The slope levelled briefly into a narrow natural shelf, a thin mercy granted by the mountain. Selene paused there, pressing her back against the rock, and let the cold air settle in her lungs. Nihil hung against her spine like a dead weight.

  Oswald was two steps behind her, shivering but moving.

  She stopped abruptly.

  Voices. Ahead and below, somewhere within the dense line of dark pines clinging to the next descent.

  Selene pressed closer to the rock and listened.

  "We can't beat Lucian. We just need to reach the colosseum. That's all that matters."

  "And what? What happens to us after? The nobles will simply discard us." A second voice, sharper.

  “At least we’re not dead. Reaching the Colosseum is enough.” A pause. Boots crunched on frost.“I hope Oswald crosses our path. Or that new, weird girl—Selene. Killing them will give us something to show. Otherwise it’ll look like we just walked there.”

  A third voice, quieter said, "We need to reach the tunnels at the base of the mountain. The colosseum is inside it."

  Selene's eyes moved to Oswald. He had heard it too, his brow furrowed against the cold, his red-veined eyes reflecting the crimson moonlight.

  She leaned close and kept her voice barely above a breath. "Under the mountain. I was right."

  "Is that good?" Oswald whispered.

  "It means there's a way in. Somewhere at the base." She shifted the strap of Nihil. "It also means we need to get down there before those three find it first."

  Oswald nodded. He fell silent for a moment, then murmured, "Did you hear what they said? About us?"

  Selene met his eyes. “Let’s hope we don’t cross paths with them. For now, let’s follow them from behind.”

  She slipped off the shelf and descended through the loose scree, keeping the trees between herself and the voices below. Oswald followed, placing each step with care.

  Selene froze. "Wait. What was that? Did they draw their weapons?"

  Ahead, the bushes rustled.

  Something stepped out.

  It wore armor of the Caryome Kingdom, but the metal had gone terrible. It bulged at the joints, fused with something black and glistening that pulsed faintly in the moonlight, as though the armor and the thing inside it had grown together over a long and agonizing stretch of time. Its movements were not natural. It walked like a puppet handled by someone still learning the strings.

  The three candidates relaxed.

  Selene pressed her palm flat against Oswald's chest, stopping him behind her.

  One of the candidates stepped forward, the strong one Selene had heard speaking first.

  “What is this creature?” he said. “Look at it. Like an injured animal waiting to be put down.”

  Another voice laughed. "Let's put it out of its misery."

  With careless arrogance, he advanced toward the twitching armored soldier, sword raised.

  Selene's eyes widened. The figure looked like the corrupted soldiers they had encountered on the road to the kingdom.

  He crossed the distance in two strides and swung. A diagonal slash, fast and committed, aimed to split the corrupted soldier from shoulder to hip.

  The blade stopped.

  It drove into the armor and stuck, wedged into the bloated join between chestplate. The candidate yanked. The blade held fast. He yanked again, leaning back with his full weight, the cords of his neck straining, his breath coming sharp and panicked now.

  The corrupted soldier turned its head.

  The visor of its helm had warped, the eye slits stretched and split into ragged openings. Through them, a dull orange light glowed.

  He did not have time to react.

  The corrupted soldier raised its sword and brought it down.

  The sound was blunt. A single wet crack of force that split him open. The candidate came apart along the center line, cleaved from the crown of his skull straight through his collarbone, his sternum, everything. One half toppled left. The other toppled right. The ground between them turned red as the blood spread.

  His sword remained lodged in the armor, jutting from the soldier's chest like a marker on a grave.

  Oswald made a sound that wasn't a word.

  The two remaining candidates, shocked and horrified by what they had just witnessed, broke and ran. They were fast, the injected blood carrying them in long, desperate strides.

  For an instant, the corrupted soldier watched them go.

  Then, without any sign of intent, it moved.

  It was among them before they could react. One candidate simply split, the soldier’s arm driving through him from behind. What was left of him struck the ground in pieces.

  The last one made it few more steps before the soldier caught him by the back of his uniform. The impact ended him against the face of a boulder with a sound Selene felt in her bones.

  Then silence.

  The soldier stood among the wreckage, its bloated armor glistening darkly in the red moonlight.

  Oswald had gone still behind Selene. She could feel him shaking against her back. Fear had taken him completely. His hands were pressed over his mouth.

  He shifted his weight. Just slightly. Barely anything.

  A branch snapped beneath his boot.

  The corrupted soldier stopped.

