One town, one shared nightmare told across ten stories.

History has recorded several tragic events shrouded in mystery: the vanished colony of Roanoke, The Donner Party, The Dyatlov Pass Incident. What if all those events were connected, orchestrated by a single malevolent entity that feeds on human death and psychological torment?

And what if it’s happening again? In the quaint mountain town of Coldwater, Idaho, in the year 2026.

This is a collaboration between Jonathan of Beneath the Wolfmoon and Kara of . Just in time for spooky season, we’re building an anthology of ten horror stories, each following a different resident of Coldwater through a single brutal fall/winter, as the town becomes a hub of terror, death, and mayhem.

We want it all: psychological horror, creature feature, cosmic horror. What will your story entail: a neighborhood terrorized by poltergeists, those rumored creatures in the forest that might not be just superstition after all, the town’s dead rising, the creepy neighbor - you know, the one that’s always out back chopping wood - finally snapping. Sky’s the limit, anything goes. The one line we draw is violence toward children, so don’t even go there. Otherwise, we want your worst nightmares to come true and manifest in the town of Coldwater.

What we’re looking for:

• Original short fiction, 1,000-2,000 words

• Set in Coldwater, Idaho (a fictional location) during the fall/winter of 2026

  • Coldwater is a mountain town with a population of about 2,500 people. It’s located in a valley surrounded by a dense evergreen forest, roughly a three-hour drive to the nearest city. The winters are cold with snow and temperatures that reach well-below freezing. The local economy runs on logging and year-round tourism.

• Your story doesn’t need to focus on the entity itself, just leave a trace of its presence, something felt more than seen. Its nature should stay ambiguous, but that shared thread ties all ten stories together. The fun part is yours: decide how the horror manifests in Coldwater as a result of the entity’s presence.

• Submit via this form

Deadline: September 30th

This is a free, community-driven project designed to promote author engagement and publicity. There’s no payment involved. We simply want to build a collaborative anthology for Substack horror writers to be featured alongside each other. By submitting, you grant one-time, non-exclusive permission for your story to be published as part of this anthology on both Beneath the Wolfmoon and The Grimoire Vault Substacks, free to read. You retain all other rights to your work and are free to publish it elsewhere at any time.

Note: This is a curated selection process, so not every submission will be accepted. Additionally, there is no revision process; thus, please submit your story in its final, polished form.

Have questions? Send them to: beneaththewolfmoon@gmail.com

The terror began in Blackpeak that winter with the missing livestock. Farmers’ pens that were stocked full at sunset held only butchered remains by dawn.

Panic started as a seed, then blossomed into a full bloom of black fear the night the wainwright’s son went missing. No trace of the boy remained, other than the hat which his parents found near a bloody groove in the snow that disappeared into the depths of the dark pines.

The villagers gathered in the tavern at night, sitting by the hearth and whispering tales of ancient superstitions as they drank their bitter beer. Most believed that the thing in the trees was a varkulak, a wolf-skinned man that haunted the deep woods, feeding on flesh and blood. They were desperate to end the slaughter of their animals and the cloud of horror that had settled over Blackpeak. Thus, the hunter proposed a solution. He would engineer a trap: a suspended cage of thick wood and iron bars, large and strong enough to snare and hold it. He would bait the trap with a tethered goat, and fashion a mechanism to collapse and pin the beast when it came to feed.

So he did.

And on the night of the full moon, the trap was sprung. The goat’s bleating stopped. In its place, an unearthly sound echoed through the village.

The people came, circling the trap with torches and blades. Trapped inside the cage was a creature, almost human in shape but covered in slate-grey fur. The hirsute beast crouched on clawed hands and digitigrade hind legs, baring yellowed fangs at its captors. It snapped its teeth then unleashed a howl that was half bestial warning, half human scream of rage.

Those gathered debated what to do with the creature. “Burn it,” some screamed. “Drown it,” cried others. “Put it in a pit and let it starve to death,” yelled one man.

They argued until the dawn broke over the peaks. That’s when everything changed.

The creature grew frantic, thrashing against the iron bars. Its eyes showed bloodshot whites as it watched the sunlight edge closer to the cage. But try as it might, it could not escape the light. When the first rays of morning touched its body, it shrieked. The thick fur steamed, wrinkled and then sloughed off the thing’s body like a sodden blanket.

To the villagers’ disbelief, beneath the hide of the varkulak was a woman in her early twenties, naked and shivering, staring at the shed pelt with bewildered eyes. She looked at them and wept, begging for help.

But help was not what they gave her. They dragged her into the public square and bound her to a post. There they flogged her and demanded that she tell them the secrets of her dual nature. She said she was innocent and did not know how she had arrived in their village. She begged them to believe her, but instead they crushed her fingers one by one with a vice.

When her wails of agony finally ended, she spoke again. “I don’t remember,” she sobbed, her voice cracking. Her lips were blue and her blood made steaming patterns across the snow. Her hands were turning a purplish-black, but from the torture or frostbite it was impossible to say. Probably both. “I was attacked by something in the woods near my village. Since then, I’ve been stuck, trapped in a nightmare of killing. I saw myself eating animals raw… and… even a few humans. I screamed at my body to stop, but I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t wake up from the nightmare. And the next thing I knew, I was here.”

Three times the wainwright had to be taken from the scene. Once, the man threw a stone that made a loud crack when it hit the woman’s face. “Where’s my son you bitch?! You harlot of the dark one! Tell me where I can find my boy!” Tears covered his snarling face, and he would have killed her then and there if not for the restraint of those watching.

Despite her pleas, the villagers remained steadfast in their accusations that she was a vessel of black magic, and they sentenced her to death at nightfall. They bound her to a stake and set it ablaze, convinced that only fire would rid them of the wolf-skinned curse.

The hunter stood apart from the baying mob. He heard the woman’s screams as the flames engulfed her, but his attention was fixed on the discarded wolf pelt left lying in the mud and snow next to the cage.

It would be a shame to waste it, he thought. He stepped forward and picked the pelt up. And what a trophy: the hide of a varkulak, one of the wolf-skinned people.

He took his prize and went home, where his walls were already crowded with the skulls and pelts of a hundred kills. He spent the following weeks tanning the hide. Salting. Scraping. Smoking. Until at last, he hammered the human-shaped wolf skin directly above his hearth with a handful of iron tacks.

The days went by, and life in Blackpeak slowly moved on. Snow covered the wolf woman’s ashes and talk of the varkulak faded.

The next full moon came, casting a blue pallor across the frost and snow. Inside the hunter’s cabin, the warmth of the roaring fire fought valiantly to keep the chill out.

The hunter sat at his table, eating dinner by the light of the hearth. He raised his fork to his mouth, and his arm froze halfway. He’d heard a sound, the soft scraping of something hard against wood. Another fucking mouse, he thought, taking the bite. But then the sound came again, louder, heavier this time.

He stood, grabbed a skinning knife from the block, and looked around, scanning the shadows of his trophy-laden room. The house was silent, save for the crackling pops of the cedar logs in the fire.

There it was again — more scraping across wood. He tried to track the phantom noise across the room, then made his way toward his weapon rack. As he neared the fireplace, something pierced his boot and sank deep into the arch of his foot. He cursed, looked down, and saw iron tacks scattered across the floor, one jutting from the leather, blood already seeping from the puncture.

He slowly lifted his eyes to the mantle, cold dread blooming in his chest.

The pelt was gone.

He was still processing the blank space on the wall when the heavy wolf hide dropped from the shadows of the rafters.

The hunter barely had time to gasp before the pelt wrapped around his face. His arms were pinned to his sides by the constricting leather. The grey fur began to weave into his skin, the individual hairs sliding painfully into his pores like wiry needles. He fell to the floor, thrashing wildly as the flesh and fur fully merged with his body.

The thudding of his boots against the floorboards ceased, and in its place, a low growl grew.

The next morning, Blackpeak woke to find its recently replenished livestock devoured once again. Their pens held only butchered remains and frozen offal.

The door to the hunter’s cabin was wide open, swinging in the cold wind, banging in an irregular rhythm against the timber frame. The snow around it was pristine except for one set of tracks. They were massive, unmistakably lupine, and led away from the doorstep to the livestock pens, then disappeared into the dark of the ancient evergreen forest.

Of the hunter, there was no trace.

If you enjoyed this story, or the other work I’m sharing here, and want to contribute, I am powered by coffee.

New to Godfang? Start here: Godfang Chapter 1

The story thus far:

Kaelvor was betrayed, mutilated, and murdered by his own tribe, the Blackfang. A mysterious entity named the God Beneath resurrected him as its champion, giving him a black-scaled demon arm, a burning green eye, molten blood, and Godfang, a greatsword forged from one of its own fangs. In return, Kaelvor owes the god a debt to be claimed at a later time.

After his rebirth from the grave, he cut through a horde of scavenger demons, defeated the Iron Witch, and met a stranger named Saelira, the Moon-Blooded Huntress.

Saelira was the War Queen of the Osskari, a fierce nocturnal people of the wastelands who had been enslaved by a warlord of terrible power who traveled in a moving fortress called the Colossus. The two forged a pact to infiltrate the Colossus, kill the warlord, and free the Osskari, and in return, Saelira and her people would march with Kaelvor into the volcanic highlands to take vengeance on the Blackfang.

Catching up to the Colossus, they encountered the avatar of the God Beneath, a two-headed jackal, which revealed the warlord’s name, Ozravel, and his true nature as the half-mortal son of the Void Matriarch, a demon queen from another realm. From the jackal, they also learned that no weapon of this world could harm the warlord; thus, only Godfang, a weapon not of this world, held any chance of slaying him.

They infiltrated the Colossus through its underbelly, freed the Osskari, and defeated Ozravel. Kaelvor and Saelira now control the Colossus, and they are moving toward the Blackfang.

Welcome to Chapter 7: The Spider Goddess

The cistern chamber was black with the kind of darkness that only exists in deep places that have never seen sun. Kaelvor stood alone at the water’s edge, Ozravel’s headless body slung over one shoulder. His green demon eye gazed back at him in a hazy reflection from the glassy surface below. All around, rusted pipes dripped grit-filled condensation, and the air carried a mineralized odor mixed with the stench of stagnant water.

Kaelvor had insisted on doing this alone. Witnesses would turn the task into a performance, a ritual; this was neither. This was unceremonious disposal.

He let the headless warlord’s body fall. It struck the water with a flat slap, and for a moment the corpse simply floated there, arms spread, drifting in a slow spin at the center of expanding concentric ripples. He drew Godfang and struck the cistern’s stone lip three times with the blade. The sound rang out and rolled away into the dark. He stepped back from the edge, not sheathing the weapon yet.

The water stirred, and a vast shape rose from beneath. A reptilian snout broke the surface, its jaw opening to reveal massive fangs crusted with layers of filth and parasitic growths. The creature struck and the corpse vanished in a swirl of bubbles and black water.

Kaelvor could imagine no better end for Ozravel. The warlord responsible for so much death and suffering would be consumed in the gut of a beast, shat out, and left to dissolve in black water at the bottom of a hidden abyss — utterly destroyed and forgotten. A thin smile grew on his face as he turned and began the long climb back to the light.

***

The Colossus moved northwest across the wastelands. Pistons the size of tree trunks hammered deep in the heart of the engine room, the massive wheels churning grey clouds of ash that hung suspended in the air long after the machine had passed. The land was precarious and unpredictable, shifting its topography with every league. They traveled through a sprawling valley riddled with sulfurous vents that hissed yellow steam into the sky, then rolled over fields of obsidian that cracked beneath the mechanical weight.

Kaelvor stood alone atop the highest tower, his black armor dully reflecting the sky’s pale red light. The warlord’s banner had been torn down, then burned in the furnaces below. In its place, Kaelvor had placed Ozravel’s head, shoving the exposed windpipe onto an iron spike. The once-handsome face was swollen and discolored, with one eye missing and the remaining one filmed over with white, the long black hair swaying in the wind. Kaelvor had mounted the severed head as both a trophy and a declaration: all who laid eyes upon it would know that the old master of the Colossus was dead. And now the demon-wrought god machine belonged to the very people he had enslaved. It belonged to those who had survived his sadistic oppression, fought back, and reclaimed their freedom in blood.

Kaelvor leaned against the metal railing, staring at the distant volcanic slopes pulsing like an infected wound on the horizon. He let his mind drift to days long gone.

***

The funeral pyre roared with fury, carrying their mother’s body into the sky in a column of thick smoke. The tribe had gathered to pay tribute, and Kaelvor, a young boy, stood next to his father, his eyes staring blankly at the flames that consumed his mother’s remains. Draega stood beside him, hands curled into fists at her sides.

That night, long after the fire had burned to a bed of smoldering coals and the tribe slept, she’d crawled into his tent and lain beside him in the dark. They pressed their heads together and wept, neither speaking until sleep finally took them in a brief reprieve from their sorrow.

***

Now a boy of sixteen, Kaelvor was practicing his blade forms just beyond camp when six older boys circled him with their own wooden practice blades. He recognized the one with the bruised and swollen face; he had bested him in a sparring match the day before. The boy’s aggressive style had left Kaelvor with no choice but to end the match with a hard strike to the jaw. Apparently, the lad had not forgotten that match either, and was back for some face-saving retribution. It didn’t matter that Kaelvor was the chieftain’s son. Blackfang law provided no exceptions for lineage. A chieftain’s respect was earned through deeds, not through bloodline. And a leader who could not bleed among his own people was no leader at all.

Without a word, the pack of boys attacked. Kaelvor broke one’s nose and knocked the wind from another before the rest brought him down, their boots and wooden swords raining onto his ribs and skull until his vision swam and went red at the edges. He hadn’t cried out. Just weathered the blows and waited, curious to see if he’d still be breathing when the beating stopped.

Then Draega was there. Her wooden blade cracked across the back of one boy’s head. She faced the remaining three with teeth bared. By the time it ended, one boy was unconscious in the dirt and the last two were fleeing back to the tents, leaving trails of blood in their wake.

She watched them go, spat in their direction, then stood tall over her brother. Her lip was busted, and one eye was purple and swelling shut. She grinned down at him.

“You know, it’s easier to win a fight when you’re on your feet,” she said. “Not lying on the ground, curled up like a baby.”

“Who invited you?” Kaelvor grimaced as he stretched, checking for any broken bones. She held out a hand. He took it, and she yanked him to his feet.

“I don’t wait for invitations.” She spat blood. “I go where I want, when I want. Besides, no one beats my brother’s ass unless it’s me.”

He grinned, then caught her arm, pulling her into a bear hug, both of them laughing.

***

Boots scraped on the ladder rungs, pulling him back to the present moment. Saelira hauled herself up and took her place at his side. She scanned the horizon a moment before speaking.

“The Nightweavers are ready,” she said quietly. “They await in our chambers.”

He gave a single nod, then looked back at the horizon. I’m coming for you, sister. Not long now.

***

Kaelvor and Saelira entered their chamber to find three of the Nightweavers waiting. Cloth of midnight blue, patterned with intricate silver, wrapped around their bodies from the chest down. In place of arms, appendages of pale translucent light hung at their sides. The moonlight limbs grew from the cauterized scar tissue of their shoulders.

“Your arms… I had no idea…” Kaelvor’s eyes went wide.

The Osskari at the center, older than the other two, smiled. “We hung far too long from Ozravel’s chains. So long that our arms forgot how to heal.”

“The healers took them,” Kaelvor said, studying the scar tissue.

“No. Our arms were already gone, the warlord saw to that. The healers just made it official.” She lifted a small iron cup with her moonlight hand, the appendage moving with fluid grace. “But our powers allow us to make do.”

Kaelvor bowed his head. “I am sorry for what was done to you.”

One of the others replied, “The past cannot be changed. We have learned to carry its lessons with us and focus on the future.”

“Just so,” the eldest said. “I am Kamari, Moon-Speaker of the Nightweavers. And we are not here to speak of ghost limbs. We are here to discuss the battle ahead.”

Kaelvor nodded. “Please be seated.” He indicated a table and chairs. When they had all settled, he looked at the three women. “When we face my people, you and the rest of the Nightweavers will need to stand against the Shamanka.”

“The sorceresses of your tribe.”

“You know of them?”

