Heavy as sin he was. Like a sodden sack of shit hauled from the bottom of a tannery trench. He leaned into me like a corpse that hadn’t the courtesy to lie still, boots dragging, knees buckling with every third step. A drunkard without the dignity of wine or the charm of slurred excuses.

  So here we were again. Back in the gullet of the fort. Back to officers and their postures, stale air thick with spoiled rations and old hags, the damned Gustavians—gold-braided ghosts—and the Blemmye, towering, wordless, watching as though the world had already ended and they were just here for the echo.

  No matter. Opportunity always clawed its way in through the cracks. One just had to know when to bite.

  “Use your legs, you sodden fool,” I spat, as his weight shifted again and nearly brought us both down.

  “You stabbed me, you mad dog!”

  “Aye. And you tried to choke the life from me, weak-willed, lily-livered bastard. By all rights I should’ve let the crows pick your liver clean.”

  He laughed, low and wet, beneath the breath of his pain. That laugh was a cracked thing—half cough, half grin, all stale breath.

  “Can’t let go of your companion, can you?” he wheezed. “You’re going soft, Johan. Two years ago, you might’ve let me bleed dry for less.”

  I gave a slow nod. Maybe I would’ve.

  “In times like these,” I said, voice flat as stone, “it stands to reason that company is needed.”

  And if that company came with a limp, a curse, and a haunted eye, then so be it. Better the devil you knew than the one who laughed in the dark.

  We arrived, slowly, at the gate, but the gate seemed to arrive before us.

  Men poured out—too many, too quick—armed with pikes, firelocks, blades half-shined and fists clenched. Faces drawn taut with anger, nerves, or drink. Hard to tell which. They looked less like soldiers and more like the sort who brawl over cards, then salute at dawn.

  I held tight to Elrik. His limp made us look pitiful, slow-moving. No doubt they thought us guilty already. I braced for the bark, the shove, the eager crack of the buttstock across the jaw.

  “HALT!” came the cry—gravel-voiced, sharp, not slurred. One of the meaner ones, though his eyes were clearer than the rest. A bastard with purpose.

  “You’ve been declared fugitives and deserters in times of dire! Stand ready for trial, and we might grant you alms of mercy!”

  “Fuck your alms!” I shouted back, spit flecking my chin, rage rising like bile. “We gave more than coin in the swamp, and we took back something worth ten of your prayers!”

  “Johan—” Elrik whispered. His fingers dug into my arm. “Do not kill us now.”

  I didn’t turn.

  “Will you have us rot in that mire, huddled like dogs, when we can hunt? It’s what we do!” I barked at the line of raised blades.

  The men bristled, uncertain. Orders or instinct—one would win out. I’d seen enough lines break to know it wasn’t always the command that held.

  An uncertainty I would use.

  My free hand dug into the folds of my soaked satchel, past crumbs, old cloth, and wood shavings—until my fingers struck glass. Cold, slick. I drew it forth.

  “Look!” I shouted, raising the jar high.

  Dark oil sloshed within. It clung like tar but shimmered beneath the murk—a sour, shifting light that quivered in protest. Sebastian’s femur, cut clean, still pulsed faintly at its core. A ghost’s breath caught in oil. A sin in waiting.

  “Relics!” I cried. “Powers of the world beyond, in our grasp! Things once sold for fortunes—now ours to wield!”

  The soldiers stilled. A few lowered their weapons a thumb’s breadth, eyes narrowed. Even fear, when strong enough, listens.

  “LOOK!” I thundered, stepping forward so the light hit the glass.

  “Do you see what power we bring? Do you understand what we hold?”

  The sound of heavy, rhythmic footfalls cut through my thoughts like a boot to the gut. That gait. Measured, deliberate, like a fucking ghost doing penance. One foot always ahead of the other, like the bastard thought the earth owed him safe passage.

  A Gustavian.

  Blue and black, of course. Their piss-perfect uniforms always looked too clean, like they’d stepped out of a painting and not the muck. And tall. Every one of them fed like cattle for parade. Clean-shaven cunt with a blade at his side—not some ceremonial pig-sticker either. That thing was made to draw blood without needing so much as a raised voice.

