"More than two hundred years have passed, and I can still hear their screams. I can still see their fear-stricken faces. They offered us salvation, and in return, we became their apex predators." — Scars

  Scars walked deeper into the Shadow Forest, leaving the stench of the terrified village miles behind her.

  A sudden, unnatural rustle in the dense brush ahead made her stop. Like the heavy iron gears of a siege engine locking into place, her mind shifted effortlessly from wandering into hunting. Her senses sharpened, dialing down the ambient hum of the wind and the distant chirping of insects, isolating the heavy, erratic rhythm of something large breathing just beyond the tree line. Her movements smoothed out, becoming deliberate and silent.

  She parted the ferns with the tip of her broken spear. Fifty yards away stood a massive adult brown bear.

  Scars thought pragmatically.

  But as the beast shifted, her sky-blue eye caught a sickening detail. The bear’s massive flank was torn open by four perfectly parallel, deep claw marks. Instead of crimson blood, a thick, luminescent green fluid oozed from the lacerations. The flesh around the wounds was already black and necrotic. The bear’s breathing was a wet, ragged wheeze, and its eyes were clouded with a watery, jaundiced yellow.

  Scars’ grip tightened on her weapon.

  Butterflies—grotesque, apex horrors of the Abyss—didn't expand their hunting grounds unless a turf war forced them out, or the Endless Night was falling. But the Endless Night wasn't due for another three months.

  There was only one reason a creature survived a Butterfly attack: it was being used as an incubator. The beast was carrying larvae.

  Before Scars could decide her next move, the wind shifted. The bear’s ruined nose twitched. It caught the overwhelming stench of the Nightstalker gore still painted across Scars’ bare torso and face. The Nightstalker blood was an excellent deterrent for normal predators, but it had the unfortunate side effect of terrifying everything else in the woods.

  The bear bolted. It ran in the opposite direction with explosive, unnatural velocity.

  Scars broke into a sprint. Normally, running down a bear in dense woods was simple geometry and endurance. But this bear was tearing through the underbrush with the speed of a panicked racehorse.

  It confirmed her darkest suspicion. The human—or animal—body possesses natural physical limiters to prevent muscles from tearing themselves apart off the bone. When an Abyssal larva infects a host, its primary defense mechanism is to sever those limiters, flooding the host with agonizing, suicidal strength to ensure the parasite's survival.

  Scars let out a dry, breathless laugh as she vaulted a rotting log. The irony was exhausting: the larva's defense mechanism was to destroy the host's.

  The bear was pulling away, but its massive, careless bulk left a trail a blind man could follow. Scars looked down at the splintered, damaged shaft of her spear.

  She was losing ground. She had just finished paying off her last spiritual debt to clear her conscience, and now, the forest was forcing her to open a new line of credit.

  To break the boundaries of mortal limits, one could borrow power. But the gods of this world were cruel bankers. They offered contracts—future debts paid in blood, servitude, or pieces of the soul. The greater the power, the heavier the chains.

  Scars closed her eyes as she ran, her lips moving in a rapid, desperate whisper.

  "You are the end and the beginning. From you, disorder was born, just as Order was born. Another bears the name of the wind, but even the father of hurricanes originated from your breath. I beg you to lend the power stolen by false gods. This poor soul, wandering the path of chaos, offers a debt in exchange for dominion over the gale."

  A sharp, stabbing pain spiked behind her left eye. The milky gray iris shifted, swirling into a vibrant, glowing light green.

  Instantly, the weight of the world vanished. Her steel boots no longer sank into the mud. Her footsteps fell completely silent. The pores of her skin drank in the shifting air currents, mapping the forest around her in a three-dimensional web of pressure and breeze.

  She surged forward, the wind pushing violently against her back, propelling her until she was closing the gap with terrifying speed.

  She raised her spear and hurled it. The blade sank deep into the back of the bear’s thick neck. The beast didn't even stumble. It kept running, the spear jutting from its spine like a gruesome metal spine.

  Scars reached out her open hand toward the fleeing weapon and commanded her fingers to close. The wind answered. An invisible tether of localized atmospheric pressure locked onto the shaft of the spear. The weapon jerked backward, tearing violently at the bear's neck muscles, but the beast's unnatural strength held it fast.

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  Instead of the spear flying back to her, the sheer tension caught Scars. The wind slingshotted her entirely off the ground. She flew through the air, trailing the stench of blood, hurtling straight at the raging animal.

  She grabbed the embedded spear shaft with both hands right as she collided with the bear's back. Hanging off the side of the massive creature, her muscles screamed under the strain. She dragged her steel boots down, digging her heels deep into the earth to act as an anchor. Using the bear's own terrifying momentum against it, she twisted her torso, using the spear shaft as a lever.

  The colossal weight of the bear lifted off the ground. It arced directly over Scars’ head, the wooden shaft of her spear bending in her hands with a sickening crack.

  With a final, explosive surge of strength, she hurled the beast. The bear slammed sideways into a thick pine tree. The impact was deafening. The trunk splintered and crashed toward Scars, who threw herself backward into the mud just as the timber pulverized the earth where she had been standing.