“Indeed,” the Moon-Speaker replied. “We have felt them for two days now. We can sense their power north and west of here, growing closer. They are powerful. They do not simply draw from the arcane powers as we do. They rip it loose from wherever they find it: spirits, the land, the life essence of others if they so choose. Theirs is a primal, hungry magic.” Her moonlight hand brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

Kaelvor nodded, leaned forward. “Can you defeat them?”

“That remains to be seen. We can respond to their power with our own,” Kamari said. “But responding is not the same as defeating. I promise you this, Kaelvor of the Blackfang, when the Shamanka wield their power over the battlefield, ours will be there to meet it. And hopefully, we will be the wall that they break themselves against.”

“Let’s show the traitors what it is like to stand against our combined might,” Saelira said.

“There is something else we must discuss,” said Kamari.

Kaelvor met her eyes. “Yes?”

“We are able to sense your Shamanka because power of that nature radiates outward, creating signs of its existence. It is like seeing the glow of a bushfire over a hill. We have learned to look for those signs. There is another sign of great power that we have detected, an older power, something hidden, something with its fingers in all of our fates now.”

Kaelvor said nothing, a knot of dread building in his chest.

“Those signs connect to and flow from you, Kaelvor.” Kamari’s moonlight hand settled flat on the table. “It was on you when you first entered the Colossus, and it is on you now. It follows you. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it wants. We don’t know, but we suspect you do.”

“And you want to know what I know.”

“I want to know the full scope of what we are walking into. You are part of that answer. You are not all of it, but this power is linked to you.”

Kaelvor looked at Saelira and she gave him a small nod. “Tell them, Kael. Tell them everything.”

He raised his demon arm slightly, sighed, then set the scaled hand on the table. “There are many things you need to know, things that I would not believe if I heard them told, but I will tell you exactly what happened to me. It starts with the night I died.”

He told them everything. He told of his betrayal at the hands of his own people. He described how they maimed and murdered him, then left his body in a corpse pit as a final insult. He spoke of the darkness below and of the entity that dwelt there — the God Beneath. He told them of the bargain he made that gave him the demon eye and arm, and the sword fashioned from a fang of its own mouth. He told them of his resurrection.

When he finished, the chamber was quiet for a long while as the Osskari women processed his words with unreadable expressions.

“You have given us the truth of the past,” Kamari said at last, “and so I will give you the truth of the future. I do not think we are simply marching into a battle. No, my sense is that we are headed for the middle of a conflict that began long before any of us drew breath, and we are only small players in this game. Whatever awaits at the end of this road will be unlike anything any of us have experienced. What comes will change all of us — for better or worse I cannot say.”

Kaelvor leaned back and crossed his arms, lifted his chin slightly. “Does this mean the Nightweavers wish to withdraw?”

“No,” Kamari said instantly. “We made a vow, Kaelvor of the Blackfang, and we are not oath-breakers. You freed us from Ozravel’s chains. Thus, we will march with you as promised, and we will meet your tribe and the Shamanka on the field of battle.” She leaned forward. “Understand me, Chieftain, there is no road out of this — not forward, not back. Whatever is coming has already pulled us into its grasp. The only choice any of us have left is who we stand with when the moment of reckoning arrives.”

***

At dawn the following day, Kaelvor and Saelira stood atop the high tower once more as the Colossus continued onward. Heat vents along the exterior of the great machine glowed dimly in the low light of dawn. They watched the volcanic red glow on the horizon creep ever closer, the Nightweavers’ foreboding words from the night before still lingering in their ears.

Kaelvor exhaled, rolled his neck to release the tension and glanced at Saelira. He smiled, marveling not for the first time at her beauty. “We’re making decent time,” he said. “At this pace we should make it to the highlands before nightfall.”

Saelira opened her mouth to respond but let out a cry instead as the ground dropped beneath the weight of the Colossus’s front wheels.

Metal shrieked against stone as the machine slid forward into a pit that had not been there a moment ago. They stumbled forward, slamming hard into the railing, and clung tightly until the machine jolted to a halt, tilted at an angle.

Clouds of ash bloomed in the air, blotting out the morning’s meager light.

“What in the bloody fucking hells was that?” Kaelvor growled, then pushed himself upright from the rail.

Saelira stared down into the pit. “I don’t like this. It feels like a trap. Someone, or something, dug a trench just beneath the surface, waiting for us.”

“A trap?” Kaelvor echoed. “But who? What would do this?”

As if in answer to his question, noises arose from the darkness of the pit — sharp chittering and rhythmic thuds. Kaelvor’s eyes widened. “Gods below,” he whispered.

A wave of black spiders, each the size of a small horse, erupted from the yawning hole in the earth. Pale and gaunt figures sat upon the creatures’ backs, screaming maniacally and wielding crude weapons made from sharpened bones.

“Venom Drinkers,” Saelira hissed. She pulled her star-metal blades from her belt.

“Venom what?”

“Insane cultists who worship a spider goddess. They drink the venom of those spiders, and rumor has it, they even try to mate with them.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

The cult swarmed up the Colossus. Some of the cultists spotted Kaelvor and Saelira, then steered their eight-legged mounts toward the watchtower, while most moved to the doors and hatches along the machine’s hull and began pouring an acidic substance on the hinges. Steam rose as the caustic liquid ate through the metal, and the doors buckled inward.

The cultists ripped the doors free and entered. “They’re going for those inside,” said Kaelvor.

“They’ll find that the Osskari are no easy prey. We have our own hides to worry about,” said Saelira. She braced for the pack of spiders closing the distance.

From the door behind them, a handful of Osskari emerged.

“Kaelvor, War Queen! Are you alright?” blurted one of the men.

“We’re fine. For now,” Kaelvor said. “Warrior, I need you to get below. Tell those inside to unleash hell on these creatures. Let’s show them the full power of the Colossus.”

The man was gone as soon as Kaelvor finished his last word.

The spiders spilled over the rail, riders hunched against their backs, and the Osskari met them with their blades.

Kaelvor swept Godfang low, shearing the front four legs off the nearest spider. The thing dropped onto its belly, the stumps spraying fluid and flailing uselessly as it tried to find purchase and stand up. The rider lost his grip and fell forward onto the deck. Kaelvor snapped the man’s spine with a single stomp.

The next spider leapt over the dying one. Kaelvor caught the fangs on his demon arm, then plunged Godfang into its belly. He twisted the sword and tore sideways, ripping the giant arachnid nearly in half, the fangs still scraping against the scales of his arm as the body collapsed, its legs curling inward.

The Osskari moved like shadows of death, slipping between the cultists’ bone weapons and the spiders’ fangs, slashing at the tender parts of the mounts’ bodies and slicing vital arteries in the riders’ legs.

Saelira slid beneath the body of a charging mount with her crescent blade raised, slicing the creature’s abdomen neatly along its full length as it passed over her. She rolled clear just as the thing’s innards spilled out. She spun, burying her blade into the rider’s spine before he could leap free of the dying creature.

Hundreds more of the spiders poured from the hole in the earth, encircling the machine, and making their way up the walls.

Iron panels slid open along the Colossus’s flanks and metal cylinders emerged from the ports beneath. Kaelvor roared in delight as gouts of flame shot from the cannons, the heat washing over his face. The fire rolled down the outer walls in sheets, engulfing the climbing attackers. Spiders curled inward as they burned, legs drawing to their bellies, and dropped away screeching from the hull in blazing clumps. So too did the riders, flaming and screaming as they plummeted to their fiery deaths.

A second breath of fire blasted from the tubes, followed by a third. The air filled with the stink of burning hair and roasting flesh.

But the attackers kept coming. More of the cultists and their mounts flowed from the earth and scuttled up the walls, penetrating breaches in the hull.

The flame cannons couldn’t take them all.

More doors slid open on the walls of the Colossus and the Osskari activated hidden slag chutes, sending molten metal raining down on the attackers in glowing waterfalls. The swarm of spider cultists on the ground broke around this new onslaught. One spider tried to jump over the slag, but didn’t make the leap, landing in the molten metal, its legs incinerated instantly, followed by the rest of its body — it sank into the slag, dragging the screaming cultist on its back down with it.

The cult howled and beat their chests in fury. More of them pushed upward, weaving through the Colossus’s weapons and sliding into the growing gaps in its exterior.

Kaelvor cut a rider in half as it leapt toward him from its mount. A screeching woman landed on his back. He reached over his shoulder with his scaled hand, caught a fistful of hair, then yanked the cultist over, slamming her into the deck with a squelching crack.

Saelira’s crescent blades moved in deadly arcs, slicing spiders’ eyes and removing her attackers’ hands and fingers with surgical strikes.

A cultist came at Kaelvor swinging a large animal skull on a braided leather cord. He batted the skull away and landed a kick to the man’s ribs, connecting with a mound of bulbous flesh on his chest. The fleshy lump burst in a spray of fluid, and a cloud of small spiders poured out, hundreds of them, spilling down Kaelvor’s leg, swarming up his body. They crawled underneath his armor, a multitude of legs running across his skin. Kaelvor roared, ripping the armor free, and beat at his own chest with the palm of his scaled hand, crushing the spiders against himself. They kept coming out of the corpse, a slow black tide of clicking legs spreading across the deck.

Then they began to bite, each one a hot needle digging into his flesh. Their stings bloomed into a deep itch that crawled beneath his skin. He clawed at the sensation, tearing away his own flesh in deep gouges. His skin turned soft and grey, and the bite marks sank in on themselves. His molten blood surged into the wounds, but the venomous necrosis spread out from a mass of new bites, faster than he could heal.

He went down on one knee, tearing at himself, teeth bared. Through the haze of the venom’s neurotoxin and the itching pain came a voice.

Kamari the Nightweaver approached, her midnight blue wrap whipping in the wind, both moonlight arms raised and growing brighter. She brought her hands together in a sharp clap, and the sound reverberated out in a subsonic wave.

Every spider on Kaelvor’s body seized at once. They curled and fell, hitting the deck in a steady patter of tiny exoskeletons striking metal, dead where they lay.

The rotting itch in his skin slowed. His blood purged the wounds, his flesh going from grey to pink. Kaelvor examined his body, still feeling the spiders on his skin where there were none left.

Something in his mind triggered a warning, and the sound reached him before he actually heard it. A steady rumble growing in the earth.

The ground erupted, sending a cloud of grey ash and stones heavenward as something massive rose from beneath the plain.

A single leg emerged, black and jointed, longer than the Colossus was tall, covered in bristles the length of a spear. Then more legs followed, each unfolding, latching on to the earth to pull the emerging bulk free from below.

Wet fangs, each the size of a tower, hung beneath a cluster of eyes. Her gargantuan body was plated in carapace, old and cracked. The cultists on the ground went to their bellies in reverence as their Spider Goddess emerged.

“Gods below,” Saelira whispered. “She’s real.”

The Goddess turned to face the Colossus, sizing up this metallic foe. Then her forelimbs rose, and from the hairy, black, stinking pit below the fangs came a soundless scream.

The psychic blast hit all those aboard the Colossus, penetrating their minds. Invisible psionic hooks slid behind Kaelvor’s eyes and buried into his thoughts. He was no longer atop the metal tower; he was back on the table in the Blackfang camp with the Shamanka hacking his arm off, in slow motion this time, each bite of the axe an eternity of pain. This time, he screamed. Next came the eye removal, the blade descending for what seemed a century until the tip slid in, slicing the flesh and sliding behind his eye. The pressure and agony were unbearable. He roared in pain and fury, then came the nauseating pop as his eye came free.

Then he was back on the Colossus, on his knees, hands gripping his head. Godfang lay beside him. He panted, eyes wild as he scanned those around him. Saelira, the Osskari, all of them were on their knees, hands on their heads as they wrestled with whatever nightmare memories the Goddess’s scream unearthed in their minds.

Nausea rippled through him. He looked at the giant spider, saw her raise her forelimbs once more.

“Oh gods, not again.”

Then she screamed.

Kaelvor was back in the corpse pit. The stump of his arm and his gushing eye socket throbbed and burned. The first body landed on him, then the next. The air from his lungs pushed out with each added corpse, and his body slowly crushed until his skull began to crack. Worms and maggots slid into his nose, ears, and the exposed veins of his arms. He screamed, and blood and shit filled his open mouth. His one arm was pinned and useless in the mire of undead remains. He tried to breathe but could not draw breath. There was a gap in the bodies and overhead he saw torchlight. The Shamanka stared down at him in judgment.

Then Draega’s face appeared, tears in her eyes as she raised her hands, reaching for him. Then a hand covered her mouth, and a blade slid across her exposed throat. The muck covered his face, and he sank down, deeper and deeper still, suffocating in a pool of putrid death.

***

The spider’s scream invaded Saelira’s mind.

She was on the ash flats again with Kaelvor, crouching over the body of the dead berserker, removing the crude iron helmet to reveal the obsidian skin beneath it, the white hair, pointed ears, and the silver markings of her people. The Osskari’s lifeless face was slack and feral.

This time, the eyes opened. It drew breath. “War Queen! How could you let this happen to us?” Then its yellowed teeth snapped at her face.

She escaped the horrific vision with a ragged gasp. The spider’s next scream pulled her back into the nightmare.

She wore manacles around her wrists once again, the chain swaying overhead, her feet dangling above the stone. Around her the Nightweavers hung in their rows. Their gazes locked on her, blood running from their eyes and their ears. “You! You did this to us!”

Then she was in the cold room, nude, chained and surrounded by the Voidwitches. Ozravel held her pinned to one of the crystal cylinders, his hand around her throat, the lustful heat of his touch spreading through her belly and thighs. He spun her around, bent her over, and took her there, fucking her hard and mercilessly. Her body was a maelstrom of contradictions; her core rippled with orgasmic ecstasy even as nausea and revulsion overwhelmed her. She never wanted him to stop using her. She wanted to die. She grasped his hands on her hips, holding them lovingly. She wanted to break every finger off and force-feed them to him.

Time leapt forward, and she gave birth to his child. She held the thing in her arms, a perfect Osskari babe, but with burning eyes of Void-purple. It opened its mouth to reveal needle-like fangs before latching to her breast to feed. She screamed as it took hold, blood running down her breasts and stomach as the child drank everything she had.

The nightmare lifted and she was back on the Colossus, on her knees.

She raised her head and found Kaelvor across the deck, down on all fours.

***

In his mind, Kaelvor was still in the corpse pit, trapped, unable to breathe yet unable to die. He was stuck in an eternal suffocating crush.

Champion. The voice came muffled and distant.

Darkness swallowed him, and two glowing green eyes appeared.

The God Beneath. The thought appeared in his mind, then floated past like a leaf on a stream.

The voice came again, louder this time. You are not in the pit, boy. You climbed out long ago. She is twisting your mind. You must fight. Get up.

Kaelvor tried to breathe, but the crushing weight on his lungs let no air in.

The God’s command boomed: Fight, champion! GET UP!

His hand found Godfang and he lurched to his feet, back on the tilted deck of the Colossus.

He looked around, and there it was, on the horizon, the silhouette of a two-headed jackal.

The Osskari around him were still trapped in the spider’s psychic assault, and the unfolding chaos made his stomach churn. One warrior set his blade against his own throat and cut deeply. Two more threw themselves over the railing, falling limply to their deaths. A woman screamed at whatever mental visions she couldn’t escape; her eyes burst as she pressed her thumbs deep in their sockets, blood and white fluid running down her face as she wailed in torment. A man knelt next to the railing, beating his own forehead against the metal in a slow, brutal rhythm, his skull crushed flat at the front, nose pressed into his brain.

Kaelvor screamed for them to stop, but none could hear him.

The Goddess moved toward the Colossus, close enough now that her shadow fell across them. She reared back to unleash another scream, but the flame cannons took her by surprise, multiple streams converging on the nearest foreleg. The bristles on the limb caught, and flames rushed up her leg.

The creature recoiled and hammered the flaming limb against the ground, crushing many of her own cultists as she thrashed in desperation.

Around the deck the Osskari were returning to their senses, shaking free from the nightmares of her psychic assault.

Saelira moved next to Kaelvor, saw the Goddess attempting to extinguish the flaming limb. “That will not delay her for long,” she said.

Kaelvor grunted in agreement, his mind racing, searching for any way to defeat this enemy.

