– Hope Dellacrox

  "Oh god of flames, of warmth and comfort, I beseech thee... light my way. Drive back the creatures of the abyss."

  The prayer tumbled from Hope’s cracked lips in a breathless, bloody rhythm. She dragged her ruined leg through the suffocating dark of the Shadow Forest, her fingers wrapped in a death grip around the brass handle of her lamp. It was her Lamparina—her lifeline. The amber light flared with the frantic cadence of her heartbeat, pushing back the encroaching shadows just enough to keep her from tripping over the gnarled, rot-slick roots.

  The heat of the magic numbed the agony in her shredded thigh, but it was a fleeting mercy. Her body was a fraying rope on the verge of snapping. Her leather boots were shredded, the soles flapping, her skin scraping raw against the unforgiving forest floor.

  But panic was a loud, drowning static in her skull. And louder still was the laughter.

  It wasn't a howl. It wasn't a roar. It was a shrill, bone-scraping chattering that echoed from the canopy above and the brush behind her. The Nightwalkers were hunting her, and they found her struggle hilarious.

  Her knee finally gave out.

  Hope collapsed against the rough bark of an ancient oak, her chest heaving, her lungs burning with the taste of damp earth and ozone. The lamp’s flame sputtered, shrinking into a pathetic, trembling ember. The shadows immediately rushed in, an infinite, hungry emptiness pressing against her skin.

  With a trembling left hand, she drew her dagger. The steel was chipped, the edge dull. She let out a wet, hysterical cough of a laugh.

  "A broken dagger against a pack of Nightwalkers," she rasped, wiping a mix of sweat and blood from her eyes with the back of her wrist. "Skins like ironwood... yeah, this will go well."

  She dragged in a ragged breath, the cold air slicing her throat. "This doesn't make sense. The Endless Night wasn't supposed to fall for another three months."

  The laughter stopped.

  The silence that followed was infinitely worse.

  At the very edge of her dying lamplight, a massive silhouette pulled itself from the gloom. The Nightwalker dropped to its knuckles like a grotesque, oversized primate, looming nearly three meters tall. Its gray skin hung in thick, leathery folds, abrasive as grinding stones. Three thick, fleshy tentacles twitched atop its skull, tasting the air. Its jaw unhinged into a horrific, ear-to-ear smile, revealing rows of needle-pointed teeth dripping with a viscous black venom. Above that nightmare grin, yellow crocodile eyes locked onto her.

  Hope thought, her pulse thundering in her ears,

  The beast took a slow, deliberate knuckle-step into her circle of light. It was playing with its food.

  "Right," Hope spat, her fear crystallizing into a bitter, suicidal defiance. "The Forge's power wanes in the Endless Night. But if I'm dying here, you ugly bastard, I'm making you choke on me."

  She forced her screaming muscles to lift the lamp one last time. She didn't whisper the incantation; she screamed it from the bottom of her bleeding lungs.

  "O Forge! I borrow the flames that wrought the chaos-reaping sword! Let these fires forge the death of my enemy!"

  Hope hurled the lamp straight at the creature's feet.

  The glass shattered. The dying ember exploded into a blinding, roaring column of liquid fire. The flames twisted, hardening into the colossal, glowing shape of a blacksmith’s hammer. It swung in a brutal arc, smashing into the Nightwalker's skull with the force of a falling meteor.

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  The shockwave blasted Hope backward into the tree, ringing her ears, while the concussive force leveled the brush around her. The forest went dead silent.

  Hope slumped, totally drained. The adrenaline vanished, leaving only a hollow, heavy cold.

  she thought, a sad, resigned smile pulling at her mouth. She was just a Lamparina who wanted to be a Storyteller.

  The smoke cleared.

  The Nightwalker stood in the crater. Half its face was a scorched, bubbling ruin, but its yellow eyes burned with renewed, furious malice. The superficial burns only pissed it off. It unhinged its jaw, and that shrill, mocking laughter started again.

  Hope let her eyes slide shut. She was out of magic, out of strength, out of time. She waited for the tearing of teeth.

