I saw Darius, a young Paladin with hair still cropped like the boy he had been, swallowed by a wall of shadow that closed over him like a black wave. His scream echoed once, then silence.
I saw Sera again, standing her ground, blade blazing, cutting down tendril after tendril. Until her own shadow betrayed her. It rose from beneath her boots, coiled up her spine, clamped over her mouth, dragging her backward into the roots. Her eyes met mine, wide with pleading, before the forest devoured her.
Leonidas fought like ten men, his sword a beacon, his shield glowing with the Sun God’s blessing. He roared as he struck, his defiance a clarion call.
But even he—broad-shouldered, unshakable Leonidas—staggered as shadows lashed his legs, his arms. He looked at me, and I saw the truth in his eyes: we could not win.
“High Priestess!” His voice was raw. “Go! You must—”
The ground split beneath me.
A force unlike any other seized me, ripping the breath from my lungs. It was not tendrils, not mere shadow—but a pull, deep and inexorable, as though the forest itself had chosen me. My staff flared, the light guttering against the weight of it.
“No!” I tried to brace, to anchor myself in fire, but the pull wrenched harder. My Paladins’ cries blurred in my ears. Leonidas reached for me, his hand outstretched—but the distance between us stretched into eternity.
The shadows closed in, swallowing his face, his voice, the glimmer of his blade.
“High Priestess!” he bellowed one last time, before the dark claimed us both.
Then silence.
I stumbled, weightless, dragged deeper, deeper. The light in my palm flickered, waned. My chest tightened as though the darkness pressed fingers around my heart. I reached out blindly, but there was no hand to grasp, no path to follow.
Only shadows.
And in them, something waiting.
Chapter 4: The Shadow King
The Forest of Night’s Bane whispered to me through the shadows.
The air thickened, bending toward tension the way the sky bends before a storm. I felt it first through the roots—the pulse of foreign feet pressing into the earth, the vibration carried upward into the marrow of the trees. The wards trembled faintly, not with fear, but with anticipation. My foresthungered.
The Paladins had returned.
And this time, they did not come alone.
Her light arrived before she did—an intrusion across my senses, a sharp cut of warmth against the cool weight of shadow. Where the Paladins burned like scattered sparks, weak but insistent, she blazed like a wound in the dark. My shadows recoiled instinctively at her presence, a tide pulling back from fire.
The Phoenix Priestess.
The stories of her radiance had reached even the edges of my prison, carried on the voices of those foolish enough to stumble into my woods and leave again. I had expected brilliance. I had not expected this… pull. A tug in the chest, in the very marrow of my cursed form, as though some hidden tether between us had been knotted long before this night.
I rose from my place among the roots, letting the darkness fold around me. I did not need to walk to find them; the forest carried them to me. Every step they took was mine, every breath they drew measured against the silence of my domain. I drifted between trunks, unseen, formless. A silent observer.
I stood hidden in the shadows, my form barely distinguishable from the darkened trees around me. She didn’t know I was watching her.
Didn’t know how close I was, how easily I could snuff out her light.
But I didn’t move. I didn’t strike.
Instead, I waited.
The Paladins moved in disciplined formation, shields up, blades glowing with the last sputtering remnants of the sun they carried with them. Their captain walked at their head, voice low but firm as he urged them deeper into the dark. Their courage was admirable, I supposed, but courage without wisdom is nothing more than a death wish.
The forest responded as it always did, bending and shifting beneath my will. Roots rose subtly, altering the path, weaving them off course. Shadows leaned in from the branches, swallowing the glow of their torches. Each step led them further from the safety of the wards, further into me.
I could have struck then. I could have ended them all with a thought, smothered their lights beneath a tide of shadow, silenced their cries before they ever realized what hunted them.