A sound came from behind them. They turned and saw the Nightweavers standing in a ring with their moonlight arms raised. The sorceresses’ voices joined in an unearthly sound. It was the most beautiful, melancholic song Kaelvor had ever heard, no words, only a serene chant that made his heart ache and his eyes fill with tears. The Nightweavers’ arms turned to small galaxies of swirling colors, growing so bright he had to shield his eyes.

Kamari, the Moon-Speaker, stepped forward. She let her wrap fall away, and her nude body unraveled and grew into a glowing column of dark light. Her shape thinned and stretched upward. One by one the other Nightweavers followed. Their wraps fell away, their black-skinned bodies morphing into pillars of the same dark light. The sorceresses’ combined essence coalesced and rose into the sky, high above the Colossus, and a magnificent form began to take shape.

“What are they doing?” Kaelvor asked. “What in the hells just happened to them?”

“They are becoming one.” Saelira’s eyes stayed locked on the shape overhead.

The shape stretched into a long, serpentine body. Its scales were stardust and glistening black obsidian. Its great wings unfolded, and the membranes resembled the night sky, nebulas and stars of various colors floating within that cosmic darkness. Its head was crowned with horns of luminescent pearl that burned with lunar radiance, and its eyes were two glowing orbs of blue-white light.

The air went cold. Frost bloomed across the railings and spread over the deck plates.

Saelira gasped. “They have done it. They’ve created the sacred Night Dragon. I have only heard tales of this creature. They have become something this world has not seen in over a thousand years.”

Kaelvor’s eyes moved from the dragon to the Spider Goddess, still trying to extinguish her flaming limb. “Can they kill her?”

“If they cannot, we are doomed. They also take a huge risk. If the dragon dies, every Nightweaver joined in its making will perish as well.”

The Night Dragon turned in the air above them and sailed toward the Goddess.

“Then it had better not die,” Kaelvor said.

“No,” Saelira agreed. “It had better not.” She pulled an Osskari aside. “Warrior, get to the engine room as fast as you can. I want every furnace pushing full power to pull us back. We need to get out of this pit, and put some distance between us and the cultists’ hive.”

The man nodded, then slipped through a nearby door.

***

Out on the plain, the two god-like forces met.

The Night Dragon dropped from the sky, its clawed feet slamming into the spider with enough force to topple a fortified city gate.

The Goddess stumbled sideways, legs churning to keep herself upright, then responded with her own attack. Her body quivered, and a cloud of spear-sized bristles sprayed toward the dragon, dozens of the projectiles embedding in its body, some tearing fist-sized holes through wing membranes.

The dragon flew in low, catching one of the spider’s legs in its jaws and ripping it off at the joint. The Goddess’s exoskeleton tore free with a wet crack.

The spider spun with fluid speed and sank its fangs into the dragon’s neck. Wings beat hard against the spider’s face, and the two creatures went down in a tangled crash that shook the earth. Venom welled up from the punctures and ran down the dragon’s scaled body, leaving trails that sizzled and steamed as it thrashed, trying to free itself.

Kaelvor’s demon hand tightened on the rail until the iron bent. His only chance against the Blackfang’s Shamanka lay with the women inside that dragon, and things were not going well for them.

***

Deep in the belly of the Colossus, Saelira’s order reached the engine room.

Every furnace was pushed to its limits. Giant bellows stoked the flames until the metal grates burned white-hot. Then the crew set the wheel mechanisms to reverse, and for the first time since its construction, the Colossus moved backward.

The wheels turned slowly, metal grinding against stone and packed earth until the machine pulled free of the trench and sat level on the plain once again.

***

“They’ve done it,” Saelira shouted over the cacophony of battle. “We’re free!”

Kaelvor caught both fangs of a spider rushing him, one in each hand, then yanked in opposite directions, ripping the thing’s head in half. He twisted one of the fangs, ripped it free, flipped it in his grip, then slammed the point of it into the chest of the rider.

More cultists came, but their advance had slowed as they realized the warriors on the Colossus’s deck were no easy victims.

“Hold your ground,” Saelira called to her warriors. “Yield nothing.”

***

The Goddess still held her bite. The dragon tilted its head and released a breath of liquid starlight — where it struck, the spider’s carapace glowed white and cracked, frost and steam spreading together across the shell.

The spider released its grip to retreat, but the frozen limbs only quivered in place.

The dragon swept its tail in a low arc that caught all four limbs at once, and the frozen appendages burst apart into glittering shards.

The Goddess toppled over, and the ground shook under the force of her body landing. Her remaining legs flailed violently at the air. The Night Dragon lunged on top of her, its fangs tearing into the soft chitin of her underbelly in a relentless barrage of savage bites, ripping the armored belly wider with each one while her remaining legs beat uselessly against its back. Pale green fluid poured from the wounds.

Kaelvor saw the opportunity. "Forward!” He roared. “Sound the horn! Forward with everything we have!"

Three long notes rang out from behind him and carried down through the hull to the engine room below. The Colossus turned toward the battle of god-beasts and lurched forward, gaining speed as the churning spiked wheels built momentum. Cultists in its path were crushed to jelly in the ash.

The Colossus turned toward the battle of god-beasts and lurched forward, gaining speed as the churning spiked wheels built momentum. Cultists in its path were crushed to jelly in the ash.

Kaelvor and Saelira moved to the rail and watched the gap close.

The Goddess thrashed against the dragon holding her, legs raking and body bucking uselessly.

The dragon pulled away and flew upward right before the wheels of the Colossus came down on that great arachnid head, and it burst apart in a wave of gore and gelatinous meat that sprayed in every direction. The creature’s remaining legs went straight for a heartbeat, quivering, and then slowly curled in as life left its body.

***

The cultists broke; their voices were a chorus of wailing shrieks as they fled back into the pit from where they had come. The Colossus’s cannons released bursts of flame that took many more of their numbers down as they retreated.

The dragon hovered over the Colossus, then transformed into a column of light that slowly separated into human forms on the deck. The light faded and the Nightweavers stood before Saelira and Kaelvor. Their bodies nude and bloodied, their moonlight arms dim and flickering in and out of existence.

Kamari stumbled, and Kaelvor caught her, helped her stand. “Are you okay, Moon-Speaker?”

She smiled at him, and her voice came out hoarse but strong. “I will survive, Chieftain.”

He exhaled and felt the tension drain from his shoulders.

Kamari gazed at him. “Since meeting you, Kaelvor, the Osskari have slain the prince of the mother of demons. And today, we battled and defeated the Spider Goddess herself.” She let out a cough, then stared back into his eyes. “Yours is a path of wonder and destruction.”

“Indeed. And we’re only getting started,” he grinned.

***

Two days later there came a knock at their chamber door. The scout stepped into the room with a quick bow.

“War Queen. Chieftain. We have found them.”

Kaelvor’s eyes widened. “You’re sure it’s the Blackfang?”

“There is no doubt.”

The man bowed again before stepping out.

Kaelvor sat in a chair, that familiar fire burning in his chest.

After everything, he had arrived. He had located his tribe, and the time of vengeance had come.

It’s all led to this. Kaelvor and his army will face the Blackfang tribe — his betrayers, his murderers — in Chapter 8 (coming soon).

Are you enjoying Kaelvor’s story? Would you like to read another tale set in the same world (Etheroth)? If so, check out my novella Black Sun Revenant, available now in paperback and on Kindle: https://a.co/d/0i6KTPSD

Serialized Fiction:

Godfang

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8 (coming soon)

Black Sun Revenant

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

The Tower and the Darkness (an epic dark fantasy - forthcoming)

Chapter 1 (coming soon)

Short Stories & Flash Fiction:

The Wraith of Nhalvarn

Skull of the Empress

The Map and the Knife

The Tomb of the Jaguar King

Iron-Tooth

The Valley

Hell-bound

The Wolf Skull Helm

Sins of the Past

The Spine of Creation

The Gravedigger

The Beast of Blackpeak

Non-Fiction:

The Paradox of Chosen Suffering: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Why We Love Horror Movies

Poetry:

Teal Empire

Enjoy the stories I’m telling here? Want to see more? Feed the beast that which it desires: coffee!

The gravedigger’s shovel bit into the icy earth with a gravelly crunch. Freezing rain fell, hissing softly against mud so dark it was nearly black. The light from the lantern at the grave’s edge flickered through the cloudy amber glass.

The church compensated him in silver for his work, but the real payment was the silence. He’d always preferred to be alone, and the corpses didn’t make small talk or ask questions – just the way he liked it.

He slung the last shovelful of muddy slop from the hole and climbed out.

He looked around. Still no sign of the body. He’d received the message that morning that his services were needed, along with a description of the burial plot, but no other details. The thick, dark paper the letter came in was different from what he was used to. Usually the priest just gave him a simple folded shred of parchment with instructions. This envelope was sealed with a glob of glossy black wax pressed with the seal of a star surrounded by a circle. Odd, but he didn’t care. A bag of silver accompanied the letter, and that was what mattered.

He sat on a stone beneath the skeletal tree, pulling his wool cloak tighter to keep out the wet chill, and waited. He stared at the empty grave and then at the empty road leading to the cemetery. Where the fuck are they with the worm food?

Then he saw it: the shape of a cart, coming his way. No lantern. That was strange.

As it approached, the gravedigger felt icy claws take hold within his chest. The horse pulling the cart was so gaunt that he couldn’t believe the creature was still alive. Further, the thing was blind; its eyes were a milky blue-white and didn’t blink once even in the steady drizzle of the freezing rain.

The man driving the cart, if indeed that’s what it was, was somehow worse.

The driver’s body was covered in a thick, matte black cloak; only his hands, pale as milk, were visible on the reins.

The cart came to a stop, and the gravedigger saw the corpse wrapped in a burlap sack and bound tightly with heavy rope. He glanced back at the driver in his midnight cloak, and all the curses he’d conjured in his mind earlier for making him wait vanished.

“Very well then,” he blurted, not knowing what else to say.

Before he could reach for the corpse, the driver’s hooded head turned towards him and stared. The gravedigger couldn’t make out a face in that impenetrable darkness. His knees began to tremble, and suddenly his bladder felt a screaming urge to release its contents.

The cloaked creature craned its neck, seeming to investigate the grave itself. Its hood angled back towards the gravedigger, then a voice that sounded like a coffin lid with rusted nails creaking open came from that black circle.

“Dig deeper. It will not stay buried if the grave is too shallow.”

At those words, the human-shaped burlap package began to thrash violently in the cart.

The gravedigger stumbled back, and his bladder finally lost the fight and emptied itself against his will.

Sebril drew his broadsword as he walked the last length of the dragon-spine bridge, the blue metal blade gleaming beneath the light of the white sun. The citadel loomed overhead. The blood-colored doors, tall as twenty men, groaned open at his presence, revealing the passageway beyond that ended at the dais holding the obsidian throne.

A shadow seemed to detach from the black stone chair as the undead princess stood, her pale body wrapped in rotting silks, witchfire burning in her eyes.

Pointing his blade at her, Sebril shouted, “You have sat that throne for a millennium, usurper! Your reign ends today, sister!” He raised the sword to the skies, and called out to the Goddess Below the Waves, the ruler of the devils of the deep. Spiny wings with crimson membranes tore from his back, horns sprouted from his temples, fangs and claws ripped free from his flesh. Black lightning struck all around him. The ground quaked and stones rose into the air, levitating in the pull of his sorcery.

But the undead princess did not flinch at his display. She spread her arms, and the sky glowed in kaleidoscopic bursts of ancient magic. Flashes of green, cobalt, black, white, silver, and arterial red flickered through the fabric of reality. Her body twisted like a living corkscrew as she grew, turning into a glistening white demonic serpent, eyes blazing like supernovas. She roared, and the sound wave set the air around her aflame.

The two colossal forces flew toward each other — toward a battle that would shape time, space, and memory itself.

They met at the center of the main hall, and the citadel simply vaporized around them under the force of that collision, a clash that rattled the very spine of creation. The cosmic warriors landed blows that shifted tectonic plates in catastrophic quakes. The oceans steamed and turned red under the heat of their fury. Though men could never explain it, this day would be remembered in history unending as the day of the great cataclysm, the day the earth shook.

When the fighting ceased, the two stood in a blackened crater that had once been the country of their birth. Sebril held the hilt of his sword with both hands, the blade buried in his sister’s heart. She looked down at the wound, then slowly raised her head, a fanged smile growing across her face.

“You…fool! Just like all the others, you think death is the way to defeat me.” She grabbed both his wrists, pulling his hands from the hilt. “I have embraced the dark. And now, I feed on death!” She ripped both arms free of their sockets.

Sebril fell to his knees as jets of blood and neon cosmic energy burst from the ragged pits where his arms had been. He screamed until the spirits of his ancestors erupted like a geyser from his throat and spun in a celestial cyclone into the heavens.

His sister, the undead princess of the obsidian throne, pulled his blue metal blade from her chest and tossed it aside. “And now, my brother, all of reality will kneel before me. I will erase your memory from the minds of every soul that has ever lived. It will be as if you never existed. But you will exist. You will exist in a dimension fashioned for you to relive the moment I defeated you, over and over again, for all eternity. Thus is the power of death.”

Sebril could only stare as his sister opened the portal, the doorway to his eternal torment.

The smell of her village burning was all around, even reaching beneath the floorboards where Tia hid curled and shaking. Boots stomped overhead, motes of dust sifting down around her.

The reaver known as the Red Boar laughed, and his words were guttural and condescending as he shoved her father to the floor. Through a tiny knothole in the pinewood, she met the gaze of the only member of her family she had left, one last time. She bit her lip to keep from crying out, and watched her father’s eyes go wide, then still and glassy as the reaver’s blade plunged through his back. He sucked in a breath of agony, then loosed a final exhale as his blood pooled and dripped through the cracks, onto her chest.

She memorized the face of the reaver, the man who had butchered her village and her father. And that man’s death became the focus of her existence from that day forward.

Over the next twenty-five years, she trained relentlessly, forging her body into a weapon, a dark and violent predator shaped and driven by grief, pain, and anger.

When at last she found the Red Boar, he was no longer the mountain of muscle and cruel dominance from that black day in her memory. He was an old man. Gaunt and frail, asleep in his bed. Tia crept through the shadows of his chamber, pulled the dagger made from her father’s femur loose from her belt, covered the man’s mouth with one hand, then drove the dagger in, twisting and pressing slowly, letting the fucker feel every inch of his past sins sliding into his flesh to pierce his heart and make him pay for his brutal deeds.

The old man’s wide eyes looked into hers in bewildered fear.

Good, she thought. Let his death be painful and his journey to hell a path of confusion.

The kingdom’s northern coasts had never been worth much. It was a no-man’s land of permafrost, shattered shoreline, and stones covered in poisonous black lichen. The ground yielded no timber, no gems, no ore, and no crops. Only the beasts of this region thrived: grey bears and large tusked cats that screamed in the dark with sounds like dying women. A hunter brave enough to traverse it could make a fortune in pelts. That is, if they survived.

Prince Anmar had ridden to the coast with three of his house’s finest huntsmen and a cart ready to be filled with their kills. On the third day, they tracked the largest bear any of them had seen, and it refused to die. It carried fifteen of their arrows in its hide and bled rivers as it ran. The men pursued the beast as it retreated along the coast, riding at a steady gallop, the icy wind off the green sea whipping their fur-lined cloaks around them.

The chase ended when they found the bear lying dead before a weathered stone door set into a hillside.

A burial mound, Anmar thought. He checked his map and found nothing marked on that shore, no sign that this barrow existed at all.

He dismounted and examined the door, brushing away frost and years of grit to reveal a sigil of a wolf’s head surrounded by thorns. He knew that symbol; the history of his house had documented it well. It was the sigil of House Varael, the sworn enemies of his own family. Three centuries ago, every last Varael had been destroyed by his ancestors in a single bloody encounter, an act so brutal that most historians and scholars called it an extermination rather than a battle. Every castle, temple, and monument bearing the wolf symbol had been burned or torn down. This Varaelean tomb, though, had somehow gone unnoticed and undisturbed. Until now.

He called his men over and ordered them to open the barrow. Using spears and lengths of driftwood, the men pried until the stone barrier slid just enough to leave a man-sized gap. Cold, stale air burst from the opening. Earthy smells of damp soil, wet fur, and old leather swirled around them.

