The howling wind of the Peak of Lamentation was a sound I thought my ears would never hear again.
Fresh snow drifted down upon my bare shoulders, melting against my feverish skin. Each breath of frigid air pierced my lungs like a row of clean silver blades, scouring away the stench of brimstone and miasma that had clung to the back of my throat across eight loops.
Yet the relief was a fragile illusion, powerless to mask the agony ravaging my flesh and soul.
At the base of my spine, where my third silver tail had once swayed, there remained only a ragged, bleeding void. Severing a third of my own soul was no ordinary physical wound; it was a terrifying mutilation, a cold, throbbing emptiness sending electric spasms through every nerve in my body.
My two remaining tails lay limp across the snow, their mystic luminescence dimming, unable to sustain even a flicker of spectral flame.
The sheer shock seized my very bones.
“Hold still, you reckless fox...”
Ignis’s voice came strained, edged with an uncharacteristic crack of raw concern right beside my ear.
The dragon woman knelt in the blizzard, anchoring my hips with one of her massive, armored hands.
The palm of her other hand flickered with a faint, golden flame, regulated with such painstaking precision that the crimson scales along her forearms trembled with the strain.
With deliberate care, she pressed the heat of her sacred fire against the raw wound at the small of my back.
The hiss of searing flesh broke the mountain silence.
I clamped my teeth down hard onto the damp sleeve of my forearm, stifling a scream that threatened to shatter the crags.
The stench of my own blood vaporizing mingled with the sharp ozone of the brewing storm.
“Almost done, my sweet Queen... endure it for just one more breath,” Carmilla whispered at my left.
The Vampire Progenitor did not give an inch of space.
Her marble smooth arms encircled my torso, pressing my chest flush against hers to channel the numbing, soothing chill of her immortal flesh into me.
Her crimson eyes burned with feverish concentration as the fingers of her free hand danced through the air, weaving dozens of threads spun from liquid shadow and coagulated blood.
The dark filaments sank into my cauterized flesh, stitching severed mana circuits and sealing the spiritual breach that threatened to drain my core dry.
When the final shadow thread knit shut across my back, my strength gave out.
I slumped forward, exhausted, letting my forehead rest against the cool curve of the vampiress's neck.
“The tithe is paid,” I rasped, struggling for breath against Carmilla's skin. “We're out... We finally made it.”
Ignis drew back her smoking hand, letting out a heavy, shuddering exhale that liquefied the snow in a two meter radius.
Her magma pupils rose toward the vaulted night.
It had been three thousand years since the Calamity had drawn breath beneath an open sky.
Her wings of fire were kept furled, but the draconic membranes along her shoulders quivered with fierce, untamable exhilaration as she gazed upon the stars glittering across the black velvet firmament.
“The moon is still right where it belongs...” the dragon woman growled, clenching her fists until her scales ground together with an audible crack.
“And the bones of this world are just as fragile as I remembered.”
Carmilla turned her face up into the blizzard.
Pale moonlight washed over her divine features, casting her in a lethal, spectral radiance.
The Progenitor inhaled the surface air with almost sensual indulgence, savoring the myriad scents carried up from the valleys below: pine needles, damp soil, distant herds... and the unmistakable tang of human settlements.
“The world hasn't changed a bit,” Carmilla said, a slow, predatory smile parting her lips to reveal the gleam of her fangs.
“Mortals still multiply like vermin in the tall grass.”
Suddenly, a shrill whistle pierced the howling gale.
The fox ears atop my head twitched in unison toward the eastern ravine.
Less than two hundred meters away, upon the rocky ledge overlooking the trail to the Peak of Lamentation, a flare of golden arcane light detonated into the night sky.
The incandescent orb soared fifty meters before splitting into seven distinct bursts, tracing the radiant silhouette of a winged phoenix against the storm clouds.
An alarm flare of the Holy See.
“There are guards...” I muttered, struggling to find my footing in the snow on trembling legs.
