Snow swirled around Nyxia in restless spirals as she watched the arrow vanish into the whiteout. The mist swallowed the sound, leaving only the faint echo of dying screams somewhere deeper in the storm. Loque's eyes shimmered beside her, their glow cutting through the frost as he paced in a slow arc, tail low, body tense. The scent in the air was wrong: metallic, sour, too human to be a wandering beast and too careless to belong to a real hunter. Nyxia crouched beside a frozen trunk, gloved fingers brushing across blood-warmed snow that hadn't yet cooled. Her stomach tightened. Not hers. Not Loque's. Good. But the warmth of it pulled her back for a breath—back to days when she bled for different reasons, when cold nights carried voices she pretended not to hear.
She remembered standing alone in the barracks doorway, the smell of salve thick in her nose, stitches tugging along her cheek with every exhale. Outside, frost glittered under moonlight like tiny broken mirrors. The Sentinel captain had spoken softly behind her, warm hand hovering near Nyxia's shoulder. "You should stay. Heal. No one expects you to chase ghosts." But the forest beyond the gates pulsed with a different kind of gravity. Something old. Something familiar. She'd felt it tugging at her ribs, urging her forward like claws catching cloth. "They aren't ghosts," she'd whispered, more to herself than the captain. "They're calling."
The memory tangled with the present as the snow thickened, the same way it had that night when she'd limped through the woods following claw marks only she could interpret. Frost crunched under her boots and every step pulsed through her healing wounds, but she'd kept going until the trees thinned and moonlight washed over a clearing that didn't feel empty at all. Loque stood at its center, fur glowing like breath caught in moonfire, his gaze locking onto hers with something that pierced deeper than fear. She whispered, "You were the one," the cold stinging her scars, her breath shaking. He approached, slow, deliberate, a creature neither fully real nor fully dream. When his nose brushed her cheek, the ache faded. The cold left her. Something settled inside her chest and rooted itself there—quiet, strong, unyielding.
Nyxia blinked, snow blinking back with her. The warmth of that moment melted into the sharp sting of the present as Loque slinked closer again, shoulders lifting, ears angled. They were surrounded. She exhaled once. Calm. Focused. The girl who once staggered into a clearing half-broken was long gone. What crouched in the snow now was something honed by pain and sharpened by every night she'd chosen to survive.
The first assassin broke from the trees, blade raised, breath fogging in frantic bursts. Nyxia waited until he was nearly on top of her, then pivoted. Her arrow snapped through the mist and buried itself in his eye, dropping him instantly. Loque was already moving, a streak of pale fury, tackling the second before he could turn. Snow flew up in sheets as ghostly teeth clamped his throat and ripped. A hiss of burning blood hit the air. The third came from Nyxia's blind side, quick, smarter than the others. She let him think the blade would land. At the last moment she ducked under it, seized his wrist, and drove her dagger into his side. He howled, stumbling into the tree behind him, and Nyxia used the leverage to carve upward through muscle until his legs gave out beneath him, insides spilling in steaming ropes onto the ice.
The fourth hesitated, breath trembling, and that heartbeat of fear cost him everything. She sent an arrow into his thigh to drop him, then pinned him beneath her boot, blade at his throat. His pulse hammered against her steel. "Who sent you." His voice cracked as he spat out the only thing he knew: a woman with pale hair, void-touched eyes, paying in gold and promises of moonless deaths. Nyxia's jaw tightened, her scar pulling tight across her cheek, and a cold memory stirred under her ribs—the same words whispered in a ruined temple years ago. She slit his throat cleanly, letting the blood paint the snow, letting the truth settle like frost.
She knelt, rifling through his pouches with numb fingers until she found it: a scrap of parchment, half-burned, sealed with wax that shimmered faintly purple. The moment she touched it the world cracked open. She fell, or maybe she was pulled, into a memory she had buried deep beneath the roots of the Ash'myra temple. The air tasted of smoke and blood. Marble floors slick with ichor reflected firelight in broken streaks. Screams twisted down the halls, voices warped by Void whispers, not fully elven anymore. Nyxia sprinted through splintered corridors, calling for Ves with a voice she barely recognized. When she reached the Sanctum, the silver doors were shattered and Ves knelt in the ruin holding Sister Alyss, her hands trembling over a wound too deep to heal. "Elune won't answer," Ves whispered, eyes hollow. Nyxia dropped beside her, offering help, offering anything—but Ves only shook her head, shadows creeping along her fingers. "I can stop it. Trust me." Nyxia hesitated. One second. One breath. And Ves chose darkness for them both.
Alyss's scream still clawed at her skull as the memory spat her back into the cold. The note trembled in her grip. Four words written in void-touched ink glimmered in the dim light: She remembers. Bring her to me. Nyxia stood slowly, breath sharp in her chest as she looked toward the trees. Loque pressed against her hip, a low rumble rising in his throat. She swallowed once, tasting iron, and whispered the name she hadn't dared speak in years. "Ves'Sariel." The snow seemed to darken at the sound of it. She crushed the parchment in her fist, already turning, already moving. "If she's stirring again… we can't let another tragedy begin. Come on, Loque. We're going back."
—
The temple barely resembled the place Nyxia remembered. Once, moonlight had lived in these stones, threading silver across the walls and filling the air with quiet hymns. Now it felt like a wound that refused to close. Black-veined trees bowed under the weight of twisted banners, their leaves shriveled into brittle claws. Shattered statues of Elune lay half-buried in ash, replaced by unsettling effigies of Ves'Sariel, sculpted from writhing bone and stone, each with hollow sockets stuffed with mouths frozen mid-scream. Loque moved beside her like smoke with weight, the faint gleam of his spectral fur catching on wet patches of rot that clung to the pillars. A heartbeat pulsed under the floor, slow and sickly, shaking dust from the cracked ceiling.
