Chapter 26: The Shaman’s Tether
The forest canopy swallowed the moon, drowning the undergrowth in a heavy, suffocating pitch.
Rex led the strike team through the ferns, his dragon eyes painting the blackness in smears of thermal crimson and orange. Ahead, the goblin scouts slipped through the brush, silent as shifting shadows. Every few minutes, a small, lithe shape would materialize at his side, offering a terse whisper: the Stone Fist camp remained still. Sleeping. Unaware.
The Blood Bond thrummed at the base of his skull—a vast, delicate web connecting him to forty-seven souls across the valley. But here in the dark, his focus narrowed to the handful of threads at his back. Rhea’s steady, banked heat. Tor’s barbed tension. Fen’s anxious, shifting pulse. Mira’s razor-sharp focus. Nara’s frigid calm. At the rear, Kress and the Lizardkin broadcasted a low, rhythmic drumbeat of pure discipline.
They had pushed through the night, pausing only once at a creek to drink. Now, as the sky bruised purple with the approaching dawn, they crested the ridge overlooking the enemy camp.
Rex dropped to a crouch, a sharp hand signal bringing the team down with him.
Below, forty-odd warriors lay scattered across a rocky clearing, huddled in furs around a pit of dead ash. Crude weapons rested within arm’s reach. A few sentries paced the perimeter, but their posture was slack. They hadn’t expected the war to reach them this far out.
In the dead center of the camp sat a tent built from stretched dark hides and jagged, crooked bones. The air around it didn’t just shimmer; it warped.
[Mana Sense: Active]
Rex’s vision shifted. The world stripped down to leylines, the earth’s natural mana glowing in pale blue arteries. But the central tent was a dead zone. The mana there didn’t flow—it festered. Thick, oily tendrils of corrupted energy bled upward, infecting the air with a suffocating miasma.
"The rot’s centered there," Rex breathed.
Nara crawled up beside him. On her shoulder, Screech remained deathly still, his feathers slicked flat, unblinking yellow eyes locked on the tent. "It’s worse than I calculated," Nara murmured, her voice tight. "It’s not just residing within her. It’s bleeding into the soil. She’s acting as an anchor for the dragon’s power."
"Can you cut it?"
Nara stared at the oily mana. "I don’t have a choice."
Rex shifted his gaze to Tor. Through the Bond, the woodcutter’s emotional state was a hurricane of grief and rage, barely held in check. Tor’s knuckles were white where his hand gripped the carved mammoth bone at his belt.
"You don’t have to push through the center," Rex told him quietly. "If seeing her is going to—"
"Five years, Rex." Tor’s voice was a dry rasp. He didn’t look away from the tent. "I’m ending it today."
Rex studied the man’s rigid jaw, then gave a sharp nod. "Stay on my shoulder. When we breach, you’ll get your opening. But if the corruption drives her to attack, you defend yourself. Do you hear me, Tor? No hesitating."
Tor swallowed hard. "Understood."
Rex looked down the line, meeting the eyes of his squad. "Goblins take the east. Ignite their supply stores, blind them with the smoke. Kress, take the western flank. Hit them before they can rub the sleep from their eyes. Break their lines."
Kress thumped his heavy bone club against his scaled chest, a silent vow.
"Rhea, Tor, Fen—you’re the tip of the spear with me," Rex continued. "Straight up the middle to the shaman. Mira." He pointed to a jagged outcropping that offered a clear vantage of the bowl. "High ground. Anyone tries to pinch our flanks, you drop them."
Mira gripped her crystal spear, her jaw set. Her thread in the Bond was sharp, hungry. She had killed two Mouths in the last skirmish. The hesitation was entirely gone from her.
"Nara stays in my shadow," Rex finished. "Once we engage, she is the only priority. She has to make physical contact to break the tether. We keep her alive, or this was all for nothing. Let’s move."
Dawn broke alongside the first streak of fire.
The arrow arced from the eastern tree line, sinking into a stack of cured hides and dried meat. Three more followed in rapid succession. The supply stores erupted. Flames roared to life, casting wild, leaping shadows across the clearing as Stone Fist warriors scrambled from their bedrolls, choking on thick black smoke.
Before the first shout of alarm could even finish, Kress hit the western perimeter.