  Its head turned in a sharp, unnatural snap. The bloated helm swept across the tree line, searching with those ruined eye slits until they settled on the darkness where Selene and Oswald stood.

  It began to move toward them.

  "Stay behind me," Selene said as she found the hilt of Nihil. The leather was cold. The fire opal gave her nothing. No warmth, no pulse. Just silence.

  Then a sound came before she could register it.

  A hiss. Clean and fast.

  Then another. Then a third so close behind the second they were almost one sound.

  Three impacts. Each punched through the bloated armor with a crack like a hammer through glass, leaving clean holes the moonlight shone through.

  The first arrow struck the corrupted soldier dead center in the helm. The head snapped back in a spray of black fluid, the ruined visor bursting outward in warped metal.

  The second and third drove through the chest in quick succession, piercing the fused plate and leaving perfect, devastating circles.

  What remained of the corrupted soldier collapsed.

  Selene stood very still for a moment, listening to the silence it left behind.

  From across the tree line, a figure stepped out from the shadows between the dark pines.

  A carved recurve warbow of dark wood and gold detailing caught the blood moon’s light as it hung loosely at her side. A black leather quiver rig crossed her back, its brass filigree plates gleaming softly.

  She saw Selene and stopped.

  Something shifted in her expression.

  "It's you."

  “Alice!” Selene exhaled. “It’s good to see you. If it weren’t for you, I don’t want to think what might have happened to us.”

  “There were three of those things where I come from,” Alice said, stepping over the fallen soldier. “They move like animated corpses.”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Oswald was staring at the ruined soldier in disbelief.

  "What is that?" he managed.

  “I think this is the corruption the kingdom has been fighting,” Alice said. “And I believe I’ve found a good strategy to deal with them.”

  Selene looked at her steadily. "What?"

  “You had a front-row seat,” Alice said, her eyes moving to the three candidates lying scattered across the ground. “Up close, these things are a menace. Fighting them is a death sentence. The strength they carry is far beyond what that frame should be capable of. No hesitation. No mercy.”

  She paused.

  “But at a distance, when they don’t see you, they’re just target practice.”

  She glanced at Oswald, then back at Selene. “The Ascension was always going to be difficult. We knew it would be brutal, but…”

  “This is something else entirely.”

  She looked up at the mountain, at the black slope rising above the tree line into the blood moon’s red glare.

  The three of them stood in the silence of what surrounded them: the fallen soldier, the three candidates scattered across the frost. For a moment, they let the weight of the night settle.

  "You're heading for the base," Alice said finally.

  "The colosseum is inside the mountain," Selene said. "There has to be an entrance at the base."

  “I know where it is,” Alice said. “I think we have a better chance of reaching it if we stay together. If you two want to reach the Colosseum, let’s do it together.”

  Oswald looked at Selene.

  Selene considered Alice for a moment.

  Astraea’s warning echoed in her mind: Trust no one.

  Beneath it, the divine whisper slithered through her thoughts. They are all only using you.

  But she did not want to live in a world where every extended hand was a trap. She did not want to believe the only truth worth learning was suspicion. If that was the price of survival, she wasn’t sure the thing that survived would still be her.

  “Together, then,” Selene said.

  Alice smiled. “Follow me.”

  She moved into the dark, and Selene followed, carrying her faith like something fragile she refused to set down.

  Two corrupted soldiers were moving in a slow, irregular circuit along the base of the rock face when Alice first spotted them.

  She dropped to a crouch behind a low shelf of stone without a word, and Selene and Oswald came down beside her. Below, through the thin screen of scrub trees, the corrupted soldiers moved. Moonlight caught on the black glistening places.

  “Two,” Alice said, barely above a breath. She had already nocked an arrow. “If I flank from this side, I can take them both.”

  She glanced at Selene. “But I need something to close the distance. Someone has to take their attention off me.”

  “A distraction,” Selene said.

  "Yes. You go ahead, make noise, give me a few seconds to get into position." Alice glanced past Selene to Nihil. "You might want to actually draw your sword this time."

  Selene reached back and gripped the hilt.

  Nihil came out the way an anchor comes out of the sea. Genuine effort, absolutely no cooperation. She hauled the blade clear with both arms, felt the tip drop toward the earth with its own enormous gravity, and managed to keep it upright. Her shoulder screamed in protest.

  Alice watched as Selene drew the massive sword and tilted her head.