Carmilla rose with me, never loosening her grip, slipping a protective arm around my waist to bear the brunt of my weight.
With her free hand, she snapped her fingers. The shadows of the abyss answered her summons instantly, slithering over my bare skin and weaving themselves into an airy gown of black silk mirroring her own, tailored with neat slits at the back to accommodate my two silver tails.
“Do not strain yourself, Elina,” the vampiress purred with possessive tenderness.
“Your vessels are still mending your bloodlines. Leave this little diversion to us.”
Down from the crest of the gorge, figures descended at a frantic gallop.
They rode no ordinary steeds. These were Siege Griffins feathered winged beasts clad in barding of consecrated plate, ridden by a dozen knights draped in immaculate white cloaks and gilded chainmail boots.
Emblazoned across their steel shields was the exact emblem I had seen within the magical projection of the seal: the seven-starred phoenix.
The patrol of Outpost Four of the Holy Order.
The Church of Althea had not left the sepulcher untended.
Far from it. They maintained an outpost on the Peak of Lamentation not merely to cast the condemned into the abyss, but to watch for any anomaly along the arcane wards.
The collapse of the Abyssal Seal had tripped alarm bells across the entire mountain range.
The griffins touched down on the snow with heavy beats of their wings, kicking up billowing clouds of white powder.
The knights dismounted in unison, instantly drawing blessed blades whose edges flared with brilliant holy mana. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
At the vanguard marched a burly man whose gold embroidered cloak marked him as an Inquisitorial Captain.
A jagged scar slashed across his right cheek, and a heavy mithril crucifix hung against his breastplate.
The captain halted thirty paces out, raising his broadsword toward the sky.
“In the name of the High Priest of Althea and Commander Lucas!” the man barked, his voice seasoned by years of military command.
“Identify yourselves! The summit of the Peak of Lamentation is consecrated ground under apostolic quarantine! State your business!”
I went rigid within Carmilla’s embrace.
Commander Lucas...
The venom in those words surged through my veins with greater potency than any healing tonic.
The traitor who cast me into the abyss was no longer a mere mid-tier squad leader; the crown had elevated him to Commander of the Sacred Guard on the back of his consecrated lie.
That wretched bastard.
Ignis took three heavy strides forward into the snow.
A suffocating aura rolled off the dragon woman.
Bare from the waist up, her crimson scales gleamed under the moonlight, and her thick, plated tail dragged behind her, melting the snow into trenches of blackened slush with every step.
Wreathes of sulfurous smoke coiled off her iron horns. In her right hand, she gripped her magma halberd, its blade radiating heat so intense that snowflakes vaporized before ever touching the metal.
The Inquisitorial Captain narrowed his eyes at her, but in an instant, every ounce of his seasoned military composure collapsed.
The siege griffins bred and conditioned to face high tier magical beasts were the first to break.
The winged predators let out piercing shrieks of pure primal terror.
Recognizing the apex predator standing before them, they beat their wings in frenzied panic, scrambling backward toward the cliff edge, their talons scrabbling frantically across the frozen crust in a desperate bid to flee.
“Wh-what is that...?” stammered a knight in the rear, the sword shuddering in his grip. “Captain... the mana... that thing isn't recorded in any of our bestiaries...”
Drawn back by the suffocating weight of Ignis's presence, the captain took an involuntary step backward.
His gaze drifted past Ignis's horns to Carmilla standing just behind, cradling me within her cloak of shadows.
In the military academies of the capital, every initiate learned the history of the Great Purge.
The stone reliefs depicted the two primordial horrors the founding fathers had sealed within the abyss millennia ago.
No living knight had ever laid eyes on their flesh, yet the dread etched into Althea's sacred grimoires was a genetic memory no man could silence.
“The... the Red Beast of the Spires...” the captain breathed, the air deserting his lungs as the mithril crucifix upon his breastplate grew scalding hot against his flesh from the sheer draconic heat.
“And... the Blood Queen of Mirrors...”
