The hay was dry, scratching at his neck and smelling faintly of sun-baked earth and what he prayed wasn't shit. Shabuto remained perfectly still beneath the mound, his breathing shallow, his ears straining against the sudden cacophony of shouts and confusion echoing from the gate’s ramparts.

He had ...

--Three Days Later--

The wind carried the scent of roses—faint, almost mocking in its delicacy—as it danced across the open plains beyond the Vaeroth Swamps. Shabuto stood atop a sunbaked ridge, his silhouette stark against the golden horizon. Three days since the battle. Three days since fire ...

The Vaeroth Swamp shuddered.

It's thick, briny mist coiled like serpents through skeletal trees, drowning the planet Vescrutia’s dying sun in a veil of gray. Here, in this land of sunken spirits and forgotten gods, the air was never still. It pulsed—wet, heavy, alive.

And in its heart, two forces ...

Epine, her whip of eerie, pulsing material, snapped back to her side with a hiss—nigh instantly, as if drawn by invisible gravity. The weapon’s form shimmered, retracting into a coiled serpent of obsidian and silver ember, its surface threaded with veins of something older than steel. Shabuto ...

The air currents of the swamp licked at Shabuto's heels as he crouched low, coiled like a jaguar ready to pounce. Every stray eddy of wind around him trembled, a testament to the Vareoth gales he had summoned. His fingers dug into the saturated earth, the pressure subtle at first, then rising—an ...

Minutes became hours, and the expanse was far larger than a simple sprawl of swamp. It was a massive mound of intertwining life that seemed to span the breadth of a small nation on its own. Shabuto eventually came to somewhat of a clearing. Plant life bountiful as it was beautiful unfurled over the ...

The dusk was beginning to settle in, a stark reminder of the coming of night, and the things that go bump within it. Yet despite the many horrors of the unknown chittering around in the veil of nighttime, Shabuto traversed the blackened land unabated. The murk of the swamp hindered him not in the ...

The storm was a symphony of destruction, and Shabuto was its conductor. Rain lashed down in silver sheets, and lightning tore the bruised purple sky, but he felt none of it. He was the eye of his own hurricane, a point of lethal calm amidst the chaos. The power thrumming through him was a song he ...

Shabuto said nothing, not immediately. He wasn't sure what to say; his body was consumed with emotion, feelings that words couldn't do any justice to describe. A screaming vortex of grief, fury, and a hollow loneliness so vast it threatened to swallow the storm itself.

So he did not speak.

He ...

Shabuto’s eyes traced the sharp, familiar script. He read in silence, the howling of the wind the only sound for a long moment. His face remained a mask of stone, but a single tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek, a final, saltwater tribute to a love that had died.

Well? Grixas ...