49. Band of Sumir

The wind outside Vanguard Station howled like a dying animal, rattling the metal shutters and breathing sand into every crack it could find. The place wasn't much—a hollowed-out structure at the edge of the town, reinforced with old thaumite and rusted bolts. But tonight, it felt like the last warm place on a cold, forgotten map.

Inside, under dim oil lamps swinging gently from above, Nelson Lang sat beside four strangers wrapped in worn cloaks and bleeding pride.

Band of Sumir, they called themselves.

He'd heard whispers of desert warriors. But nothing prepared him for the sight of them—half-covered in cuts and bruises, their boots caked in white salt, and their eyes... their eyes were like chipped glass, holding more silence than any words could offer.

Nelson pressed a warm cloth to Randy Wager's arm. "You're lucky your muscle didn't tear clean off."

Randy chuckled through a grunt. "Guess luck's got a twisted sense of humor."

Across from him, Andy Gaze rested with his back to a support beam, sharpening his knife not because it needed it, but because his hands needed something to do. Jack Dalinger, the largest of the four, leaned against the window frame, eyes fixed on the dark horizon like he was still expecting something to come clawing out of it.

And Khloe Lockhart sat quietly near the fireplace, her long braid loose and her gaze half-lost in the flickering flames.

Nelson looked at them all. "So... how did you even get here?"

Jack exhaled, like someone peeling off a memory that had stuck too long to the skin.

"It started three days ago," he said. "We were heading to the Arcan Flats. Routine patrol. Sand was calm and wind was singing. Then it changed suddenly."

Khloe's voice, soft and low, followed: "It wasn't just a storm. It wasn't natural. The sky folded inward, like paper set on fire. Everything turned blue. Not sky-blue—wrong blue. Like—"

"Like it came from another mind," Andy muttered.

"We thought we were hallucinating," Randy added, eyes narrowing. "But our compasses cracked. The sun blinked. And then... we lost time."

Jack nodded. "Next thing we knew, we were lying in the salt dunes on the outskirts of Ceferin. Our tents gone. Provisions half-fused to the sand. Andy was dragging Khloe's body from a pit of something that didn't belong to the world."

Nelson frowned. "So you walked here? From the flats?"

"Didn't walk," Randy grinned faintly. "We stumbled, crawled, shot down two of those... things. Long-limbed, no face. Smelled like rust and gravewater."

Nelson poured water into a bowl, dipping a strip of linen into it. "And the storm?"

"Gone," Khloe whispered. "Like it had never existed. Except it had. It had teeth. And it bit something off us. I just don't know what."

The fire cracked, throwing sparks against the soot-stained bricks.

Nelson leaned back, studying them. "You were meant to be somewhere else, yet you ended up here. In the middle of all... this." His voice dropped to a hush. "Maybe not a coincidence."

Andy finally stopped sharpening the blade. "We don't believe in coincidence."

Randy chuckled. "Too many bones buried under that word."

Jack sighed, glancing at Nelson. "This town. It feels like it's waiting for something. The people walk like they're trying to not wake it up."

"It?" Nelson raised an eyebrow.

"The thing they're all pretending not to see," Jack replied. "Like it's not wrapping around their shadows."

Khloe met Nelson's eyes, her voice steady now. "There's something here. We felt it when we crossed the town's edge. Like walking into a room where someone just died, but no one's told the body yet."

Nelson swallowed hard. "You're not wrong."

No one spoke for a moment. Just the hiss of the wind through the cracks, the pulse of a coming dread tightening around them.

Then Andy stood, shoulders squaring despite the gash on his side. "We didn't come here by choice. But now we're here, we won't run."

Randy nodded. "If the storm brought us, it had a reason."

Nelson smiled faintly. "Then I guess Ceferin's lucky."

Khloe's lips curled into something like a smile. "No one's ever lucky around a storm, Sir."

....

The rusted doors of Vanguard Station groaned open with a sound like a wounded beast gasping its last.