The prince sent the men to take the bear’s pelt and dress the meat. He lit a torch and loosened his sword in its scabbard. You fool. The last Varael has been dead for three hundred years. A prince does not fear dust. He rolled his shoulders, raised his chin, and slid through the small opening.

His torchlight spread across the chamber. Skeletal faces emerged from the dark. Hollow black eyes glaring at him.

Anmar lurched back, blade half drawn, heart hammering, before his eyes made out what he was seeing. Corpses. A heap of them piled just inside the door. Their skin had gone brown and leathery, their lips shriveled back from their teeth.

He raised the torch and looked closer. The inside of the stone door was scored with hundreds of scratches. The fingers of the dead ended in split and broken nails. These people had been sealed in alive, had spent their final days in the dark, hungry and clawing at the stone until death claimed them.

Many of the corpses wore tarnished bronze symbols of the Varael wolf and thorns. Understanding grew, a blossom of revulsion in his gut. These damned souls had been imprisoned and left here to rot by his own ancestors; he could think of no other explanation.

Past the corpses lay rotted banners and broken shields. On a slab of dark stone lay a suit of armor, a single skeleton curled beside it. The helm was terrifying, black iron hammered into a wolf’s head with bared teeth.

He lifted the helm, examining it carefully. The metal was so cold it almost burned against his palms. Dust sifted from inside. The design was mesmerizing, the most intricate smithing work he’d ever seen. And before he knew why, he raised the thing and set it on his head.

The visor slammed shut. A metal vine of thorns grew from the interior and sank into the meat of his throat like fishhooks.

Then came the voice, not through his ears but from behind his eyes, in his skull.

House Kharos blood. The words were slow and breathy, like a connoisseur sniffing a fine wine and naming its underlying notes. Your blood is the same as those that sealed us here.

The prince pulled at the helm, trying to yank it free, but it would not budge, the hooks digging deeper into the tender flesh of his throat. The voice came again, louder this time, tinged with hate. I have waited for so long in this ice and darkness, for someone, anyone, to come. And now I have an heir of my enemy’s house. How serendipitous.

“What are you?” Anmar’s choked voice cracked with pain.

Shall I tell you what your kin did to my people, Kharos? How they killed the children first, making the mothers watch. Should I tell you how they drove the men out onto the ice until it shattered beneath them, letting the winter sea finish the work? Do you want to hear how they sealed me and my family into this hole, to freeze and starve in the dark?

“Stop! Leave me be!” Anmar pulled at the helm again. Blood ran hot and wet down his chest as the thorns buried themselves further.

Silence! Put on the rest of the armor, Kharos. All of it. We have so much work to do.

His mind refused, but his hands moved in obedience to the voice. He lifted the breastplate from the slab and placed it over his chest, and he cried out as more steel thorns wrapped around his torso, ripping through his tunic to latch onto flesh and muscle beneath. Then he donned the rest, gauntlets, greaves, and every piece released more thorns, burrowing into his skin and locking into place.

The entity was in his mind now, sifting through his memories like someone searching for an item in a messy drawer. And the connection went both ways. Memories that weren’t his own flooded through the psychic link. He saw a Varaelean castle burning. He saw naked men herded by soldiers with spears onto grey ice until it cracked and the sea claimed them. He saw a kneeling lord with his hands on a suit of empty armor on a black slab, whispering an enchantment with his dying breath. Hatred swirled like a maelstrom through three hundred years of icy dark.

Now you understand, boy. Take me to your house, the keep of your father, the one on the shores of the sea. Take me there.

“No!” Anmar tried to refuse, but his legs were already moving.

The voice laughed.

His huntsmen were waiting back at camp. The wolf helm’s visor was up, and they stared uncertainly at the sight of their prince’s face in the bizarre suit of armor. Each died by his blade before they could draw their own weapons.

Anmar rode south, staring blankly from the iron wolf’s face, until his father’s keep appeared on the horizon, the ocean’s icy teal waves crashing against sea walls covered in brine and frost.

The guards at the gate readied their spears at the approaching knight in black wolf-armor. The rider raised the visor, revealing the prince’s face beneath. His countenance startled them: pale, dark veins visible beneath the skin, eyes wide and bloodshot.

“Open the gate,” Anmar demanded.

The guards glanced at each other, hesitated, then raised the portcullis.

He dismounted, not waiting for a stable boy to take his horse, and strode into the keep. The voice breathed heavily in his skull. Yes. Yes. The night of reckoning is upon House Kharos.

Tears formed in Anmar’s eyes as his legs carried him forward against his will.

His brother Horis saw him first in the main hall. “Anmar! Back so soon, man? Did you freeze your balls off?” He chuckled. “How was the hunt? And… why are you wearing that ridiculous armor?” His smile faded into a perplexed frown. Anmar’s enslaved arm opened his brother’s throat in a flash of steel. Blood spilled out in a deluge, and Horis fell forward, convulsing.

“No! Please! I beg you! Stop!”

The prince stepped over his little brother’s corpse and continued down the hall. His own voice screamed in protest as the one in his head laughed in perverse delight.

He hadn’t made it far before his parents appeared, candles in hand, following the sound of his screaming. Two guards stood before the king and queen — Anmar’s sword took both their heads in a single stroke. His mother screamed just before he drove his blade through her heart. He left the blade embedded there and seized his father by the throat, both clawed gauntlets squeezing as he forced the old man to his knees.

Their eyes met, Anmar’s full of tears as he took his father’s life with his own hands. Yet his lips curled into a sneer, and an alien voice came from his throat. “The Kharos king dies by his own blood. How delicious. A fair trade for what your family did to mine, don’t you think?”

His father’s face turned purple, his eyes bulged, and the thrashing slowed, then stopped. He released his grip and the king’s body hit the floor

Pulling the sword from his mother’s bloody breast, he walked down another hallway. Anmar’s mind exploded in primal terror. “No! Not them! No! Helena! Helena, run!”

He reached a large oaken door and kicked it open, splinters spraying through the air. His wife, Helena, stood in the far corner, arms outstretched, their two small children hiding behind her back.

The voice panted, whispering darkly. And now you will snuff out the last of your bloodline. Do it!

Helena stared at him, wide-eyed, jaw trembling. “Anmar, my love. What are you doing? It’s us. Please stop.”

Anmar’s legs took him one step toward his family, the bloody sword dripping in his hand. He heard his children crying.

“No,” he said, and this time it was not a plea.

Summoning everything he had, he forced himself to turn the other way. His body moved like a man wading through mud. The voice shrieked in his skull. Kill! Kill them as they killed mine! The thorns tightened, steel points sawing deeper into flesh. Pain like molten lightning tore through him, searing every nerve. Still, he pressed forward, away from his family, toward the open window and the breeze blowing in off the sea.

Obey!

His bones cracked. His teeth splintered and shattered. Blood poured from his nose and ears. One eye bulged and burst in its socket. He kept moving towards the window. The entity screamed into his marrow, forced him to bite off his own tongue. He spat it free, swallowed his own blood, reached the window, and pushed himself through.

He plummeted down the face of the cliff, the cold and salty ocean wind rising to meet him.

The water hit like a blade of ice. The armor pulled him down, heavy as an anchor. He sank fast, fathoms of black water closing over him. The voice was begging at first, then screaming in its own terror, offering to set him free. Anmar’s lungs filled. He felt the undertow pull him out, deeper, farther, until he settled into silt and the crushing dark.

Blind, pale things struck at him, testing this strange new creature.

The soul of the last lord of House Varael screamed into water too deep to carry the sound, locked inside the ancient armor like a dungeon cell, wearing a drowned man’s bones, knowing it would never be found. It had waited three hundred years for its revenge and would now spend eternity in the watery abyss.

On the face of Anmar, eldest prince of House Kharos, was fixed a smile. In the end, the final command to his body had been his own.

Mortal tongues had no word strong enough for the cruelty of Morgra Vull.

In every corner of the world they cursed her name. Cities watched the horizon, fearing her silhouette would appear. She was the apocalypse made flesh. A warrior without equal. She wanted no crown, no gold, no lands. Only the killing. The carnage was her reward.

Death only made her worse.

She died bloody and laughing, impaled on a forest of spears, surrounded by more slain than living, and Hell swallowed her down its raw gullet—but its lord does not waste a good weapon. Seven arch-demons had rebelled and fled his realm. The bargain was simple: hunt the traitors down, shatter them, and remain in the mortal world, to kill as she pleased. Morgra accepted. For freedom. For the thrill of the hunt. For the carnage.

The city of Vhalmorith had held ten thousand people. Every one of them had been slaughtered here in the great hall of the keep, its sunken floor turned into a shallow lake of blood, littered with macabre flotsam and jetsam. Severed limbs drifted in the crimson murk. Half a head floated past, one eye staring up, the other bobbing from a nerve like a fisherman’s line, the exposed brain seeping into the blood. A body hung from a chandelier of antlers, hooked and suspended by its own guts, blood dripping like molten rubies.

The stench of copper and bile hung thick over the lake as Morgra waded in. The blood dragged at her knees, warm at the center of the hall, congealing at the edges. Things beneath the surface bumped against her legs and floated away.

The arch-demon Zhavrek sat the throne, the queen’s flayed skin spread above him, flapping softly like a translucent tapestry. The king lay across the demon’s lap, still alive, two clawed hands digging inside him, pulling out each organ before placing it on the armrest in a glistening row.

The demon’s head lifted from his work. Milk-white eyes found hers across the hall, and a smile spread across his face, showing teeth like heated iron.

“The black lord sends a mortal to do his work,” Zhavrek sneered. “Pathetic.”

“I am mortal no longer, pig.” She drew her serrated battle axe. “And you will die screaming by my hand.”

Zhavrek raised the king’s heart and bit into it like a ripe tomato, dark crimson rivulets running down his chin. “A hell-bound. Then come die again.”

They met in the middle of the lake of blood. Zhavrek swung his clawed hand down. Morgra’s axe caught it between the middle fingers, splitting the arm to the elbow in two flopping halves. The demon roared, seized her skull, and forced her beneath the surface.

The world went red and airless. Corpse-pieces pressed against her face in the murk.

“I have tasted millions of humans,” Zhavrek said, his deep voice reaching her through the blood, distorted and wet. “But never a hell-bound. I will crack your bones and suck the marrow.”

She locked his ankle, found the toes, then began breaking them. Three muffled gristly snaps reverberated through the blood before the demon howled and released her. As she rose streaming gore, his claws lashed out and raked across her chest, deep enough to scrape bone. Blood sheeted down her front and joined the lake.

She ignored the wound and raised her dripping axe.

The demon’s scorpion-like tail shot out. She spun, avoiding the piercing appendage, and opened the demon’s belly in a horizontal arc. Iridescent-black intestines spilled steaming into the lake, and Zhavrek stumbled backward, screaming and clutching at the pouring entrails.

A strand of his black guts drifted toward her across the blood. Morgra lifted the dripping intestine from the lake and began wrapping it around one forearm like a windlass, hauling him closer one twist at a time. The demon’s screams of pain climbed an octave.

Her axe took his right arm at the shoulder. Then the left. She grabbed him by the throat, marched him backward, and slammed him onto the throne.

She grinned, pinning the demon with her knee, and reached for a handful of guts from the king's cooling corpse.

“You wanted a taste of a hell-bound,” she said. “Finish your meal first.”

Morgra pinched his nose closed and shoved the viscera down his throat. Zhavrek bucked and gagged, gullet convulsing around the mass, trying to scream through a windpipe packed with raw meat. She jammed fistful after fistful, cramming each handful deeper with her thumb. The bucking turned to convulsions, then shudders. Then Zhavrek sagged against the throne, milk-white eyes bulging.

Morgra laughed and patted his stuffed cheek, the wet slaps echoing through the silent hall, then waded toward the great doors, the lake lapping in her wake, the only remaining sound in Vhalmorith Keep. She stepped through the great doors out into the gray light of morning, and the mountain wind swirled around her.

Six of Hell’s traitors remained. She hoped they would die as deliciously.

For two years the Empress’s army had marched east, and nothing could stop it. Fortresses that stood in her way were burned. Lords who refused to kneel were hanged by the neck from the highest spires of their cities, naked and castrated.

Then the army reached the blank space at the edge of its maps, and the crusade of conquest funneled into a valley of green-black trees, walled on both sides by jagged, snow-capped peaks so high one had to lean back to see their summits. There was no way over, no way around—the only path east lay through the unknown valley.

The valley floor was choked with dense timber and broken ground, too tight and treacherous to move an army through without a clear path. To advance blind would be to lose soldiers, horses, and supplies.

The Empress sent scouts to plot the way ahead, yet the first party never returned, nor did the second. The third stumbled out of the trees four days after entering it. They swore they had marched due east by sun and star, yet they had become lost. It seemed the valley changed every day, its landmarks shifting around them. Soon, they could no longer tell which way was forward and which was back.

And so, the army waited. Most nights, a faint trembling ran through the ground beneath the tents, and a low moaning wind drifted up from the valley.

The Empress summoned the royal cartographer, Wulfric, to the command tent, where a great map lay spread across the table, weighted at its corners with daggers. The eastern portion, where the valley began, remained blank vellum.

“Three scouting parties,” she said. “Two deserted me or died. The third wandered in circles for four days and came home babbling like fools who cannot follow their own trail.”

“Your Majesty, if I may,” Wulfric said. “Those were seasoned scouts, the best pathfinders in your army. Perhaps we should proceed with caution. There could be beasts or barbarian tribes in the valley.”

The Empress slammed her fist on the table. “I don’t need excuses, cartographer. I need a road. Draw me one.” She threw a blank roll of vellum before him. “Take fifty of my royal guard. They will slaughter any beast or barbarian that stands in my way.”

***

He rode out at dawn with fifty of the Empress’s elite soldiers, hardened warriors in dark armor under the command of Sergeant Volda, a one-eyed woman of unyielding grit.

The journey proved difficult. On the first day, the soldiers hacked through black-barked trees that bled sap thick as clotted blood, and by dusk they had gained less than a mile. They made camp beneath a rock formation, and sleep took the exhausted soldiers quickly.

The ground shook them awake in the darkest hour. A violent tremor rolled through the valley, and with it came a low and hollow moaning. Then the tremor stopped all at once, and the silence that followed was somehow worse than the quake. None of them slept again before dawn.

At first light, they saw the land had shifted. The rock formation they had camped beneath now stood in the opposite direction.

“This is madness,” Wulfric said. “This valley is haunted, or cursed, or something I have no word for. We should turn back.”

Sergeant Volda looked at the rock formation for a long moment, then turned to face him. “If we return without a map, the Empress will take our heads. Yours first, then mine.” She placed a hand on the sword hilt at her belt. “Try to leave and I will cut you down myself. Prepare to march.”

No one spoke of turning back again. And so it went: for five more days they cut a path forward, and each night the valley quaked and moaned, rearranging their surroundings.

On the sixth day, the forest thinned and gave way to a circular clearing of soft green moss. The air was sweet and thick with the smell of spoiled honey. Across the clearing, the bones of men and beasts lay scattered in the moss.

“I don’t like this, Sergeant,” Wulfric said. “Something is wrong.”

“Find your backbone, cartographer.” Sergeant Volda drew her sword. “Soldiers, at the ready!” she shouted, followed by the sound of fifty swords leaving their scabbards.

The ground began to tremble.

Wulfric looked down as the fibers of moss elongated, then whipped around his horse’s legs. The animal shrieked in terror, throwing him from the saddle.

The center of the clearing sank, and the ground became a funnel of steep walls. The moss sloughed away in sheets, revealing glistening gray-white flesh.

Then the valley opened its throat: a ribbed gullet of pale, veined meat, wide enough to devour the company. Tentacles tipped with hooked black barbs lashed out, snagging horses and soldiers. The sweetness in the air curdled with the stink of bile and old carrion. A wind howled up from the darkness, hot and wet, the same low moan they had heard each night.

The ground tilted steeper still. Soldiers and horses slid into the throat in the earth, screaming and trying to cling to something, anything, as they were dragged down.

Wulfric slid with the rest. He laughed, a broken sound lost in the howl of the beast’s breath. There had never been a valley. There was only this creature, hungry and patient. He opened his hand, letting the unfinished map flutter away in the stinking wind.