“The maggots of this era have quite the memory,” Carmilla purred at my side.
The Vampire Progenitor did not wait for a command.
With chilling elegance, she eased her hold on my waist, making sure I could stand on my own, and drifted a step forward onto the snow without leaving so much as a footprint upon the pristine white crust.
Her crimson eyes flared with a homicidal madness that froze the mountain gale and the knights standing before her in equal measure.
“Tell me, Elina...” The vampiress tilted her head back slightly, never taking her gaze off the armed men.
“Shall I roll their heads down the precipice this instant, or would you prefer I play with their entrails a while so you can enjoy the view?”
Ignis leveled her halberd with one hand, training the incandescent blade squarely on the captain's breastplate.
“Dibs on the overgrown birds,” the dragon woman rumbled with vicious glee.
“Their bones should make a delightful crunch when I skewer them.”
I looked upon the twelve knights of Althea.
They wore the exact armor I had once sworn to defend when I was Alan. They wore the same white cloaks Elena used to embroider on quiet nights by the campfire, promising me we would build a home in the southern valleys.
They were the watchdogs of an empire built upon the carrion of the sacrificed.
“Kill the griffin riders,” I commanded. My Kitsune voice emerged clear and smooth, carrying an icy detachment that brooked no mercy.
“Leave the captain alive. He has news from the capital I intend to hear.”
Carmilla's smile sharpened like a scythe in the dark.
“As you command, my radiant Queen.”
Then the world dissolved into a three-second slaughter.
Carmilla drew no weapon; she merely raised both arms, cloaked in a dreadful aura, and the ground beneath the knights erupted into a forest of black blood spikes.
Shadows pierced upward from the snow with the force of ballista bolts, impaling four paladins from below before a single prayer could leave their lips.
Consecrated plate split like tin beneath the weight of primordial magic.
Simultaneously, Ignis blurred into a streak of molten gold.
The dragon closed the distance in a single blink. Her halberd carved through the air in a devastating arc; a wave of pressurized magma sheared through three siege griffins and their riders in one sweeping blow.
The beasts' boiling blood splattered the snow in geysers of crimson steam as their charred corpses tumbled over the cliffside into the chasm below.
The remaining paladins fumbled to tear open emergency teleportation scrolls, frantic to flee like cornered rats, but Carmilla materialized behind them in a swirl of spectral bats. With two sharp flicks of her marble claws, she snapped their necks backward, the double crack echoing crisp through the freezing air.
Their bodies crumpled lifelessly into the snow.
In less time than it took a mortal heart to beat four times, eleven elite champions of the Holy See lay butchered across the Peak of Lamentation.
Only the captain remained.
The man knelt in the crimson slush, drenched in the blood of his subordinates. His consecrated blade lay shattered into three pieces beside him, slagged by the residual heat of Ignis's charge. You are reading on novelping . com, the official source.
He trembled violently from head to toe, his hollow gaze fixed on the smoking corpses around him, unable to comprehend the horrifying speed with which two living myths had eradicated his squad.
I walked toward him slowly.
My bare feet stepped onto the blood-soaked snow.
My two silver tails swayed behind me in a hypnotic rhythm, trailing faint ribbons of spiritual fire through the freezing air.
I stopped a pace before the kneeling inquisitor.
Carmilla took her place at my left, languidly flicking her tongue out to taste a stray bead of enemy blood from her index finger.
Ignis loomed at my right, resting the butt of her bloodied halberd against the stone, glaring down at him like an ash-born goddess waiting for the signal to crush his skull.
“Look at me,” I commanded evenly.
The captain raised his head with agonizing slowness.
His eyes were glazed with panic, but as he took in my porcelain features, the silver fox ears atop my head, and the concentric rings of crimson and gold swirling within my irises, a look of profound bewilderment broke through the terror on his pallid face.
“A... a Kitsune...?” the man stammered, his lips purple from the frost and terror.
“You... you weren't among the legends of the abyss... Who in the gods' names are you?”
