They left the Broken settlement.

  They did not linger.

  They could have.

  They were Astrastars.

  They have the strength to stand against the Pale Coil and slaughter all of the lizardmen until there were none to stand against them.

  Illara had done it before. She fought the Dread Corsair when she was a member of the Starwing Alliance. She held a choke point, bled an army of corsairs, laughed when the last arrow fell.

  Matthias had ventured into the heart of Aithnerath the City of Dying Embers in the aftermath of the Starless Night darkness to take the lives of those who instigated it.

  But this was not war.

  They are not here as Astrastars.

  Thus Astrastarian warmaking did not follow them.

  The Pale Coil lay where they had fallen, five bodies of cultured brutality and gilded hunger, steaming faintly in the damp.

  Their blood ran darker than the Broken.

  Thicker.

  It clung to the wood as the earth was reluctant to soak it up, the land itself refused to drink it.

  Illara turned around at the gates and looked back at the settlement.

  Beyond the ring of pikes, the Broken remained strewn in grotesque heaps.

  Hundreds upon hundreds.

  They could not linger.

  They could not give them a brief last rite.

  It went against Illara’s heart but she had to leave them where they had fallen.

  Fallen where they had been cut down, where they had crawled, where they had tried to drag themselves away and failed.

  Their throats had been opened.

  Their bellies opened.

  Their limbs hewed in casual cruelty.

  The kind inflicted by those who knew their victims cannot fight back.

  The Pale Coil had not fought them.

  The Pale Coil had culled them.

  The Pale Coil had been culled in return.

  Illara’s jaw tightened as they made it pass the corpse of a Broken, laying where it was slain.

  “There is no honor in this.” She said softly.

  Matthias placed a hand behind her back and moved her along, his expression unreadable beneath the hood-shadow of his cloak.

  “I know how you feel.” He said, “but we cannot tarry.”

  He did not look at the bodies as long as Illara did.

  He looked at the edge of the tree line, at the mist gathered there like a curtain held by unseen hands.

  His keen ears picked up.

  The scratching of leaves against an uneven body.

  The skittering of a hundred claws.

  The gibbering of a thousand maws.

  Illara heard it now.

  “No,” she agreed softly, “we cannot bury them all.”

  “Come.” The Nightblade said, “let us not linger.”

  They left the mask untouched.

  They left the shrine unburned.

  Illara had half a mind to destroy it.

  To cleanse, to deny the island its hook.

  To vent.

  But she felt, instinctively, that destruction would be a kind of worship here.

  She would draw eyes.

  Unwanted eyes upon them.

  Violence was invitation.

  Violence was revelry.

  The island and its inhabitants seemingly revel in it.

  “Their kin are likely coming,” Matthias said, “we go out back.”

  They stepped out of the hovel and circle to the back.

  Illara took a glance back.

  The mist had thickened.

  It crept into the settlement.

  A shroud being pulled over the massacre.

  The island kept her dead.

  The dead looked less like bodies and more indistinct shapes.

  The settlement felt already like a memory.

  Something that had happened long ago rather than moments ago.

  Matthias held up a hand across her.

  He pointed.

  Within the mist, moving shapes.

  The Cult of Pale Coil.

  Scores of them.

  She went instinctively for their weapons.

  He stopped her.

  Shaking his head.

  “We can take them all.” Illara whispered fiercely.

  “Yes, we can,” Matthias agreed, “but that does not mean we should.”

  She glared at him, then her expression softened.

  “Believe me, Lara,” he said, “I wanted to slay as much as you do.”

  “But that will not sate your bloodlust.”

  Illara exhaled and nodded.

  Matthias nodded in return.

  The Nightblade turned and go.

  He trusted her to follow.

  Illara’s fingers closed around the compass in her coat.

  She did not open it.

  She did not want to see it spin.

  Matthias moved first, gliding toward the treeline.

  Illara followed.

  Their boots soundless on damp earth.

  They slipped between the pikes, back into the forest, leaving behind the stench of blood and sanctified rot.

  They had taken five lives.

  The island cared not.

  The forest watched them with indifference.

  It closed behind them without sound.

  They fled not in fear, but in the cold warcraft of the Astrastars.

  Every blade drawn demanded a blood price

  Every blade strike carried consequences.

  Sound draws roving ears.

  Blood draws roaming eyes.

  The Broken had been dead.

  The Pale Coil had been culled.

  But there were still shapes in the mist.

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  Still eyes. Still whispers.

  Illara felt a presence behind her.

  The sense of a malevolent presence leaning in.

  Probing her thoughts.

