13. Greylands

The scream tore through the Court like a serrated blade.

"Eternal Life to the Monarch!" Bruno's voice warped, his throat glowing a sickly yellow as holy magic surged through him. Veins bulged beneath his skin, pulsing like infected rivers, and his eyes liquefied into pools of molten gold. The stench of burning flesh clogged the air—sweet, cloying, wrong.

Devon moved first, void-tendrils lashing out to encase Bruno in a cocoon of static. But the man's body was already splitting at the seams, light bleeding from his pores. The Sewer Queen hissed a command, and the luminescent moss coating the walls erupted into a barrier—thick, spongy, reeking of damp earth—sealing Bruno's convulsing form away from the crowd.

"Get down!" Claire tackled Natalie behind an overturned cart of purifier cores.

The explosion was soundless.

The absence of noise made it worse. Pressure compressed Natalie's eardrums like diving into poisoned water. Light refracted through the moss-barrier in prismatic shards—blinding gold, arterial red, the sickly green of infected wounds. The air tasted of charred sugar and burnt hair, a saccharine rot that coated tongues and teeth. When the barrier dissolved, the ground where Bruno had stood was glass-smooth, fused by heat into a mirror reflecting the Court's terrified faces. Devon's shadow stretched across it, warped and faceless.

For a heartbeat, the barrier glowed translucent, revealing Bruno's silhouette consumed by golden fire. His skin sloughed off in ash, bones disintegrating into shards of light. Then the moss-blackened, withering as it absorbed the blast. The Court trembled, sewage rippling in stagnant pools.

When the barrier fell, only Devon remained standing in the scorched circle.

"Well," he said, brushing phantom soot from his translucent sleeve, "that's one way to skip confession."

The Sewer Queen's crow cawed, a raw, scraping sound. Bruno's body lay crumpled at Devon's feet, a desiccated husk. His skin clung to his skeleton like parchment, lips peeled back in a final rictus grin. The holy magic was gone—devoured.

"You…" The Sewer Queen's Talin-stone eye whirred, focusing on Devon. "You ate it."

"Tastes like overcooked zealotry." Devon's void-eye flickered, threads of gold swirling in its depths. "Bit heavy on the dogma, though."

Natalie staggered to her feet. "Are you—?"

"Alive? Debatable. Entertained? Absolutely."

Claire stepped forward, her boot crunching on a shard of Bruno's rib. "How?"

Devon flexed his hand, static crackling around his fingers. "Turns out the Void's a picky eater. Holy magic's just… seasoning." He nudged Bruno's corpse with his toe. "Monarch's leash snaps both ways. Break the connection, and the hound starves."

The Sewer Queen's laugh was a dry rasp. "You're a fool, Lindberg. But useful." She snapped her fingers, and her sentries began herding the crowd. "Pack the larders. Dismantle the forges. We relocate in six hours."

"Six?" Claire's voice sharpened. "The Monarch's hounds will track Bruno's meltdown."

"Five, then." The Queen turned, her barbed-wire crown catching the moss-light. "And you'll take the backroads to the Greylands. My price? A favor." Her Talin-eye gleamed. "From him."

Devon bowed, the motion more threat than courtesy. "Careful, Your Majesty. Favors have teeth."

The Queen's Talin-eye whirred, adjusting to some unseen frequency. "Teeth I'll pull if they bite," she said, too softly for others to hear. Her crow ruffled its mangled feathers, one wingtip brushing a hidden compartment in her throne. Inside, a cracked Talin-stone pulsed—a relic from the first Purge, when the Monarch's smog first choked the skies. Let the Void eat its fill, she thought. Then we'll see who rules the rot.

Melissa prodded Bruno's remains with a wrench. "Think we can salvage the sigils? Holy scrap's worth a fortune."

"Leave it," Claire snapped. "We're not grave robbers."

"Speak for yourself," Gonov muttered, pocketing Bruno's gold molar.

The Court buzzed with frantic energy. Children bundled black-market goods into rat-skin satchels, while hawkers drained vials of censer magic into makeshift bombs. The Sewer Queen's voice cut through the chaos, barking orders with the precision of a wartime general.

Lapen crouched beside his sister Lissa, adjusting her purifier mask. "Stay close. No wandering."

"But the countryside's safe, right?" Lissa's voice muffled through the filter. "No smog. No Seraphim."

Lapen glanced at Devon, who was arguing with the Queen's blacksmith over a void-scorched blade. "Nowhere's safe. Just… quieter."