  “I don’t know how useful that thing will be in actual combat,” she said, her eyes moving over the blade. “But that stone at the hilt…”

  “Alice.”

  "It is not the time to be joking around." Selene turned to look at her.

  Oswald said nothing. He stared at the blade. Even on this mountainside, the fire opal caught the blood moon’s light and scattered it through its depths in slow, deep waves of gold and crimson. His expression was almost reverent, as though he stood before something sacred.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said quietly.

  Alice looked at Oswald, then turned to Selene. "Are you ready?"

  "Yes, just give us a moment to—"

  She was already gone before Selene could finish, dissolving sideways into the shadows between the rocks.

  "You’ve got to be kidding me."

  Selene quickly looked at Oswald. "Stay here. Don’t move unless I say."

  He nodded.

  She dragged Nihil forward, its tip carving a shallow furrow through the earth, and crouched to pick up a loose piece of stone with her free hand. She straightened.

  "Well, here goes nothing."

  She looked at the two corrupted soldiers moving in their slow, wrong circuit below.

  She threw the stone hard into the space between them.

  "Hey! I’m right here. Come and get me, you rusted scraps."

  The soldiers stopped.

  They slowly turned toward her.

  For half a second they were simply still. Then they came.

  They covered the ground in those terrible, lurching bursts of speed, the eye struggling to track them properly, and suddenly they were there, both blades already swinging from opposite angles.

  "Damn it."

  Oswald closed his eyes, unable to watch.

  Selene swung Nihil across her body.

  The collision was immense. A single metallic impact rang off the surrounding rocks. The shockwave surged up through the blade and into Selene’s arms, her shoulders, her spine.

  But Nihil was impossibly dense.

  The two corrupted blades struck it and stopped dead. The soldiers lurched back from the impact as if they had swung into a wall of solid stone. For one fractured second they stood there, their bloated armor vibrating.

  “Alice!”

  The arrows came.

  The first punched through what remained of the left soldier’s helm with a sharp crack, snapping its head back in a spray of black fluid that painted the rocks behind it. Before the sound had finished, the second arrow struck its chest, then the third, punching through fused plate and leaving thin shafts of moonlight shining through the holes.

  The right soldier turned toward the arrow's source. Alice put two through its chest and one through its face in the time it took to turn.

  It went down hard, face-first into the ground. Black fluid spread slowly outward beneath it, steaming in the cold.

  Silence.

  Selene stood in the ringing quiet, Nihil held low, her breathing ragged and her arms burning. She looked at the two fallen soldiers.

  Alice stepped out from behind a broken pillar of carved stone. She lowered her bow and looked satisfied.

  Her eyes moved to Nihil, then back to Selene.

  “Well, that ceremonial sword,” she said, “does have its uses. Let’s continue. I think we’re getting close.”

  A faint smile touched her lips.

  The entrance to the colosseum stood ahead, a gap in the rock face where the ruins had collapsed inward, leaving a low passage framed by old carved stone. Beyond it, a downward slope led into the mountain's interior.

  As they approached, they heard voices.

  Four candidates stood at the entrance.

  Opposite them stood two other candidates. They looked hollowed out. Exhausted.

  "This is not right. Let us through," one of them was saying, his voice tight, fraying at the edges. "Why are you all doing this? There are rules about—"

  “The only rule here is that the strong survive. It is the only rule that has ever mattered.”

  "Lesser candidates should die on the mountain. That's what the mountain is for."

  Selene had taken two steps forward before Alice's hand closed around her arm with surprising firmness.

  "Selene." Alice's voice was low and completely level. "Stop. Let it play out."

  "But they are—"

  “This could turn to our advantage if they fight we run for the entrance.”

  Selene clenched her jaw

  "This isn't right. We should help them."

  “There is no time for that,” Alice said. “Look. They are about to fight.”

  Then the roar came.

  It tore down from the sky above them, vast and feral, shaking loose dust and sending pebbles skittering across the stone.

  Every head tilted back.

  It filled the entire sky, a sound so deep and so absolute that it felt more like pressure than noise. Everyone froze as realization struck, fear rising in their eyes.

  A dragon was approaching.

  Then the shadow came down fast.

  It dropped from the peaks above and landed between the two groups with an impact that shook the ground and sent loose stones tumbling from the ruined entrance. Wings cracked open and folded back, but the membranes were torn and threaded with black rot, smoke clinging to them like a second skin.

  The long neck swung low. Split scales exposed strips of dark flesh beneath, and in places the bone showed through.

