Hello again, my fellow fanfictioners. Here's the second part of my Warhammer fic attempt. If it's received at all well, I'll definitely continue with it. :)
Usual disclaimers apply :)
Enjoy!
THE UNBROKEN KING
FROM THE MISTS, COMETH A MAN
The mist was thick the night he left, heavier than usual, clinging to the eaves of Dunwyth like a second skin. No wind stirred. The beacon flames hissed low, casting only weak halos through the Ceithir. He stepped out onto the fen paths, silent. The earth was cold, the peat slick. But he did not shiver. He moved with certainty, each footfall placed with care, as if he knew the way.
Something called to him.
Not a voice. Not quite.
More like a memory—not his own, but older. One buried in stone and fog and time. A pull that hummed low in his bones, steady as a drumbeat, impossible to ignore.
He passed the goat fields. The low stone walls. The empty watch post. The half-collapsed causeway that no one used anymore. Past the place where Darrin had died. Where the Bracken Host had come. Where he had ended them.
The Ceithir opened before him, not parting, but accepting.
And still he walked.
East. Toward Cael'Marrach. To the place where he first fell upon Caerdyn Vallis.
The tower came into view slowly, like a dream sharpening into shape. It rose from the fen like the broken tooth of a giant, its crown shattered, its sides wrapped in vines and time. No fires marked it. No birds sang near it. The very fog around it throbbed—not with life, but memory.
Artorias stepped onto the slate path that led to its gates. Moss had crept over the stones, but he could still see them beneath: lines, symbols, etched in some ancient hand. He crouched, brushing away the moss.
The markings were faint. But they glowed, faintly—just for him.
He who is given shall give in kind.
He who is named shall name the world.
He who walks between shall not walk alone.
He read the words aloud. Not in the tongue of Dunwyth, but in something older. Something he should not know.
The mist trembled.
A sound rang out from within the tower. Not metal. Not wind.
A bell. One chime.
And silence.
Artorias stepped forward.
Through the threshold.
Into the dark.
Inside, the air was colder, but the mist held back. Walls stretched high above, crumbled in places, vines curled through every crack. The floor was slick with old moss and broken glass. But the symbols continued—up the walls, across the floor, etched deep into every stone.
He walked the hall. Not like a trespasser.
Like a pilgrim.
Something waited at the centre of the ruin. Not a relic. Not a voice.
A presence.
It stood at the base of a hollow stair, half-collapsed, leading to nowhere. A statue—broken at the shoulders, face weathered to ruin. But the stance was unmistakable.
One hand outstretched. The other upon its chest.
Artorias stepped close.
He reached up—matching the gesture.
And the stone beneath his feet shifted.
Not down. Inward.
The world fell away.
He stood in blackness.
No, not black. Not entirely.
A sky. But not his.
Stars above—endless, bright, unfamiliar. No fog. No wind. Only silence.
And then—behind him—footsteps.
He turned.
A man stood at the edge of nothing. Cloaked in white and ash, eyes glowing silver. It took a moment, but he recognized him. His form had changed from old to young, but Artorias recognized his presence. A feeling from a long-forgotten nightmare.
Artorias spoke before he could think. "Who are you?"
The man smiled.
"Your name is Artorias."
"Yes."
"Then you already know." The old man, now young, replied gently.
Artorias frowned. "This place... it isn't real."
The man looked up at the stars. "No. But it will be."
"What do you want from me?"
"Nothing," said the man. "But one day, they will ask everything of you."
Artorias stepped forward. "Why me?"
The man's smile faded.
"Because you were returned. And the mists do not give without reason."
Then—
A shiver.
A sound like thunder from beneath the earth.
And the world snapped back. He awoke kneeling at the foot of the statue.
His hand still on its chest.
The tower was silent.
But something had changed.
In his palm, a symbol burned faintly—just for a moment.
Not pain. Not fire.
Recognition.
He stood.
