Book One – Chapter 13

Securing and supporting him from behind was a creature even more unnerving — a scorchborn; a humanoid abomination born from the decaying swamps of the Midlands. With bodies composed of the diseases and toxins of their birth environment, scorchborn are bringers of plagues. This individual’s skin was a dark, diseased mass, riddled with fungal growths and spore-like protrusions, covered only in ragged, brown cloth and patches of fur. She radiated pestilence, her mere touch enough to rot flesh. Midnight had seen the effects of a scorchborn’s infection before, how even her wizard had barely survived such an affliction. As the darkness examined the forms of both the scorchborn and the wizard, Midnight understood that this wizard, too, had been marked by the scorchborn’s disease. His body trembled with the strain of it, every breath a labored effort as the sickness clawed at him from within. Yet still, he held on, driven by the voltera’s fury. Their bond was palpable, a shared ferocity that fuelled the massacre below.

The darkness spotted another creature. Behind the voltera, perched on a jagged mass of stone jutting straight out of the middle of the snowtrail, sat a feathered beast. It was avian in form, yet something about it was wrong. Thick feathers covered its body, but where wings should have been, there were only stumps — mutilated remnants of what had once been a creature capable of flight. Midnight traced the contours of its powerful form and recognised the signs of its severed wings, the scars still visible, cutting deep into its flesh. Though flightless, the beast exuded a strange, bitter pride, its head held high despite the humiliation of its mutilation. But his pride and presence was hollow, a vestige of what he once was. It was a creature without power, yet unwilling to hide, its eyes watching the slaughter below with a cold, detached malice.