The smell was worse than anything she'd faced in the field. Incense thick and sweet, mingled with the sour bite of decay and something older, something that stirred an instinct deep in her ribs telling her she didn't belong here anymore. Chanting drifted down the hall, low and guttural, every syllable vibrating like it was never meant for a mortal throat. Nyxia shifted into the shadows of a collapsed wall and peered into the atrium. A ring of warped elves knelt around a blood-drowned altar, their bodies twisted beyond recognition, limbs bent wrong, mouths torn wider so they could speak the void's tongue. One dragged a ribbon of its own intestines across the floor as if presenting an offering. At the center, a high acolyte stood with her face hidden behind flayed bone, breath fogging through the pale slats. "She comes," the acolyte rasped. "Make her bleed. Make her sing."
The ground erupted beneath Nyxia before she could draw breath. Hands shot through the stone, clawing for her legs. She rolled free, slicing through the nearest cultist's eye before its teeth reached her thigh. Hot black blood spattered across her armor. Loque slammed into another, tearing it apart at the waist with a crack of bone that echoed off the walls. From the shadows, a long-limbed figure lunged at her, its fingers curved like hooks. Nyxia ducked under its strike, seized its jaw, and ripped until it came away in her fist, the scream dying into a choking gurgle. She buried her dagger in its temple until the blade cracked through bone with a sharp snap. More shadows surged in. Loque's claws opened a chest like parchment, ribs peeling back, while Nyxia planted an arrow at close range into another's gut so deep it pinned the creature to a pillar. Blood sprayed her cheek as she twisted her dagger upward into the skull of the next attacker who got too close.
Soon the sanctum floor was a mosaic of limbs and spilled organs, the air vibrating with residual magic and the fading tremors of dying bodies. Nyxia stood panting, sweat stinging the cut on her cheek, as the chamber finally fell still. Behind the altar, a door creaked open, a whisper pulling her forward like a hand around her spine. Loque bristled at the threshold but she raised a hand. "Stay." Her voice was steady only because she forced it to be. The corridor breathed around her as she entered, the scent shifting between moonpetals and rot as if memories themselves were decaying in the air. She touched the frame of the prayer chamber door where her name had once been etched in druidic script. Gouged out now, violently, like someone wanted to erase her from the stone.
The sanctum opened before her and the sight made her stomach twist. It should have been ruined like everything else, yet it looked untouched. Marble gleamed under ghostlight, silver railings smooth and unbroken, but all of it smothered under black vines dripping a faint violet mist. The altar still stood. Something pulsed beneath it like a second heart. And standing atop the dais was Ves'Sariel, risen from memory and nightmare both. Her robes clung to her shape like liquid shadow, her hair cascading like starlight drowned in ink. Veins of living void pulsed beneath her skin. And around her throat hung the moonstone pendant. The one Nyxia once clasped for her after long nights on the balcony. "You still wear it," Nyxia whispered. Ves's head tilted slowly. "Of course. It's the only piece of you that didn't leave."
The silence between them rippled like water disturbed by something beneath. Nyxia stepped closer, heart pounding with something raw and confused. Ves's voice dropped into something almost tender. "I warned them not to hurt you. But hunger has its own will. They believed killing you would quiet me." Nyxia's jaw tightened, the ache in her scar pulling. "You're twisted. You chose this." Ves's gaze shimmered, not angry, just unbearably full. "I chose vision. I asked Elune to speak and only heard silence. But the Void answered with truth." Nyxia swallowed, the grief thickening in her throat. "I tried to save you," she said. Ves's expression softened painfully. "And I begged you to stay." Nyxia stepped back as if struck. "You begged me to follow you into madness." Ves's eyes darkened with an emotion too complex to name. "Then let me show you."
Before Nyxia could move, voidlight curled from Ves's fingers and wrapped around her head like smoke given intent. The world shifted. She stood in the old sanctum, unbroken, moonlight shimmering across polished stone. Ves knelt at the altar, hands clasped, praying with the quiet focus Nyxia remembered from years ago. But the silence around her felt wrong, hollow. Then a whisper seeped through the air like a breath against her ear. You are chosen. A star flickered out through the window. Shadows crawled along Ves's arms as she reached toward the light. When the darkness touched her, she didn't flinch. She welcomed it. A wounded sister ran into the room, begging for help. Ves raised her hand and voidlight spilled forth. The woman's wounds sealed instantly then twisted, bones warping, her scream spiraling into something inhuman. Ves watched her, almost serene, and smiled faintly as if finally understanding her purpose.
Nyxia wrenched herself back into her body, bile crawling up her throat as she fell to her knees. "You butchered them," she whispered, shaking. Ves stepped close, the vines drawing back for her like obedient servants. "I saved them," she murmured. "I freed them from the silence." Nyxia looked up, eyes burning. "You infected them. You infected everything." Ves's face crumpled in a way that hurt more than rage. "You think I forgot us? Do you know how many nights I reached for your voice? Your scent?" Nyxia's heart twisted painfully. "And I watched you change into something I couldn't follow." The distance between them felt impossibly small and impossibly vast. Ves leaned in, her breath cool against Nyxia's ear. "When the stars fall, you'll remember the taste of me."
The vines slid aside as Ves walked away without looking back, her steps soft, robes trailing mist. "You'll stay," she murmured. "Until you understand what it means to be chosen." The door closed with a quiet finality. Nyxia stayed kneeling on the cold stone, hands trembling, the scent of moonpetals and rot clinging to her like a bruise.