Turned.
And walked back into the mists.
Artorias stepped from the crumbling tower of Cael'Marrach, the cold mist curling around his ankles like a living thing. The wind had died entirely. Even the usual distant croaks and whines of fen-creatures were silent. He felt it before he saw it—the wrongness in the air, the pressure, like a breath held too long.
Then came the sound. A chittering, wet and low, like bones cracking beneath flesh.
The mists parted.
It stood there.
A shape torn from nightmare. Twice his height, but hunched, with limbs too long, its joints bent backward. Its skin was like glass filled with smoke—constant shifting, pulsing veins of shadow threading beneath translucent armor. Where its face should have been, there was only a jagged mouth that stretched impossibly wide, full of teeth like shattered flint.
The mistspawn.
It shrieked.
Artorias didn't flinch. He turned, leading it back toward the tower.
The creature leapt—faster than its size should allow.
He rolled, just in time, and its claws tore stone where he'd stood. He scrambled into the ruins, weaving through broken walls and collapsed pillars. The thing followed, crashing through rotted wood and ancient stone like a tide of ruin.
He fought to keep distance, dodging, throwing chunks of debris to slow it. A broken sword he found lodged in a stairwell cracked in his hands as he tried to parry. The mistspawn came on, tireless, howling.
It drove him downward.
Deeper into the belly of the tower, into halls untouched by light.
He stumbled on an uneven flagstone and fell hard.
And the floor gave way.
Stone split. The world dropped. He fell—
Down, down—through choking dust and darkness—until he landed hard on something cold and metallic with a grunt that knocked the air from his lungs.
Silence.
He gasped, pulling himself upright. Above, the jagged hole he'd fallen through was choked with mist. No sign of the creature.
He turned.
He was in a chamber. Ancient. Carved into the bedrock, half-flooded with dark water. Runes lined the walls in spiraling arcs, old script he did not recognize, but that stirred something in his blood. In the center, atop a dais of moss-eaten stone, a single object waited.
A sword.
It was unlike anything he had ever seen. Not rusted. Not broken. It lay embedded in an altar of blackened rock, the blade sunk hilt-deep, its surface shimmering with a faint sheen like frozen mist. The air around it was cold—not the chill of shadow, but something deeper. Something primordial.
He stepped forward.
The closer he came, the more the mists in the room recoiled, as if bowing.
He placed a hand upon the hilt.
A hum. Low. Felt more than heard. The blade was warm beneath his palm. Not hot, not burning—alive.
Etched into the fuller, in letters older than the tongue spoken in Dunwyth, were words that glowed softly as his fingers brushed them:
"By Ceithir's breath I rise, and by the name of Artorias, I endure. The mists remember. The mists return."
His breath caught.
The name.
His namesake.
The stone split with a whisper.
The sword slid free.
And in that moment, the mist around him curled inward, drawn to the blade like rivers to the sea. The weapon drank the fog, not with hunger, but with purpose. Its edge shone with quiet silver, and when he raised it, the weight felt perfect. Familiar. As though it had been waiting for him across centuries.
A screech split the dark.
The Mistspawn reappeared, dropping from the ceiling like a spider of smoke and bone, jaws unhinged, eyes burning with a sick, violet light.
It rushed him.
He did not flinch.
The sword met the creature in a single, clean arc.
Where it struck, light poured from the wound—pale and silent. The Mistspawn convulsed, limbs thrashing, the mist around it tearing away like flesh. It tried to reform.
But could not.
Its scream came not from its throat, but the very space around it—warped, hateful, afraid. Then it was gone, not slain but unmade.
Silence fell.
The fog returned slowly, shyly, curling around Artorias's ankles. But now it felt different. Not hostile. Not watching.
He looked down at the blade in his hand.
Mist curled along the fuller. The edge gleamed. And something—some faint glimmer of knowing—settled into his bones.
He raised the weapon before him.
