#soulsedge

In a world cloaked in shadows and untold secrets, Taki found her way into the embrace of twilight. The air crackled with the weight of unseen energies, thick and alive, as if the very earth beneath her feet harbored stories of ancient struggles and forgotten passages. Her heart pounded a steady, rhythmic cadence, echoing in her ears, a stark contrast to the stillness that surrounded her. This mystical realm—an ethereal echo of her own world—was unlike anything she had encountered during her relentless pursuit of the Soul Edge.

Cherry blossoms floated lazily through the air, their delicate petals brushing against her skin like spectral whispers, leading her deeper into the enigma that beckoned her. Fragrant yet unsettling, the scent of the blossoms danced playfully in the breeze, mingling with the ominous undercurrent that ran through this serene landscape. Here, in this hauntingly beautiful grove, lay the threads of a prophecy long obscured.

Taki paused to observe the trees, their gnarled limbs stretching upward, shrouded in a veil of unfurling blossoms. She could feel an omnipresent gaze, heavy and relentless, lingering just beyond the periphery of her vision. The tranquility of the grove was mere illusion; the unearthly silence was a prelude to chaos, a premonition of dread that gnawed at her insides.

With every cautious step, the ground seemed to pulse beneath her soles, throbbing like a heart that had not breathed in centuries. Whispers, nearly inaudible, rose from the underbrush; voices woven with fear and desperation, ancient souls seeking solace in her presence. Taki’s instincts sharpened, a hunter aware that danger lay coiled among the blossoms, watching, waiting.

The path twisted like a serpent, winding away from the vibrant hues of life toward the gray of despair, and Taki sensed she had crossed a threshold into something primordial—a conflict not yet realized, but simmering just beneath the surface. Memories tugged at her, echoing shadows of her past struggles against nightmares embodied, of fights against merciless foes, and ultimately, of the fight against herself.

Life as an assassin had not come without its wounds; each scar bore testimony to quests that had tested her limits. Taki had sought vengeance, justice, and clarity, yet standing here among these cursed blossoms, she recognized a new journey unfurling before her. The prophecy she sought was more than mere words—it was a tapestry of fate, and she was a reluctant thread weaving through shadows.

Lurking somewhere within this grove, she discovered, was a spirit—an entity awakened by her presence, intertwined with the fate of the cherry blossoms. A pulse of malevolence unfurled its wings, stretching out to consume the light. As she navigated deeper, the grove became entangled in a web of inescapable darkness, a rift forming between reality and the uncanny.

Underneath the canopy, visions unfolded—scenes of despair played like a grotesque filmstrip. Shadows of leafless figures drifted between the trees, their mouths moving silently, mouths tightly sewn shut. The ground beneath Taki’s feet trembled; roots twisted into sinister shapes, burrowing silently like forgotten spells seeking retribution. Each step sent shivers racing up her spine, tugging at the vestiges of her sanity.

At the heart of the grove, she would confront the spirit, a being born of tragedy—a guardian twisted by grief. Legends spoke of it as the Keeper of the Blossoms, once a benevolent entity, now an anguished soul bound to protect the seeds of life while simultaneously nurturing a blight that could unravel the very fabric of existence. Taki clenched her fists, her resolve hardening; she was no stranger to soul-bound beings, yet the dread of facing an entity twisted by sorrow was particularly daunting.

The brightness of her past—dense with warmth—contrasted sharply as she stepped into the clearing where the trees bore witness to her presence, their branches swaying as if warning against her approach. A figure materialized amidst the swirling petals, coalescing from the darkness. It was an exquisite apparition, graceful yet monstrous. Ethereal, adorned with cherry blossoms, the entity bore an uncanny resemblance to Taki, wrapped in an aura of haunting beauty. The spirit’s eyes glimmered like twin voids, drawing Taki in.

“Why treads the living among the spirits?” the specter spoke, its voice a silken thread woven with despair. “What seeking do you pursue amid the ruin of hope?”

In the depths of a moonlit night, when shadows danced with a life of their own, Taki slipped through the trees like a whisper carried on the wind. The haunting song of crickets reverberated in the silence of the forest, an eerie melody that set the stage for the perilous journey ahead. With each step, the weight of her task bore down on her shoulders, a reminder of the fate that hung in the balance. Artifacts scattered across the world, cursed relics infused with deadly power, awaited her relentless pursuit.

