"To finally find what you lost, only to discover you can’t hold it anymore."
***
The shaman’s breathing grew ragged.
Its transford features twisted with emotions too complex for its monstrous face to properly express. Rhys could see human expressions trying to force themselves through inhuman anatomy.
Grief pulling at lips that had grown into a beast’s muzzle.
Sha drawing down brows that had fused into a single ridge of bone.
The effect was grotesque and pitiful in equal asure.
"So you made a choice," the figure continued. Stepped closer with each syllable. The smoke parted before him like courtiers making way for a king.
"You found your master’s forbidden texts. The ones he kept locked away in the heart of the oldest oak. The ones he said were never to be opened. You learned the blood-songs. The flesh-rites. The ways to steal power from those who trusted you."
The stranger’s voice was almost gentle now.
"And when your own tribe ca to you for protection. When they gathered in the sacred grove and begged you to save them from the approaching armies..."
He paused.
Head tilted like a curious bird examining a worm.
"Well. They certainly got closer to the earth than they expected. Much closer."
"Stop."
The word ca out as a broken whisper.
The shaman’s massive fra hunched forward. As if trying to shield itself from the onslaught of words.
"Stop. You don’t understand. I was trying to—"
"The transformation took decades to complete," the newcor continued. As if the creature hadn’t spoken at all.
"Each life you consud added to your power, but also to your isolation. The earth itself rejected you. No more gentle songs. No more coaxing life from stone. The roots that once reached toward your footsteps now recoiled. The stones that used to sing in harmony with your voice fell silent."
His voice dropped.
"Just hunger. Just the endless need to prove that your choice was worth the price. That all those lives, your mother, your brothers, the children who used to bring you flowers, that their deaths ant sothing."
Rhys found himself holding his breath.
His injured shoulder throbbed with each heartbeat. But he couldn’t look away from the scene unfolding before him.
This wasn’t a fight.
It was an execution.
The newcor was systematically destroying their enemy with nothing but words. Stripping away centuries of accumulated rage and power to reveal the broken creature underneath. Each sentence landed like a hamr blow. Cracked through defenses that had withstood armies and heroes and the grinding passage of years.
"But here’s the truly pathetic part," the figure said. Now close enough that Rhys could see his face clearly.
Young features. Smooth and unlined.
But eyes that held depths no teenager should possess.
They were old eyes. Ancient eyes. Eyes that had seen too much and judged all of it wanting.
"You’re not even particularly good at being a monster. Forty-three levels over three centuries? That’s what, a level every seven years? My grandmother could have managed better, and she died when I was twelve. Tripped over a cabbage in the garden. Very tragic. But at least she made sothing useful of her ti."
Who is this person?
The question burned in Rhys’s mind as he watched the grey-robed figure circle their enemy like a scholar examining a particularly dull artifact.
What kind of student knows things like this? What kind of first-year walks into a monster’s lair and starts delivering lectures on its personal history?
"The worst part," the newcor continued, his voice dropping to sothing almost intimate, "is that you’ve forgotten why you started this path in the first place. Your people. Your groves. The gentle songs that could bring rain to drought-stricken fields and make barren rock burst with flowers."
He stepped closer still.
"You threw all of that away for power, and you can’t even rember what their voices sounded like. Your mother’s laugh. Your brother’s terrible jokes. The way the children used to gather around you in the evenings, begging for stories."
A pause.
"Gone. All of it, gone. And you can’t even properly rember what you lost."
The shaman let out a sound that might have been a sob if it had co from a human throat.
Coming from that massive, twisted form, it was sothing worse.
A grinding, tearing noise like rock splitting under imnse pressure.
Its massive form crumpled slightly. Ancient shoulders sagging under the weight of mories it had tried to bury beneath centuries of violence.
The creature that had seed so unstoppable monts ago now looked like nothing more than a very old, very tired thing that had been running for far too long.
"You want to know the real tragedy?"
The figure’s voice dropped to a whisper that sohow carried clearly through the tunnel. Reached Rhys’s ears with perfect clarity despite the distance.
"I’ve read the songs your people sang. Beautiful work. Harmonies that could make stone weep and flowers bloom in winter. Complex enough to take years to master. Simple enough that children could learn the basic lodies."
The shaman’s head snapped up.
"They’re preserved in the Celestial Archive. Section Twelve. Shelf Four-Hundred-and-Seven. Third to from the left. Leather binding. Gold leaf on the spine."
The stranger smiled.
"Gathering dust while their last practitioner plays dress-up as a cheap knockoff of better monsters. The librarian told no one’s checked them out in over a century. No one cares anymore."
Rhys watched in fascination and growing horror as the creature that had nearly killed him dissolved before his eyes.
Not physically. Its transford body remained as imposing as ever. All corded muscle and razor claws and burning eyes.
But sothing fundantal was breaking apart.
The aura of ancient nace. The sense of terrible purpose that had made it so terrifying. Cracked and crumbled like old parchnt exposed to sudden light.
What remained was hollow.
Empty.
A shell of power with nothing inside to give it aning.
"How do you know this?" the shaman whispered again. But now the question carried desperate hunger rather than fear. It leaned toward the grey-robed figure like a drowning man reaching for a rope.
"The songs... they still exist? They weren’t destroyed? They survived?"
"Of course they do."
The newcor’s smile was sharp enough to cut glass. It held no warmth. No rcy. Just the cold amusent of soone who knew exactly what effect his words were having.
"Though I doubt you could rember the fingering patterns anymore. Corrupted flesh makes for poor instrunts. Those claws of yours, very intimidating, very dramatic, but good luck playing a seventeen-note chord on the singing stones with talons like that. You’d just scratch up the surface and get a noise like cats fighting in an alley."
The shaman looked down at its clawed hands.
Weapons of war that had once coaxed lodies from stone and root.
Rhys watched as the creature turned them over. Examined them as if seeing them for the first ti.
The talons that could tear through steel. The scaled hide that could shrug off arrows. The raw physical power that had seed so overwhelming monts ago.
All of it now looked like a prison.
A cage the creature had built around itself, one bar at a ti, until escape beca impossible.
Its expression, monstrous as it was, held a grief so profound that Rhys felt sothing twist in his chest despite everything the creature had done.
He rembered his sister’s face the day she’d been diagnosed with the mana-sickness. The way hope had drained out of her eyes. Replaced by a resignation that no twelve-year-old should ever have to carry.
This creature’s expression held that sa quality.
The understanding that sothing precious had been lost.
And no amount of power or ti could ever bring it back.
"I could..." the shaman began. Then stopped. Its burning eyes fixed on the grey-robed figure with sothing approaching worship.
"I could rember. If you showed . If you let see them again. The songs. The harmonies. I could learn. I could—"
"Could you?"
The newcor’s head tilted again. Considering.
The motion was bird-like. Inhuman in its own way.
"I wonder. After three centuries of feeding on fear and pain, do you think there’s enough of Ghel-thak-mor left to sing the old songs? Or would they just turn to screams in your throat?"
His smile widened.
"That would be quite the tragedy, wouldn’t it? To finally find what you lost, only to discover you can’t hold it anymore."
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