The night breathed through rotting brickwork, its exhation frosting the dirty snow beneath Sara's scaled boots. Silence draped the Warrens like a shroud - the good kind of silence, where screams get digested before they escape throats.
Her serpent-kin tongue flicked out, tasting metallic anticipation... and the girl's cloying fear-sweat.
Finally, after so long, they had caught that elusive little Drakarri brat. Boss was going to be so damn happy.
Her tongue flicked out once again, tasting the air.
Ahh. It might snow soon.
“Did we overdo it?” Zyan muttered beside her.
Sara's vertical pupils contracted. The Fox-kin reeked of fermented anxiety, his three tails matted with alley grime. Faerin were supposed to be cunning - this one must've been whelped during an eclipse.
How in the seven realms had she ended up with such a spineless idiot on her team? If she were in charge, he wouldn’t have survived his first week.
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘overdo’?” she spat, twirling her crossbow. It still carried the faint, bitter scent of poisons brewed by kidnapped alchemists. Elegant, really. Art refined in suffering.
Zyan hesitated. “The paralytic. Are we sure it’s not too strong? We need her alive, you know that, right? Last time, the girl lost control of her limbs and—”
“And we had to kill her.” Sara finished for him, rolling her eyes.
Zyan’s nervous gaze darted to the sprawled figure in the snow. “Yeah. That.”
Sara just shrugged. “Don’t worry so much. This one’s no weakling.”
Her eyes gleamed as she scanned their prize. Yellow Core. Oh, she’d be fine—just a little... tormented.
She grinned.
Poison was never just about the body. People feared steel, but steel was merciful—a swift cut, a quick death. Poison? Poison lingered. It taught patience. It educated.
A serpent doesn’t just kill its prey. It wraps around it, squeezes, lets its victim feel its own helplessness before the end. That was how true hunters did it.
Zyan still wasn’t convinced. “Are we even sure she’s the right target? What if we hit a warren’s gang member by accident?”
This fool. She almost pitied him. He was new, after all—questioning her methods like some wide-eyed recruit.
Before she could respond, the urgoth at her back rumbled a growl. “It’s her.”
Niko didn’t waste words.
“Matches the description. Too well. Besides, people have been watching her.”
Sara smirked. There’s my confirmation.
She stepped forward, boot hovering over the colpsed girl. Then she kicked her.
Zyan yelped. That only made Sara smile wider.
She crouched, fingers curling under the girl’s mask, peeling it away. A whistle escaped her lips.
Wide, terrified eyes stared up at her.
Ahh. There it was.
Fear.
It was a cocktail finer than any alchemist’s brew—thick, electric, delicious. Her tongue flickered, savoring it.
The paralytic was a work of art. It didn’t dull the mind—only the body. The girl’s limbs wouldn’t move. Her lungs would barely obey. She could see and hear everything, her brain screaming commands that her muscles refused to follow.
Sara grinned. The st two? They’d pissed themselves.
She was eager to see how this one would fare.
The sheer horror on her face?
Oh, this was going to be fun.
A crow cawed from above.
Sara’s crossbow blurred. Crack. A wet explosion of feathers and bone rained down, the headless body plummeting to the slush-covered cobbles.
Zyan yelped at the sudden violence, but Sara remained still, pensive, scanning the rooftops. Nothing but dark silhouettes against the smog-choked sky. Good.
The crows around here were bad news. Spies. Harbingers. It was best to remove them whenever feasible.
Her gaze trailed down to the Drakkari girl.
Still frozen. Still helpless.
Sara crouched, taloned fingers tracing the delicate tracks of dried tears down the girl’s cheek.
“Observe,” she whispered.
She let the sharp edge of her nail linger against the girl’s jawline, pressing just enough to remind her that she could tear through flesh if she wished.
"Serpent fangs don’t kill immediately." She tapped the girl’s trembling throat. "The venom invites.”
Her forked tongue flickered out, grazing the girl's cheek. The taste of salt. Fear. Futility.
“First, paralysis. Awareness heightens as the body betrays.”
She dragged her fingers lower, pressing lightly against the girl’s ribs.
