After a minute of running, Torin had to stop.
His chest heaved, his breath steaming in the cold air, his heart pounding loud enough to drown out everything else. He stood in the middle of the fog, axe held low, ears straining for any sound that would tell him which way K'hila had gone.
Nothing. Just the wind. Just the creak of trees. Just the thick, suffocating silence of the fog.
He'd lost her.
Torin's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. He forced himself to breathe. Forced himself to think. Running blind through unfamiliar woods in weather that turned the world into a white wall was just as likely to get him further from her as it was to get him closer.
Moreover...
His hand tightened on his axe.
Something was out there.
He felt it before he saw it. That same cold pressure against his skin, that same weight in the air. But there was something else now. Movement. A shape in the fog, shifting, sliding, coming closer.
Torin's eyes narrowed, scanning the whiteness. His grip shifted on the axe, ready. Whatever this thing was, it was big. Fast, too—he could hear it moving, a soft rustling that didn't match any animal he'd ever tracked.
It was circling him. Or maybe just... passing through. Moving with a purpose that didn't seem to include him.
It was searching. Just like he was.
For K'hila, Torin realized. It's hunting her.
His eyes finally caught the silhouette. Tall. Thin. Moving through the fog like a fish through dark water, all smooth curves and unnatural angles. The shape swayed as it moved—left and right, not up and down, like nothing with legs should sway.
Something coiled beneath it, long and sinuous, propelling it forward without any sound Torin could identify.
Could this be the monster K'hila spoke of? The thing that had been hunting her for months?
Torin's feet planted wider. His axe came up. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't getting past him to get to her.
The creature moved closer. Close enough now for Torin to see it through the fog, and for a moment—just a moment—his mind refused to process what his eyes were telling it.
It had the face of a woman. An ugly woman, the kind that appeared in children's nightmares and old stories told around fires. The skin was pale, bluish, stretched tight over sharp bones. The eyes were pale blue too, almost white, with pupils that were little more than slits. They fixed on Torin without blinking, without any expression Torin could read.
The lips were thin and black, pulled back just enough to reveal teeth that were too sharp, too many, rows of them packed into a mouth that shouldn't have been able to close.
It had no hair. Instead, its head was crowned with something that might have been bone or might have been something else—a ridged crest that extended upward and back, splitting into four horns that curved like a crown of thorns.
Below the face, the body was worse.
Four arms. Long, thin, jointed in ways that didn't make sense. Each arm ended in a hand with three fingers, and each finger was more claw than digit, black and curved and sharp enough to gut a man with a single swipe. The arms moved constantly, twitching, flexing, never still, like spiders legs testing the air.
No legs. Below the torso, where hips should have been, the creature's body tapered into a long, serpentine tail covered in scales that gleamed dully in the fog. It coiled and uncoiled beneath the thing, supporting its weight, moving it forward with a fluid grace that was somehow worse than if it had been clumsy.
Torin's expression darkened as the pieces clicked into place.
A harvester.
He'd read about them in the College's libraries, in the sections Phinis Gestor had pointed him toward when he'd asked about the more dangerous denizens of Oblivion. The tomes had been old, their pages brittle, their illustrations crude but accurate.
He'd studied them out of academic curiosity, never expecting to actually face one.
But here it was. In the flesh. In the fog.
Harvesters were rare, even among Daedra. They weren't like the common vermin that crawled out of Oblivion's cracks—the scamps and clannfears that any half-competent mage could call upon and exile at their whim. Harvesters were something else entirely.
They were strong, yes, with bodies that could shrug off blows that would shatter mortal bones. Swift too, faster than anything that size had any right to be.
But the real danger wasn't their claws or their speed. It was what they did with souls.
Necromancers, every last one of them. Specialists in manipulation of the dead and the almost-dead. They could tear a soul from a living body with a touch, bind it to their will, make it serve them long after the flesh had rotted away.
And the souls they collected? Those didn't go to whatever afterlife they'd earned. They went to Molag Bal, the King of Rape, the Lord of Domination, who had a hoard of collected souls so vast that even the other Princes looked at him sideways.
The Harvester before him grinned, its black lips pulling back from those rows of needle teeth. The expression was hideous—too wide, too knowing, too pleased with itself. Its pale eyes fixed on Torin's face, and something in them gleamed.
"What beautiful, knowing eyes," it hissed. The voice was wrong—too many layers, like several voices speaking at once, some high and some low, all of them hungry. "Yessss.... I will eat them and taste the secrets behind them with every chew."
It lowered its torso, coiling its long tail beneath it like a serpent preparing to strike. The four arms folded close to its body, claws clicking against each other, that horrible grin never wavering.
"I will eat them!"
The creature launched itself forward like a serpentine bullet, its tail propelling it across the ground faster than Torin's eyes could track. The fog tore apart in its wake, and for a moment all he could see was that pale face, those dead eyes, those claws reaching for his throat.
Torin didn't hesitate.
Magicka surged through his arm, down into the axe, into the runes etched into the blade. The weapon hummed with power, lightning dancing along its edge, and he hurled it with every ounce of strength he had.
The axe spun through the air, trailing sparks, aimed straight at the Harvester's chest.
The creature didn't flinch. Didn't try to dodge. Its four arms came up, crossing in front of its face, and spectral gauntlets materialized around each hand—glowing, translucent things that looked like solid light and sounded like grinding stone.
The axe hit.
