The Burning Coast lived up to its cursed name tonight.
The winds carried ash and something sharper the metallic tang of burnt sanctity.
Brightharbor smoldered on the horizon, its ruined walls glowing faintly gold beneath the moon as if the Saints’ touch had seared holiness directly into the stone.
Vris crouched low atop Varkha’s ridgeback the largest of the pack and narrowed his eyes. Behind him, goblin outriders waited in tense silence. Orcs muttered among themselves, hands gripping cleavers and spears. The wargs huffed uneasily, their hackles raised. Even beasts felt what lingered there.
Maz rode up beside him, her warg smaller but faster, its fur the same ember-red as her skin. Scaldfang was strapped across her back, glinting faintly with each breath.
“Smells wrong,” she murmured. “Like a feast that rotted inside the pot.”
Vris nodded. “Light shouldn’t smell like decay.”
Maz snorted. “Light shouldn’t burn.”
They descended the sand dunes in silence, the tide whispering against the blackened shore. Corpses lay half-buried in wet sand not human, but Blight-Tusks, their enormous boar-like bodies twisted unnaturally.
Some had burst open as if burned from within.
Others lay frozen mid-charge, skulls lit with faint golden cracks.
“Not all of them,” Maz observed, kneeling beside one carcass. “Some fled. The rest died… like this.”
Vris touched the edge of a cracked tusk.
The moment his claw made contact, a ripple of holy light flashed through the corpse like it was still alive, still burning and then fizzled out.
A chill slid down his spine.
“The Saints did this,” he whispered.
“Holy magic that kills monsters?” Maz frowned. “That’s expected.”
“Magic that tortures them while killing…” Vris shook his head. “That’s new.”
They pressed deeper along the coast, shadows stretching long behind their patrol.
From afar, Brightharbor pulsed faintly with impossible radiance towers glowing from within, as if something alive crawled beneath the stone. Human silhouettes shuffled along the ramparts, their motions jerky, wrong.
“Look,” Maz said, pointing.
Vris followed her gaze.
A man walked along the wall… or what had once been a man.
His veins glowed like molten gold. Light leaked from his eyes.
Each step seemed to strain his body, causing faint cracks to appear across his arms.
A priest stood beside him radiant, smiling whispering prayers that made the creature’s body flare painfully bright.
Maz growled. “They’re not healing their people. They’re filling them.”
Vris’s claws dug into his saddle. “With what?”
“…Light,” Maz whispered. “Too much of it.”
Vris felt a horror he couldn’t name.
Not fear but recognition.
Humans had chosen this.
Willingly.
They made camp deep in the dunes, far from Brightharbor’s glow.
The Bloodmoon hung above them, swollen and red, casting Maz’s skin in shimmering crimson.
Goblins slept in scattered piles. Orcs kept watch. The wargs circled the camp like silent shadows.
Vris sat alone at first, staring at the glowing horizon. Maz approached without words, dropping beside him on the sand.
For a moment, they simply breathed together.
Two warriors.
Two killers.
Two people who didn’t know how to be anything else.
It was Maz who broke the silence.
“You’re thinking too much.”
He huffed. “I do that.”
“Not always.” She nudged him. “Only when the Bloodmoon makes you honest.”
He didn’t argue.
Maz leaned back on her hands, her braid trailing down her spine, bronze rings clicking softly. Scaldfang gleamed across her back like a sliver of frozen fire.
She waited until he finally spoke.
“Tonight, I saw something,” Vris murmured.
Maz raised a brow. “In Brightharbor?”
“In me.”
Maz turned fully, giving him all her attention something she rarely offered anyone.
He swallowed.
“I remember… another life.”
Her eyes narrowed, but not with disbelief with interest.
“Go on.”
“I see a boy. Small. Weak. Walking halls of stone with books instead of blades. He was hunted, just like any runt in a goblin burrow. And he died.”
His voice grew quieter.
“And I think… that was me.”
Maz was silent for a long moment. Then, softly:
“Do you think this world stole you?”
He shook his head. “No. I think it gave me a chance to stop being prey.”
He looked at his hands at the claws, the scars, the power that throbbed beneath his skin.
“I don’t know which one is real anymore. Him… or me.”
Maz reached out, her calloused fingers brushing his cheek, forcing him to meet her gaze.
“Both are real,” she said. “But only one stands here, leading the Red Maw. Only one made me follow him out of my mountains.”
Her voice lowered.
“Only one made me love him.”
Vris froze.
The words hit him like a spear between the ribs not painful, but heavy, terrifying.
He whispered, barely audible:
“Love?”
Maz smiled a slow, dangerous thing.
“Yes, Fanglord. Love. I know the word scares you more than any blade.”
She leaned closer, forehead touching his.
“I am yours. First and only.”
Something inside Vris cracked.
Not from weakness but relief.
He exhaled, voice trembling with a truth he had never spoken aloud:
“You are my first,” he whispered. “My only love.”
Maz’s breath hitched.
He had never seen her startled before.
She sat back slightly, voice hushed but firm.
“Then hear me, Fanglord: I’m going to give you children. As many as the Red Goddess allows.”
He laughed not mockingly, but from shock and fear and a strange warmth spreading through his chest.
“Children?” he rasped. “Me? A father?”
Maz smirked. “Terrifying thought, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “More than anything else in this world.”
Maz took his hand and placed it over her heart.
“Then we face that fear together.”
Vris laced her fingers within his own, and smiled.”You are the fire of my heart..”
Maz grinned leaning her head against his shoulder. “Fang of my soul..”
The Bloodmoon watched them in silence, staining the dunes red as the two of them leaned into each other Fanglord and Forgemistress, monster and monster, bound not by instinct or convenience, but by something far stronger: