Elin's eyes snapped open.
"AAAAAAH!"
A scream ripped from her throat before she could stop it. She gasped, lungs seizing, hands clawing at the ground beneath her as she tried to drag herself back to reality.
Breathe. Just breathe.
When her vision finally steadied, she found herself inside a dilapidated room. Black bricks, cracked with age, formed walls that seemed to lean inward like they were listening. The ceiling was low, veined with old mortar that had begun to crumble. Yet despite the decay — despite the absolute wrongness of everything around her — the suffocating pressure from before was gone.
It felt almost peaceful.
Trembling, she rose to her feet. She was still in her usual clothes. Small mercy.
She stepped out of the room into a corridor that opened into something much grander. The structure she was inside was enormous — a fortress, ancient and immense, built from the same dark stone. The kind of place that had seen centuries of war and remembered all of them. Her bare feet touched the floor and flinched. It was like stepping onto a frozen lake.
She crept toward the nearest embrasure, a narrow slit in the stone wall, and pressed herself against it to peer outside.
Pitch-black darkness. Absolute and total.
No moon. No stars. No horizon. Just endless, breathing black.
The isolation hit her like a blow to the chest. Her knees buckled. She slid down against the cold stone wall and buried her face in her palms, tears spilling freely through her fingers.
"AAAUUUH... why did I even come here?" she choked out between sobs. "I only wanted to impress Vlad... but now I'm in so much danger. Forgive me, Mama. I really am a bad girl..."
"Children only truly grow up when they finally face themselves."
The voice was cold. Familiar. It came from directly behind her.
Elin's spine went rigid.
"Please—" she croaked, scrambling to her feet. "Please don't hurt me—"
She turned around.
And froze.
Standing in the shadows of the corridor, arms folded, expression unreadable, was Vlad.
"VLAD!"
She didn't think. She lunged forward and threw both arms around him, pressing her face against his chest, weeping so hard her whole body shook.
"Get off me," he muttered flatly, already prying at her wrists.
Not far away, two soldiers lingered in the corridor. They had been mid-conversation when the reunion unfolded before them, and now both men had gone utterly silent.
One leaned sideways toward the other, jaw tight with barely concealed envy.
"Tsk. Look at him. Decorated at his age, commands respect from everyone around him, and he even gets a girl."
The other soldier clicked his tongue. "Hmph. Some men are just born lucky."
A short while later, the two of them sat together at the embrasure, side by side, staring out into the bleak expanse of nothing beyond the fortress walls.
Vlad broke the silence first. His tone was matter-of-fact, like he was reading from a campaign map.
"This is the southern fortress of Aethelgard. It's a safe zone — we rest here for the night." He paused, eyes distant. "Going forward, our daily objective is to push from one fortress to the next. We send messengers back to the main force as we secure each perimeter."
Elin hugged her knees to her chest. "How many days will this take? How many dangerous things are we going to face?"
"Six days to reach the port," Vlad replied. "We rendezvous with the other units there. After that, we cross the sea and make for the Askerent continent."
A beat of silence.
"What?!" Elin sat bolt upright. "Another continent?!" Her voice cracked. "Oh no, oh no, oh no—"
Vlad turned and fixed her with a look sharp enough to cut glass. "Stop whining. Why did you even join the military in the first place?"
"I'm sorry..." She shrank, her gaze dropping to the floor.
A faint exhale left him — not quite a sigh, but close. "...Were you that terrified by the dream?"
Elin blinked up at him, genuinely surprised. "How did you know it was a dream? You woke up before me."
"I noticed the fog was manifesting our deepest fears at that exact moment." He spoke carefully, as though recounting an experiment. "To test my suspicion, I looked over at you. At that time, my two greatest concerns were my cavalry unit — and you. The curse was affecting both simultaneously. Things don't align that conveniently by accident." He turned back to the dark horizon. "That's how I knew it was an illusion."
Elin stared at him.
Then the corners of her mouth curled upward. A soft blush crept from her cheeks all the way to the tips of her ears.
"Aww!" She pressed her hands together. "So you DO care about me! You love me!"
"No," Vlad said immediately. "I tolerate you."
The blush evaporated. Elin's eyes flashed.
"Hmph! You don't care about me — but I bet you care about Lina!"
Vlad said nothing.
But deep behind his composed expression, his temples began to throb.
Idiots, he thought. Both of them are driving me completely insane.
He exhaled internally, long and slow.
Brother Joseph saved my brother and me. To honour that debt, I respect his daughter, Lina, at the academy. And you, Elin — your family gave us shelter when we had nothing, so I've looked after you since childhood. I repay those who saved me. It's that simple.
Somehow, these two fools supposed that's romance.
Elin, thoroughly displeased with his non-answer, turned her face away in a deliberate show of sulking.
Her gaze drifted through the embrasure, out into the darkness of the trees below.
Something made her pause.
Two faint points of red light flickered deep within the treeline.
She frowned. "Hey, Vlad... did you set up red torches outside the walls?"
He didn't even glance up. "What red torches?"
"Those ones."
She pointed.