By the next morning, the basin lay flat and still once more. Slowly, the picked-clean bones of horses and men pressed up through the green moss.

Think about the absurdity of eating a ghost pepper. You sit down at a table and put something in your mouth that your body registers as a chemical burn. Your eyes water. Your skin flushes. Your nervous system begs you to stop. Then you take a breath and go back for another bite.

On paper, engaging in pain-inducing activities for pleasure makes no sense. Yet suffering is clearly on the menu of human recreation: sour candy, rigorous exercise, BDSM. Psychologists call this phenomenon “chosen suffering,” and it is not a glitch. It is one of the most sophisticated hacks our biology has produced.

And nowhere is the paradox more apparent than in horror entertainment. Horror fans like me pay hard-earned money to sit in dark theaters and watch people get hunted by monsters (human or supernatural, pick your poison). We stay up past midnight with a novel about a serial killer that has us double-checking the locks on our doors. Whatever the format of the terrifying story, something specific is happening in your brain during those moments.

Comfort: Too Much of a Good Thing

To understand why anyone pays to be terrified, let’s start with a more basic question: does pure comfort truly satisfy us? Psychologist Paul Bloom examines this topic in his book The Sweet Spot (Bloom, 2021), arguing that human beings do not thrive in pure, consequence-free comfort. That sounds counterintuitive, right? We think we want comfort and pleasure unending. But put someone in a perfectly cushy, temperature-controlled room with every need instantly met, and they do not stay fulfilled for long. They get miserably bored. Without friction, there is no traction.

We need effort to establish value. There is a term for this: eudaimonia. It is a deeper, purpose-driven form of happiness, as opposed to fleeting hedonic pleasure like eating candy (Ryan & Deci, 2001). We assign greater value to those experiences that cost us something.

Horror entertainment is that concept in practice. A scary story charges an emotional toll on us before it pays out. You spend ninety minutes, or two hundred pages, in dread, and “surviving” the horrific events delivers a dopamine bath because your body believes you’ve earned it. The pleasure isn’t free. That’s exactly why it works.

But earning implies risk, and watching a horror film from a couch is not dangerous. So what exactly is going on with your body and brain during these experiences?

Benign Masochism: The Safe Threat

This is where Paul Rozin’s theory of benign masochism comes in (Rozin et al., 2013). The name sounds like an oxymoron, but the actual psychological mechanism is elegant.

When you watch a horror film, your body mounts a naturally occurring fight-or-flight response. Your heart rate rises. Pupils dilate. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. Your biology believes you are in actual danger, and your body goes berserk. At the same time, however, a protective frame in your brain knows the experience is only a simulation (Apter, 1992). It’s like riding a roller coaster. Your stomach drops, your nervous system screams that you are falling, yet your conscious mind notes the reinforced steel bar across your lap, keeping you safe. You are literally manufacturing a crisis and tricking your own survival instincts for a thrill.

The most interesting part is that the reward comes from what researchers call the “contrast effect.” The euphoria does not come from the fear itself. Fear is the setup, the gateway. The pleasure comes from the surge of dopamine and endorphins that hits the moment you realize you are safe. Dolf Zillmann showed that the arousal left over from terror does not vanish when relief arrives. It spills into the relief and intensifies it (Zillmann, 1996). You subject your neurology to a simulated crisis so you can experience the triumph of surviving it.

Escape from the Self

There is also a therapeutic function at work, and in the modern world this may be the most important component of why we enjoy horror entertainment.

Our day-to-day mental lives are dominated by what psychologists call the default mode network (DMN) (Buckner et al., 2008), the brain circuitry responsible for worry and rumination. It is the anxious voice in your head at 2 a.m. while you stare at the ceiling worrying about next week’s presentation, replaying an awkward conversation from 13 years ago, or thinking of the perfect response to an argument that is long over. The DMN is the engine of low-grade anxiety, and it rarely stops. Gripping, terrifying narratives, however, can temporarily shut the DMN down.

When your brain believes a predator is near, the intensity forces total awareness of the present moment. You cannot worry about your inbox while a monster stalks across the screen. Chosen suffering becomes a brutal but effective moment of respite. Think of it as forced mindfulness through terror.

The Great Divide: Horror Fans and Non-fans

If all of this is beneficial, a fair question follows: why can one person watch a brutal slasher and sleep soundly while their partner needs the lights on after a mildly creepy trailer?

The dividing line comes down to real biological and psychological differences in sensation seeking. Marvin Zuckerman’s work (Zuckerman, 1994) shows that fans of intense media (e.g., horror movies, heavy metal music) tend to have a higher baseline tolerance for stimulation. Their engines idle lower, and it takes more to rev them up. A terrifying film brings them to optimal arousal. Non-fans have a lower threshold, so the same stimulus pushes them past excitement and into actual distress.

We horror fans can also compartmentalize the experience due to the elasticity of our mental protective frame. We see a gruesome scene and think about the cinematic craft: effects, set design, plot progression; our protective frame holds. Non-fans often cannot keep that distance. Some feel too much empathy for the victim on screen. Others may have lived through something similarly traumatic, too close to what they are watching. Either way, their protective frame collapses. The movie stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling real.

None of this means horror fans lack empathy. Research suggests the opposite (Clasen, 2017). Our empathy is intact; we do care about the characters. What differs is where we draw the line. We can feel for the victim without drowning in the feeling. Our protective frame holds, and part of what maintains that frame is the knowledge that we can get off the ride anytime we want.

Disgust sensitivity draws the line between horror fans and non-fans even more sharply. Disgust is one of our oldest primal defenses, designed to keep us away from contamination and threats (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). Horror fans either have lower disgust sensitivity or have trained themselves to find transgressive beauty in viscerally stirring imagery. Non-fans see cinematic gore and experience an unpleasant somatic rejection. They do not just feel fear; they feel an instinctual urge to flee contamination, hardwired in their biology, and it drains rather than energizes them.

The Purpose of Fear

These differences mean fans and non-fans are not just reacting differently. They are using media to do opposite jobs. The horror fan uses terrifying media as an anxiety release valve. Modern stress is abstract and intangible: deadlines, finances, endless emails, the mortgage. It is exactly the fuel the default mode network runs on. The scary movie fixes that. It gives anxiety a face, and a runtime. The monster appears, the threat escalates, the conflict resolves. The credits roll. Our bodies complete the cycle and release the tension.

The non-fan uses media for restoration. Their system is already saturated with stimulation. They do not want more; they want safety, predictability, and cognitive rest. The screen becomes a warm blanket, not a pressure valve.

The irony is that both are pursuing the same goal. The person watching a slasher film and the person rewatching a cozy romcom for the twentieth time are both trying to relax. They simply take opposite paths to get there.

A Question Worth Sitting With

So dear reader, we have traced the path from ghost peppers to dopamine, from protective frames to disgust sensitivity.

But a question lingers…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers found that horror fans and the morbidly curious showed greater psychological resilience, likely because they had spent years vicariously experiencing catastrophe through entertainment (Scrivner et al., 2021). They had essentially inoculated themselves against the terrors of reality. So what happens if we strip that away? If we seek only comfort, only positivity, only safe narratives, do we lose a vital mental training ground? Do our protective frames weaken from disuse?

What happens when real adversity arrives without cognitive rehearsal? It’s something to consider the next time you are hovering over the play button on a brutal slasher film.

To all my fellow horror fans: know that you are not malfunctioning for enjoying the simulated fear, gore, tension, and panic. Your brain knows exactly what it is doing.

References

Apter, M. J. (1992). The dangerous edge: The psychology of excitement. Free Press.

Bloom, P. (2021). The sweet spot: The pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning. Ecco.

Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1-38.

Clasen, M. (2017). Why horror seduces. Oxford University Press.

Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. E. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94(1), 23-41.

Rozin, P., Guillot, L., Fincher, K., Rozin, A., & Tsukayama, E. (2013). Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 439-447.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 141-166.

Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2021). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personality and Individual Differences, 168, 110397.

Zillmann, D. (1996). The psychology of suspense in dramatic exposition. In P. Vorderer, H. J. Wulff, & M. Friedrichsen (Eds.), Suspense: Conceptualizations, theoretical analyses, and empirical explorations (pp. 199-231). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Zuckerman, M. (1994). Behavioral expressions and biosocial bases of sensation seeking. Cambridge University Press.

The storm clawed at the mountain peaks like a beast tearing at a fresh kill. Vargos trudged through the dark pines, his fur-lined cloak heavy with hoarfrost. A mercenary with a ruthless reputation, the people had taken to calling him Iron-Tooth, a moniker he loathed with a simmering fury. A heavy burlap sack hung from his belt, weeping crimson from its bottom as it slapped rhythmically against his thigh. It held a bounty from the high caves — the head of the creature he’d spent three days hunting. The reward offered from the mountain villagers below was measly, but it would suffice.

He stumbled through the blizzard until a cabin appeared ahead, nestled among the evergreens, its timbers so dark they seemed carved from shadow. Firelight bled through the windows.

Vargos hammered his fist against the heavy oak door. After a few heartbeats, it cracked open to reveal a woman’s face. Hard life had left its mark on her features, but a fierce beauty remained. Her eyes flicked from his face to the blood dripping from the sack at his hip.

“What brings you to my door this night, stranger?” she said, her voice barely cutting through the wind.

“Survival,” Vargos grunted, his teeth rattling. “The storm’s worsening. I’m looking for a hearth, not trouble. I can pay in coin.”

She studied him through the narrow gap, then smiled. “Coin,” she murmured. “Funny how men worship gold and silver, but coin won’t keep the frost from your bones on a night like this.” Her grin widened. “Come inside, stranger.”

The heavy door swung open, and heat wrapped around him like a lover’s embrace. Inside, dried herbs and mushrooms hung from a rack; pelts of wolf, bear, and a mountain cat lined one wall. In the far corner, a night-fairy no larger than a sparrow circled a flickering lantern, its purple wings shedding faint green motes that died before touching the floor.

The hearth crackled, but the light stayed low; guttering tallow candles threw shifting shadows across the walls. The woman moved to the hearth, ladled a thick stew into a wooden bowl, and offered it to him.

They ate in silence for a time, the wind howling like a banshee. Vargos savored the rich broth, the heat spreading through his frozen marrow. He gestured to a pair of men’s boots near the fire. “Where is your husband?”

“He’s where men like him always end up.”

Seeing she would offer nothing more, Vargos let his gaze move to the collection of snares, traps, and game hooks in one corner. “A hunter, then.”

She took a slow sip of stew. “Yes. He hunts the high ridges.” She took a bite, swallowed, and said, “A cruel man. Thinks he owns the mountain… thinks he owns the creatures of the forest… thinks he owns me. He isn’t worth the salt.”

Vargos’s brow furrowed. “His salt.”

She froze and slowly turned her head. Her eyes locked onto his with piercing focus. “What did you say?” she whispered.

“His salt,” he repeated. “You said he isn’t worth the salt. The phrase is: worth his salt.”

A chuckle escaped her.

Vargos lifted his spoon for another bite, then froze. A pale, severed finger floated among the root vegetables.

He looked up. Their eyes met. Her smile had turned feral, lips stretched wide, teeth gleaming in the firelight.

“Are you enjoying the stew?”

A hot fury burned in his chest. His axe took her head in one stroke. It bounced across the floorboards and rolled into the shadows.

He looked back down at the stew. Cannibalism was no sin to him; he had eaten man-flesh before when survival demanded it. No, the bitch had tried to trick him. Tried to deceive him.

No one makes a fool of Vargos Iron-Tooth, he thought, grimacing at the moniker.

He lifted the woman’s limp body onto the table, then glanced from the bubbling pot to the skinning knife on the shelf. In the dead of winter, a man couldn’t afford to waste good meat. He reached for the knife.

Jaela pushed deeper into the throat of the cavern, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and ancient rot. Her torchlight revealed yellowed bones scattered along the floor. A massive web stretched along the tunnel wall, and at its center a gargantuan spider shifted, its multifaceted eyes glistening in the torchlight as it studied her. The creature chittered, its legs twitching, then retreated, dismissing her as too large for a meal.

The tribal elders had said this tomb was cursed, a place that brought only madness, but they were superstitious fossils, fools who couldn’t see the fortune right beneath their very noses.

She stepped over a fractured ribcage and into the central chamber. A colossal jaguar, carved from stone, loomed over the tomb. Its eyes, orbs of polished gold, seemed to track her every movement. But what caught her attention were the piles of gold and glistening jewels scattered across the floor. She gasped. There was more wealth here than she could spend in ten lifetimes of hedonistic greed.

At the center sat an ornate golden sarcophagus, its surface etched with scenes of primal slaughter. As she approached, she saw skeletons strewn across the chamber floor, some half-buried in gold. A cold wind brushed her skin, and she glanced up at the jaguar, hollow dread stirring in her chest.

Then it began. A heavy, rhythmic thump… thump… from within the sarcophagus.

Panic surged. The thumping came again, more violent this time. The latch rattled loose. The lid groaned and lifted slightly on one side, revealing the darkness within.

Jaela sprinted and threw herself onto the sarcophagus, forcing it shut with her weight. Horrified by what might emerge, she snatched an ornate dagger from a nearby pile and drove it through the latch, pinning it closed. The banging turned frantic. A muffled voice called out four unintelligible words, then trailed off into silence.

The threat contained, greed conquered her fear. She snatched up her bag and shoveled gems into it with shaking hands. I’ll be back for the rest.

A sudden, violent gust tore through the chamber, and the sarcophagus lid exploded open. Whispers swirled around her ears. From behind her came a chitinous skittering sound. Jaela spun and stepped back, her boot catching on a protruding skull.

She tumbled backward into the waiting darkness of the sarcophagus. The carved jaguar’s face was the last thing she saw before her head struck stone with a sharp crack.

The lid slammed shut with a reverberating boom.

Consciousness returned. Jaela found herself in a suffocating, pitch-black nightmare. She thrashed and reached out, searching for whatever creature had tried to escape before, but there was nothing there. She was alone.

She clawed and shoved at the underside of the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. The latch had sealed again. She hammered on the stone, thump… thump, the same rhythm she had heard before.

Her fists pounded until she heard a click. The latch rattled loose.

She pressed upward. The heavy lid lifted just enough for a sliver of torchlight to cut through the darkness.

Through the narrowing gap, she saw herself, torch in hand, eyes wide, her expression twisted in terror.

She watched as her double leapt forward and slammed the lid shut. She heard the familiar scrape of the ornate dagger sliding into place, locking her in.

Jaela hammered her fists against the stone one last time, screaming the four words she finally understood:

“Please! Let me out!”

The map was smeared with blood, and Daelin held it like a holy relic.

The two black-clad assassins leaned against the stone wall, panting in the damp shadows of the sewer outlet, the fortress looming above in the moonlight and midnight fog. The rival noble’s defenses had been a meat grinder of armored guards, black-sorcery curses, jagged steel traps, and a horde of undead. Daelin’s face was a collection of bruises; Ravena’s leather armor hung in shreds, gashes beneath still weeping dark crimson. They had slipped out just as the alarm horns began to wail.

“We did it,” Daelin rasped, eyes wild with fevered triumph. “The warlord will pay us a king’s ransom. A life of luxury, Ravena. Together.”

Ravena took his hand, leaned in until her lips pressed hard against his. “Together,” she whispered. “The luxury can wait. I want you now.”

They tumbled onto the muddy ground. Mist coiled around them like a shroud as she rode him. Her moans reverberated off the stone as her pleasure peaked first. Seconds later, Daelin’s spine arched and he spilled inside her with a guttural moan, hips bucking beneath her.

Her silver stiletto flashed in the dark. With a single stroke, she opened his throat.

Daelin’s eyes widened; a wet gurgle burst from his lips as his blood poured into the filthy water below. His body convulsed, death throes tangled with the last spasms of pleasure, then he went still, eyes glassy and hollow.

Ravena wiped the blade on his cloak and slipped the map into her pouch. The warlord’s reward was immense, too immense to split in half.

She practiced a tearful tremor in her voice as she made the long journey back. It would be a heartbreaking report to the warlord, of how her beloved had died valiantly to secure their victory.

