The forest reeked of rot and wet earth.

  Eniya could no longer feel her legs—they’d turned into leaden blocks she moved by sheer reflex, stumbling over roots that jutted out of the ground. Branches lashed her face, leaving scratches, but the girl didn’t even flinch. Pain had dulled, giving way to a blunt, ringing emptiness in her skull.

  She hadn’t eaten in two days. Or three?

  Time moved differently in this thicket—thick and sticky as resin. She couldn’t remember why she was here, or where she was going.

  The girl stopped to catch her breath, bracing herself against a trunk slick with moss. Her heart hammered somewhere in her throat, dry and terrified, like a bird beating itself against a cage.

  A snapping twig cracked through the woods like a gunshot.

  Eniya whipped around—but too slowly. A shadow burst out of the undergrowth. A rough hand, stinking of rancid fat and sweat, seized her by the hair and yanked her backward. She cried out, but the sound choked off when a cold, serrated blade pressed against her throat.

  “Well, look at that, Gant—a forest fairy,” a voice rasped by her ear.

  There were three of them.

  Ragged men, white scars crisscrossing their unshaven faces, quilted jackets mottled with mud and other people’s blood. Bandits. Carrion-men—worse than wild beasts in these lands.

  “Too skinny,” the second one spat, idly swinging a club. “But the skin’s pale. In Port Crow, they’d give a couple gold for one like this—if we wash her first.”

  “And we’ll inspect the goods before we sell,” the third one grinned, stepping closer. His hands reached for her cloak.

  Fear.

  It hit Eniya like a wave of ice.

  Not the dull fear of death that had stalked her along the hungry road, but the sharp, animal terror of violation. The world shrank to the gleam of the knife at her throat and the greasy eyes of the bandit. Her pulse pounded in her temples like a funeral bell. Blood roared in her ears so loudly it drowned out the men’s laughter.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  No. Don’t touch me. Please—no!

  The air around them suddenly grew heavy.

  The temperature plunged. Steam spilled from the bandits’ mouths. The birds went silent. The forest froze, as if it had drawn breath and held it before a leap.

  Behind Eniya, straight out of the air itself—woven from dusk and fear—Darkness began to gather.

  “Hey… what the—” the bandit with the club cut off, staring over the girl’s head. His eyes went wide.

  The one holding Eniya didn’t even have time to understand.

  In the silence, a wet, sickening crunch split the air.

  A huge gauntlet—not leather, but bone, bound with rusted metal—appeared from nowhere and swallowed the bandit’s face whole.

  A single swing.

  The bandit flew sideways like a rag doll.

  Only without a head.

  His body slammed into the mud, while the head remained in that bony hand—which clenched, crushing the skull to splinters.

  Eniya dropped to her knees, covering her ears with both hands.

  He had come.

  A figure towered over her. More than two meters tall. A rotted cloak unmoved by the wind. Ancient plate pauldrons punched through in many places. And ribs… bare, yellowed ribs visible through the gaps in the armor. A closed helm with a half-broken visor, behind which a bony face could be seen. No fire burned in its sockets. There was only bottomless, cold darkness.

  In his right hand he held a monstrous two-handed sword, the blade lined with executioner’s serrations—only this one was sharpened to a killing point and blackened with the stain of ancient blood.

  “Demon!” shrieked the bandit with the club.

  The third one—the one who’d wanted to “inspect the goods”—snatched a short sword and rushed the specter with a yell, hacking straight at the skeleton’s ribs.

  The blade passed through bone without resistance, as though it had cut smoke.

  The knight did not so much as twitch.

  Thrown off balance by the empty strike, the bandit stumbled forward by his own momentum, ending up chest-to-chest with the ghost.

  The skeleton slowly lowered its head.

  Then, with a movement too fast to follow, it shot out its left hand and seized the attacker by the throat.

  This time the hand was harder than granite.

  The bandit gagged, kicking in the air. The knight did not strangle him.

  He simply began pressing the man down into the earth.

  Slowly.

  Relentlessly.

  Like a screw press.

  One by one, bones snapped under the supernatural weight of the ghostly hand. Screams ripped through the forest.

  “AAAgh—Mercy—PLEASE NO I—I DON’T WANT TO DI—”

  There was a sound like a spine breaking.

  The body went limp, half sunk into the soft forest soil.

  One left.

  He staggered backward, dropped his club, and ran.

  The ghost-knight extended the arm holding the sword, pointing it straight after the fleeing man.

  A whistle.

  The enormous iron weapon flew after the brigand as if possessed, slicing forward in a dead line. Trees meant nothing to it—it passed through them as if they weren’t there.

  BAM.

  The blade pinned the bandit’s head to a tree trunk ahead of him. Blood splashed over the dandelions blooming nearby.

  Silence returned to the forest.

  Eniya sat trembling on the ground. Her heartbeat slowly eased. The knight turned his head toward her. He did not breathe. Made no sound. He simply stood over her, an unbreakable cliff of death.

  And then, just as Eniya’s panic began to ebb, the knight’s outline wavered.

  He turned translucent, thinning into mist until he dissolved completely into the air—leaving behind only three mangled corpses and a girl too terrified to cry.