  Scars lay there for a second, her chest heaving.

  Her arm muscles felt like they had been dipped in acid. The wind magic receded, leaving her body heavier and more exhausted than before. She looked down at her right hand. She was holding the bottom half of her spear—the end with the heavy iron ring and the chained book. The blade half was still buried in the bear.

  "Seems our history together ends here," she murmured to the broken wood.

  She forced herself to her feet, ignoring the screaming protests of her torn ligaments. She approached the fallen tree, looking for the front half of her weapon.

  Without warning, the timber exploded outward. The bear lunged.

  Its hind legs were utterly crushed, but its front claws dragged its massive bulk forward. It threw its weight onto Scars, pinning her legs beneath its paralyzed half. Its jaws snapped wide, lunging straight for her exposed throat.

  Scars threw her right arm up. The bear's teeth clamped down violently on the thick steel vambrace protecting her forearm. The metal groaned and buckled under the impossible pressure, the sharp points of the beast's teeth piercing the steel and sinking deep into her flesh.

  Scars howled, a raw, primal sound of pure agony.

  With her left hand, she gripped the splintered, jagged end of her broken spear shaft and drove it squarely into the bear's right eye.

  The animal thrashed, trying to pull its head back, but her trapped right arm kept it tethered to her. Trapped. Bleeding.

  "JUST DIE!" Scars roared.

  She let go of the wood, grabbed the bear's ruined jaw with her free hand to hold the skull steady, and shoved her right hand—armor, blood, and all—deeper against the splintered wood, driving the jagged stake through the ocular cavity and straight into the brain.

  The bear stiffened, let out a wet gurgle, and collapsed, its massive weight deadening across her chest.

  It took Scars several agonizing minutes to wriggle out from beneath the corpse. She lay in the mud, staring up through the canopy. The sky wasn't just getting dark; it was turning an absolute, unnatural pitch-black. The clouds were swallowing the daylight entirely. The Endless Night wasn't early. It was already here.

  Scars rolled over. She crawled to the bear's flank and grabbed the blade of her spear, yanking it free from the spine. Using the sharp edge, she ruthlessly dug into the necrotic, green-oozing wounds on the beast's side, carving through the fat and muscle until she found it.

  The larva was the size of two human hands pressed together. It was a writhing, smooth white cylinder, entirely featureless save for a massive, perfectly round maw lined with hundreds of razor-sharp, rotating teeth. It snapped blindly, trying to latch onto her fingers.

  Scars grabbed it with the hand that was already bleeding from the bear's bite. She squeezed. The worm let out a piercing, high-pitched shriek before it popped in her grip like a grotesque blister, showering her hand in acidic green fluid. She dropped the twitching husk onto the dead bear.

  "I'm no priest," she muttered, wiping the slime on her pants, "but I can't risk another one of you waking this thing up."

  She closed her right eye.

  The physical world fell away, replaced by the spirit realm visible only to her left eye. The forest transformed into a faint, ethereal sketch. The trees and rocks were mere outlines, faded prisons holding the dim echoes of what they once were. Living things, however, were vibrant, free-floating flames.

  The dead bear's essence should have been fading, returning to the earth. Instead, it was burning with a thick, putrid black flame. It was consuming the space around it like an oil fire. Hidden deep within that black inferno, Scars saw a dozen smaller, intensely dark points of light. More larvae. Just looking at the concentrated Abyssal corruption made her left eye burn and her skull throb.

  She didn't have the magical reagents to cleanse a corruption this deep. If she left it, the corpse would birth a hive within days.

  "You," she said to the empty air.

  She opened her right eye and looked toward the splintered stump of the pine tree. Perched atop the ruined wood was a creature of pure, silver essence. It held the shape of a large owl, but its eyes were impossible—the sclera was pitch black, and the irises were pools of liquid silver, reflecting a light that didn't exist in the forest.

  It was a fragment of the true Moon.

  Scars slowly lowered herself to her knees, bowing her head before the pale avian.

  "I, Scars... I, who have forgotten the name I was given," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly with the weight of the pact. "I wish to solicit a mutual exchange. I offer you a fragment of my story. I offer you my true self. In return, I ask for your strength during this Endless Night. Be my companion. Help me prevent the Abyss from consuming this world."

  The owl blinked its silver eyes.

  The suffocating smell of rot and Nightwalker blood vanished. The cold mud beneath her knees disappeared.

  Scars opened her eyes.

  She was kneeling on the surface of a perfectly glass-still lake, her weight supported by the water without breaking the surface tension. Above her, a massive, flawless full moon dominated a starless sky.

  Her heavy boots, the broken remnants of her armor, the blood and gore—all of it was gone. She was draped in a flowing, ethereal dress of spun silver. She reached up and touched her hair; her cracked helmet had been replaced by a delicate, woven wreath of glowing blue lilies.

  She looked down at her reflection in the dark water. Her face was clean, but her scars remained—the jagged map of her violent life, carrying over even into the spirit realm. On her right arm, a fresh, deep scar stood out starkly against her pale skin, the permanent price of the bear's final bite.