  Fuck.

  They’d let them in. Some deal had been struck, no doubt behind closed doors with wine and sighs and too many prayers. The damned bastion had opened its legs to the puritans.

  Bartering with pricks like that would be harder than the swamp.

  My aloft jar did nothing to impress him. Bastard didn’t even blink. No doubt he’d never seen a relic in his life—never cared to. To men like him, the world was clean lines and cleaner doctrines. God alone ruled the earth, and no bone-oil jar, no whispering soul trapped in tar, would shake that gospel.

  "Two dirtied whores have been reported missing by the commandery! Two dirtied, soiled rags make a noise at our door! And one, lone, sinful pile of shit raises his voice as if it was worth a single thought!"

  His face was not red. This one was not angrier than usual, so much was plain. Anger was beneath this one, or a state that had become standard ages ago.

  I could respect that. Hell, I shared the sentiment.

  “We are under protection by the commander of the fort, lest ye have forgotten,” I said—calm now. His fury outmatched mine, so another tack was needed. Let him boil over. Let him err.

  “A privilege lost,” he snapped, “the moment you left this gate to sodomise, perform devilry, or both!”

  There it was. That spark. The bile beneath the discipline. Almost made me grin—finally, a soul not buried beneath pomp and powdered wigs. Pity he wanted us both strung up.

  “Sire,” Elrik managed, voice tight now. The pain was gnawing its way up. “We left the fort to gather what aid we could. For all our sakes. This relic—it’s a boon, if rightly handled. A tool that decides life or death.”

  I watched the Gustavian’s face—square as a stone block, carved with purpose, with damn certainty. His eyes, sharp and narrow, flicked to Elrik. They didn’t blink. But the men behind him did. One shuffled. One touched his belt where no weapon was.

  They knew. They’d seen relics work. They knew what bone and oil could mean when the dead began walking.

  But this bastard? He hadn’t the faintest. Or worse—he had, and called it heresy. Either way, we were fucked if he stayed in charge.

  "Sir, heed them. I can see the power from here—they’ve brought something potent." A soldier's voice rang out behind the line. Clear. Hesitant. The seed of doubt, planted. Just deep enough to take root.

  The Gustavian officer turned on his heel like a hound smelling piss in his soup. His glare tore through his own man.

  "I will not be preached to by two horsecocks dipped in gutter filth! I don’t care if their jar spits gold and sings the fucking psalms!"

  His rage cracked through the ranks now, unchained. He didn’t care who it struck, only that it struck.

  But the line had shifted. That same soldier stepped forward, boots crunching on gravel with intent. "It’s not your word that rules here," he said, firmer now. "This fort flies the Grenzland banner. Not yours."

  The others followed. One step. Two. Like wolves deciding their leader wasn’t worth the food.

  Steel rasped.

  The officer drew his blade—not a parade sword, no, this thing had tasted bone. You could tell from the edge: the faint chips, the discoloration where the oil hadn’t reached. No pig-sticker indeed.

  He raised it high, voice cutting cold through the thickening air.

  "Command is mine! From your lord, and from mine! These bastards will rot in the mud—or hang, alongside their heathen idol!"

  The bone hummed.

  A low, teeth-itching vibration crawled up through my palm, then broke warm across my wrist. Sebastian’s foul aura had caught a scent—like a hound lifting its head from the grave.

  I raised my hand. Only then did I remember Elrik hanging off me like a sack of spoiled wine, his weight sloshing, his knees giving more sermon than strength.

  “Silence, you wretched dogs. All of you.”

  The words cracked out of me like a whip. Enough to still a few tongues. Enough to turn the line of pikes rigid.

  The officer did not still. His gaze hit me like a musket ball—direct, cold, drilled through meat to bone. He came forward without breaking stride. Sword half-raised, the bastard’s stubble brushed my cheek like iron filings dragged over stone.

  “My authority is clear,” he said. His breath carried no liquor, only the sourness of a man who thought himself necessary. “My orders are to apprehend all who hinder our survival, and deal with them as seen fit.”

