The black lands batter him with coal rain. H ills like scars loom on the uncertain horizon. The air is a blood haze, and t he ground is brittle and dry. Cracks in the earth hold pools of stagnant water. V oices linger in the black wind.
T he city is behind him. He ’ s left t he Eidolos alone with its painful desire s to be free. Now h e stumbles across a stygian world filled with frozen ash.
Something in the sky seems to follow him, a vague shadow like an obtuse hawk. Distant shapes fold and distort, clouds twisted into dark faces.
He moves with purpose. He searches for the entrance to the Shadow Lord’s territory.
I can escape this place, he thinks, but the thoughts don’t come easy to him. His blade gives him the strength to retain a sense of his own identity in this shadow-drenched world. W ithout it he would be a formless shade, another refugee of th e perpetually eclipsed landscape. I can be free.
We can be more. The Eidolos’ words ring in his mind.
The land slopes up. He is suddenly close to the trees, which are sharp and twisted like handfuls of blades. Dark fumes fill t he air. T he roar s of beasts echo from deep within the black forest.
The constant blood sun dips lower, obscured by phantom clouds.
He ’ s never walked near these woods before. Somehow, in spite of years spent exploring the Whisperlands, he ’ s never witnessed this forest, not until the Eidolos directed him to it.
T he dread wind carries leaves that crackle like bones. Every step he takes kicks up ecologies of shadow insects. Pitiless moans ooze from the dark.
Vaguely humanoid c reatures twist and slither like half-melted serpents at the edge of his vision. L oose stone s and twigs roll down the hill as he ascends.
Distant storm clouds boil and churn with electric light. Thunder echoes through the tin sky.
His body groans with tension. He feels eyes on in him in the dark, the gaze of cold and hungry shadows.
N atives stand at the edge of the forest. They look out over the path that leads to the heart of the grim woods.
He can’t make the figures out clearly. They aren’t the same arcane wanderers he ’s spied before, those people made black b y the necrotic essence of the calcified plains. These new creat ures are different. They aren’ t human, but c onglomerations of dissident life forces. O ne moment the y resemble hawks, and in the next they are simian. They are leopards and then wolves, humanoid and then serpent.
Whatever they are, t he creatures keep their distance. He wonders if maybe they ’ re the basta rd offspring of fused worlds, random ly jettisoned souls that have melted together into unstable forms. They are h ybridized survivors without any true identity, creatures so drenched in darkness they don’t even realize what abominations they’ ve become. They mewl and growl at his passing, but they keep their distance.
The world is vast behind him. He looks back over his shoulder and sees endless plains like dry ocean s. The wastelands are broken and withered. Fissures in the ground leak vapors that congeal into mistsludge. The horizon is preposterously far away, a tiny cut at the edge of a blank nowhere. There are mountains and hills and the ruins of cities in the distance. Black lightning scars the sky.
He can see further than before. The shadows seem less thick.
Things are more real here, he realizes. I’m close r to the border. Closer to the edge of the Whisperlands.
He follows the Eidolos’ directions, empathic knowledge not so much known as felt. H is instincts guide him, even though he knows they are not his instincts, for the knowledge has been instilled in his mind.
The voices in the wind grow louder. They remind him of his spirit, and he is fil led with sadness. He suddenly feels very small, and very alone.
H e comes to the edge of the forest. Hard wind rattles the skeletal branches. D ead leaves fall like shards of glass. Black-grey mist obscur es any detail of what lie s deeper in the trees.
His fingers tense near the hilt of his blade. He knows he isn’ t prepared for this, even with the information the Eidolos has implanted in his subconscious mind.
The mist envelops him in frozen arms. His boots sink into dust and silt. He presses through the mire, and enters the trees.
W eb-patterns of shadow mark the path. Brackish fluid drips down and collects in rancid pools. The air is cold and raw. He smells organic waste and feels the tang of smelted iron on his tongue.
There are no paths, no means to find his way aside from following his false instincts. Soulrazor/Avenger cuts a swat h through the corpse-dry trees. The ghost wind drowns out the sound as he crash es through the underbrush.
He senses a presence nearby, a malign entity as much a stranger to th e dread wilderness as he is. W hatever it is, it keeps its distance.
He carries on. He ponders the dire reality of his situation.
W ithout his spirit, even Soulrazor/Avenger isn’t likely to do him much good against a cadre of mages.
This is suicide. But I have to try.
He walks. There seems to be no end to the forest.
