The Journey, Book 2; Chapter 14 - Previous Chapter
Chapter 15; Corruption
Deep in the slumbering pits of Cartakunthor, the ancient and forsaken realm where light itself seemed to drown, Matthaios, though he preferred the title “The Corrupter”, busied himself with his grim craft. Around him, the ground quivered as his army of undgrolls clawed their way into being, their malformed bodies rising from ashen soil within bubbling cauldron-like mud holes. The air was thick with a stench so vile, so rancid, that even the sanest of minds would teeter into criminal madness after a single breath.
Matthaios’ tall, sinewy frame loomed over the scene like a shadow stitched into reality. His skin stretched tight over bone, making him look half-dead and half-immortal, his ribs visible beneath the tattered folds of his black robes. He moved with a disquieting grace, his long, skeletal fingers flicking in sharp, precise motions. With each gesture, an undgroll’s crooked spine snapped into place, or its eyeless sockets filled with a dim, pulsating glow. His sunken eyes, glowing with a sickly green-grey fire, never strayed from the ritual’s progress.
There was purpose in every motion, every hissed incantation, for Matthaios was not merely raising an army, he was birthing a plague of loyalty and malice, a force that would not rest until the world was remade in his image. Yet in the deepest shadows of Cartakunthor, where the stone walls bled whispered about forgotten curses, something stirred.
The Corrupter’s gaze shifted, the unnatural green-grey glow in his eyes narrowing like blades. There, amidst the shadows, something moved, a sound of soft, labored breathing and the faint rattle of chains. Within a rusted iron cage sat an elf who had once wielded power and command beyond mortal reckoning. Her aura, though diminished, still hummed faintly like an ember refusing to die. Her pale complexion told the tale of endless days under the oppressive gloom of Cartakunthor, but her mind, razor-sharp and unbroken, remained a defiant fortress.
Matthaios had tried to shatter that mind. He had whispered horrors older than time, clawed into the elf’s thoughts with dreams of despair, and offered salvation cloaked in corruption. Yet the elf had not broken. Not even when the Corrupter demanded her name, a name that held power, secrets, perhaps even the key to unraveling the fragile weave of resistance beyond these cursed pits.
The Corrupter’s long fingers curled, the bony knuckles cracking like dry branches. “Stubborn little elf,” Matthaios hissed, his voice like venom dripping over ice. “Do you think silence will save you? That your name will not slip from your tongue when the last fragments of your soul rot?”
The elf lifted her head, her once-bright eyes dulled yet burning with quiet defiance. “You will never own me,” she whispered, her voice hoarse but resolute, “and you will never speak my name.”
Matthaios glided toward the cage, his robes whispering across the ashen floor like shadows peeling from the walls. The elf’s gaze followed him, calm yet unwavering, the faintest ghost of a smile curling his cracked lips. That smile made something cold and furious coil in the Corrupter’s hollow chest. He stopped inches from the bars, his skeletal fingers wrapping around them, blackened nails screeching against the rusted iron.
“You mock me,” Matthaios hissed, his voice deepening, guttural, like a dozen voices speaking in unison. “Do you think your laughter makes you strong? Do you think your silence saves anyone?”
The elf tilted her head slightly, her matted silver hair falling across her gaunt face. Then, like a blade cutting through the stench-filled air, she laughed, a low, rasping sound that grew into something wild and bitter. It was not the laugh of one who has lost hope, but of one who has seen through the deepest veil of terror and found it wanting.
Matthaios’ jaw clenched, his sinewy frame trembling with rage. With a snap of his fingers, the ground beneath the cage split open, revealing one of the mud pits used to birth undgrolls. The stench intensified as the thick, bubbling sludge gurgled hungrily. The Corrupter’s hand reached through the bars, his fingers curling like talons around the elf’s throat. His touch was like cold fire, leeching warmth from the elf’s veins.
“Tell me your name,” he whispered, his voice a serpentine hiss that slithered into the elf’s ears, coiling around his mind. “Give me that key, and I will grant you freedom from this torment. Refuse me again, and I will flay your memories from your soul, one by one, until there is nothing left of you but a shell.”
The elf’s breath hitched, but her smile never faltered. Her voice was hoarse, but steady. “You can peel the flesh from my bones, Corrupter. You can break my body and drown me in your filth. But you will never have my name.”