Vlad looked.
His entire body went rigid.
In the forest below, the darkness was no longer empty.
Two crimson lights pulsed between the branches. Then four. Then a dozen. Then dozens more, multiplying in silence, spreading outward across the treeline like embers catching in dry grass.
Twenty. Forty. Eighty.
They kept coming.
By the time the count eclipsed six hundred, the forest had transformed into a sea of burning red — each pair of eyes perfectly still, perfectly fixed on the fortress walls.
An ancient malice rolled off them in waves. The kind of malice that didn't have a name, only a feeling — something older than the fortress, older than the war, older than memory.
Vlad's instincts screamed at him all at once.
Those aren't torches.
Those are eyes.
CLANG — CLANG — CLANG!
The fortress's great iron alarm bell detonated into sound, shattering the silence like a fist through glass.
"ENEMY AMBUSH! ALL UNITS, TO YOUR POSITIONS!"
The fortress erupted.
Soldiers threw on their heavy iron armour with practised urgency, hands steady even as their faces had gone pale. Blades scraped free of scabbards. Orders barked through corridors. Boots hammered across stone floors.
With a deep, grinding groan of ancient machinery, the heavy drawbridge began to lower. It crashed into the dirt with a thunderous boom. A phalanx of armoured soldiers marched out in tight formation, locking into a defensive line with shields raised.
Torchlight spilt outward from the walls.
And the darkness finally gave back what it had been hiding.
They emerged from the trees slowly, as if they wanted to be seen.
They were enormous — twice the height of a man, broad enough that two soldiers standing side by side wouldn't match their width. Their bodies were covered in thick, matted fur, brown and grey and black, but there was nothing natural about them. The flesh beneath was rotting. Great patches of skin had turned a sickly, decomposing green. In places, the rot had gone deeper — deep enough to strip away flesh entirely, leaving raw bone exposed and glistening in the torchlight.
Their jaws were wrong. Mutated. Elongated teeth had grown too large for their mouths, punching through their own cheeks and jutting outward in jagged, asymmetric rows, slick with dark fluid.
"Skinwalkers—" one soldier breathed, his voice barely audible.
"They were not ordinary Skinwalkers," Vlad said quietly, stepping forward to the front of the line. His weapon was in his hand, blade lowered but ready. "They've been demonified."
A tremor ran through the ranks.
One of the creatures stepped forward from the pack. It was larger than the others — broader, its rot more advanced, its red eyes burning brighter. When it spoke, the sound was a deep, wet rumble that moved through the ground and into the soles of their boots.
"Who leads you?"
Complete silence from the fortress line.
The soldiers stared. A demonified beast with speech — full, coherent, deliberate speech — was something none of them had ever encountered. The implications of it pressed down on them like a physical weight.
Vlad met the creature's gaze and held it without flinching.
"I am the 6th Guard Knight, Vlad Josephine."
The Skinwalker's deformed face shifted — the grotesque approximation of a smile, its distended jaw pulling the expression wide and wrong.
"Ah... one of the Aves race." Its voice rumbled low, almost contemplative. "It matters little. You will join us soon enough. The curse already festers inside you. It has already begun."
Up on the fortress walls, Elin gripped the stone railing with both hands. Her knuckles had gone white. Her eyes were locked on Vlad below — on his stillness, his silence.
Don't rise to it, she thought desperately. Don't rise to it.
Vlad kept his blade level and his voice even. "Why are you here? Are you marching on Warkuron?"
"No." The beast's burning eyes drifted briefly across the line of soldiers before settling back on Vlad. "We march on Vendora. There is a rebellion there that requires suppression." A brief pause, and then something shifted in its expression — a flicker of something almost like curiosity. "Creatures like you do not belong in this place. Someone summoned you here. That someone has made a significant error in judgment."
The Skinwalker let out a low, wet chuckle — the sound of something deeply amused by something the rest of the world hadn't understood yet.
Then, without another word, it simply dissolved.
Not retreating. Not turning to walk away.
Its massive form broke apart into thick black fog and vanished. The hundreds of red eyes behind it did the same — winking out one by one, then in clusters, then all at once, until the forest was empty and dark and silent.
The sudden stillness was so complete it felt like a sound of its own.
Vlad's voice cut through it a heartbeat later, sharp and immediate.
"All units — fall back inside the fortress! Seal the drawbridge! High alert until dawn — no exceptions!"
The soldiers moved.
Up on the ramparts, Elin released a breath she'd been holding for what felt like hours. Her shoulders dropped. The white-knuckled grip on the railing loosened.
"Hah..." She exhaled, shaky and small. "It's gone. I thought — I really thought—"
She almost laughed. The desperate, relieved kind.
"I guess it was just another illusion after all."
She turned to head back inside.
Standing directly behind her — close enough that the heat of its rancid breath hit her face — was a demonified Skinwalker.
Its jaw hung open. Green saliva dripped from the tips of its elongated teeth. Its red eyes burned from barely a metre away, locked onto her with the singular, patient focus of something that had been waiting.
It had been standing there the entire time.
"AAAAAAAH!"