Eventually he escapes the mist, and the trees thin. He moves through clearings filled with black earth and dead leaves. Piles of dark branches stand ne xt to long-abandoned campfires. He smells charcoal and mold. T he whispers of the dead are stronger there.
He looks closer. What he’d thought were branches are actually bones, burned to black and stacked in heaps.
Some of the trees are made o f bone, as well. Their blanched hue has been discolored by a fire that seems to have ripped through th at part of the forest some time ago. He runs his finger against a tree and wipes away a film of burned grime. The bone underneath is yellowed and cracked.
Skin flags dangle from the bone trees. They hang placid, as there is no wind that deep in the forest. The flayed flesh is coal black, the skin of some shadow-infused beast. The hide banners stretch like standards and mark an uneven path through the haunted woods.
He smells meat in the air, and he grimaces at the taste of salt and acetone.
The ground ha s been disturbed by the passage of other creatures. C rude blades made of fused carbon lie scattered on the ground. He hears a faint groan in the distance.
Mountains loom ahead, still many miles away, barely visible through the dead branches.
Bla de in hand, he follows the new path.
Tendrils of web stretch between the trees. Dark silk play s against his skin like smooth fingers. He feels dust on his skin and burned wood on his tongue.
Bodies dangle from the trees, suspended by necrotic threads. They appear frozen in mid-fall and hang at violent angles. Most of the ir flesh and clothing has corrod ed off the bones. They bob like grisly marionettes.
He pushes through the perpetual gloom. His joined arcane blade lights his way with a subtle shine like blue moonlight.
The forest grows darker. He smells dead fish and glacial moisture, a raw ice-water breeze that clings to the trees like saliva.
He sees m ore signs of passage, bla des and bedrolls and cold camps that have long-since been looted for anything of value.
The presence he sensed earlier return s. It shifts in the dark. Being close to it makes him f eel like he stands at the edge of an abyss.
The air is grey. His feet swim in a cold wash of shadow that obscures the forest floor. The air is so cold he feels crystals in his beard, and every breath freezes in his throat and lungs.
He realizes he hasn ’ t passed through any of the black webbing for quite some time. He’ s moved past its outer perimeter, past the warnings, and straight into the home of whatever made them.
A bone-white and bladed arm as long as a lance launches at him from out of the darkness. He uses Soulrazor/Avenger to knock it aside, then hacks through the carapace and severs the knife- limb. T ender layer s of pulsing red meat lie be neath the cracked bone shell. White puss oozes from the maimed appendage.
He sees the trees and the darkness, and nothing else. He stands surrounded by a world of shadow, and it grows thicker as the curled howls of his attacker draw close. Fear ices his gut. He holds the blade ready, and calls his spirit. H e remembers that she isn’t there, and his heart sinks.
Another blade-limb erupts from the dark. He barely rolls away before it slices by him and cleaves a bone tree in two. Another limb flies out, insanely long, a bone needle mounted on a pale and twisted tentacle. He can’t see the source of the limbs — they stretch back into the vertical sea of darkness beyond the trees.
He rolls beneath the hacking a ttacks and ru n s forward, leaps over piles of skin and bones left to wither and freeze on the soiled forest floor.
The creature bleeds into his vision like a white wound. It’ s humanoid, but only barely, a pale and writhing mutation with an elongated torso that twists like an eel. Its head is bald, with tiny black eyes and an enormous maw of razor teeth. Its many arms are spindly whips of flesh dotted with bone spurs.
It resemble s the strange creatures he saw before, back at the edge of the forest, only this one is white where they were dark. It’ s somehow resisted the corrupting pall of the Whisperlands, only to evolve into something much worse.
It whips another bone-claw at him, but he ducks beneath it and charges. The creature releases a blood-curdling scream that rattles the ground and chills his blood. He smells vomitous fumes and rot gases. Its teeth are curved and black, stained with ebon flesh.
It can’t raise its limbs in time to defend itself, and even with its fearsome fangs he knows he can kill it, and he does. Soulrazor/Avenger plunges into its skull and cracks it open like ice. White blood sizzles when it hits the dark ground.
The hunter falls without another sound. Its body melts into a milk pool. He stands over its remains.
He finds its lair. It isn’ t far away, a deep cave system built into the side of a massive hill, a dark orifice in a darker cluster of stone that’s been camouflaged by the shadow landscape. The forest continues on past the hill. He ’ ll scale the stone and ascend to the Shadow Lord’s next layer of defense.