Word had spread through the hidden realms of the dark forces at play—forces that conspired to resurrect an ancient evil from the remnants of the past. Taki, skilled in the way of the ninja and marked by the burdens of an ancestral duty, had made it her mission to find these artifacts before they fell into the wrong hands. Each artifact was a piece of history, a lingering echo of battles long forgotten, and those who dared to seek their power would unleash nightmares that would threaten the very fabric of existence.

The first destination called to her was an old temple, buried beneath layers of overgrown vegetation and despair. It lay concealed in a forgotten valley, rumored to be the resting place of a blade that could consume the souls of its victims. Taki’s heart raced as she approached the dilapidated structure, the ornate carvings of ancient deities twisted and gnarled by time, leaking a sinister energy that barely concealed the horrors within. The air thickened with foreboding, as though the spirits of the past rallied against her intrusions.

Pushing aside the heavy curtain of vines, Taki stepped inside the temple. The interior was cloaked in darkness, illuminated only by the wavering glow of her enchanted lantern. Each flicker cast monstrous shadows that danced against the walls, while a chill crept along her spine—an instinctual warning that not everything within these sacred halls desired her presence. Echoes of the temple's despair tinged the air with a heavy sorrow. Whispers taunted her from the corners of her mind, urging her to turn back, to abandon the cursed quest.

Yet retreat was not an option. Taki pressed deeper into the darkened sanctuary, the soles of her feet barely making a sound on the cold stone floor. The atmosphere thickened with each step, knotting itself around her heart. A faint glimmer captured her eye, drawing her towards a shadow-filled alcove at the chamber’s edge. Hidden beneath layers of dust and neglect, a weapon lay upon an altar, and not just any weapon—a blade enshrined in an inky blackness that seemed to pulse as if alive.

“The Soul Eater,” she murmured, recognizing the name that had been etched into her family’s lore. Legend spoke of its insatiable hunger for power, ensnaring both the wielder and their prey in a web of despair. As she approached, the blade’s edge shimmered with a seductive allure, betraying its true nature. Taki hesitated, the weight of her ancestors’ warnings reverberating in her mind.

A voice, cold and sharp as the blade before her, broke the tension. “You think you can handle the darkness?” it sneered, echoing from within the shadows. The air thickened, constricting around her throat. Taki spun, her instincts igniting, finding herself face-to-face with a figure cloaked in the shadows—an apparition conjured by her doubts.

“I do not fear you,” she declared, drawing strength from her lineage, the memories of past warriors flooding her senses. “I am Taki, a guardian against the vile.”

The specter let out a chilling laugh, a sound that twisted the very air. “Guardians become prey when truth is revealed. The blade craves, and so shall you.”

With a swift motion, Taki lunged for the Soul Eater, but as her fingers curled around the hilt, a surge of darkness swallowed her whole. Visions of torment plagued her mind—a kaleidoscope of fear, desperation, and the horrid echoes of those who had succumbed to its thirst. Each scream haunted her, weaving threads of dread that wrapped tightly around her heart.

Yet within that chaos, a flicker of clarity sparked. Taki tore herself from the grip of despair, forcing her will against the malevolent force trying to consume her. Channeling the energy of her ancestors, she focused on the past—warriors whose spirits resonated, reminding her of the strength that came with unity, with purpose.

Ivy Valentine: Mistress of the Abyss ANIMATION

Beneath the River's Teeth

Ivy stood on the old bridge as if it had been waiting for her all its life — a bone white arc of stone that remembered the weight of footsteps and the slow rot of promises. Night poured around the city in a low, wet sigh, and the river beneath glinted like a mouth. Her whip-sword hung loose against her hip, an elegant wrongness that could bloom into violence with a thought. Each breath she drew tasted of iron and the faint, sickly sweetness of something decaying in the dark.

She had been told the homunculus liked bridges. Strange creatures liked thresholds: places where one world leaned against another and forgot to mind the seam.

The shape-shifter had been stealing faces for weeks, leaving behind husks stitched with laughter. It imitated lovers and thieves, mothers and mirror-images of the dead. Those who saw it up close had cursed and fled. Those who touched it came back with intimate knowledge of their own failures, as if the thing scraped the varnish off truth and served it cold.

Ivy had not come for compassion. She had come because the homunculus wore a face she had never seen but recognized in the gut like an old letter: a child's grin framed in a smear of soot, teeth too white for the river's affairs. The homunculus had laughed at her in dreams, a sound like coins on the bottom of a well. It folded itself into alleys and donned the shapes of saints and small tragedies. It was all of the city in a single mouth, and Ivy's curiosity was a blade no therapy could blunt.