Matthaios tightened his grip, black veins of magic spreading from his hand like roots digging into the elf’s flesh. Pain shot through the prisoner’s body, arching her back against the cage bars, but instead of screaming, she laughed again, louder, harsher, a jagged sound that reverberated through the dark pit like a weapon.
Something shifted in the shadows beyond them, an almost imperceptible ripple in the stale air, like a presence stirring. Matthaios paused, his attention momentarily flicking to the darkness beyond. The elf’s voice followed, quiet but cutting:
“Keep trying, Corrupter. Every time you speak my name in your mind, every time you reach for it, you awaken something you do not understand.”
The laughter of the elf echoed in the pit like a taunt carved into the air itself. Matthaios drew back his hand, his bony fingers twitching with frustration. The shadows along the jagged stone walls seemed to writhe as if alive, coiling like serpents around his form. From within them, voices began to emerge, thin, ghostly, like whispers dragged across broken glass.
“Careful, Corrupter…” one hissed, its tone sly and unnervingly calm.
“You drain yourself for a name,” murmured another, its voice stretching like a dying breath. “This is not the time. You will need your strength when the veil thins…”
“Patience,” a third voice crooned, darker than the rest. “The elf’s soul will crack in time. We have eternity. Do not squander your fire for a single defiant whisper.”
The wraiths took shape around him, wisps of black smoke given form, their hollow faces stretched like skin over skulls, their eyeless sockets burning with pale embers. They hovered close, like vultures circling the scent of death, their ragged whispers rising into a chorus.
“Let us try,” one of them rasped, reaching a clawed hand toward the cage. “We can slip inside his mind, tear the secrets out grain by grain, and—”
Matthaios’ skeletal hand rose sharply. “Enough.” His voice was quiet, but its edge cut through the shadows like a blade. The wraiths stilled, their forms quivering, their whispers silenced in an instant.
The Corrupter’s eyes flared green-grey. “Do not presume to tell me when I should show restraint,” he growled. “I am not bound by your petty warnings.”
Then he snapped his fingers.
The nearest wraith convulsed violently, its form unraveling like smoke in a storm. A scream tore from its hollow maw, a sound so piercing, so shrill, it seemed to scrape against the mind itself. The other wraiths recoiled, writhing in silent terror, while the elf clamped his hands over his ears, grimacing but refusing to bow.
All around, the undgrolls wailed, their deformed hands clutching their heads as the sound clawed at their fragile minds. Some collapsed back into the bubbling muck from which they had been born, their eyeless faces twitching as though begging for silence.
The Corrupter, however, smiled. His long, thin silhouette seemed to grow taller, darker, feeding on their pain. He watched the elf through the bars, eyes alight with malice. “Your laughter is hollow now,” he said softly, almost mockingly. “You see what I command. Shall I make them all scream for eternity until even your defiance turns to dust?”
The elf, breathing heavily, managed a grin. “If you need the cries of slaves to remind you of your power,” she spat, “then perhaps you are not as strong as you pretend to be.”
Matthaios stood still, his long frame frozen like a drawn bow, his gaze locked on the elf’s grin. For a moment, there was only silence, broken only by the hiss of the bubbling mud pits and the faint, dying whimpers of the undgrolls. Then, as the Corrupter’s stare lingered, something changed.
A faint light, so weak it could have been mistaken for a trick of the shadows, began to pulse from within the elf’s chest. It was a soft yellow glow, barely visible, like moonlight buried under layers of ash. It shimmered once, then faded, returning just enough to catch the Corrupter’s eye.
Matthaios’s breath hitched. His mind, as cold and calculating as a rusted blade, tried to comprehend what he had just seen. It wasn’t magic, at least not any magic he knew. It wasn’t a defense spell, nor a curse, nor an illusion. It was something deeper, older. Something that should not have been there.
“What…” he whispered, almost to himself, “was that?”
The elf’s grin widened. Her voice, though cracked and hoarse, carried a quiet, taunting weight. “Something you cannot corrupt,” she said. “Something that fears no shadow, no rot, and certainly not you.”
Matthaios’s skeletal hands trembled, not with weakness but with a sensation he rarely felt—fear. He hated the way it gripped him, like a parasite gnawing at the back of his mind. Fear was for mortals. Fear was for the broken and weak. Not for him.
And yet… the sight of that faint, defiant glow sent something vile boiling in his veins.
