The old woman stirred from a restless sleep, her body betraying the wear of centuries, though time had long since lost meaning for her. Her single, cloudy white eye snapped open, wide and alert despite its blindness. She felt it immediately—something had changed in the night, something ancient and powerful, carried on the heavy air that pressed against her skin like the weight of a storm about to break.
A faint hum filled the room, almost imperceptible, yet it vibrated deep within her bones. Her breath came in shallow rasps, catching in her throat. It had been so long since she had felt anything stir in this place. The Wyrdwood, usually filled with the low groans of its ancient trees and the rustle of creatures in the underbrush, was unnervingly silent tonight. It was as though the forest itself had stopped to listen.
"It cannot be," she whispered, her voice a hoarse rasp barely audible in the stillness. She struggled to her feet, her joints creaking like dry wood about to snap. Every movement was a labor, each breath a reminder of the endless years that had worn her body down. Yet, urgency stirred her to action, something she hadn’t felt in lifetimes.
Her hovel, a sunken structure of ancient stones and wood, was dimly lit by the faint glow of runes that had been carved into its walls long before she had made this place her sanctuary. The runes flickered to life—each one a symbol of long-dead gods, now pulsing with a faint, throbbing light that seemed to grow stronger with each passing second.
The room smelled of damp earth, mildew, and rot—scents so ingrained in the stones and the woman’s own bones that she no longer noticed them. But tonight, there was something different in the air. A crispness, almost metallic, like the scent of blood just before it spills. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and her gnarled fingers twitched as she reached for a crumbling wall to steady herself.
"After all this time?" she muttered to herself, her mind racing. Her thoughts were sluggish, weighed down by the eons she had lived, but deep inside, something began to stir, something old and familiar.
The runes had been dead for centuries—remnants of a time long forgotten by all but a few. And now, they were glowing with life, each one thrumming with the pulse of something vast and terrible. She reached out, brushing her fingertips over one of the symbols etched into the wall. The stone was cool beneath her touch, but the power within it was hot, almost burning her skin.
Her eyes, though clouded and blind, somehow saw the light. It wasn’t just her senses that were awakening—it was her very soul, stirring in response to something beyond the physical world. She took in the sights and sounds with a clarity that made her feel young again, if only for a moment.
The shack had always been a part of the forest, nestled deep in the heart of the Wyrdwood, a forest that stretched for miles, far from the villages and towns where people huddled together, telling stories of places like this. Places where trees twisted into unnatural shapes, where the fog never lifted, and where the ground itself seemed to breathe with the weight of ancient secrets.
The Wyrdwood was alive tonight.
The forest that surrounded her had always been a place of dread. The air within the Wyrdwood was thick and suffocating, damp with the smell of decay. Even the rain, when it came, did not cleanse this place. It left the forest sticky and wet, clinging to the earth and trees, giving the impression that everything was rotting from the inside out. The trees, old beyond imagination, bent and twisted, their bark slick with moss and their branches stretching toward the sky like skeletal hands, desperate to claw their way out of the earth. No birds sang here, no animals rustled in the bushes. Only the occasional crack of a branch underfoot or the distant groan of a tree marked the presence of life at all.
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Tonight, even those sounds were absent. The only sound was the faint hum of the runes, growing stronger as she approached the small, hidden compartment in the base of the cold stone wall. Her gnarled fingers shook as they brushed against the familiar rough surface, her touch hesitant. She had opened this compartment so many times before—hoping, praying, and always finding nothing. Just empty stone and silence. Yet now, the compartment seemed to breathe with the same ancient pulse as the runes, as though it had been waiting for this very moment.
Her frail hands fumbled for the piece of coal near the dying embers of her fire pit, the last warmth in a room that had long since become as cold as the earth itself. She scrawled a rune on the glowing wall, her strokes surprisingly precise despite the tremor in her fingers. The stone groaned, a deep, resonant sound that seemed to echo through the very bones of the forest, and the compartment slid open, revealing a blinding white light that flooded the room.
She gasped, recoiling at the brightness.
For centuries, there had been nothing. And now, after lifetimes of waiting, the light had returned. It was a light so pure, so powerful, that it sent waves of heat through her frail body, warming her blood and stirring something deep within her. The air was suddenly heavy with the scent of ozone, sharp and electric, as though the light itself was charged with raw, unbridled energy.
Her breath hitched in her throat as she stared into the compartment. The runes that lined the interior glowed with an intensity she had never seen before, their symbols shifting and pulsing as if they were alive. She reached out, her hand trembling, fingers hovering just above the surface of the light, but she hesitated. Something inside her screamed to turn away, to close the compartment and forget what she had seen. But she knew it was too late.
Her body was already changing.
She glanced down at her hands and nearly stumbled back in shock. Her withered, wrinkled hands were no more. Instead, they were smooth and strong, the pale skin tight and alive with youth. Her fingers flexed, moving easily, free from the stiffness and pain that had haunted her for as long as she could remember.
Her heart raced. Her pulse thrummed in her ears, deafening in the oppressive silence of the room. She reached up, touching her face, her breath catching as she felt the fullness of her cheeks, the softness of her skin. Her hair, once thin and brittle, was now thick and lustrous, cascading over her shoulders in raven-black waves.
For a moment, she stood frozen, her mind reeling. How could this be? After centuries of watching the world move on without her, of waiting in this forgotten place, her youth had returned.
The transformation was a gift. Or perhaps, a curse.
She staggered back, her gaze falling to the center of the room where something even more impossible had appeared: a staff. Tall and twisted, it stood as though it had always been there, waiting for her to see it. The wood was dark and gnarled, its surface covered in intricate runes, some she recognized from the old days before the Dissolution, others foreign and unknowable.
At the top, two twisted wooden fingers held a small, cloudy lavender stone, the figure of a man carved into its surface. The man’s arms were outstretched, his face contorted in eternal agony, mouth open in a silent scream. A faint crackle of energy rippled from the stone, spiraling into the air before fading into nothingness.
The sight of it made her heart skip a beat. She had not seen a relic like this in centuries—not since the time of the Dissolution, when the gods themselves had torn the world apart with their war. It had been that war, the war of the gods, that had brought the world to the brink of destruction. To save the cosmos from utter annihilation, the gods had made a final sacrifice: they had scattered their essence, their Godsblood, into the mortal world.
And from that act, the Godsblood Walkers were born—mortals touched by the divine, beings of immense power who had once shaped the world. They had walked the earth for a time, wielding the remnants of the gods’ strength. But that time was long past. The Walkers had vanished, their power fading with the centuries, until they were little more than myths and legends.
But the staff in front of her, pulsing with energy, was real. As real as her renewed flesh, her strength.
She took it in her hands, and a wave of warmth and power surged through her body, nearly knocking her to the ground. It was as if the gods themselves had returned, their presence filling the small room, pressing down on her chest, making it hard to breathe. Her hands trembled around the staff, but not from fear—from the sheer force of the power that now coursed through her veins.
She closed her eyes, letting the warmth flow through her. For so long, she had waited.