The impact was thunderous. Lightning exploded outward, forking into the fog, illuminating the clearing in brief, stark flashes. The Harvester's eyes went wide—really wide, the pupils dilating, the pale irises shrinking to thin rings around sudden black voids.
Its arms buckled. Its tail slapped against the ground, once, twice, trying to find purchase, trying to push back.
The axe would not move.
Torin poured more magicka into the Telekinesis spell, his hand outstretched, his fingers curled like claws. The axe pressed forward, inch by inch, the spectral gauntlets cracking under the pressure. Lightning danced across the Harvester's arms, blackening the pale skin, making its teeth clench so hard Torin could hear them grinding.
The creature hissed—a sound of pure, unfiltered rage.
It wrenched two of its arms free from the axe's assault, the gauntlets shattering into fragments of light. Its claws spread wide, fingers splayed, and from each palm bloomed a sphere of blue flame. Cold fire. Soul fire. The kind that didn't burn flesh so much as the thing inside it.
The Harvester's other two arms kept the axe at bay, trembling with the effort, the remaining gauntlets spiderwebbed with cracks. But its eyes were on Torin now, and its grin had returned.
Torin raised an eyebrow and returned the grin.
Without a word, he reached deep into the axe—into the enchantment coiled there like a sleeping serpent—and pulled every scrap of stored magicka stored withing. All of it, released at once.
The axe exploded.
Lightning erupted outward in a blinding corona, white-hot arcs of power tearing through the fog, illuminating the clearing like noon sun.
The Harvester's eyes went wide—those pale, dead eyes finally showing something that might have been fear—and then it was flying, its serpentine body tumbling end over end, its arms flailing, its tail whipping uselessly at the air.
It disappeared into the fog with a shriek that was cut short by distance.
But it didn't go whole.
One of its arms—the left one, the one that had been holding the axe in place—lay on the frost-hardened ground, twitching. The fingers still curled and uncurled, claws scraping at the dirt, even though the limb had been severed clean at the elbow.
Black blood oozed from the wound, thick and wrong, pooling in the frost and steaming in the cold air.
Torin called the axe back to his hand. The haft slapped into his palm, warm despite the explosion, the runes along the blade still glowing faintly. He didn't have time to admire it.
His left hand came up, palm forward, and he pushed. Telekinetic energy rippled out from him in a wave, scattering the fog like chaff before the wind, revealing the clearing in stark, unforgiving light.
No Harvester.
The ground where it had landed was torn up, frost scattered, dead leaves flattened into a rough impression of its body. But the creature itself was gone. The blood trail led a few feet, then stopped—cut off, like someone had simply erased it from existence.
Torin's eyes narrowed.
He began to turn, slowly, scanning the fog at the edges of the clearing, his ears straining for any sound that would tell him where the thing had gone. His free hand moved, fingers weaving the familiar pattern, drawing magicka from the reservoir in his chest.
The Ebonyflesh spell settled over him like a second skin, dark and hard, the color of ore freshly pulled from the earth.
Just in time.
The Harvester hit him like a falling tree.
It came from above—how, Torin didn't know, couldn't process—its serpentine body slamming into him with enough force to drive him back a step, then another.
Its remaining three arms wrapped around him, claws digging for purchase, finding none. Its tail coiled around his legs, his torso, squeezing, crushing, trying to lock his limbs in place.
Its mouth opened wide—wider than any mouth should open—rows of needle teeth gleaming in the dim light, and it lunged for his shoulder.
Teeth met ebony-hard skin.
The sound was like stone breaking. The Harvester's fangs shattered on impact, shards of enamel spraying into the fog, black blood welling from its torn gums. It made a sound—a wet, choking noise, half surprise and half agony—and its grip loosened somewhat.
Torin didn't move. Didn't struggle. Didn't try to break free. He wove another spell.
Gigantize.
The magic flowed through him like water finding a riverbed, natural, easy. He'd cast this spell a hundred times, a thousand, and his body knew what to do before his mind even finished the thought.
He grew.
Not slowly. Not gradually. In a rush, a surge, his frame expanding outward, his shoulders broadening, his arms lengthening, his legs driving down into the earth like tree roots.
The Harvester's coils, which had been tight a moment before, suddenly found themselves stretched thin. Its arms, wrapped around his chest, began to slip. Its tail, wound around his legs, began to loosen.
It tried to tighten its grip. Tried to squeeze harder, hold on, keep him restrained. But Torin kept growing, kept expanding, and the creature's grasp was like a child's hands around a grown man's wrist—useless.
The Harvester hissed, its ruined mouth dripping black blood, its remaining teeth bared in frustrated rage. It let go, unwinding its body, trying to slither back into the fog where it could regroup, could strike again from somewhere he wasn't looking.
Torin's hand shot out.
His reach was twice what it had been. His palm was the size of a dinner plate, his fingers like iron bars. He grabbed the back of the Harvester's head—that bony, horned crest—and his fingers closed around it like a vice.
The creature went rigid.
Its remaining arms flailed, claws scrabbling at his wrist, leaving scratches on the ebony-hard skin that healed almost as fast as they appeared. Its tail whipped back and forth, trying to find leverage, trying to find something to strike.
Its mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, a fish out of water, black blood dripping from its shattered teeth.
Torin held it there. Suspended. Helpless.
Its pale eyes met his.
And for the first time, Torin saw something he recognized in those inhuman eyes. Something human.
Fear.
...
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