  Acknowledging her existence.

  Matthias did not speak.

  He did not need to.

  His weapons were close at hand

  Illara kept her crescent blade loose in her hand, shotgun across her back.

  The runes upon her weapon flared dimly, she could feel them alive beneath metal, pulsing.

  They pushed deeper into the woods behind the settlement.

  The forest changed.

  They felt the landscape shifted.

  With each pace the air thickened.

  Dampness gathered.

  The scent of copper and ash gave way to something sweeter.

  Cloying, rich.

  Like bruised fruit left too long in heat.

  Beneath it a hint of rot.

  Not the rot of death. The rot of abundance.

  Illara slowed, breath catching. “Do you smell that?”

  Matthias’s head tilted slightly, as if listening to a sound beneath sound.

  “Yes, but do not tarry.” His voice urged haste.

  Illara’s stomach tightened.

  She felt it.

  Something.

  Approaching.

  Illara stopped.

  Matthias stopped beside her, silent, watching her expression.

  The forest had gone still.

  The Pale Coil darted as half-shapes in the mist.

  Illara swallowed. “We crossed a threshold.”

  Matthias nodded once. “Yes.”

  Illara took a careful step forward.

  The moss beneath her boot was velvet black, slick with dew that clung like sweat.

  She felt movement beneath the earth.

  Faint and twitching.

  Tendrils the thickness of thread recoiled from her sole like limp umbilical cords retreating into soil.

  Illara froze.

  She had fought things that bled fire.

  She had walked ruins where time itself had broken.

  She had seen the void-hollows between planes.

  She felt the forest turned.

  It warped.

  Illara reached for her compass.

  She snapped it open.

  The compass spun wildly.

  Matthias crouched and pressed two fingers to the ground.

  He jerked them back instantly.

  A smear of milk-pale ichor clung to his glove, shimmering like oil.

  It did not drip quickly.

  It stretched in a thin filament, reluctant to break.

  He wiped it on bark and the bark absorbed it, darkening as if drinking.

  A roar.

  Soft.

  The Pale Coil recoiled.

  They vanished.

  Illara readied her blades, “as before.”

  Matthias’s voice came low. “as before.”

  Illara’s throat felt tight. “They are alive.”

  Matthias shook his head slowly. “No. Not alive.”

  Illara’s gaze lifted.

  Ahead, the trees bowed inward toward a shallow glade.

  A grove.

  Not arranged by nature, but a fractured that forced the world to curve around it.

  Illara took one more step. Matthias moved with her.

  They saw them.

  Amongst the trees.

  Sacs.

  Dozens at first, then hundreds once her eyes adjusted.

  Hanging from branches like fruits.

  Half-submerged in thick pools of loam.

  Embedded in the sides of swollen trunks.

  Some intact, translucent. Something within pulsing faintly.

  Others ruptured, their torn membranes hanging in strips like wet cloth.

  “What are these?” Illara whispered.

  From one torn sac a glistening shape lay half in the dirt—lizardlike, but wrong.

  Its limbs were unfinished, its jaw too wide.

  Its eyes lidless and too many. It did not move.

  All horned. All winged.

  Matthias knelt by one of the ones that came out of the sacs.

  “Not lizards. Dragons.” he said, awed.

  Illara stared, breath shallow. “This is a birthing ground.”

  A rustling.

  Matthias’s gaze swept the grove, searching for edges, for exits, for threat.

  He found none.

  The grove felt like it had no boundary.

  It bled into the forest, into the soil, into the air.

  The Pale Coil closed in.

  “Dragons,” Matthias said quietly. “But not of dragons.”

  Illara’s mind flashed unbidden to the tales she heard as a child.

  Dragons of the Night.

  Fire and void.

  A thought came like a cold knife.

  Dragons of the Night. Borne of the Void.

  Illara swallowed hard. “Here be dragons.”

  “No.” Matthias said grimly, “these are not dragons.”

  They stood at the edge of the grove.

  The air smelled sweet and sickening.

  Rot and nectar.

  Iron and blood.

  It crept into the lungs too quickly.

  Illara forced herself not to breathe deep.

  Her skin prickled.

  She felt, rather than heard, a thrum beneath the earth.

  Not a heartbeat. Something larger, like pressure flowing through forgotten veins.

  A black star.

  It was headed their way.

  One step.

  The leaves upon the trees shook.

  Matthias whispered, almost to himself, “Mother of fertileness.”

  Illara looked at him sharply. “Do not speak its name.”

  Matthias’s eyes remained fixed on the center. “I am not.”

