Open The more I see, the less I know for sure.

The evening died around them. The last light caught wet across Venla's throat.

Vaaga spoke of punishment like it was mercy. Some men seemed spend so long alone with their own suffering they start believing it makes them prophets.

“You think I’ll look back on tonight and be thankful you for hitting me?” she asked softly. Did Vaaga really think the important thing here tonight is that he slapped her like an angry father? No, he was just a frightened man trying to tell himself he still had a hand on the reins. Fear wrapped in lectures and cold little acts of control. Venla saw it plainly now. And once seen, such things cannot be unseen.

Vaaga was talking like he was the only thing standing between her and becoming a monster.

All this blood. All this ruin.
And still, Venla’s first instinct had been to save Mina. Even with thunder living in her bones. Even with something vast and hungry breathing against the back of her thoughts. Even knowing now that part of her had liked it. Monsters do not kneel in the mud with their hearts in their throats, trying to hold the broken world together because somebody smaller and weaker is depending on them.

Monsters did not do that.

“I think tonight frightened you a great deal more than it frightened me.” she murmured and shook her head.

Vaaga spoke of waiting at the top of the world. Then she laughed. It slipped out of her sharp and breathless, almost drowned beneath the distant creak of the trees. “No, I don’t think I’ll b...” Venla’s head turned sharply toward the forest edge.

Yips and shrieks rolled through the darkening trees in tangled waves, wrong sounds made by wrong throats. The kind of noises that set every ancient warning buried in human marrow clawing toward the surface. Shapes moving through the underbrush in feverish bursts. Greenery parted in long, violent ripples as the blighted things poured through the dark. Too many limbs. Bent backs. Eyes catching the last of the dying light like wet coins scattered in mud.

The smell hit next. Rotting bile. Open meat. Wet fur.

One of the things burst from the treeline and landed sideways, limbs sprawling at angles no beast ought to survive. Something that might once have been a badger dragged itself forward with three joined torsos. Another came behind it. Then more.

Drawn to the blood.
Drawn to the magic.
Drawn to her. Mina.

“Oh no.” Venla moved before she thought. She shoved past Vaaga without another glance for him and strode fast toward Haelyn and the spirit horse. She reached Mina and snaked her arm around her waist, supporting the small stuttering steps. “There we are,” Venla murmured softly. “Easy now.” Mina felt terribly light and terribly fragile all at once. Venla’s heart twisted at it.

“You are going to get on the horse, Mina.” she said gently, trying to keep her voice calm despite the panic chewing at the edges of it. “And then you’re going to have a very fast ride all the way back to the monastery.” A small, shaky smile tugged at her mouth. “You just hold on tight and stay awake for all the ride.” Her voice softened further. “That’s your job. Nothing else.”

Glancing toward the great dark spirit. “He looks friendly enough, bit gloomy maybe..."

That horse… It stood huge and black beneath the dying sky, its hide swallowing light. Ribs faintly visible beneath skin stretched too tight over old strength. Its mane drifted slow as deep river weeds though no wind touched it. The eyes alone gave it away. Not cruel eyes. Tired ones. Deep and sorrowful. The eyes of old soldiers.

“I think they’re after Mina,” she said, voice tight with stress now. “The blood… or they're scenting whatever magic’s in her.”

Another shriek sounded from the trees. Closer.

Venla looked up quickly toward Haelyn. “You should go, please. Take her on the horse and head for the monastery." Her eyes darted back toward the woods again. The nearest creature crept forward low to the ground, swollen belly dragging through dead leaves while too many jaws clicked wetly inside one another.

Venla swallowed hard.

“I’ll try to keep them off your backs. Maybe that’ll buy you enough time.”

What transpired betwixt the broken man and Venla, Mina could not say.

Pooling anger. Sharp bitterness. Cold sadness. She could see those things, swirling about him. Just as she could see fear smothered low by something greater there about Venla. Was that where her power came from? Waiting to be unbridled. Greater than fear. But what was it?

Mina could not name it.

Just as she could not name that which sprouted and took root in the squire Haelyn's heart. Something like fear. For Mina was familiar with fear. Felt as if that black sticky darkness inside of her had been fermented into such a fine vintage borne of that same fruit. Fear. But Haelyn grew with it. Above it?

Mina felt small.

The chittering. The chattering. The hungry hisses of the beasts. She knows they come for her. Sniff for her. And yet. That is not why she feels so small. So empty.

Then, Venla is there once more. Lifting her up. Putting her on the sad horse. The lonely horse. The horse like her. Broken. Like she is broken. Venla speaks. Soft. Warm. Tender words. Like little hearth fire cinders. Mina remembers those from the Knoll. From the ovens. All the cookings she had spied. All the bakings and stewings. Venla is like that.


Mina's three eyes stare wide at the woman, who is warm as a cookfire. Can feel she is afraid. Worried. Of the rats? Of something bigger? She finds the courage to put on a brave face. Nods. "I will do this, Venla," she says the words like a whispered promise carried on a dragonfly's wings. Small and low, but so very there.