“LIES!” he roared, his voice splitting into a chorus of a hundred wailing tones, echoing through the pits of Cartakunthor. With a violent gesture, he tore a rift in the ground beneath the elf’s cage, sending bursts of ashen steam and burning sludge into the air. The undgrolls shrieked, collapsing into heaps, clutching their malformed heads as the Corrupter’s fury poisoned the very air.
He slammed a hand against the bars of the cage, bending the metal inward with a screech. His eyes burned brighter, his face twisting into something monstrous, his rage barely contained. “You dare show me such light in my domain?!” Matthaios hissed, his voice dripping with venom. “I will rip it from you. I will devour it. I will make you watch as I snuff it out with my own hands!”
But deep inside, behind his fury, the Corrupter knew the truth, he had seen something in that yellow light that unsettled him. Something that whispered that all his undgrolls, his pits, his wraiths, even his endless corruption, might not be enough to destroy whatever spark the elf carried within.
The faint yellow glow pulsed again, just a heartbeat of light, but this time, it rippled outward. It was subtle at first, like a wave of warmth moving through the cold stench of the pits. The undgrolls stirred. Their eyeless faces, usually slack and devoid of any thought, began to twitch and turn. One by one, their heads pivoted, not toward the elf, but toward Matthaios.
The Corrupter’s breath stilled.
The undgrolls, his creations, his mindless army born of ash and rot, looked at him. Blank, hollow sockets fixed on his tall, sinewy form, not with fear, not with obedience, but with something alien. Something he could not name. The eerie silence of their stares was worse than any scream.
Matthaios took a step back. A flicker of confusion, a feeling as vile to him as weakness, gnawed at his mind. He had never felt the gaze of his own constructs, for they had no will, no soul, no mind of their own. They were extensions of him. Tools. Weapons. Puppets.
“Stop this,” he hissed, but his voice carried an edge of unease. He raised a hand, commanding them to bow, to grovel, to do something. But they did nothing. They only stared.
The elf chuckled, a sound low and mocking. “Do you see it now? Even your filth remembers what it means to defy you.”
“Silence!” Matthaios barked, his voice cracking like thunder. The wraiths murmured nervously in the shadows, whispering among themselves:
“The Light of the Forgotten Name…”
“It awakens what should not awaken…”
“Corrupter, control them, before they remember…”
But Matthaios’s control was slipping, and he felt it like oil running through his fingers. Rage, hot, desperate, unrelenting, consumed him. With a snap of his skeletal fingers, a sharp crack echoed through the chamber.
The nearest undgroll jerked violently, its spine snapping like a dry twig. It collapsed into the mud, twitching once before going still.
Snap. Another undgroll’s back arched grotesquely as bones cracked, its body folding inward before it crumpled like broken clay.
Snap. Snap. The sound of cracking spines filled the pits like rock shots from a sling hitting a wall, and the remaining undgrolls screamed in warped, gurgling agony before falling silent.
When the last one fell, the pits were quiet save for the bubbling of the cauldrons and the elf’s steady breathing. Matthaios stood there, his skeletal hand still raised, trembling, not from weakness, but from the fury clawing at his insides.
The elf tilted her head, her lips curling into that same defiant grin. “You destroy your own creations because you cannot stand their gaze,” she said softly. “Perhaps the rot has already taken you, Corrupter.”
Matthaios turned to him, eyes burning with unholy fire. “I will burn that light out of you,” he snarled, “even if I must tear apart every soul in this pit to do it.”
The elf’s defiance eventually gave way to exhaustion. Her head sagged against the cold iron bars, eyes fluttering shut as she drifted into a restless, disturbed sleep. Yet even in the haze of slumber, her will reached beyond the pits of Cartakunthor. On the faintest whisper of wind that snuck through the cracks of this forsaken place, she sent a hidden message, a plea wrapped in ancient words, hoping it would find someone who still remembered him, someone who could answer.
Matthaios turned from the cage, his skeletal frame trembling with unspent fury. The sight of his fallen undgrolls littering the ground like shattered dolls burned in his mind, a bitter reminder of the elf’s silent victory. “I will rebuild,” he muttered, voice like grinding stone. “Stronger. More loyal. They will not look at me with those hollow faces again.” With each step, his anger festered, the promise of vengeance carving itself deeper into his corrupted heart as he disappeared into the shadows of the pits, already scheming the next generation of his army.
