Night tears itself apart.
No howl heralds his arrival. No cracking of branches. Simply darkness, condensing until it takes shape. A pitch-black shadow detaches itself from the shadows between the trees—massive, upright, shoulders as broad as fully grown oak trunks. The wolf-man steps into the flickering torchlight, and the air freezes to ice in Liyen's lungs.
His eyes. Two slag-heaps of glowing ruby, smoldering in caves of pitch-black fur. Larger than the others. Older. The pure embodiment of an Alpha, forged from muscle and murder-lust.
"I will tear you all to pieces," the voice whispers. Deep. Intimate. As though it crawls directly into Liyen's skull rather than traveling through the air. "Piece... by... piece."
The Noctusborn offspring—those half-starved creatures of claws and milk-teeth—fall silent mid-fight. Their small, black bodies stiffen. One after another, they lower their heads, press their snouts into the dusty ground. Not from fear. From reverence.
"Formation!" Yaoming roars, but his voice breaks. He leans on his sword, which rested secure in his hand minutes ago, but now trembles like an aspen leaf. "Men, to me!"
The warriors close ranks. Steel clashes against leather. But no one attacks. How could they? Before them stands a mountain of black fur and red eyes that swallows the moon.
Then the sky moves.
Liyen feels it first as pressure on her eardrums. A deep, subsonic pulse not heard but felt in the chest. She looks up. Above the clouds, where the stars fade, something falls from the darkness. Fast. Too fast.
The Alchemist's husk crashes to the earth beside her.
The impact sounds wet. Fleshy. A wet sack of bones striking stone from forty meters up. Liyen leaps back, feels cold sweat running down her spine. Master Sheng's eyes—those milky-white, blind orbs—stare into nothing. His mouth hangs open, black threads dangling between his lips like webs of pitch.
"Father," the Noctusborn children whisper in chorus. Their voices sound like glass shards in the wind. "Father comes." Almost as though they feel joy.
Suddenly! Something crawling, something alive moves in the dead Alchemist's chest. The ribs bend outward. Break. With a moist, smacking sound, the wound gapes open—a strand of black blood and silver light winding into the air like an outstretched finger, only to seal itself again with lightning speed.
He rises, hovers. For a heartbeat only. Then he opens his blood-red eyes. The dead Alchemist-wolf—Elandor's flesh-made prison cell—twitches. The limbs curl backward, joints grinding at impossible angles.
Growth. Deformation. Flesh billows over bone like molten wax.
Two voices speak from one mouth. One hoarse and human, the other a snarl from the depths of hell: "You thought..." A cough, wet and foaming. "...you could control me?"
The body rises. Now it is huge, a mixture of human grace and wolfish savagery, covered in white-silver fur that gleams in the moonlight like dull metal. Two red eyes open in a face that is half Elandor, half good old Master Sheng.
"Now you will pay for your arrogance with your life."
The white-silver wolf-man charges. The ground trembles beneath his paws. Varnok—the black Alpha—roars, a sound that could uproot trees, and leaps.
The collision is no impact. It is an explosion.
The shockwave hits Liyen like a fist. She flies, tumbles through the air, crashes against a rock. The pain is blind and hot. All around her, figures are thrown about like dolls—Yan, screaming; Tessa, reaching for her daughters; Yaoming, slamming against a tree and lying motionless.
When Liyen's vision clears, she sees them.
The two titans have fused into a tangle of claws and teeth. Varnok is faster, wilder, raw instinct. His paws bore into Elandor's chest, tear shreds from white-silver fur, dig deep into the ribcage. "You cannot win against your creator!" the Alpha hisses. He pulls, strangles, tries to tear the black something from his opponent's chest. "I am the Alpha! I am your god!"
Elandor—the Dark King—laughs. It is a smacking sound issuing from the half-torn throat of the Alchemist-wolf. His claws—longer than daggers, curved like sickles—enclose Varnok's wrists. Hold them fast. Tight. Tighter still.
"I have learned much," Elandor gasps. His face contorts into something that resembles a smile, if one finds a skull's grin friendly. "From the humans. I do not have to defeat you, Varnok."
He pulls closer. His breath—reeking of sulfur and burnt sugar—warms Varnok's snout.
"I only need... to buy time."
Click.
A sound like a lock opening. Varnok's eyes widen. He feels it too late.
The white-silver wolf's chest rips open. Not from without. From within. Ribs break outward, forming a bloody flower of bone and black veins. Something slimy, something alive winds out with lightning speed—not the body, but what has hollowed it from within, a mass of black strands winding upward and reaching for Varnok.
Varnok tries to retreat. Cannot. Elandor's white-silver husk still holds him fast, dead claws like vises around his joints.
The black mass strikes the Alpha's chest with the sound of a wet cloth hurled against stone. Sickle-shaped claws flash—black as night, sharp as needles—and slit Varnok's fur open. Skin. Muscles. Ribs. One cut. One opening.
Elandor crawls inside.
"NO!" Varnok's scream is animal, a howl of deepest despair. He shakes at his own body as though he could shrug it off like a wet coat. "Get out! OUT!"
Too late. The black blood-strands—the same thread-like branches that spilled from Master Sheng's corpse moments ago—wind around Varnok's organs. They sew the wound on his chest with jerking movements, not healing but sealing. A seam of dark flesh that pulses like a second heart.
Varnok stumbles. His eyes—red, confused, full of terror—blink. Then, with a delay that freezes ice in Liyen's veins, his face twists into a smile.
The same familiar way of smiling that Elandor has.
Then he laughs. It is Varnok's laugh, but the melody belongs to Elandor.
"So this shall be my new flesh-garment," Varnok's mouth says. But it is not his voice. It is two voices. The Alpha and the King, fused into a new nightmare.
Varnok's body twitches. One arm lifts, moves against his will, claws extending; a leg buckles, straightens. A bitter battle rages beneath the skin, visible in the convulsive movements of muscles, in the trembling of black fur.
"Run!" Liyen croaks. Her throat is dust-dry. She scrambles up, fingers clawing into her bow, but the string trembles too much. "We must flee!"
Yan rolls aside, bleeding from his nose. He stares at the scene, at the black wolf trying to strangle himself while part of him laughs. "The line," he gasps. "'Buy time.' Did he... did he get that from us?"
"Now!" Yaoming is beside her. His face is pale, one hand pressed against his ribs—broken, Liyen thinks, at least two—but his eyes are clear. Clear with terror. "While they fight each other, now or never!"
"Back to the village," Tessa calls. She holds Elin and Lora by the hands, the girls ashen-faced, their small faces frozen into masks of horror.
"'The Little Blossom.' It's safe there. There..."
She stops. Liyen knows why.
"My mother," Liyen whispers. The memory hits her like a blow. I'm coming. "She's waiting there. She's waiting for me."
The thought gives her legs. Gives her a reason to flee that is greater than mere fear. Behind her, Varnok—or Elandor, or the monster that has become of both—roars in two voices at once. The earth trembles as the possessed Alpha takes one step, then another, not yet mastering the body, but already powerful enough to uproot trees.
"Run!" Yaoming screams.
They run.
And behind them, the sky begins to bleed.