Chapter 22: Elegance In Carnage

Beneath the crimson-stained sky of Sorneth, the second griffon dove like a javelin through the stormwinds, wind slicing past its wings in banshee shrieks. On its back, draped in black and bone-colored formalwear, the Dressers stood still as statues—until Savrec raised his slender wand, flicked his wrist once with a conductor's flourish, and the griffon let out a snarling caw as it barreled downward.

The monastery loomed below like a festering heart—white stone walls laced with veins of living red marble that pulsed and dripped from the spires, giving the entire cathedral the appearance of a bleeding carcass stitched together by sacred rites. Its windows, circular and stained with a thousand blood glyphs, glowed with life. 

A choir of Blood Saints inside were already preparing, standing in concentric rings of fresh blood that hissed against the floor, drawing runes with their bare feet as they inhaled one long, shared breath, and their veins began to bulge. Red vapors coiled from their open mouths. As the griffon screamed past, the Dressers leapt off like dancers from a stage ledge, and the impact was a shattering symphony.

The marble roof exploded inward in a cyclone of gore and stone as the Dressers landed amidst the Blood Saints. 

The monastery floor trembled as threads of golden silk erupted in violent strands from Savrec's wand like whips from a divine loom. He stood atop a shattered pillar at the far end of the hall, untouched, his coattails fluttering like wings. 

"Ah," he exhaled with delight, voice like a cold smile across velvet, "formality… what a lovely corpse to dance upon." 

With a flick of his wand, dozens of golden threads twisted and spun, dragging Saints off their feet mid-incantation, some garroted before they could scream, others spun around so hard their limbs separated in flight. 

A Saint reached toward a glyph—and a thread laced through their open palm, splitting their bones apart like split reeds, as another wove into their lungs and jerked them into a backbend, strangling their last prayer.

The Dressers surged forward with no hesitation. Men and women in dark suits, long skirts, sleeveless coats, tuxedos dyed with threads of sin, all wielding no blades—only fabric. They reached out with their gloved hands, and the cloth around them obeyed like starving wolves. 

One Dresser vaulted from a Saint's severed shoulder, his cloak unraveling mid-air and wrapping around the Saint's throat like a silk executioner's noose, yanking hard enough to break the neck before the corpse hit the floor. Another Dresser twirled mid-dodge beneath a blood-slick glyph, her high-collared gown splitting open to release razor-thin ribbons, which spun like whirling fans, carving clean lines through three Saints in a single pirouette. 

Saints retaliated with feral lunges, dragging blood through the air to detonate it mid-motion—but threads of hardened velvet lashed through the space between breaths, sewing mouths shut, wrists together, lungs closed from the inside out.

One Blood Saint screamed and pulled the blood from his own arms, forcing it into dense, shaking orbs he slammed into the ground—but the Dressers around him vanished into synchronized lunges. A male slid beneath the explosion with knees bent and one hand extended, while his female partner leapt above it, flipping backwards with her sleeves flaring, the fabric hardening into jagged shears. When they met in the Saint's blind spot, their hands touched, and their magic twisted. 

His jacket and her corset split open, threads dancing between them like serpents, fusing into a new weave. They spun together as one—their clothing reacting mid-motion, forming strangling scarves and sharpened sashes as they moved. Together, they rotated, dipped, vaulted—one holding the other's waist while their clothes unfurled like wings of bloodstained silk, lashing Saints in mid-air, slicing torsos into fountaining ribbons.

Savrec lifted his wand again. "Beautiful," he said to no one in particular, grinning wide. "The art of restraint lies in what you unravel." Behind him, another wave of Saints charged. They didn't fight with crude bloodblades or flares. One slammed their fists together and caused the monastery walls to weep blood, the liquid slithering down in vertical strands that fused into hovering spheres. 

The Saints dipped their fingers into these and began to chant, their bodies going limp, suspended in the air like marionettes. One by one, their own blood surged out of their spines and carved sigils in the air, each one pulsing like a womb. Then from those sigils came impossible phenomena—blood that pulsed in slow-motion, blood that burned when looked at directly, blood that hissed with the voices of children.

Yet the Dressers didn't falter. One pair ducked beneath the suspended glyphs, rolling together in a flowing spin as their suits unravelled into whips that sliced the floating blood symbols apart. 

One Dresser leapt from the spinning couple's vault, touching a Saint's blood-coated chest with two fingers—and that fabric ruptured inward, strangling his lungs in reverse. Another Dresser cartwheeled over a collapsing column, her skirt twirling into a sharpened spiral, and split a Saint's arm at the elbow before her partner's gloves clasped around the Saint's face, sewing the mouth and eyes shut with a simple flick. The movement didn't stop for a second. No time to pause. No room to retreat. Just flowing brutality choreographed with artisan cruelty.