Chapter 15; Corruption
Deep in the slumbering pits of Cartakunthor, the ancient and forsaken realm where light itself seemed to drown, Matthaios, though he preferred the title “The Corrupter”, busied himself with his grim craft. Around him, the ground quivered as his army of undgrolls clawed their way into being, their malformed bodies rising from ashen soil within bubbling cauldron-like mud holes. The air was thick with a stench so vile, so rancid, that even the sanest of minds would teeter into criminal madness after a single breath.
Matthaios’ tall, sinewy frame loomed over the scene like a shadow stitched into reality. His skin stretched tight over bone, making him look half-dead and half-immortal, his ribs visible beneath the tattered folds of his black robes. He moved with a disquieting grace, his long, skeletal fingers flicking in sharp, precise motions. With each gesture, an undgroll’s crooked spine snapped into place, or its eyeless sockets filled with a dim, pulsating glow. His sunken eyes, glowing with a sickly green-grey fire, never strayed from the ritual’s progress.
There was purpose in every motion, every hissed incantation, for Matthaios was not merely raising an army, he was birthing a plague of loyalty and malice, a force that would not rest until the world was remade in his image. Yet in the deepest shadows of Cartakunthor, where the stone walls bled whispered about forgotten curses, something stirred.
The Corrupter’s gaze shifted, the unnatural green-grey glow in his eyes narrowing like blades. There, amidst the shadows, something moved, a sound of soft, labored breathing and the faint rattle of chains. Within a rusted iron cage sat an elf who had once wielded power and command beyond mortal reckoning. Her aura, though diminished, still hummed faintly like an ember refusing to die. Her pale complexion told the tale of endless days under the oppressive gloom of Cartakunthor, but her mind, razor-sharp and unbroken, remained a defiant fortress.
Matthaios had tried to shatter that mind. He had whispered horrors older than time, clawed into the elf’s thoughts with dreams of despair, and offered salvation cloaked in corruption. Yet the elf had not broken. Not even when the Corrupter demanded her name, a name that held power, secrets, perhaps even the key to unraveling the fragile weave of resistance beyond these cursed pits.
The Corrupter’s long fingers curled, the bony knuckles cracking like dry branches. “Stubborn little elf,” Matthaios hissed, his voice like venom dripping over ice. “Do you think silence will save you? That your name will not slip from your tongue when the last fragments of your soul rot?”
The elf lifted her head, her once-bright eyes dulled yet burning with quiet defiance. “You will never own me,” she whispered, her voice hoarse but resolute, “and you will never speak my name.”
Matthaios glided toward the cage, his robes whispering across the ashen floor like shadows peeling from the walls. The elf’s gaze followed him, calm yet unwavering, the faintest ghost of a smile curling his cracked lips. That smile made something cold and furious coil in the Corrupter’s hollow chest. He stopped inches from the bars, his skeletal fingers wrapping around them, blackened nails screeching against the rusted iron.
“You mock me,” Matthaios hissed, his voice deepening, guttural, like a dozen voices speaking in unison. “Do you think your laughter makes you strong? Do you think your silence saves anyone?”
The elf tilted her head slightly, her matted silver hair falling across her gaunt face. Then, like a blade cutting through the stench-filled air, she laughed, a low, rasping sound that grew into something wild and bitter. It was not the laugh of one who has lost hope, but of one who has seen through the deepest veil of terror and found it wanting.
Matthaios’ jaw clenched, his sinewy frame trembling with rage. With a snap of his fingers, the ground beneath the cage split open, revealing one of the mud pits used to birth undgrolls. The stench intensified as the thick, bubbling sludge gurgled hungrily. The Corrupter’s hand reached through the bars, his fingers curling like talons around the elf’s throat. His touch was like cold fire, leeching warmth from the elf’s veins.
“Tell me your name,” he whispered, his voice a serpentine hiss that slithered into the elf’s ears, coiling around his mind. “Give me that key, and I will grant you freedom from this torment. Refuse me again, and I will flay your memories from your soul, one by one, until there is nothing left of you but a shell.”
The elf’s breath hitched, but her smile never faltered. Her voice was hoarse, but steady. “You can peel the flesh from my bones, Corrupter. You can break my body and drown me in your filth. But you will never have my name.”
