Embers in Her Blood
Eliana's transformation did not end with the reshaping of her flesh—it carved its way into the marrow of her being. Her bones ached not with pain, but with pressure. Something vast and ancient stirred inside her, something older than language and darker than memory. The magic she once feared now crackled behind her eyes like an ever-watching flame, flickering in rhythm with her heartbeat. It didn't wait to be summoned. It moved with her breath. It was her breath.
She no longer cast magic.
She bled it.
Every time she inhaled, the tunnels around her seemed to constrict. Shadows gathered where light should have been. The deeper she walked, the more the cave felt like a throat, and she—its parasite—devouring it from the inside out. Her footsteps made no sound, yet every goblin in her path flinched, as if they could feel the heat of her rage before she turned the corner.
Her thoughts had grown still—terribly still. She didn't cry anymore. Didn't mourn. Didn't even want to. Compassion was a foreign language. Mercy, a joke she couldn't remember the punchline to. Pain was no longer suffering—it was data. Just another set of sensations. If her skin tore, she learned how much force she could take. If a rib cracked, she memorized the angle. If she bled, it only fed the spellwork now buried in her skin.
She moved like something wrong. A thing out of place in this world, neither alive nor dead. Her magic sang a low, endless note under her skin—a constant hum, like a swarm just beneath the surface, waiting to break free and consume.
The tunnels had once whispered her name in fear.
Now they choked on it.
The air around her tasted like copper and old rot. Moss peeled from the walls as she passed, scorched by her very presence. Her footsteps left behind not footprints, but ash. Even the stone flinched from her touch. Goblins who caught her eyes too long collapsed days later from fevered nightmares, gibbering about a red sun and teeth in the walls.
She felt their fear.
She fed on it.
Some nights, she could hear the earth whispering to her. Murmurs that didn't sound like goblin speech. Deeper voices. Lower. Like something buried leagues beneath the world had noticed her… and approved.
And still, she was changing.
Her claws tingled constantly, soaked in residual magic. When she flexed them, sparks leapt from her knuckles, tiny flashes of blue lightning dancing in the damp air. Her veins glowed faintly beneath the skin, as though her blood itself had caught fire. Her body was no longer goblin. It was becoming something else—something unnamed, something forbidden.
Each kill was a sacrifice.
Each death, a tithe paid to whatever eldritch force now curled inside her spine.
The old Eliana—the human girl, the noble daughter, the betrayed corpse—was gone. What crawled from that grave of pain was not a soul seeking justice. It was a storm given flesh. A ruin in the shape of a woman.
She didn't seek vengeance.
She sought obliteration.
And she would start with the city above.
But first, she had to finish devouring the one below.
The Beast Wears a Crown of Bone
Once, she had whimpered in the dark, curled into herself like a dying rat—broken, bloodied, forgotten.
Now she strode through the depths like a living blasphemy.
Her body was no longer shaped by the weak, desperate movements of prey. It had been reforged in the furnace of survival—battle-hardened, brutal, elegant in the way only killers can be. Muscle coiled beneath her skin, dense as iron cables, her limbs moving with silent purpose. Her hide had darkened to a dusky, ashen hue, smooth like obsidian and just as unyielding. The few scraps of cloth that clung to her were stained with dried blood, soot, and magic residue.
And her face—gods, her face.
Gone was the trembling girl who once bore the weight of her own betrayal. What remained was angular, sharp, alien. Her cheekbones jutted high and harsh, her eyes sunken and smoldering like coals left to simmer in a dying fire. Her teeth had grown—not just sharp, but jagged, uneven, made to rend and tear. She smiled rarely, but when she did, even seasoned goblin warriors stepped back, as though her grin might leap from her face and bite.
They didn't bow to her from loyalty.
They bowed because they couldn't not.
Even the hobgoblins—those massive, brutish leaders of the forge clans—averted their eyes when she passed. They felt it. The crackle in the air. The pressure of something ancient pressing down on the world through her. A monster hiding behind a woman's skin.
Eliana tested her might not with words or challenges. She simply walked into the war camps of the forge city's elite. Walked right up to their champions. Said nothing.
And struck.
It was never a fight. It was a demonstration.
They lunged with war cries and rusted axes. She stepped to the side, almost lazily, and opened their throats with a single flick of her claws. There was no wasted motion. No breath out of place. Her eyes never blinked. Blood arced through the air like ribbons, painting the stone in thick, steaming lines.
One strike. One fall.
