Malcolm climbed to the chapel's spire and looked down on his newly acquired empire.

Below, a picture of half-burnt buildings, mangled corpses, and dying fires foretold the ever-growing difficulties of his trial, but he couldn't waver, not yet.

He took a deep breath, trying to take in the morning's freshness, but ended up coughing due to all the smoke.

"Well... What now?" He sighed. In times like this, he wished he was a more careful planner, even a schemer, if that could give him some semblance of the problems that seemed to spiral out of control. He had a town, sort of.

He had about a month before whatever lord oversaw the area realized that something was off and sent a scout force to investigate. By then, he had to assemble forces of his own, but conscription was out of the question. He was public enemy number one; it was a miracle that the peasants were so compliant instead of simply fleeing the town.

He assumed it had something to do with the confidence that the King or whatever figure they served under would quickly send inquisitors to purge the demon out of their homes. Still, if he pushed things too far, they might still massively escape, leaving him with no workforce, which would render the town useless. He had an idea, though he wasn't sure whether it would work or not.

He walked down the stairs and took a moment to appreciate the carved, varnished furniture. He was surprised at the amount of resources the locals had put into this place of worship, considering that their windmills were in dire need of renovations, not to mention other public buildings such as the makeshift hospital or the noble's "mansion," which was objectively inferior in quality to this temple.

In particular, the white, immaculate altar was polished to the point where even a mirror reflection would be comparatively blemished. Through the five windows to the sides and the huge rose window next to the altar, the church was filled with sunlight that rebounded off the white, polished paintings. To Malcolm, it was... too much.

He shook his head; really, who was crazy with whites and light? He didn't dislike it in particular, nor did his skin start to burn with the holy light or something like that. It was just that the place had so much light; it simply seemed out of place, not in the "flower on the marsh" out of place, but a "full plate armor knight riding a mini-bicycle" out of place. Cute? Sure. But tacky and self-absorbed. It's like whoever built this didn't even consider the surroundings, a bit perhaps like how Malcolm thought about decorations and architecture to distract himself from the sweating woman kneeling, tied up at his feet. It did help that she had run out of the will to scream while he was observing his town.

"Should I rename this town? What was its name before, Darkguard, Frostguard...?"

He looked at the woman and untied her. She nailed her sight to the floor, defeated. Her red, puffy eyes and swollen eyelids spoke of a long night. 'This is mercy,' thought Malcolm.

"Thornguard, my Lord. I don't think you'd win anything by changing the name of the town, my Lord," she spoke in a soft voice, almost a whisper.

Malcolm gestured to Kantor to approach.

"The woman is sad, Kantor. Give her a hug, will you?"

He held back a smile at his own deviantness. The plagued hugged the woman, who found the strength to scream again as the shard lodged in her body made her twist in pain.

"That's enough. Back down a little."

Kantor took a few steps back, a little too happy after torturing someone for a non-sapient. Malcolm was ninety percent sure that the thin threads that held the plagued to humanity were severed the moment he led them into town to cause havoc. The wound in the woman's shoulder seemed irregular; she held stifled crying as the pain apparently persisted. Malcolm took off her shirt and observed the wound more closely; the red coloring along the Z-shaped cut indicated some degree of infection, but that could be attributed to the wielder's peculiarities rather than a property of the weapon itself. What was much more concerning was how, underneath the skin near the wound, Malcolm could have sworn he saw something squirm. The woman yelled again.

"What have you done to me, you monster?! They're inside, inside me..."

Malcolm frowned and took a knife he salvaged from one of the late guards, making a shallow cut where he saw movement. As he slid his knife, he jumped back at the sight of countless long, slender annelids burrowing into her flesh, their bristled segments making him shudder at the thought of how having them moving inside your veins felt. But he was puzzled; this certainly hadn't happened with Kantor.

He grabbed the shard and, with all the reluctance in the world, cut his hand with it. For a moment, he felt squirming, but it was a trick of his mind; there was nothing there. He looked back at the woman. He couldn't let her go, and her utility had expired; better put her out of her misery. He shoved the shard through her cranium and watched as all the insides of her head turned into a pack of countless worms, moving left and right as if synchronized. So much for the purity theme.

