The Interstice breathed around him like a dying lung.
Floating islands of black stone drifted in a green storm that devoured itself. Lightning without thunder crawled across the void, illuminating monuments older than sin: ribcages the size of cathedrals, frozen screams carved into obsidian, rivers of blood that flowed upward into the cannibal clouds.
Grimm walked the narrowing causeway of stone toward the lone figure waiting on the final island.
Anabel.
She was already breaking. Black antlers tore through the skin of her forehead, curling like frozen flame. Her spine bowed backward with wet cracks as her torso split open, ribs flowering to cradle a heart of bleeding ice. Wings—broken, leathery, still dripping afterbirth—shuddered from her shoulder blades. The stench hit him like a wall: rotting meat, frozen pine, and the copper reek of a thousand opened throats.
Grimm stopped ten paces away. The Wraith-Breaker rose level with her absent face.
"You chased a god," he said, voice flat as a grave. "Now it wears you."
Anabel's head snapped toward him. Where eyes had been, only black voids remained. Her answer came as a psychic blade straight into his skull.
I am the god now, rider. Bow, or starve forever.
Grimm pulled the trigger.
The bullet took her dead-center in the sternum. Ice exploded outward. Her body jerked, staggered—and toppled backward off the edge.
Silence.
Grimm turned to leave.
Behind him, the void screamed.
A column of green lightning punched upward from the abyss. Something vast rose on shattered wings, hooves scraping stone that wasn't there a moment before. Eight feet of bone-plate and starving flesh. A woman's silhouette stretched into nightmare: split chest gaping around a bleeding heart of ice, talons long as swords, demon wings torn and dripping, face nothing but a smooth elk-skull mask with black sockets weeping frost.
The Wendigo opened its ribcage wide and inhaled. The stench of a million graves flooded the Interstice.
Grimm's coat billowed as the wind tried to drag him into that maw.
He smiled—small, tired, terrible.
"In the mortal realm I wear chains," he said, rolling his shoulders. "Here?" Black smoke poured from his sleeves, coiling into the shape of a six-foot scythe—its blade forged from the same void that once remade him. "Here I am unbound."
On mortal soil the void's gifts were chained; here, in the space between heartbeats, they were law.
Black smoke answered his will, coalescing into the six-foot scythe he had carried dormant in his soul. The true shape of the Wraith-Breaker finally broke free of the lies of iron and rune, forged in G'norr's gloom when the void first remade him.
The Wendigo shrieked and dove.
The fight was no longer human.
They collided like collapsing stars. Talons met scythe in a shower of green sparks and black blood. Grimm carved a wing from its socket; the severed limb spiraled away into the void, still beating. The Wendigo answered by driving its frozen heart forward like a spear—Grimm twisted aside, the icy shards grazing his cheek and flash-freezing the blood there. He spun the scythe in a blur, opening her from hip to shoulder. Black viscera rained upward into the storm.
She screamed in a thousand stolen voices.
He answered with G'norr's own tongue—words that tore holes in reality. The scythe drank her essence with every cut.
Again and again the blade fell. A leg severed at the knee. An arm torn free at the elbow. The last wing ripped away in a storm of membrane and bone.
The Wendigo collapsed to the stone, a quivering torso impaled on its own broken ribs, heart pulsing frantically in the open cage.
Grimm stood over her.
"Anabel of the North," he said, voice soft as falling snow, "I claim your wicked soul for reaping."
The scythe rose high.
It came down like the end of the world.
The blade punched through the frozen heart and kept going—through stone, through the island itself. Green fire exploded outward. The Interstice screamed as reality tore along the seams.
Cracks of pure white light spider-webbed across the void. Islands crumbled into dust. The cannibal clouds howled and devoured themselves into silence.
Grimm wrenched the scythe free and ran.
Behind him, a black archway yawned open—G'norr's door.
He dove through as the Interstice collapsed into a single, soundless implosion of green and black.
He landed hard on blood-slick marble.
The throne room.
Silence, save for the wet sobbing of something that had once been Jack.
The prince—no, the thing Jack had become—lay broken at the foot of the ruined throne. Fur sloughed from his bones in wet strips; antlers cracked and fell away like burnt branches. His kingdom was ash outside the windows. Dawn bled pale across a city of corpses.
Jack looked up. His eyes were human again—green, wet, and ruined.
"Kill me," he whispered. "Please… I did this. I wanted more and I killed them all."
Grimm looked down at the ruined thing that had been a prince—half man, half scar tissue, the curse broken but the hunger etched forever in his bones.
G'norr's voice echoed, soft as rot, "End his suffering. Bind him to me. One more soul."
Grimm stepped over the prince without a word. The will does not bend—even when the flesh screams for release. He walked away, his silence earth-shattering as he stepped over the weeping prince, boots crunching on frozen blood and shattered bone, and walked out of the palace without looking back.
Outside, the wind had died. Snow began to fall—clean, indifferent, already covering the bodies.
Grimm put two fingers to his lips and whistled—one low, mournful note.
Hoofbeats answered from the ruin. The pale horse emerged from the smoke, eyes black as forgiveness refused.
Grimm mounted.
In the courtyard, the same black archway shimmered into existence—exactly as it had the day he sold his soul.
G'norr's voice purred through the marrow of the world, satisfied at last.
The archway widened. Three small piles of ash stirred in the dark, shaped like a woman and two children. A wind that was not wind scattered them forever. G'norr's laughter was the only homecoming he received.
Grimm looked once at the horizon—where dawn was trying, and failing, to warm a dead kingdom.
Then he spurred the horse forward.
The archway swallowed them both.
Behind him, the snow kept falling, erasing footprints, erasing names, erasing everything but the echo of a single, ancient truth carried on the wind:
The flesh weakens. The will does not.
END.