  It never came.

  Instead, a sickening, wet ripped through the air—the heavy sound of steel parting dense muscle and bone. Then came a horrific, gurgling shriek of absolute agony.

  Hope forced her heavy eyelids open.

  A stark, freezing blue flame hovered in the space where the monster had been. she wondered dimly.

  Through the blur of exhaustion, the chaos resolved into focus. The giant Nightwalker was a heap of severed meat on the forest floor, thick black blood pumping furiously from the stump of its neck. Standing over the corpse was not a god, but a woman.

  She was a tapestry of violence. Her pale skin was a canvas of thick, raised scars. She wore the battered remnants of silver armor—a crooked breastplate that left her bare to the cold air, drenched in fresh, dark gore. In her hands, she casually twirled a strange polearm. One end was a deadly, curved blade dripping black ichor; the other ended in a distinct iron semicircle framing an ancient, chained book.

  A crow. A book. Floating just above the woman's shoulder was the source of the light: a perfectly spherical, cold blue flame. It flared brightly, sweeping away the shadows and revealing four more Nightwalkers circling the clearing, their hands thrown over their sensitive yellow eyes, hissing at the sudden brilliance.

  "Forge?" Hope breathed, her voice barely a whisper.

  The scarred woman slowly turned her head. One eye was a piercing, vibrant blue; the other was a dead, milky gray. Her expression was utterly empty, like a corpse forced to walk the earth.

  "Forge," the woman repeated. Her voice was a low, gravelly scrape that sounded like two stones grinding together. "In two hundred years, that is the first time anyone has mistaken me for a false god."

  Before Hope could process the blasphemy, the Nightwalkers recovered. With synchronized shrieks, they lunged.

  The woman—Scars—didn't flinch. She flowed.

  As the first beast swung a massive, clawed fist, Scars vaulted lightly into the air, planting her steel boot off the creature's extended forearm. She vaulted over its head, driving the blade of her spear cleanly through its skull from above. She landed softly on the other side, already spinning.

  To Hope, it looked like a lethal, impossible dance. Scars was a phantom of butchery. She ducked under a sweeping tentacle, her blade moving in tight, economic arcs that severed limbs as easily as a scythe through wheat. These creatures had skin like ironwood, yet Scars was dismantling them piece by piece, her face locked in total, terrifying boredom.

  She was the predator. They were just meat.

  But the rhythm broke.

  As Scars pivoted to execute the third beast, a fourth launched itself from the upper branches of a dead pine. It slammed into her blind side.

  The impact sounded like a cannon shot. Scars was thrown through the air, her spine crashing violently against the trunk of a massive tree. All the air left her lungs in a sharp hiss. She hit the ground hard, her weapon skittering just out of reach.

  If some idiot Lamparina hadn't blundered into the deepest part of the Shadow Forest screaming prayers and throwing fire, Scars thought viciously as she tasted copper, she would be setting up camp right now.

  The largest Nightwalker charged the downed warrior, its jaws snapping wide to crush her skull.

  Hope felt the world fading, her vision tunneling into blackness, but a sudden, violent surge of desperate energy seized her heart. She couldn't let her savior die.

  She reached deep into the well of her soul, bypassing her drained magic reserves and pulling directly from her life force—incurring a fatal Debt. Blood poured from Hope's nose, hot and thick.

  Hope screamed, her vocal cords tearing.

  A wall of white-hot fire erupted from the earth between Scars and the charging beast. The monster shrieked, skidding backward as the flames singed its flesh, buying Scars the precious seconds she needed to roll, grip her spear, and regain her feet.

  The remaining beast turned its fury toward the source of the fire. It locked its yellow eyes on Hope and charged.

  Hope didn't even try to move. The fire spell had burned out the very last spark of her existence. The roaring of the flames faded, replaced by a deep, ringing silence. The dark canopy above blurred into a sea of gray, and then, into nothing at all.

  She slipped into the void, leaving her life, her dreams of being a Storyteller, and her bleeding body entirely in the hands of the scarred stranger.