"Kantor, get rid of those things, please?" said Malcolm, a bit disgusted by the whole thing. Turning his back on the plagued before he saw something he wouldn't be able to unsee, he started going back up the spire, but before he told him:

"And bring me another."

He sat at the stairs, thinking of what could've gone wrong. Why did the woman have such terrible effects, and neither he nor Kantor (and probably none of the plagued) suffered any consequences? Why did the thing that carried the shard lodged in his head have to be deformed to such an extent? Was it a human? Is that what happens if you subject a human to prolonged exposure? Who'd willingly put themselves under such a terrible influence? He gave turns and twists to the matter yet found no solution. He didn't have the mind of an investigator nor a scholar, but he had confidence that his warlike mind was able to put two and two together and deduce what the shard was about.

His newly acquired steward, the most cowardly of men, walked in dragging a tied man behind him.

"I brought you another, just as you requested, my Lord!" He flung the man forward and fell to his knees, without even daring to look at Malcolm.

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"Is my face so fearsome that he falls to his knees without even being addressed?" He thought to himself while grabbing the tied man by the chin and looking him in the eye. He saw terrible repulsion as the man's eyes darted, trying to avoid his gaze. He dismissed the cowardly one without paying him too much mind and gestured to Kantor to draw closer. Kantor crackled and sliced the man's cheek with the shard, and this started screaming to the top of his lungs, as instead of stone, an infernal fire blazed in his flesh. A few moments later, the senseless screams receded, and he started speaking coherently, still yelling though:

"I can't see! I can't see! Oh, what have you done, you perverse monster! My eyes! My eyes!"

Malcolm winced and covered his ears, as useless as that gesture was. He grew tired as the minutes passed by, and the man simply kept insulting him, so he slapped him strongly enough to send him all the way across the room, where he hit his head on one of the pews, which apparently did the trick, as the man was almost silent, aside from some stifled crying. Malcolm approached and told him:

"We did nothing to your eyes. They're perfectly fine."

"Liar! You forced shadows into my skull, and now darkness enshrouds my eyes, taking away my vision!"

"Kantor, what's he talking about? More importantly, why is he talking like this?"

"I shall not fall for your deceit, demon! I will never worship Kantor! Elyria, show me light in this dark night, don't let me be consumed!"

Malcolm's face drooped. He grabbed the shard from Kantor and stabbed the man in the chest. He started gasping for air, as if drowning.

"The cold, alone, in the void... There's no light, no love... Only perpetual, everlasting... Darkness."

Malcolm tried pulling the man out of whatever nightmare he was having, but it was as if he wasn't even in the room with them. A few minutes later, he stopped drawing breath. Kantor started devouring the corpse as Malcolm considered the implications of his experiment.

"This was much better than the first try, yet so different. Is the shard somehow related to fear? If so, why didn't it affect me? I'm brave, but far from fearless... Maybe because I don't let the fear control me?" He shook his head. The hypothesis that he was special wasn't enough to justify everything, and even if it was, it would render no results in the armaments department. Not knowing what on earth the shard did, where it came from, or even what the consequences of prolonged exposure had, Malcolm did what every sensible military man worth his dime would do. He told Kantor to turn the damn thing into a spear and called it a day. Perhaps, one day, with the help of a mountain of corpses, he'd have more information about the shard. It was a terrific implement for instilling fear into the population, though. He could already see himself turning rebellious villagers into a formless mass of squirming worms and having the entire town too afraid to move a finger against him. Some said that certainty beats severity at times of punishment, but the latter can certainly make them think twice before acting.

With a whole town to manage, Malcolm felt overwhelmed. As he walked down the streets of Thornguard, he observed how the townspeople vacated the streets, fearing he'd put them in the rack for looking at him wrongly. Which, in all honest fairness, was perfectly feasible; he was angry, upset, frustrated. He had it all, yet he had nothing. He had the windmills and the food supplies, but no army to feed. He had weapons and gold, but no one to use them on. He was in a quite considerable conundrum, lost in the far-behind enemy lines with no ability to even dream of backup or support. He couldn't arm villagers and expect them to simply follow orders, and a dozen plagued weren't nearly enough...

