The herald's words hang in the air. A command. An exposure.

  My purpose ignites. No more waiting.

  I lift Aeternus high.

  A thing of judgement and oaths.

  It is enough.

  Strike.

  What erupts from the Legion is not a battle cry but the silence of certainty. The quiet before the killing stroke.

  The captain's skull swivels toward his buried warriors. His jaw clicks once. A command without words, understood by bone and final oath.

  The ground erupts as three dozen skeletal warriors burst from mud, riverbank, and half-constructed fortifications.

  Their bones wet, yellowed, white, soil falling off from spaces between bone piles.

  Empty sockets burn with cold purpose. Fingers curl around rusted weapons, shields rise in unison. The dead remember duty and second chance granted to them.

  Where seconds before only mud and reeds shifted, skeletal forms explode upward. Bone fists shatter the skulls of the two nearest armored warriors before they turn. Hooked blades skitter uselessly against ancient legionary shields that materialize from the earth.

  The warriors collapse, gurgling water pouring from shattered helms. Two down instantly.

  Arrows come

  From the shadowed crates, from the tangled roots along the bank, shafts tipped with sharpened bone whistle through the air. Not random shots, but a focused volley. Half arc towards the herald, seeking the flawless face. The other half strike the many-eyed abomination, sinking deep into its pulsing flesh.

  It shrieks, a sound of grinding and thrashing, tentacles flailing wildly. Several eyes burst, spraying fluid in steady streams.

  The herald glides sideways avoiding the worst of the volley. Arrows splinter against the air where she stood, deflected by unseen force. One grazes her arm, drawing not blood but something like tar that smokes upon contact with air.

  Her eyes snap open. They are solid black, voids reflecting nothing.

  The charge begins.

  From the ridge, the heavy infantry descends.

  Bone feet on packed earth, a wave of retribution, inevitable, crashing in. They slam into the remaining armored warriors, shields meeting tridents, ancient swords cleaving through corrupted plate.

  Tridents and barnacle-encrusted shields, shatters under our onslaught.

  My borrowed wolf bones lend speed to my charge. The dragon plates across my spine deflect a hurled trident that shatters against me. I leap past the front line.

  Two armored figures try to reform their line. I cleave through both with a single arc. Their bodies split, water and something else spilling where blood should flow.

  The Legion fights quiet. No battle cries. No gasps of pain. Only the wet crack of bone meeting corrupted flesh and the scrape of ancient steel against barnacled armor.

  The Legion remembers.

  They need no orders beyond the initial command. Shield walls form and advance. Flanking maneuvers execute without hesitation. Bone archers loose volleys in perfect rhythm.

  A Drowned captain, his helm a mass of coral growths, rallies five warriors. They lock shields, preparing to counter-charge.

  The captain intercepts them. His skull, marked with that ancient wound, tilts slightly. Six of my soldiers pivot instantly, surrounding the formation. Their rusted blades find gaps between plates, between ribs, between helmet and whatever lies beneath. .

  The Drowned captain's formation dissolves into thrashing limbs and bubbling screams.

  "To me!" I call with recent voice given clarity.

  One legionary drives his sword through an armored warrior's neck joint, severing the head. Another uses his shield boss to crush a helm, extinguishing the cold blue light within.

  The air fills with the clang of metal, the sharp crack of bone, the wet tearing of corrupted flesh.

  I advance. Straight for the herald.

  Aeternus hums in my grip, resonating with the Legion's purpose, with the memory of Avernus, with the Arkashoth fragment's ancient hatred for these consuming tides.

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  My wolf-knight form strides through the chaos, claws digging into the mud.

  Lesser abominations, the fish-limbed horrors, scramble towards me. They drag their misshapen bodies across mud and stone.

  I cut them down without breaking stride, Aeternus a blur of white death. Bone meets corrupted flesh with surgical precision. They dissolve into foul-smelling mist and sinking slime, their essence returning to the tainted waters that spawned them.

  They are distractions. Meaningless obstacles.

  Only the herald matters now. The true threat. The harbinger of deeper corruption.

  The herald raises her arms, and the waters churn behind her. More corrupted warriors emerge, scaling the bank to intercept, impede.

  My Legion reacts instantly.

  The captain's skull swivels.

  Three squads of soldiers split from our main force, bones scraping as they reform into flanking positions. They move with discipline, just as they did in life. Their final oaths guide them still.

  They fan out pincer maneuver.

  The left wing curves through the reeds, silent save for the grind of ancient armor. The right presses forward through the half-built fortifications, shields interlocked.

  I stand at the center of our advance, Aeternus burning cold in my grip.

  An armored warrior charges, trident aimed at my chest. Salt water streams from its scaled armor. Its gills flare with rage.

  I step into the attack. No hesitation. No fear. Only purpose.

  The prongs pass through phantom tissue, scraping harmlessly against ribs. Metal meets hollow space where organs should be.

  Before he can retreat, my hands seize his helmet, bone fingers finding purchase where polished metal meets corroded bronze.

  Then hand closes around the warrior's throat, bone fingers puncturing gill slits. Its dark blood spurts between my knuckles, viscous and too thick.

  It pulses with each desperate heartbeat. The warrior thrashes, trident clattering forgotten to mud.

