Blood and Mud

Chapter 44: Chapter 44

I normally do not like to write my notes on the Chapters because it counts towards your coin, but here there are more than 2k words, so I want to let you know that I published some images in the Auxiliary volume section that are ”close” to how I imagined some characters, items and places. Go check it out. It is free.

--------------------------------------------

The fever dreams gave me nothing to hide in.

Ash falling like snow over a city I couldn’t name anymore. Faces I didn’t recognize, screaming in a language I’d lost. Then my eyes snapped open, and the cavern’s dark swallowed what was left of it.

I was still on the stone floor of the Shaman’s dead sanctuary. My tunic had gone stiff with dried blood. The arrowhead was still buried in my arm, throbbing dull and deep. But none of that came close to the hunger. My stomach had stopped cramping and started grinding, like it meant to eat itself from the inside. My mouth tasted like copper and dust.

I got up. Took effort — my whole body shook just lifting its own weight off the ground. I used the sword as a crutch, leaning on the hilt until I was standing.

No food left. No water. Just the stairs, dropping away into the dark ahead of me.

I limped past the Shaman’s remains, left the brazier’s red glow behind me, and fed the runes what little Ember I had — barely enough to answer. The sparks that came back were thin, sputtering, gone almost as soon as they lit. Just enough to catch the edge of the stairwell before the dark swallowed it again.

Going down was its own kind of blind. The air sat dead still, thick with the smell of old copper and older rot. The steps were steep, uneven, cut straight into the rock. I kept my shoulder against the wall and eased my boots over each edge before trusting my weight to it. No tactical read on the space, no map in my head to fall back on. Just what my body could feel.

My boot caught a raised stone tread. Wrong — didn’t feel like the others. Loose.

I didn’t have time to think about it. My body threw itself backward before I caught up, flattening against the cold wall.

Click.

Something ancient locked into place, the sound rolling down the stairwell ahead of it. The tread sank an inch under where my boot would’ve landed. Then the rock face on the far wall cracked open, and three rusted iron scythe blades tore across the width of the staircase, faster than anything that old had any right to move.

They cut through empty air right where my chest had been a heartbeat earlier. Slammed into the wall inches from my face, throwing sparks and shards of limestone across my skin, then slid back into their grooves like they’d never moved at all.

I let a ragged breath out, the last of the sparks catching the fresh gouges in the stone.

The Shaman hadn’t trusted the dead alone to guard this place. The whole corridor was rigged.

No time to measure the gap between plates, no way to dismantle whatever ancient mechanism ran this place even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t have the tools for it, let alone the knowledge. So I stopped treating the trap like a puzzle and started moving like something built to survive one — low, slow, every sense stretched wide open.

Every step counted. I read the dust on the floor, felt for the places where the stone ran a shade colder, listened for the hollow give under my boots that meant something wasn’t solid rock.

Ten paces on, my foot found a wire — thin, dark, twisted out of old sinew, almost invisible against the stone. I stepped clean over it. Behind me, gas hissed out of somewhere in the wall. I didn’t turn around to watch it fill the stairwell. Just moved faster, arm burning the whole way down.

The stairs ran out all at once, opening into a wide, circular chamber.

What little light the sword gave me caught a floor of smooth black obsidian, seamless underfoot. At the far end stood a set of double doors easily twice my height, forged out of blackened bronze and covered edge to edge in the same sharp, frantic glyphs I’d seen in the Shaman’s journal — Falcon Tribe work. Dead center, a locking mechanism shaped like a raptor’s eye stared back at me.

This was it. The Shaman’s lab. Whatever heresy he’d been hiding down here.

I stepped onto the obsidian.

The second my boot touched the glass, the temperature dropped hard. The sparks off my blade guttered out, smothered by something heavy pressing into the room — something that had no business being natural.

Three alcoves I hadn’t even noticed, buried in shadow along the curved walls, ground open all at once, stone dragging against stone.

Inside them, eyes lit up. Three pairs.

Not the sick pale glow of the fungus upstairs. Not the hollow black of the skeletons I’d fought in the corridor. These burned red — a tight, contained heat that looked exactly like an Ember. Exactly like mine.

He’d actually done it. Built working Ancient Runes and put them into his best guards.

Three of them stepped out onto the obsidian. Towering things, built out of bleached bone wrapped in dark, overlapping steel plate. And they didn’t move like the dead upstairs had — no stiffness, no lag. They moved fluid. Fast. Like something alive and augmented, not something that should’ve stopped moving centuries ago.

Left one carried twin curved scimitars, armor cut light for speed. On the right — a spiked tower shield paired with a heavy iron flail, built for weight instead. And the one in the center, a shade bigger than the other two, carried a halberd with a blade wide enough to double as a headsman’s block.

No shambling, no hesitation — they spread out together, cutting off the stairs behind me before I’d even finished counting them. I had the bronze doors at my back and nowhere else to go.

