“My unfinished song.”

  The air cracked, like ice under too much weight, the void of Heathrine’s domain split into jagged fractures, trembling with strain. A deep, grinding groan followed, not pain, but the sound of something ancient waking under duress.

  The god stirred from the hold, eyes glimmering in the hollow sockets of their half-human skull, pale orbs, disembodied and floating. A thousand whispers died mid-breath. Heathrine’s binding shadows writhed desperately, the last coils of her spell resisting, then shattered like brittle glass. From the abyss beneath them, a hand erupted, veined bone wrapped in cords of living sinew. It surged upward, massive and terrible, seizing Heathrine mid-chant. She gasped as the spell faltered.

  “Enough games,” the god murmured.

  Their voice was the sound of iron dragged across wet stone, and with a single motion, they hurled her. She spiraled through the air, limbs slack, body limp from the psychic whiplash of her broken dominion. She was weightless. Broken.

  Until-

  WHAM.

  A streak of pale light cut across the field, intercepting her mid-flight.

  Enoch.

  His arm wrapped around her, his boots skidding across the dirt, carving trenches in the soil. Divine sparks danced across his skin, arcs of oathbound energy whispering of ancient promises. His body hummed with a hymn. He knelt and laid her down with quiet care. Her eyes fluttered open. Just long enough to see his face.

  The battlefield went still, not from fear, but from recognition. The god turned towards Enoch. Their distorted form twisted with interest, bones flexing backward. A smile, too wide, too hungry, unfurled across their ruined face.

  “Ahh… you.”

  They floated above the ground, limbs cocked like a curious predator.

  “I thought you were dust. Gone. Like the rest.”

  Their head tilted at an unnatural angle.

  “And yet here you are. Still dragging around that old axe like it means something.”

  Their voice slithered across the battlefield, smooth and sick with delight of his arrival. Enoch stepped forward. Each step cracked the earth. He lowered Heathrine’s unconscious body to the ground, then reached behind his back.

  His fingers curled around the axe.

  "You made a mistake," he said, calm as still water.

  "You took the wrong child."

  The god laughed.

  It was not joy. Not mockery.

  It was a sound of long patience fulfilled.

  “Oh no,” they said, lifting a hand lazily toward the clearing behind them.

  “She’s still here, Oathwielder.”

  There, the creature lay, Rayne’s face twisted in restless slumber, blood-speckled and unmoving. Her chest rose with labored breath. Fingers twitching. Dreaming in silence.

  “The debt was paid,” the god continued, voice honeyed and hollow.

  “The bargain struck. Ask the Vimezulte, as they've called my name.”

  Enoch froze.

  That name. That cursed name. It pulled something out from behind his calm, a quiet, ancient grief buried deep beneath years of silence.

  "You made a deal with them," he said, almost to himself.

  Then louder.

  "And your mistake..."

  He drew the axe. The holy etchings along its edge flared to life, seething with the wrath of a soul torn in mourning.

  "...was thinking you could keep what you stole."

  The wind screamed through the broken domain. The red moon bled harder, casting monstrous shadows that twisted with every heartbeat. The god grinned wider. Their joints popped as they lowered into a stance, welcoming.

  “Then come! Oathwielder!”

  Their voice slithered.

  Behind them, a cathedral of flesh loomed. its pulsing walls and shadowed spires breathing like a living thing. Tendrils waved gently in the still night, swaying like weeds beneath black water. The ground trembled beneath their bare feet, fractured and bleeding steam.

  ...

  She felt it before she opened her eyes. A low vibration in the earth, steady, like a war drum buried beneath miles of bone. Magic, old and ugly, churning the world like rot.

  Then came the cold. Not a temperature, but a pressure. A presence.

  Heathrine stirred herself awake. Her eyes fluttered, the vision behind them blurred and distant. Sound returned next: the static hiss of air pulled too thin, the hum of divine tension, the murmur of voices too vast to belong to any one mouth.

  She tasted blood. A breath. Then another. Her ribs screamed with each draw, but she forced herself upright, propping on one elbow. A man she didn't recognize stood not far ahead, axe gripped tight in his hand, shoulders rising and falling with the rhythm of rage barely contained. Before him, the god smiled, serene, inevitable, monstrous. The ground cracked beneath their feet as the silence between them grew thick enough to crush breath.