Out stepped the Band of Sumir—four figures weathered by storm and salt, their silhouettes backlit by the dying oil lamps behind them. They walked further crossing two streets and a closed market.

The sky above was no longer blue.

It bled.

A veil of crimson fog rolled over Ceferin's rooftops, thick as curdled milk and humming with a wrongness that made the lungs strain with every breath. The sun—if it could still be called that—hung overhead like a dying eye behind the gauze of a diseased dream, pulsing weakly.

And then there were the tentacles.

Massive, rooted, twitching things stretched across the town like the fossilized roots of some ancient, godless tree. They slithered up buildings, pulsed beneath cracked roads, and writhed slowly against the sky, responding to something unseen.

Andy Gaze adjusted the strap on his shoulder, eyes narrowed. "Hell's bleeding into the air."

Randy Wager smirked, though the joke died in his throat. "And it's leaving claw marks behind."

Khloe Lockhart's hand hovered near her dagger, her breath caught somewhere between a whisper and a prayer. "The church should be two blocks east. Lower foundations. We need to move fast."

They began walking silently, deliberate past the collapsed signposts and abandoned stalls crusted in salt and sand. The buildings leaned like mourners, and the road cracked like ancient paper under their boots.

Then—

A sound.

Neither a scream or roar.

A wet clicking. Bone against bone. Flesh unbuttoning itself.

They stopped.

From behind an overturned carriage, the creatures emerged.

Six of them—each more repulsive than the last.

Humanoid only in shape, these things might be the nightmares coming from the tentacles. Thin torsos, no real heads—just clusters of wet compound eyes bulging from bloated chitin. Their arms bent backward at two points, ending in pulsating claw-pincers. Their skin—if it was skin—looked like boiled leather fused with centipede legs and molted husks.

They clicked as they moved. Squirmed more than walked. One dragged its belly across the stone, leaking yellow fluid like melted fat. Another had no mouth—just a circular, gaping orifice that opened and closed like a parasitic flower.

Khloe took a step back. "No..." she whispered. "That's not even—that's not alive."

Andy's scratched his jaw. Randy muttered, "We shouldn't even be looking at this. Such a time waste. Move—"

But Jack Dalinger didn't hesitate.

The moment the first bug-thing lunged, Jack moved.

With a roar that drowned out the skittering, Jack charged forward. His great blade—shaped more like a slab of sharpened iron—arced downward with a crunch, splitting the first creature's head-body clean in two.

Viscera sprayed, hissing against the stone.

Another leapt—Jack twisted, ramming the blunt of his elbow into its abdomen, then driving his foot through its leg-joint with a sickening snap. He grabbed it by the neck—or what passed for one—and slammed it against the wall until it stopped twitching.

The others closed in, skittering up the walls and leaping from both sides.

Jack welcomed it.

He caught one midair and crushed it against the ground. Another he impaled through the center, holding it screaming as it spasmed, then hurling it at the last one like a sack of meat. He was a storm of raw power—breathing hard, soaked in black-green blood, but never backing away.

Andy, Randy, and Khloe only watched—frozen. Not with fear. But with reverence.

The kind of stillness born when watching something holy, something wrathful.

It was over in seconds.

Bug-bodies twitched in puddles of acidic slime. Jack stood amid them, chest heaving, his coat torn, blade dripping.

"I hate insects," he muttered.

No one spoke.

Then Randy exhaled, slow and quiet. "That was…"

Andy nodded. "Excessively heroic."

Khloe offered a faint smile. "You really like making messes, don't you?"

Jack glanced over his shoulder. "They weren't supposed to be here. Which means something else is."

The crimson fog thickened around them.

The cathedral doors opened without a creak.

The four entered slowly. Khloe first, blade still damp, eyes alert. Behind her came Andy and Randy, the twins of wit and war, followed lastly by Jack Dalinger, shoulders soaked with monster blood, dragging his colossal blade behind him like a broken oath.