As the final wave of Saints fell, dismembered, strung up by their own robes, crucified on lines of thread stitched into the air, the Dressers formed into pairs. A hush swept through the ruined chamber. Blood soaked the walls, pooled on the marble tiles, ran from torn glyphs and shattered stained glass. Then the Dressers smiled. 

One by one, the males bowed. The females curtsied. And they embraced. Their magics, once individual, now fused—suit and gown, cloak and corset, belt and sash merging into swirling harmonies of fabric. Then they danced. Not just spun, but danced—ballroom steps amidst corpses, dipping and twirling, their movements creating shockwaves of slicing fabric, gold-threaded wind, tearing apart the very stone they stepped on. 

Above them, Savrec flicked his wand in time, conducting. "Magnificent," he murmured. "The only battlefield worthy of fashion… is one where blood is the accessory!"

But the music died.

The blood on the floor trembled.

And from its depths, she rose—Yuma, the Blood Chaplain.

First came the hair, flowing upward like liquid rubies. Then the red cape, alive and whispering as if it mourned. Her gold body shimmered like divine filth, gilded in sacrifice, and from her half-helmet of steel and blood emerged a mouth of pure gold lips, unmoving. Her eyes were hidden behind helm and shadow, but five blood-soaked grimoires hovered behind her in perfect formation, spinning slowly like the hands of a god's clock. Eight arms unfolded, each one thin, long, and trembling with coiled power. In her palms, five blood orbs cackled with cracking heat, veins of red energy snaking into the air.

She didn't move.

She simply was.

"The beauty of blood," she said, voice like hollow scripture echoing through a cathedral long abandoned, "is that it remembers the names of every throat it spilled from."

And her head tilted.

"So sayeth the King and Queen."

The blood beneath Yuma's feet rippled like breath.

Then she vanished.

Savrec gasped slightly, breath stopping for a mere millisecond.

There was no sound—just a violent void in space where she once stood, replaced by a scream of displaced fluid as her body splintered into a stream of sentient blood and streaked across the battlefield like a divine javelin. 

She reformed mid-flight, twisting with six arms extended outward, gold skin glinting with hellish light, and crashed into the first two Dressers mid-dance—she didn't strike, she eclipsed. One arm punched through a ribcage, the other crushed a skull like wet glass. 

The blood trailing behind her coagulated, curled, and shaped into ghost-images—copies of Yuma's form, lesser than her, but just as lethal in silhouette. These echoes moved with discordant jerks, each carrying orbs that pulsed violently as they mimicked her strikes. One clone vaulted from a puddle and impaled a Dresser mid-twirl with an open palm, forcing the man's entire bloodstream out through his mouth. Another clone backflipped mid-air, slammed her six fists together, and exploded in a rainfall of acidic blood needles that melted skin and fabric in symphonic ruin.

"Is this your ballet of elegance?" Yuma's voice rang across the chamber as she eviscerated her way through a trio of Dressers, spinning between them with her eight arms outstretched like the spokes of a death wheel. 

"This choreography of constraint?" She surged again, this time using a Saint's spilled entrails as a path, skating across the viscera in a crouched sprint before launching herself into another pair. She didn't slash or pierce—she peeled. 

Hands struck pressure points with alchemical rhythm, causing organs to rupture from within. The grimoires behind her flared—each one pulsing in time with her movements, one feeding her speed, one her senses, one her grotesque precision, one giving her clones autonomy, and one accelerating the blood's corrosive pulse. A Dresser managed a backward somersault to evade—only to be caught by the ankle by a blood-clone erupting from a fallen comrade's mouth. The Dresser screamed as he was crushed into a human paint smear.

Across the crimson haze, Savrec's wand danced in looping strokes, sending golden threads lashing in impossible, spiraling angles—threads that wove through the burning air like calligraphy strokes from a mad god's brush. One clone leapt at him—he flicked his wrist, and three separate threads folded through its spine, torso, and throat in a single movement, unmaking it. 

"A masterpiece must earn its audience," he answered, sidestepping a gout of scalding blood and pulling a fallen Dresser's corpse upward by the seams. It danced in mock life beside him, flailing elegantly as threads pulled its limbs into savage counterstrikes, its face blank. "You smear—smear!—beauty with obsession! Blood cannot be tailored. It stains!" More corpses followed, animated in agonizing grace, flinging themselves at blood clones with rupturing impacts.