Wait. He smacked his head. The plagued! That was the answer; he could turn these useless, traitorous villagers into a formidable (sort of) army. He snapped out of his daydream. But how to do that? He imagined pouring the noxious liquids that festered within the plagued blisters down some random's throat, and them dying immediately afterwards due to the caustic acidic effects of said liquid. Malcolm knew well of the equipment lost to the plagued particulars.

Malcolm sighed. It was time to consult with the divine. He could've thought of contrived methods, candles and rituals, but he was a simple man, so he fell to his knees and prayed to Kramathor:

"Oh, Sebastos. I find myself aimless; once again, I request your guidance. Please send me a sign to follow..." He was somewhat skeptical, not of his God's existence but rather that he'd be able to hear him in these tumultuous times. He didn't think greatly enough of himself to think that the Gods should be paying attention to his every action or that they should find time to assist him. Which is why, when he felt the room's light extinguish like someone had snuffed out the very sun, and himself, suddenly falling into the depths of the earth, he panicked.

Malcolm was a proud warrior, and it embarrassed him deeply to lose his composure, but when you're staring at the Grim Reaper swinging his scythe at you, little importance does courage have within your mind. Malcolm's thoughts raced as he remembered how Kramathor had put those who offended him with superfluous requests to an excruciating death; a high priestess that came before his time, whom everyone revered and thought perfectly devout, had suddenly found herself speechless after "demanding" a certain healing miracle from Kramathor, as her organs crawled out of her mouth and left her body; a member of the council made an oath he couldn't keep and exploded in the public square, one limb at a time; countless others were smitten by thunder or spontaneously combusted into flames. His train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the cold water and the despairing feeling of water filling his lungs, diving due to the long fall into the ocean surrounding him with only darkness; he didn't know where the surface was, so he frantically began to swim in random directions.

"I don't want to die like this; I can't die like this!" He thought as he felt his limbs grow weaker and his head lighter. On top of the layer of darkness, another one appeared as death loomed closer... Tears of fear joined the water. He thought he was ready to die whenever he marched toward battle, but now he knew that it was just an illusion, an excuse. When he took arms and marched toward Thornguard, he didn't think he'd die. Rationally, he knew it was a possibility, but not like this: there's no way to prepare for the moment when death arrives.

Finally, he felt his claw break through the water, and he gasped for air. The chill of the night, endless like the ocean that spread in all directions, pierced his lungs. But never before had he been so happy to feel pain. Pain meant he was still alive! Keeping himself afloat, he tried to see something - anything - but it was as if, rather than matter, an ethereal void of absolute, cold, and horrifying emptiness enveloped him. He closed his eyes, thinking he had nothing to see anyway, but a feeling of dread made him open them again, as if having his eyes closed made him more vulnerable somehow.

A pressure in his chest built as a flash of lightning showed him that not only was he in the middle of an endless mass of water, but that a storm was coming his way. Drowning was inevitable; the waves would drag him all the way to the bottom. His desperate attempts to keep himself afloat only delayed certain death. He scoffed. How could he have ever considered that he, a poor mortal, would be able to elude the judgment of a true god?

The shadows returned, and a terrifying bellow that came from the depths made him shiver. He had sailed a few times in his life, but never had he heard such a piercing, seaquake-inducing sound. Whatever creature haunted these parts didn't belong here. The storm clouds drew closer, and the waves grew fiercer; he felt something change. Something terrible dwelt below. He averted his sight, but the waves shook his body around like a ragdoll in a tempest, and he couldn't help but see it. A myriad of maddening colors and organs that grew without sense, a gargantuan thing with a thousand piercing eyes, not bothering to hide now that its prey was within hand's reach.

Malcolm felt how the thing grabbed him and pulled his flimsy body, once thought hardened by training and countless battles, towards one of its gaping maws. The last thing he saw before his self was torn to shreds was the glowing blisters that protruded from its body, spiraling, mesmerizing colors... He didn't even feel anything as his consciousness dissipated. Something dreadful lurks below...