Two figures moved through smoke and ruin, locked in a battle that had long outlived purpose.
The forest was gone.
What remained was a wasteland of scorched, splintered earth—ashen soil riddled with fractures, jagged roots torn from the ground like veins ripped from flesh. Trees lay in heaps of blackened trunks and broken boughs, turned to charcoal under the pressure of something far greater than fire. Nothing here breathed anymore.
The sky above was bruised. Sunlight choked behind the smog. The air reeked of raw Aether, acrid and sharp, a taste like static on the tongue.
Every time they clashed, the land shuddered.
This wasn't elegance. It wasn't grace.
Just two remnants of a war with no name, no winners—only survivors trying to break each other open.
One fought like earth. His stance was low, powerful. Each strike was a landslide, momentum building in waves that cracked the ground. His boots left craters. His fists bled force, every blow meant to crush bone and bury what was left beneath it.
The other moved like a shadow carved into human shape. Fast, deliberate. No wasted effort. His blows weren't heavy, but precise. Efficient. Dangerous. The darkness followed his footsteps like an extension of his will—not wild, not formless, but measured. A blade held against the throat of the world.
Between them, their resonance pulsed—opposing rhythms clashing in bursts of light and dark. Dust swirled around them, torn from the earth by the violence of their dance.
"You're not gonna back down, are you, Soren?" the larger man—Rowan—asked, breathing hard, voice cracked from exhaustion and rage.
Soren didn't answer at first. He rolled his shoulders, brushing soot from his sleeve as his stance shifted again.
"No," he said flatly. "I don't surrender."
It wasn't bravado. It wasn't threat.
It was fact.
They surged forward again—fist meeting fist, resonance shrieking as power collided—and the ground beneath them splintered from the impact. But before either could strike again—
The sky made a sound it shouldn't have.
A groan.
A deep, low tearing—like fabric pulled at the seams. Like the world itself didn't want to hold together anymore.
They both froze.
Above them, the clouds twisted violently, coiling into a vortex of slate and violet. Lightning crackled at the edges—not white, but crimson—like veins bursting through skin.
And then the rift opened.
A jagged split tore through the sky, deep and unnatural, a wound that didn't bleed but breathed. It pulsed—once, twice—before unraveling into something vast and terrible.
Out of it poured darkness. Not smoke. Not shadow. But something older. Thicker. Tendrils like blackened roots slithered outward, coiling into the air as if searching.
The air went still.
Then the sound came.
It began as a hum. Low. Nearly imperceptible.
Then it grew.
A high-pitched whine that pierced bone, too sharp to be wind, too ancient to be thunder. It was the sound of something old waking. Something buried too long, clawing back to the surface.
Rowan took a step back. Soren's fingers twitched. They watched, not breathing.
From the edges of the rift, pale light poured through—murky, like moonlight filtered through oil. It cast long shadows that writhed independently of their sources.
And then the sky began to drop.
Not warriors. Not monsters in the traditional sense.
Things.
They tumbled from the rift like waste from a ruptured wound—slick, glistening shapes with too many limbs, too little form. They hit the earth with wet cracks, bouncing off rocks, landing in twisted heaps. Some splattered into trees. Some rolled into shallow water.
No grace. No intent.
Just falling.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It went on for too long.
They looked like fish at first. Long, serpentine bodies. Glistening flesh. But then one rolled upright—and legs snapped into place where no legs should be. Bent backward. Sharpened at the joints. Not natural. Not evolved. Just… wrong.
The creatures began to move.
Jerking. Twisting. Tails lashing like whips, limbs scrambling for direction. They writhed across the ground, leaking water as they moved, their bodies slick with an unnatural sheen. Their skin shimmered—almost beautiful, almost glass—but where beauty should have been, there was only revulsion.
One creature landed too close.
It convulsed.
Then split.
A jagged seam tore from chin to stomach, and its jaw unhinged with a sound like splintering bone. From that gaping mouth, water erupted—pressurized, violent, surging like a broken dam. It carved a trench through the clearing, uprooting soil, battering stone, flooding everything in seconds.