wound in its chest and craters that had once been eyes. An icicle the size of the
Despite the oppressive heat, Kataria felt her blood run cold.
The Abysmyth had been a definition up until this moment. Despite being a creature of hell, it had existed according to rules: it killed and it could not be killed. The ending of the trail’s story had changed everything. Something had fought the frogmen and Abysmyth, something that left no bodies, only smears of pulsing green ichor.
And amongst it all, someone, a man or woman who strode between infernos and blizzards as casually as one skips through a meadow, had given her a plot that she no longer wanted to read.
Suddenly, finding Lenk seemed like a rather good idea.
Her ears twitched and, for a fleeting moment, she was almost relieved to hear a sound other than the crackling of ice and fire. Such a moment was short-lived; the sounds of steel singing through the air slipped muffled through scars in the smoke, accompanied by faint mutters of voices she had never heard before.
They were vaguely familiar. There was grunting, snarling, the sound of something heavy being swung through the air. Yet there was something odd about the voices: they all spoke at once, echoing and reverberating off of each other to become incomprehensible. Like wisps of smoke, they trickled through to her, brief scents of sulphur and brimstone without the stink of something truly burning.
And then, all at once, they were silent.
She waited, ears twitching, hoping to hear more; she ought likely to have fled, she knew, but was tempted into stillness by the sounds. She had to find the end of the story that had begun back in the jungle.
Moments passed, a tense eternity of quiescence. In the distance, a seared branch crumbled at its joint and collapsed upon the sand with a faint crash. Her breath was loud, she knew, so loud she might as well have been speaking.
‘Ah,’ she barely whispered, ‘hello?’
She received her answer half a blink later.
Lenk came hurtling through the air like a wiry javelin, cutting through the smog and leaving a trail of clear air behind him. He hit the earth, shifting from missile to plough as he dug a deep trench in the charred sand, a cloud of ash in his wake. There was an alarmed cry, a faint crash as he struck the tree.
Then, silence once more.
She rushed to him, not bothering to call his name, not bothering to shriek out in alarm at whatever had hurled him such a distance. She made no noise, save for the earth crunching beneath her feet and the words hissed between her teeth.
‘Don’t be dead, don’t be dead,’ she chanted to herself like a mantra, ‘Riffid Alive, don’t be dead.’
He might as well have been, lying in a half-made grave with the seared tree to mark it. Motionless, eyes closed, sword held loosely in hands, he looked almost at peace in his trench. So deep was the rent in the earth that she had to leap in to reach his body.
‘Don’t be dead, don’t be dead.’
Two fingers went to his throat; nothing. A long, notched ear went to his chest; soundless.
‘Don’t be dead, don’t be dead.’
She leaned closer to his face; his breath was cold and icy. Her eyes remained open, watering as the smoke stung them.
‘Don’t-’
His eyes opened with such suddenness that she recoiled. He rose from the ground like a living corpse draped in an ashen cloak. His sword was in his hand, naked and silver. His eyes pierced the gloom like candles burning blue. His stare shifted over her, merely acknowledging her presence, before he soundlessly pulled himself out of the hole.
‘Lenk,’ she all but cried after him, ‘are you-’
‘Not sure,’ he replied. His voice was like the sound of the embers beneath his boots. ‘Fight now.’
‘What fight?’
That, too, was answered as soon as she emerged from the grave.
Sixteen
‘They won’t listen! They can’t hear You!’
Kataria’s ears twitched. A dozen voices, all choked and speaking at once, tone shifting wildly between each word.
‘I’ve tried! How I’ve tried! How I’ve
Footsteps, embers crunching under massive, webbed feet.
‘But for what, Mother? They refuse enlightenment, deny You!’
The crack of ice.
‘Have I done nothing to show You my devotion? Is all my suffering in vain?’
Silence. The sound of smoke rising from the earth.
‘
The endless grey trembled and scattered, exposing the Abysmyth as a towering tree in the centre of the forest of frozen frogmen. The beast was alight in the gloom, eyes flashing wide and empty, talons wet with ooze, pulsing green ichor pumping in time with each staggered breath it took.
‘There’s. .’ Kataria paused to stare at the creature with ever-widening eyes, ‘more of them?’
‘More?’ Lenk swept the smoke for a sign. ‘Where?’
‘Behind us,’ Kataria replied. ‘Dead. Something happened here.’ She glanced from the demon’s wounds to a glob of the throbbing green substance on the earth.
‘One or one thousand,’ the young man muttered, raising his sword. ‘We will clean the land of their blight.’
‘You think we can?’
‘
‘We?’ She glanced at him, terrified. ‘Who’s-’
She never finished the sentence, her breath robbed from her the moment her eyes met his. Perhaps it was the cover of smoke, the angle at which she saw him or stress from the horrors of the battlefield that twisted her vision. She prayed it was, for she saw his stare burning brightly through the smoke.
Pupilless.
She tightened her jaw, turned away, resolved not to look again.
‘Then what do we do?’
‘Stay,’ he commanded coldly. ‘We kill.’
‘You can’t kill that thing.’
‘He cannot,’ Lenk replied, ‘
‘Damn it,’ she muttered breathlessly, ‘of all the times for you to go
If the young man had a reply for that, it was lost in the scurry of boots on burned earth. He was up, a flash of silver and blue, carving a path through the endless smoke towards his towering foe. The creature, for its part, seemed unimpressed.
Then, suddenly, it erupted.
‘The Shepherd is ever tireless! Ever vigilant!’ It roared and the frozen frogmen quaked against the ice. ‘It is through his mercy that deliverance is possible! It is through the Shepherd that Her mercy is ever known!’
Lenk lunged, and a great black arm shot out, seizing him about the waist.
