Rules For The Bled

The next day, they were back on the road, the horses plodding steadily beneath a sun that never quite shone. It was noon, but the light filtering through the ashen clouds was dim and colorless, just another joyless sky in a joyless land.

"There's a small town up ahead," Adeline said, her voice cutting through the quiet. "Gliese, if I remember correctly."

Yvain squinted into the horizon. Sure enough, the jagged silhouette of a settlement began to rise from the uneven terrain. A clutter of rooftops, smoke, and stone, hemmed in by half-collapsed walls.

"Finally," Mars sighed from the back.

"We still have a coin problem," Celeste reminded them, her gaze set ahead.

"Shit," Mars muttered. "We might have to start considering theft."

"Or," Adeline added with a half-smile, "we could enthrall a merchant."

Celeste turned to her cousin, a glint of amusement in her eye. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"You're the unofficial leader of this merry band. Shouldn't it be your decision?"

Yvain groaned and rolled his eyes. "Not like we have a wealth of options."

They reached the outskirts of Gliese shortly after. It was immediately clear that something was wrong.

The town wasn't just messy, it was sick.

Caravans sat abandoned in muddy lots, their horses skeletal and flies swarming over them. Beggars coughed up blood from the gutter, and too many of the townsfolk were wrapped in bandages, their eyes sunken and their skin blotched with lesions.

The smell hit them next. Sour, metallic, and laced with death.

"Looks like a plague," Yvain muttered, pulling his cloak over his nose as the cart rolled on.

"It's the Rot," Celeste said grimly.

They all knew it. That particular kind of ruin had a look, flesh mottled like spoiled fruit, hair falling in clumps, blood that bubbled black. The Rot was no ordinary sickness. It was metaphysical corruption, the price of living too close to the divine.

In Malkuth, divinity and sorcery were not benign forces. Every invocation of the Mystery Thaumaturgic, every angelic descent, every sorcerous duel or holy act, all of it leaked contamination. It seeped into the stone, poisoned the rivers, and made the very air a slow death sentence for mortals too near its epicenter.

This was why rites of passage were essential for those entering the Mystery Thaumaturgic, not merely tradition, but survival. They fortified the body and spirit against the corrosive purity of the Breath.

Even so, the cost was steep.

Mortals lived longer lives, sixty to ninety years, usually. Sorcerers, by contrast, rarely saw fifty. The more powerful the magus, the swifter the decay. The proximity to the divine gnawed at their lifespans like moths through silk. And for nephilims, like the Dehmohseni, it was even worse. Their lineage, half-mortal and half-divine, burned brighter and faster. Twenty-five to thirty-five years was a common span before their bodies gave out, consumed by the very fire that made them godlike.

But there were exceptions. Through alchemy, vitalism, and forbidden conjurations, sorcerers had learned to twist time in their favor. Lifespans could be prolonged but only through pain, sacrifice, or worse.

Even so, nothing was free.

Most mortals looked upon the great towers of the magi, their ivory spires and floating citadels, and saw arrogance. The segregation of sorcerers from common folk, the ritual barriers, the laws forbidding unlicensed practice of the Mystery Thaumaturgic. To many, it reeked of hubris.

And they were right.

But it was also necessary.

This—this sickness, this silence choking Gliese—was the reason why.

"What could have caused something like this?" Adeline asked, eyes scanning the coughing children, the covered corpses, the rot blooming beneath bandages.

Yvain didn't answer. Not because he didn't want to, but because he didn't know.

Rot on this scale couldn't be the result of a mere cantrip or the careless muttering of an incantation. This wasn't the collateral damage of a sorcerer showing off in the village square.

"I'll ask around," Mars offered, hopping off the cart like he hadn't just watched people cough out pieces of their lungs. "I've got a trusting face."

Yvain pulled the cart to the side of the main thoroughfare, just beside a rickety old tavern whose sign had long since fallen into the mud. He hopped down, tied the horses, and turned to the others.

"I'll follow the bard before he charms a plague widow or gets himself stabbed. You two handle the coin problem."

Celeste smirked and Adeline gave him a mock salute.

He found Mars not far off, standing in animated conversation with a peddler selling headscarves and leather hoods. The man had sun-browned skin, a faded robe, and a smile like scattered gravel, missing teeth and all.

"He said a man claiming to be an apostle passed through here," Mars explained when Yvain joined him, "preaching and performing what he claimed were miracles. Healing the sick, calling down light, all that."

"An apostle of who?" Yvain asked the vendor.

The peddler blinked, chewing on the question. Then he turned to a man seated behind the neighboring stall and mumbled something in the local tongue. The other man spat and gave a single name.

"Thum-Neh-Rhi," the peddler said.

Yvain stiffened.

"She Who Limps Through Dreams," he murmured, recalling one of the many whispered names of the ancient being

"You know her?" Mars asked.