Sorcerous blue flames danced along the blade in his hand, casting dancing shadows throughout the crypt. The Lich-King hovered before him, an acid-green star burning in its exposed rib cage. Behind the undead monarch, a pedestal held the skull of the world’s first Empress; a crown crusted with glowing black gems sat fused to the ancient bone. The crown was of incalculable worth, a thing of legend, sought by kings and thieves alike for a thousand years. And now Coruvain Thresk, Warlock Prince of the Vhale, had at last found it. He spat blood, his armor cracked by the strikes of the lich’s bone golem guardian he had slain moments earlier.

“You die in vain, mortal,” the Lich hissed. “None shall possess the skull of the Empress.”

Coruvain’s bloody mouth broke into a smile.

The Lich cast a wave of flesh-melting rot. Coruvain channeled a wall of black lightning that devoured the rot and staggered the king. Closing the gap, he opened the Lich’s throat with a horizontal slash.

Coruvain grabbed the dying figure and leaned in, their faces almost touching. “You fool. I’m not here for the skull; I’m here for you.” His jaws unhinged like a feeding snake, and he began to inhale with the sound of a tornado. The green star within the Lich tore free, flowing like liquid into Coruvain’s mouth and down his throat. His flesh shifted to pale marble, his eyes igniting with unholy yellow-green fire—he felt the cosmic power flood into parts of him unseen.

Dropping the Lich’s desiccated husk, he lifted the Empress’s skull, examined it like spoiled fruit, then tossed it aside. He had not come for some trinket. He had come to be the new undead king.

Before the prison of black water,
their towers of white stone burned beneath the sun.
Cold rivers braided the valley in silver,
and fields of green and bearded gold
bowed softly beneath the wind.

The god-king said he loved them.

And when the sky caught fire,
when the mountains split like rotten teeth
and the earth drank their kingdom whole,
he called his people back from death.

Bone answered bone.
Rot remembered its shape.
Ribs stitched themselves together
in the silt of abyssal graves.

“Rise, my children.”

And they rose.

But the valley was no more.

Above them loomed a sea without end,
miles upon miles of crushing jade darkness.
The river had become an oceanic trench.
The fields of gold had withered into forests
of seaweed swaying like the hair of the drowned.

Their cities slept beneath the black tide,
broken domes buried in drifting silt like ash,
each doorway a mouth of brine,
each hall hung with streaming kelp
that moved like mourning banners in the deep.

Still they worship.

Verdigris crowns fused to naked skulls.
Coral flowering through the hollows of their lungs.
Their hearts,
hollow engines of grit and salt,
throb with tides they cannot breathe out.

Centuries encrust them.
Barnacles seal their fingers in eternal prayer.
Memory rots within them
like drowned parchment containing old scripture.

Sometimes the darkness blooms.

Pale lanternfish drift through the pressure,
cold blue embers in the eternal deep.
And the dead gather around them
as though remembering fire,
as though remembering warmth,
as though somewhere above the crushing water
the sun still burns.

But the light always fades.

And when it does,
the hunger returns.

Far above, waves glitter beneath the stars.
Far above, the living call to one another
in the sweet open air.

But in the drowned valley,
the god-king’s gift endures.

And still they kneel
in an empire the sun abandoned long ago,
where the darkness lies teal and endless,
and still as the dark of the moon.

New to Godfang? Start here: Godfang Chapter 1

The story thus far:

Kaelvor was betrayed, mutilated, and murdered by his own tribe, the Blackfang. A mysterious entitity named The God Beneath restored him as its champion, granting him a black-scaled demon arm, a burning green eye, molten blood, and a greatsword forged from one of its own fangs, which he named Godfang. In return, Kaelvor owes the god a debt to be claimed in time. Reborn from the grave, he cut through a horde of scavenger demons, defeated the Iron Witch, and crossed a settlement of slaughtered dead before taking shelter in a watchtower, where dreams forced him to relive his past and betrayal. He woke to find riders pursuing a lone figure bearing the same crimson fist banner he had seen in the massacred settlement.

He intervened and learned the pursued figutre was Saelira, War Queen of the Osskari, a fierce nocturnal people of the wastelands whose tribe had been enslaved by a warlord of terrible power who traveled in a massive moving fortress called the Colossus. The two forged a pact: together they would infiltrate the Colossus, kill the warlord, and free the Osskari; in return, Saelira and her people would march with Kaelvor into the volcanic highlands to take vengeance on the Blackfang. Along the road north, they discovered the warlord had been twisting captured Osskari into mindless berserkers, turning Saelira’s own people into monsters.

Catching up to the Colossus, they encountered the avatar of the God Beneath, a two-headed jackal, which revealed the warlord’s name, Ozravel, and his true nature as the half-mortal son of the Void Matriarch, a demon queen from another realm. From the jackale, they also learned that no weapon of this world can harm the warlord; thus, only Godfang, a weapon not of this world, holds any chance of slaying him. They infiltrated the Colossus through its underbelly, but upon reaching the inner sanctum, they were ambushed by Ozravel’s soldiers and living stone statues. The bridge collapsed, sending Kaelvor plummeting into the abyss below, while Saelira was captured and dragged before Ozravel, chained among the Nightweaver sorceresses of the Osskari.

Welcome to Chapter 6: The Colossus, Part Two: Engine of Slaughter.

Content Warning: This chapter contains extreme graphic violence and gore, sexual content, and other dark fantasy themes intended for mature audiences only. Reader discretion is advised.

Kaelvor plummeted through the dark. Bloody corpses and flaming human remains rained around him, painting the falling debris in a sick orange hue. In the black beyond the deluge, two red eyes burned; one of the living statues, watching him as they fell.

Far below, something glimmered. A faint amber glow against a plane of flat black. He had only a heartbeat to realize what it was before he struck it.

Water.

The bridge wreckage hit the surface half a second before him. From that height, the impact with the water was as unforgiving as stone. His skull fractured. Fluid drove through the cracks and pushed his right eye from its socket — it hung suspended in the murk, clinging by the optic nerve. Ribs snapped and punched through flesh and lung. Organs ruptured. His arms and legs shattered. The ruined pulp of his body spread through the black water, barely the shape of a man anymore. Where his molten blood escaped, the water hissed and boiled.

Awareness clung by a thread, a dim flicker in the wreckage of his brain.

Then the regeneration began.

His remains pulled together and convulsed in the dark water. Shattered bones fused and reformed. His skull rebuilt from the base up, seams knitting beneath mending flesh. Somewhere in the reforming architecture of his mind, a memory surfaced. He was a child again, staring out from a cave mouth, thinking of his dead mother. His father’s hand fell on his shoulder.

Kaelvor. Stay close to the fire, my son. The dark takes those who wander.

The dark bloomed into fractals made from shapes and colors without names. Thoughts floated past, trailing streaks of prismatic light.

Kaelvor. Yes. That is my name.

His eyes snapped open; freshly repaired lungs sucked in black water. He choked, gagged, and let out a muffled underwater scream as his ribs ground back into place with wet, grinding pops. Kicking hard, he broke the surface in a violent gasp, then vomited water that tasted of rust and ash. A stone ledge rose three feet away. He grabbed it with his mortal hand and coughed until his lungs cleared. Only then did he register the familiar weight in his other hand — Godfang, still clenched in his demonic fist. He lifted the blade from the water, set it on the ledge, and looked around.

The cistern stretched outward, flat and vast. The water was dense, unnaturally buoyant. What remained of the iron bridge protruded nearby, sinking. He began pulling himself up.

Something seized his ankle and dragged him under.

One of the living statues from the bridge, tangled in debris and trailing human remains. Its grip was crushing; something in his ankle snapped. The thing’s weight pulled him deeper into the dark. He reached down with his scaled hand, found the statue’s wrist and twisted. Stone cracked. He torqued harder, and the limb split apart in a cloudy burst of grit. The statue sank alone, reaching toward him with its remaining hand, red eyes shrinking to pinpricks before vanishing below.

He kicked hard for the surface, lungs burning, and broke into open air. He hauled himself over the lip and rolled onto the stone walkway, chest heaving.

The commotion on the surface had reached the depths, and something answered. Water swished, then came the sound of heavy sheets cascading off an enormous body. A low, resonant click echoed from deep in a monstrous throat. He snatched Godfang and spun to his feet.

An immense, wedge-shaped reptilian head hovered above the cistern’s edge; its pale eyes fixed on nothing. The thing was blind. Kaelvor held his breath and went still. The creature’s head tilted, hunting for some sound or vibration to give away his location. Its jaws parted slowly, revealing teeth the length of his forearm. Several heartbeats passed, then thin membranes slid across its eyes, and it slipped beneath the surface without a sound.

He watched the water settle, then turned. His glowing eye cut through the blackness. A tunnel opened ahead, a hot draft flowing from it. He had no idea how far he’d fallen, or how far he had to climb, but Saelira was somewhere above, taken by Ozravel, and he would find her. He tightened his grip on Godfang and moved into the tunnel.

***

The chain held Saelira’s wrists high above her head, her feet dangling inches above the stone. A ripping pain burned through her shoulders with every breath. The Nightweavers hung from chains around the chamber, wrists bound overhead like her own, unconscious and still.

Ozravel stood so close she felt his breath on her skin. He studied her the way a butcher examines livestock, slow, appraising.

“I sent my soldiers to retrieve you,” he said, “but you saved them the trouble.”

His gaze crawled across her nude body before locking onto her eyes. “Returning through the vents. Now that was clever. Your companion surviving the heat was unanticipated.” A thin smile. “Not that it matters. He’s dead now, in case you were wondering.”

She kept her face still. Her heart twisted at his words, but she hid the pain, refusing to give this monster the pleasure of her grief.

He drew one finger slowly up her body, navel to chin, light enough to make her squirm. Fresh fire lanced through her straining joints at the movement.

“Your pain grows,” he murmured. “I can smell it. Hanging like this is excruciating. The shoulder joints pull apart gradually.” He withdrew his hand from her chin. “Yet you hide it well. Exceptional endurance.”

“Kill me or shut your mouth,” Saelira snarled. “I’m done listening to you speak.” She gritted her teeth as another wave of agony rippled through her arms. “Your voice is like wasps lodged in my ears.”

Ozravel’s smile widened, cold and venomous. “Oh, but our business is far from over, huntress.”

He gestured at a soldier, who yanked the lever. The chain dropped without warning. Saelira crashed down, knees smashing into iron. Pain shot through her legs and hips. Her arms screamed as blood rushed back into her shoulders in a burning flood.

A soldier unhooked the chain from her wrist manacles and shoved her face-down against the cold stone. Iron shackles clamped around her ankles. A heavy collar snapped shut around her throat, tight enough to make every breath a struggle. A chain lead was fastened to the collar and handed to Ozravel.

“Up,” he ordered. “Walk.”

She rose on shaking legs and pulled hard against the chain. “Go to hell.”

Fury grew behind Ozravel’s eyes. He raised his free hand and slowly closed his fist. Violet light flared along the chains binding the suspended Nightweavers, surging through their bodies in a crackling wave. Every sorceress convulsed at once. Their heads snapped back, and the sounds that ripped from their throats were raw, animal wails of agony. Blood streamed from their eyes and ears. They thrashed and twisted like live meat on a butcher’s hooks.

“Stop!” Saelira screamed. “Stop this!”

He lowered his hand. The violet light died. The Nightweavers slumped forward, limp and twitching, swaying from their chains once again.

“You will listen and obey, or your people will suffer. Make no mistake, huntress. You serve me. Now, come.” He turned and walked. She followed.

He led her through a door and into a narrow passage that opened into a wider chamber. Cold air met them, carrying the sharp-sweet tang of Void-sorcery. Rows of crystal cylinders stretched from floor to ceiling, lit with cold blue-white light. Each held a figure suspended in pale luminescent fluid, arms slack, hair drifting in slow, ghostly halos. Many of the bodies were incomplete—limbs missing, flesh half-formed over bare muscle and bone. One had teeth exposed through a missing cheek, jaw muscles dark and glistening in the fluid. Another’s skull was fully intact on one side, raw bone and exposed brain on the other, violet veins pulsing through the tissue like burrowing worms.

Disgust coiled in Saelira’s stomach. “What are they?”

Ozravel stopped beside one of the cylinders and placed a hand against the glass. “My Void-witches. Mortal vessels infused with the essence of the Void. When they are finished, no army in this world will be able to stand against them.”

Her eyes moved slowly down the row, unable to look away. Incomplete faces. Twisted anatomies. They stopped before one cylinder where the upper body was unmistakably feminine — full breasts, rosebud lips, high cheekbones still forming beneath the skin, long hair floating weightlessly. Below the waist, it had a man’s legs and a penis.

Saelira’s voice came out low. “What… is this?”

“The process doesn’t care what the vessel was, man or woman,” Ozravel said. “The Void overwrites everything. They all become the same in the end, remade in the image of the Void Matriarch — my mother.” He studied her face. “No reaction. You already know what I am. How interesting. I’ll enjoy learning how you came by that knowledge.”

At the far end of the row, one of the figures slowly opened its eyes. Flat, violet-black irises locked onto Saelira and held, unblinking.

Ozravel’s attention returned to the cylinder before him. “In my early attempts, the mortal vessels rejected the Void-essence and tore themselves apart in seconds. I needed a bridge, and your Nightweavers’ sorcery provides it. Their power stabilizes the infusion long enough for the transformation to take hold.”

The cold in the chamber seemed to deepen. Saelira now recognized the blue-white glow inside the cylinders for what it was: the Nightweavers’ sacred power, drained and siphoned into these grotesque amalgamations.

She turned to face him. “Why show me this?”

“Because it will all be yours.” Ozravel gestured at the cylinders and the iron chamber around them. “These warriors. This machine. The empire that will rise from it.” He looked at her directly. “I want a queen, and I will have one.”

“What?” she hissed.

He pulled the slack from her chain and yanked her forward until their faces were inches apart.

“You are the War Queen of the Osskari,” he said. “Your bloodline survived a cataclysm that erased entire civilizations.” His gaze moved over her face with a look between reverence and hunger. “That legacy does not die with your people. It continues through a child carrying both your ancient blood and my Void power. An heir worthy to rule the world I conquer.”

Revulsion twisted in her throat. At the same time, a deep, unwanted warmth stirred low in her belly, a foreign, invasive lust coiling through her flesh like something alive.

“You will bear my child,” he said. “That is my command.”

Saelira held his stare. When she finally spoke, her voice dropped into the low, venomous cadence of the Osskari death-tongue, the dialect of her people reserved for damning verdicts and funeral rites.

“I will do no such thing. You are an abomination draped in a warlord’s skin. Your empire is a rotting corpse that hasn’t yet realized it’s already dead. Your mother is a profane atrocity, a whore who spread her legs for a man even more cowardly than you. Everything spawned by the Void ends the same way: destroyed, forgotten, and irrelevant as the very darkness that shat it into existence.”

His jaw clenched. The chain went taut in his fist.

Saelira didn’t flinch. “Your bloodline ends with you, worm. You will have no heir. No queen.” She spat in his face. “Crawl in a hole and die. That is my command.”

Ozravel’s hand shot up and clamped around her throat. He slammed her against the nearest cylinder, her head cracked against the crystal and the iron collar bit into her neck beneath his grip. His other hand drove between her legs without warning, gripping her hard and possessively.

She cried out, not from pain, but from the sudden, violent surge of alien carnal heat that exploded through her core. Her body responded instantly, against her will — a bewildering, unwanted yearning for him. A deep, liquid warmth bloomed as her flesh grew slick under his palm. Her thighs spread and her hips pushed forward before she could stop them. This was not her. Whatever power he controlled reached inside her and pulled the strings of her desire like an insidious puppet master. Terror flooded her as she felt herself grow wet against his hand, her body opening to him even as her mind screamed in revulsion.

Ozravel’s face was against hers. A slow smile spread across his lips as he felt the growing wetness beneath his fingers. “Your body has already made its decision,” he whispered.

Saelira’s voice came out steady, even as her legs trembled. “Whatever you think I feel is a lie. Your perverse power twists my flesh, but it means nothing. My mind and my heart are mine alone. Those you will never touch. What you crave, you will never have. Not from me. Not from anyone, you pathetic maggot.”

He released her throat and stepped back, handing her chain to the nearest guard.

