The wind that blew through the valley of Millhaven tasted of copper and ash.
Adam crested the final hill, his chest heaving, his body humming with the strange, inexhaustible endurance he had discovered during his escape. He had expected to see lights. He had expected to hear the low murmur of a village at rest.
Instead, he found an abattoir.
The quaint cottages, with their thatched roofs and flower boxes, were splintered ruins. Some burned with a low, sullen flame; others had been smashed inward as if by giant fists. Bodies lay scattered across the cobblestones, Mrs. Garrett, Mr. Willem, faces Adam recognized from a dozen festivals, now twisted in the final rictus of death.
"No," Adam breathed. The word fell from his lips, heavy and useless. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, n… ."
He stumbled forward, his feet slipping on ground made slick with blood. He needed to find them. Noah. Zoe. The children.
He reached the village square. It looked like the center of a storm.
And in the center of the carnage, standing amidst a sea of corpses, was Noah.
He stood with his back to Adam, his posture rigid, a scythe of solidified crimson mist held loosely in one hand. But he was not alone.
Surrounding him were monsters.
Grotesque, some with scales, some with exposed bone, some with too many limbs and others with too few. They formed a protective circle around him.
Adam froze. The air left his lungs. "Noah?"
The blonde boy turned slowly. His face was streaked with blood. But it was his eyes that stopped Adam's heart.
They were void a flat, dead calm. A tomb where a soul used to be.
But when Noah’s gaze landed on Adam, a tiny fracture appeared in the void. A flicker. A single spark of relief.
"Adam," Noah whispered, the sound barely carrying over the wind.
Bile rose in Adam's throat. But then, his gaze shifted past Noah.
Floating silently behind Noah, hovering a few feet off the ground, was something else.
It wasn't a beast like the others. It was a silhouette of concentrated crimson mist, shaped vaguely like a woman with tattered, weeping wings. It had no face, only a smooth, featureless surface.
Adam felt a fear spike in his chest, sharper than what he felt for the other monsters. This thing felt... heavy. Sacred. Wrong. It didn't kneel like the others; it hovered close to Noah’s back, like a guardian angel made of blood.
Adam swallowed the bile. "Noah... what... what happened? And where is Zoe?"
"I..." Noah started, his voice trembling for the first time. He looked as if he wanted to explain, but the words died in his throat.
Before he could answer, the ground beneath them groaned.
It wasn't an earthquake. It was a heartbeat. A deep, gluttonous vibration that shook the teeth in their skulls.
"Move!" Noah screamed.
But before Noah moved to defend himself, he spun around, facing the floating red angel.
"Hide!" Noah commanded, his voice desperate.
The crimson figure didn't argue. It dissolved instantly, spiraling into a tight vortex of red mist that slammed into Noah’s chest, absorbing back into him.
Then, the cobblestones exploded.
Grey roots, slick and pulsating like exposed veins, erupted from the earth. They moved like vipers striking..
One surged directly toward Adam, a spear of timber thick as a man's torso.
Adam didn't think. Instinct took over, he didn't dodge; he caught it. He slammed his hands against the grey bark, his boots skidding backward through the bloody mud. He felt the immense, crushing strength of the root, a strength that should have flattened him, but his arms held.
"Adam, get back!"
Noah moved. The crimson scythe spun in a blur of light. He severed the root attacking Adam with a single, clean stroke. The wood shrieked, a high, human-like scream, as it was cut, spewing black sap.
But there were more. Dozens more. They erupted from the ruins of the cottages, from the well, from the very ground they stood on.
"Defense!" Noah commanded.
The circle of monsters moved instantly. They were not mindless; they were an extension of Noah's will.
The creature that had been Mr. Willem roared, swinging a bone-hammer to smash a cluster of roots. The serpentine creatures wove a net of scales and teeth, tearing at the encroaching wood.
"We have to cut them down!" Adam yelled. "Noah, we fight!"
"No!" Noah’s voice was sharp, panicked. "Don't let them touch you! Watch out!"
A root whipped past Adam’s defense, striking one of the smaller summons. The grey wood didn't just strike; it sizzled.
Where the root touched the summon, the crimson mist hissed and boiled. The monster shrieked, its form destabilizing, turning into vapor.
"No..." Noah whispered.
The summon didn't reform. It didn't heal. It simply evaporated, erased from existence.
"They're corrosive," Noah shouted, swinging his scythe to deflect a barrage of tendrils. "If they touch the summons, they die!"
Adam swung his fist, striking a root that aimed for Noah's blind spot. His knuckles collided with the timber, but instead of breaking his hand, the force of his blow knocked the massive tendril off course.
"Summons?"
He stopped. He looked at the creature beside him, a twisted thing with a familiar locket embedded in its chest scales. It was Elena.
The realization brought Adam to his knees. The adrenaline evaporated, replaced by a horror so absolute it paralyzed him.
"These are them," Adam whispered, the fight draining out of him as the roots loomed high above. "The orphanage... the kids... Noah, these are the kids."
Then, a second realization hit him, colder than the first.
If the hammer beast was the blacksmith... if the serpent was Sara... if this was Elena...
Then the thing behind Noah. The Angel. The one Noah had frantically absorbed back into his body to protect it from the roots.
Zoe.
"Adam, get up!" Noah screamed, slicing a root that was inches from Adam's face.
"They're dead," Adam mumbled. "Everyone is dead."