A voice like dry bell-metal spoke from the shadow beyond the bridge's lamp.

"You hunt what wears every name," Zasalamel said, appearing as if he had stepped sideways from a different calendar. He leaned on an umbrella carved with numerals, his robes moving with the indifferent dignity of old clocks. There was an ancient scale of things in his eyes — not judgment, only the patient arithmetic of doom.

"I hunt what's been stealing more than faces," Ivy answered, her voice a velvet that could tear. "It collects memories. It knits them into new lives. Where you are, there is profit in knowledge. Why do you stand in my way?"

Zasalamel's smile was a geometry she had no use for. "I stand where the hours are known to be unreliable. Do not imagine I oppose you. I merely remind."

He had reminded many before. His warnings came soft as powder and sharp as gravestones. Ivy felt the old prickle across the base of her skull — a premonition like the cooling of hot iron.

"You warn," she said. "That is your trade."

"My trade is to read the ledger," he murmured. "And the ledger says: some deaths settle debts, but others compound them. Kill this thing, and its ledger will not close; it will write on you."

Ivy smiled without humor. "And if I do not kill it, it will keep writing in other people's margins."

Zasalamel's eyes flicked toward the river, where the current was a smear of oil and star-ash. "Perhaps the only difference is which ledger belongs to whom when the cost becomes due."

They walked the bridge together, the city's breath rising behind them like the huff of a sleeping beast. Ivy felt the pull of her heritage then: a lineage of obsession wrapped in a family's curse, a rope of blood that tightened whenever she bared the name she kept hidden. She had fought other things — steel ghosts, nobles with rotted virtue — but the homunculus was a mirror that refused a simple reflection.

"It sings," Ivy said at last. "I can hear it in the bricks."

"You can," Zasalamel agreed. "It sings with borrowed tongues. It will suit itself to what you fear and what you desire. Beware the harmony."

Ivy laughed, and the sound scattered pigeons from the arch. "You sound like a lover warning me I might enjoy the pain."

He looked at her then — not with pity, but with the old, affectionate curiosity of someone who had watched entire empires discover they were doomed. "There is a seduction to catastrophe," he said. "But remember: murder may satisfy the immediate vanity of justice, yet curses are sticky things. They do not prefer clean exits."

She did not answer. She had always preferred direct verbs to proverbs.

Amidst the ancient ruins of an accursed temple, the air thick with an eerie silence, and shadows cast by flickering torches danced ominously on the cold stone walls. Once a sacred site of worship to the gods, now demonized by bloodshed, it stood as a testament to the horrors unleashed by unchecked ambition. Here, whispers of forgotten prayers mingled with the mournful cries of the souls lost to evil. The ground, interspersed with remnants of broken altars and shattered statues, pitted the earth beneath, a visual reminder of the extreme toll of centuries of conflict.

For many years, peace had woven itself into the fabric of the land, allowing the villagers to thrive under the blessings of the deities they revered. Guiding guardian spirits roamed the peripheries of the prosperous realm, ensuring safety and harmony. Among those virtuous defenders was Sophitia Alexandra, a fervent guardian of the human race, blessed with divine resolve and the power of her ancestral sword, the Omega Sword. She stood as both protector and beacon of hope, yet her fate was about to entwine with malice that had long been staved off.

While the sun dipped below the horizon, streaking the sky with hues of blood-red and twilight blue, whispers reached Sophitia’s ears—tales of a warlord, known only as Drakthul, rising in the shadowed corners of the land. His once-human form, twisted into something grotesque by his insatiable thirst for power, wielded dark magic as deftly as he wielded a blade stained with untold crimes. With each village he seized, he enslaved not only the bodies of the innocent but also the essence of their spirits, binding them to his will and serving as an army of terror, wreaking havoc in his wake.

Fear crept into hearts once filled with joviality, tightening its grip around the throat of their collective serenity. Villagers spoke in hushed tones about the figure who had descended upon them—a monstrous silhouette cloaked in shadows, eyes that shone like infernal fires, and a voice that promised kingship through misery. Many believed it to be a harbinger of doom, a puppet of malevolence pulling strings directly from the depths of the underworld. But Sophitia, stoic and unyielding, understood that as long as breath and belief endured, hope would persist.