The Lizardkin crashed through the crude wooden barricades like a wrecking ball of scale and muscle. Bone clubs shattered collarbones; crystal-tipped spears found the seams in heavy leather armor. The Stone Fists fought with the rabid zealotry of dragon-worshippers, but they were uncoordinated raiders caught in their sleep. Against the brutal, lockstep discipline of the Lizardkin, they were torn apart.
Rex tore through the center.
He broke the tree line with Rhea on his right, Tor and Fen on his left. A shrieking warrior lunged at him, swinging a heavy bone axe wildly. Rex didn’t break stride. He slipped inside the man’s guard, felt the heavy rush of air as the axe missed his head, and drove his copper sword up through the raider’s ribs.
[Stone Fist Warrior defeated | +120 XP]
Rhea was a force of nature beside him. Her ancient sword hissed as the fire-aspect runes flared to life, superheating the air. A warrior raised a thick wooden shield to block her overhead strike; Rhea cleaved through the wood and the man beneath it, the blade instantly cauterizing the wound.
Through the Bond, the battle played out in Rex’s mind as a symphony of violent intent. Tor’s grim, mechanical butchery. Fen’s frantic, darting spear thrusts. From the ridge, Mira’s lethal rhythm—the sharp twang of a bowstring, the immediate slackening of an enemy thread. On the flank, Kress held an iron wall.
The Stone Fists shattered. The survivors abandoned the camp, fleeing into the dense brush.
But the central tent remained untouched. Then, the hum began—a deep, marrow-vibrating frequency that made Rex’s scales prickle beneath his skin.
"Brace," Nara warned.
The heavy hide flaps parted.
As the shaman stepped into the pale morning light, Tor’s thread through the Bond seized with a spike of agony so intense Rex nearly stumbled.
She was only fifteen. Sixteen at most. Her dark hair was matted, woven through with small, yellowed bones. Her skin had taken on the bruised, necrotic grey of a storm cloud, and her eyes burned with a sickly, aware ember-light. It wasn’t the feral glow of a beast. It was calculating.
Around her neck hung a tight collar of finger bones. Children’s bones.
When she smiled, her jaw unhinged slightly, and the voice that spilled out was a horrific overlay—a teenage girl’s vocal cords forced to channel something impossibly old and resonant.
"A little spark," the voice grated, echoing in Rex’s chest, "trying to burn down the dark." She tilted her head, a sharp, unnatural twitch. "The master is watching you, Dragon-Bound. He finds you... fascinating."
The cold spot in Rex’s mind—the southern compass pointing toward Valthorion—pulsed violently. The dragon was looking right at him through her eyes.
Tor dropped his axe. It hit the dirt with a dull thud. "Alara."
The shaman snapped her gaze to him. For a fraction of a second, the ember-light flickered. Her face went slack. Realization, and then raw terror, bubbled up to the surface.
Then the corruption slammed back down, suffocating it.
"Alara is meat," the doubled voice hissed. "I am the Mouth-That-Walks. I am the Voice." She looked at Tor, her lips curling into a sneer. "And you will feed the earth."
She threw her hands forward.
Thick cables of shadow violently erupted from her palms, ripping through the air with a sound like tearing canvas. One lashed out, catching a flanking Lizardkin in the shoulder. The warrior shrieked, dropping his spear as the dark mana ate through his heavy scales, blackening the flesh beneath.
A second tendril whipped directly toward Tor’s chest.
Rex moved faster.
[Hard Scales LV.2: Active]
A translucent, geometric lattice of mana flared across Rex’s skin as he threw himself into the tendril’s path. The shadow-whip slammed into his chest armor. The impact felt like taking a sledgehammer to the sternum. Frostbite and battery acid chewed at his mana-shield, radiating a bone-deep ache, but the barrier held, shattering the tendril into black mist.
"Rhea! Right flank!" Rex barked, gritting his teeth against the pain.
Rhea blurred to the side, her sword a brilliant streak of orange, but the shaman slammed her hands together. A dome of writhing, semi-liquid shadow ripped out from the earth, encasing her. Rhea’s blazing sword smashed against it, sending up a geyser of sparks and hissing steam, but the blade bounced off.
Behind Rex, Nara began to chant.
The syllables were raw, guttural, dragging from the bottom of her throat. Screech took to the air, his frantic cries weaving into her spell. The atmospheric pressure dropped drastically as Nara’s spirit magic summoned a localized gale, the rushing winds violently buffeting the dark barrier, trying to find a seam.
"Keep the stragglers off us!" Rex yelled, deflecting another shadow-whip.
