Claw met bronze and flesh.

Wolves bayed as pack-brothers transformed both before and behind him.

Dying screams echoed through the tunnel.

These were the sounds that clasped the young poet in an icy grip and set his heart thundering. Haldrych, the Patriarch of House Ameldan - who had yearned for combat that would carve his name into legend - had at last found the storm of battle. His hands trembled…from excitement.

‘Yes, only from excitement,’ he told himself.

His mask. His mask had grown stifling. Suffocating him.

He ripped it off and drew a deep, quivering breath.

Good. Now he would be ready to perform the deeds he had always imagined. His heart quaked…from anticipation.

‘Yes, only from anticipation,’ he told himself.

His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword - not so magnificent as the blade the thief had undeservedly borne - but a handsome weapon still. He had commanded his servants to polish it to perfection in preparation for this fateful day.

Now it was ready: honed to bite flesh and taste blood.

And he would compose a mighty ode of the deeds he would perform with it.

“Forward!” one of the pack brothers commanded from the head of the column. Half of their number had remained in human form to retain speech and issue commands to the acolytes. “Do not look back!”

“But we must!” One of the masked cultists brandished his blade above his head. “Interlopers sully the arena! Do you not hear our brothers dying?”

“And their strength will become our strength!” barked their commander. “The Sacred Alpha will restore order! We must aid our other brothers! Redouble your pace!”

The column of blacked robed cultists quickened their push through the tunnel. Torches bounced in their hands, spitting and guttering. The path sloped up and Haldrych’s legs had begun to burn. How long had it been since he had last run? Yet he was not alone. Others wheezed around him.

Some acolytes had entered the fold from sturdy stock, but many were like he: socialites, merchants’ sons, and aristocrats. In past times, the descendants of the Tigrisian Empire would have been iron-thewed, practiced men who could join in Laexondael’s defence with spears in hand.

But the city had known peace for many years, and the Duke’s Battalion had shouldered the mantle of war. As such, the upper classes had turned away from bronze and toward the trade of coin, craftsmanship, the arts and philosophy. Such a change had transformed Laexondael into one of the grandest cities of the north.

Yet these young men had grown unsatisfied with their lot. They craved ‘freedom’ from the stifles of civilization, sought to rid themselves of it, and so had taken up the path of the beast.

And now this path would lead them atop the mountain.

There they would face a woman who was said to have tossed hulking werewolves as though they were children’s dolls. One who had burnt flesh from bone and torn lycanthropes asunder with her bare hands.

And now she would be armed and girded for war.

That is what they would face.

That is what Haldrych would face.

His legs shook…from the thrill of the coming battle.

‘Yes, only from the thrill of it,’ he told himself. ‘And nothing else…not fear. Not fear! Never fear!’

“A-against an armoured opponent… There…a bludgeoning weapon…joints…” His panicking mind desperately tried to recall vague boyhood lessons in weaponry. Many years had passed since - the training had proven tiring and calloused his hands, thus he had ended it quickly, feeling his craft was mastered.

It had been his mother who had hired the instructors at his begging, and she had also complied when they no longer pleased him.

…his mother.

A shudder crawled down his spine on pointed legs of ice.

Did she watch him even now?

Did she guide his enemies to his very neck?

Yes…so it must be.

The foul woman had caged him in life, but now threw him to starving dogs in death! He grasped at his rage, seeking to draw from it as he had on that dark, fateful night in her bedchamber. But his nerve slipped in the face of fear, confusion and…

A familiar pain stabbed his belly.

…guilt?

It could not be.

He had done no wrong! He had only reached out for his own destiny!

So why? Why did it all keep going so wrong?

“Haldrych! Haldrych!”

A hand grasped his shoulder and gave him a vigorous shake. Adelmar was beside him with eyes wide. “Are you alright? Focus, man!” He bore a tight grin and his voice held too much enthusiasm. “This is what you always wanted! Glory! Combat! Inspiration! Prepare to write of our victory, my brother, for our names are soon to become legends!”

He laughed then, but his complexion was pale. Haldrych found his eyes tracing his old friend’s features: etching them into his deepest memories. Why? He knew his friend better than anyone.

Then he realized the truth of it.

This could be the last he ever saw of him. His laugh now could be his last in this world.

Adelmar could die. Or he could. Or both.

‘No,’ he told himself. ‘You are Haldrych Ameldan: your blood is the blood of heroes! You will slay this warrior and all others! You will return a victor and be praised! You will drink in the power of the beast, as Adelmar has, and then-’

Vroooosh!

The tunnel went white.

Kyembe had heard their approach.

Through the din of the dying, the war party’s steps had echoed within the deep. Drawing out his blade’s hilt until it was a sword-staff, he slowly drew his eldritch energies to his ring and waited. Their footsteps grew louder. Their voices drew closer.

Flickering light swelled around the corner, preceding wolf-like breaths and padding feet.

Twenty paces away.

The Sengezian took a breath and held it.

Ten paces.

Five.

Kyembe cast off the furs, shut his eyes and swept around the corner. Burns crawled up his arm. With a crackle like bursting bone, otherworldly heat leapt from his ring and issued into the dark.

Vroooooosh!

Screams arose.

Blinding light and heat blasted through the tunnel as men and werewolves burst into white ash. Their remains swept through the air with the stench of scorched flesh, choking the lungs of their surviving comrades and creating a macabre fog through the passage. Kyembe dove through it soundlessly as he channeled his eldritch energies again.

Roaring hellfire woke on his blade and that heralded his coming.

Sccchrrrrp!

Boom!

The fiery steel drove deep into a wolf-man’s gut, superheating his entrails until they erupted, coating the stone and scalding his comrades. They screamed, coughing and choking, as Kyembe’s blade struck like a nest of cobras - spearing heads, necks and pounding hearts with fearsome speed.

In breaths, the shrieks of pain had withered to dying murmurs and the sizzle of entrails. The Sengezian waded into this path of ruin, pausing only to cast a silver dagger into the chest of the fallen werewolf, shearing his heart and slaying him with finality.

“Attack!” one of his foes choked out. “It will slay us all if we do not fight back!”

With battle cries, cultists threw themselves toward their attacker, but he gave ground and allowed the superior reach of his sword-staff to do its grim work. He withdrew a step for every man or monster that charged, and every sweep of his weapon cast another ruined cultist to the stone. They fell in waves.

Constricted in the tunnel, they could not match his blurring swiftness nor overwhelm him with a scant two or three at a time.

Their numbers withered by the breath, and they knew they could not last.

And so, an act of desperation was born.

One that would lead to a grim parting.