Compelled by a sense of duty, she wrapped her hands around the hilt of her sword, feeling its power pulse with the fervor of her convictions. A prayer whispered from her lips as she set forth, moving swiftly across the landscape, traversing hills shrouded in mist and woodlands where the gnarled trees reached out like fingers entwined in despair. The night air thickened as it embraced her, a protective shroud against the gathering darkness; yet she felt its bite, the chilling caress of fear lurking beneath every rustling leaf.

In the heart of the night, she came upon what remained of a village that had not been so fortunate. The once-vibrant homes lay in smoking ruins, vibrant colors turned to sepulchral grays. A melancholy atmosphere draped the surroundings as she navigated through the remnants of life now extinguished. The faint echoes of laughter and mirth, now replaced by silence, made her heart ache; remnants of lives interrupted, dreams shattered under the weight of an evil warlord’s lust.

But amidst the ruins, a flicker of movement caught her eye: a shadow darting between the remnants of walls. Sophitia’s instincts kicked in, and she approached cautiously, hand always near the hilt of her sword. With gentle inquiries, she uncovered a ragged figure, a young girl, eyes wide with terror. The child trembled as Sophitia knelt before her, the flicker of hope igniting in the depths of her sorrow.

“Where are your parents?” Sophitia asked softly, her voice soothing amid the crackling of embers around them.

“They… they were taken by the dark knight,” the girl whispered, her voice barely audible, trembling lips betraying sorrow too profound for her tender years. “He said we would make good servants… good sacrifices.”

A primal rage surged through Sophitia, intertwining with her grief as she took the girl’s hand; it felt like a lifeline, and in that moment, darkness retreated slightly as she vowed to avenge the lives lost. With resolve settling in her heart like an ancient shield, she whispered, “Fear not, little one. I will rid this land of the shadows that haunt it, but you must stay safe.”

Seong Mi-Na: Restless Guard ANIMATION

Steppe of Whispered Oaths

Mi-Na walked as if she owned the horizon.

Not in arrogance—the land permitted no arrogance—but in the sort of insistence that makes the wind pause and reconsider its route. The dusk had the color of old copper, and the steppe lay torn like a war-scarred scroll: charred stables, dull spears thrust into the earth like frozen questions, banners clinging to nowhere. Here, the dead had not yet finished their conversations.

She tightened her grip on her polearm. It was lighter than the burdens in her pockets, which was not to say those burdens were small. Stories rode with her: the brittle laughter of a village, a mother’s hand that had been a map and no longer was, the scent of blood that smelled nearly like rain when she remembered properly. Her boots pressed a rhythm into the sod, and each step hummed with old promises broken by new violence.

A figure waited where the ground held a shallow hollow, the figure improbably still in a place where nothing favored stillness. Kilik stood like an accusation, staff vertical, eyes folding the dusk into reason. The monk’s robes had the neat cruelty of someone who polished not to hide but to understand. His restraint radiated—clean, cold, the discipline of a thing that believed the world could be taught to behave.

“You took the long way,” Kilik said, voice not unkind but calibrated.

Mi-Na smiled without warmth. “The short way was full of soldiers. The long way told me tales. Which do you prefer, Kilik? Soldiers or tales?”

“I prefer what is useful,” he replied. “And you—” he inclined his head, a bow without yielding—“prefer what is beautiful.”

She laughed, a sound like a blade testing the air. “I prefer what will not fit into your hands. Try, if you must. Fit me in your neat little mind.”

Kilik’s lips tightened. “I do not intend to hold you. I only intend to stop the harm you walk toward.”

“Who says I walk toward harm?” she countered, stepping closer until their boots were a fist’s breadth apart. Up close, she could see the monk’s scars—thin white threads crossing his knuckles as if they were text he had written with blood. She could see the way his jaw clenched when he measured his breath. “Perhaps I walk toward freedom.”

“Freedom,” he echoed, the word like a prayer he’d been taught to mistrust. “Or chaos. There is a difference.”

They had hardly crossed two polite sentences when a sound threaded the air: not quite wind, not quite speaking. The grasses bent away from the hollow as if obeying the suggestion of something that dwelt just under the skin of the land. A hush fell that had the quality of an inhale held too long. Mi-Na’s hair lifted, though she had not stirred; Kilik’s hand brushed the staff, a reflex that tightened and became readiness.

