He squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand, while adjusting to the sudden brightness and change of environment. He raised his head high and breathed in the sharpness of the air, his nostrils flaring. Then, he exhaled.
Not a single human life.
For some peculiar reason, he could simply tell.
..This place is strange. Everything felt so still, yet moved and persisted nonetheless. There was still natural life here. Occasionally, a group of birds flew past overhead, far, far in the sky, though it was difficult to discern if they were actual birds through the bright sunrays that descended from the cloudy skies.
Something was eerily off. The sky was a pale, sickly color, like a corpse. The clouds were motionless, like they were just... painted there. The air was stagnant, as if it hadn't moved in days or years. The expansive crater was quiet. No specific smell lingered in the air.
Despite the conspicuous absence of human life, he felt something. Something watching, and it was not what he had felt in his past life. He craned his neck, his gaze sweeping through the crater, carefully studying everything.
Occasionally, there was a corpse. One in particular caught his eye: a body slumped over a large rock, head hanging forward, long hair obscuring their face. A thin, white arm was extended towards the sky, palm up and fingers curled as if to cradle something precious.
He extended his right hand, tugging and pulling the spirit of the corpse as he stepped around the expansive crater and ruined facility, consuming and absorbing the spirits of the long deceased. He did this slowly.
Hours had gone by. Looking up at the sky, the sun had not moved. Neither had the clouds. It was still as bright as ever. Some sort of time anomaly, he initially thought. After searching the ruined facility for several hours, he had uncovered various things. Documents, for example, were particularly useful in this circumstance. He would have to read them throughout the next days.
Spirits consumed: [16/100]
Strolling down a corridor that led away from the main crater, he continued to search. Oddly enough, his footfalls did not produce any sound, as if sound itself was mute.
But, that wasn't the case.
Click. Jjejejeje...rrrkk.
Ech. Krrramch.
The corridor reverberated with sound. Sound in which resonated much deeper within.
He paused mid-step, raising his head slightly at an angle, rotating, listening intently; like a canine turning its ear in the direction of sound. He remained still, waiting.
Shiff.
And then silence.
Eerie and dreadful silence. Long. Encapsulating.
Only one thought came to his mind...
It heard me.
Ba-dump. Thump.
Ba-dump.
...Thump.
He heard the sound of a heartbeat in his ears, reverberating through his being.
And it wasn't his.
The corridor thrummed, pulsating in time with the beating heart, as if the structure itself was alive. But it wasn't.
Despite his enhanced senses, he could not pinpoint its origin any longer. However, he didn't have to...
Drip.
And drip.
And possibly for once in a lifetime, he was unnerved. A viscous black liquid dripped slowly from the ceiling above, and onto his shoulder. He twisted his head and gazed up, to find a maw; dark, terrible, horrible. Agape. And inside, his vision flickered between a tide of undead eyes, peering unto his being with a wistless gaze, and the constant thrumming of a heart beating; only to be more consistent, the more his vision became more clear to what was lingering above him.
A monstrous, frightful thing. A thing that should not be. It stared; its eyes pierced his very being. And then, it moved, finally. Deft and swift.
Its maw gaped wider, moving to... consume him. But he acted quickly. His hands shot up, grasping the maw's edges; prying and keeping it at bay. Even with his strength, he struggled. His grip waned as its 'teeth' dug deep into the palms of his hands.
A dog, a deer, a bird, a bear. So many things at once, mixed, matched, mashed together; whatever this thing was, it wasn't meant to be. A crude form of something, but nothing. For a moment, it terrified him, somehow.
In the next moment, he composed himself and tightened his grasp around the maw's edges, twisting his body with it, and tossed the wretched, massive thing down the corridor and through a waning metal wall. It weighed at least a ton, perhaps even more.
Karrrasch!
This thing...
It's toying with me.
It had the opportune chance to devour him whole, maybe even outright kill him on the spot if it were quicker to act. However, it was instead waiting for him to react to its presence before attacking, as if a predator toying with its prey.
"How vile."
Click. Krrrch.
Sprinting towards the gaping hole, he peered inside, finding nothing but a cramped office with its interior thrashed about. The creature was gone.
"Well, shit."
That thing can teleport.
He was certain it must have been some sort of teleportation, for he would have sensed its presence if it were invisible and still present.
While most would have been relieved, he was not. He was wary and cautious. This thing was playing with him. It was going to purposefully fool with him and whittle down his resolve until he cracked. But he wouldn't.
And with his passing thoughts, something emerged into view. A notification from the system that read: "New primary directive: Survive the hunt."
With a more cautious step, he turned away from the gaping hole and strolled down the looping corridor, continuing his search.
Step. Another step. There was no sign of the wretched, horrific creature that he had encountered earlier. But that only made it more eerie, more dreadful. A feeling he shouldn't have felt. After all, he was rid of them so very long ago.
He remembered the first time he felt true dread and apprehension. Guilt.
He was young back then. Naive.
***
…My eyes opened.
A thick mucus veiled them; I blinked, again and again, until a gloved leather hand scraped away the vapid film of blurred light.