“Then…”
She closed her fist abruptly. The girl’s diaphragm spasmed—a fish gasping on nd.
Zyan retched into the shadows.
Sara grinned.
"Poison is truth serum," Sara crooned, counting the frantic rabbit-pulse beneath her grip. "Strip away motion, lies, pretense… what remains is primal. The animal truth even red-core prudes can’t outrun."
Terror shone in the girl’s wide, gssy eyes.
Satisfying.
She stood, brushing nonexistent dust from her coat.
“Niko, haul her. We’re taking her to the base.”
The urgoth bent down with a grunt, slinging the limp body over one shoulder.
"Bind her?" he rumbled, calloused hands already mapping pressure points.
Sara ughed—a sound of dry scales over stone. "Let the venom bind her. Unless our little alchemist has rewritten her meridians in secret…" She leaned close, drinking the girl’s shallow breaths. "...this body belongs to the poison now."
Niko nodded, adjusting his grip on the girl’s dead weight. With that, they moved. The Warrens welcomed them home, alleyways folding around the procession like a serpent’s coils. Sara led them through sewage mist and rat-song.
***
The city hunched around them, the Lower District a festering sprawl of crumbling tenements and alleyways where the forgotten went to rot. It stank of damp decay and stagnant regret, of scorched grease and unwashed ambition.
Their destination loomed ahead—a squat warehouse, long since abandoned, its brickwork stained with the soot of a hundred careless years. It fit the district like a broken tooth.
Jagged windows leered through haphazard boards, scavenged from who-knew-where. Moonlight slithered across colpsed beams, pooling in rust-bitten gutters that hung like rotting fangs. The loading bay doors bore the scars of some long-dead fire, their wrought-iron scrollwork melted into silent screams.
A pce even rats scorned. Perfect camoufge.
Sara cut around the back. The rear entrance sulked beneath a sagging awning, its pitted steel door mottled with corrosion that bloomed like a leper’s lesions. Her knuckles tapped out six notes—three quick, two deliberate, one final flourish. A shanty’s rhythm, the kind whispered by lips that would soon kiss the noose.
A beat of silence. Then—thud.
“The brewery requires more grapes,” Sara murmured in Elvish.
Hinges shrieked as the door cracked open, revealing slitted amber eyes beneath a Rakari helm. The guard’s muzzle twitched—a suppressed recoil at her scent. Good. Let them flinch. Let them wonder what clung to her.
Inside, three Rakari warriors stood at attention, their armor a patchwork of conquest—dwarven chainmail sleeves stitched to elven breastptes, an ogre’s spiked pauldron reshaped for a predator’s frame. Moonlight licked the edge of their sabers, runes carved into the steel whispering sever-sever-sever to anyone foolish enough to listen.
They were here to turn interlopers into perforated memories. And in the Warren, interlopers were plentiful.
Yet even they lowered their gazes as she stepped inside.
As they should.
She was their prized hunter, after all.
The youngest guard’s ear flicked. Sara’s tongue flicked back, catching the sour tang of fear-sweat. Adolescence. Unripened. Delicious. She made a note to request him for cleanup duty ter. Tender meat always had the sweetest screams.
Behind her, the iron door smmed shut, locks smming home like hammer blows. A ripple of light shimmered through the air—wards fring to life, sealing the entrance against all things unwelcome. Be they flesh and bone… or that pesky thing called divination.
***
Inside, the warehouse was a skeleton of its former self—scattered crates, rusting machinery, thick support beams draped in cobweb ce. Yet beneath the grime of abandonment, there was purpose. Structure.
Guards stood at measured intervals, their silence not of idleness but vigince.
At the center of the space, a heavy tarp had been dragged aside, revealing what y beneath—
A stone circle, its surface webbed with Elven runes that pulsed cold and unnatural, etchings breathing with the glow of something very, very old.
And within the ring, a thick, tar-like substance slithered in a perfect, circur path. Bck as ink. Restless as oil on water.
The portal.
The only path to their true stronghold.
Sara exhaled through her nose, her gaze flicking between the guards and the shifting runes.
Finally.
Their prized catch had arrived.
