The inn door slammed open and the night poured in.
Not just the dark — the sound. Screams layered on screams, a chorus of terror rolling down the street like floodwater. Somewhere close, a woman was shrieking a name over and over, her voice shredding into sobs. Somewhere further, a man was bellowing orders that no one was following. And beneath it all, the raw, wordless howl of people who had stopped trying to communicate and were simply expressing the fact of their own terror.
Nyra was first through the door. Her boots hit the cobblestones and slid — the street was wet, slick with something that wasn't rain. In the gutter, a thin river of red was already finding its channel, running downhill toward the lower districts. The smell hit her a heartbeat later: iron and bile and the particular sweetness of ruptured organs.
A child ran past her.
A boy, maybe seven, barefoot, his nightshirt plastered to his thin body with someone else's blood. He wasn't screaming. His mouth was open, but nothing was coming out. He'd used up his voice already. His eyes were wide and blank and fixed on nothing, and he ran with the mechanical desperation of someone whose body had taken over because his mind had simply stopped.
"Hey—" Nyra reached for him, but he was already past her, vanishing into the dark between two shuttered shops.
A girl burst out of an alley to Nyra's left — twelve, maybe thirteen, her dress torn, her knees scraped raw from falling. She collided with Nyra and rebounded, landing hard on the cobblestones, and when she looked up her mouth was a perfect O of terror. She scrambled backward, away from Nyra, away from the inn, away from everything, until her back hit the wall of the opposite building and she couldn't go any further.
"Don't—" she choked out. "Don't let it touch me. Please. Please don't let it touch me."
Nyra crouched, her axe low, her voice as steady as she could make it. "I won't. What did you see?"
The girl's eyes were huge, the pupils blown wide. "The man. The man in white. He came out of my mother. He just — he just came out of her, and she — she—" Her voice broke. She pressed her hands over her face, and her shoulders shook, and no more words came.
Nyra straightened. Her jaw was iron. She looked at Tar, who had emerged from the inn behind her and was standing motionless, his great axe resting on his shoulder, his single eye moving across the chaos with the measured assessment of a warrior who had seen too many battlefields to be shaken by one more.
"Stay with her," Nyra said. "Keep her safe."
Tar rumbled. It wasn't agreement.
"I'll find the source." She turned to the others, who were spilling out of the inn behind her. Valen's twin swords were already drawn, their edges catching the faint lanternlight. Luken's staff was glowing, runes chasing themselves up the wood. Alinda's crimson eyes swept the street with cold precision, cataloguing threats. Neo's blade was out, his stance wide, his breathing too fast but his hands steady.
"The screaming is coming from three directions," Nyra said. "North toward the market. East toward the houses. South toward the old well. We can't cover ground together."
Valen was already nodding. "East. The houses. People are trapped. We heard children."
Luken fell in beside him without a word, his staff lighting the way with pale blue light.
"North," Alinda said. Her voice was flat, stripped of its usual edge, and when she looked at Neo her crimson eyes held something dangerous — not anger, but a promise. Stay close. "The market. That's where Black Hollow is. If this is connected to the potions..."
Neo nodded once. His hand was steady on his blade now. His breathing had slowed.
Nyra watched them go — Valen and Luken first, Valen already shouting for people to clear the street, Luken's staff casting long shadows against the blood-slick walls. Then Alinda and Neo, loping north toward the merchant stalls, their forms shrinking until the dark swallowed them.
She looked at the girl huddled against the wall. At Tar, standing over her like a monument of horn and muscle. At the blood running in the gutters.
"South," she said. "We find the centre."
She moved without looking back. Behind her, the sound of the city divided itself — Valen's voice cutting east through the chaos, Luken's staff lighting a pale trail between the houses, and then nothing, just the dark swallowing the rest of them whole.
Valen heard the children first.
The residential quarter was a warren of close-set houses, their windows dark, their doors hanging open like mouths frozen mid-cry. Bodies lay in the street — not all dead, most of them just too terrified to move. A woman crouched behind an overturned cart, clutching a toddler to her chest, her eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance that Valen didn't want to look at. An old man sat against a wall, his leg bent wrong, his lips moving in a prayer he didn't seem to believe.
But the children — the children were still screaming.
"Down here," Luken said. He'd found a narrow stair leading to a basement door, the kind of half-submerged entrance common in the older houses. The door was bolted from the outside. Someone had locked them in.
"Get it open," Valen said.
Luken's staff flared, and the bolt shattered in a spray of blue sparks. Valen yanked the door open and nearly collided with a small body hurtling up the stairs.