  Illara’s mouth went dry.

  Fertility without will.

  Creation without mind.

  Life without restraint.

  The grove pulsed.

  A sac near the center twitched, then tore open with a wet sigh.

  The life within stirred and slid free.

  It collapsed into the loam.

  It did not cry. It did not scream.

  It simply lifted its head for a moment, then stilled.

  Illara’s stomach lurched.

  Matthias’s hand hovered near her elbow, near and ready.

  He feared she might falter or surge forward.

  Illara took a slow step back.

  The grove did not follow.

  It merely waited.

  “We should leave,” she whispered.

  Matthias turned to her. “Too late.”

  They began to withdraw.

  And then the forest changed again.

  The trees did not move. The air did.

  Heat gathered, damp and heavy. The sweetness intensified until it pressed at the back of the throat. The mist thickened in slow pulses, as if drawn inward toward an unseen center.

  Illara froze.

  Matthias’s hand snapped up, a finger to his lips.

  Silence.

  Not the dead silence from before.

  A pregnant silence.

  Then it came.

  Unbidden.

  A deep, meaty thud reverberated through the earth.

  The ground trembled beneath Illara’s boots.

  Branches overhead bowed as if pressed by an immense weight.

  Somewhere to the left a tree groaned, not snapping but bending, its wood complaining in long, wet protest.

  Illara’s pulse hammered.

  Matthias shifted into a crouch.

  Illara followed suit, her posture lowering.

  Another thud.

  Closer.

  Then a sound.

  A cacophony.

  Gibbering and chattering.

  A chorus rising beneath hearing.

  Bleats, cries, wet inhalations, the rasp of many throats struggling to shape breath.

  They overlapped and bled together, forming a low constant murmur that pressed at the edges of perception.

  It was not loud.

  It was everywhere.

  A thousand maws. A thousand mouths.

  “Into the mist, Lara.” Matthias said as he stepped into the shadows.

  Illara took one step.

  The mists enfolded her.

  Her vision blurred at the edges.

  Colors dulled. Contrast flattened until the forest felt unreal.

  The mist pulled a veil over her eyes, as the pall of a shroud.

  She wanted to look.

  Everything in her wanted to look.

  Matthias’s voice came like a blade across her urge. “Do not.”

  Illara swallowed, forcing her gaze downward.

  The mist concealed her.

  Ahead the shroud thickened and thinned in pulses, drawn inward toward an unseen shape.

  And she saw it anyway.

  Not cleanly.

  Not wholly.

  A silhouette.

  Shifting, swelling, collapsing, reforming.

  A shape too large to be contained by one outline.

  Illara instinctively knew this was what crept by her earlier.

  In the words.

  It moved through the trees and the trees bowed, they bowed in reverence to an uncrowned matriarch.

  Illara’s breath caught.

  She saw limbs.

  Too many limbs.

  Not arms and legs though the shroud of mist, but tendrils and cords and growths that resembled limbs because her mind could find no other words.

  Words not in her native or the common tongue.

  Some dragged through loam, slick and fibrous.

  Some coiled upward like vines seeking light.

  Some ended in blunt hornlike protrusions.

  Some ended in mouths. Some resembled maws and orifices.

  Some mouths took the shape of birth canals, wet and soft, whispering without speech.

  Ichor and substance dripped, hanging in trailing strings upon its malformed grotesque shape.

  Illara’s skin crawled.

  At the core of the hulking shape, at the center of the shifting mass—she saw hollows.

  Wombs.

  Chambers within chambers, pulsing, opening, closing, leaking dark fluid and milk-pale ichor. Sacs hung from her like fruit, some swelling, some rupturing, some already empty and slack.

  Illara’s mind screamed.

  She clamped a hand over her lips and gashed her teeth to keep silent.

  The mass stirred.

  It turned its head towards her.

  Or rather, eyes formed to regard the mists concealing the Mistwalker.

  “Courage,” Mathias’s voice came to her, “she cannot see you.”

  Illara stayed deathly still.

  Matthias crouched beside her, eyes half-lidded, forcing himself to see without being seen.

  Illara dared to glance at him.

  His face was pale beneath the hood-shadow. Not with fear of death. With something worse:

  The failure of instinct.

  A Nightblade’s greatest weapon was understanding where a thing ended.

  This thing had no end.

  It filled the grove and the forest around it, the air and the soil, as if it were the concept of fertility given shape.

  It did not look for them.

  It did not notice them.

  It did not need to.

  Instead it turned towards the grove.

  Where the corpses of the stillborn lay.

  It devoured them.