The survivors said she moved like smoke—impossible to catch, impossible to hold. Others claimed she was lightning, fury packed into muscle, burning through the air with unnatural speed. But it was her stillness they feared most. How she watched before the kill. Silent. Cold. Studying.
Choosing.
She stripped her victims where they fell, tearing the armor from their corpses with practiced indifference. The metal groaned in her hands, warped and reshaped by her claws. She wore the mismatched remains like a second skin—each piece fitted together not for beauty, but for dread. Charred pauldrons, fractured breastplates, skull-faced helms… she became a walking reliquary of death, draped in the armor of the fallen.
And the skulls.
She kept them.
She broke through the ancient arches that lined the city's upper tunnels—once built to honor long-dead goblin kings—and hung her trophies there. Bleached bone grinned down at the cowering masses. Rows of them. Warriors, brutes, shamans. Each skull a promise. Each socket a warning.
The whispers began.
"She wears a crown of bone."
Some said she didn't sleep. Others claimed her shadow twitched even when she stood still. That if you listened too long, you could hear the screams of the dead echoing through the tunnels in her wake. That her armor whispered back when spoken to.
She had become a myth too fast.
Too violent.
Too real.
And yet—she wasn't finished.
Because somewhere, far above the filth and stone and blood-soaked halls, her name had been buried in lies. In noble courts and marble towers. Among silver-tongued traitors and velvet-robed butchers.
Valerius.
It was still hers.
And she would reclaim it the only way she knew how—drenched in the fear of kings, carried on the backs of monsters, wearing a crown of broken gods.
Hunger That Cannot Be Named
The blood on her hands dried too quickly.
She killed. She conquered. She rose—but the higher she climbed, the hollower it felt. Her strength grew monstrous. Her magic blazed like a storm behind her eyes. Her enemies fell before they could scream, and yet… she ached.
Not in the body.
In the soul.
A cold, rotting emptiness gnawed at her marrow, whispering beneath the skin she no longer recognized. It wasn't hunger for food. No thirst for water, no carnal craving. It was other. It had no name in the goblin tongue. No sound in the living world could describe it. It wasn't the desire to kill—it was the need to ascend.
To tear open the flesh of the world and crawl out as something new.
She began to feel it in her dreams—nightmares more vivid than life itself. Towers made of bone and obsidian spiraled into storm-filled skies. Oceans of screaming black ichor churned under a dying moon. Creatures vast and blind roamed endless fields of broken bodies, their tusks as long as trees, their voices deep enough to shake stars loose from the heavens.
And through it all, a word echoed like a heartbeat wrapped in chains:
"Orc."
It wasn't spoken.
It arrived.
Pressed into her mind like the brand of a god. A single syllable wrapped in fate. Her body shuddered every time it surfaced. Her blood thickened. Her eyes burned.
She stopped sleeping.
What use was rest when her mind was no longer hers?
The goblins, the hobgoblins—even their strongest—were less now. Their blood no longer thrilled her. Their deaths gave her strength, yes, but not progress. Not transformation. She drank deep of their magic, their marrow, their lives—and found nothing but ash on her tongue.
She began to wander deeper. Beyond the mapped corridors. Past where light died and breath turned thick. Into the roots of the world. There, she could feel the pulse of it. The thing inside her. Awake. Watching.
Calling.
She clawed through walls of rot, carved her way through chasms slick with fungi and ancient bones. The silence was crushing. But it spoke to her. Not with words. With promises. Hints. Warnings. She saw flashes behind her eyes—a crown of thorns woven from spines. A battlefield lit by green fire. Her own hands dragging a human noble from a burning carriage, his screams high and useless.
Her future was already written.
All she had to do was become it.
An orc was not a goblin. Not a mutation. Not a step forward.
It was descent.
Into something older than flesh. Older than kingdoms. A return to the purest form of destruction. But she would not be mindless. No. She was not born of chaos. She was born of vengeance.
She would mold this hunger. She would chain it. Weaponize it.
An orc's strength. A noble's mind. A soul sharpened into a blade.
She would not just evolve.
She would emerge—the true heir of ruin. Not some wild beast... but a prophecy wrapped in sinew, rage, and fire.
The whispers in her bones cackled. Her claws trembled.
The transformation had already begun.
The Broken Flame Rises
She did not kill for survival anymore.
She culled.
Each murder was a ritual. Each slaughter, a sermon. Her path through the forge city was a trail of ash, bone, and severed prayers. She no longer attacked in chaos—she selected. The strongest, the cruelest, the ones who walked with arrogant weight—they died first. Warriors who had broken hundreds of bones under their clubs. Shamans who had eaten the tongues of men to chant blood-hexes. Overseers wrapped in scar-iron and madness. She tracked them. Watched. Waited.