  The bone vibrated harder—heat rising, crawling up the inside of my arm, sweat beading at the elbow. Whatever simmered in that jar wanted out.

  “I see fit to sabre you down,” he rasped. “What loss would that entail? What reason can you give me to spare your pitiful life?”

  The ground answered before I did.

  A deep rumble. Not Sebastian, not this time. Earth itself shifting its weight. Somewhere behind the ranks, a frightened neigh split the air—sharp, panicked. Boots shuffled. A pike thudded against another.

  I leaned in, voice low, steady, and hot with the truth he lacked.

  “Because I know this land,” I said. “And you do not, you ignorant whoreson.”

  Another rumble rolled beneath the stones—closer this time, like thunder choosing a direction rather than drifting.

  I raised the jar a fraction, letting the soldiers see the flicker in the oil, the sick light breathing against the glass.

  “And I know what is coming.”

  The bone hummed again—longer, deeper—like something far from human had fixed its gaze on all of us.

  A shrill cry tore across the marsh—shrill only by name, for the sound carried a rot so deep it could have made a demon void itself in terror.

  It wasn’t a cry so much as a landslide forced through a throat. A mountain’s collapse stuffed into the narrow shape of a mortal scream. Something vast compressed into the pitch of a dying thing.

  “To stations!” The shout came the same heartbeat the cry ended. No hesitation. Not even the dullest Gustavian could ignore when the world itself called for blood. The order leapt from mouth to mouth, clattering along the pike-lines, across the bastion’s stone throat, up the border-road where the wind carried it on.

  The world moved at once—pure instinct, a single pulse through a hundred spines.

  Whatever was coming, every soul knew it bore death on its back.

  Children screamed in the same breath. Women, men, the bent-backed and the barely grown—everyone lurched at once. Not toward safety; none of them knew where safety lived anymore. They moved because their bodies remembered what their minds refused to hold. The howl had carved the truth into them: GO.

  “By Joseph’s balls, Johan—get me inside!” Elrik wheezed. The fear in him had taken on a pitch. Pain and exhaustion braided through it, thinning his voice to something brittle.

  The jar burned. The heat crawled up my arm—oil roiling like it meant to boil over, bone glowing faint as an ember pried from some pit beneath the world.

  “ALL INSIDE!” I roared, shoving past the bastard blocking the gate. Let him sabre me, if he dared. If I died here, he’d still have a larger beast to cut down after me.

  No reprimand came. No barked order. The world had answered in my place.

  We stumbled in as the brave ones stormed out. Riders of both Gustavland and Grenzland were already mounting, filing toward the breach with sabres sheathed and pistols cocked—faces stiff with dread they pretended was resolve. Frostbitten men. Sweat-slick men. And fools like Elrik and me—limping, soaked, half-drunk on pain—wobbling through the arch along with conscripts and officers whose courage had begun to mutter and fray.

  I was about to drop Elrik somewhere he could whimper in peace when a hand—hard, insistent—hooked my gear and yanked me forward.

  That shit-stain of an officer again. Breath hot with fury, eyes like chips of cold steel shoved into a skull too small to hold them.

  “Have you called that horror here?” he hissed. “Is this your blasphemous work? Meddling with God’s domain through your gutter-born trinket to damn us all?”

  I seized him by the collar. Felt the fabric strain. One of his polished blue buttons snapped free, pinged off stone like a tooth.

  “You couldn’t smell blasphemy,” I snarled, dragging him closer, “nor God, if He shat hot on your lap. Your ignorance led your camp to the slaughter, and now you think to chastise me for finding tools to see?”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I threw him. Old muscles, bitter and burning, gave him more distance than pride could stomach.

  “Go find some other poor bastard to harangue,” I spat. “I want to see the shape of what’s coming.”

  He didn’t shoot me. Didn’t cut me down. Not a word followed. So I took the silence for surrender—or at least for a moment’s truce.

  I climbed the parapet, the same cursed perch where I’d watched the last fight for our lives. Now the next one stirred beyond the fog.