“You hear it?” Mi-Na whispered. “The steppe is gossiping.”

Kilik’s eyes did not leave the shadow between them. “It tells many lies.”

The duel began without ceremony. They moved like thought suddenly given body—Mi-Na’s polearm a wind of insult and dare, Kilik’s staff a stern line drawn through the air. Their weapons sang, and the world answered in echoes that smelled of iron and old snow. Blows fell; neither wanted merely to injure. Each strike was a question, each parry an attempt to force the other into confession.

“You always dance around the truth,” Mi-Na said between blows. “You hide behind order because you think chaos will swallow you.”

“Order is not hiding,” Kilik led the staff in a slow arc, forcing the polearm aside. “Order is remembering who you are in the dark.”

Her blade flashed, ribboning the shadow. “And what if I like the dark? What if in the dark I find what no teaching ever promised me?”

He did not answer with words. His staff struck her polearm hard enough that stars—real or imagined—wheeled across Mi-Na’s vision. She grinned, because pain was honest; it left marks he could read. The duel blurred into argument and the argument into something more intimate, a pulling apart of hearts arranged opposite on the same map.

Ivy Valentine: The Serpent's Kiss ANIMATION

Ivory Marionette

A child's laughter stopped mid-air outside the Corbeau Salon; the cut was not sound but expectation, and Ivy noticed it as if it left a fingerprint on the night. She was leaning against the marble balustrade, a silhouette that looked like something expensive made dangerous — velvet spilling like dark water, a parasol hiding a whip of metal. Her hair was the sort of pale that could be described as alabaster or moonbone; people argued about it at banquets and duels and over the beds of the men who thought they possessed such things. Ivy did not care which word they used. She only cared that the laughter had halted.

"You are staring at silence, my dear," said a voice behind her that sounded as if it polished blades for sport. Raphael Sorel stepped from the shadow of a pillar with the limping grace of a man who had learned to charm his wounds. He wore arrogance like a coat — tailored, warm, a little too snug for humility.

"It is rude to eavesdrop on ghosts," Ivy replied, not turning. Her hands were clasped at her waist; a silver ornament winked there — a key, a serpent, something older than fashion. "They may find you boring and leave."

Raphael smiled with the hint of a blade. "Only if you do not make conversation first."

They watched as servants in powdered masks ferried a casket through the salon, passing under chandeliers that spilled liquid light. The city, for all its civilized pretenses, had been learning a new grammar of death; nobles were found dead upon their chairs, upon their beds, in carriages, their throats slit in shapes that suggested a practiced hand… yet something delicate enough to be called handiwork had accompanied each demise. Dolls: porcelain-faced, with Ivy's narrow chin and rose-lipped mouth, laid at the feet of the dead as if to say apologetically, I am the crime.

"A toy taxidermy," Raphael mused. "Artful enough to impress the police."

Ivy laughed, which was not like anyone else's laugh but like a bell that predicts a storm. "They make the dolls well," she said. "They put my face in places where it must stay silent."

Raphael's eyes narrowed; there was an affection in his expression, an irritation twined with care. "You insist you had nothing to do with them."

"I insist I had many things to do with." Ivy turned then, and the movement was a revelation — an invitation and a warning. "But murder is not on that list."

"You wound me," Raphael murmured. "To be suspected by the public and adored by you — both are injuries."

They were drawn into the current of gossip that flowed faster than any river: which noble had been found with one of the dolls at his knees, the porcelain cheeks stained with the same red as the victim's collar; how the dolls were constructed with locks of hair, with an intensity of devotion that tasted like obsession. Ivy had been many things — assassin, heiress, survivor of curious engines that seamed bone to steel — but immortalized in doll form was a fiction she never asked for.

The first doll to deliver a verdict was discovered at the edge of the mansion of Lord Caron, the philosopher of the court, a man who wrote treatises on will and control and how one might bend others without cruelty. He had been found seated as if in thought, fingers poised over a page, his throat opened in a perfect oval. The servants swore they heard a child's lullaby when they entered his study. A doll lay upon his desk, blue eyes fixed on the ceiling. Its dress was trimmed with lace and a pattern that imitated the vinework of ivy — someone had wanted the pun to be both obvious and obscene.

At Caron's funeral, word spread like spilled wax. Ivy walked among the mourners and felt the gaze of a thousand small carnations of loathing. They whispered that she wielded her beauty like a blade; that she corrupted with a smile; that perhaps the dolls were a natural consequence — the psyche's revenge via fetishized likeness. Ivy moved through accusations like a current through reeds.

