"A Blackwood does not surrender. Not while there is breath in his lungs. Not while soone is waiting for him to co ho."
***
The shaman wasn’t expecting it.
Creatures that had been beaten, broken, and stripped of their weapons were supposed to cower. Not attack. They were supposed to weep and plead and offer anything for a few more monts of life.
Rhys covered the distance between them in three quick strides.
The broken spear shaft raised above his head like a war club. His boots found purchase on the slick stone floor through sheer stubbornness. His body scread in protest against the demand.
But his body had been screaming for days now.
He had learned to stop listening.
The shaman tried to bring its staff around to block.
But Rhys was already inside its guard.
The creature was fast, yes. But it had grown complacent in its certainty of victory. It had expected the prey to die quietly.
Rhys brought the splintered wood down on the creature’s wrist with every ounce of strength he had left.
Bone cracked beneath the impact.
The shaman’s grip on its staff loosened. The weapon clattered to the floor between them.
The creature shrieked and staggered backward. Clutched its injured wrist against its chest. Its yellow eyes burned with fury and sothing that might have been fear.
This wasn’t how the script was supposed to go.
The broken human was supposed to die quietly. Not fight back with the jagged remains of his weapon.
Rhys pressed his advantage. Swung the makeshift club again.
His shoulder scread at the motion. The injuries from everything he’d endured flared with fresh agony.
He ignored it.
He’d had plenty of practice ignoring pain.
This ti he aid for the shaman’s head. The creature ducked and the blow caught it across the shoulder instead. Dark blood welled up through its robes. It stumbled against the tunnel wall.
The stone was slick with ancient moisture. For a mont the shaman’s feet slipped. It slid down to one knee.
For a mont, just a mont, Rhys thought he might actually win.
The shaman was hurt. Off-balance. Separated from its staff. Its yellow eyes were wide with shock and sothing that looked almost like respect.
If he could just land one more solid hit. If he could bring the splintered wood down on its skull with enough force to crack bone. Maybe, just maybe...
That was when the creature’s eyes began to glow.
Not the sickly green light of its magic. Not the corruption that had animated the dead and tainted the very air of these tunnels.
Sothing else entirely.
A deep, hellish red that seed to burn from within. As if soone had lit a furnace behind the creature’s skull and the light was leaking out through its eye sockets.
Oh no.
The shaman’s form began to shift and writhe.
Its robes fell away to reveal sothing that had never been entirely goblin to begin with.
Its limbs elongated. Bones crackled and reford as muscles bulged beneath skin that turned from green to mottled black. The transformation was not smooth or elegant. It was violent. Organic. The kind of change that should have been accompanied by screaming if the creature had still possessed anything like a normal throat.
Claws erupted from its fingertips. Each one as long as a dagger and twice as sharp. They glead with an oily sheen that suggested poison or worse.
Its face stretched and warped. The jaw unhinged like a snake’s to reveal rows of needle-sharp teeth. The eyes, still burning that hellish red, had doubled in size and now dominated a face that no longer held any trace of goblin ancestry.
Whatever this thing was, it had been wearing the shaman’s form like a disguise.
A mask to fool prey into thinking they faced sothing rely dangerous rather than sothing catastrophic.
When it spoke, its voice was no longer the guttural chatter of goblin-kind.
It was sothing far older.
Infinitely more dangerous.
The words seed to co from everywhere at once. Vibrated through the stone walls and the damp air and the marrow of Rhys’s bones.
"You-think to war-fight with splinter-wood, man-child?"
The creature rose to its full height.
Easily eight feet now. Its transford body filled the tunnel like a nightmare given flesh.
"I am old-ancient. I walk-tread these tunnels when your father’s father was dust-unborn. I drink-taste the fear-soul of hero-fools greater than you could dream-imagine."
It took a step toward him.
"Your kind... your kind I eat-consu like bread-scraps."
Rhys backed away.
His makeshift weapon suddenly felt pathetically inadequate. The thing that had been a shaman was now sothing else entirely. Sothing that belonged in the deepest nightmares of sleeping children. Sothing that bards whispered about in stories designed to make warriors check over their shoulders in dark rooms.
But he didn’t drop the broken spear shaft.
And he didn’t run.
Because sowhere in a cottage at the edge of the world, a little girl with pale skin and tired eyes was waiting for her big brother to co ho.
She was probably sleeping right now. Her thin chest rising and falling with those labored breaths that kept him awake at night with worry.
She believed in him.
She had told him, the day he left for the academy, that she knew he would co back. That she knew her big brother would never leave her alone.
And that was worth dying for.
Even if it ant dying badly.
Even if it ant dying afraid.
Even if it ant his last monts would be spent screaming in the grip of sothing that had crawled out of the world’s oldest nightmares.
The creature’s taunt echoed off the tunnel walls. Each word a mockery of everything Rhys had ever believed about courage and honor.
But standing still ant surrender.
And a Blackwood did not surrender.
Not while there was breath in his lungs.
Not while Elara waited for dicine that would never co if he died here as a coward.
Rhys tightened his grip on the broken shaft.
Planted his feet.
And roared.
I’m coming ho, Elara.
Even if I have to go through this thing to do it.
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