“Strange thing, isn’t it?” Tarik mumbled through the mouth of a sabretooth tiger.

  What is, mortal? Shriekfang asked. The obsidian rapier floated casually out of the darkness, herald to the arrival of Dahlia and the Ebon Chorus.

  “The men who call themselves heroes never think of the songs sung in other lands, where their names are curses, their deeds the stuff of nightmares.” Tarik’s glowing golden eyes shifted across the corpses before they returned to the cursed sword, who hummed with delight.

  “But I wonder… do they ever hear those songs before they die?” For all the casual idleness of his question, Tarik’s golden eyes did not leave the pool of blood spreading from the corpse of Jabari.

  Mr. Disapoofer plodded forward in response to Dahlia's pressure. The wolf stopped a bit short of Tarik while the fairy studied the corpse of the inquisitor guard.

  “They hear it, in the end,” Dahlia murmured with a small smile. “Not in words. Not in the tongues of men. But in the silence.”

  Dahlia extended a finger, brushing the tip along Shriekfang’s hilt. The blade practically shuddered in delight, pressing against her hand like a dog seeking pets, eager for more, despite the pastel glitter the motion of Dahlia’s fingers left behind.

  “The moment before the dark takes them, there’s a pause—a realization. A sudden knowing deep in their being that the story was never theirs to tell, that they weren’t the leading actor, nor even a supporting role. Just another piece of the background, as important as the trees are to the set.”

  Dahlia’s blue, violet, and black wings beat dramatically. The fairy lifted into the air and hovered over Jabari's corpse. While her violet eyes examined the shape of his lifeblood made on the ground, Dahlia’s lips turned into a hard pressed line. The spirits of the dead and damned of Riverwatch painted a picture with the inquisitor’s blood.

  A skeletal hand, palm upturned, fingers curled as if grasping at something unseen in desperate plea. The dead were not finished, and begged for justice.

  She could answer. She could give them their vengeance. She could even do it without ripping their souls from the afterlife, a kindness she was uncertain the people of Riverwatch truly deserved. For all his cute daughters and warm welcome to Dahlia, he had been harvesting tortured dryads for the Inquisitors.

  “Guard me,” Dahlia snapped to the Ebon Chorus. The shuffling of feet widened Tarik’s eyes—there were far more figures with Dahlia now. Wights, an Elven Mummy, Shadows, more spiritual beings, on top of the scary tree-man and other fey beings that accompanied the fairy earlier.

  “If you have a personal vendetta against any of these inquisitors, I’d recommend you seek them out as swiftly as possible. I’ll listen to no complaints about missed opportunities,” Dahlia chided Tarik. “You have a minute or two.”

  The Sabertooth tiger looked confused for a moment. Tark couldn’t puzzle out how the fairy would kill hundreds of inquisitors alone, even with a squad of formidable undead already with her.

  Dahlia drew her lute from the Feywoven Satchel and played a mournful, somber song as she burned the ten Glimmer it cost to use Fey War Magic. Tarik’s golden feline eyes widened when the magic built, and he leaped into the shadows to hunt.

  “O hush, ye broken, weep no more,

  Ye bound in chains of fate and war,

  O lost in fire, drowned in pain,

  Rise now, rise now, strike again!

  The sun has fled, the stars grow dim,

  No gods worthy will ransom them,

  The iron struck, you burned and bled,

  Let darkness claim what light has fled.

  Come forth, ye wretched, all pale and grim,

  Leave behind both bone and skin,

  No graves shall hold what Horus defiled,

  Step from shadow—make them die!

  By Twilight Fallen, with midnight’s cry,

  By vengeance sworn by voices dry,

  By oaths unbroken, debts unpaid,

  Rise in wrath, let none be saved.

  Heed my call, follow my song,

  Unshackled now from blood and form,

  No mercy left, no solace to give,

  Rise in darkness, and drag them down.”

  Dahlia’s performance did not go unnoticed. Yet the Inquisition brass were in the midst of their own ritual. Two patrols were sent to quell the fey magic surge on the town's edge. Neither patrol ever reported back.