"It's kitschy," she told Raphael when he found her beneath a portrait of an ancestor whose eyes were painted too kindly. "Someone has a grotesque sense of humor and the ability to buy silence."

"Whoever commissioned these dolls has an intimacy with your image I find troubling," Raphael said. "Do not they know their craft? To replicate the tilt of your head, the sweep of that—"

Ivy Valentine: Gothic Enchantress ANIMATION

Ivy's Thorns of Justice

The village of Hearthmire did not die quietly. Its death rattle was the wind through splintered barn doors, the creak of empty rocking chairs on porches stained with things that glistened black under a jaundiced moon. The air, thick with the cloying sweetness of rotting rye and something older—brimstone and forgotten prayers—clung to Ivy Valentine’s neck like a lover’s unwelcome breath.

She stood at the tree line, a silhouette of velvet and vengeance. The road into the village was a scar of churned mud and fragmented hope. Her arrival was not born of charity, but of a faint, discordant resonance that had hummed along the coiled length of her alchemical weapon, the Snake Sword. A resonance that tasted of Soul Edge’s foul kin. The villagers’ desperate missive, nailed to a post outside the last functioning tavern for fifty miles, had spoken of “devils in the mist” and “the music of broken bones.” It was enough.

Ivy pushed forward, her heels sinking slightly into the muck. Her attire, a deliberate contrast to the squalor, was a masterpiece of impractical elegance: a crimson and black corseted dress that emphasized a form both lethal and alluring. She was a rose walking into a boneyard.

The first house yielded the first mystery. The door swung inward. A table was set for three. A ladle of cold stew sat in a pot. No bodies. No blood. Just… absence, and the pervasive, sweet-rot smell, stronger here. On the wall, a child’s drawing was pinned. It showed stick figures under a yellow sun. But someone, with a frantic, charcoal hand, had later scribbled over the sun, giving it dozens of spiraling, hungry eyes, and had drawn thick, dark vines wrapping around the stick-figures’ feet.

“Not demons who rend,” Ivy murmured, her voice a low contralto that seemed to absorb the silence. “Demons who… cultivate.”

A soft sob echoed from the village square.

Ivy moved with predatory grace. The square was a wide space dominated by a dry stone well. Around it, perhaps two dozen villagers huddled, faces gaunt with terror. They clutched scythes, rusted swords, and simple faith. Before them stood a man in the tattered remains of a parson’s coat. He was holding a crude wooden icon aloft, his voice cracking.

“—and the Lord shall be a refuge for the oppressed! We must not yield to the whispers! We must hold fast to our memories of the light!”

“It’s eating the light, Parson Aldric,” a woman wailed. “It showed me my Ned… but his smile was all teeth!”

“Silence, Marta! Faith! We must have—”

“Faith is a brittle shield against what haunts this place,” Ivy announced, stepping into the moonlight.

All eyes turned to her. The parson’s faltered. In their gazes, she saw not hope, but a new kind of fear. She was too beautiful, too composed, a creature from a different world entirely.

“Who are you?” the Parson, Aldric, demanded, lowering his icon.

“The answer to a nail-borne prayer,” she said, her eyes scanning the rooflines. “Explain the nature of your pestilence. Quickly.”

A burly smith named Kael, his bravado fueled by terror, spat. “Wraiths in the fog! They come at dusk. They don’t fight, not proper. They… sing. And things change. My anvil wept rust yesterday. Wept, I say!”

“They show you things,” a young girl whispered, hiding behind Marta. “Pretty lies. Your best memory. Then… then the memory turns sour and sticky, and you want to follow the song.”

Ivy’s gloved finger tapped the pommel of her sheathed sword. “A psychic parasite. Feeding on emotional resonance, memory, the very substance of your past. It sweetens the core before devouring it. How… refined.”

“You speak of them like they’re a vintage,” Aldric accused, his fear curdling into anger.

“I speak of them as a problem to be dissected,” she corrected, her gaze icy. “Your faith, Parson, is loud. Your terror is louder. It is a beacon. You are ringing the dinner bell.”

As if summoned, the mist began to coil from the alleyways. It was not grey, but a bruised purple, and it carried a sound—a faint, polyphonic hum that seemed to vibrate in the teeth. The villagers cried out, huddling closer.