A girl. Nine, maybe ten. Dark hair plastered to her face with sweat and tears. She grabbed Valen's sleeve with both hands and wouldn't let go, her small fingers digging into the fabric with desperate strength. "They're still down there," she gasped. "The little ones. I told them to hide but they won't come out and there's blood coming through the ceiling—"
"Luken, get them out." Valen peeled the girl's fingers from his arm — gently, carefully, one at a time — and steered her toward the wall near the basement stairs. "Stay here. Don't move. We'll be right back."
The girl pressed herself against the stone, her eyes still huge, her breath still coming in short, sharp gasps. But she nodded. She stayed.
Luken was already descending, his staff lighting the way, his voice low and calm as he called to the children below. "It's alright. I'm here. Come toward the light. That's it. You're safe. Take the stairs slowly—"
Valen turned back to the street.
That was when he saw the man on his knees.
Not dead. Not running. Just kneeling in the middle of the cobblestones, his back to Valen, his arms limp at his sides, his head tilted forward as if in prayer. His body was swelling — not with breath, but with something else. Something inside him pressing outward. The skin of his neck was distending. The seams of his shirt were straining. The fabric began to split along his spine, and beneath it, something moved.
"Sir?" Valen called. His blades came up. "Sir, can you hear me?"
The man's chest split open.
From sternum to gut, a vertical seam tore through skin and muscle and the white bone of his ribs. Two hands pushed through — bronze-skinned, lean, the fingers long and precise. They found the edges of the wound, one hand gripping each side of the split ribcage, and then they pulled. The body tore in half.
The man inside stepped out.
He was tall — taller than Valen, though not as tall as Thal. Silver hair fell past his shoulders, matted and wet, clinging to the white leather of his collar. His eyes — red irises burning in white sclera — swept the alley with the unhurried assessment of a man arriving at a job site. The white leather was drenched, blood already darkening to rust at the edges. A piece of the man who had been his doorway slid off his shoulder and hit the cobblestones with a wet sound.
The two halves of the body collapsed behind him. Forgotten.
He rolled his shoulders once. Loosening a joint.
His red eyes settled on Valen. He said nothing.
Luken emerged from the basement stairs, the last of the children scrambling past him into the street. Two boys, maybe six and eight, their faces pale, their clothes streaked with dust and something darker. Luken nudged them toward the girl still pressed against the wall. "Stay with her," he said quietly. "Don't run. Stay together."
The boys huddled beside the girl. None of them moved.
Then Luken turned, and his staff came up, and the runes along its length flared bright enough to cast the whole alley in pale blue light.
"What are you?" he demanded.
The man in white didn't answer. He looked at Luken's face — at the place where the illusion sat, where the horn was hidden, where the eye that saw what it shouldn't was masked by magic. He looked at that spot for a long moment. Then his eyes moved on, down to Luken's chest, where the corrupted Node pulsed beneath the skin.
Valen stepped sideways, placing himself between them. Both blades up. "You came out of a man's chest. You want to tell us what the hell you're doing?"
The red eyes shifted to him. Unblinking.
"Testing," he said.
One word. Flat. Final.
Valen's grin was a rictus. "Testing what?"
No answer. The man's gaze moved past him, toward the street where more screams were rising. He listened without expression.
Then he looked back at Luken.
"You're holding back," he said.
Luken's blood went cold.
The man took a step forward. His boots left red prints on the cobblestones. "You think if you hide it, it goes away." Another step. "It doesn't."
Luken's staff flared. A bolt of crimson energy — darker than his usual blue, tasting of copper and old rage — lanced toward the man's chest.
The man dropped.
A vertical plunge, fast as a blade falling, the blood beneath his feet swallowing him in a single instant. The bolt passed through empty air and struck the wall at the far end of the alley in a shower of red sparks.
A ripple spread across the pool. Then nothing.
Luken stood frozen, staff raised, breath caught in his throat. "Where—"
The girl screamed.
She was right there — five feet from him, pressed against the wall with the two boys — and her scream was not fear. It was agony. Her back arched. Her small hands clawed at the stone. Her chest split open from the inside and the man in white tore through her in a burst of blood and motion, no pause, no emergence to standing — one moment inside her, the next already lunging. The two boys scattered, screaming.
The man's hand was already moving. The blood around him — hers, his, all of it — gathered, flowing up his leg, over his hip, along his arm, coating his fist in a sheathe of liquid red. It hardened. Sharpened. A blade of blood, dark as old rust, extending from his knuckles.
He drove it forward.
Luken tried to block. His staff came up, the runes blazing—
The blood-blade punched through the wood. Through Luken's stomach. Through his spine.
