Every step was a negotiation with pain. When Geneviève emerged from the ruined sanctuary of Morr, the freezing air of Sylvania struck her like a wet slap. There was no true morning: the sky had simply transitioned from an impenetrable black to a livid grey—the color of a days-old bruise.
Before setting out, she had spent an hour camouflaging herself. She had gathered thick mud and cold ash, methodically smearing them over every plate of her Gromril armor. There was to be no reflection, no trace of the dwarven silver or the knight she had once been. Using strips of cloth torn from her tattered cloak, she wrapped Duraz's hooves to muffle their sound on the rock. The horse let her do it, snorting in resignation; he too seemed to understand that the rules of survival had changed.
Without the divine energy to sustain her, Geneviève felt the true weight of her gear. The thirty kilograms of metal weighed heavily on her shoulders and hips, while the poisoned wound under her armpit throbbed with a dull rhythm—a constant reminder of the silver-masked creature.
They walked east, keeping far from the Old Way, preferring thorny undergrowth and rocky ridges. Sylvania, seen in the light of this false day, was a landscape of absolute desolation. Trees were twisted in poses of agony, their bark black and cracked, devoid of sap. The ground was covered in a carpet of dead leaves that never rotted, as if the natural cycle of life had been frozen.
Around noon—or what Geneviève's internal clock suggested was noon—they heard a sound. It wasn't the snarl of a monster or the howl of a Varghulf, but the methodical, rhythmic, and desperate creaking of ungreased wooden wheels.
Geneviève crouched behind a schist rock outcropping, pulling Duraz down by the reins and covering his nostrils with a mud-caked gloved hand to keep him from neighing. Below them, in a narrow gorge carved by a long-dried river, a caravan was passing.
It was not a merchant caravan, nor a group of Strigany nomads. It was the "Blood Tax." Five massive wagons, reinforced with rusted iron bars, proceeded slowly. They were pulled not by horses, but by human beings. Emaciated men and women, dressed in rags, bent under the weight of heavy wooden yokes, dragging the carts with catatonic resignation. They wore no chains; their hollow stares suggested their minds had already been shackled by a superior will.
On the wagons, there were no goods, only sealed barrels of dark oak and, on the last wagon, a large iron cage containing a dozen terrified prisoners. They huddled against each other, too frightened even to cry.
Escorting this macabre procession were skeletal soldiers, but leading them was a very different being. He rode an undead steed barded in black leather. He was a pale man with sharp, aristocratic features, wrapped in a dark red velvet cloak—worn, but still opulent. A lesser vampire. A servant of the Von Carsteins, sent to collect tribute from the border villages for the cellars of Castle Drakenhof.
Geneviève watched the scene with calculating coldness. In another life, a month ago, she would have leapt from the ridge invoking the Lady, her sword overflowing with blue light, to decapitate the vampire and free the captives. But today, the Grail was empty. Her body was barely able to stand for a prolonged fight, let alone face a mounted vampire and an undead escort in the open.
However, those wagons were going exactly where she needed to go. And crossing the gates of Drakenhof alone would be impossible. She had to enter as cargo. Or as a shadow.
She waited for the head of the caravan to pass the rock outcropping. The last wagon, the one with the cage, was guarded by a single skeletal soldier dragging its feet in the dust, clutching a rusted spear. Geneviève looked at Duraz. "Wait for me in the woods north of the castle," she whispered in his ear. "If I'm not back within three nights, go west. Save yourself." She didn't wait to see the animal's reaction.
She moved. She forgot the weight of the armor. She forgot the pain in her shoulder. She became a soldier on a mission behind enemy lines, applying the pure brutality of military training. She slid down the slope, silent as a dust slide. She reached the skeletal soldier's back just as the wagon jolted over a pothole, masking the sound of her footsteps.
She didn't use her sword. A blade strike against bone armor would have made too much noise. With a sharp, precise movement, Geneviève seized the monster's skull with both iron-gloved hands. She twisted it with unnatural violence, snapping the dry cervical vertebrae. Before the creature could fall, she supported it, laying it gently on the ground in the mud.
The prisoners in the cage noticed her. Some widened their eyes, about to scream. Geneviève brought a finger, covered in metal and mud, to her dirt-encrusted lips. Her grey eyes, hard as stone, fixed on the prisoners with an intensity that froze the blood in their veins. They understood. They remained silent, trembling.
Without wasting a second, Geneviève grabbed the back of the wagon. Beneath the rotten wooden frame, there was a crossbeam used for tying down the guards' supplies. She slid under there, wedging her body between the hard wooden beam and the bottom of the wagon. It was a claustrophobic space, barely twenty centimeters from the dusty ground racing beneath her. The stench of old wood, rust, and despair was suffocating.
Clinging with hands and legs like a spider to the belly of the wagon, Geneviève felt the wheels resume their relentless rhythm. The stones of the road brushed her back every time the wagon hit a bump. Her muscles burned from the effort of anchoring herself in that unnatural position, but she gritted her teeth.
Above her, the prisoners traveled to the slaughterhouse. Beneath them traveled the blade that would seek to cut the throat of the one wielding the butcher's knife. Castle Drakenhof was waiting for her, and she was entering through the front door.
