“The future?” I ask in confusion.
“How?” Dastian asks.
I’m slightly concerned about this. If he doesn’t know, then what the hell is this?
Voren shrugs. “I’m thinking out loud. How the fuck should I know?”
“Well, great. So, you are either cryptic as all fuck, or you have no fucking idea what’s going on. Or maybe the latter is just it. You are all as clueless as each other!”
“Nyssa!” Voren says, calmly, his gaze over my shoulder. “Don’t move.”
Dastian hisses as I do the natural thing and turn around.
Most of me wishes I hadn’t.
A monster, the likes of which I have never seen before in real life or in the texts, opens its giant maw and roars at us, covering us, mostly me, in spittle and toxic fumes that make my head spin.
“Well, that’s new,” Dastian says, slowly. “I like it. Very avant-garde.”
My blade is in my hand before he is finished admiring the horror show. It’s all mismatched parts, like chitinous plates, too many spindly legs like a spider from hell,and a head that looks like a pissed-off boar with glowing red eyes. It’s a monstrosity straight out of a fever dream, something the Order’s texts never even hinted at.
I plant my feet in the mud, blade held in a two-handed grip. “Anyone got a name for this one, or are we just making shit up as we go along?”
To my right, Dastian has gone serious. The air around him crackles with raw energy, and his eyes are molten gold. “Never seen one before,” he says, his voice a low growl of something that sounds suspiciously like excitement.
Voren, on my left, is a statue of chilling calm. He watches the creature with an unnerving stillness, as if cataloguing its weaknesses. “It doesn’t belong. It feels stitched together.”
“Well, I’m about to un-stitch it,” I snarl and charge. The monster swivels its grotesque head, its red eyes locking onto me as I splash through the mud, aiming for the soft-looking flesh where one of its legs meets its armoured torso. This is what I do. It doesn’t matter if it has a name or not. If it’s a threat, it dies.
My blade hits the chitinous plate with a screech of protesting metal, skidding off without leaving so much as a scratch. Sparks fly, and the impact jars my arm right up to the shoulder. The monster shrieks, a sound like a train derailing, and one of its spindly legs lashes out, aiming to impale me.
I throw myself sideways, landing with a wet squelch in a patch of particularly deep mud. Before the creature can strike again, a bolt of crackling red-gold energy slams into its side. It’s pure chaos, a contained explosion that makes the air smell like burnt sugar. The monster stumbles, one of its legs twitching uncontrollably.
“A little help, slayer?” Dastian calls out, a wild grin plastered on his face.
On my other side, a wave of cold washes over the beast. Frost spiders across its armoured hide, and its movements become sluggish. Voren hasn’t moved a muscle, but his pale blue eyes are glowing faintly. The air around the monster thins and dies.
“It has no soul to speak of,” Voren says. “Just a hunger stitched into its core.”
“Where the hell did it come from?” I rasp.
“Does it matter?” Dastian shouts, launching another ball of crackling energy that slams into the creature’s boar-like head. “It’s ugly, and it needs to die!”
“Could say the same about you,” I mutter.
“Hey,” he snaps. “I’m many things, but ugly isn’t one of them.”
The monster ignores him. Its glowing red eyes are locked on me. It knows I’m the mortal one, the squishiest snack on the menu. It lunges, scuttling across the mud with unnatural speed, its many legs churning up the earth.
Before it can reach me, a wall of pure cold erupts in its path. Not ice, but a visible wave of soul-sucking chill that comes from Voren. The monster skids to a halt, its movements becoming jerky and slow as if its essence is being frozen solid. The pause is all I need.
Voren said it was stitched together. Now that I’m closer, I can see the faint, shimmering lines where the different parts meet, like spectral sutures holding the nightmare together.
I duck under a flailing, frost-covered leg and drive my blade into one of those shimmering lines at its hip. This time, the blade sinks in. There’s a sickening tear, and the creature lets out a shriek of genuine agony.
It thrashes wildly, and a leg catches me in the ribs, sending me flying. I land hard, the air knocked from my lungs in a painful gasp. My vision blurs, the world tilting crazily. Through the swimming grey, I see both gods move, planting themselves between the wounded, raging beast and me. When the third one appears, I sigh. Looks like I’m not fighting this alone after all, and I fucking hate it.
Dreven doesn’t appear in a flash of light or a puff of smoke. He’s just suddenly there, a pillar of shadow and disapproval standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the other two. He doesn’t even glance at me. His entire focus is on the wounded, thrashing beast.