He felt the cold first. Then the pressure. Then the pain — vast and white and absolute, blotting out the world. He looked down. The man's fist was buried in his gut, the blood-blade emerging from his lower back, dark red and glistening. His own blood was running down the man's arm, mixing with the blood that was already there, indistinguishable.
The man withdrew his fist. The blade dissolved. Luken swayed. His staff clattered. His hands pressed to the hole in his stomach, blood pulsing between his fingers — hot, too hot, far too much of it. His mouth opened. No sound came. He fell.
Valen was already moving before Luken hit the ground.
Both blades carving through the space where the man in white was standing. The man swayed back — left blade passed through air, right blade passed through air — and Valen kept coming, pressing the attack, no room to breathe, no room to think. A diagonal slash. A thrust. A spinning backhand cut. His swords blurred, and the man in white moved through them like water.
He didn't counter. Not yet. Just evaded, his body shifting by inches, his red eyes tracking Valen's blades with cold precision.
Valen lunged. Both swords drove forward in a straight thrust aimed at the man's heart.
The blood on the ground surged upward in a solid wall.
The blades struck it and stopped, held fast as if embedded in stone. Valen hauled at them, snarling, his boots skidding on the wet cobblestones. The wall held. The blood rippled — a faint, almost lazy pulse — and then it shoved. Valen was hurled backward, swords still in his hands, hitting the ground hard and rolling, coming up on one knee.
He was already rising, already surging forward again—
The man's hand came up.
The blood around him lifted into the air. Dozens of droplets, then hundreds, hanging like a cloud of red stars in the dim light. They sharpened. Needles, thin and fine, each one a tiny blade. Valen tried to dodge. Too many. They hit him in a wave — his shoulder, his thigh, his forearm, his ribs — punching through leather and skin and muscle. He staggered, caught himself, kept coming. A needle buried itself in his calf and his leg buckled. He went down on one knee, blades still up, still guarding, still refusing to drop.
The man in white looked at him.
Then at Luken, lying on his side in a spreading pool of his own blood, his hands still pressed to his stomach, his breathing shallow and wet.
The man turned away from Valen. Walked toward Luken.
Valen lunged — ignoring the needles still embedded in his flesh, ignoring the pain, ignoring everything except the man in white walking toward his friend. He drove one blade at the man's spine.
The man didn't turn.
The blood on the ground behind him surged upward in a single thick tendril and caught Valen across the chest. The impact lifted him off his feet, drove the air from his lungs, slammed him into the wall. He hit stone. The world went white. When it came back, he was on the ground, his swords somewhere out of reach, his body screaming.
The man in white stood over Luken.
He looked down at the mage. Luken's eyes were open, glassy, struggling to focus. Blood was running from the corner of his mouth. His hands were still pressed to the wound, still trying to hold himself together.
The man studied him for a moment. No expression. No words.
Then he turned his head. Looked at Valen, still crumpled against the wall, still struggling to rise.
"I expected more," he said.
His voice was flat. Cold. The words landed like a blade slipped between ribs.
"From the Triad."
He stepped back. The blood around him stirred. Swirled once around his ankles. His body compressed, folded inward, and the pool of blood at his feet swallowed him whole. A ripple. A splash of red.
Then nothing.
Valen stared at the empty space where the man had been. The words hung in the air, heavier than the silence that followed. Then Luken made a sound — a wet, rattling breath — and Valen was moving, dragging himself across the cobblestones, his leg screaming, his hands shaking.
He found Luken and pressed his palms against the wound, pressing hard, pressing desperately. The blood came through his fingers. Hot. Too fast.
"Stay with me," he said. His voice cracked. "Luken. Look at me. Stay with me."
Luken's eyes were unfocused. His lips moved, but no sound came. His hands, still pressed weakly to his own stomach, were slick and red.
Valen looked around. The alley was empty except for the dead — the man split in half, the girl in two pieces, blood pooling and spreading and running in the gutters. The two boys were gone. Fled. Somewhere in the distance, the screaming continued.
He was alone.
He pressed harder on the wound. Luken's blood pulsed against his palms, hot and relentless. The mage's breathing was shallow, wet, each inhale a struggle.
"Help!" Valen shouted. His voice echoed off the stone walls. "Someone help! We need a healer!"
No one came. The city was still screaming.
He looked down at Luken's face. Pale. Slack. The blood was coming too fast. Way too fast.
"Don't you fucking die on me," he whispered. "Don't you dare. Not here. Not like this."
Luken didn't answer. His eyes were closed.
Valen kept pressing. The blood kept coming.