The Rim was endless, and yet the Typhon dominated its horizon like a god stitched together. Neo walked toward it with slow steps, each footfall sending soft pulses through the red-black ground, the world reacting to his presence like a surface half-asleep. There was no sound. Not from his boots, not from the wind. Even his breath seemed to vanish the moment it left his body.
The Harbinger had shape here, coiled at the centre of the Typhon like a heart wrapped in bone and frost, its limbs shifting slowly, its body never fully formed but always present. Horns curled like thorned vines through a sky with no stars. Its face was not a face. Its head bowed low, as if waiting.
Neo stepped closer, sword in hand, jaw tight. His tail curled low behind him for balance, the weight of the Rim pressing around him like deep water and then the shadows rose. The earth cracked open in smooth controlled motions. Like the world itself was peeling back its skin and from them came the first wave twisted silhouettes, neither entirely beast nor man. Some slithered forward on too many limbs, others strode upright with arms too long and necks twisted like vines. Their bodies were made of shadow and bone, their eyes absent, their mouths filled with black teeth that poured what seemed like blood but black.
Neo took a half-step back, only to steady himself again. He didn't retreat, he brought his sword up and waited.
The first came fast, leaping without noise, claws raised. Neo vanished in a ripple of violet light and reappearing to its flank. His blade caught the creature mid-motion, slicing it clean across the torso. The shadow split open, unravelling into smoke that vanished into the Rim like it had never been real.
Neo turned, ready for the next and there were more, dozens of them and far away in Empyrean they rose mirroring them from the Rim.
Across the storm-wrapped tundra, in the snowbound fields outside Snowdrift, bodies twitched. Corpses that had not moved now stirred. Beast bones buried in ice clawed free. Humans with frozen armor stood at impossible angles. Each one in the same position as their counterpart in the Rim fighting what seemed to be nothing but the air.
One Jotun shouted as a twisted elk-creature charged from behind a drift, its antlers made of blackened bone. Another warrior turned just in time to meet a frost-bitten knight rising from the snow with hollow sockets and a scream less mouth.
Tor headed toward the newest wave of dead. She had seen this rhythm before, the rise and fall of attacks but not this pattern. These were not the same corpses, these were new and deliberate. Born from nothing but rising too precisely to be random. Her eyes narrowed as they were fighting what seemed to be amongst themselves, but each one fell from what to be from nothing.
Neo fought alone in the Rim, unaware of Empyrean's mirrored response.
Another shadow charged him this one thin and long-limbed, crawling low like a centipede made of arms. He ghosted from one spot to the next once, twisted in mid-air, and brought his sword down with a hiss. It collapsed into itself, scattering in black mist.
And in Empyrean, a spined beast disintegrated mid-run. The Jotun chasing it staggered, confused, watching as the thing turned to ash on the snow.
Neo cut down another and then another. The more he fought, the faster they came. The Harbinger was not still it was aware…. Watching and it would not allow him closer.
He moved like water, blinking from shadow to shadow, his blade trailing light in arcs through the Rim's dark but he was slowing. Not from exhaustion, but from weight the weight of the realization pressing in as he paused between kills.
They weren't just defences but were reflections. Each time he struck one down, another died in Empyrean. Neo stopped. Just for a moment. He blinked atop a rise in the realm's splintered ground, sword gripped tightly in his right hand, breath calm but heavy with focus. Below him, the shadows circled. No sound. Just movement. They were watching now as so was the Harbinger.
Its massive form did not move, but something behind it did a great curl of mist, wing or limb, dragging through the darkness with a soundless presence. It wasn't attacking. It wasn't charging, it was waiting…. prodding.
Neo grit his teeth. His blade trembled from fear, but also anticipation. He could push through them, cut his way forward and stand before the thing's true form but everyone he killed echoed into the waking world. He had to be precise and couldn't kill aimlessly he would start to get tired not here, not now.
Another shadow crept forward, shaped like a bear but with too many legs, its face stretched and lunged. Neo rolled beneath it, slashed upward, and disappeared in a blink, landing behind another two already closing in. He carved one down, ducked a blow, and blinked again.