  Mikhail stood several paces away, jaw clenched, firelight dimming around him like a candle guttering in wind. And she was the third. Heathrine staggered fully upright, spitting blood to the side. Her shadows, at first slow to respond, began to rise around her again.

  "I’m not done yet," she muttered hoarsely.

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  Mikhail glanced at her with surprise, then nodded once, relieved. Enoch didn’t turn, but something in his stance shifted. A small tension uncoiled. He knew. The god’s eyes slid toward her, just slightly. Their smile widened.

  “Oh. You’re awake,” they said, voice laced with sweet rot.

  “How wonderful. I was hoping you'd live to see the end.”

  Heathrine’s lips curled back, half a grin, half a grimace. Her fingers twitched, and shadow sharpened. Heathrine let out a dry, broken laugh, more breath than sound. Her shadows rippled at her feet like reluctant memories. She didn’t smile. Not this time.

  “Yeah,” she rasped, wiping blood from her mouth.

  “Seems I’m always waking up when I shouldn’t.”

  She stood taller, trembling but steady.

  “I don’t even know why I still get up anymore...”

  Her gaze lifted, tired, sharp.

  “But if I’m still breathing, I might as well make it hurt.”

  The god laughed.

  Then—light.

  Mikhail struck first.

  He raised his hand, and from it burst a wave of fire so pure it seemed to bleach the world itself. White flame screamed forward, unfurling into wings behind him as he charged, every step burning with divine fury. The god didn’t blink. The fire kissed their face. Clung to their robes. But with a single raised finger, they split it, twisted it, until it evaporated into harmless smoke.

  “Really? A spark,” they murmured. “Adorable.”

  Heathrine was next. No chant. No theatrics. Just a snap.

  Darkness surged beneath the god, pulling back like a tide before a storm. Then the abyss rose, dozens of tendrils like blades and fangs, screaming without mouths. Her domain writhed open into a spiral of negation, swallowing light, swallowing sound.

  The god glanced down, almost fondly as they closed their fist. The void collapsed inward. A concussive pop echoed like the end of a world. The shadow dome crumpled into a single point and vanished. Heathrine staggered, blood in her mouth, eyes wide in disbelief. Her magic, ripped apart like paper.

  And then, thunder.

  Enoch moved.

  He was purely weight and wrath. No blessing gilded him. No glamour shielded him.

  The axe sang against the air, a low, guttural hum, carved with ancient runes that bled blue. Enoch was already in motion, a blur of motion and murder. His blade tore through the unraveling remnants of magic, straight into the god’s chest.

  Steel met flesh with a loud squelch.

  No shield. No divine immunity. The god reeled backward, staggering.

  Across their torso bloomed a wound. No blood. Only static. Reality itself seemed to flicker where the edge had passed.

  They looked down.

  Then up.

  At him.

  “You,” they said, voice fracturing like a prism across dimensions.

  "You dare!"

  Enoch said nothing.

  He was already on the second strike.

  Elbow. Axe. Knee. Spin.

  Each movement was brutal, precise. Each impact landed. The god blocked with limbs that snapped and healed, bone reknitting, flesh bubbling like wax, but Enoch kept breaking them. He was a rhythm no immortal could predict. Every strike carried history. Every blow rang like a bell of judgment.

  “You are... truly... inconvenient,” the god hissed between deflections.

  “What a lovely nuisance you’ve become. But I can still notice your rust.”

  Heathrine and Mikhail closed in again, Mikhail radiant with roaring flame, Heathrine flickering between planes, a ghost of vengeance. Together, they pressed the assault. They slipped beneath Heathrine’s blade of midnight and caught Mikhail mid-swing, flicking him skyward like an ember. Mikhail twisted, igniting his body in flame, then hurled himself downward, an exploding comet.

  The god sidestepped. The world went white.

  From the inferno, Enoch emerged.

  His axe howled.

  CLANG.

  The god caught the strike. Bare hand to divine steel.