This girl? The Alchemy Tower’s little prodigy?
Worth more than those two useless brats combined.
One of the portal guards shifted—a breathing monument of muscle and old scars. Igor’s lion-kin mane bristled with grudges left to fester, his ruined eye milky as a dead moon. The only soul here whose kill-count came close to hers.
“Finally netted the eel?” he rumbled, cws drumming zily against the pommel of his notched executioner’s bde.
Sara’s grin fshed needle-thin. “Slithers through the Warrens like abyssal spawn. Masks. Anti-divination charms. Never steps where walls don’t have ears.” Her tongue flicked toward the paralyzed girl. “But tonight, the serpent ate the serpent.”
Igor’s intact ear twitched. “Clean work.”
Sara opened her mouth, then paused. Her own ears flicked, her tongue tasting the air. Something was off.
“What’s with that weird water-churning sound in the warehouse today?” she asked. “Y’all leave some enchantment running?”
Igor frowned, ears angling before he shook his head. “I don’t hear anything.”
But Sara did. A deep, rolling undercurrent. Pressure building at the base of her skull like a cresting tide. Instinct scraped at her spine, her pulse slipping into a fight rhythm.
She scanned the room.
“What’s wrong?” Igor muttered.
A sound cut through—not heard, but felt. A subsonic growl, the distant voice of leviathan currents. Pressure swelled behind her eyes, the sensation of a held breath before a deep dive.
“I’m hearing things,” she muttered.
Igor scoffed. “Yeah, maybe you’re just—”
Her secondary eyelids flicked across her vision, pupils narrowing into slits.
“FOOL.” The word cracked sharp as a whip. “No one just hears things in Varkaigrad.”
Niko shifted. The girl’s limp body slid from his shoulder with a dull, fleshy thud.
And that’s when Sara saw it.
Standing just beside the paralyzed girl.
A doll.
Porcein flesh split by a rictus grin, its stitched velvet gown devouring the light. Hollow eyes like event horizons, swallowing screams into silence.
Every instinct howled.
Sara reached for her crossbow—only for her body to betray her.
Her hand never moved.
Her mouth opened to scream, to warn—but silence swallowed the sound.
She reached inward, calling lightning from her core—only to find even her mana was no longer hers.
She stood there. Impassive.
Her lips moved on their own.
“Hmm. Seems like it was nothing.”
NO. NO! WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?!?
“Must be fatigue gnawing.”
ARGHHH!
Her synapses fired into a void. Trapped behind her own eyes, she watched—helpless—as her tongue, her own goddamn tongue, flicked over lips she no longer controlled.
The doll’s head creaked sideways, its joints screaming like tortured rats.
And in the corner of her gaze, the paralyzed Drakkari girl’s lips twitched—not in terror. In mirth.
A trickster?!
Then—a scream.
Back at the entrance. One of the guards.
Sara’s head turned without consent.
The doll now stood nose-to-nose, its hollow eyes churning with fractal storms. A pill banced on its palm—obsidian, glistening with saliva not its own.
“Mistress wants you breathing,” it lisped, syrup-sweet and maggot-rotten. “Belle wanted to liquefy your sinuses. Had to… persuade her.”
Her jaw unhinged. The pill slithered down her throat, burning like swallowed fire.
The doll’s head rotated full-circle, porcein grinding bone.
“Now…” A needle-tipped finger, cold as grave soil, tapped her crossbow arm. “…py.”
Her body obeyed.
Igor’s remaining eye widened, lion-kin nostrils fring as her poisoned quarrel kissed his jugur.
“And don’t worry,” the doll cooed. “That pill should keep you from becoming an accidental part of the carnage.”
Please. Please.
Her tear ducts burned, hot saline streaking down paralyzed cheeks—the only rebellion left.
The doll giggled, harmonizing with the Drakkari girl’s crystalline ugh—windchimes and breaking ribs.
Igor’s nostrils fred. Recognition. His lone eye locked onto hers, pupils diting as he scented the betrayal.
His cw twitched toward his bde.
Too slow.
Sara’s finger squeezed.
Snick.
Igor’s roar died wetly as neurotoxin froth filled his throat.