"The mists remember," he said quietly, voice steady.
And then, after a long moment:
"I name you Ceithraig."
"Mist's Edge."
The mist stirred at the name.
The mists clung to him like a shroud as he stepped out of the ruined tower's threshold. The sword—Ceithraig, he had named it. The Mist's Edge, after the four winds that shaped the land—rested in his hand, humming faintly with a presence that felt both ancient and awake. Its new scabbard, fashioned from ropes made of reed and bark, rode across his back like it belonged there. Before he left, he made sure to take another piece of the pod he had left behind. The metal felt cool in his hands, the stylized 'XI' awakening something inside him.
The battle with the mistspawn had left his armor scraped and darkened by ichor that steamed in the cold air, and his body ached from the bruises of the fight. Yet he moved with purpose, cutting through the veil of Ceithir like a man walking out of a nightmare.
He walked for a full day and night, pausing only when his legs threatened to give. The mists shifted around him, almost reluctant to let him go. Yet Ceithraig's presence at his side seemed to part them, as if the blade itself held dominion over their thickness.
When the low stone walls of Dunwyth finally rose out of the haze, the boy stopped.
A warm, golden light flickered in the windows of Caellin's hut.
Home.
He crossed the threshold in silence.
Caellin was at the hearth, turning broth over the flame. She turned at the sound of the door, and the wooden ladle in her hand fell to the floor.
"Artorias..." she breathed.
He was taller than when she had last seen him, or perhaps it was something in the way he stood. His armor bore wounds she could not name even as the strange metal seemed to flow like liquid before her eyes, the gouges and rents smoothing out. The sword at his back whispered of stories unspoken. But it was the weariness in his eyes that struck her deepest.
He knelt before her without a word and placed the second shard of the sky-metal pod at her feet.
"I want to forge a scabbard," he said. "For the sword."
It was not what he had meant to say.
I missed you.
She reached down, brushing a hand through his matted hair. "You're hurt."
"It's over," he said. "For now."
She helped him to his feet, and they embraced—silent, the kind of embrace that speaks more than any poem or prayer could.
The next day, he took the pod fragment to the blacksmith's lean-to. The metal, like before, resisted heat and hammer alike—but when Artorias touched it, it softened, shimmering faintly beneath the soot. The forge-fire danced in pale hues, like fog turned to flame, and the hammer rang with a clarity that made the villagers stop and listen.
The scabbard that emerged was not beautiful by worldly standards—but it fit Ceithraig as though the two had grown from the same root. It drank the sword's mist-light, glowed when drawn, and whispered in a tongue none could name.
When Artorias slid the blade into the scabbard, a stillness fell over the forge.
Caellin stood in the doorway, watching.
"You changed," she said.
"I did," he replied.
The mists began to change when Artorias was in his eleventh winter.
Not visibly—not at first. But the villagers said they could feel it. The fog no longer simply swallowed sound, it seemed to breathe with it. Shadows lingered too long. Paths shifted beneath the feet. Beacons that once held back the gloom now sputtered without reason.
And the Ceithir whispered louder.
Caellin noticed the Ceithir most at night. Dreams clawed their way into her sleep, voices of long-dead kin speaking in tongues not heard in centuries. Once, she awoke to find Artorias standing by the window, eyes reflecting the moonless dark, murmuring words in a language she could not place.
When she touched his shoulder, he turned and said nothing. Just stared. Then went back to sleep as if he'd never moved.
In the same season, a fire was seen atop Cael'Marrach.
It had not burned for generations.
The old tower, long left to rot and be reclaimed by the fen, now flickered with sickly light on cloudless nights. Birds fled it. Wolves howled in its direction and would not hunt nearby. Some said it was a warlock's fire, others that the dead had returned to reclaim their bones.
Artorias said nothing of it.
But he began to train.