In Empyrean, a dead frost-troll collapsed as if struck by an invisible blade. A group of warriors behind it shouted in shock, not knowing where the blow had come from but grateful. Tor glanced in its direction. She felt it now. The pattern. The rhythm of a fight beyond the veil. Her ear twitched. Her jaw clenched.
Neo narrowed his eyes as he stood in the silence again, shadows beginning to encircle him once more. His shoulders rose and fell with slow breath.
"I can't just cut my way through," he murmured. "It wants that. It feeds on it."
He looked toward the Harbinger again. Still distant. Still unmoved. But the shadows were unending, coiling around him like roots from something deeper. He took a step forward anyway. Then another. If he could walk through the Rim carefully, if he could slip past instead of slicing through, he might reach it.
He might reach the body to find where to strike. The hollow beyond shuddered around him. Like a note struck wrong in a song too old to name. The Harbinger knew he wasn't stopping. Neo flickered again, slipping into the next shadow, sword lowered, not drawn to kill but to deflect.
He had stopped counting how many he had cut down. This broken domain gave no time, no rhythm only the endless horde of the Harbinger's shadows, rising and falling in grotesque patterns with every step forward. Neo's muscles burned from exhaustion every swing had become a choice, every kill measured. He didn't strike unless he had to. He blinked instead, moved instead, let the horror pass him by when it could but even then, it clawed at him. The Rim didn't want him to reach the centre.
The Harbinger didn't need to say it. It spoke through the things it sent, through the way the ground distorted, through the shifting shape of its broken crown outlined against the black sky. It watched him as he moved, through all the shadows it sent, through the pressure it wove into the air and Neo kept going eventually he reached it.
The shadows thinned. Not because they had given up, but because he had passed the threshold. The Harbinger's form loomed just ahead, its shape still unstable, made of fractures in light and matter, its body a breathing contradiction. Bones shifted where there were none. A chest rose and fell without lungs. The closer he got, the more it looked like something that wasn't allowed to exist.
Neo stepped slowly across the last few feet of ground and started to crack beneath him, his blade lowered at his side. The silence here was thick. It wasn't just quiet it was wrong as if he had crossed into a place outside time, where breath didn't belong.
The Harbinger turned not moving quickly there was no urgency in it. It regarded him the way a forest might regard a single flame in the rain. Neo stopped a blade's length away. His heart pounded once before striking
He blinked once reappearing directly above the creature, his sword raised high in a reverse grip, and brought it down in a clean, brutal strike across what could only be described as the Harbinger's side. For a moment, it didn't seem to work. The blade passed through smoke, through shadow, through something that resisted being real but then resistance followed by impact and then blood.
It wasn't red nor black. It was a colour Neo couldn't name, something shimmering and cold, like molten starlight smeared with ink. It sprayed out from the wound, painting the cracked Rim in thin, twitching lines that refused to settle, as if the blood itself was rejecting existence.
Neo staggered back a step, blade still dripping, breath caught.
The Harbinger didn't cry out. Didn't roar but its shape twitched. Its spine convulsed once. The sky above it buckled slightly, like the Rim itself had blinked and in Empyrean the Typhon bled.
At first, no one noticed. The storm still howled. The dead still marched. Then the air shifted, just slightly, and a splatter of blood unnatural, glimmering, and wrong painted across the snow.
Jotun warriors near the barricades froze. The wind howled louder, suddenly thinner, as though the storm itself had gasped. Tor turned her head sharply. She saw the blood.
It wasn't dripping from a corpse. It had appeared, high in the swirling gale, then splashed against the white. The Typhon shuddered. The clouds trembled and beyond the storm, beyond the line of snow and cold and dead, the figure that had stood still for hours stood taller.
It had not moved since the beginning. Had not approached, had not raised a hand, had not made a sound. But now it did. Just slightly.
Its posture straightened. Its attention focused. It saw the blood and it knew what it meant. The storm in Empyrean was not the storm.
Tor's eyes widened, her grip tightening around her axe. She couldn't name the feeling, but it crawled up her spine like prophecy. Neo had struck something no one was supposed to reach.
