Garioch brought the battlecycle to a trembling halt behind the crater's jagged rim, the grav-engines throttling down to a low idle that thrummed through the frame like a caged beast.

  The lip of the depression offered scant cover, just a crumbling bulwark of shattered rock and fused ash, but it might provide some protection, blunt the edge of those beams, though none had lanced forth in what felt like an eternity.

  He vaulted from the saddle, his boots sinking into the blighted soil, his lighter Strider plate’s hydraulics grinding with the motion.

  He cast a quick, uneasy glance back over his shoulder at Simo, the Layman still perched motionless in the towed cart like some discarded effigy, rigid and completely unmoving.

  There was no twitch of muscle, no flicker of breath or awareness, no nothing, almost certainly Lost now, his body reduced to a hollow shell, an empty vessel cracked open and inviting the first slithering possession to claim it.

  Garioch scrambled over the rim, his gauntlets scraping furrows in the loose soil as he hauled himself up, his visor sweeping the fractured vista.

  The Wraithlord stood in the distance, a still obscenity, its colossal tentacles dangling limp like the limbs of a puppet with severed strings.

  No thunderous advance, no lashing fury.

  It simply stood, as if the infernal engine driving it had seized, its crimson-veined bulk pulsing faintly under the churning sky.

  He peered into the crater's maw, a pit of churned earth and splintered stone, the walls slumped in ragged cascades, the bottom a muddle of debris where Salvador had been hammered down, with no glint of armor, only the dull gray and brown of pulverized soil.

  Garioch slid down the incline in a controlled avalanche, his boots kicking up plumes of dust, and set to work with frantic urgency, hurling boulders aside like a man possessed, his enhanced strength flinging chunks the size of torsos into the air, each impact cracking like muffled thunder as he clawed deeper into the grave-like hollow.

  At last, his gauntlet struck metal with a clang, the vibration jolting up his arm. He redoubled his efforts, scooping away fistfuls of rubble until a rune-etched pauldron emerged.

  Salvador's hand thrust upward from the mire, fingers splayed in grim determination, and Garioch seized it in a vise-grip, planting his feet and heaving with all the fury his frame could muster.

  The earth yielded grudgingly, sucking at the buried form like jealous quicksand, but the Seraph erupted free in a cascade of dirt, staggering upright amid the settling haze.

  The Cataphract armor was a battered mess, now cracked in spiderweb fractures across the breastplate and greaves, the golden runes flickering erratically like fading embers.

  He shook off the clinging soil with a hydraulic shrug, his voice crackling through comms. "The other two?"

  "Angar charged the damn thing on foot," Garioch replied. "His vitals are steady in the HUD, but he’s not visible, moving with the monster, probably Lost, same as Simo, possibly Enslaved. I sent an emergency hail, but…"

  "You damned fool," Salvador growled out, interrupting, his helm tilting in accusation, the visor glowing with condemnation and ire. "Why didn't you haul them clear? Get them out of the whisper’s reach as I ordered? You’re a Saint, and you can’t even control those in the first Realm?"

  Garioch exhaled sharply, shaking his head, the crushing weight of failure pressing down on him like a yoke, bending his shoulders under the armor.

  There wasn’t time to explain, and he knew Sal wouldn’t care anyway. He’d hated Garioch for a long while.

  He was proud God spoke to him, and he wouldn’t balk from this blessing, nor hide it as if it were a shame.

  They’d mostly gotten along during their early time on Tribute. When Garioch told Sal he was very possibly God’s chosen, the Seraph had just laughed.

  But as the days wore on, it seemed everything Garioch did annoyed Sal. And as Garioch tried to please the Seraph, going above and beyond, performing all tasks and labor in their camp, it made things worse instead of better, every word spilling from Garioch’s mouth, no matter how mundane, infuriating Sal.

  There was no sense trying to fix it. "I'm going in after Angar," stated Garioch.

  Salvador paused, appraising him through that impassive visor. "No. I'll retrieve the Knight. You guard the Layman. If he so much as twitches, he's gone, a Thrall bloated with possession. Kill him without a second's mercy. No hesitation. Go."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  With that, Salvador ignited his jump-jets in a roar of flame, vaulting from the crater in a graceful arc of armored might.

  Osenas hissed. Venom slithered through the shuddering recesses of his manifold consciousness, rage roiling throughout his eternal essence, a tempest of infernal fury that threatened to unmake the fragile veils between realms.

  This latest fantasy he had woven for the intruder had endured the longest yet, a testament to his exquisite cunning, but the flesh-sack's stubborn defiance ate at sensibility like maggots ate at a fresh corpse.

  If this delusion shattered like the others, he resolved to simply obliterate the fool's mind outright, a petty indulgence in destruction that would free him from this vexing distraction.

  This effort had consumed him entirely, siphoning his focus like a parasitic drain, preventing him from ensnaring the third flesh-sack in his web of darkness, or even commencing the subtle corrosion of the powerful one's psyche, that armored behemoth whose runes flared with infuriating resilience.

