The smoke rising from the glass-lined crater had barely begun to drift before the air itself curdled.
There was no sound. No dramatic thunderclap, no roaring wind. The silence that had defined the dead town of Hullbeck returned, but it was heavier now, thicker, pressing down on the eardrums like the deep pressure of the ocean.
Right in front of Artemia, the space twisted. The empty air tore open like black cloth being sliced by a razor, and from that bleeding darkness, three shapes stepped out.
They did not look like the clumsy, decayed beast she had just obliterated. These were smaller, sleeker, and infinitely more terrifying. They were bipedal, humanoid figures, but their bodies were constructed entirely of a shifting, liquid shadow that seemed to swallow the light around them. Their faces were smooth slates of featureless obsidian, broken only by single, horizontal slits of glowing crimson light where their eyes should be.