Matthaios tightened his grip, black veins of magic spreading from his hand like roots digging into the elf’s flesh. Pain shot through the prisoner’s body, arching her back against the cage bars, but instead of screaming, she laughed again, louder, harsher, a jagged sound that reverberated through the dark pit like a weapon.
Something shifted in the shadows beyond them, an almost imperceptible ripple in the stale air, like a presence stirring. Matthaios paused, his attention momentarily flicking to the darkness beyond. The elf’s voice followed, quiet but cutting:
“Keep trying, Corrupter. Every time you speak my name in your mind, every time you reach for it, you awaken something you do not understand.”
The laughter of the elf echoed in the pit like a taunt carved into the air itself. Matthaios drew back his hand, his bony fingers twitching with frustration. The shadows along the jagged stone walls seemed to writhe as if alive, coiling like serpents around his form. From within them, voices began to emerge, thin, ghostly, like whispers dragged across broken glass.
“Careful, Corrupter…” one hissed, its tone sly and unnervingly calm.
“You drain yourself for a name,” murmured another, its voice stretching like a dying breath. “This is not the time. You will need your strength when the veil thins…”
“Patience,” a third voice crooned, darker than the rest. “The elf’s soul will crack in time. We have eternity. Do not squander your fire for a single defiant whisper.”
The wraiths took shape around him, wisps of black smoke given form, their hollow faces stretched like skin over skulls, their eyeless sockets burning with pale embers. They hovered close, like vultures circling the scent of death, their ragged whispers rising into a chorus.
“Let us try,” one of them rasped, reaching a clawed hand toward the cage. “We can slip inside his mind, tear the secrets out grain by grain, and—”
Matthaios’ skeletal hand rose sharply. “Enough.” His voice was quiet, but its edge cut through the shadows like a blade. The wraiths stilled, their forms quivering, their whispers silenced in an instant.
The Corrupter’s eyes flared green-grey. “Do not presume to tell me when I should show restraint,” he growled. “I am not bound by your petty warnings.”
Then he snapped his fingers.
The nearest wraith convulsed violently, its form unraveling like smoke in a storm. A scream tore from its hollow maw, a sound so piercing, so shrill, it seemed to scrape against the mind itself. The other wraiths recoiled, writhing in silent terror, while the elf clamped his hands over his ears, grimacing but refusing to bow.
All around, the undgrolls wailed, their deformed hands clutching their heads as the sound clawed at their fragile minds. Some collapsed back into the bubbling muck from which they had been born, their eyeless faces twitching as though begging for silence.
The Corrupter, however, smiled. His long, thin silhouette seemed to grow taller, darker, feeding on their pain. He watched the elf through the bars, eyes alight with malice. “Your laughter is hollow now,” he said softly, almost mockingly. “You see what I command. Shall I make them all scream for eternity until even your defiance turns to dust?”
The elf, breathing heavily, managed a grin. “If you need the cries of slaves to remind you of your power,” she spat, “then perhaps you are not as strong as you pretend to be.”
Matthaios stood still, his long frame frozen like a drawn bow, his gaze locked on the elf’s grin. For a moment, there was only silence, broken only by the hiss of the bubbling mud pits and the faint, dying whimpers of the undgrolls. Then, as the Corrupter’s stare lingered, something changed.
A faint light, so weak it could have been mistaken for a trick of the shadows, began to pulse from within the elf’s chest. It was a soft yellow glow, barely visible, like moonlight buried under layers of ash. It shimmered once, then faded, returning just enough to catch the Corrupter’s eye.
Matthaios’s breath hitched. His mind, as cold and calculating as a rusted blade, tried to comprehend what he had just seen. It wasn’t magic, at least not any magic he knew. It wasn’t a defense spell, nor a curse, nor an illusion. It was something deeper, older. Something that should not have been there.
“What…” he whispered, almost to himself, “was that?”
The elf’s grin widened. Her voice, though cracked and hoarse, carried a quiet, taunting weight. “Something you cannot corrupt,” she said. “Something that fears no shadow, no rot, and certainly not you.”
Matthaios’s skeletal hands trembled, not with weakness but with a sensation he rarely felt—fear. He hated the way it gripped him, like a parasite gnawing at the back of his mind. Fear was for mortals. Fear was for the broken and weak. Not for him.
And yet… the sight of that faint, defiant glow sent something vile boiling in his veins.