  This was the seventh fantasy he had woven for the belligerent insect, each prior delusion crumbling under the mortal's unyielding scrutiny, its soul a fortress of ironclad suspicion that defied the prince's most artful manipulations.

  In this iteration, he had cast the flesh-sack into an endless gauntlet of carnage, pitting it against relentless tides of infernal foes, waves of gibbering imps and slavering horrors, all to occupy that accursed mind with the simple ecstasy of battle, drowning out the niggling inconsistencies that had unraveled the previous deceptions.

  Let the brute revel in the slaughter, let its thoughts drown in blood, blind to the seams of the lie.

  Manifested as a chitinous insect, a gleaming scarab of obsidian malice skittering through the blood-soaked grass of this fabricated battlefield, Osenas observed from the undergrowth, his compound eyes drinking in the spectacle with rageful impatience.

  The plain stretched out forever under a storm-lashed sky, craters pocking the earth like scars, the air filled with the coppery reek of blood and caustic brimstone.

  He waited, coiled in anticipation for the inevitable moment when the mortal's gaze would pierce the veil, unraveling all his meticulous labor once more.

  As soon as that flicker of realization dawned, as soon as the fool's belligerence reared its head, Osenas would strike without mercy, shattering the psyche into irreparable shards, an evisceration that would leave the vessel a drooling husk.

  Never in his eons of predation had he encountered such insolence, such unbridled recalcitrance from a mere sack of insipid meat.

  It was unacceptable, an affront to the natural order of domination, a stain upon his princely dignity that would not stand.

  He would make an example of this one, even if it meant forsaking the exquisite pleasure of prolonged torment.

  The flesh-sack tore an imp asunder with its bare hands, fingers like iron claws rending the diminutive horror's leathery hide in a spray of foul gore, the creature's shrieks twisting into a gurgling death-rattle as its innards spilled onto the churned mud.

  Then it stood, a towering silhouette of mortal fury, chest heaving with labored breaths, its body crusted in blood and viscera, crimson runes of battle’s glory, steam rising from the fresh kills at its feet as it scanned the horizon for the next horde, the next onslaught.

  In the blink of an eye, it snatched downward with surprising swiftness, its fists closing around Osenas' insect guise in an unyielding grip.

  "I got you now,” it growled.

  Osenas' rage transmuted to an almost overwhelming, malevolent glee, an effervescent poison surging through the depths of his essence like venom in a spider's veins, as the flesh-sack's spectral grip closed around him.

  Ah, the exquisite irony. The mortal's being had plunged wholly into the shadow realm, ensnared by his own belligerence, a fool in the prince's domain where all illusions stripped away to reveal the unbridled horror of truth.

  Here, in this liminal void, the intruder’s true form manifested. It was naught but a speck, a flickering mote of ethereal essence, dwarfed and doomed, ready to be devoured in a single, contemptuous nibble.

  In the span of a single, contemptuous blink, Osenas shed his insect guise entirely, his essence swelling outward from the gripping hands in a violent metamorphosis that warped the surrounding ether, twisting the shadow realm's substance into rippling distortion.

  From that rupture, a colossal apparition erupted forth, a blasphemy birthed raw and screaming from the Underworld's festering womb, a vast and graceful leviathan unbound by the crude chains of physicality, its presence alone a profane symphony that drowned out the mortal's growl in waves of primordial dread.

  His true form hovered ominously above the ground, becoming a flattened, disc-like body spanning wider than a star craft, undulating with a sickly grace on currents of shadowed wind, rippling with power.

  The hide was a mottled expanse of fortified flesh, pallid and veined with pulsating rivers of obsidian fluid, riddled with excrescences of moss-like growths jutting like fungal tumors, dripping with viscous slime that hissed and steamed upon the ground, intertwined with writhing tendrils of calcified bone and clusters of suppurating eyes that wept foul tears of luminescent pus.

  Barbed spines erupted along the edges, each tipped with hooks, and from the underbelly dangled chains of ossified entrails, where unholy sigils glowed faintly alongside hidden spiracles and gill slits.

  Eyes like polished onyx flared with unholy malevolence, set far apart on a flattened, diamond-shaped frame that seemed carved from the night itself.

  Twin lobes curled forward from its head like spectral horns, guiding unseen currents as it glided above the shadow realm’s ground.

  At the fore, his maw gaped wide, an abyss lined with rows of jagged fangs, curving inward, flanked on either side by massive chelicerae, fang-pincers that scissored with ravenous hunger, their edges serrated and dripping acidic darkness.

  From its back, a thin, whip-like tail trailed like a forgotten thought, barely stirring the ether.

  Osenas left no sound, no wind in his wake, only the hush of awe from those who looked up and saw, for the first time, his majestic, nightmare form.

  The prince's laughter boomed then, a thunderous roar that shook the shadow realm's foundations.

  And he went to snack.