The silence after battle always felt like a lie.
Kael's fingers trembled around Mercy's hilt as he stared at Draven's withered corpse. The sword's bruise-dark blade now pulsed with silver veins that matched the alien patterns creeping beneath his skin. It should have felt like victory. Instead, the quiet made his teeth ache.
Eris touched her throat where the corrupted initiate's blade had kissed flesh.
"It didn't heal me," she murmured. Blood welled between her fingers—too dark, nearly black. "The Maw just… paused it."
Kael saw it then. The veins weren't gone. Just hiding beneath her collarbone, slithering inward like roots seeking heartwood.
Above them, the death bells began to toll.
The old chapel stank of wet iron and burnt hair.
Lyra no, Harvest—stood atop the sacrificial altar, her jagged knife carving arcs through the smoke-thick air. Hooded acolytes chanted as she raised the blade over a bound initiate.
"Another branch pruned," she crooned.
The knife flashed downward—
—but Eris' sword took the acolyte's head before the chant finished.
Chaos erupted.
Kael moved on instinct. Mercy hummed in his grip—not with hunger, but with quiet calculation. The blade didn't crave blood. It watched.
Lyra's laughter cut through the clangor.
"Still letting it use you, Kael?"
Her knife found his ribs before he could react. Cold fire lanced through the wound.
The vision struck like a hammer.
He was back in that cold, sterile lab. Lyra at twelve, pressing a stolen med-kit through the cell bars.
"Don't let them see you cry," she whispered. "It makes the tests worse."
Kael staggered. Mercy's hilt burned.
Lyra's blade slashed across his thigh.
"Remembering now?" she hissed
She was pinned, a hooded figure's dagger poised above the silver wound pulsing at her collarbone.
Mercy twisted in Kael's grasp, its point shifting—not toward Lyra.
Toward the rusted sconce behind the altar.
Stone cracked and gave way.
They plunged into black water so cold it stole thought. The current dragged them through a tunnel of fused bone. Screaming faces watched them pass—these weren't carvings. They were real.
Eris surfaced first, gasping.
"It's herding us!"
The lake stretched endlessly. The shore wasn't stone. It was skeletons—warped, fused together, their limbs twisted into grotesque, rootlike forms.
At the center of it all stood a tree.
Not wood. Not flesh. Something between. Its roots drank from a pool of shimmering silver, its branches twitching like limbs caught mid-dream.
And Mercy's voice stirred in Kael's mind.
This is where the first Scythe woke.
He emerged from behind the trunk.
The Hollow King wore a dead man's face. Skin stretched over silver veins, stitched where it had split. One human eye still clung to its old brown hue. The other glowed softly like the liquid root at his feet.
His smile tore through old scar tissue.
"Kael of the Black Hollow," he said, voice creaking like roots pushing through stone. "Come to take your place in the Garden?"
Behind them, water rippled.
Lyra surfaced. Her knife gleamed with silver.
The Hollow King extended a skeletal hand toward the silver pool.
"All Scythes drink from the root," he said. "Will you take your birthright…"
Mercy began to scream in Kael's skull, a sound that wasn't sound but something deeper. A pressure against his thoughts.
"…or die a slave?"
The silver pool rippled as the Hollow King's hand hovered above it.
Kael's breath came in ragged gasps. The wound Lyra's knife had left in his ribs burned with unnatural cold, his blood sluggish as mercury in his veins. Mercy's scream in his mind had faded to a dull roar—the sword's hunger momentarily stunned by proximity to its birthplace.
Eris staggered to his side, her fingers digging into his arm. The silver light beneath her skin pulsed faster here, syncing with the tree's unnatural rhythm. "Don't look at the water," she warned through clenched teeth.
Too late.
The pool wasn't reflecting the cavern. It showed memories—his memories, warped and gleaming. The Gauntlet's walls closing in. Draven's smile as the brand touched Eris's ribs. Lyra screaming as lab doors sealed between them.
The Hollow King's grafted lips peeled back. "All roots drink from the same dark." His voice was the sound of bark splitting under frost. "Even yours."
Lyra emerged from the black water, her silver eyes burning. The jagged knife in her hand dripped liquid metal that hissed where it struck stone.
"You always were slow, Kael." Her voice carried that same metallic distortion, but beneath it—just barely—he heard the girl who'd shared stolen meals through cell bars. "The King offered you power, and you hesitated."
Mercy twitched in Kael's grip, its silver veins flaring as Lyra approached. The blades recognized each other—siblings torn from the same poisoned root.
Eris lunged first.
Her sword clashed against Lyra's knife in a shower of sparks. The impact sent both women sprawling—Eris into the bone-strewn shore, Lyra back into the water.
The pool reacted.
Silver tendrils lashed around Lyra's limbs, dragging her under. For one terrible moment, her human eye met Kael's—wide with terror—before the liquid metal swallowed her whole.
The tree's branches shuddered.
Something massive uncoiled from its trunk—not a branch, but a limb of fused bone and pulsing veins. It extended toward Kael, its clawed tip hovering just above his chest.
"All Scythes return to the root," the Hollow King murmured. "Will you feed the Garden..."
The claw pressed against Kael's sternum. Agony lanced through him as silver threads wormed beneath his skin.
"...or become its keeper?"
Mercy's voice roared back to life in his skull, clearer than ever before: "Liar! He wants to wear you like a glove!"
Kael's vision doubled—he saw the cavern as it was, and as it could be: The tree's roots strangling cities. Lyra's face among its branches, screaming. Himself on a throne of grafted flesh, Mercy weeping silver in his hand.
Eris's dagger took the Hollow King in the throat.
The blade shouldn't have harmed him—Kael had seen swords pass through his flesh like mist. But this steel had been quenched in the same black water that birthed Mercy.
The King staggered, his human eye widening. For the first time, he looked surprised.
Eris wrenched the dagger free. "You don't prune your own roots," she spat.
The cavern trembled.
Above them, the tree's branches spasmed. Silver sap rained down, burning where it struck. The pool began to boil.
And from its depths, Lyra rose—changed.
Her skin had turned to liquid metal, her bones visible as dark streaks beneath. When she opened her mouth, a dozen voices emerged:
"The Garden must grow."
Mercy's scream in Kael's mind became a single, lucid command:
"Run."