The wound still shimmered across the Harbinger's side with ribbons of impossible blood leaking into the air like spilled starlight stretched through a mirror. It moved unnaturally, spiralling in thin strands that refused to fall or freeze, as though the Rim itself didn't know what to do with it. The air had changed louder and heavier.
Neo took a breath sharp, controlled but the cold in his chest wasn't from the Rim anymore. He had made it bleed. The Harbinger turned toward him fully. Its body convulsed once, then began to unravel not fall apart, but change. Its arms became longer. Its legs bent backward. Its spine cracked and kept going. Its body stretched and reformed, shaping itself with no care for bone or flesh, its logic folding over on itself as if it were remaking what it meant to be "alive."
Neo stepped back one pace…. he didn't mean to. His body moved on its own. The shadows screamed and they rose not in waves, not in patterns, but in shrieks of motion, contorted limbs and hollow faces pulled from beneath the Rim's crust like they'd been buried there for him. They were no longer just guards or sentries. They were vengeance.
One surged at him all tendons and fangs, skin that bubbled and peeled with each movement. Neo slipped, sidestepped, slashed it down. Another came with a jaw unhinged too wide, its scream shaking the air around it. Neo twisted, dodged, spun, and blinked again this time just in time to avoid the talon of something that resembled a bird but they kept coming.
He struck one, cleaving it through the neck and it didn't fall. It howled, split open from the middle like a flower, and kept moving, biting at him with teeth that had no mouths behind them. Neo ducked, slashed, blinked but one claw caught his shoulder.
Pain screamed down his back. His breath left him in a burst. He staggered, feet dragging across the Rim's pulsing ground. He blinked again too late, and another caught him across the ribs. The armor slowed it but not enough. He landed hard, rolled, came up into a crouch with his sword raised and blood dripping from under his arm. He was breathing fast now not just from exertion from fear.
They weren't just trying to kill him anymore. They were trying to devour him. He could feel it not just in the way they moved, but in the intent behind the attack. The Rim itself had turned. The Harbinger wasn't a creature. It was a law. And that law had just been broken.
Neo rose, staggering once before setting his stance again. His tail lashed behind him for balance. His fingers were slick. His side burned. His heart pounded. Even as a shadow with no head lurched toward him with hands made of thorns. Even as a mouth opened beneath the ground, and something tried to pull him down by the ankles. Even as the sky above the Harbinger began to twist in spirals of black and violet like it was trying to unmake the air itself.
In Empyrean, the Typhon bled harder. Crimson-black arcs sprayed across the wind, splattering on snow, on corpses, on the longhouse roofs. The storm churned in uneven pulses now, its rhythm broken, its core staggering.
Tor stared up at it, her breath misting in short bursts. She didn't understand what was happening, not exactly but she knew the pain of something wounded and behind her, in the distance far past the reach of the storm the watching figure moved again. Not by much just a step forward but it was enough. Enough for the wind to shift. Enough for the snow to still. Enough for the ice to listen.
Back in the Rim, Neo screamed not out of panic, but to force air back into his lungs as he tore through another shrieking shape, its torso blooming open into a ring of eyes that bled smoke when he cut it down. He had to reach the Harbinger again, one more step, one more strike but the Rim was no longer just watching. It was hunting. The Harbinger bled, and the world shook and yet it did not fall.
Neo stood with blood on his hands, his, its, he could no longer tell. The Rim around him pulsed with a sick rhythm, reacting to every slash of his blade, every ripple of violet light that carried him from one position to the next. Shadows continued to rise, even when torn apart. The wound he'd carved into the Harbinger's side still shimmered, still oozed that alien ichor that dripped in defiance of gravity and logic. The thing didn't stop. It didn't stagger. It didn't scream. It watched. It endured. It learned.
Each time Neo struck it, he expected change expected it to falter, to bend, to at least react. Still each time, it remained upright, shifting yes, adapting but not falling.
Its form twisted further now, limbs bending in reverse, antlers curling tighter into patterns of pain. The blood that dripped from it didn't paint the ground. It burned it sizzling against the Rim's flesh, carving new scars into an already broken land.
Neo shimmered and reappeared behind it, blade angled high, and he brought it down with precision, cutting across its back. The wound split open like before, releasing that impossible fluid but again, no cry, no collapse, no sign of weakness.
