Chapter Eighteen: Blood in the Wind

Night clung to the mountains like a burial shroud. The monastery's high bell tower, cold and trembling, gazed out across the forests below. But Elara did not look back. She descended the winding stone steps with a pace that bordered on frantic. Brother Aram followed at a distance, his candle bobbing in the dark like a flickering soul.

The Order had stirred. She heard it in the muffled thuds of hurried feet, in the rustle of ancient robes pulled over armor hidden beneath. No longer monks of peace, the brothers were becoming what they once were sentinels of blood and fire. And Elara, the key between their ancient oaths and the war to come.

Outside, the mountain air clawed her face. She welcomed the sting. A single thought rang louder than the bells that still echoed in the cold: The generals are moving. The wolves are unaware. There is no time.

Brother Aram caught up, his breath misting before him. "You must go alone?"

"No," she replied, eyes set on the dark path ahead. "I must go first."

Behind them, torches flared to life. The Order was awakening. She could feel the weight of it. The silence of centuries breaking.

---

The road down the mountains was treacherous. Snow, long absent from this time of year, had returned in patches, as though nature itself recoiled from what stirred beneath it. Ravens followed her. Wolves howled distantly,not Ethan's pack, not any known to her.

She traveled with haste, the monastery fading behind her like a dream half-remembered. By the third night, she crossed into the lowlands.

And on the fourth, the visions returned.

They came not while sleeping, but in the flickering edges of reality in shadows cast by fires, in puddles of water that trembled with no wind.

---

Elara knelt by a stream. The water was dark, but in it she saw fire. A battlefield. Then, the generals again.

They marched, but now she saw their faces. Or what remained of them:

1. Lord Varek the Hollow-Eyed, whose helm was fused to his skull, eyes forever scorched out by the sun he betrayed. He carried two blackened sabers that howled with the voices of the condemned.

2. Seraphine the Shroud, once a seer of light, now blindfolded by cursed silk. Her staff dragged behind her, and with every step, the ground died.

3. Drennach of the Spire, suspended by chains that held his disjointed form aloft. His laughter echoed endlessly, the mirth of a soul that had forgotten death.

4. Morrakai the Skinner, whose flesh changed with each victim he had worn. He bore no face—only a mask of stitched agony.

5. Thul, Bride-Eater, the woman with blades for hands and a sorrowful face that shed endless tears of blood. The wolves would fear her most.

6. Kolvak the Maw, whose armor was shaped like a gaping mouth, always chewing. He had eaten cities in his prime.

And at their center, not marching but gliding:

7. Malrion the Silent King, Lord Strahen's right hand before his fall, now a shade with no voice. He carried the sigil of ruin on his back, and wherever he went, memory withered.

They were no longer dreaming. They were real. And if they fed on souls, they'll transform or they'll even be more stronger. They were moving toward the Forest of the Dead.

---

Elara gasped, stumbling back. The vision receded, but the cold stayed with her. She whispered a prayer,not to the saints, but to the bloodline within her.

"Izolda," she said. "What did you do that they awaken now?"

The answer came not in words but in sensation. Guilt. Buried choices. Love twisted by time.

She rose, soaked and shivering. Her destination had changed. She no longer sought the wolves only to warn them. She had to find the blade. The Blade of Severance—once used to bind Dracula, once lost in the Forest of the Dead. Ethan had tried and failed.

But maybe she could find it. Or die trying.

---

Two nights later, the wind changed.

Elara had reached the outskirts of the Forest of the Dead. The trees loomed, bare and pale, their limbs like the fingers of corpses clawing at the sky. Fog pooled between roots like blood.

She stepped inside.

The forest did not welcome her. The moment she crossed the threshold, the air became dense. Not just with mist, but with memory. Her own and others. Screams echoed in the distance ,some human, some not.

As she walked deeper, the path disappeared, swallowed by thorns and skeletal roots. Whispers brushed her ears,names she had never heard, moments she had never lived. Yet somehow, they all belonged to her.

Izolda's past clawed up through the soil.

A child she had once cradled. A betrayal whispered in a lover's arms. The sword slipping through a man's back Strahen's, perhaps though she couldn't see the face.

Then, silence.

And a clearing.

A circle of stones stood before her, blackened and marked with symbols she had seen in her dreams. Blood-runes of the old world. In the center lay a hollow, where a weapon once rested.

Gone.

Elara stepped closer and the wind around her stilled. The trees seemed to hold their breath. From the shadows emerged a figure cloaked in feathers and bone.

A woman. Old, impossibly old. Her eyes were milky, but her voice was strong.

"You seek the blade."

Elara nodded. "It was here."

"It was taken," the woman said. "By one not meant to hold it."

Elara's chest tightened. "Ethan."

The woman stepped forward. "He was not the thief. He was the bait. Something else came with him. Something that stole into the dark and claimed the blade while the wolves fought shadows."

"What was it?"

The woman turned her face upward. "A memory wearing flesh. A revenant."

Elara's blood turned to ice. She could feel it now,just beyond the forest, just beyond reach. The blade in unworthy hands. A general, perhaps. Or worse.

"Can I find it again?"

The woman tilted her head. "Only if you let go."

"Let go of what?"

"Everything."

A gust of wind tore through the clearing. The woman vanished like smoke.

Elara stood alone.

She dropped to her knees, fingers tracing the hollow where the blade once lay. Her vision swam, her breath shallow. But she knew what she had to do.

She reached into her satchel, drawing out the small vial given to her by Brother Aram. "Should your blood ever forget itself," he had said, "drink."

She drank.

The pain was immediate. Fire surged through her veins. Not the fire of death, but of awakening. Memories crashed down,Izolda's, her own, the history of blood and betrayal.

And with it came a scream. Not her own. Not Izolda's.

A call.

A wolf's call.

Ethan.

She rose. Her eyes now fully golden, light bleeding from them. She turned her face toward the west.

"I'm coming."

The generals would not wait.

But neither would she.

---

Far from the forest, in a ruined city half-sunk in swamp, a figure walked among corpses that would not decay.

In his hand, the Blade of Severance.

Lord Varek, Hollow-Eyed, turned his face to the sky. His voice was a rasp through steel.

"The bloodline awakens. The bait is set. The Crimson King stirs."

Behind him, the other six generals gathered. A sound like iron splitting the earth echoed as Malrion raised a banner made of skin.

The war had begun.

And the wolves would howl before they bled.