The griffin.
Samael stopped.
His stomach tightened. Not from weakness, but from something far older and infinitely more terrifying.
The certainty that time, that relentless enemy, was running out.
He knelt just long enough to touch one of the feathers.
It was still warm.
Fresh.
Far too fresh.
— Still close...
he murmured, his voice like dry branches snapping.
A few more yards.
Fragments of steel.
The insignia of the Royal Guard.
The wolf and the moon.
Now stained crimson.
Leonia's armor.
First a pauldron, still fastened to the leather torn away with it.
Then the plates protecting her forearm.
Crushed as though they had been made of parchment.
Then part of the flank armor.
So horribly twisted it looked as though some colossal beast had chewed it apart.
Torn away.
Not removed.
Torn away.
As though someone had tried to tear the knight apart along with her armor.
Samael closed his hand around the mangled steel.
The metal groaned beneath his grip.
Yielding like clay.
The silence became suffocating.
So absolute that he could hear his own blood flowing through his veins.
Then...
A drop.
Fresh blood.
Fell from the stone overhead.
Slowly, he raised his eyes.
Ahead...
the mouth of a cavern.
Black.
Endless.
Breathing an ancient darkness.
The kind that had existed before the moon.
Before the gods.
Before time itself.
The air flowing from within was colder than the night.
Heavier than grief.
The ground surrounding it resembled an execution field.
Bodies piled high.
Not like soldiers fallen in battle.
Like offerings left behind by a wrathful hand.
Severed limbs scattered like grotesque petals.
Heads separated from their bodies.
Eyes still open.
Mouths forever frozen in roars that would never again be heard.
No carrion creature approached.
Not even they dared cross that boundary.
Even death itself seemed afraid of that place.
Samael took one step.
Then another.
Each footfall echoed through the darkness like the toll of a funeral bell.
Then he saw it.
A sword.
Driven into the snow.
Still standing.
Like a final banner refusing to fall.
A silent cry against oblivion.
Behind it...
a body.
Too small to be what he feared.
Too large to ignore.
Golden hair, once bright as the rising sun, had turned dark beneath layers of blood.
It spread across the snow like a macabre halo.
Her chest no longer rose.
One hand remained outstretched.
Her fingers still reaching for something.
Someone.
Anything that might have brought light into that darkness.
Samael moved faster.
For the first time since entering the forest...
he ran.