  The cannons stood ready. Two nights ago, their crews fumbled like cold-handed children. But now their shoulders were set, their grips sure. Even their sweat-soured uniforms carried a grim sort of dignity, stiff with powder and resolve.

  I burned. Heat climbed my spine. The jar throbbed at my hip. The vibrations bored into my skull, each pulse heavier, deeper.

  Our rotting friend had a strength in him.

  A strength that would take time—hard, dangerous time—to tame.

  “You fucking bastard. Having the balls to show yourself here again.”

  A voice rasped beside me—low, rotted, soaked in bile. I could smell the man before I finished turning. Liver gone to sour wine. Breath like wet wool left in a crypt.

  I faced the limping pile of shit who had dared question me like a chained thief not two nights ago. His ruined gait brought him close, his hard eyes finding mine. One sat lower than the other, giving him that crooked, half-scorched look—yet the scowl was intact, pointed sharp as a knife.

  “Officer Brandt,” I murmured. Sour old goat.

  Another shrill cry rolled across the marsh—thin, skinned alive, dragging through the low trees like something that wished it could die but hadn’t earned the mercy. It twisted my stomach tight enough to cramp.

  Brandt didn’t flinch.

  “Leaving the fort,” he spat, “without stated reason, without consent. You’re the reason I was embarrassed and wrung out in front of my own command. You know this, you stubborn fool?”

  Annoyance flared in him like a fever, but the edge was dulled. Tempered by the howl, perhaps. Or maybe that senile wine-barrel remembered precisely what kind of tools I had the misfortune of collecting.

  “If you didn’t want me to leave,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow as the jar burned hotter at my hip, “you should’ve stated it more clearly.”

  Below us, the last stragglers—barefoot younglings and weak-backed old men—were scrambling from their shallow firing pits. Grenzlanders in their ragged palette, Gustavians in crisp blue, each leaping to fill the empty earth with muskets and the squat shapes of light cannon.

  Brandt’s jaw twitched.

  “What if I break your back?” he growled. “Leave you marrow-legged in the dirt right here. Would that be clear enough?”

  I chuckled. The sweat was pouring now—hot, sour, relentless.

  Gods damn you, Sebastian. Ease your temper or I’ll drown in the fumes.

  “Then you can juggle this jar of contempt in my stead,” I said, lifting it just slightly so he could see the sick shimmer within. “I think you’d rather lie in a puddle of your own making than wrestle with this ungodly excuse of a saint.”

  The rumble deepened—no gait to it, no pattern a sane beast would claim. Not legs. Not hooves. Just force, dragging itself forward in pulses that made the stones underfoot tremble like they feared being remembered.

  “So what have you brought to our gate? More of the child-spawn?” Brandt didn’t even spare me a full glance. His eyes combed the treeline, the marsh, the shifting fog with a veteran’s indifference—steady, bored, almost insultingly calm.

  “We brought naught,” I spat. “It hauled its own carcass here. Don’t name me a harbinger of doom because the world chooses poor timing.”

  “Very well,” he muttered. “But you claimed the expertise. So—tell me. What comes?”

  I scanned the same terrain. Riders in tight packs tearing divots into the road. Cannon crews sweating at their posts. Officers in mismatched colours barking over each other for the right to be obeyed. Smoke rising already from tinder-readied touch holes.

  “More,” I said. “A tide of it.”

  The ground shuddered again—then again—closer now, closer than anything that size had a right to be.

  “Between us and the Gustavians sits a horde of rotting flesh,” I said, voice dropping as the heat from the jar clawed up my ribs. “Our side is the softer one to break upon.”

  Another tremor rolled beneath us, lifting dust from the stones.

  “Maybe,” I added, “they know.”

  Another foul cry tore loose—meant to mimic sorrow, but stripped of anything human. It carried only pain, the frame of a soul with nothing left inside but rot.

  “CANNONS! READY TO SWIVEL AND FIRE AT COMMAND!” Brandt barked. Uneven shouts answered him up and down the line. Orders flared along the parapet, clashing like blades. Below, riders began to lose formation as their horses panicked—hooves skittering, reins jerking, beasts refusing to remain near whatever clawed its way closer.