The journey beneath the wagon's frame was an agony measured in jolts, dust, and cramps. Every pothole of the Old Way was transmitted directly to Geneviève's spine. The wooden beam she clung to sawed into her arm muscles, while the Gromril armor, once her greatest defense, acted like a lead vise threatening to tear her away and drop her under the iron-shod wheels. The poison in her armpit wound pulsed to the rhythm of her heartbeat, spreading a cold numbness down her left arm. She had to use sheer will to maintain her grip, focusing on the rhythmic thumping of the undead steed's hooves and the ragged breathing of the prisoners above her.
They lost track of time. In Sylvania, the sky offered no clues, only different shades of gloom. Then, the sound of the terrain changed. The crunch of gravel and dry mud gave way to the dull rumble of massive, squared stone blocks. The air suddenly became colder, stagnant, saturated with the smell of copper, stale incense, and graveyard earth.
Geneviève realized she had passed the first defenses. Turning her head with difficulty, she saw enormous black basalt pillars passing inches from her face. They had entered the drawbridge.
Above her loomed the invisible but oppressive bulk of Castle Drakenhof. The capital of eternal night. The stronghold of the Von Carstein dynasty. A labyrinth of needle-like Gothic towers, grinning gargoyles, and battlements that seemed to devour the little light that dared touch them. The wagon stopped with a metallic screech of brakes. Geneviève held her breath, flattening herself as much as possible against the rotten wooden floor.
"The Blood Tax from Siegfriedhof, my Lord," echoed a servile voice—the human or ghoul tasked with receiving the convoy. "Late," replied an aristocratic voice, bored and cold as ice. There was no trace of humanity in that tone; it was the voice of a predator evaluating livestock. "Let us hope the quality compensates for your ineptitude. Take the barrels to the lower cellars. The living... take them to the Hall of Lamentations. We have esteemed guests tonight, and the staff needs refreshing."
The metallic clang of the cage being opened followed, followed by terrified cries and the shuffling footsteps of prisoners being driven out with spear thrusts. Geneviève knew she had only seconds. Once emptied, the wagon would be inspected or hauled away. While the attention of the skeletal guards and jailers was turned toward the weeping prisoners, she let go.
She fell heavily onto the dark cobblestones of the inner courtyard, her mud-covered armor partially muffling the metallic sound. She immediately rolled under the adjacent wagon, disappearing into the deep shadows cast by the high courtyard walls. She flattened herself against the stone, motionless as a corpse, as a jailer's boots passed less than a span from her face. When the courtyard partially emptied and the wagons began to be dragged toward the sheds, Geneviève slipped out of her hiding place.
She found herself in a massive clearing surrounded by porticos supported by columns shaped like intertwined bones. Torches fueled by greenish flames cast dancing, eerie shadows. She couldn't search for the entity with the broken mask by wandering aimlessly through the upper corridors, where vampires strolled and held court. Her scent of the living—sweat, blood, and mud—would betray her in an instant. She had to move from below.
She spotted a drainage grate recessed into the floor, near a fountain spitting murky water (or perhaps diluted blood) from the mouth of a stone manticore. With the strength of desperation, she pried at it with her iron-gloved fingers. The grate groaned, rusted by time. With a wrenching tug that cost her a lancing pain in her left shoulder, she lifted it just enough to slip inside, closing it silently above her.
She descended into a slippery shaft, climbing down blindly until she touched the bottom of a dry drainage channel. The crypts of Drakenhof. The darkness here was absolute, dense, and palpable. Geneviève moved by feeling the cold brick walls, one step at a time. There were no rats; even the vermin stayed away from the vampires' dungeons.
She walked for what seemed like an eternity, following corridors that rose and fell according to a mad geometry. Finally, a faint reddish glow outlined itself at the end of the tunnel. Geneviève crawled toward the light, peering through an iron grate overlooking a massive subterranean hall.
What she saw made her blood run cold. The room was a circular catacomb, its walls lined with skulls. At the center was a black stone table around which nightmare figures were gathering. There were vampires encased in ebony armor, their faces pale and fangs bared, surrounded by an aura of ancient, evil power. At the head of the table sat a vampire more imposing than the others, whose eyes glowed with an infernal red. But he was not the reason Geneviève had crossed through hell.
Standing opposite the vampire lord was the being that had nearly killed the Empire's heir. It wore a new mask—not silver this time, but forged of black iron, smooth and expressionless, completely covering its skull and ruined face. The entity emanated that unmistakable smell of emptiness and corrupted magic.
"The Empire is weak, Von Carstein," the creature was saying, its voice scraping against the stone walls. "The Throne wavers. My agents have spread paranoia and poison through their Colleges and cathedrals. But shadows cannot hold the ground. I require the fall of their faith. You... you require the bodies."
The vampire smiled, an expression that held no joy. "Your promises taste of smoke, Shapeshifter. But your actions in Altdorf have proven you are not merely a madman. If the defenses of the Reikland fall, the armies of Sylvania will march. But I want guarantees."
Geneviève realized the magnitude of the impending disaster. This was no longer about stopping a ritual; it was about preventing a military alliance between the inexhaustible armies of the dead and a Chaos entity operating in the shadows. If they struck that bargain, the Old World would burn. She slowly drew her bastard sword from its scabbard, the metal dark and dull. Without the Grail, she was just a wounded woman in a den of dark gods. There was no way to defeat them all. The only hope was to make the deal fail. And to do that, she would have to kill the diplomat.