“Take her to the torturers,” he said, his voice cold. “Put her on the wheel until she’s ready to be reasonable. Then keep her there a while longer, for good measure.” His eyes met hers. “And have them burn out her tongue. I’d prefer her silent.”

The guards seized her arms and marched her toward a far door. They walked through dim corridors before reaching a long flight of iron stairs. With each descending step, the sounds from below grew louder — the agonized shrieks of the torture chamber.

Saelira refused to think about what waited below. Instead, she burned the path behind her into memory, mapping every turn, every passage, every step that led back to the throne room.

***

Guided only by the faint emerald glow of his eye, Kaelvor moved through the dark tunnel. The Colossus groaned beneath him as he climbed through twisted gaps in the metal framework. With every step, the air grew drier and hotter, carrying a scorched mineral stench that clung to the back of his throat.

Ahead, an orange glow swelled in the darkness, and a low rhythmic thunder pulsed through the structure like the heartbeat of something enormous. New sounds emerged as he moved toward the light: the sharp hiss of pressurized steam, the crack of whips, barked orders, and cries of pain. He reached the end of the tunnel, and the engine room opened before him.

The space was immense, vast enough to swallow the largest settlement Kaelvor had ever seen. At its center rose a colossal tower of iron and brass. Giant pistons drove in and out with slow, thunderous power. Jets of white steam erupted from hundreds of vents, flooding the lower levels in hot fog before drifting up through layers of catwalks. Chains dangled everywhere, bearing counterweights, hooks, and massive pulleys that swayed in the infernal orange glow of the furnaces.

All around him, chained Osskari slaves toiled like damned souls in an iron hell. They labored at massive cranks and heaved heavy slabs of coal into the furnaces. Overseer demons prowled among them, metal whips trailing arcs of purple light. Tongueless soldiers stood at intervals along the outer walls, their faces blank.

Kaelvor’s hand went to Godfang’s hilt. This was the heart of the Colossus, the core of Ozravel’s power. And this was where it would begin to die.

High above on the central catwalk loomed an enormous, broad-shouldered figure, its flesh fused with heavy mechanical augmentations. Kaelvor watched it for several heartbeats, then slipped from the tunnel and crept along the shadowed outer wall, weaving between the demonic machines.

The nearest soldier stood with his back to him, eyes on the floor below. Kaelvor closed the distance in silence, clamped both hands around the man’s skull, and crushed inward. The soldier’s neck snapped with a thick, gristly pop. He dragged the body into the shadow of a support column, tucking it between two massive chain housings, then crouched, watching the floor below.

A low grunt came from the other side of the structure to his left. Kaelvor moved silently and peered around the corner from the shadows. A horned demon stood with its back partly turned; an Osskari woman knelt before it, trembling with fear and fury.

The demon coiled its whip around her throat, pulled its loincloth aside, and gripped her head. “Beg for it, slave,” it growled, its voice like stone dragged over rusted iron. “Please me, and I might let you keep your teeth. Disappoint me, and I’ll feed you feet-first into the furnace. Slowly.”

The woman caught movement in the dark. Her eyes flicked past the demon and found Kaelvor’s face. She startled.

Shit.

The demon turned to follow her gaze, just as Kaelvor surged forward. He slammed his scaled palm into the creature’s face and drove its head into the iron behind it. The skull splintered beneath the blow with a sharp crunch. Purple blood and mashed brain sprayed across the metal. The demon’s body convulsed, then went limp.

The woman stood and took two steps back in fear.

Kaelvor raised his hands, palm out in a gesture of peace, and kept his voice low. “It’s okay. I’m not with them. I’ve come to help. What’s your name?”

The woman studied him, eyes narrowed with suspicion. A long moment passed before she answered. “Vaura.”

“Vaura, listen to me. I know it’s dangerous to trust a stranger.” He looked down at himself, then back at her. “Especially one covered in demon blood. But if we do nothing, we all die in this hell. Horribly. I don’t want that. Do you?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Good. Join me. You and your people. Together we can fight back and retake your freedom.”

She looked at the dead demon on the floor, skull crushed in, then back at him. “You killed one. That does not make you our savior.”

“No, it doesn’t, but I plan to kill many more. In fact, I plan to kill all of them before it’s over. If we take this engine room, we take control of the Colossus.”

Vaura considered his words, doubt still clouding her eyes.

Kaelvor leaned in slightly. “Your queen escaped. She returned with me to free you. She’s above us right now, fighting her own battle. If we take this room, we can fight our way up to her.”

Vaura went still. Her eyes widened, shock flickering across her face. For a moment she looked like she didn’t believe what she’d just heard. Then her expression shifted. “Are you truly here with the moon-blooded huntress?”

“Yes,” Kaelvor said. “I am here with Saelira, your War Queen. I made a promise to her, and to your people, to fight for your freedom.”

Vaura looked at the dead demon again, then back to him. Finally, she gave a single, reluctant nod.

“Good,” Kaelvor said. He pointed up at the massive figure watching over the engine floor from the central catwalk. “First, tell me, what is that thing?”

Vaura followed his gaze. “A thermark demon. They call it the Architect. It built and runs this machine.” Her eyes returned to his. “It is very dangerous.”

Kaelvor grunted. “Go now. Pass the word quickly and quietly. Tell your kin to be ready when I give the signal. First we take this room. Then we fight our way to Saelira.”

“And if they do not believe me?” she asked. “Or lack the will to fight?”

“Then they are already dead,” he said flatly.

Vaura hesitated. “How will we know when it is time?”

“Trust me. You’ll know. Go.”

She slipped away into a line of slaves hauling a heavy chain. Kaelvor watched from the shadows as she leaned close to the woman beside her and whispered. The woman froze, eyes wide with fear, then began scanning the room. Vaura grabbed her arm and spoke again, more urgently. After a tense moment, the woman gave a tiny nod and whispered to the next prisoner.

Vaura’s message rippled outward through the engine room in whispers, like a spark catching and creeping along a line of dry tinder.

Kaelvor watched and waited, giving the Osskari time to pass the message along. Then he slipped back into the deeper shadows and began making his way up. He took out another soldier along the outer wall, covering the man’s mouth and driving two scaled fingers through his temple with a squelching crunch. He crossed to the iron stairs and climbed fast, boots ringing against the metal.

At the top of the catwalk stood the Architect. The demon was a nightmare of fused flesh and iron. Seven feet of brutal muscle wrapped in skin that looked like cooling slag, cracked and glowing faintly from within. Four iron pistons jutted from its spine, pumping and venting hot steam with every breath. Dark metal bands were bolted into its joints, flesh and scar tissue bulging around each graft.

Kaelvor filled his lungs and roared. “Demon! Face me!”

The cry rang through the engine room, turning every head. A sea of eyes rose to the catwalk, where steam curled between the two figures in thick, glowing plumes.

The thermark turned toward him. Its eyes, the color of old blood, narrowed. With a wet rip of muscle and cartilage, it drove a clawed hand into its own torso below the ribs. Black blood poured down its abdomen as it wrenched free a short, brutal maul of black iron, slick with gore. Along the wound, iron staples punched out from beneath its skin and snapped shut, dragging the torn meat closed. It threw its head back and bellowed, then charged.

Kaelvor crouched low, Godfang gripped in both hands.

The platform shook as the Architect charged across the catwalk. It closed the distance in a handful of thunderous strides, swinging the brutal maul in a savage horizontal arc aimed at Kaelvor’s skull.

He dropped beneath the swing, then rose and brought Godfang down in a two-handed overhead chop. The blade sheared through the demon from crown to groin as if its flesh were wet parchment. The two halves split apart and toppled from opposite sides of the catwalk, striking the floor far below with heavy, meaty thuds.

The chamber fell silent except for the relentless thud of the pistons and the hiss of steam.

Kaelvor stood at the center of the catwalk and looked down at the multitude of upturned faces below. Slaves. Soldiers. Demons.

“Osskari!” Kaelvor’s voice boomed through the chamber. “Your War Queen lives! Saelira, the Moon-Blooded Huntress, fights for your freedom. Even now she stands against the warlord!” He raised Godfang high above his head. “Join me. Fight with me. Win your freedom or die trying. This day, your people will be free!”

The sound of boots came from both ends of the catwalk. Soldiers charged, weapons drawn.

Kaelvor glanced left, then right. He brought Godfang down in a savage arc, shearing through the catwalk. The entire walkway buckled and collapsed beneath Kaelvor in a wail of tearing metal. The soldiers plummeted with him. Some screamed as they fell into open crucibles of molten slag. Others slammed into the iron grating far below and never rose again.

He crashed onto a lower platform, legs folding with a loud snap. Metal slammed into his face, and something deep inside him ruptured. Shattered bones and burst organs repaired as he drew ragged, agonizing breaths. He pushed himself up, raised Godfang once more, and roared.

The Osskari stared in stunned silence. This stranger had butchered the Architect in a single blow and survived a fall that should have killed any mortal. Whatever he was, he was no ordinary warrior. That was all the convincing they needed — they had a fighting chance.

One of the women moved first. She whipped a heavy chain through the air, smashing a soldier across the face and dropping him. Before he could rise, she drove her heel into his throat with a crunch of cartilage.

Violence erupted across the chamber. Hammers crushed skulls. Chains lashed out and wrapped around necks. Whips were torn from the overseers’ hands and turned against them. Three Osskari drove a demon backward and shoved it screaming into an open furnace. Another group seized a tilting mechanism and threw their weight against it, tipping a crucible that sent a roaring wave of molten slag pouring across a cluster of soldiers; their screams lasted only a second before their bodies vaporized. Four prisoners dragged a soldier to the ground and beat his skull to pulp with fist-sized lumps of coal, screaming with every blow.

Kaelvor seized a hanging chain and rode the counterweight down, boots slamming into the floor, then carved a path of destruction through the soldiers. Godfang rose and fell in brutal arcs. A demon lashed at him with its whip; he snatched the glowing cord mid-swing, yanked the creature forward, and drove his forehead into its face, collapsing its snout in a burst of shattered teeth and bloody spittle. Another demon charged. Kaelvor sidestepped, caught it by the throat, and slammed its head into a spinning flywheel — its skull exploded in a spray of blood and bone. A third lunged at him from the side. He rammed Godfang through its open mouth, the blade punching out the back of its skull. He twisted the sword, scrambling what was left of its brain, then ripped the gore-slick blade free.

The remaining demons and soldiers broke and ran, but the Osskari did not let them escape. They ran the oppressors down, cutting throats, crushing skulls, and burning them alive in the crucibles of molten metal.

Kaelvor stood at the center of the carnage, blood dripping from his hands and chest, and watched the Osskari gather around him. Hundreds of them, battered but still clutching their improvised weapons. He raised Godfang. “You fought like the warriors you were born to be! Osskari don’t bow! Osskari don’t break!”

A roar erupted through the room. Fists lifted. Chains rattled. Bloodied weapons struck iron.

“Your queen is above us. We go to her. Show the warlord exactly what it means to be your enemy.”

The roar surged again, louder this time, weapons raised high.

Kaelvor scanned their hardened faces. “Now. Who knows the way out of here?”

***

The soldiers marched Saelira down the stairs as the screams rose to meet her. They intended to break her with torture, but she was Osskari — she could endure far more than most could imagine. To them, she was just another frightened prisoner being dragged to unspeakable torment — so she played the part.

She let raw terror spread across her face. Her shoulders sagged, her breathing turned shallow and ragged. Pleas for mercy spilled from her lips in a cracked, trembling voice. Then her legs gave out and she collapsed on the stairs. The first guard edged closer and crouched over her limp body. His armor creaked as he leaned in to inspect her condition. Her hand flashed up, ripped the dagger from his belt, and drove it repeatedly into his throat in a blur of savage strikes. Hot blood sprayed across her face.

The second guard charged. She kicked his legs out from under him and looped the ankle chain around his neck as he fell, yanking it tight. They tumbled together down the stairs and slammed onto the landing at the bottom. She planted a knee in his back and pulled the chain hard, the links tearing into his flesh, until his spine snapped and his body went slack.

A search of the corpses yielded the key from the first guard’s belt. The shackles and collar fell with a clang on iron. She took a short sword from one and a long knife from the other, then descended the remaining stairs.

The torture chamber opened before her, and she strode in without hesitation. Prisoners were strapped into iron chairs, their mouths forced open by hooked jaw braces. A hooded torturer heated the tongue-removal instrument in a brazier of glowing coals. Two others moved among the prisoners, tightening the straps around their wrists. All three hooded heads snapped toward the blood-smeared, naked Osskari warrior who had just entered.

Saelira moved like wrath given flesh.

One torturer took her short sword through the chest, the blade punching out its back. She left the blade buried there, ripped the red-hot instrument from the coals, and rammed it into another torturer’s hood. For a split second, the glowing tip lit the nightmare beneath: a cluster of wet, lidless eyes above a lipless maw lined with jagged, overlapping teeth. The creature shrieked as the burning metal sank deep into its skull. When the last torturer turned to flee, she hurled the long knife between its shoulder blades into its spine, dropping it face-first onto the stone. She took a hammer from the rack, walked over, and crushed its skull with two heavy blows.

She yanked the short sword free from the dead torturer’s chest, wiped the blade on its robe, then cut the prisoners loose. They tore at the hooked jaw braces — one woman ripped hers off and spat a mouthful of blood onto the stone. “Thank you,” she rasped. “Please. My sister. She’s in the cell just beyond that door. They’re holding more of us there.”

Saelira nodded. “Lead the way.”

The holding cell was long, low, and packed. Humans and Osskari alike sat or lay on bare stone, hollow-eyed. The air reeked of unwashed bodies and old terror. As Saelira entered, several prisoners stirred. She brought her sword down on the cell lock, snapping it open in a spray of sparks.

“I am Saelira, War Queen of the Osskari. I’m getting you out of here.” She swept her gaze across the ragged faces. “There are more of our people enslaved in the engine room of this machine. If we free them, we have a chance to fight. If not, we die here anyway, only slower and in pain.”

A gaunt man near the back lifted his head. His wrists were raw from shackles, but his eyes were strong. “I know the way. They brought me here from the engine.”

“Then you’re with me at the front. Let’s move.”

***

Kaelvor and the freed Osskari moved upward through the Colossus.

A soldier charged from a side passage. Kaelvor took his head with a backhanded swing of Godfang. The headless body stumbled three steps forward before collapsing, spraying blood across the wall.

A demon crashed into their ranks from above. The Osskari scattered as the creature swung a hooked chain in a wide arc, ripping warriors in half. Kaelvor rolled beneath the swing and buried Godfang deep in the demon’s chest. He ripped the blade free in a torrent of black blood, and the creature pitched forward.

Without warning, iron portcullises slammed down at both ends of the corridor with an echoing crash. The Osskari at the rear were crushed beneath the falling gates before they could scream. Others were trapped beyond the bars, cut off from Kaelvor and the rest. A grinding noise filled the corridor and the floor shivered. The ceiling began descending, driven by some mechanism in the walls. The trapped Osskari looked up, some shouting in terror.

Kaelvor slammed Godfang into the nearest portcullis. The metal bent outward slightly, but the gate was too thick. He would never hack through it in time. The ceiling kept dropping. He planted his feet and thrust both arms upward against it. The metal was scalding beneath his palms, making his skin bubble and smoke. The Osskari joined him, bodies straining against the crushing pressure from above.

The weight forced Kaelvor to one knee, his arms and shoulders still pressing upward. Every muscle screamed. His skin sizzled against the metal, and his joints creaked under the strain. Beside him, the Osskari grunted and heaved. He roared and pushed with everything he had, but the ceiling continued pressing down. Then it stopped. The machinery groaned in the walls, and the ceiling lifted. Both gates at the ends of the corridor rose back into their recesses.

Kaelvor stood, chest heaving. At the far end of the passage, the soldier who had pulled the lever lay dead, a blade buried in his back. A robed figure stood over the body, hood drawn low. One of the torturers. The figure reached up and pulled the hood back.

“Saelira!”

Kaelvor crossed the corridor, and she met him halfway. He pulled her into his arms and pressed her face against his chest, his heart hammering. “I was coming for you.”

Saelira pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. “I was coming for my people.” She grinned. “Apparently, you needed saving in the process.”

Kaelvor grinned back and motioned to the Osskari behind him. “I brought you your people.”

“That’s the least you could do.”

They came together in a brief, hard kiss.

