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Midnight instinctively densified the darkness that clung to her. As she tracked the fiator through the jagged terrain, her focus honed in on the delicate space between the essence and all that the essence held. Her intent was to sever the arachnid’s webbing right at its legs, to tear apart the sticky structures that bound the physical form and Rothar to the core so tightly that they seemed inseparable from the essence itself. Midnight aimed to distinguish what was truly the fiator, and what was merely an extension of him.
But each attempt met with failure. Midnight’s darkness, potent as it was, could not hold onto essence, Rothar or matter. The very nature of all that was something resisted the intrusion of the nothing that was her. The fiator, still sensing the preying nothing, fled with desperate agility, his small form darting ever further down the mountainside. Gushes of determination and frustration rippled through Midnight, merging, maddening storms flooding her mind, while the bird’s movements grew increasingly erratic and unpredictable, driven by a primal surge of survival amidst the chaotic elements.
The chase became more frantic as the fiator swooped down, skimming the snowtrail that wound through the mountain’s lower reaches. Where the air around the birds’ resting place had almost been calm, the night now transformed into a maelstrom of elements, mirroring the intensity of the hunt. The wind howled with fury, snowstorms screamed through the jagged peaks and valleys, hurling thick layers of snow across the landscape. Dense fog rolled in waves, shrouding the treacherous slopes and steep cliffs. Loose rocks and icy ledges gave way to the ruthless forces, breaking and plunging into harrowing depths.
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Midnight crossed the snowtrail, her movement swift and fluid. In the fraction of a second it took her to soar past, she registered two batherga, resilient mountain wanderers renowned for their endurance in these barren heights. Their deliberate, cautious movements revealed their purpose — they were scouting the trail ahead of a patrol party that followed about a kilometer behind. In that instant, Midnight grasped the full gravity of the situation. The batherga were walking into an ambush; a pack of armed orks lay in wait on a ledge above the trail, poised to descend and attack. To the seeing eyes, their silhouettes were but flickers of shadow, barely discernible against the stark backdrop of the mountain. Their positioning was strategic, ensuring the patrol would be caught off guard in the narrowest part of the trail, where escape or effective defense would be nearly impossible without magic.
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An impulsive thought surged through Midnight’s mind — she could abandon her hunt, swoop back up, and warn the batherga. The possibility flickered, the choice to intervene, to change her course and theirs, perhaps even to impact the balance in the ongoing ork invasion that had befallen the Midlands. But as swiftly as the thought came, it was gone. Her decision was made in the brief moment it took her to assess the situation. This was not her fight. While orks were a notorious threat deserving eradication, they were neither her responsibility nor her concern. Her duty lay with the mission assigned by her wizard, and her priority was the sustenance and mastery of the dark existence granted by her Gods. The world of humanoids and beasts was not hers to save or to suffer.
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Midnight pressed on, her focus narrowing back onto the fiator, who had plunged into an even fiercer battle against the elements. The wind screamed with a beastly ferocity that skinned the mountain slopes of their snow and exposing its everlasting bones of ice and jagged rock beneath. The temperature dropped further, turning the biting rain into sharp pellets of ice, flurries whipping past and through Midnight like millions of shards of glass that struck and ricocheted off the stone with a harsh clatter. They were illuminated by flashes of lightning, stark bursts of condensed light fragments that shot across the dark sky, chased by the deafening roars of the emerging thunder.
Driven to desperation, the fiator dove and wove through the narrow corridors of the mountain with frantic determination, his wings brushing perilously close to the rough stone walls as he sought both protection and any possible escape. Midnight, unfazed by the elements’ wraith, understood that he intended to descend further until the winds would allow him to break off from the mountain, to lose her in the swamps of the northern Midlands. Midnight did not evade the challenge. Obsessed by a mixture of admiration, determination and mounting frustration, she strained to solidify her darkness, to see it coil tighter with every strike. Each attempt was met with failure — a manifestation of intent with no effect. The very nature of his existence defied her, slipping through her grasp like water through claws, a core of tangible life that resisted the nothingness she wielded.