Not just with the blacksmith's apprentice or Caellin's old spear or even his blade. He would vanish into the mists for hours, sometimes days, and return with cuts on his hands, bruises across his ribs, mud on his clothes and a strange clarity in his eyes.
He built weights from stone and rope. He sharpened sticks until they splintered. He practiced strikes against trees, then shadows, then things no one else could see.
And still, he spoke little. But when he did, his words began to sound like commands.
Even the elders began to listen.
He came from the north, blood on his boots and frost clinging to his cloak.
A stranger, tall and silent, with a greatsword slung across his back and a battered sigil hanging from his belt—three flames within a broken circle. His armor was scorched, dented, moss-grown at the edges like it had been pulled from a tomb.
He collapsed near the stone hearth at the center of Dunwyth.
The villagers did not trust him—no one from the north crossed the Blackwood. But Caellin felt something in him, something old. She knelt beside him and pulled the message from his hand. The parchment was stiff with dried blood, the seal a crude knot of iron and wax.
It bore a single symbol: a flame inside a crowned eye.
She read the letter aloud, though it was not addressed to her.
It spoke of the fall of Caer Varyss, once called the Shining Hold—last bastion of the Flamewardens, an order sworn to guard the great mountain-fires that once lit the world. It told of an ancient enemy rising again from beneath the Hollow Peaks, a tide of blackened men who could not die, whose eyes bled shadow.
It told of betrayal. Of a king slain by his own kin. Of a world turning cold again.
And at the end, it spoke of a name: Artorias.
Caellin burned the scroll that night.
But the name would not burn from her thoughts.
The next arrival to Dunwyth came not on a steed, but on foot.
Boots torn, blue eyes bright, hair wild as a flame in the wind. He was perhaps a year older than Artorias, though his smile made him seem younger. His armor was piecemeal—scavenged and stitched, gold beneath the grime—and he carried a longsword as tall as he was.
"I am Lucan of Varyss," he said, with a crooked bow and a grin that tried too hard. "Squire of the Flamewardens. Or what's left of us. And, uh—could I trouble someone for a drink?"
The villagers stared.
Artorias stood in silence, hand on the pommel of his blade.
Lucan's grin faltered, then returned. "I came through Blackwood. Nearly got eaten by a will-o'-thing. Pretty sure it cursed me. Good times."
They gave him a drink. And food. And a place to rest.
And when Caellin asked him why he came, Lucan looked to Artorias and said, without irony:
"They said he'd be here. The one with the eyes of gold. My knight-lord died holding the gates. Told me to find the boy who walks the mist like it's a memory. So, I did."
Caellin did not answer. But Artorias nodded once. That short jerk of motion was enough for the villagers, and they let the boy be. Many assumed that he would leave soon after.
But Lucan never left.
Lucan was everything Artorias was not.
Loud. Warm. Restless. He cracked jokes even when no one laughed, tripped over his own sword, and once tried to joust a tree "just to see how it'd go." He named every rock he trained on and spoke to birds like they were barmaids.
But when he fought, he moved like fire.
Lucan taught Artorias the Way of Flame—a dueling style passed down by the Flamewardens, all sweeping arcs and precise footwork, meant to mimic the dance of a torch in the wind. In return, Artorias taught him the Mist Step, the way the fenfolk fought: swift, close, and quiet as breath.
They trained until they bled.
They hunted together, sparred in the rain, laughed beneath the bones of the old gods. And slowly, the village began to hope again.
Lucan became a fixture—helping the smith, racing the younger kids, building traps that sometimes even worked. He carved a flame into the old oak at the village edge, and beneath it, Artorias carved a blade.
They never said what it meant.
But they sharpened each other like iron on iron.
When a barrow-wight clawed its way from the peat—its eyes full of frostfire and its mouth sewn shut—they fought it side by side. Artorias drove the spear through its chest, and Lucan whispered a rite over the corpse that made the mist burn away for hours.
And afterward, they sat side by side, shoulder to shoulder, saying nothing.