My heart slammed against my ribs. Stomach cramping hard enough to fold me over. I didn’t have the fuel for a long fight, and I didn’t have time to think my way through this one move by move. If I tried to meet all three of them straight on, they’d have me on the floor inside thirty seconds.

The twin-blade one moved first. Crossed the distance so fast I barely tracked it, launched into the air, both scimitars coming down in a cross-slash meant to open me from both sides at once.

I didn’t back off. Went under it instead, sliding beneath the arc, sword coming up in a thrust aimed straight at the gap in its ribs. Steel found the seam in the armor — but the thing twisted in midair, impossibly fast for something that size, and both scimitars came down anyway, cutting through leather and into the meat of my shoulders.

Blood hit the black floor. I didn’t let the pain slow me — twisted the hilt, locked the blade inside its ribs, and shoved every scrap of heat I had left straight into the runes.

The discharge went instantly. Blue lightning tore through its artificial Ember, the red in its eyes flickering hard before the bones underneath that armor just came apart.

I ripped the blade free as it dropped, a heap of smoking steel hitting the obsidian.

No time to breathe. A shadow swallowed what little light was left in the room.

The shield-bearer hit me full force, like getting run down by a carriage. The spiked shield caught me square in the chest and threw me clean off my feet — I hit the bronze doors hard enough to knock every ounce of air out of me. Before I’d even started sliding down, the flail was already swinging for my skull.

I dropped flat. The flail smashed into the doors right where my head had been, punching a crater into the bronze.

I got up. Left arm hanging dead at my side, numb from the collision. Sword in my right hand — that was all I had left to work with.

The third one arrived while I was still finding my footing. Halberd already swinging, a flat arc built to cut me in half at the waist.

I threw myself into a roll, sliding across obsidian slick with my own blood, and the halberd sparked off the floor an inch behind my legs. I came up fast, put the shield-bearer’s body between me and the halberd.

Fast as they were, their weapons were heavy enough to work against them — every swing had a wind-up, a recovery. That was something.

The shield-bearer came at me again, flail already rising for an overhead strike. I didn’t back away — stepped straight into its guard instead, drove my shoulder into the shield. It rattled my teeth in my skull, but it stopped the thing cold for one second. Just one. That was enough.

Behind it, the halberd wielder thrust forward, aiming to spear me straight through its own ally’s side to get to me.

I dropped.

The halberd missed me clean — punched straight through the shield-bearer’s armor instead, severing whatever passed for its spine. The red in its eyes went out like someone had thrown a switch.

The halberd wielder wrenched its weapon back, trying to pull the blade free of its dead ally. For one second, its guard was wide open.

My whole body was shutting down. Vision going spotty at the edges, the arm wound bleeding freely onto the glass under me. Nothing left in reserve — no fuel, no air to spare, no strength left in my arms.

So I burned what was left of myself instead.

I reached into the dying coal in my chest and demanded more anyway. It answered — a vicious, tearing heat that started eating the muscle in my arms and back for fuel, because there was nothing else left to take. Felt like swallowing fire and having it stay lit.

Something came out of me that wasn’t a word — just noise, animal and raw — and I lunged.

The sword went straight through its chest plate, deep into the core of the rune underneath. It dropped the halberd and grabbed the blade with both armored hands, trying to snap it in half.

I didn’t pull back. Just gripped the hilt tighter with my bloody hand and let go of everything — every last scrap of heat and charge my body had just torn out of itself.

The runes let go all at once — blue lightning and raw static tearing out of the blade in a flash that lit the whole chamber white.

The shockwave hit the whole room. Obsidian cracked under both our feet. Its armor went white-hot in an instant, and whatever was holding that artificial Ember together came apart under the surge — violently, all at once.

The skeleton detonated.

It threw me clean across the room. I hit the obsidian hard, skidded, and finally stopped against the wall of one of the dark alcoves.

Silence rushed back in, so complete it was almost loud.

Ozone, burnt bone, scorched metal — the whole chamber reeked of it. I lay on the cold glass, staring up at a ceiling I couldn’t see. My whole body felt like one open wound. Couldn’t feel my left arm at all. Every breath came in like a blade between my ribs.

But the red eyes were gone.

I rolled onto my stomach and spat blood onto the black floor. Then I started dragging myself forward, one hand on the sword hilt, using it to haul my own weight across the obsidian until I reached the doors.

I got my back against the cold bronze and just breathed for a second. Then I reached up with a shaking, bloody hand and pressed my palm flat against the center of the raptor-eye lock.

No magic left to force it open. Just whatever raw weight I had left to lean into it.

Something ancient groaned awake after centuries of silence. Tumblers shifted somewhere deep inside the door, dropped into place one by one.

The doors gave, slow and heavy, breaking a seal that had held since the Shaman first shut himself in here. Stale air hit my face — chemical, sharp, wrong. The doors swung wide, and whatever waited in the dark beyond them didn’t make a sound.

I fell forward across the threshold, and this time I let the dark take me.