The forest was alive.
Not rely whispering or swaying — it breathed. Damp, rotten air moved with purpose, thick and warm, carrying the pulse of sothing ancient. Every trunk was a spine, every branch a twisting limb. Beneath the creak of bark ca wet sounds — slurping, whispering, hunger.
William stood in the heart of that nightmare, surrounded by a vortex of darkness and the shrieking dead. His breath ca ragged and low, almost animal. Fangs glinted. His eyes — gold, slitted — belonged to a predator that had finally caught the scent of blood.
The first blow split a corpse in half. The second tore the air, flinging muck and decomposing flesh.
No pause, no thought — only rhythm.
Claws. Roar. Step. Flesh. Blood.
Each movent was perfect in its madness.
One of the dead vaulted onto his back, sinking its teeth into his neck. There was a crunch, a wet, tearing sound.
Pain — pure, blinding, electric.
A flash of white filled his skull, his eyes rolled back — then ca the roar.
A monstrous roar that shattered the air. His neck twisted with a sick snap; muscles clenched and reknit in seconds. The zombie's skull — half missing now — tumbled away as William shook himself like a dog shedding rain.
Blood poured freely, hot and scarlet, only to vanish — drawn back under his skin as if the body refused to stay broken. Each new wound was fuel. Each bite stoked the beast.
Then the thing from the mud ca down — vast, grotesque, its hand made of tree roots and ribs.
The blow struck like a falling god.
William flew backward, smashed into a tree, and dropped like a broken marionette.
For a breath he lay still.
Then — crackling, snapping — his spine began to rebuild itself. Vertebra by vertebra, soft and obscene, the sound of at rembering its shape.
The demon laughed. Its laughter ca from everywhere and nowhere — from the wind, the soil, the dark hollow behind William's eyes.
"There it is... your true face. Feel it? The old blood waking in your bones? The beast scratching at your skull?"
The voice swam through him, thick as oil.
"How many centuries did you think you could hide, child of the forgotten?
I know your scent. I devoured your kind before the stars had nas."
William roared to drown it out. His claws drove into the muck, tearing roots free, dragging himself upright. Broken, bleeding — yet whole again, trembling with wild strength. His chest heaved; gold eyes shone not with rage, but with a terrible recognition.
The demon's thousand mouths curled into a grin.
"You pretend at humanity, but you reek of the hunt. Your heart was never a man's — it's the heart of the wolf that slaughtered its own pack."
Out of the dark, corpses ca crawling. Hundreds, maybe more — a tide of splintered limbs and torn faces. They rged into each other, twisting into towers of at, walls of flesh riddled with darkness.
"You were no gift of the rciful," the demon said, its face forming out of mud and rot. "You were their mistake. Your power is not a blessing—it's the broken oath they buried. And you, monster, dared to wake it."
William lunged. The roar split the forest — a sound huge enough to strip the leaves from the trees.
He plunged into the wall of the reassembled dead, tearing, ripping, breaking them apart with his bare hands. Each blow ignited a burst of gore, like at packed with gunpowder. He wasn't just killing them — he was trying to kill the words that had crawled under his skin.
"Kill, kill, kill — maybe then you'll believe you're still a man!" the Lord laughed.
And William answered with nothing but the sound of destruction — a sound too brutal to be called human.
The hulking creature struck again, claws of bone and bark slamming into the soil, the earth itself coming apart under the weight. Darkness collapsed around him, suffocating and endless.
And yet — he rose. Blood slick down his chest, eyes burning like lanterns. His breath ca slow now. Controlled.
In every inhale — the beast.
In every exhale — the man.
Sothing formless rose before him — rot given shape.
A tower of flesh and mud and bone, an amalgam of faces that shifted and slid across one another until they ford sothing resembling a mask.
And through the dozens of mouths, it spoke. The voice was thick, wet — as though it ford inside his skull instead of through air.
"So… there you are,"
the Lord rumbled. One of the black, glistening faces swelled out from the sludge, stretching, reshaping — until it beca his own. A rotted copy of William's face, with molten amber eyes that smoked like dying stars.
"The child who forgot his own flesh."
The other mouths murmured and echoed the words like a choir of drowned ghosts:
"Son of the First Claws… exile of the Elder Pack… the one who drank blood from the sky before the sun had a na…"
William froze. His jaw tightened. The muscles in his face twitched as sothing—old, wrong, familiar—picked at the walls inside his mind. Fractured images ca: the sll of blood on hot sand, a sky burning black, a half moon, people running from his shadow.
No.
He stepped forward through the downpour, the wind, the static roar inside his own veins. His eyes narrowed to slits, his lips curling in a feral grin.
"You don't know what the hell you're talking about."
His voice was more growl than speech.
"Oh, but I do,"
the creature whispered, a thousand throats trembling at once.
"I rember your forebears. I rember the howl that snuffed the stars. I rember when you slaughtered your pack to pretend you could be human."
The darkness shivered. From the muck, a shape clawed its way up — a figure bleeding from its mouth, words running out with the blood:
"You never escaped. You just beca ."
William stood silent for a heartbeat — then laughed. A sharp, broken sound, flecked with blood.