Two boys. One swamp. A thousand years of forgotten blood.
For a time, life simply continued in Dunwyth.
But destiny was not so easily thwarted, and Artorias could feel the change in the mists. Something was coming.
It began with the dead rising in Varnhold.
Not the usual sort—the barrow-ghosts and moss-ghasts that came with the mist and were put down with ash and salt. These rose in silence, skin stretched thin over iron bones, eyes aglow with green fire.
They bore no weapons at first.
But they walked in perfect lines.
The survivors—few as they were—spoke of creatures that did not speak, did not hunger, did not die. Steel-grey men with faces like sarcophagi, who passed through stone like mist and reaped flesh like wheat.
Artorias was sent with a scouting party to a nearby village that had been attacked. Only he and Lucan returned.
Artorias refused to speak of the horrors he had witnessed there. Lucan spoke little, his skin turned white from terror.
But Artorias carried something back—a shard of metal, black as night, smooth as glass and heavier than iron. It hummed in his hands. The druids of the marsh could not name it. One touched it and wept.
The shard was buried beneath the village hearth.
They prayed it would not call the others.
In the elder tongue, they are called by many names. The Nether Host. The Ashen Ones. The Blackened Men.
The Fen Mothers speak of them in hushed tones—metal wraiths from the time before time, sealed beneath the Hollow Peaks after the Fall of the Flame. They say they were once men, or something like men, who gave up their souls for eternity, and in doing so, lost even the memory of what it was to be alive.
They slept for ten thousand years in a tomb of blackstone.
But now they wake.
The tomb itself is a wound in the world. A city of obsidian and jade, pulsing with green light, carved into the bones of the deepest mountain. No one alive has seen it and returned.
No one mortal, that is.
But Artorias dreams of it.
He sees long corridors lit with alien fire. Thrones of metal, occupied by unmoving kings. Great machines that breathe without lungs. And at the heart, a single figure cloaked in silence, who lifts its hand and turns the stars black.
He wakes in sweat, but unafraid.
Some part of him knows that tomb. A part of him knows that that is where his journey ends. One way or the other.
By now, Artorias is no longer a boy.
He towers over men, thick with scars, his voice a gravelled thunder when he chooses to speak. His hair falls like a dark mane, his shoulders too broad for common armor. The villagers call him Giant-Born, The Last Ember, The Ironroot.
There are even a few more hushed whispers. Of another name they would give him.
The Twice-Born King
He wears no crown, but people bow just the same.
Lucan is his shadow and his light. Smaller, quicker, always talking, always laughing—but no less deadly. Together they have slain horrors in the deep swamps, broken the horns of barrow-lords, and stilled the breath of things that once ruled the night sky.
But the enemy is no longer content to rise in ones and twos.
Now they come in phalanxes—marching through mountain passes in unison, each with a blade of green light, each with a heart that does not beat. They do not burn. They do not bleed. And when they fall, they rise again.
The people call them the Blackened Ones.
But the druids have begun to use an older word.
Necrontyr.
North of the Hollow Peaks, where the world ends in cliffs and silence, they say there walks a man of black iron, whose blood is green flame.
He was once called Vaedran.
A prince, a prodigy, a hero of the Dawn Holds in times long forgotten.
He disappeared lifetimes ago on a pilgrimage to the Deep. He was searching for the Truth Beneath the World. He found it.
And it unmade him.
Now, he is no longer mortal. A blade of the Infinite Empire, commander of the first awakened cohort. The Blackened Ones follow him like hounds. The people, the ones he let escape, call him the Dread Heir, or The Fallen Light.
But he still remembers.
He remembers honor.
He remembers envy. His victims have begun to pray of late, in the moments before he snuffs out the candle of their lives. They pray to a man whose name he had all but forgotten.
A man he had once called brother aeons ago.
They pray to Artorias. Cold logic is replaced with violent rage when he hears it.