They called it the Bloody Banquet.
Methods others might call unnatural or abhorrent had been conjured in desperation, to endure. These were no manmade horrors; they were tools, necessities in the face of an infinitely worse tide: raised soldiers, hollow and endless. It was the lesser evil, some might claim, though none present would admit even that. If the evil allowed a companion to smile, a friend to laugh, a child to cheer… then was it truly evil? An opportunity clawed from the chaos. The Free Cities had fallen; Korus had withered; and for what I had done, I had earned that fleeting breath of peace in the North.
The Manakel ritual had not been merely a grasp for strength, it had been a barter. Ethics for survival. I had never known if evil had birthed the Ritual or if a wretched thing's tendrils slithered in afterward. I only knew something had to change.
"Slayer! You old wretched wolf, what makes you think you're welcome here?" A voice, round and booming from a belly soaked in beer, called out from the hall's interior.
There was no room for hesitation. The winds outside howled like beasts against my back, wrapping my cloak tighter around my form as if attempting to restrain me.
Bast's gaze flicked downward toward the sword strapped at his hip, half-exposed from where the cloak twisted and snagged in the Taiga's feral gales.
My golden irises drifted back up. And from the pores of my face, my facade leaked through, a sludge of mockery curling my lips into a fanged grin.
Bast staggered, momentarily caught off-guard by that feral expression. "Bah!" he barked, laughing with enough force to send snow tumbling from the pine tree outside. "Get your tail in here, you bloody loner." With calloused fingers, Bast gripped me by shoulder and dragged me forward into the Meeting Hall, once a stave church, now crowned as the heart of the Monarchy.
But today, it bore no armor or prayer, only laughter, clatter, and roasted meat.
I stepped inside. The warmth struck me immediately, soaked into my damp clothing and long white hair. Humid air thick with spice and smoke clung to me. Soon enough, I was on my own, wading through a congregation of nobles and mystics. Jarls, Barons, Warchiefs, Sages; all had gathered beneath one banner: House Manakel. And it wasn't long before they noticed me, the prodigal conjuror of the Belkoyene legion.
"Where's Eliza, you ambitious little man?" a druid called.
"I bet my boy could take your Sulla!" added another.
"Aren't you a sorry sight," said a voice, soft and warm—not the heat of bodies packed in a hall, but a gentler fire, one that promised familiarity and shelter even if the world beyond were splintered into ruin.
"You shouldn't have come, Persephone," I muttered, removing my soaked cloak to reveal a silk-laid tunic of decadent design.
She smiled—bemused, but genuine—and for a brief moment, my mask slipped.
But even she, like the rest of them, would need to be purged. Evil filth. Fuel for the flame.
The words of my kin rang in my skull. This was what I was made for. My entire existence had funneled into this night.
Persephone tilted her head. "Sweet Eliza didn't come?"
I shook my head, golden lashes dropping low for a moment as I turned, hair brushing across my vision. "As you shouldn't have."
"Miss a House Manakel banquet? You must think me mad."
She was right. Denying oneself bread, meat, and enough wine to drown the past would be lunacy.
"You had at least three goats, no?" I asked, a flicker of that naive optimism slipping through—one I knew the people loved. She scoffed.
They found their place at the grand table. Above them, chandeliers and floating candles orbited upward toward the cathedral ceiling—a dome vast enough to forget the Frozen Wastes pressing against the walls.
I sat barely two seats from the head of the House. I knew what he had done. But before I could dwell, my attention was yanked back—Persephone's voice jolting my thoughts.
"No, no, no! They're doing what those wall-huggers down in Korus do. Mana—in the crops! That's like eating your own shit!"
I couldn't help it—a smirk twitched onto my lips. A real one.
"Made you smile," she teased. "Eliza would be congratulating me for that."
And then, she drank.
My heart sank like stone—thousands of them—dragging each artery into the abyss.
My mask twisted once more. It must never break. Not now.
But the warmth that had once felt ambient… had pierced Persephone's aura. She was part of it now.
There was no time. No countermeasure. No recalibration. This entire lifetime had led to this moment.
Then the voice spoke—one I had been taught to loathe. And yet I smiled. Nodded. Played my part.
"Conjurer of the Belkoyene Legion, rise."
And I did.
Despite the teasing, despite their watching stares, they respected me. Revered me.
"Lead our toast," the Monarch ordered, raising his goblet between knifelike fingers.
I never had a choice.
Lifting my own goblet, I met their gazes. With their pride buoying the Monarch's words, he proclaimed his congratulations.
They cheered.
And, of course, I drank.
To them, it was wine.
To me, poison slicked like oil along my tongue.
My hands lifted, engulfed in crimson fire. They laughed, thinking it a show.
I spat the poison aside.
And embraced the warmth.
▯▯, my son. You have done it. You have cleansed us of those filth.
For months, crimson fire would linger in the creases of my palms, carried from village to village, house to house—cleansing. But no soul remembered. None loyal enough to survive the purge.
It was a banquet.
A Bloody Banquet.
***