As they neared the mountain base, Midnight’s frustration surged, breaching into the prospect of failure. With four to five hundred kilometers left before they reached the bottom, she detected the first traces of potent swamp poison swelling upward with the winds. The sensation was subtle yet distinct, a sharp contrast to the cold mountain air, and while she could not spare the attention to explore this newfound sensitivity in the midst of the chase, it intrigued her. She instinctively suspected that this heightened awareness was linked to her initial transformation into a creature of poison, a lingering connection to the rock weaver poison she had woven into her existence.
Refusing to let the fiator slip away, Midnight altered her approach. She compressed her form, becoming more noticeable, and repeatedly closed in from underneath the bird, only to retreat at the last moment. She created the illusion of singular escape routes, subtle openings that strategically steered her prey back upward. She forced the him to ascend once more, back towards the snowtrail and away from the safety of the swamps below.
As they climbed higher, they crossed paths with another scene of violence, stark and brutal slaughter — a horde of orks, fifty-nine in number, was scrambling up the steep mountain slope. Their movements were erratic. They were a ragged, battered and bloodied force, struggling through the onslaught of snow and hail towards a natural crevice in the rock, a desperate attempt at shelter. The crevice, extended crudely into the mountainside, seemed to have once been intended as a tunnel or a hideout, but for the horde it was but a poor excuse for refuge. The orks were severely injured and agitated, pushing, pulling and trampling each other as they ran, climbed, collapsed, slipped and fell down the slope.
The reason for their terror became clear moments later. Ahead, Midnight encountered their pursuer, the creature that had turned their retreat into a massacre — a voltera, a monstrous predator resembling a panthera but far more massive, was tearing through the remnants of orks that had fallen behind. His muscles rippled beneath a scarred hide of thick brown fur; his rampage the realisation of raw carnage. In the face of such primal power, the orks were decimated. Their strikes barely left a mark on the voltera's hide, blades breaking and axes splintering as they connected. Trying to gain distance, the majority of the horde retreated, regrouped and switched their various handheld weapons to their metal spears. It took the voltera but a few moments to slaughter the three fighters that had remained to grant the remaining sixteen the time needed to mount their defense; his claws slashing through flesh, sending bodies flying. Blood and snow mixed beneath the voltera's claws, drowning his growing territory in crimson as he surged forward and swiped at their spears.
Atop the voltera’s back sat a twisted figure. A bearded wizard, gaunt and sickly, clung to the beast's fur, hunched over the voltera’s massive shoulder blades. His body sagged as if on the brink of collapse, barely able to remain conscious, barely able to hold on.
Securing and supporting him from behind was a creature even more unnerving — a scorchborn; a humanoid abomination born from the decaying swamps of the Midlands. With bodies composed of the diseases and toxins of their birth environment, scorchborn are bringers of plagues. This individual's skin was a dark, diseased mass, riddled with fungal growths and spore-like protrusions, covered only in ragged, brown cloth and patches of fur. She radiated pestilence, her mere touch enough to rot flesh. Midnight had seen the effects of a scorchborn’s infection before, how even her wizard had barely survived such an affliction. As the darkness examined the forms of both the scorchborn and the wizard, Midnight understood that this wizard, too, had been marked by the scorchborn’s disease. His body trembled with the strain of it, every breath a labored effort as the sickness clawed at him from within. Yet still, he held on, driven by the voltera’s fury. Their bond was palpable, a shared ferocity that fuelled the massacre below.
The darkness spotted another creature. Behind the voltera, perched on a jagged mass of stone jutting straight out of the middle of the snowtrail, sat a feathered beast. It was avian in form, yet something about it was wrong. Thick feathers covered its body, but where wings should have been, there were only stumps — mutilated remnants of what had once been a creature capable of flight. Midnight traced the contours of its powerful form and recognised the signs of its severed wings, the scars still visible, cutting deep into its flesh. Though flightless, the beast exuded a strange, bitter pride, its head held high despite the humiliation of its mutilation. But his pride and presence was hollow, a vestige of what he once was. It was a creature without power, yet unwilling to hide, its eyes watching the slaughter below with a cold, detached malice.
Midnight halted, staring. In that fraction of a second, the bending phantom presences of light caught up with her sudden stillness. It was a brief but crucial lapse in her stealth. The voltera’s head snapped in her direction, his eyes locking onto the faint shimmer of the emerging orb of light. Above, the wizard stirred, his head lifting, eyes bloodshot and hollow, yet filled with a sudden awareness for the darkness that had long surrounded them.
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