Lissa pressed a hand to her purifier, its hum syncing with her wheezing breaths. "Quieter's good. Maybe we'll hear birds." Lapen's throat tightened. He'd promised her birds once—before the Soot Fever, before their parents vanished into the Rendering Pits. Now his promises were dust, lighter than the ash clinging to her shoes. He tightened her mask strap, fingers brushing the scar where her cheek had been seared by a Holy Lamp's backlash. "Stay masked until I say," he lied. "Birds hate smog."

Natalie approached Devon, her arms crossed. "You knew. About Bruno."

"Suspected." Devon conjured a shadowmoth, its wings edged in gold. "Holy oil has a stench. Like roses left to rot."

"And you didn't tell us?"

"Would you have believed me?" The moth dissolved into his palm. "You needed to see the chains to break them."

"Poetic. Still an asshole."

"Consistency's a virtue."

Two hours later, the group huddled in a smuggler's tunnel, its walls slick with bioluminescent algae. The Queen's sentries had split them into pairs—Claire with Devon, Natalie with Gonov, Lapen and Lissa guarded by Melissa's drones.

"The Greylands," Claire said, tracing a map etched into the tunnel wall. "Farmstead ruins here. Abandoned seminary here and small towns here, here, here and here. The Monarch's grip is weaker, but so's our network."

Devon peered at the map, his void-eye casting jagged shadows. "Weakness has its perks. Harder to strangle what you can't see."

"Optimism? You're slipping."

"Realism. The Void thrives in the unseen."

A sentry approached, his face wrapped in scarred linen. "Queen's orders. You'll take the eastern checkpoint at dawn. Bribes are arranged."

"Bribes with what?" Natalie eyed the man's rusted dagger. "We're fresh out of holy corpses."

"With stories." The sentry grinned, revealing a censer-chip wedged between his teeth. "Rumors of a ghost in the Greylands. Monarch's dogs love ghost stories."

Devon's smirk faded. "They'll come hunting."

"Let them." The sentry spat the chip onto the ground. "Greylands chew up holy men. Always have."

The sentry's grin widened, revealing more censer-chips studding his gums. "Last patrol sent there? Found their commander's armor fused to a scarecrow. Sigils reversed, see? Holy magic gone sour." He spat again, the chip sizzling in a puddle. "Fields are hungry out there. Always have been." Natalie's Stealth Brawler sigil itched—a phantom ache. She wondered if the Greylands hungered for rebels too.

At dawn, the group emerged into a ravaged orchard, the trees skeletal, their branches clawing at a sky less choked with smog. The air tasted of damp soil and decay—a novelty after years of industrial rot.

Lissa tugged off her mask, coughing. "It's… green."

Patches of lichen clung to the ruins of a farmhouse, its roof collapsed, walls scorched by old purges. Natalie knelt, brushing ash from a child's doll half-buried in the dirt.

"Don't." Claire pulled her back. "Memories here are traps."

Devon lingered at the tree line, static swirling around his fingertips. "The Void's quieter here. Like the land itself is… asleep."

"Or waiting," Gonov muttered, reloading his rifle.

Melissa's drones buzzed ahead, scanning for threats. "No Holy Lamps. No patrols. Just rats and rot."

"Rot's honest," Devon said. "Doesn't pretend to be anything else."

Claire shouldered her pack, eyeing the horizon. "Move out. Seminary's three miles northeast."

As they trudged through the overgrowth, Lapen fell into step beside Devon. "Will it work? The Void, I mean. Out here."

Devon glanced at Lissa, who stooped to collect a withered wildflower. "Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether we're digging graves or planting seeds."

Lapen frowned. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

Far behind them, in the skeletal remains of the Sewer Queen's Court, a shadow detached from the wall. It knelt beside Bruno's remains, gloved fingers brushing the scorched earth. A censer flared to life in its palm, casting hellish light on the Inquisitor's bone-mask.

"Subject deceased," the Inquisitor intoned. "Containment breach confirmed. Initiate Purge Protocol: Greylands."

The censer's smoke coiled into the shape of a crow—a mirror of the Queen's familiar—and shot into the smog-choked sky.

Somewhere ahead, Devon paused, his void-eye narrowing.

"Problem?" Claire asked.

"Just déjà vu." He flicked a static-charged pebble into the undergrowth. "Let's pick up the pace. Countryside's lovely this time of year."

"Which part? The corpses or the curses?"

"Yes."

The group vanished into the mist, unaware of the Heavy Knight, an Archon(Tier-5) trailing behind.