“If IWA will not reach for me, I will reach for Them with fang and claw.”

 - Inscription on the blade of the Behemoth Calling Sword

The light of the ring stung like the unforgiving summer sun at high noon. Its rays attempted to sink into Nemira's pores, tear at her flesh, and found no foothold with which to launch its assault on her. Still, she grimaced and took a step back from the sheer force of it as a sudden wailing chorus flooding her ears. Countless aetherians swam frantically in the beams of light. Their collective terror and bewilderment pierced through her like javelins, and if she were alone she might have fallen to her knees from the weight of it all and wept.

And then, in a blink, the light vanished. The cacophony of screaming faded away to the usual sounds of the ever-restless forest. She let out a heavy breath and stepped forward, her pneuma roaring back to life around her. "Are you done?"

"No!" Lord Black stumbled away, stepping all over his food and almost tripping over his heavy pack. "That should have killed you! That should have—"

"But it didn't," she cried, her patience snapping. "It didn't, and if you weren't such a disgusting ignoramus you would not have just ripped thousands of aetherians from the Firmament in the hopes that it would."

She marched at him in a towering fury, forcing him to stagger further back from her. His already pale face grew stark white. "Get away from me, witch! You devil! I will not surrender, you will not take me back!"

"Give me the ring," she told him, her voice trembling with heat, the echoes of shrieking aetherians still ringing in her head. "Give me the ring and then face the consequences with your head held high and maybe you will be able to maintain a shred of dignity when you stand before the judge!"

She reached for him. With a shout, Lord Black scrambled back one more time and threw something onto the Avenue with all his might. Nemira looked down at the tiny shards of broken glass at her feet. Dark smoke much like the fog around the Vale curled up from the flagstone.

Distantly, she heard Lord Black laugh. "My good lady, did you really think the ring of Anima Rex was the only arcane artifact I possessed?"

She felt more than heard the low, thunderous snarl rumbling from the smoke. Before she could even think about stepping away, the smoke shot right into her like a geyser, punching the air out of her lungs as it tackled her into the ground. Lightning bolts of pain cracked through her shoulder as she collided against stone. Slavering above her, the smoke whirled at dizzying speeds until it formed a heavy, lion-like maw full of jagged, hungry teeth. She gasped and shoved the end of her torch into its mouth with all her might before it bit her face clean off her skull. It bellowed in agony, flailing at the air with its clawed forelimbs, but she could not muster enough strength to push its suddenly significant mass off of her.

"I'm a rather avid collector, you see." Lord Black's voice sounded obnoxiously upbeat as she struggled against her opponent, her torch now a pillar of angry pale fire. "I don't have much of a head for all those dreadfully tedious calculations arithmancers must suffer through and I wasn't about to sully my family name by engaging in the violent behaviors of the thaumaturge, but money and a thriving black market can make up for quite a bit of a man's deficiencies, don't you think?"

Arms shaking and head pounding with effort, she glared fiercely into the rolling eye of the bestial smoke and began to recite. "Colossus of the tomb, towering and bright—"

"Give it up, Lady Summoner!" The forced levity of Lord Black's tone disappeared as quickly as it came. "The creature will feast upon your flesh and I will add that staff of yours to my collection once it takes me to the Necropolis."

"—Grant me thy fists, thy fiend-crushing might!"

A summoning card from her pouch shot up into the sky and burst into a rampant blue-black flame. The enormous arm that emerged out of it was a ghastly sight: more bone than flesh in its emaciation, fingers too long and too gnarled. Silver bangles clattered at its wrist as it reached down and grabbed the beast of smoke by the head, its thick yellowed nails digging into its eyes as it wrenched it off Nemira's torch and tossed it further down the Road. Nemira leapt to her feet, adrenaline pulsing through every nerve she possessed. The tiny particle of her brain not focused on survival registered it as a wilding aetherian. It had the head and mane of a lion and a bipedal body comparable to a human or nephilim, but much longer and strangely gaunt. Muscles and veins stood out like whipcords against its thin coat of bristling fur. She jabbed her torch in its direction as it screamed and rolled on the pavement, clutching at its ruined eyes. 

“Send it back to the Firmament!”

Her Colossus arm reared, fingers clenched, then launched itself at the wilding with the speed of a striking snake. It grabbed the wilding’s head again, easily lifting the entire creature off the Road despite its frantic kicking and gnawing before slamming it down with cruel force. Nemira scowled at the sound of crunching bone and fleshy wetness exploding from the impact before turning back to Lord Black.

