geralt would likely find a use for the alchemical tissue.
Looking at the grim, soot-stained faces of Salat’s kinsmen, Will caught the subtle shift in their posture.
They had crossed the line from parade guards to seasoned veterans who had tasted an abattoir; only this time, the butcher’s bill had been paid by the elves.
Leaving the bloodstained threshold behind, the party stepped through the shattered breach.
Will’s eyes swept the interior, only for his shoulders to sag in profound disappointment.
Where are the ancient relics?
The staves?
The enchanted blades?
He should have known better.
The chamber bore no resemblance to a divine sanctuary; it looked like a high archivist’s study, thick with centuries of gray dust, centered around a massive slate desk buried beneath mounds of yellowed vellum.
He could guess the nature of the texts without reading a line.
Handing such manuscripts to an archmage would trigger a political tempest across the northern courts, though the history they recorded was common knowledge to a traveler from another world.
Still, passing the vellum to Geralt might give the witcher a clearer view of the hounds hunting Ciri.
Will blew the gray powder from the top folios, carefully leafing through the tight, angular glyphs of the Hen Llinge.
The records laid out the genesis of the Elder Blood and the tragedy of the Alder Folk in chilling detail.
The lineage originated among the Aen Elle, masters of space and time who once stepped between parallel worlds at will.
They were merciless conquerors who had subdued every sphere they set foot upon, putting the native humans to the sword and enslaving the proud unicorns.
The unicorns had possessed the natural gift of opening inter-dimensional gateways, but they rebelled against the brutal dominion of the elves.
In response, the Aen Elle had hunted the noble beasts to near extinction, severing their own access to the pathways.
When the Conjunction of the Spheres tore the cosmos apart, the Aen Elle found their transit severed, leaving their magnificent towers stranded in a dying world slowly being devoured by the encroachment of the White Frost.
To pierce the frost’s perimeter, their riders took on the mantle of spectral horsemen, riding the astral currents to hunt down carriers of the lost genetic spark across alien spheres.
The Red Riders.
The legendary Wild Hunt.
Centuries prior, the elven scholars had cultivated the Hen Iker within their own high caste, producing Lara Dorren.
But the grand design fractured when Lara chose exile, wedding a human sorcerer and perishing in the snows of the North, leaving the lineage diluted among mortal bloodlines and seeding centuries of bitter racial hatred.
Centuries later, King Auberon Muircetach of the Aen Elle sought to capture Ciri, intending to bed the girl and breed the Elder Blood back into the pure stock of Tir ná Lia.
Will closed the heavy portfolio, tying the deerskin cords tight before tucking the manuscripts beneath his arm.
Stepping over the scorched threshold toward the surface shaft, he gestured for the knights to pick up the pace.
A great deal of bloody laundry remained to be cleaned before the morning watch took the walls.