The Eidolos had named the Shadow Lords leader: the Witch Queen. What was she looking for? Why had she built her stronghold t here, in that dreadful place?
H e feels that it ’ s important to search the hunter’s lair. Something drives him, a base instinct he can’t ignore.
The inside of the cave is dank and cold. He finds m ore skins, some of them human, most not, all tainted by the ebon touch of the Whisperlands. Tunnels lead off into deeper chambers. He smells rot and ice. Pools of neretic slime bubble up from the ground.
There are tools and weapons, spears and shreds of clothing. This thing has feasted on creatures in the Wh isperlands for some time. It’ s gorged i tself on travelers and refugees and natives and other mutations. He isn’t sure how he destroyed it so easily, except that it seemed unused to direct confrontation. It normally took its prey by surprise.
He wonders if m aybe it hadn’t wanted to die. Maybe it didn’t understand why it had n ’t changed like the other creatures, and it couldn’t go on living in a land carved from nightmares.
In a way, he feels sorry for it, even after he finds it’s young.
They a re grotesque. They mewl like sick kittens and writh e like lampreys thrown from the water. Their mouths have not yet fully formed, and their limbs have yet to grow their blade appendages. They are a mass, a pile of pale flesh and slime held in a bowl in the earth. They look like they ’ ve just been born.
They were, he realizes. That wasn’t the mother I killed, but the father.
He presses deeper into the cave. He isn ’t sure how, but he knows he is n ’ t safe, not w hile these creatures live. They evolve quickly, and they will hunt him.
The mother i s still weak from birthing the offspring. Her body is bloated, not thin an d flat like the male’s but fat and bulbous. She looks like a living egg-sack.
Her limbs whip out at hi m, but he’ s able to elude them easily. Without thinking he charges into the room and slaughters her. P art of him believes he is meant to do this.
That this family of hunters is not meant to be here, and that he is meant to set them free.
He finishes the young quick ly. His heart p ounds as he exits the cave. White blood covers his chest. His limbs shake, and he isn’t even aware of his own tears until he’ s halfway up the rocky hill side.
His feet tread across dark stone. The hill is steep and covered in drifts of black ice and frozen clay. Ooze clings to his boots. Rocks dislodge beneath his feet and tumble down to the forest below.
The trees grow thin ner as he climbs. They stand at slanted angles, aimed at the blood sky like jagged spears.
The forest beneath him is like a black ocean. A dead wind chills his skin. Shadows scramble just out of sight. He sees child-like shapes and hears cackling laughter.
Memories flash back at him, and it’s difficult for him to hold them off. He sees ghouls in the darkness as they chas e him across a mist-covered landscape. He sees a dead city at the edge of the world.
He thinks of Snow. He remembers her, burning on the train.
It wasn’t your fault, he tells himself, but he ’ s told himself this before, and he never believes it. He tries to convince himself she was dead already, that the girl he’d grown up with was gone, her identity wiped clean by the vampires of Koth well before he ’d found her.
It doesn’t help. In the end, he ’d killed her, and that guilt has scarred him. He will forever bear that wound.
Tears stain his face, but he pauses, breathes in air filled with grit and shadow, and thinks about wh at he wants to go back to. It’ s difficult, at first, to remember, and for a moment he feels a kinship with the hunter beast, a creature that had grown so confused and lost and desperate it no longer wanted to continue living in the nightmare it was trapped in.
But after a moment more memories come to him, good memories, and they fill with him with light and warmth. He sees Mike and Ronan and Maur and Grissom and Ash, and especially Danica, so beautiful, so much under his skin, and if he sees her again, he tells himself, maybe, just maybe, he’ll tell her how he feels, he’ll take advantage of the chance he’s been given, he won’t make the mistake again of drifting apart from someone he cares about, not again, never again, not like with Snow.
He wants to see them… all of them. No distance or obstacle will keep him from going forward.
I have to try. It’s all that I have left.
He comes to the top of the massive hill and steps over the ridge. A flat field stands before him. B lack skulls on the ground mark the border to another region of the Whisperlands. R ows of stakes protrude from the earth like broken fingers. Thin trails of blood smoke rise up from shallow pits and curl into the sky.
A cold building made from black bones stands in the distance, right at the edge of a nother dead forest. The shrine is low and built in vicious angles, like something reached down and crushed it into splinters and edges. A pair of unmoving skeletons, their frames burned black and their eyes fi ll ed with cold fire, stand s vigil outside the twisted door.
He steadies himself, readies his blade, and walks towards them.