  The rumble turned violent. A rhythm without rhythm—movement, mass, inevitability. The trees bowed aside. The marshwaters shuddered and peeled away.

  And then it arrived.

  The sight struck me hard enough to sway my footing.

  It was vast—barn-wide in its bulk—yet thinned in places to a child’s limb. Legs, arms, and other growths jutted from it in a mad tangle, each more twisted and bloodied than the next. It flapped itself forward, slabs of flesh slapping against each other, limbs grinding like a waterwheel turned by a poisoned tide. No order to the body. No sense. Just motion, brutal and blind.

  Faces—God damn it—faces bloomed across it.

  Stacked. Interwoven. Buried half-deep, or jutting out as if gasping for truth. Some contorted in pure agony. Others locked in a red, mindless rage. And some slack and empty—drooling, slack-jawed, eyes dull as pond-water. The dumb stare of a child who’d never met thought.

  Its skin shifted in patches—soft as an infant in one place, leathery and pus-swollen in the next. Blackened rot spread between the folds like mold searching for light.

  And from other seams, it bled.

  Profusely—red, blue, black—pouring down its mass and staining everything it touched. Every step left a trail of filth: soil soaked, roots drowned, water curdled into streaks of dark.

  It screamed.

  Mouths unhinged in shapes no prayer could soothe—one shrieked like metal torn apart, another ground its teeth together until I heard crowns splitting, splintering. And still, amid the chaos, some faces remained stiff—stoic masks staring ahead as if they’d already passed beyond pain.

  Then my stomach turned cold.

  Some of the faces weren’t screaming.

  Some were dead.

  “By God and Joseph’s will,” was all I managed—sweat spilling down my neck, bile scraping the back of my teeth—

  when the cannons erupted on the frontline.

  One shot first in panic. Then three more followed, fired by instinct alone as the mass dragged itself through the marsh.

  The rounds screamed across the air—shrill, useless—and missed. One shattered a tree; another blasted mud and riverwater skyward; the rest vanished into the reeds. Not a single iron ball struck the thing. The weak-kneed bastards had fired before their hands even caught the aim—fear squeezing the trigger before discipline could breathe.

  “HOOOLD LINE! NO CANNON FIRES BEFORE AIM IS MADE, YOU INGRATES!” Brandt bellowed, voice tearing down the parapet. Around him, other officers beat and shoved their men into shape—fists flying, boots kicking—their only prayer that the next volley wouldn’t be wasted.

  No.

  No.

  They’d let it come too close.

  These untrained fuckers would lose their chance—and then the thing would be on us.

  The riders were circling now—up and down the prepared road—loosing volleys as they swept past in a sick, swirling dance. Muskets cracked. Pistols flashed. Powder smoke curled into the sludge-heavy air.

  If their fire had any effect, it was to make more faces twist toward them—eyes burning, jaws cracking open in fresh rage.

  “LEAD FIRE TO THE SOUTH!” a new voice boomed—loud enough to shake dust from the stone.

  Edelmer.

  That fucking shitstain had returned.

  “RIDERS, MAKE IT HEED! TAKE ITS WRATH!” Edelmer roared over the parapet.

  A ragged cheer rose from the nearest riders. A hurrah trembling on the edge of panic, thick with the kind of fear that wanted to run but had been trained, barely, to charge instead.

  More volleys from the riders. Cracking thunder from the Grenzlanders—raw, staggered, furious. A disciplined bang from the Gustavians—tight, unified, drilled into their bones. Shot after shot hammered into the creature, each volley twisting its rage further, driving it toward some new and unknown madness.

  Shrieks answered them—crib-born wails torn through mangled throats, wet gurgles from half-formed mouths. Infants screaming in boiling water. Old men gasping through shredded windpipes. A whole choir of torment, all of it wrong.

  It hauled itself forward still—dragging its bulk with limbs like stripped snakes, reaching blind and frantic for whatever hurt it most. A bullet struck an eye; pus spilled out, thick and yellow, and the eye folded inward like old fruit. Another shot burst a jaw. Another tore a cheek into ribbons.

