The wind in the outlands did not merely blow. It shrieked like a dying animal across the jagged
obsidian cliffs of the northern provinces. Jahma stood at the edge of the churning blackwater
rapids, her feet hovering a fraction of an inch above the mud, never making contact with the
earth.
She was a vision of royal contradiction. Her skin, the color of rich, polished mahogany, glowed
with an inner luminescence that defied the gloom of the twilight. She wore silks of deep indigo
and gold that clung to her curves, the firm swell of her breasts and the athletic grace of her
thighs, yet the fabric billowed as if caught in a gale only she could feel.
She was beautiful, a masterwork of flesh and spirit, but she was a hollow sanctuary. No hand
had touched her in twenty years, and no hand ever would. At her feet lay the body of Cailan, the
monk she had plucked from the frigid depths of the river.
His lungs were full of silt, his heart a silent drum. Beside him, hovering in a cloud of crimson
miasma, was the thrashing shadow of Devon. The Minotaur beast king, even in death, was a titan
of rage.
His spirit still wore the phantom scars of the blades Moruki had used to butcher him after the
failed siege of Centaural province. Devon howled, a sound of grinding stone and broken metal,
his hatred for the kings of the south keeping his essence from dissolving into the ether. The
time for rest is denied to you both, Jahma whispered.
Her voice carried the weight of a thousand ancestors, melodic yet terrifyingly cold. She reached
into the folds of her floating raiment and withdrew the shamanic crucible, an ancient artifact of
her tribe. It pulsed with a rhythmic sickly green light.
As she began the ritual, her movements were a dance of sacred geometry. She moved through
the air like a veil between the living and the dead. She called upon the elder wisdom, the
forbidden rights of the soul binders.
"Devon, son of the horned peaks, take your vengeance, she commanded. Luke, son of the
silent tide, provide the clay." With a violent surge of energy, she slammed the crucible into the
monk's chest.
The ground beneath them shattered. Luke's corpse let out a wet guttural gasp as his back
began to arch at an impossible angle. The sound of snapping bone echoed off the cliffs like a
succession of whip cracks.
From the center of his spine a massive fleshy mound erupted, pulsing with the rhythmic beat of
a second heart. Devon's spectral form was sucked into the hump. The monk's skin turned a
bruised shade of gray, stretching thin as the werewolf spirit fought for dominance.
A canine snout, dripping with black ichor, forced its way out of the hunchback's flesh. Fur thick
and coarse as wire sprouted in patches across the distorted torso. The entity that rose from the
mud was a nightmare of biological fusion.
A man with the face of a saint, carrying a snarling humanoid wolf upon his back like a parasitic
twin. They screamed in unison. The sound was a discordant harmony of human terror and
bestial fury.
The creature lunged at Jahma, claws extended to tear her throat. The massive wolf head
snapped its jaws inches from her face, but the claws passed through her throat as if she were
nothing more than a trick of the light. Jahma didn't even flinch.
She looked down at them with a gaze that was disturbingly tender, the way a mother might
look at a newborn, regardless of its deformity. "Release me, witch!" Devon's voice tore through
the wolf's throat, ragged and wet. I was meant for the halls of my fathers.
I will not inhabit this, this worm. And I was meant for the silence of the temple, Luke's human
mouth wheezed, his eyes rolling in agony. Why have you brought me back to this hell? Jahma
stepped closer, her form shimmering like a mirage.
"You are the only weapon sharp enough to cut the throat of the coming darkness, you will travel
to the heart of the province, you will find Torioni, and you will kill him before you can complete
the rite. If you do not, the demon king Sotan will walk these lands, and there will be no afterlife
left for either of you to return to." "I owe nothing to humanity," Devon snarled, the hunchback's
body shaking with tremors.
He tried to strike her again, his fist passing harmlessly through her hip. The frustration in his
golden eyes were palpable. He was a conqueror, a warrior of renown, reduced to a passenger
and a broken human.
"You owe me everything," Jahma countered, her voice softening with a sudden, sharp pang of
empathy that she quickly suppressed. She felt the ache in her own chest, the crushing weight of
her eternal virginity, the isolation of being a guardian who could never be held. She looked at
the grotesque duo, bound together in pain, and for a fleeting second, she envied them.
At least they could feel the friction of another soul. "Go, now forevermore, fight for me Luken!" she whispered, the command rippling through their shared nervous system like an electric shock. The moon is rising, and the hunt has begun.
As the hybrid creature began to lollop toward the tree line, a clumsy four-legged gate that was
neither man nor beast, Jahma remained alone on the cliffside. She reached out a hand to touch a
nearby willow branch, but her fingers slipped through the wood. She was the savior of the
world, and she was its ghost, watching the monsters she created march toward a war she could
only witness.