And in Artorias, he sees a reflection—what he could have been, had he not taken the path beneath the tomb. Had he stayed at his brother's side instead.
He will not allow that light to burn.
Vaedran made a vow before his silent army.
Artorias would be broken.
This Twice-Born King would die.
The mists thickened in the months that followed the first awakening. Word spread slowly—on the tongues of travelers and the bloodied lips of dying scouts—that a tomb had opened in the north. The Blackened Ones had risen. And they did not sleep again.
Villages fell in silence. Farms turned fallow overnight. The dead walked, not as ghouls or revenants, but as metal phantoms lit from within by a green fire older than language. They bore weapons that made bones ash and minds break. They came in silence and returned to silence; the soil scorched behind them.
And yet, amid the endless shroud, a light.
Dunwyth.
It had begun as a collection of hovels built around a shattered watchtower and the old stones of a forgotten chapel. The strange witchlight of Cael'Marrach the only landmark visible through the mist. But now, smoke curled from hearths that hadn't burned in generations. Voices rang out from the stonemasons' yards and the half-finished walls of fresh battlements.
At the heart of it all stood a man like no other.
Artorias.
He had grown. In strength. In stature. In legend.
What had once been a strange child clad in stranger mail had become a legend cloaked in iron and oath. No longer merely tall, Artorias now stood head and shoulders above any living man—his mysterious nature asserting itself with every trial, every wound endured. His voice carried over storm and steel. His golden eyes glowing, flaring with every word of action he spoke.
He fought at the gates of Dunwyth, Mist's Edge cutting down the Blackened Ones one by one. Behind him rallied those who still believed in the old virtues. Men and women, weathered and raw, who came bearing nothing but broken spears and desperate hearts.
They held. Every time. But at a cost.
They came in trickles, never waves. Small bands of survivors crawling out of the fog. Sometimes a family, sometimes a lone figure stumbling forward with a hollow look and no shoes.
Among them came knights—tattered, defeated, but proud. They bore broken banners of once-great houses, the crests nearly unrecognizable beneath soot and blood. Their armor was dented, scorched, their oaths tested.
They brought stories with them:
"We tried to fight. The arrows bounced off. The fire did nothing."
"They took my brother. He walked beside them, not dead. Not living."
"It sang to us in the night. A whisper in our sleep. When we woke, the walls were gone."
Artorias listened to each tale. He stood among them not as a king or lord, but as a watcher. The stories did not weaken him. They tempered him.
At his command, the people of Dunwyth began to build. Walls of blackstone hauled from the ruins. Spikes and palisades carved from the remains of ancient forest. And when materials failed, they built with the bones of the old world—iron scavenged from forgotten wars and melted down for new blades.
The city grew. Slowly, like a wound that refuses to scab. But it grew.
The Blackened Ones or 'Necrontyr', though few in number at first, pushed south along the old riverbeds. They emerged from their tombs not in armies but in small hunting parties—scouting, harvesting, learning. And even these were nearly too much.
One such band crossed the river just east of Dunwyth.
Artorias led the response personally.
It was not a glorious battle. There were no banners, no horns. Just the wet slosh of men in the reeds and the sudden flash of green light that unmade a dozen before they could scream.
Artorias waded in alone at one point, when all else failed. His blade met metal, and the sound it made was like a bell cracking in a tomb. One by one, he slew them, until he stood chest-deep in blood and riverwater, surrounded by twitching limbs and sparks.
They buried their dead with stones and silence.
That night, a child gave Artorias a flower. He knelt to accept it, hands still shaking from the adrenaline.
I have to keep fighting.
The next attack came that night.
The mists were thick as wool, blanketing Dunwyth like a funeral shroud. Even the fires on the parapets barely pushed the fog back more than a few feet, their light smothered by the ever-hungry haze. Somewhere beyond the veil, something moved.
