◇_ _
The first thing Garran noticed was the silence.
Not the usual kind—the tense, sleepless hush of a camp built on suffering—but a deeper stillness. Like the whole place was holding its breath.
He sat at the edge of the trench, dagger in hand, sharpening it by touch and habit. Steel against stone. Over and over. Not because he needed to. Because it gave his hands something to do besides tremble.
He'd heard the whispers. The artifact had been found.
They even had a whole meeting about it. And what came out has stupefied the majority. Some of his friends had looked toward him, making sure he'd heard the order that followed.
No witnesses.
After tomorrow, there will be no souls able to tell what happened these last weeks.
◇_ _
At first, the changes were subtle, strange dreams, twitches, Words muttered in sleep, in languages no one recognized. A boy laughed in the dark, then cried when he woke, claiming he'd seen his dead brother smiling with black eyes.
Another man carved a prayer into the dirt with broken nails to a god no one else had heard of.
During the day, everyone pretended nothing was wrong.
But they felt it. Like pressure in the skull. A weight in the lungs. Like the air itself had become aware of them.
Guards snapped faster. Captives fought over nothing. Everyone was on edge. And like that,Gradually;The situation went into awful mode.
It began with a shout. Then a scream. A guard fell. A captive stabbed someone with a chisel. Blood hit the dirt, and the spiral began.
Mercenaries turned on each other. Captives clawed at captives. No sides. No rules. Just raw survival. The lines blurred in seconds.
Garran dodged a wild swing from a fellow merc, shoved a blade into his neck, and kept moving.
This wasn't rebellion.
It was contagion.
◇_ _
Lothar moved through the chaos as if it didn't touch him. Around him, chaos was dominating. Fire spreading through the tents, bodies dropping in the smoke.But he felt none of it.
Only the pull,something was calling out to him and he wasn't the only one.
Others moved with the same purpose. Captives. Slavers. Cooks. A foreman still wearing his ledger belt.
They weren't speaking, but they all walked the same path—toward the trench. Toward the vault.
Drawn by something ancient.
Worried,Mira grabbed Lothar's arm.
"Lothar. Don't."
He didn't stop. "I have to."
"You're not yourself."
He looked at her ; eyes glowing faintly in the smoke.
"Maybe I am."
They descended together, silent and staggering, into the belly of the earth.
Down the carved stone steps. Through tunnels wet with condensation and age. Into the vault.
◇_ _
It waited for them.A dark chamber lit not by torches, but by the pulsing red light from the carvings in the walls. Symbols etched so deep it looked like the stone had been wounded.
At its center stood the chest.Black. Bound in metal and bone. Open.
Floating; there was something that nobody would think of.
There it was ,a flask.Glass, blackened and veined with iron. Filled with thick, dark liquid that didn't slosh—it writhed.
This was Blood.Sealed. Ancient. Alive.
A woman stepped forward, reaching.
Her fingers brushed the glass.
She convulsed. Screamed—a sharp, unnatural sound—and burst apart in a flash of steam and red.
Another tried. And another.Each one touched it.Each one was rejected.
Exploding. Burning. Collapsing into fragments and smoke.
◇_ _
Lothar stepped forward.The others were gone; burst, broken, burned. Their bodies smoldered in silence around him.
But the flask didn't resist him.
It welcomed him.
The moment his palm touched the glass, the world vanished.
There was no light. No breath. No time.
Only pressure. Endless. Crushing.
The blood didn't pour into him.
It invaded.
It surged through his veins like liquid fire, chewing through nerves, boiling marrow, rewriting him from the inside out. His lungs spasmed. His heart misfired. His bones groaned under the weight of something not meant to live inside flesh.
Pain eclipsed thought.
Then it came,the voice.Not spoken,felt.
A hunger. A history of war, extinction, gods dragged screaming into the dark.
Dragging him somewhere he did not know, he felt it attack something; something that if swallowed, would make him a goner.
He immediately went into survival mode.
His body convulsed, muscles locking like iron bars snapping shut.His mind screamed; fractured pieces folding into each other, begging to forget.Nerves flared white-hot, as if being pulled out of him one by one. The pain was so much that even his name faded from memory.His memories cracked like frozen glass.
The blood wanted him hollow; it wanted space. He felt the blood circulating as something ancient howled behind his ribs.
He tried to scream but came to find out that his voice was gone. His will frayed and he felt himself disappear, like a gaz dissipating, his personality was melting; his soul losing of its brilliance.
And that's when he heard them, Corin's last words still echoed.
"Don't let them break you."
He heard them,again ,and again, and again.
Lost into the strangeness of his situation,these words became the last words that kept him from losing it all.
In the deepest dark, where only agony remained—he held on.
He just didn't die fast enough.And even as the entity swallowed him, a part of Lothar remained—silent, sunken, buried beneath the tide. Watching.
Unbroken.
◇_ _
The blood spoke,its voice dripped into the chamber like poison through cracked stone.
"Unawakened trash,This vessel is flawed. Frail. Soft."
"But it endures."
"Barely."
Flesh stretched. Bones lengthened, twisted. His muscles warped—twice their size, laced with burning veins of pulsing light. His skin cracked like scorched clay, bleeding black between glowing fissures. His eyes—once ember-bright—were now eclipses, rimmed in red.
Power radiated from him in waves.
And still the entity held back.
It wasn't even using one percent of its might.
And yet—Lothar's body crumbled.
His fingers flaked, like ash in the wind.
His spine trembled. His heart tore. His jaw cracked with each breath.
Two hours.
That was all the body would last.
No more.
And the entity;housed in human ruin; began to rise toward the surface.
◇_ _
The camp was still burning, but the chaos had changed.It was quieter now.
Not calm,never calm; but hushed. Like the forest itself was listening.
Those who had survived the initial madness didn't move much anymore. They crouched behind debris, hid inside collapsed tents, knelt beside bodies of people they no longer recognized. Some whispered prayers to gods they'd never spoken to before. Some just stared at the trench.
They all felt it.A pressure rising from beneath the earth. Like the ground was exhaling something it had buried too long.
Smoke curled through the trees, heavy and unmoving.
A mercenary—face slashed open, barely standing—turned slowly to the others.
"We shouldn't be here," he rasped.
Another one nodded numbly, eyes fixed on the trench.
"It's awake."
No one asked what "it" meant.They already knew.
At the slave pens, even the sick had gone silent. The children pressed their faces against the wooden slats, not crying, not speaking—just watching.
One of the older prisoners clutched her chest, whispering over and over, "He came back wrong… he came back wrong…"
From somewhere deep in the forest, animals shrieked and scattered.
The birds didn't return.
Near the southern edge of the camp, a soldier stood frozen. Not in fear—but awe. His sword dangled from his fingers.
He saw Lothar's silhouette rising through the smoke, dragging a shadow behind it like a second body.
He dropped to one knee, unthinking.
His mouth opened, and a single word slipped out without his consent:
"Fuck"