Yuma surged toward him, her real body now among her doubles, spinning with her arms in spirals, her feet gliding on liquid gore. 

One hand clutched a screaming orb that distorted the nearby air, another held a roiling sphere of hissing pressure that she slammed into a reanimated Dresser, atomizing it into a fine mist. 

Savrec hurled three threads at her simultaneously; she grabbed them with three different hands and twisted, causing them to snap and explode backward in a chain reaction. Then she was upon him. He parried with a roll of cloth that hardened mid-motion, sliding backward as three of her fists struck in rapid succession—first high, then mid, then low—each dodged by hair's breadth, though one landed on his side, cracking ribs.

They moved through the collapsing monastery in a hurricane of counterstrikes. Savrec hurled his wand into the air, leapt, and caught it behind his back as he flipped over Yuma's head, landing with threads dragging five Dresser corpses into defensive formations. 

Yuma vanished into blood again, reappearing behind him with a crescent of clones that rotated in mid-air, each releasing a pulse from their orbs that destabilized the area's blood concentration. The floor cracked. Threads recoiled. Savrec caught the edge of a shattered staircase, spun beneath it, and used his own blood as a line to swing upward—then slammed his wand downward, pulling six corpses into an aerial pirouette formation that intercepted the clones mid-lunge, crashing them into opposite walls like broken dolls.

But the bodies ran out.

The clones didn't.

Soon, it was just him—and her.

Savrec nodded, "Interesting. Though I'm not convince you're being formal."

Yuma responded, "Yet, you still haven't shown me why you or all of Kalazeth are as beautiful as the blood which leaks from our souls. It contains power, which is all we need."

"Yeah. Not everything needs power. It needs elegance and patience and crafting."

Savrec tore the coat from his shoulders and let the fabric harden around his forearms. He stepped into a brutal stance, raised his hands like a conductor preparing his final piece. 

"My final dance."

Yuma descended in silence, her clones dispersing. She sprinted toward him with her orbs rotating in separate directions now, each of her eight arms moving on independent rhythms, her legs never stopping. 

The fight was pure fury. She punched, and he slipped, countering with a palm strike enhanced by thread tension. She countered with a downward elbow, he twisted into a spin and struck her ribs with a hardened knee. Her fists came in clusters—two high, two middle, one grabbing his ankle mid-leap and slamming him into the wall. But he retaliated mid-crash, looping a single golden thread through her shoulder and pulling—dragging her into a stagger that let him drive his foot into her neck.

They traded fists like gods writhing in the belly of a dying world. Her speed was terrifying, erratic, soaked in centuries of sanctified slaughter. His was fluid, measured, a symphony of restraint. He struck, ducked, reversed grip, struck again. 

She retaliated by leaping over his head, flipping, and catching him mid-turn with a three-arm flurry that pulverized his spine, but he twisted with it, using the force to fling himself upward into a rising kick that cracked her helm. Blood and gold spilled into the air. They crashed together, both heaving, bleeding, coughing, but neither slowing. Until, at last, both struck each other at the same moment. Her hands pierced his chest. His threads ripped through her torso. They staggered apart.

Savrec fell to one knee, blood pooling beneath him like a stage. He breathed shallow. His wand slipped from his fingers. Then he smiled, and raised one trembling hand—not to strike, but to pose.

He stood tall, hands lifted in the stance of a high tailor's flourish. His broken limbs held the shape of a forgotten ballroom step, one leg bent, the other straight, blood painting his lapel. A single tear ran down his cheek as he whispered, "I only ever wanted… to show them… beauty. When I was a child… I made cloaks of torn rags and buttons. I dressed mannequins in alleyways. Not for gold… no… but for passion. They said it was grotesque. I said it was formality." He choked, smiling wide now, eyes glassy. "And now they've seen it, haven't they? All of Kalazeth… saw it."

His body fell like folded cloth, perfectly aligned, a final pose frozen in grace.

Across the blood-drenched field, Yuma collapsed as well, the grimoires falling silent..dead as her.

'Is all of Kalazeth so…honorable..?'

(Palace of Sorneth)

The throne room of Sorneth was no longer a hall of rule—it was a womb of sacrilege.

The floor, once quarried obsidian, now resembled clotted flesh. Crimson veins ran through every black tile like arteries beneath skin, pulsing faintly to a rhythm that did not belong to this world. The walls bled. Actual rivulets of blood wept from the sculpted murals of Sorneth's saints, staining their faces with tears that had a heartbeat. The stained-glass windows, once depicting heroic Chaplains, had shattered and been replaced with stretched skin veils—translucent, writhing with patterns like vascular maps.