Artorias stood on the battlements, Ceithraig sheathed across his back, eyes narrowed against the gloom. Beside him, Lucan, battered but resolute, adjusted his grip on the haft of his great axe. Neither spoke—the stillness of the air did not invite it.
Then, the silence cracked.
It began as a vibration underfoot, faint as a shiver. Then came the sound—skittering, like claws across slate and stone. From beneath the city itself, from drains, from the cracks in the ancient foundation, they came.
Tiny metal things. Spider-like, beetle-shaped. With eyes like embers and mandibles of burning silver.
They poured out in waves, like oil made flesh. A clicking tide, fast and endless. They swarmed over the defenses and into the alleys, chewing through wood, cloth, and flesh with the same hunger.
"TO ARMS!" Artorias roared, his voice rising above the chaos like a clarion call. "TO ARMS!"
The soldiers rallied. Arrows hissed into the dark, only to glance harmlessly from the creatures' armored shells. Firepots burst, engulfing dozens, but more came—unfeeling, unrelenting.
Artorias leapt from the wall like thunder, his blade drawn and trailing mist. Ceithraig sang as it struck, its unnatural edge cleaving through the metal things with unnatural ease. Where it cut, the creatures did not rise again. Their inner light guttered and died like candles in wind.
He moved with brutal precision, carving a path through the horde. The mist wrapped around him like armor, each strike guided by something deeper than instinct.
Lucan fought at the eastern gate, where the wall had begun to crack beneath the weight of the invaders. There, from the shadows, came taller figures—humanoid, but stretched unnaturally thin. Their limbs ended in blades and tendrils. Their faces were eyeless masks of smooth metal, and their bodies shimmered like smoke.
Two of them came forward, silent as death.
Lucan met them head-on.
He ducked beneath the first blow, driving his axe upward in a brutal arc that tore one of the things nearly in half. Sparks flew. The second creature lashed at him with a scythe-like appendage, slicing deep into his thigh. He roared and countered, slamming his axe into its chest and pinning it against the wall.
But still they moved.
Lucan bled. His armor was shredded. But he would not fall.
With a cry, he tore his helm free and smashed it into the creature's featureless face. It staggered. He brought his axe down once more—then again—until it stopped twitching.
The troops nearby watched in awe.
But danger was not done.
Behind the battle lines, through a fissure in the outer ring of the village, a fresh swarm burst forth. They scuttled through the back lanes and alleys, seeking the unguarded, the weak.
One group skittered toward the homesteads—toward the house where Caellin slept.
Lucan saw them first.
Even wounded, he did not hesitate.
He broke from the front lines, shouldering past startled soldiers and hurtled down the slope. The creatures were nearly upon the door when he arrived, sweeping his axe in a wide arc and crushing half of them against the stones. The rest turned on him with a mechanical screech.
They climbed his legs, dug into his arms, ripping at chain and skin. He howled, flung them away, and kept fighting.
Inside, Caellin had heard the commotion. She stood ready, Artorias's old spear in hand, but the terror was plain on her face. She had lived through fear before—but this was different.
Lucan fought like a man possessed. His axe broke in two under the weight of the swarm. He seized a broken beam from the rubble and wielded it like a cudgel, flattening anything that crawled too close.
And then—Artorias arrived.
Ceithraig's blade parted the fog like dawn. He carved through the enemy like fire through snow, reaching Lucan just as he collapsed to one knee. In seconds, the remaining attackers were gone, split and silent.
Lucan slumped against the doorway, blood streaming from a dozen wounds.
Caellin caught him before he could fall completely.
"You came," she whispered.
He nodded, breath ragged. "Couldn't let them take you."
That night, when the dead were counted and the fires were lit, they called him Lucan the Valiant.
And Artorias? He stood atop the broken gate and looked northward, past the bones of the enemy, into the mist that never broke.
He knew this had only been a probing strike.
And more would come.
This has to end.
That's where I'm going to end this chapter. Thanks for reading!
See you next time!