Ian had spent months preparing for this mont—truly preparing.
Not for the politics of Esgard or the venom of nobles in silk, but for what lay beyond the Blackfall.
For this—the First Reach, the opening scar of the Hellscape.
Before he even left Esgard, not even long after he had taken his oath before man and gods.
when blood still dried fresh on the trial hall grounds, he studied every tale the condemned scread before execution.
Every scroll Elise could smuggle from forbidden libraries for him.
Every whisper from dying cultists, their tongues torn from speaking the truth too often. He hoarded knowledge like weapons, because here, in this ash-stained realm, knowledge was the only armor worth wearing.
And what he'd learned was simple.
Demons were not just monsters.
They were like a ladder of damnation, each rung darker than the last.
So were low things, barely thinking—carrion-biters that screeched and bled easy.
Others were clever, cruel, walking on two legs with voices like cracked bells and mories older than cities.
Higher still were horrors that twisted ti, that rembered you before you were born. The air grew thinner the further up you climbed.
The silence deeper. The screams more lodic.
But those things lived far away from this place. For now.
This was where the descent began.
The First Reach was not Hell itself, not yet—but it was the threshold.
The shallow grave before the fall into fire. And Ian stood on its edge, a shadow dressed in steel and determination, unblinking beneath a blood-hung sky.
His boots rested on the edge of a crumbled pillar overlooking the ruin—the fallen temple long since desecrated, eaten hollow by ti and rot.
Its bones stuck out of the earth like ribs broken.
The sky above was dim with rusted crimson, flickering with veins of darker red lightning, and the air itself had that thick, strange weight—like it was trying to crawl into his mouth and nest in his lungs.
Sixteen of them.
Small, wiry, and fast.
With jaws too wide and arms that bent the wrong way.
The first kind.
He had read of them often in old parchnt, called by many nas: Emberkin, Ghrelings, Boneborn—but everyone who had bled in the Reach called them Imps.
Their claws scraped across stone as they circled a shallow pit, a fracture in the earth glowing faintly red. A leyline, cracked open and glowing like a wounded heart.
They fed off it. Nested near it. Multiplied in it.
He watched them in silence. Not fear, but calculation.
They moved like scavengers but possessed that twitching awareness predators had when cornered. Their orange eyes glead in the dim, and from the way they shifted and hissed, Ian knew—they felt him watching.
A shadow shifted beside him—tall, armored, monstrous.
Torkas.
His great soulbound. Once an arena champion, now nothing but a loyal soldier. His horned helm faced the creatures below.
"They gather like vermin, my liege," Torkas murmured, voice like cracked stone and iron dust. "A nest of them."
Ian's gray eyes stayed on the pit.
"Yes, it is said they always co in swarms," he said. "Snapping and biting like rats drunk on filth."
"Shall I descend? Their souls would be a worthy offering." Torkas inquired.
Ian's hand hovered over his hip, fingers brushing the bone hilt of his dagger. The blades knew this realm.
They itched for it. Hungered for it.
"No," he said.
Torkas turned his head slightly, unreadable.
Ian inhaled slowly, cloak twisting in the strange wind. "This ti, I'll get my hands dirty."
He drew one dagger.
It whispered as it ca free, lightless steel edged with a shimr of soulfla. Then the second, its bone surface veined with threads of obsidian.
Vowbreaker.
Torkas gave a slow, respectful bow, then lted back into shadow, vanishing behind Ian's boots.
Alone now, Ian crouched atop the pillar.
The breath before the plunge. The heartbeat before carnage. The silence before screams.
He leapt.
The wind howled past him.
Red sky above, cracked temple below.
Ti slowed as his cloak flared around him like the wings of a descending vulture. His body twisted mid-air, daggers gleaming, eyes locked on the writhing swarm below.
The imps turned, one by one.
Heads snapping. Jaws unhinging. Orange eyes glowing like coals.
Ian's boots hit the shattered floor with a sharp crack, dust bursting outward in a halo. He straightened slowly, the twin daggers glinting in his grip.
The creatures recoiled, shrieking.
He felt it—that mont of recognition.
Not afraid. Instinct.
As if so whisper in their bones told them that the thing before them did not belong to the living world as usual visitors did.
That he had stepped beyond death and returned bearing its scent.
Their hisses grew louder, echoing between the ruins.
Ian tilted his head slightly, as if disappointed.
"Darkmist told your kind—demons, were the best source of strength in this world…" he said softly.
The nearest Imp screeched, rising onto its spindly legs. Behind it, the others tensed—hackles raised, claws twitching.
Ian smiled, just a little.
"I guess I'll confirm it now."
The ruins beca too quiet.
Not still silence, but the breathless pause before violence. The kind of silence that made the crumbling walls lean in as if they, too, were watching.
Ian remained still at the clearing's edge, breath fogging in the cold air, twin daggers glinting faintly in his grip.
His skin prickled.
Then—
The shadows twitched.
A hiss.
Sothing small, quick, and sharp darted from the underbrush, and Ian moved before thought.
His body blurred—a wisp of motion—vanishing from where he stood.
The imp struck nothing but air, its claws raking through empty space.
Then it froze.
A silver line opened across its throat, almost lazy in its precision.
Black blood sprayed.
The imp collapsed.
Another hiss.
Then another.
Then—
Dozens.
Tiny, twisted things crawled from the woods. Bone-thin limbs. Hooked claws. Gnarled, grinning faces with too many teeth.
Their skin glistened, slick with blood or bile—he couldn't tell which.
Reviews
All reviews (0)