The lower church was built into the earth itself, stone ribs rising like frozen waves of an old-world beast. Candles lined every groove in the cracked stone walls, fluttering as though afraid to breathe. Dust spun lazily in the air, and the faint scent of ash and incense clung to the pews like something sacred had long since burned and never been cleaned.

And there, beneath the shattered mural of Saint Tellius—stood him.

A lone man in an old cassock of woven black-and-ivory threads, sleeves rolled, fingers dancing across the strings of a worn violin.

The melody that left the bow was neither joyous nor mournful. It moved like a question unanswered. A child asking if the sky still held stars. Each note bent the air. The kind of sound that made silence jealous.

"Still can't resist a dramatic entrance," Andy said softly.

The man turned. He didn't stop playing. Just opened one eye dark, sharp, unreadable—and nodded.

"Band of Sumir," he said, finishing the last refrain. "It's been a long time."

"Not long enough," Randy replied with a grin.

The man lowered his violin and bowed with old-world grace, "Father Vain Ford"

" Still a mouthful," Khloe smirked. "What happened to just 'Father Vain'?"

"Blame the congregation," he said, eyes twinkling. "They insist on stacking titles like bricks against fear."

Jack leaned his blade against the pew and cracked his neck. "We received the summons two nights ago. Direct invocation. Blood-marked parchment. Came through the North River winds. You're sure it was your end?"

Father Vain nodded. "It was us. Or rather, the faithful of this land."

Andy stepped forward, voice cooler. "You know the rules, Father. The Band of Sumir doesn't respond to mere prayers. Only when the God of Argue is invoked through correct passage. This Kingdom bows to the God of Fate."

Vain raised his hand and turned it over. The brand of two spiraling snakes burned on his palm. The Spiral Transaction. An oath-mark. Still fresh.

"I gave up three sacred texts. The original ink of the Book of Crossed Threads. And a living oracle's tongue." He smiled faintly. "They bartered fairly. And fate, for once, bent its knee."

Khloe let out a low whistle. "So Francis agreed to pay Fate's debt with blood and ink. That's rare."

"They're desperate," Vain murmured, sitting on the edge of the altar. "The tentacles you saw? Only one root of something deeper. The Dreaming Root has awakened. Creatures of unshaped thought are slipping in. And the Fated Ones they observe. They do not interfere."

Randy snorted. "Figures. Fate's a cruel mathematician. Loves his ledger, hates getting his hands dirty."

Jack said nothing. He walked toward the cracked mural of Saint Tellius who once, they say, debated Death for the soul of a city and stared at the faded paint.

"So what's the plan, Father?" he asked at last.

"You're not just here to witness, are you?"

Vain looked tired now. His eyes drooped behind the elegance. "No. You're here to rescue the last Knot. A young woman named Hana Kraves. She's a Threadling—born with the gift to alter one strand in fate's web. The Outer Deities wants her bled and archived."

Randy blinked. "Wait, wait. So you're hiding her? That's high heresy, even for you."

Vain smiled. "Argue thrives in heresy. That's what makes us beautiful."

Andy chuckled. "You're insane. And brave. But mostly insane."

They all laughed quietly, like they weren't sure if the walls were listening.

"Any resistance?" Khloe asked.

"Yes," Vain said, standing again. "Three Fatebound Hunters are already in the city. Masked, numbered, cold as their master. And something else... something not quite divine, but older than scripture, is stalking her scent."

Jack stepped forward. "Where's the girl now?"

"In the crypts below the church," Vain said. "But the path is no longer stable. Doors shift. Time drips backward. You'll need a tether—each other."

The Band exchanged glances.

No fear. No questions. Just shared breath and ready weapons.

"Then we start tonight," Jack said. "God of Fate can watch. But we'll do what gods won't."

Vain raised his violin once more and played again. A darker tune now. The kind of melody that felt like steel being drawn from a sheath beneath the world.

"May Argue's breath stir your courage," he whispered.

And the Band of Sumir, once again, descended into the dark.