  Webbed hands claw at my arm, finding only unyielding bone.

  Its eyes bulge, not understanding how death can kill. How the void that walks can end life.

  The warrior goes rigid, then limp. I discard the corpse, already turning toward the next threat. The Legion moves with around me, with me. Three warriors drag down a scaled officer, rusted blades opening his throat. Five more surround a massive brute whose webbed hands wield a barnacle-encrusted anchor.

  The brute swings wildly the massive anchor. Two of my soldiers shatter instantly, ribcages collapsing under attack. Their skulls roll across mud, eye sockets still burning, still animated.

  For them, as with I, it is no matter.

  They reform even as they fall, bone fragments skittering back together, pulled by oaths that transcend flesh.

  I advance.

  The brute roars, a sound like stones grinding underwater. Its skin ripples with scales and barnacles, face stretched. Gills flutter at its neck, drinking air that should drown it.

  My Legion soldiers harass it from all sides, their blades finding little purchase against its armored hide. It swings again the anchor.

  This time my soldiers are ready. They duck beneath the blow, bones bending, dismantling, reforming to get away at odd angles.

  One drives a rusted spear into the brute's knee joint. Another leaps, skeletal hands grasping for eyes.

  The brute stumbles, momentarily vulnerable.

  I see my opening.

  Aeternus hungers as I leap. Dragon bone plates shift along my spine, lending strength to my lunge. Wolf instincts guide my strike, finding the soft spot where neck meets shoulder.

  The blade sinks deep. Not a killing blow, but a crippling one.

  The brute howls, anchor dropping from suddenly nerveless fingers. It tries to turn, to face me, but its body no longer obeys.

  My Legion soldiers swarm it, bone fingers grasping at limbs, neck, face. They pull it down into the mud like crabs dragging a wounded fish into the depths.

  I focus on the herald as my Legion tears the brute apart. Her black eyes narrow, fingers twisting in patterns that seem to bend the air. The water behind her churns violently, frothing with unnatural force.

  "Death's puppet," she hisses, voice like stones grinding beneath waves. "You cannot stop the drowning. Haven will become our nursery."

  I advance, Aeternus held steady. The blade pulses with recognition—it knows corruption when it faces it.

  The herald's hands complete their pattern. The river surges upward, defying nature's laws. A wall of water rises behind her, suspended impossibly, churning with shapes that should not exist. Eyes. Mouths. Grasping limbs that have never known sunlight.

  "The depths will have you," she promises.

  My Legion continues its relentless advance. Bone soldiers march through mud and water, unfazed by the abomination forming before them. They cannot drown. They cannot fear.

  Neither can I.

  The herald's form begins to change. Her elegant features stretch, skin splitting along invisible seams. What emerges is no longer pretending to be human. Tentacles burst from her torso, her arms elongate into barbed appendages, her jaw dislocates to reveal rows of needle teeth.

  There is a great rending, a tearing as her body violently transforms. Skin peels back like parchment, revealing glistening tissue beneath. Her ribcage cracks outward, exposing pulsing organs that should not exist in any creature of land or sea. The sound is wet, obscene—bone splintering, flesh parting, something ancient emerging from a shell too small to contain it.

  The water wall behind her shudders, then collapses forward, not as a wave but as hundreds of liquid tendrils, each seeking to ensnare, to drown, to pull down into darkness.

  My Legion braces. Shields lock. Ancient steel gleams dully in the fading light.

  The herald's true form towers before me, a nightmare of the depths given flesh. Water and corruption flow around her like a second skin.

  I advance toward the transformed herald, Aeternus raised for the killing stroke. Her monstrous form towers above the battlefield, tentacles lashing in frantic defense. My Legion presses forward on all sides, bone warriors cutting through remaining drowners with mechanical precision.

  The herald sees me coming. Seven eyes widen in recognition.

  "Too late," she hisses, voice distorted by her transformation. "The depths have already fed."

  A terrible sound rises behind me, not a roar or scream, but a wet, churning suction. I turn.

  Where the many-eyed abomination had fallen beneath Legion blades, something worse now rises.

  It has grown.

  The creature pulses, its amorphous bulk expanded to three times its original size. Dozens of fallen drowned ones lie half-absorbed into its mass, their armor and flesh being pulled inward like sinking ships into whirlpools. Their struggles grow weaker as they dissolve, features melting into the creature's bulk.

  With each warrior consumed, more eyes blink open across its surface. Not just the original orbs, but the drowned ones eyes as well, now glowing with sickly green light. Their weapons become new appendages, tridents and hooked blades protruding from pulsing flesh as new arms and armanents of terror from the depths.

  My captain's skull swivels toward the new threat. His jawbone clicks rapidly, alarm, assessment, command. The Legion responds instantly, twenty warriors breaking from herald pursuit to form new battle line.

  Too few.

  The abomination surges forward, no longer the wounded, retreating thing that arrows had crippled.

  Now it moves.

  The Summoner of Beckham Estate

  Monster hunter Silas Beckham just inherited an estate he never knew existed from a grandfather he never met.

  Bonereghard and a mythic Fenrir cub named Diog, Silas must become a real heir—fast—or lose everything.

  "There’s no thieves’ guild in Bastian. Just city hall and the tax collectors."

  Read on Amazon