"Listen," he rasped, stepping closer until the monster's colossal face hung just above him, dripping and stinking of the grave,
"I don't know what kind of rot you've been chewing in that skull of yours—"
He spat, and the thick admixture of blood and dirt splattered into one of the creature's hollow eyes.
"—but you don't know a damn thing about who I am, you piece of shit."
His roar made the ground tremble. He lunged — pure instinct, pure violence — his claws sinking into the monster's flesh.
He tore through layers of skin, mud, bone, as hot filth stread out in black ribbons. The air was thick with the sll of decay and burnt at.
The thing howled. Then it laughed, its laughter splitting in all directions like shards of glass.
"Ah, there it is. Bite, deny, scream. So human of you. But you…"
The laughter deepened, swallowed the rain.
"You are not human, William."
It leaned closer; its many faces turned upward, mouths splitting wider.
"You know the scent of your own fear — because it's mine."
The beast's words poured into him like poison. William's breath hitched; blood ran down his chin, mixing with the rain. Still, his eyes burned bright, refusing to dim.
"If you really know sothing," he growled, stepping forward through the filth, pain flaring in every nerve,
"then tell , monster. Tell who I am. Tell what the hell you are to speak my na like that."
The Lord of the South widened his maw — not a smile so much as an opening into absence itself. There were no teeth, no eyes, only a pulsing dark that seed to laugh without sound.
"I am mory,"
it said, voice stretching into a chorus of itself.
"And you… you are the fear I rembered too well. When you finally recall what you are, boy—"
Its form swelled, faces peeling away into smoke and muck.
"—this world will burn like the shell your kind left behind."
And for a mont, in the silver wash of rain, William thought he saw glints of fire beneath its skin — as though his mory had already begun to ignite the world.
The creature struck with the force of an earthquake.
The air imploded — blackness and filth burst outward like a shockwave, swallowing every scrap of light.
William was lifted off his feet, hurled through the air, and slamd into a tree. Before he could even draw a breath, one of the monster's bony limbs punched straight through him.
A choked sound ripped from his throat — half gasp, half scream.
He looked down. A jagged shard of sothing white jutted from his chest, slick with his own blood.
Then the creature yanked upward… and he realized, with a sick twist of horror, that it was his own rib.
Pain wasn't pain anymore — it was molten tal crawling beneath his skin. He dropped to his knees, gasping against the world's roar. The ground quivered, and from all around ca a laughter stretched thin and wet.
"Ahhh… how frail the children of the Ancients have beco,"
the Lord of the South growled. His voice sank lower, thicker, vibrating inside bone instead of air.
"Had your foremother stood in your place… oh, she would not have spared her strength. She would have burned this cursed continent clean — turned the forests to ash and flesh to wax. Even I feared her, I and my legions of the dead."
The thing smiled — a thousand mouths curling in perfect mockery.
"And you… you're a pale shadow of her fire. A kitten pretending to be a lion. Your claws make noise, William, but beneath all that rage…"
A pause — a breath that stank of graves.
"…you reek of fear."
He swallowed blood, his jaw shaking.
"Wh–what the hell… are you saying?"
The words cracked, dissolved into a rough snarl.
"How do you even… know my na?"
The demon's laughter grew — a wet percussion rising from hollow chests below it, skulls splitting open like drums in applause.
"How?" it hissed. "From the sa pit where you were born, little beast. From the sa abyss where she ward your blood in the dark. Don't lie to yourself — you rember the scent of lightning, the light above black waters… are those not the dreams that gnaw at you every night?"
"Shut up,"
William rasped, but his voice faltered, weak against the thunder and the whispering dead.
He pressed a hand against the hole in his chest, feeling the heat pulse out of him… and then, unbelievably, the bone began to grow back — screaming against itself, like tal grinding on glass.
Too fast. Too alive. Too wrong.
How does it know her na? My dreams? My na?
The thought cut through him like a blade — and he shoved it away, hard, like pulling out a splinter.
"You're just digging through my head, you worm!"
he roared, his voice breaking into sothing feral.
"You think you can scare ?!"
"Scare you?"
The demon's grin widened — not with laughter, but with a kind of cosmic amusent.
"Then why do your hands shake? Why do your bones sing — rembering the touch they've felt before?"
William staggered to his feet. Every joint scread, but he rose anyway. With a crack, his claws slid free once more; his eyes burned amber and furious.
"I don't know you," he hissed, voice rough and trembling,
"and I damn sure don't care what you whisper about!"
The creature bent low, its thousand dead faces gleaming in the rain.
In every sunken eye, William saw a reflection of himself — the beast, the man, the fracture between.
"You lie to yourself, little mouth,"
the Lord murmured,
"You were never human. You never will be. Your flesh still rembers her ashes. Your soul…"
It leaned close enough for its voice to crawl through his teeth.
"…is mine to claim. When you rember who you are, you'll tear your own heart free — just to forget it again."
William spat straight into its face — the spittle ca out dark red, glowing like hot iron in the rain.
"Not today," he snarled, standing on shaking legs, eyes burning brighter than the storm above.
"Not today. Not ever. And Fuck You!"
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