"I do. Unfortunately."

Thum-Neh-Rhi was an Old One. Beings that had not been formed from the Endless. An outer god from the crevices of the unseen world. Part god, part contagion, part echo.

Her faith had once flourished in the dream-ridden wastes of Dain Serath, long before the Sanctuary outlawed the worship of any being that was not the Endless. That ban was absolute. To revere another power was heresy.

"Is she bad news?" Mars asked.

Yvain glanced at the sickly children playing in the dirt nearby, their laughter dry and hollow.

"They all are."

Mars made a face. "Wonderful. Love that for us."

Yvain opened his mouth to reply, but a jolt in the Breath of the World interrupted him.

A flicker. A hum. A warning.

His instincts screamed.

"Down!" he shouted, kicking Mars sideways.

They both fell, hard.

When he twisted on the ground, he saw her.

The automaton knight stood perfectly poised, as if she had been part of the village all along and had simply stepped out of the background.

Her dull bronze armor reflected nothing. Her eyes, though she had none, bore into them from behind a smooth mask of featureless metal. And in her hands was the a sword, broad, and single-edged.

Her stance was faultless. Her Breath was silent.

The marketplace erupted into chaos.

Merchants screamed, overturning their stalls in a frantic scramble. Goods scattered, fruits rolled underfoot, pottery shattered, bolts of fabric trailed behind like fleeing banners. Some fled with their wares, clutching them like lifelines. Others abandoned everything in blind terror.

Two town guards, brave or foolish, drew rust-bitten swords and rushed at Sorel.

It was in this act that both men fell, their torsos sliding from their legs as if they had been gently unstitched. The only sound was the thump of bodies hitting cobblestone and the wet spill of red across the dust.

Yvain scrambled to his feet, hauling Mars up with him. His mind roared with breathless fury, but he kept his voice calm.

"She's fast," he said.

"She's death," Mars muttered, already drawing his own blade. It sang with a low note as it left the scabbard. "Here goes nothing."

Yvain exhaled, slowly.

Then he let go.

His Breath unfurled like smoke and thunder, a slow-building hurricane radiating from his chest. The world around him dimmed, sound fell quiet, and the stink of death became familiar. He reached for the dead, not just the freshly fallen guards, but the countless bodies that littered the village unseen.

Rot victims.

They were everywhere.

Beneath carts. Slumped in alleys. Covered in burlap. Forgotten in doorways. He whispered their names, or the names they might have once had, and Breath stirred within them.

One by one, they rose.

Bloated and silent, limbs jerking with puppet rigidity. Skin cracked, eyes hollow, mouths stitched with dried blood. They came to him with reverence, their master in unlife.

A dozen. Then more. A small legion of the dead.

He stepped behind them.

Sorel moved with eerie calm, her blade gleaming dully in the sickly daylight, already stained with blood. She stood unmoved by the shambling dead surrounding her, posture as still and perfect as if she were a statue carved from bronze itself.

Then, for the first time, she spoke.

Her voice echoed with metallic clarity, neither man's nor woman's, and both at once.

"Cease these games, Yvain," she said. "I know your tricks. Your magicks. Your arts. I know the cadence of your necromancy and the rhythms of your conjuring. There is no version of this in which you prevail."

She tilted her head slightly, as if offering a kindness. "Return with me to the Needle, and we will forget all about this."

Yvain narrowed his eyes.

He wanted to speak with the dignity of a prince, the intellect of a scholar, the calm of a peerless augur.

But all that came out was, "No thank you."

Then he raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

The revenants surged forward in a groaning wave, their rotten forms lurching with inhuman speed, jaws slack and arms outstretched. Some moved like beasts, crawling on all fours, others staggered like broken dolls, but they all moved as one, toward Sorel.

At the same instant, Mars vanished into the charge like a shadow under a flood.

He ducked and weaved between the undead, sword low, eyes fixed on the automaton. His aim was clear: get close, strike true, and pray his blade found something vital, if such a thing existed in a creature of brass and cog.

Sorel didn't retreat. She stepped into the oncoming horde.

And then—

She began to dance.

Not literally, but her movements had that same measured grace. Her blade spun with brutal efficiency, carving through flesh and bone and pestilent rot. Heads flew. Arms were severed. Rotten spines split open like fruit.

One revenant lunged. She impaled it without looking.

Another leapt. She sidestepped and cleaved it in two.

Then she caught Mars's sword mid-swing.

Her hand closed around the blade like iron, and though it cut her palm, sparking and hissing as metal scraped enchanted steel.

Her gaze turned toward Mars. "Clever."

Mars's grin faltered.

With one motion, she flung him backward. He crashed through a cart, splinters flying.

Yvain's Breath rippled again. More dead stirred.

But he already knew, this wasn't going to be enough.