I leaned in close, letting a lock of silver hair brush against his gore-splattered breastplate.
“I was the scout your commanders left for dead on this very mountain,” I whispered into his ear with venomous precision.
“And now, I am the nightmare that has returned to collect the debt.”
The captain’s eyes widened in horror. His mind struggled to reconcile the memory of the fallen scout Alan with the lethal, seductive entity standing before him, flanked by two ancient calamities gazing at her with murderous devotion.
“Alan...?” The name slipped from his lips like an involuntary blasphemy.
“No... that's impossible... Commander Lucas brought your shattered blade back to the capital... He declared you were devoured by the shadow dragon...”
“Lucas lied,” I replied with a calm that chilled even my own heart. “Tell me when that bastard's wedding takes place.”
The man hesitated for a fraction of a second, but the edge of Carmilla's claw resting against his carotid artery and the blistering heat of Ignis's clenched fist hovering inches from his brow instantly melted any thought of defiance.
“In... in four days!” he broke into hysterical weeping, completely broken.
“The Winter Solstice... at the Grand Cathedral of Light! The Holy Father will consecrate Commander Lucas’s union with Lady Elena before all the monarchs of the confederation! That's all I know! I swear it on my life! Please... have mercy!”
“Four days...” I murmured, rolling the words over my tongue like aged wine.
Four days were more than enough for my core to restore its mana flow, for the wound upon my back to heal beneath the care of my companions, and for us to descend the mountain toward the capital walls to claim my vengeance.
A sharp chime echoed from the captain's waist.
Fastened to the right flank of his cuirass in a sheath of consecrated leather, an Arcane Communication Crystal pulsed with a rhythmic golden glow.
The device projected a luminous magic circle into the freezing night air. From the center of the radiance, a man's voice—deep, resonant, coated in simulated heroic concern—reverberated across the summit:
“Outpost Four, report.
This is Commander Lucas.
Mana readings in the capital indicate a massive surge along the fault line at the Peak of Lamentation.
Captain Varek, respond immediately. What is the status of the seal?”
The kneeling captain stared at the crystal, his eyes bulging, his mouth parting to scream a warning.
I gave him no chance.
With a single flick of my porcelain claws, I tore his throat open from ear to ear.
A hot plume of blood sprayed across the snow as he collapsed forward, choking on his own ruined airway before falling still upon the frozen ground.
I knelt and picked up the communication crystal as it rolled across the blood-soaked snow.
Carmilla leaned over my shoulder with a wicked smile, pressing her cool lips to my temple, while Ignis let out a low, rumbling laugh that vibrated in the cold air.
From the artifact, Lucas’s voice flared again, laced with authoritative impatience:
“Captain Varek? What is happening up there? Varek! Report! That is a direct order!”
Hearing that despised voice, I tightened my grip until my bloodied claws grazed the crystal's facets.
I brought the artifact to my lips. Let my Kitsune voice a silken purr he had never heard, yet steeped in the eternal hatred Alan had carried into the depths of the abyss travel across the ley lines straight into the Grand Cathedral of Althea:
“The seal is broken, Lucas.”
A tomb-like silence fell over the connection. Hundreds of miles away in the capital, the paladin's breath hitched.
“Who... who is this?” Lucas demanded, and for the first time in my life, I heard the faint tremor of genuine dread fracturing his untouchable hero's composure.
“Who is on the sacred channel?”
I looked up at the silver moon as my two remaining tails ignited with ethereal spectral flame, framed by the towering silhouettes of the Vampire and the Dragon waiting only for my word to burn the world to ash.
“I am the guest you forgot to invite to your wedding,” I whispered with venomous, velvet sweetness.
“Set the feast, false hero... for in four days, the bride will dress in mourning, and you shall join her in the dirt.”
I clenched my fist, shattering the crystal into a thousand sparkling shards that scattered into the howling night blizzard.
Brace yourself, Lucas. You have no idea what is coming for you.