He growled beneath his breath, blinking again, driving his sword forward in a deep stab into what should've been its core yet nothing…. no reaction.
The Harbinger turned slightly its body not rotating like a thing of flesh, but shifting like a thought, like a tumour. Its faceless head hovered in his direction, and a vibration rippled through the Rim.
Neo stumbled back, breath hitching. The cold was deeper now. Not the kind that bit skin but the kind that froze thought. That coiled around the soul.
He attacked again and again. A dozen times each strike faster than the last, more refined, more vicious. His blade blurred in violet arcs through the air. The Harbinger bled freely now. Its upper torso was marked in layered wounds, its shoulder notched, its side leaking but still it stood unbothered and unending.
Neo's sword lowered. His arms trembled. Not from fatigue, but from truth. "It's not enough… He stepped back. The shadows circled him again.
In Empyrean, the Typhon was falling apart. Its swirling mass stuttered, bleeding into the snow like a wounded beast. Jotun warriors cried out in shock as the storm above them hiccupped, twisted, slowed. Patches of unnatural blood painted rooftops, fields, corpses falling in thin arcs that steamed against the ice.
Tor raised her head, feeling something changed. Not safety nor victory. Tension. Like the world was bracing. and far beyond the battlefield, still as a statue upon the high ridge, the distant figure finally moved. It stepped forward then it leapt.
Neo was blinking again, dodging more shadows. He didn't need to kill them anymore. Just stay alive. The collapsing threshold was closing in. He couldn't think straight, couldn't hold his blade in the same way. His left leg burned, his ribs screamed, his shoulder wouldn't stop bleeding. He was fast but not invincible.
And the Harbinger… it hadn't even begun to fight he turned, blinking again one final time away from the centre. He couldn't win not now nor here and he had to leave.
The Rim peeled away with one last surge of violet light, and Neo's body tumbled into Empyrean with a violent gasp, crashing into a slope of snow and rolling to a stop near the outer ring of shattered corpses. He coughed hard, every breath a blade he was alive but barely.
Above him, the Typhon continued to bleed shaking, hissing. A wounded storm and then a sound like nothing he had ever heard. Not a boom, not a crack a pressure. A single note of reality being rewritten. From the sky, something fell.
It came down in a blur of light and motion, a comet of white fire that struck the centre of the Typhon and stopped it in an instant. The storm was erased the Harbinger's blood froze in the air. The shadows stopped rising Empyrean held still and in the crater of that moment a figure stood.
Massive. Towering. Clad in white. Not armor. Not robes. Something else. Something ancient in its simplicity. There were no symbols. No weapons visible. No name.
Neo tried to rise, to focus his vision, but everything shook. The figure blurred not like a person. Not like he has ever seen. It shifted between positions, impossible to track and everywhere it moved the dead fell…. no more like obliterated.
Their forms dissolved mid-motion. Screams never came. One moment, they stood and the next they were gone. Neo tried to move but couldn't.
Then the figure appeared before him. No wind. No warning. No flash of light. One moment, the world was empty, silent except for the fading echoes of battle. The next, it was there. Still. Watching.
It moved without sound, lowering itself into a crouch like a predator studying its prey. There was something ancient in its presence, something that did not belong in any world Neo had known. Then came the hand large, pale, and inhumanly strong.
Before Neo could react, the hand seized him by the throat. His feet left the ground, his body weightless in the grip. He was lifted with no effort, as though he were nothing. No strength of his own could stop it. He was caught, suspended, powerless.
Neo's boots kicked once, not from thought but instinct. It didn't matter. He couldn't breathe. The air refused to come, choked off by the unrelenting grip around his throat.
The figure leaned in. Its face was hidden not empty, not masked, but unreadable. Not flesh. Not metal. Just presence. A shadow given shape, something that didn't belong in any world Neo had ever known.
Then it spoke. The voice cracked the air like stone splitting under immense pressure. It silenced fire. It made the vastness of the Rim feel small. "This is not your place, child of dust."
Neo couldn't answer. His mouth moved, but nothing came. The grip tightened and the world held its breath.