Her three eyes looke to Haelyn. "We must go, and get help," she tells the squire. Remembering some inkling of the lessons the strange star eyed Captain, Selene, had tried to teach her. Things of Dusk, and things of Dawn. "Knights ride, together."

Her brown eyes bore into Venla for a few seconds because she let out an incredulous laugh. "Leave you behind?" Even if that other man turned back to stay, it still did not sit well with the squire to leave.

To abandon.

But upon the horse of forgotten, the dark horse called forward, Mina sat astride.

Knights ride... together... She was right, that they needed help.

Haelyn sighed, not hiding her frustration with the situation at all. Her eyes glanced back to Venla as she moved towards the dark horse, the lynx always following Haelyn coming to heel and awaiting for the hurried pace to be away from this clearing. The squire's eyes were filled with something deeper than anger. "Should you survive this, you will answer before the Captains what happened here today."

And that was the cost. For Venla to remain behind and hold off the rats of rot and life corrupted, she had to answer for what stained this earth and troubled the shroud.

Haelyn sat behind Mina. Her hands reached forward, wrapping around the phantom reins to the dark horse.

At Astenvale, Haelyn Argante would ask to speak with the Captains. She would ask for the help she was told to retrieve, but she would also be the one to tell of the young woman that could threaten lives if she went on unchecked.

"Should you survive this, you will answer before the Captains what happened here today."

Venla looked at the squire for a long moment. For a heartbeat, something almost like amusement flickered across her face. Not warmth. Not mockery either. Oh how small people sound when they’re trying to hold the world in place with rules...

Venla exhaled slowly through her nose.

“If I survive this,” she said at last, voice even and eerily calm, “you can line up every captain… and I will stand there and tell them exactly what happened.”

Venla watched Dark Horse carry the squire and Mina away through the trees.

Black against black.

---

A deep red glow bled up between the trees in slow pulses, each one brighter than the last, painting the forest in a red hues that made the eye ache to look upon. Shadows stretched too long beneath it. Bent in impossible directions. A vast splitting crack that seemed to come from underground as much as from the sky, followed by a deep grinding sound like mountain grinding against one another in the dark. There are noises living beings are not built to understand. Sounds so large and ancient the mind tries to slide away from them rather than hear them proper.

The shockwave hit seconds later. Hot wind blasted through the woods hard enough to bend trees and scatter leaves in violent spirals.

And threaded through it all came other noises. Wet noises. A thousand sudden ruptures bursting one atop another. The sharp hiss of steam. The slap of heavy things hitting bark. Somewhere within that terrible red light, someone screamed before the sound cut off so abruptly it almost seemed bitten in half.

---

The red had settled.

Settled, as though it were dust. Though settled was not the right word for it. But the mind reaches for familiar words when the unfamiliar threatens to unmoor it entirely, so: the red had settled. A mist of it hung at chest height across what had been a forest glade, catching no light from the moonlit sky above. There were things in the mist that had been animal once. Identifiable only by context rather than shape.

The trees that remained had been changed. Their bark had split along the grain and something glistened darkly in the cracks, something that pulsed like an organ. The branches closest to the cracks had bent inward, curved like fingers, and where the tips touched, they had thickened into something that was not quite wood anymore and was not quite anything else. They dripped. A slow, rhythmic drip that made no sound when it struck ground.

What lay below did not look like earth anymore.

The ground of the glade had become something with no name for it in any honest tongue.

No one who came to the edge of it could look at it all at once. The eyes would move in small increments, reluctantly, and each increment was its own particular horror. The glade was full. That would the first understanding, before the details would arrive to make it worse. Where there had been open ground and grass and the ordinary litter of a forest floor, there was now a continuous and unbroken field of ...flesh.

But it was flesh the way a river is water, technically accurate and entirely inadequate. It covered everything. It rose in mounds and lay in flat sheeted expanses and hung in pale loops from the bent and weeping branches at the clearing's edge. It filled the spaces between the roots. It had gotten into the bark of the surviving trees somehow, working itself deeper into the cracks and splits. Impossible to identify any of it.

There was no shape within the mass that resolved into something known. No suggestion of limb or feature or the particular architecture that distinguishes one living thing from another. It had all become the same thing.

---

Weavers would feel it before they even set foot in the clearing. They might notice only a sluggishness in the Shroud, as though it had thickened here, as though moving through it required more effort for less return. As though the Shroud had been pulled past its tolerance in this place. The way cloth gives when the tension is held too long, and what remained was not absence so much as wound. The Shroud was still there, it was always there, it had no elsewhere to be.

But the Shroud was open in a way it was never meant to be open, and through the opening came nothing. That particular nothing that existed on the other side of everything.

Weavings that should have come easily came slowly, and then came wrong, arriving in shapes that were adjacent to the intended shapes... but still wrong. All twisted up when moving through a maelstrom.