Then she descended.
Not like a beast. Not like a soldier.
But like a disease.
There was no warning. No mercy. A flicker in the dark. A shriek of lightning coiling down a tunnel wall. A rush of wind that reeked of scorched meat and wet decay. And then silence—broken only by the wet crack of something vital tearing open.
And then her—standing over what remained, hunched and steaming, eyes glowing with unnatural light. Not alive. Not dead. Something between.
She fed, not with her mouth, but with her very being. Magic hissed as it crawled out of her skin, sucking the life from their bodies before their hearts even stopped. She could feel it—their essence sinking into her. Thick, black, ancient. It coiled inside her ribs and knotted around her spine. Sometimes it screamed. Sometimes it wept. But always, it obeyed.
And her body changed.
Her limbs stretched, hardened, reshaped under the pressure of what she was becoming. Her spine cracked with new growth. Her skin darkened to a deep, burnt gray, etched with veins of glowing crimson, like magma beneath stone. Her breath steamed in the cold air, even when no fire burned. Her voice grew lower, layered—like many mouths trying to speak through her at once.
Her hands were no longer hands. They were weapons. Each finger tipped in obsidian claws capable of tearing through plate. Her teeth had split again, new rows forming behind the first—made for rending, not chewing. Even the bones in her jaw seemed to shift with every moon, adapting, readying.
But worse was her presence.
The forge city felt it. Even when she wasn't near.
The light grew weaker where she passed. Torches sputtered to dim glows, as if afraid to illuminate her fully. Metal rusted overnight. Stone walls wept black water. The tunnels stank of blood and ozone. Goblins whispered of her in broken chants, prayers muttered to gods who no longer answered.
They called her The Broken Flame.
She wasn't a being. She was a curse—the price of their sins come walking, screaming. Some said she could slip through cracks like smoke. Others swore they saw her melt from the shadows, her body forming from black fog and whispers. A few insisted she was not one but many—that she had become a hive of spirits, each face she killed trapped within her, wearing her body like a cloak.
Her legend grew.
But it was not the kind that inspired awe.
It was the kind that unraveled sanity.
She left messages. Not words. Symbols. Bone carvings scorched into the walls. Arrangements of flesh no one could interpret without retching. One tunnel bore dozens of skulls stacked like an altar, jawbones ripped out and aligned in a spiral. Another was coated in blood so thick it peeled in sheets from the stone.
Even the shamans—themselves warped and rotted by years of blood rites and soul-bonding—refused to speak her name. They gathered in tight circles now, clutching old totems and whispering with dried tongues, desperate to understand what she had become. Their runes burned black. Their visions came in screams. They chanted, begged, bled themselves dry.
But the spirits said only one thing:
"She is no longer goblin."
"She is no longer flesh."
"She is becoming."
And still she moved, deeper, faster, stronger. The city's foundation cracked beneath her wake, both physical and spiritual. She was changing. Something was being born through her. Not merely a warrior. Not a leader.
A harbinger. A vessel.
The hunger still grew—writhing beneath her bones like a second heart. Not for food. Not for blood. But for transcendence. For something far older than goblins, far darker than orcs.
And as her enemies fled into the dark, their screams echoing down the dead-end halls of the deep, Eliana walked among the ruin she had carved and whispered to the walls, to the old gods, to the thing whispering back through her own reflection:
"I am not finished."
The Road to War
And then—it began.
Not with trumpets. Not with banners or declarations.
But with blood. And fire. And screams that echoed through the marrow of the earth.
Eliana no longer stalked the shadows. She moved like a plague—open, violent, unrelenting. She descended upon the strongest goblin warbands not as a diplomat… but as an executioner. There were no words of alliance, no promises of glory or gold. She offered only two truths:
Submission. Or death.
The first warband laughed—until their chieftain's chest caved in beneath her bare fist. She crushed his ribs like dry bark and dragged him across the blood-slick stone, his heels carving a trail as she marched to their altar and shattered it beneath his corpse. She tore out his still-warm tongue and fed it to the fire, letting the black smoke rise, stinging every eye with the scent of burning dominance.
Then she turned.
Eyes gleaming, voice guttural and cold as grave-soil, she snarled:
"You are mine.
Or you are meat."
They knelt. One by one. Some sobbing. Some trembling. One tried to run.
She burned him alive where he stood.
And that was just the first.