A massive root arched over them. Adam didn't move. He couldn't.
"GET UP, DAMN IT!"
Noah didn't use the scythe. He threw his own body over Adam’s, shielding him.
But the blow didn't land on Noah.
Three summons, threw themselves into the path of the root. They didn't attack; they blocked. They formed a wall of cursed flesh and bone.
The root slammed into them. The hiss of acid was deafening.
Adam watched, wide-eyed as they dissolved into nothingness.
"They're protecting you," Noah said, his voice ragged, pulling Adam to his feet by the collar. "They are dead, Adam! But they are still them! Do not let their sacrifice be for nothing! STAND UP!"
The slap of reality, and Noah's hand, brought Adam back. He looked at Noah. Tears were streaming down the blonde boy's face, carving tracks through the blood, but his scythe never stopped moving.
Adam gritted his teeth. He didn't look for a weapon. Iron would bend; wood would snap against this force. He had only his body. He felt the strength flowing through him. He didn't know from where this strength came, but he would use it.
They fought.
For five minutes, it was a storm of grey wood and red mist. Noah was the blade, his scythe reaping the roots. Adam was the shield, using his unnatural strength to batter away the heavy blows.
He caught roots mid-air, his muscles screaming as he wrestled the crushing weight aside, deflecting them just before they could graze him or the summons.
Every time a root got too close to a summon, Noah would intercede, risking his own skin to save the remnants of his friends. Every time a root threatened to crush Noah, Adam was there, catching the blow. And every time a root almost scratched one of the two, the summons sacrificed themselves for them, their forms dissolving into mist to ensure their friends lived one second longer.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The vibration ceased. The roots that had been surging forward went limp, then began to recede, pulling back into the earth like sated worms.
Silence returned to Millhaven.
Adam collapsed onto a pile of rubble, his chest heaving. He looked at his hands, they were bruised, scraped, but unbroken. He looked around.
The army of seventy-seven was smaller now. Gaps in the formation showed.
Noah stood amidst the survivors, his scythe dissolving back into mist. He was staring at the distant ridge line, miles away, where the City of Light lay hidden in the dark.
"It stopped," Adam panted. "Why did it stop?"
Noah didn't answer immediately.
"The attack..." Noah said, his voice hollow and terrified. "It wasn't aimed at us specifically. It was... indiscriminate. Broad."
He turned to Adam, his eyes wide with a new kind of fear.
"Adam. That attack came from the capital. Miles away. Someone controlled those roots from miles away with enough precision and power to wipe us out."
Noah looked at the devastation around them.
"If the user of that power was here," Noah whispered, "if we had faced him head-on... we wouldn't have lasted a second. We are ants, Adam. We are ants fighting a boot."
And just as the terrifying realization took hold, a shadow detached itself from the ruins. A strange figure emerged from the darkness.
Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.
The command screamed through Noah’s mind, overriding every other instinct.
Adam stood frozen beside him, muscles locked in terror. They had faced death tonight. But this... this was different.
The figure sitting on the edge of the ruined field felt less like a person and more like a tear in the fabric of reality. She was terrifyingly beautiful, a pristine object in a world of mud and blood.
She stood up. There was no sound of fabric rustling, no displacement of air. She simply glided toward them, stepping over the carnage with the grace of a dancer navigating a stage.
Adam felt the breath trapped in his lungs turn to ice.
She was a vision of contrast. Her skin was porcelain-pale, glowing softly against the gloom of the destroyed village. Her hair was ink-black, styled in a precise hime cut, blunt bangs cut straight across her forehead. The rest of her hair fell straight down her back.
She wore a flowing, wrap-style silk kimono dress. It was an ombre of white at the torso, bleeding into a soft pink at the hem and cuffs. The wide sleeves hid her hands completely.
But it was her eyes that stopped their hearts. Large, wide-set, and a pale, multifaceted lilac.
She stopped five meters away, tilting her head.
"Hello, my darlings," she said. "My name is Lian Mei. I am one of the three Royal Guards of Mother. And under her absolute orders, I have come to retrieve the original curse."
The pressure hit them then.
It wasn't magic. It was the crushing weight of a superior biological existence. It was the feeling of a rabbit realizing the hawk is already mid-dive.
Adam couldn’t speak. His body rebelled against the sheer density of her presence. His stomach convulsed, and he doubled over..
Noah felt his knees shaking, but his mind, forced him to act. He knew, with certainty, that if this woman wanted them dead, they would have ceased to exist before they saw her.
He mustered every ounce of courage left in his hollowed soul.
"Who... who is Mother?" Noah stammered. "Who are you? And why... why are you looking for Adam?"
He didn't bother denying it. She had walked straight to them through a battlefield of corpses. She knew. To lie to a creature like this would be an insult, and insults led to death.
Lian Mei’s eyes narrowed slightly.
"It is a little bit impolite to ask so many questions at once," she whispered.
The air grew heavier. Noah’s mouth snapped shut. He gulped, the sound loud in the silence.
"But, you are frightened. So I will answer. In return... would you tell me if these fascinating little monsters are yours?"
She gestured a silk-draped sleeve toward the remnants of the undead army.
Noah nodded, unable to find his voice.
She straightened, her posture perfect.
"I am Lian Mei, Guardian of the Silk Garden. I serve the Mother of Silk, one of the five Primals, and the ruler of the Empire of Sutra, the jewel of the Eastern Continent."