“It seems we have underestimated each other,” she said coldly. The arm came back from its grim deed and curled around her protectively, its bony fist dripping in the aetherian’s dark ichor.

It might have been comedic in lighter circumstances, the way the Vittoran nobleman's mouth flapped uselessly like a fish pulled out of a lake. She took another step toward him. He shouted and lifted his hand, the small glass, cork-stopped tube in it briefly catching the streetlamp light before he threw it. More glass shattered on the flagstone. 

A new aetherian emerged from the smoke billowing from the broken tube, another wilding in the shape of an enormous centipede with serrated gnashing mandibles. It skittered at her with alarming speed on its innumerable, hideously long legs before leaping right for her throat. As with the first aetherian, its pneuma burned pitch black and in utter chaos as it sucked miasma from the Void into itself in a blind rage. After who knows how many years trapped in a tiny tube with no access to the Firmament, it was beyond reason. It would become an aberrant in mere hours if she did not destroy its physical body.

Nemira pointed her torch at it. The air before the swinging lantern tore open and the left arm of the Colossus burst forth. The decaying hand snatched it out of the air and raised it high. Together with its right, the hands gripped each end of the writhing segmented body of the wilder and ripped it apart. A waterfall of ichor spilled onto the flagstone. Above her, the two halves of the aetherian still held tight by the Colossus disintegrated into countless fragments of white light and faded away.

"You haven't even run away yet." Nemira strode toward where the now paralyzed Lord Black stood among his ruined picnic, heedless of the pool of ichor underfoot. She could feel the Colossus arms sapping her pneuma with every movement. There was some time left before she reached her limit, but not a lot. "The fog gate is right behind you, and yet you linger here. Surely you don't still hope to make it to the Tyrant's Necropolis."

"I-I will not back down," he declared. "They will kill me if I go back to Coine, don't you understand? But if I make it to Anima Rex, I can fix everything! I can revive Aimeric and my friends. They were my friends, damn you, and now they're dead! I never meant to kill them. I didn't know what would happen when I put on the ring!"

His voice broke. Tears began leaking down his grimy face. Nemira shook her head, unyielding. "I wasn't lying about this Road, Lord Black. It will not lead you anywhere you wish to go. If you refuse to venture into the forest, how will you ever survive the rest of Ewald Vale? This is only the very beginning."

"I'll find a way." He swiped a hand across his eyes and yanked more items out of his pack. A few vials and a small glass bottle, all filled with whirling smoke. "I just need your pretty winged staff first."

There was no point in telling him that the wings would disappear as soon as anyone else tried to handle her torch. Still, she hesitated all the same. Any one of those containers were capable of killing the man in an instant. If she tried to grab him he would probably smash all of them at once in a panic, and she didn't even want to think about the ensuing battle that would follow. How many rampaging aetherians could she take on before the last of her pneuma drained away?

"Enough of this," she said. Above her, the Colossus arms slowly balled their hands into fists before her, ready for the next fight. "Lord Black, put those bottles down and give me the ring. It won't save you. Those trapped aetherians won't save you. Anima Rex won't save you. You might not have much longer to live, but I can guarantee your passing here in the Vale will be a hundred times worse if you keep going along with this folly. Make peace with your dead friends and surrender."

She saw what flashed over his face even before she finished speaking. Fear, defiance, stubbornness. He would not yield, no matter what she told him. And Nemira was at a loss. She pressed her lips together, trying to come up with anything else that could prevent more combat. Trying not to listen to the chorus of voices in her mind demanding her to kill him and be done with it all.

He lifted another vial in the air. One of the Colossus arms swung back for a right hook. A terrible, earth-shaking howl shook the air. Nemira and Lord Black froze. Heart shooting into her throat at the familiarity of that wretched shriek, Nemira slowly turned around.

What stalked toward them along the Road made the first wilding Lord Black had released look like a kitten in comparison. He was nearly as tall as the trees, his wolf-like head adorned with ridged, curling horns and a sheet of pale bone that grew over his face and muzzle like a protective visor. Steam blew from his open jaws with every breath, revealing a myriad of sharp fangs. His long arms and legs were encased in steel armor that glimmered with icy brilliance against his rich black fur, but his chest remained largely exposed, the hilt of a massive sword buried right in its center. Every step he took carried a threat, the gait of one who could burst into a ferocious four-legged sprint at a moment’s notice

“I have grown tired of watching your pathetic performance, fallen noble.” The beast’s utterly mangled voice boomed loud enough to shake the forest. “If you will not listen to reason, then perhaps you will listen to me.”