“LIES!” he roared, his voice splitting into a chorus of a hundred wailing tones, echoing through the pits of Cartakunthor. With a violent gesture, he tore a rift in the ground beneath the elf’s cage, sending bursts of ashen steam and burning sludge into the air. The undgrolls shrieked, collapsing into heaps, clutching their malformed heads as the Corrupter’s fury poisoned the very air.
He slammed a hand against the bars of the cage, bending the metal inward with a screech. His eyes burned brighter, his face twisting into something monstrous, his rage barely contained. “You dare show me such light in my domain?!” Matthaios hissed, his voice dripping with venom. “I will rip it from you. I will devour it. I will make you watch as I snuff it out with my own hands!”
But deep inside, behind his fury, the Corrupter knew the truth, he had seen something in that yellow light that unsettled him. Something that whispered that all his undgrolls, his pits, his wraiths, even his endless corruption, might not be enough to destroy whatever spark the elf carried within.
The faint yellow glow pulsed again, just a heartbeat of light, but this time, it rippled outward. It was subtle at first, like a wave of warmth moving through the cold stench of the pits. The undgrolls stirred. Their eyeless faces, usually slack and devoid of any thought, began to twitch and turn. One by one, their heads pivoted, not toward the elf, but toward Matthaios.
The Corrupter’s breath stilled.
The undgrolls, his creations, his mindless army born of ash and rot, looked at him. Blank, hollow sockets fixed on his tall, sinewy form, not with fear, not with obedience, but with something alien. Something he could not name. The eerie silence of their stares was worse than any scream.
Matthaios took a step back. A flicker of confusion, a feeling as vile to him as weakness, gnawed at his mind. He had never felt the gaze of his own constructs, for they had no will, no soul, no mind of their own. They were extensions of him. Tools. Weapons. Puppets.
“Stop this,” he hissed, but his voice carried an edge of unease. He raised a hand, commanding them to bow, to grovel, to do something. But they did nothing. They only stared.
The elf chuckled, a sound low and mocking. “Do you see it now? Even your filth remembers what it means to defy you.”
“Silence!” Matthaios barked, his voice cracking like thunder. The wraiths murmured nervously in the shadows, whispering among themselves:
“The Light of the Forgotten Name…”
“It awakens what should not awaken…”
“Corrupter, control them, before they remember…”
But Matthaios’s control was slipping, and he felt it like oil running through his fingers. Rage, hot, desperate, unrelenting, consumed him. With a snap of his skeletal fingers, a sharp crack echoed through the chamber.
The nearest undgroll jerked violently, its spine snapping like a dry twig. It collapsed into the mud, twitching once before going still.
Snap. Another undgroll’s back arched grotesquely as bones cracked, its body folding inward before it crumpled like broken clay.
Snap. Snap. The sound of cracking spines filled the pits like rock shots from a sling hitting a wall, and the remaining undgrolls screamed in warped, gurgling agony before falling silent.
When the last one fell, the pits were quiet save for the bubbling of the cauldrons and the elf’s steady breathing. Matthaios stood there, his skeletal hand still raised, trembling, not from weakness, but from the fury clawing at his insides.
The elf tilted her head, her lips curling into that same defiant grin. “You destroy your own creations because you cannot stand their gaze,” she said softly. “Perhaps the rot has already taken you, Corrupter.”
Matthaios turned to him, eyes burning with unholy fire. “I will burn that light out of you,” he snarled, “even if I must tear apart every soul in this pit to do it.”
The elf’s defiance eventually gave way to exhaustion. Her head sagged against the cold iron bars, eyes fluttering shut as she drifted into a restless, disturbed sleep. Yet even in the haze of slumber, her will reached beyond the pits of Cartakunthor. On the faintest whisper of wind that snuck through the cracks of this forsaken place, she sent a hidden message, a plea wrapped in ancient words, hoping it would find someone who still remembered him, someone who could answer.
Matthaios turned from the cage, his skeletal frame trembling with unspent fury. The sight of his fallen undgrolls littering the ground like shattered dolls burned in his mind, a bitter reminder of the elf’s silent victory. “I will rebuild,” he muttered, voice like grinding stone. “Stronger. More loyal. They will not look at me with those hollow faces again.” With each step, his anger festered, the promise of vengeance carving itself deeper into his corrupted heart as he disappeared into the shadows of the pits, already scheming the next generation of his army.
Last edited: