The mist in the Deadlands was not like the mist in the valley. It was heavy. It tasted of copper.
Macus was lost. He had strayed from the supply line to harvest a patch of rare grave-moss, and the fog had swallowed the road.
"Captain?" he whispered. "Caelthon?"
Silence.
Then, the sound of footsteps. Soft. Rhythmic. Macus froze. He crouched behind a jagged boulder, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Check the signs, his mind whispered. He peered around the stone.
A figure was walking down the old King’s Road. It was not a soldier. It was not a scout. It was a woman. She wore a dark dress that seemed to drink the light. She walked with a slow, drifting grace, her hands clasped lightly in front of her.
She was humming a melody that had no tune.
Macus stopped breathing. He recognized her. Not from a briefing. Not from a report. He recognized her from the nursery rhyme book he still kept in his pack.
The Pale Bride.
She was exactly like the illustration, only... terrifyingly real. Her skin was porcelain white, flawless and unblemished. Her hair was a cascade of winter frost.
She was beautiful.
The thought struck Macus with the force of a physical blow. It was an intrusive, illogical fact. She shouldn't be beautiful. Monsters were supposed to be twisted. They were supposed to be wrong. But she looked like a doll that had been breathed into life by a lonely god.
She paused. She turned her head slightly, her cloudy-gray eyes scanning the mist. They were empty. Voids.
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Macus pressed himself into the mud, squeezing his eyes shut. Don't look at me. Don't look at me. He remembered the rhyme. She waves her stick, and the mountains crack. She reaps the soul to feed the void.
Suddenly, the footsteps changed. The rhythm broke. Macus risked a glance. Maeve had stopped. She was looking directly at the boulder.
Slowly, with terrifying deliberation, she took a step toward him. The mud squelched under her boot—a wet, sucking sound that roared in the silence.
Macus bit his tongue to keep from screaming. She took another step. She was close enough that he could see the intricate lace of her collar.
Then, just as abruptly, she stopped. She tilted her head, as if listening to a sound Macus couldn't hear, and turned back to the road. She didn't have her staff. She was just... strolling. A creature of mass destruction taking a morning walk.
After an eternity, the footsteps faded. Macus let out a shuddering breath. He was shaking. He had seen the enemy. And the terrifying truth wasn't that she was a monster.
It was that she looked like a masterpiece.
"There you are."
The voice was a cold breath against the back of his neck. Macus didn't spin. He froze, his senses overwhelmed not by the stench of rot, but by a sudden, faint scent of lavender. He turned his head slowly.
Maeve was standing directly behind him. She was impossibly close, possessing no concept of personal space. Her porcelain face was inches from his own. Macus looked into her cloudy-gray eyes and felt a sudden, terrifying vertigo—as if his soul was being pulled loose from his ribs, ready to be inhaled into the void of her gaze.
She didn't blink. She studied him, her nose almost brushing his, analyzing the terror in his pupils.
Macus looked back. He forced his internal lock to hold. He presented her with nothing but a gray, analytical reflection.
Maeve tilted her head. She searched his eyes and found no heat. No soul to reap. Just a mirror of her own emptiness.
"Curious," she whispered, the word vibrating in the small space between them. "You are already hollow."
She straightened up, losing interest in a vessel that appeared to be empty.
"I shall take your soul another time," she decided. "When it has ripened."
The soul-pulling sensation vanished as she straightened up.
She turned and walked away into the mist, fading for real this time, leaving Macus alone in the mud, shivering from the cold his heart has trained himself to be.