  Illara was overwhelmed by the horror.

  By the wrongness.

  She wanted to scream.

  But Matthias stepped forth from the shadow into the mist.

  The Nightblade caught her before her will falter.

  “I’m here,” he said soothingly.

  Illara latched on to his arm, ice-cold and frost-laden from his prolonged lingering in the fringe.

  “She cannot see us,” Matthias whispered emphatically.

  They watched as the thing took the dead whelplings.

  As the creature feasted, a sac near her core ruptured.

  Illara saw something slip free.

  A serpent-shaped newborn slick with ichor, eyes lidless, limbs too many and too few at once. It writhed briefly, mewling without sound.

  The great shape did not bend toward it.

  It did not nurture.

  It did not reject.

  Birth was enough.

  The newborn flopped into the loam and lay still.

  Another sac swelled.

  Another tore.

  Another thing emerged.

  But this one.

  This one stood up.

  It mewed.

  A thought slid into Illara’s mind, cold and terrible.

  This is not feasting.

  This is not killing.

  This is making.

  Illara’s stomach rolled.

  She pressed a hand against her mouth, forcing herself not to retch.

  The smell was overwhelmingly suffocating.

  The scent of sweet rot, iron, sap, milk, and blood.

  Beneath it all, a bone-chill bone of the void between stars.

  Illara’s eyes stung.

  Tears formed, not from emotion but from the air itself.

  The immense figure shifted.

  A heavy impact shook the grove again.

  The trees bowed. Roots tore free with wet sucking sounds.

  The earth bulged and then collapsed, making room, making way.

  Illara felt the pressure in her bones, a crushing presence that made her feel suddenly, overwhelmingly small.

  Matthias’s hand closed around hers forcefully.

  Not comforting.

  Commanding.

  Hold.

  Be still.

  Do not act.

  Illara’s fingers tightened around her blade hilt out of instinct, and Matthias squeezed harder.

  A silent reminder that there was nothing here they could strike.

  Then the thing—she—moved.

  Slow, inexorable.

  Passing through the grove like a tide, not a creature.

  The sacs and growths in her wake trembled, then stilled.

  The air warmed and then cooled again as she passed, leaving behind a damp chill that sank deep into Illara’s bones.

  The chorus of bleats and wet breaths swelled, then dipped, then faded, as if swallowed by distance or by the forest itself.

  The mist loosened.

  The pressure eased.

  Matthias pulled Illara out of the mist

  Illara realized she had been holding her breath.

  She inhaled carefully, and the air tasted of rot and milk and iron.

  The grove grew silent.

  The lone whelpling was gone.

  The Dragon of the Night had vanished.

  Matthias released Illara slowly.

  Illara did not move for several heartbeats.

  Her body refused to obey, as if afraid motion might call the thing back.

  Finally she whispered, voice thin, “What… was that?”

  Matthias’s gaze remained fixed on the space where the shifting silhouette had passed.

  “You know her name. Do not speak it.”

  Illara swallowed and nodded.

  For she do know the name.

  Spoken in tales and legends.

  Matthias nodded once. “Good.”

  Illara’s eyes burned. “It felt like—”

  “Do not,” Matthias reiterated, softer now but no less firm. “Invocation is invitation.”

  Illara’s jaw tightened.

  She forced herself to stand, legs unsteady.

  She felt grime beneath her boots, damp warmth.

  The earth here was flesh pretending to be soil.

  Matthias rose as well, movements controlled, deliberate.

  His eyes swept the grove again.

  The sacs hung silent now.

  Some twitching faintly. Some slack and empty.

  The sacs no longer pulsed as before.

  Illara forced herself to look away.

  Behind them the forest had shifted.

  A path laid open where there had been dense trunks before.

  Illara reached for her compass with shaking fingers and snapped it open.

  For a heartbeat the needle spun wildly, trembling as if caught between decisions.

  Then it stopped.

  It pointed.

  Not toward the grove.

  Not toward the settlement behind them.

  Deeper. Darker.

  Illara snapped it shut and shoved it back into her coat.

  Matthias watched her expression. “It found direction.”

  Illara’s laugh came out as a breath, humorless.

  “Or perhaps my heart desire departure.”

  “Perhaps, or perhaps I am inclined to agree.” Matthias smiled.

  Illara looked once more toward the grove’s center, toward the bloated tree, toward the breathing earth.

  “Then let us depart,” she whispered.

  Matthias nodded.

  Together they slipped back into the forest, leaving behind the grove of unrestrained fertility and silent birth.

  The mist closed in behind them.