  Something was terribly wrong with this creature.

  The motion came in jerks, joints misaligned, scales fused into dark plates that swallowed the moonlight. The same corruption that had twisted the soldiers had found something far larger to ruin.

  For one suspended moment, no one moved. No one breathed.

  One of the candidates nearest the entrance broke first. He turned and ran, scrambling for the passage.

  A voice rolled down from above, carried on the heat of the dragon's breath.

  "Are you supposed to be the best humans Carmyne has to offer? How disappointing. Let me cleanse your failure from this world."

  The dragon’s tail swept out, striking the four candidates near the entrance and sending them sprawling across the rock. The other two bolted in the opposite direction. The dragon tracked them without hurry.

  Then it exhaled.

  The world turned white-orange and searingly hot, and the screaming began.

  Selene turned her face away from the light. Even at this distance, she felt the heat against her skin, a dry, blistering pressure along the side of her face.

  Alice did not look away.

  "We stick to the plan," she said, her voice sharp with focus. "The same one we've been using. You two go that way. I'll go this way to get a better angle. I'll use my special arrows to bring that beast down. And the rider."

  Oswald had begun to hum. A thin, wavering sound, barely a melody, pressed through clenched teeth. It was the only thing he could think to do in the face of such horror.

  Selene turned, startled, trying to understand what she was hearing.

  Behind them, the massacre continued.

  Two candidates were already gone, their crimson uniforms indistinguishable from the fire consuming them. The third was still screaming, still moving, a burning silhouette staggering sideways until he wasn’t anymore.

  The fourth had made it eight steps before the dragon’s tail struck him again. The impact hurled him into the air, his scream tearing loose as he spun helplessly above the stone.

  The dragon’s head snapped upward.

  Its jaws opened.

  He vanished between them.

  The dragon lowered its head and swallowed. A slow movement of the tongue followed, as if tasting the air where the man had been.

  Alice touched Selene's shoulder.

  "Selene. Listen to me. We are next. As soon as that thing finishes, it will catch our scent. We have to move now, while it is still distracted."

  Her eyes were steady. Certain.

  "Can you do this? Take Oswald and run that way, toward the rocks. Give me a few seconds to get into position. I will not fail you. I promise."

  Selene moved more on instinct than thought. She grabbed Oswald. She found his arm in the dark and gripped it.

  He gripped back.

  "Go!" Alice screamed.

  Selene ran.

  High on the dragon's back, where the neck met the powerful line of the shoulders, a figure noticed the movement.

  "Well, what do we have here?" he said.

  Selene's blood went cold.

  She recognized that voice.

  Below, the dragon lifted its head from the ground and turned toward Selene and Oswald.

  Alice was already running. Not toward the flanking position she had described. Not toward any angle that would give her a shot at the dragon.

  She was running directly toward the entrance.

  Faster than either of them, pulling away with every stride, the distance between them growing with each second.

  At the last moment she glanced back, leapt over a broken stone, and loosed two arrows in quick succession without breaking stride. One struck Alexander. The other struck the dragon’s face.

  On impact, the arrows detonated into thick clouds of smoke that swallowed the dragon's vision and sent it rearing back with a guttural snarl.

  Selene opened her mouth.

  She understood.

  Alice reached the entrance and stopped. She turned back.

  Her face was calm. There was something close to satisfaction in her expression.

  "Thank you for your help," Alice said. "Who would have thought allying with the two weirdos would be so fruitful?"

  She nocked a final arrow and aimed at the stone arch above the entrance.

  "It was nice to meet you, Selene. Goodbye."

  She fired.

  The arrow struck the keystone and detonated. The arch cracked, split, and came down in a cascade of ancient stone that sealed the passage shut. Dust billowed outward in a grey wave.

  The entrance was gone.

  Selene stood in the open, Oswald clutching her cloak from behind, the collapsed passage a wall of rubble before them.

  Behind them, the dragon spread its corrupted wings wide.

  It beat them once.

  The stroke tore the smoke apart in grey ribbons until the air was clear and its ruined eyes found them standing alone in the open with nowhere left to run.

  The wingbeat hit Selene full force. Her hair whipped back, revealing the raw hurt on her face.

  Oswald's fingers tightened in the fabric of her cloak, and she could feel him trembling, trying not to be pulled away by the wind.

  At Nihil's hilt, the fire opal pulsed.

  Once.

  Deep and slow.

  Crimson light breathing through the stone like a heartbeat.