  The air over Riverwatch hung thick with the scent of death—pools of old blood-soaked dirt streets and the few cobbled paths in the town. Hundreds of bodies hung from the palisades, to say nothing of those strewn on the roads or tossed in the river. Men, women, and children alike had their faces frozen in terror, their bodies twisted in unnatural angles to match wherever they had fallen. The Inquisition had lit only a handful of torches and lanterns to ward off the night. The faithful of Horus did not need assistance from mere candles to hold back the night.

  And so, the plague of darkness created by Dahlia’s song spread outward like a freed curse.

  First, a corpse twitched. A low, guttural hum echoed through the air—not the sound of the living, but the sound of something being pulled from the abyss—not as itself, but as a shadow of what it once was—a hungry, hollow, and wrong shadow.

  One by one, the shadows beneath the corpses stretched and twisted before a small explosion of darkness—like a squid releasing ink in water. The bodies moved, sort of. They only twitched and jerked unnaturally when something inhuman pulled itself from the bodies—not a thing flesh or blood, only darkness incarnate.

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  A wave of them rose from the dead. Hundreds of Shadows peeled themselves from their former vessels, their insubstantial wraithlike figures wreathed in a brush of violet glitter as they rose and struggled to remember what they had been before this new life took hold. Empty sockets where eyes should be burned with cold malevolence, their featureless bodies dripped tendrils of abyssal mist, and the lullaby-like song of the Gloamcaller resonated in their minds, giving shape and direction to their boundless hunger for life.

  The first shriek emerged from the town’s dock—two of the inquisitors on duty guarding the ferry from theft were overrun by dozens of shadows, whose terrifying claws stole life and strength from the soul.

  When only bones and clumps of hair remained, the Shadows moved into Riverwatch like a wave. A black tide of the undead surged forward and poured through the streets of Riverwatch. They crawled along the walls, flowed through cracks in buildings, and slipped through doors that once had promised safety to the slaughtered citizens of Riverwatch. Hundreds of Inquisitors died in their requisitioned beds, their lives snuffed out like candles.

  Where the Shaows passed, the light died. Torches flickered in dire warning, once, twice, then they were snuffed out, devoured by the sheer numbing cold created by the roiling darkness that was hundreds of shades. They drained the warmth and life from every Inquisitor they passed. The flowers on the windowsills, the few survivors still in hiding, beloved pets, and chained prisoners were the only humans to be spared the hunger of the Shadow Swarm.

  They didn’t shamble. They didn’t hesitate. They hunted. With so many Inquisitors dead in their sleep, only the top ranking officers managed to fight back the tide amid a ritual at the town square.

  Disconcerting—for the officers of the Inquisition, at least. Walls of solid light formed a six-sided cube around the courtyard. Walls that the Shadows could not pass. Upon the stage where Lord Graystone had once spoken favorably of Dahlia stood Justicar Malzareth, whose dark brown eyes noticed an abnormality.

  “Those killed by the Shadows are not rising as other Shadows. These creatures are not run-of-the-mill undead,” he said in an exceptionally unpleasant voice—a voice of pure rasps. The dreadful scars along his throat explained why he sounded that way.

  Bubbles of blood formed and popped from the mouth of a half-elven man stretched across the altar. His weapons had been taken, but defiance still burned in Joel’s eyes despite the drugging, beating, and bleeding—and the fact he was the sole living creature of the twenty bodies bound to the long altar.

  Complicated glyphs and sigils had been carved into Joel’s flesh—the same that had been delicately worked on the other nineteen corpses, of which Lord Graystone was one of. Not only were they detailed charges for which Joel and Riverwatch had been found guilty, but they were divine punishment that settled into the soul and would follow one into the afterlife.

  “On the brink of death, you still find this funny, half-blood?” Justicar Malzareth leaned down. His hot breath barely registered as a sensation to Joel’s rapidly deadening nerves.

  “Recognize the shadows,” Joel said. Each word was accompanied by wet splatters of blood that he tried to land on the Justicar.

  “Your vaunted fairy can’t save you, and it certainly didn’t save your friends.” Malzareth spat out each painful word like a curse.

  The first sign of Tarik’s arrival wasn’t seen—it was felt.