At the far end, beneath a sloping ceiling that mimicked a ribcage of bone and petrified sinew, stood the wrong throne.

It was not the true throne of Sorneth's royalty. That had long since been buried beneath this desecration. This was the Throne of the Hollow Pulse, carved from blackened antlers and bundled spine fragments, a thing that appeared grown more than built. It faced the Statue of Vargometh—an unsettling, man-shaped figure, too smooth, too symmetrical, with no face—only a mouth that had never opened. It was bowed forward, arms out as if waiting to be fed. And atop its cracked crown, something worse: a rotting, feminine hand, slumped from the fissure like a marionette's forgotten limb. Black nails. Puckered flesh. It twitched once.

And with that twitch, the chamber trembled.

King Voren il-Dexura, thin and tall, wore a robe of stitched scalps, every inch etched with veins painted from blood. His fingers were too long, jointed with golden rings that pulsed when he spoke. His hair was gathered into a shape that resembled an inverted chalice, and from his neck dangled a severed tongue belonging to the last high Chaplain of Sorneth—now a totem. His gold eyes were always wet. 

Next to him stood Queen Thellani Virelth, wearing a gown of mirror shards and embalmed red ribbons. Her face was powdered bone-white, but from her jaw to her collar, her skin had been peeled to expose the muscle beneath, preserved perfectly. Her crown resembled antlers—but bent inward, as if trying to puncture her skull. Her mouth, when she spoke, never moved—but blood oozed from her eyes instead.

They stood before the statue, surrounded by their former maids—naked, bloodless bodies nailed to the floor in a ritual circle. All had been drained to commune.

King Voren's voice broke the hush: "Our monasteries fall, bathing in silence. The hymns didn't even echo. Our chaplains are dying."

Queen Thellani's whisper followed, eyes never blinking, voice pouring from her nose: "We have fed the scripture. We have spilled and preserved. Yet your silence infects us."

The air went still.

Then… a hum. Wrong. Low, harmonic, insectile yet melodic, like the whisper of a thousand mouths stitched into one throat. The arm atop the statue twitched again, and power surged—a force so primordial it caused the king and queen's noses to rupture at once, blood streaming freely down their necks. The rot on the hand cracked. Beneath the nails, glyphs pulsed in forgotten syllables.

Then the voice came.

Not from the statue.

Not from the hand.

But from behind the veil of the world.

"Cattle-kings of rot… You whisper to the throne, but it is the womb that listens. She is not the god. She is the cradle. And I speak through her."

The voice came from the hand—from Tereza, hidden within the statue's cavity. Her flesh was the conduit, and her soul was the hook.

"You will gather my chosen—the ones I filled. Champions draped in my wet psalms. They will carry this form… this icon… to the bleeding heart of Kalazeth. To the capital. For beneath its gilded bones lies the lock. And she—this mother—shall open it."

"And she shall unshackle the man. The son. The forgotten leaf—Adam, god-ling of chaos. Raided by Yuniper in sorrow, guided by dust, broken by peace, sealed in fate. Let him wake. Let her break the seal. As this is Yuniper's wish."

King Voren rasped, wiping his face with a flayed priest's veil. "And what of the boy… Cainan? It is he who slaughters…he's too strong."

Silence.

The room dimmed.

Then, Vargometh spoke again, and the words curled through the air like steam from fresh blood.

"I smell him. Even now. His blood… sings. Not like theirs. His was never touched by covenant. Not claimed by the Veltrac covenant. Not one of the leashed."

"He is war. Not soldier. Not general. A god of War. One of the godlings left undiscovered in the time of devouring. A wound that breathes. The kind even gods name when they kneel. As he grows, so will his power. He needs to be killed now, and Adam and Tereza can put him away."

"He is danger. Only a god… or a Witch Mother… or the Queen of Witches herself… could silence him."

A pause. Then:

"Tereza… is one of the Mothers. The sister of one still away, still bound to the petty squabbles of Vaerdyn's noble waste by command of your Witch Queen."

"They do not know what we've hidden."

"You will carry her. Soon. She will bleed the lock, and I will become."

The voice fell away. The chamber went dead. The pulsing veins of the walls slowed. Even the blood pooling from the maids cooled.

King Voren bowed, holding his stomach as if vomiting power. "We will move her."

Queen Thellani touched the base of the statue reverently, a red tear sliding from her chin. "Let Kalazeth's sky split. Let the leaf fall once more."

The hand at the top of the statue curled faintly.

The throne room remained silent—but all inside felt the truth:

The god was listening.