  None slowed it.

  “CANNONS, AIM!” Edelmer shouted, his voice cutting over the chaos. Left and right, the call echoed. Commander after commander snapped the order on, some with the stiff composure of courthouse men, some choking it out through bile as their minds struggled to anchor the sight before them.

  Even in the smoke and rot, the line shifted.

  The cannons turned.

  The beast screamed.

  I stole a glance toward Edelmer. In truth, I needed the breath—needed a half-heartbeat not spent staring into the walking nightmare dragging itself toward us.

  And I wanted to see the bastard at work.

  He had the eyes of a killer. Clear as day from where I stood. He wasn’t looking at the thing about to spill our guts across the marsh—he was already searching past it, measuring what would follow once this horror was ash.

  Good. The bastard might actually be useful.

  “PARAPET, FIRE!” he barked.

  One cannon, then another—no showboating, no unified volley to impress the ghosts. These men took their time, each gunner finding his own breath, his own aim. You don’t pretend at professionalism when your life depends on accuracy.

  A shot punched straight through one of the writhing faces—one twisted in pure torment. For a blink the agony held shape, then shattered into shards of bone and sinew, flayed clean by iron.

  Another ball caught one of the large limbs—some hell-born mixture of arm and leg. It snapped with a crack that rivaled the cannon itself, folding back with a sick slump. The creature lurched, halted mid-crawl.

  A third found the main mass. Flesh tore open like rotten canvas—revealing a churn of grinding meat and intestine, each piece pushing and writhing for space inside a body already swollen and overcrowded.

  The first proper cannonade had done its job.

  It hurt.

  The mass of ungodly horror hammered its limbs into the earth, stamping and tearing until one of its cracked appendages ripped free under its own fury. It shrieked—no longer the fractured wail of a crib-thing, but a full-throated, hideous lament. Infant mockery turned monstrous. Tears the size of a man’s head rolled from its many eyes while clots of blackened flesh and ropes of half-chewed sinew spewed from deep within.

  But the worst had yet to come.

  For a single terrifying heartbeat, it stopped.

  Stopped shrieking.

  Stopped heaving.

  Stopped dragging itself forward on its mangled wheel of limbs.

  The marsh went still.

  My jar seared my palm; heat raced up my wrist like molten iron. My skull throbbed as if Sebastian himself were dragging nails across the inside of my head.

  And then—it let it out.

  What came from those mouths struck me dumb as a lamb with a broken spine. The sheer audacity of the sound. The control of it. Too shaped. Too deliberate. Too knowing for a writhing pile of carrion to possess.

  It made no sense.

  No sense at all.

  Around me, men dropped. Clutched their ears. Screamed into their palms.

  I didn’t hear it.

  Not the monster.

  Not the men.

  Not even the cannons firing down the line.

  But they fired—God help them—they fired anyway.

  Some shots missed, shaken wild by the world coming undone.

  But many found their mark.

  This time the volley struck together—pure murder-instinct. A unified need to kill whatever had dared utter such blasphemous noise.

  Six balls hit home in the same heartbeat.

  Six rents torn open.

  Six eruptions of gore in a sea of breathing meat.

  That—that—was what it took to make the worst horror of my life finally die.

  I fell to my knees as the utterance was choked off by sheer force. To hell with it all. To hell with this land, this fort, this nightmare. The parapet shook under the pounding of boots as soldiers scattered—victors of a kill they barely understood—while my mind hollowed itself to numbness.

  A boot clipped my ribs.

  I drew breath to unleash whatever fury I had left—ready to flay the bastard who dared to disturb what passed for my reckoning—

  when I looked up and saw Edelmer.

  The world still rang. A flat, endless hum gnawing through the skull. I couldn’t hear a godsdamned word he said. Likely nothing worth hearing anyway.

  “My ears are gone, Commander,” I muttered, jaw tight. “If you want me to heed your drivel, then let me catch myself.”

  His mouth stopped moving. Instead, an arm extended.

  I took it.