  A shudder ran through the courtyard stones, a deep, pulsing vibration that traveled up through the bones of the inquisitors, like the land itself awakened from some terrible slumber. The wooden platform from which Malzareth performed the Scarlet Benediction shook so hard that one of the corpses fell from the end—the body of Lord Graystone, the first to be murdered—hit the ground.

  Malzareth stiffened, but he sensed the shift a half-second too late. The walls of light were meant to keep the Shadows out—they hadn’t been raised to keep anything else from coming in.

  The altar split apart with a deafening crack. Thick, jagged roots erupted from the ground. They twisted and writhed like a nest of cobras, lashing out and dragging inquisitors to their deaths in the embrace of dirt and stone. Their armor flared, and holy symbols of Horus burst with divine energy and burnt the ground until it rejected their presence.

  A voice haunted Malzareth from the shadows. It was a voice that the Justicar would never forget, for it was the voice of the man who had ruined his throat and desecrated Malzareth’s once grand voice—the wretched voice belonged to the Ashroot, Tarik Nazari.

  “You think you own this land,” Tarik’s voice emerged from every leaf, every blade of grass, and perhaps every ancient tree in the Bramblewood beyond the town. “You were never anything but trespassers.”

  Roots lurched out of the ground, their tendrils glistening with a sickly syrup. A single prick left each Inquisitor injected with the poison, twitching on the ground, veins blackening, mouth foaming. Malzareth knew the affliction; it had many different names amongst the Inquisition: Ashroot’s Curse, Tarik’s Kiss, or Veinrot were the most common.

  The High Justicar cringed. None of his men would survive this, and they hadn’t even acquired a new supply of dryad remains yet. Perhaps the group in River Home would avenge his men for him?

  Malzareth reacted too slowly, spinning to the side when the great tiger ambushed him. Unlike their last encounter, Malzareth protected his throat and face but took three deep cuts across his belly from the tiger's claws. Only one of the claws managed to pierce the mithril chain the Justicar wore under his robes.

  Tarik lifted his giant tiger’s claw and sniffed at the blood. Darkness worked through the Justicar’s veins in the old, familiar pain that never left Malzareth’s throat. Things grew worse by the second—the shimmering walls of light faded.

  One moment, the High Justicar’s spell had held firm against the tide of Shadows, the next? His beautiful spell unraveled.

  Yet the tide of Shadows didn’t come forward. A large white wolf trotted forward. It had two eyes, and four more appeared and reappeared around it in the environment—sometimes even floating in the air itself. Malzareth had never heard of, or seen, such a beast before. Upon its back rode a woman—no, a fey. She was taller than an elf, with blue, purple, and black butterfly wings. Her dress style was alien—she was undeniably the fairy he’d come to kill.

  The citizens of Riverwatch had claimed she was a tiny fairy, but this powerful creature riding a giant wolf was taller than Malzareth and casually commanded a legion of Shadows. Had the uneducated morons of Riverwatch welcomed one of the ArchFey into their midst?

  “This one is mine,” the tiger growled at the fairy, before it sauntered towards the Justicar.

  “By all means,” the fey said. “I’m here for his friends.”

  Dahlia raised her hand, and Malzareth’s faith crumbled.

  Lord Horus's power protected the Inquisitors' souls, and no fey could supersede a god. Yet when the fairy lifted her right hand, the divine bone ring upon her middle finger caught Malzareth’s gaze, and thanks to the Voice of Nantes, the Inquisitor knew then….

  “Impossible!” the Justicar screamed.

  The fairy bore the blessing of the High God, Amun-Ra, who had named this wretched, profane abomination the Keeper of the Last Light, the final hope of Nantes. How could that possibly be!?

  “You thought you had the right to judge them. I’ll return the favor,” Dahlia said. Her voice was soft, almost sympathetic, for a brief moment anyway. Then her purple eyes gleamed with a devilish light, and mischief spread across her violet lips.

  “What do you think, Tarik? Wights? Wisps? Mummies?” The fairy tapped black fingernails against her lips, patiently waiting for an answer—and for the druid to finish the Justicar.