“Where’s Ozravel?” Kaelvor asked.

“The throne room,” Saelira said. “And I know exactly how to get there.”

“Then let’s go kill the bastard.”

***

The passage opened into the chamber of the Void-witches. Every crystal cylinder was empty. The pale luminescent fluid sloshed softly against the glass. The cold blue-white glow was gone. “They’re loose,” Saelira said.

Kaelvor peered into the nearest cylinder. “What’s loose? What was in these?”

“He called them Void-witches. Mortal hosts reshaped with Void-essence. They will be difficult to kill. Our weapons may not work on them.”

Kaelvor glanced toward the dark passage leading upward. Then back at her.

“Then we’ll find out what kills them. Let’s go.”

***

Kaelvor and Saelira emerged from the final passage into the throne room; the Osskari poured in behind them. Across the vast chamber, rows of soldiers stood ready. Among their ranks waited the Void-witches, pale and motionless, violet-black eyes unblinking.

At the far wall, a long central staircase rose over a hundred steps, broken by wide platforms along the climb. At the top, Ozravel sat upon the black iron throne. His voice rang through the chamber. “Kill them all. Bring the huntress to me alive.”

Kaelvor turned to Saelira. “He’s mine.”

“Go. Make him pay for everything. Kill well, champion.”

She watched him sprint up the staircase, then turned and unleashed a war cry. The Osskari roared and charged with her, crashing into the enemy line with chains, hammers, and scavenged blades. The chamber filled with screams and sounds of steel meeting bone and flesh. Blood pooled across the iron floor, dark beneath the glow of witch-fire braziers.

Then the Void-witches reached them, crackling purple energy formed into long spikes around their fists. An Osskari’s sword skated off a witch’s shoulder. The warrior hesitated half a heartbeat before the creature’s spike punched through his chest.

Another witch vanished in a wisp of black smoke and reappeared behind two Osskari. Spiked hands burst through their backs and out their chests. She vanished again and reappeared beside a woman, opening her throat in a spray of blood.

The Osskari line buckled. Blades bounced off transformed flesh as if striking stone. A man drove his sword into a witch’s ribs with everything he had, but the blade only bent against her skin. The witch seized his head in both hands and crushed it like an egg, then stepped over the twitching corpse.

Another witch flashed through a group of fighters, spike-fists punching through torsos and throats in rapid, mechanical strikes. Bodies dropped in her wake. Three Osskari rushed a fourth witch together, hammering at her with chains and scavenged swords. The creature absorbed every blow, then killed all three in two sweeping arcs.

Saelira’s force was dying faster than Ozravel’s. She ducked a witch’s Void-spike that would have taken her head and fell back, scanning the creatures for any weakness. Every second cost more lives. Her people’s makeshift weapons deflected harmlessly off their Void-transformed skin.

The witch advancing toward her had exposed muscle along the left forearm and raw flesh where neck met shoulder. Gaps where the transformation had not finished. Saelira dodged a slash, then drove her blade into the open gap at the witch’s clavicle. The creature screamed. She yanked the sword free and stabbed the same spot again. The Void-witch staggered, fell to one knee, and collapsed. “The open flesh!” she roared above the chaos. “Hit the witches in the open flesh! That’s where they bleed!”

The Osskari heard and adapted. Their weapons found open throats, bellies, the joints of hips and knees, anywhere the Void-essence hadn’t finished its transformation. One by one, the witches began to fall.

***

Kaelvor sprinted up the staircase.

Three soldiers waited in tight formation on the first landing, the outer two shifting to flank him. He feinted at the man in the middle, then dove left, driving his shoulder into the flanking soldier. The man tumbled down the stairs, bones snapping with every impact. His neck broke before he reached the bottom. Kaelvor knocked the middle soldier’s blade aside, planted a boot in his chest, and shoved him hard into the third man. One sideways slash from Godfang took both their heads.

He surged onto the next platform.

The nearest soldier raised his sword, bracing for the attack. Godfang sheared through the blade and kept going, ripping through the man’s torso in the same motion.

Another soldier lunged, thrusting for his gut. Kaelvor twisted sharply. The blade missed anything vital but tore a deep gash across the meat of his flank. He seized the man’s sword arm and ripped it free at the shoulder.

The soldier let out a gargled wail. Kaelvor slammed the severed arm into the soldier’s face, again and again, until the screaming stopped.

Far below, the battle raged, but Kaelvor’s eyes stayed locked on the warlord seated on the throne above.

He reached the next platform, and a shape materialized from shadow and purple smoke. The demon was something between a great cat and a wolf, black-furred and enormous, its shoulders level with a man’s chest. Its eyes burned indigo with pinpricks of crimson for pupils. He had only a heartbeat to take it in before the beast launched at him.

Kaelvor caught it by the throat with his scaled hand. The impact drove him back a step. Claws raked down his bare chest, opening gashes that exposed ribs. His molten blood hissed and burned where it sprayed across the demon’s muzzle and forelimbs, but the beast didn’t flinch. Its jaws clamped onto his shoulder, teeth sinking deep through muscle and cracking bone.

Kaelvor roared in pain. The beast released its bite on his shoulder and lunged for his throat, jaws gaping. He drove his demonic fist straight into its maw and buried his claws deep in the soft flesh within. The demon thrashed, trying to bite down and sever his arm. Its fangs scraped and ground against the obsidian scales with crushing pressure, but they could not pierce them.

He seized its tongue by the root and ripped it out in a spray of purple blood. The demon convulsed, choking on its own gore. Its claws raked across him as its strength ebbed and its indigo eyes dimmed. With a final wet gurgle, it collapsed.

The blood pouring from the deep gashes across his chest and the bite in his shoulder slowed to a trickle as the torn flesh sealed itself shut. The broken ribs snapped themselves back together with a stomach-churning crunch he felt travel through his spine.

He looked up to Ozravel waiting on his throne at the top of the stairs.

***

On the throne room floor, the tide of battle had turned. The Osskari now held the numbers. Ozravel’s soldiers died faster than they could kill. Saelira carved a path through the thinning ranks. A Void-witch stepped into her path. She lunged in, driving her blade into the unfinished flesh of the creature’s chest, and twisted hard. She yanked the sword free, and the witch collapsed.

She looked up the long staircase. Kaelvor had reached the top.

***

Ozravel stood from the throne as Kaelvor crested the final step. “You made it. How lovely.” He examined Kaelvor intently, fascination in his eyes. “Your eye. That arm. And the sword. It seems someone has invested considerably in you.” He smiled faintly and moved to the edge of the dais, then looked down at the battle below, finding Saelira carving through soldiers and Void-witches alike. “I must thank you for returning the huntress to me. She is remarkable. Fierce. Resilient. Beautiful. The kind of creature who survives everything the world throws at her.” He turned back to Kaelvor. “Which is precisely why she will bear my heir.”

Kaelvor’s expression twisted. Ozravel caught it and smirked. “Ah. She matters to you. Good. Then you understand what you are about to lose.”

Without a word, Kaelvor closed the remaining distance, and they crashed together like two incarnations of ancient hatred, each hungry for the other’s destruction. This was no longer a battle for dominance, but a fight for what neither would yield: the woman they desired and the fate of the world.

The warlord was fast. His blade moved in lightning arcs of pure, lethal efficiency. Kaelvor met the first three exchanges with Godfang, feeling each bone-jarring impact through his arms. He dodged the fourth and retaliated with an explosive attack, but Ozravel slipped aside and opened Kaelvor’s forearm to the bone.

Kaelvor swung a wide cut. Ozravel spun inside it and drove the hilt of his sword into Kaelvor’s jaw with a loud crack. Kaelvor answered with his scaled fist, slamming it into the warlord’s ribs. Something cracked under the knuckles. Ozravel stumbled back, holding his side and staring wide-eyed at the black-scaled hand.

No weapon of this world can harm him. The god’s words echoed in Kaelvor’s mind. He looked at his scaled fist and understood. Godfang was not his only weapon in this fight. He surged in with another attack.

Their blades clashed. Ozravel’s strikes came faster than Kaelvor could track. One opened his thigh. Another sliced a deep gash across his forehead. He bled from a dozen wounds now, the stone beneath his boots pocked and scorched with molten blood. One gash healed only for two more to appear.

He finally broke through Ozravel’s guard and drove Godfang into the warlord’s shoulder, drawing black, smoking Void-blood. The warlord did not slow.

Kaelvor took a slash across his chest that would have destroyed any mortal man. Flesh parted to the sternum, the blade biting deep into bone.

They circled each other across the dais, witch-fire braziers casting their long shadows down the staircase and onto the throne room floor below. Kaelvor was slowing. His regeneration fought to keep up, but it could not match his opponent’s onslaught. He was landing blows, hurting the warlord, but it still was not enough.

Kaelvor roared, driving a heavy overhead strike with everything he had left. Ozravel caught the blow in a bind, twisted Kaelvor’s wrist with a disarming technique he had never seen, and wrenched the greatsword from his grip. The blade sailed over the edge of the dais, struck the first step, then clattered down the long staircase until the sound finally faded.

The warlord flashed a triumphant sneer and lunged. Kaelvor raised his forearm to block, and the red blade skated off the black scales. A backhand cracked across Ozravel’s face, sending him stumbling as violet smoke curled from a split lip. His sneer faltered.

Kaelvor seized the opening and drove forward, slamming into Ozravel in an onslaught of pounding jabs. Ozravel’s sword fell from his hand and clattered across the dais as Kaelvor slammed him into the throne.

Ribs cracked as Kaelvor’s fist hammered into the warlord’s side repeatedly. Ozravel bellowed and drove a knee into Kaelvor’s stomach, then seized his mortal arm and twisted it back, breaking the bone. Kaelvor’s scream tore from his throat as his forearm bent at a grotesque angle. But Ozravel wasn’t done — he grabbed two of Kaelvor’s fingers and snapped them backward until they hung broken and useless.

Kaelvor used the pain, surging forward and tackling the warlord to the floor as his shattered bones mended in rhythmic snaps. He straddled Ozravel and rained down punches with his demon fist, smashing into his face repeatedly, shattering his nose, caving in a cheekbone. One of the warlord’s eyes ruptured in a burst of blood and fluid that ran down the side of his face.

Ozravel snarled through the ruin of his features and slammed a palm into Kaelvor’s face. The impact crushed Kaelvor’s skull inward with a sickening crunch. White-hot pain exploded through his skull, and his vision blurred. Blood poured down his face as he reeled. Ozravel shoved him off and rose, spitting blood and broken teeth.

Kaelvor recovered faster. He lunged, grabbed Ozravel by the head, and tore one of his ears clean off. Blood sprayed hot across his knuckles. Ozravel howled. Kaelvor slammed his scaled fist into the warlord’s throat, and the howl cut off into a choking gurgle.

Ozravel kicked out hard, catching Kaelvor in the chest and sending him crashing backward across the dais. The warlord staggered, snatched his red blade from the stone, and advanced.

Kaelvor pushed himself up, blood pouring from his ruined face and broken body. He swung his fist again at the approaching warlord.

Ozravel caught the blow, twisted the arm aside, and drove a knee into his groin. Kaelvor stumbled and the warlord was on him instantly. The red blade punched through Kaelvor’s right shoulder and out his back. His mortal arm went limp. Ozravel wrenched upward, using the buried sword as a lever, and Kaelvor screamed in agony as he was forced to his knees. His scaled hand clamped around the warlord’s sword arm. Pain roared through his shoulder, and his head swam.

Kaelvor squeezed with everything he had left. Something snapped in his arm, but Ozravel refused to release the blade.

“It’s over, freak. She is mine. Know this before you die. Every scar you have given me, I will revisit on her in kind. Before it’s over, she will—”

A single footstep landed on the dais behind him. Godfang sang through the air and took the warlord’s head cleanly at the neck.

The head hit the dais and rolled down the stairs. The body remained upright for one impossible moment, Void-energy and violet blood fountaining upward, then toppled sideways and lay still.

Below, every Void-witch unleashed a single piercing scream. Purple smoke boiled off their bodies in thick columns. Their black eyes liquefied and poured down their faces before the creatures vanished in a haze that smelled of a funeral pyre.

Kaelvor lay on his back, Ozravel’s headless corpse beside him. Their blood pooled and mingled on the stone, his molten blood hissing where it met the black, smoking Void-blood. The two substances warred like fire and poison.

He yanked the sword from his shoulder. The torn flesh began pulling itself closed.

Saelira stood over him, Godfang gripped in both hands. Blood covered her body, and her chest still heaved from the climb.

Below them, the throne room fell silent for the first time since they had entered it. The Osskari stood among the bodies of their enemies and looked up at the dais. The only sounds were the deep groan of the Colossus and the distant thunder of the engines far below.

The faintest smile touched Saelira’s lips. “Someone once told me, kill or be killed.” She offered him her hand and pulled him to his feet. “That’s good advice. You should follow it.”

***

The Colossus had stopped. The great pistons had slowed and stilled, and the constant thunder that had shaken the floors and walls since they first boarded was gone.

Kaelvor sat on the dais at the top of the stairs, Godfang across his knees, the black iron throne looming over him. He looked out over the throne room. The bodies had been cleared. The Nightweavers had been freed and taken away to be tended. The ceiling’s chains now hung empty.

He closed his eyes and thought of his sister Draega, still out there somewhere. He would find her. Memories of the night he was murdered slithered through his mind, and rage boiled in his chest. Visions of the Shamanka cutting out his eye repeated over and over, his teeth grinding until his jaw ached.

The sound of boots on the stairs brought him back. Saelira climbed up and stopped beside him, looking out over the same room. She had bathed and wore an ornate Osskari wrap across her shoulders, star-metal blades at her hip.

“I have spoken to the Osskari,” she said. “We’ll need three days to recover, prepare, and grieve. Then they march with us. The Blackfang won’t know what hit them.”

Kaelvor said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “Three days.”

“Now, come with me,” she said, taking his hand. She led him from the edge of the platform to the throne. “Sit.”

A soft, contemptuous laugh escaped him. “Sit? On his throne?”

“No. On our throne.”

He looked at her and smiled. She shoved him back, and he let himself fall onto the cold iron throne.

Without a word, she tugged his trousers down below his thighs. Kaelvor caught her wrists, breathing hard. “Saelira. I want this. Gods, I want you. But my blood runs hot as molten iron. I cannot —”

She laughed, low and playful, and pressed two fingers to his lips. “You beautiful fool,” she whispered. “I am Osskari, remember? Flames and heat cannot harm me.”

Saelira let the wrap fall from her shoulders and stood before him, naked in the crimson light. Then she climbed onto his lap, thighs around his hips, and drew him into her in one slow motion. They both gasped. Then she began to move.

She rode him hard and hungry, chest pressed to his, his heartbeat thundering against hers. His scaled hand spread across the small of her back, pulling her down onto him. His mortal hand gripped her hip. She moved against him until his head fell back and his body shuddered, a low groan tearing loose from his chest. Heat flooded through her, spilling deep inside.

But she didn’t stop. Her fingers wrapped in his hair, mouth at his throat, until her own pleasure crested and broke, waves of euphoria rolling through her. She bit his shoulder as her whole body shook.

Still, she didn’t stop. She moved slower now, forehead pressed to his, their eyes locked together, until he groaned and shuddered beneath her again, the heat of it carrying her over the edge once more.

Afterward, she lay in his lap, his arms around her, breathing heavily, clinging to him. The throne room below them was empty and still. He held her for a long time.

***

Three days later, the Colossus rolled across the lowland plains in the gray light of early morning, great pistons driving and witch-fire engines blazing at full power. The Osskari ran the machine as a free crew now, warriors guiding a fortress they had chosen to wield as a weapon. Each rotation of the colossal wheels churned the earth beneath its weight.

At the highest tower, Kaelvor and Saelira stood side by side at the railing, clad in black armor forged in the Colossus’s own foundry. They faced the horizon, where volcanic peaks rose dark against the sky and thin columns of smoke drifted from their summits before the wind tore them apart.

Ozravel is dead. The Osskari are free. Kaelvor and Saelira now control the Colossus, and they are moving toward the Blackfang, but what dangers lie between them and their destination…only time will tell.

Godfang Chapter 7 coming soon.

Until then, stay close to the light. The dark takes those who wander.