  I’ll admit it—my knees were shaking. My head was light. By Joseph’s cracked mercy, my pants might’ve gone damp too. No shame in that. Not after seeing what screamed itself to death on our doorstep.

  The ringing eased, just enough for me to glean the truth:

  he had nothing of value to say.

  “I see you’re back,” He said, voice calm and eyes searching. “Bold of you to willingly walk back to the gallows.”

  “Fuck you and your gallows,” I coughed. Bile and acid burned the back of my throat. “We searched for aid. An expertise you and your lot will never comprehend.”

  He barely heard me. His hand shot out, catching Brandt by the collar as the old goat limped toward whatever miserable errand he’d set for himself.

  “Cordon the creature,” Edelmer ordered. His voice cut through the smoke like a pike-edge. “Observe it from a distance, and fill it with more iron if you deem it wise. It will not rise again.”

  “Yes, Commander,” Brandt rasped—more death rattle than reply. He looked like a man measuring days, not years, every word dragged from a body already half-committed to the grave.

  “You will follow me, Johan.”

  I spat. Sour, stomach-thick. Then I followed.

  Down by the gate, I found Elrik exactly as I’d left him: hunched, sulking, clutching his ears and tending his leg in the same clumsy motion. The fool could multitask misery like no other.

  “What made that shriek? What came for us?!”

  “Horrors I’d do without,” I said. “Rest here. I will scout.” We did not slow.

  Edelmer cast a look back as he led me through the gate. Strange—I’d thought he wanted me penned inside.

  “He is hurt,” he said. “Did you quarrel?”

  “Yes, but it’s squared.” I tapped the jar at my side. It had finally quieted—cooling, still, as if sated.

  “Where has this come from?” he asked.

  A sorry question.

  “We’re looking at an unknown fruit,” I said. “Staring at what shouldn’t exist won’t tell you where it crawled from. By rights, it should not be. Even the ugliest, most mind-flaying horrors in this world carry some sense. This carries none.”

  He nodded once, slow, his gaze combing over the ruin.

  A soldier—braver than wise—prodded the mass with his polearm. Edelmer’s finger cut toward it.

  “What can we learn from this, then?”

  I looked again—closer this time.

  The wounds caught my eye first.

  “There are old wounds on it.” I gestured to the lower back, where pus-filled craters sagged like rotted fruit.

  “They’re large. Whatever struck it left holes. Cannon-sized, I wager.”

  “So it met the Gustavians first,” Edelmer murmured, voice heavy with the weight of a commander piecing a battlefield together from scraps.

  He circled the corpse a pace.

  “The beast was immense… but it was killed by man’s means. It is unlikely such a thing traveled far with trauma like this.”

  We arrived at the same truth in the same breath.

  “So the Gustavians are close,” I muttered. “Their armed force is moving this direction.”

  “And with them the true horror unfolds. A mass of men not ready for whatever has changed in this world. Ready to kill whoever and whatever does not align with their plans.” I grumbled. A memory of beheaded comrades flickered at the edge of my mind—quick, cold, unwelcome.

  “Then this beast has, in essence, been a warning,” Edelmer said. “A warning that it may take more dangerous forms, and that another danger is closing in.”

  Damn his voice. Too calm. Too measured for what lay broken at our feet.

  “And this form doesn’t even phase you?” I snapped, turning to face him fully—an attempt, however pitiful, to look away from the mangled thing stretched across the mud. “This utter contempt for all that is natural?!”

  His gaze didn’t shift.

  “And the true blasphemy of what it said?”

  That cracked him.

  The commander’s expression sharpened to a fine point. Something that cut inward. Something I hadn’t the mind to name.

  “Said, Johan?” he murmured. “The beast said nothing. It cried, screamed, roared like pestilence before it died.”

  My jar warmed. The bone stirred. The compass pulsed like a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.

  “It did speak, Edelmer.”

  His eyes flicked to the jar, then locked to mine with a weight I felt in my ribs.

  “When its limb tore apart,” I said, voice low, “and the cursed faces roare in unison, it spoke.”

  The warmth spread. A warning. A truth clawing its way up.

  “It said it wished for us to die.”