She marched through the lower levels like a walking crucible, drawing tribes together through pain and awe, baptizing warbands in violence. Each new camp became a battleground—chieftains slain, bodies piled in heaps, fear binding the survivors to her cause. She did not offer them hope. She offered them direction. Purpose.
She became their blasphemous banner. Their living omen.
And they followed her—not out of loyalty.
But because she was the thing that would devour them if they didn't.
Her army was not an army.
It was a storm.
Wild-eyed fanatics bearing blades too rusted to name, limbs wrapped in bone, skin flayed in ritualistic spirals. Goblins with spiked collars and iron grafts burned into their flesh, snarling like dogs. Hobgoblins carrying heads on hooks, shrieking war chants to gods long buried. They came barefoot, bleeding, starved—and they came with joy, because to march beneath the Broken Flame was to feel like death could be chosen, not suffered.
The tunnels grew tight with movement. Torchlight flickered on rusted helmets and gnarled spears. Slime and blood painted the ceilings. The ground vibrated with their feet, a heartbeat of war pulsing up toward the surface.
But Eliana knew what they were.
They were not an empire.
They were not an eternal force.
They were a weapon—one she had forged from rot and desperation.
She would hurl them at the world like shrapnel. She would use them to shatter the gates of the kingdoms above, to drown her past in the blood of its betrayers. They would die. She knew that. Most of them would fall before the first sun touched their malformed faces.
But it didn't matter.
Because she didn't need survivors.
She only needed the storm to begin.
And as she stood atop the stone dais of the final warband she had broken—cloaked in stolen bones, teeth woven into her braided hair, her body humming with infernal power—she raised one clawed hand, pointed toward the ceiling above, and let out a scream that peeled the flesh from nearby ears.
It wasn't a command.
It was a signal.
A wailing birth cry.
The war had begun.
And nothing above was ready for what crawled from the dark.
Eliana Valerius Shall Return
In the suffocating silence of the final chamber, she stood alone. The walls pulsed with heat—sweat-slick stone bathed in a low, eternal glow. The sacrificial flame roared before her, not high but deep, burning with a hungry core that glowed blood-orange, like the last light seen through slitted eyelids before death. Shadows crawled in slow ritual around her feet, licking her heels like obedient hounds.
She did not speak at first.
Her breath was steady, but her thoughts screamed. The magic in her veins stirred, not like wind—but like magma beneath the skin, alive and seething, as if the flame before her recognized its kin. She reached into herself, deeper than she ever had. Past the mutations. Past the new flesh and twisted instincts. Past the fangs and claws and horns that marked her as monster.
And there, buried beneath ruin and rot, she found it.
The one thing left untouched.
The one thing the goblins could not desecrate.
Her name.
"Valerius."
It left her lips like poison kissed by silk. A relic dug up from a grave. It should have sounded triumphant, but instead it burned her throat, stung her tongue, like trying to swallow gold that had curdled in bile. It was sweet—yes—but spoiled. Tainted by the years of degradation. The betrayal. The blood. The laughter of her uncle as he watched her fall.
But it was hers.
She did not whisper it again. Once was enough. Once was sacred.
Eliana stared into the flame and saw her reflection flicker—a twisted silhouette haloed by fire. The pointed teeth. The crimson eyes. The blackened nails and the skin tattooed in ritualistic filth. A monster. A thing mothers would hide their children from. But beneath it all, Eliana remained, smiling with a mouth not made for smiling.
She reached into the flame, felt no pain, and drew ash across her brow like warpaint.
Not lost. Not dead. Not a victim.
She was no longer the girl screaming in the garden as blood soaked her shoes.
She was the beast that clawed her way out of the underworld, one corpse at a time.
She would not return as a princess.
She would not return as a martyr.
She would rise from the tunnels as a cataclysm in the shape of a woman,
a beast sculpted from agony,
a memory sharpened into a blade.
She would carve her name into the bones of her betrayers.
And when the kingdoms above looked to the hills and saw the black smoke rolling in,
they would not see an army.
They would not see a banner.
They would see a nightmare wearing a crown of bone and memory.
And they would whisper, too late:
"Valerius has returned."
The flame before her sputtered—then surged upward, devouring the shadows, lighting the chamber like a funeral pyre. It did not burn her. It welcomed her. As if it, too, waited for this moment. The ascension of something wrong. Something holy in its blasphemy.
Eliana turned from the flame.
And behind her, in the tunnels that had swallowed so many lives,
thousands of eyes waited for her signal.
Her horde. Her curse.
Her storm.