Despite each step sending a chill down his spine, Creation hurried forward.
He didn’t need to go very far.
Just beyond a cluster of trees, a wave of sickening magic overwhelmed him. . Creation wasn’t sure he would be able to breathe if he continued, but as a movement from within the brush caught his eye, he knew he had no choice.
The first assault was the smell, like iron and moss and something sickly sweet coming from his right, but despite its intensity, nothing could have prepared him for its cause. Hanging halfway up the trunk of a massive tree was the contorted form of a torso-less body, limbs splayed out like branches and a head partially hidden in crimson-soaked bark. A tree had sprout itself right out of the man’s middle. Half of his face was locked in the shape of an anguished scream.
And he was not the only victim to such travesty. The farther into the wilds Creation walked, the more he saw. A man half-melted, his liquefied form dripping in hues of blue, purple, and pink. Three men tangled together by the elongated crisscrossing of their own limbs like some odd and nightmarish human braid. One young man lying limp and clearly denied of any oxygen within the confines of an iridescent, pink bubble.
It was a massacre built around insanity.
Aroundchaos.
Creation’s feet dragged, his stomach souring further with each step. When he passed an archer, whose fingers had been turned into arrows, her body contorted into a grotesque rainbow-colored bow, Creation nearly got sick, turning away from the sight to catch his breath. . .
Only to find a familiar head of black curls and dark skin lying unmoving a few feet away.
Creation wasted no time, rushing to Hunt’s side. He hoped she was simply unconscious from the attack. The moment his hand touched her shoulder, however, his hope shattered. That simple touch, a barely-there grazing of his fingers, had caused large chunks of her shoulder to chip and crumble away.
Creation wrenched his hand back, but the damage had been done. He watched in horror as the cracks and fissures spread throughout Hunt’s prone form, breaking or crumbling away completely. Heart pounding, Creation inched his way around her, careful not to damage her further, until he could see her face.
The divine weren’t supposed to be able to kill their own kind, but there was no life in Hunt’s eyes. And as the cracks spread up her neck, her face, there were eventually no eyes at all. Chaos’s magic broke every law they thought they knew.
She had forsaken the pantheon and all its rules with it.
A whimper from his left drew Creation’s startled and horrified attention, his heart beating rapid-fire deep within his chest. Inches away from its master lay Hunt’s wolf, fatally wounded and sprouting roses with blood-tipped thorns from between tufts of matted, dark fur. Creation reached for him, only to be met by fanged teeth and a rough growl. So he pulled back, doomed to do nothing more than watch as the animal dragged himself to his master and burrowed into her side.
That simple action, however heartfelt and desperately well-meaning, was the last push Hunt’s body needed, the dismantled form of her shattering into pieces around the whimpering pet. The wolf howled once, a broken and mournful noise, then settled into the remains of his master and closed his eyes. Whether the wolf continued to live or not, Creation knew he would not move from his spot.
Creation needed to press forward. If Chaos had the ability to kill Hunt, to kill agod, then his and Destruction’s mission was suddenly much more dire. And much more dangerous.
Destruction had been right all along: Nowhere was truly safe as long as her counterpart drew breath.
Sparing one last glance at Hunt’s remains, her loyal pet unmoving, Creation took off in a sprint out of the wilds. Destruction needed to know exactly how high the stakes had just become.