  Their fingers hissed, blackening, steaming as the runes burned their skin. They smiled anyway.

  “Is that all you've got, Oathwielder?”

  Enoch’s voice was gravel and thunder.

  “Not even close.”

  The second swing came.

  And this time-

  The god flinched.

  For a moment, just the span of a breath, the tide turned.

  Enoch’s axe thrummed in his grip like a living thing, attuned to the rhythm of divine dissonance. Heathrine’s shadows unfurled with surgical grace, and though Mikhail’s flames now flickered dimmer, they still burned white with purpose.

  Across from them, the god stood still.

  Their newly regenerated hand dangled at their side, trembling, slightly. As if the flaw annoyed them. They looked toward Enoch: sweat beading down his temple, cloak in tatters, breath even. And they smiled.

  Not out of arrogance nor amusement.

  They had made their choice.

  No word. No gesture. The world shifted.

  Enoch lunged.

  His axe cleaved the air, and struck nothing. The ground had disappeared and the sky bled. Reality folded in on itself like damp cloth wrung tight. The battlefield evaporated, erased in an instant. And in its place, flesh. A wet squelch filled the air as the horizon heaved, muscle surging from the void like a birthing wound. A pocket dimension took shape, pulsing tissue, twitching sinew, walls that breathed, watched, remembered.

  Veins as thick as rivers veered through the sky, pumping something black and writhing across miles of steaming meat. Bone spires, cathedral-like, pierced the heavens, dripping marrow. Each step landed with a sickening squish, like treading through a womb that had no business remembering names.

  “Incantation: Sacrament of Divine Form: The Flesh Crucible.”

  The words etched themselves into the minds of the living. Mikhail fell to one knee, eyes wide with unfiltered horror.

  “What... what the hell is this place?!”

  Heathrine’s breath hitched. Even her shadows recoiled like frightened animals.

  Enoch held fast.

  Weapon ready.

  Until the god returned.

  Not in one form, but many.

  A glimpse laughing on the left. Another behind Mikhail, grinning wide.

  A third, above, below, inside, twisting.

  “Welcome,” they whispered from every direction, “to the inside of me.”

  Then they moved.

  Fast. Unseen. Unrelenting.

  A blur of limbs and pressure, claws, fists, tendrils, voices. Mikhail braced as he was flung through meat-thick corridors, every slam met with bursts of retaliatory flame. Heathrine vanished into shadow, only to be yanked mid-slip and slammed to the bone floor with a stomach-turning crack.

  Enoch braced himself, too late. A tendril, crowned with the face of a weeping infant, wrapped around his ankle and dragged him, whipping him through the twitching labyrinth like a hooked fish. Cartilage walls crashed into his back. He twisted, cleaved the thing in half, landed-

  And was punched from the sky by a mountainous fist of flesh.

  CRASH.

  The world shuddered.

  But Enoch rose.

  Bloodied. Limping. Teeth gritted.

  The god’s voice came now from everywhere, its tone layered, overlapping: children’s choirs, shrieks and cries.

  “You forget, Oathwielder. I am nor born of spirit and law.

  I am born of man.

  The hate you wield. The grief you harbor. The child you lost.

  They are mine now. They always were.”

  One of the god’s forms lunged, half-made, ribs jutting like teeth, face stretched in a perpetual smile. Enoch didn’t hesitate. Steel sang, but he was slowing.

  Heathrine flickered beside him, struggling to stand, veins blackening beneath her skin.

  “I... I can’t hold this much longer,” she whispered.

  Mikhail landed hard beside them. His light was dying, reduced to embers. He wiped blood from his lip.

  Enoch’s axe trembled.

  Not from fear.

  But in resonance.

  With something deeper. A pulse. A beat. A heart.

  Enoch didn’t reply.

  From above, the god loomed, one of many, hovering like a false messiah atop a cathedral made of suffering. An eye blinked, lazily.

  “I am the Answer of Man,” they intoned.

  “Their granted wish.”

  “Their sanctified sin.”

  Then it smiled, that same patient, perfect grin.

  “And you... you are nothing more than tender meat, caught in my cathedral.”