The howls didn’t fade by morning.
If anything, they multiplied, tracking the column’s progress from just beyond sight as the road narrowed into a mountain pass thick with gray, ash-dusted snow that shouldn’t have existed this far south of winter.
“The corruption’s poisoning the seasons here,” Lucan said grimly, studying the unnatural drifts piled against jagged rock walls on either side of the narrow path.
“This far from the barrier, and already the land’s forgetting what it’s supposed to be.”
“How much further to the watch stations?”
“Should have reached them by now.” His jaw tightened, eyes scanning the ridgelines above with growing unease.
“The silence isn’t reassuring.”
It wasn’t silence for long.
The first beast dropped from the ridge without warning — a massive, twisted thing, vaguely wolf-shaped but wrong in every proportion, bone spurs erupting through patchy black fur, eyes burning the same sickly gray-green as corrupted mana.
It hit the lead cart with enough force to splinter wood, and the entire column erupted into chaos.
“Formation!” Lucan’s voice cracked through the din like a whip, Inquisitorial guards scrambling into defensive positions even as more shapes began dropping from the rocks above, a dozen at least, converging on the narrow pass from every angle.
Ren didn’t wait for instruction.
She drew the light instantly, thin and razor-sharp exactly as she’d trained it, and when the second beast lunged for a fallen priest she moved without thinking, threads of white-gold light slicing clean through its throat before it landed.
“Caelia!”
“I’m fine!” She spun, another thread already forming between her fingers, and caught a third beast mid-leap, the light punching straight through its skull with lethal precision.
“Watch your flank!”
Lucan’s dark blade carved through the chaos beside her, ash magic decaying flesh and bone with brutal efficiency, and for a moment they fought back to back, the pass narrow enough that beasts could only come at them one or two at a time. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
Ren felt the familiar rhythm settle over her — not fear, not the frantic panic she might have expected from a sheltered Saintess, but the cold, focused clarity of someone who’d survived worse odds with considerably less power at her disposal.
“You’re not screaming,” Lucan called over the din, half a question even as he gutted another beast with a vicious upward slash.
“Should I be?”
“Most Saintesses would be.” Something almost like admiration colored his voice despite the chaos.
“You fight like you’ve done this before.”
“I’ve fought for my life plenty of times. Just never with magic this useful.” She sliced another thread clean through a beast’s spine, watching it collapse mid-lunge, and felt a fierce, unfamiliar satisfaction settle in her chest at how efficiently the power obeyed her now.
“Behind you!”
Lucan spun, blade catching a fourth beast across the throat before it could reach him, dark blood — its own, not his — spraying across the churned snow.
“Noted.”
The battle stretched longer than Ren expected, wave after wave of corrupted beasts pouring down from the ridges, the Inquisitorial guard fighting with disciplined ferocity even as casualties began mounting among the less experienced priests.
She lost track of how many threats she’d cut down, moving through the chaos with a growing, dangerous ease that felt less like desperate survival and more like something closer to purpose.
A particularly massive beast — twice the size of the others, its bone spurs curving like a crown around a skull too large for its body — broke through the front line entirely, charging directly toward a cluster of terrified priests.
“Caelia, don’t—” Lucan’s warning came too late.
Ren was already moving, cutting through the chaos with reckless speed, and drove three threads of light simultaneously through the beast’s exposed throat just as it reached the priests.
It collapsed mid-stride, momentum carrying its massive body skidding across the snow to stop inches from the cowering priests, dead before it fully registered the wound.
Lucan reached her a moment later, breathing hard, dark blood splattered across his armor, eyes wide with something between fury and awe.
“That was reckless.”
“That was effective.” She wiped a smear of gold-tinged blood from her cheek, chest heaving with exertion. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“They’re dead. That’s what matters.”
“You could have died charging in like that.”
“So could you, half a dozen times in the last ten minutes.” She met his gaze steadily, unrepentant.
“We don’t have time to argue about recklessness while more of these things are still coming.”
As if summoned by the words, the ground beneath them suddenly shuddered — not the beasts, something deeper, more violent.
Ren barely had time to register the tremor before the earth split open entirely between her position and Lucan’s, a subterranean explosion tearing the pass apart in a violent eruption of stone and ash.
“Lucan!”
His name was the last thing she managed before the ground gave way beneath her feet, the world tilting sideways as she plunged into sudden darkness, the sound of the battle above growing distant and muffled with terrifying speed.
She hit something hard, pain lancing through her shoulder, and scrambled upright in near-total blackness, coughing against thick dust and the acrid smell of raw, disturbed earth.
“Lucan!” Her voice echoed strangely in the enclosed space, no answer coming back.
She reached for the obsidian collar at her throat, and felt with dawning alarm that the steady, warm presence she’d grown accustomed to over the past three days had gone faint, distant, muffled by whatever barrier now separated them.
Above her, impossibly far away now, she could hear the battle continuing — muffled shouts, the ring of steel, the guttural cries of corrupted beasts still pressing the attack against a column suddenly missing both its Saintess and its Grand Inquisitor.
She was alone, in the dark, somewhere beneath the Shadowed Wastes’ surface, with no way back up and no idea whether Lucan had survived the same fall.
“Lucan!” she called again, louder this time, desperation bleeding into her voice despite her best efforts to stay calm.
“Lucan, answer me!”
Silence answered her, broken only by distant, dripping water and the faint, unsettling groan of shifting stone somewhere deeper in the darkness ahead.