Despite herself, Daine couldn’t help but grudgingly admire the effectiveness of Donal’s new Class.

  There was something almost eerily precise about the way he moved through the wilderness. The once impassable terrain, the steep mountain passes and treacherous ravines, had been reduced to little more than a series of well-worn paths under his guidance. It was as if the land itself bent to his will, revealing its secrets with an ease that almost seemed unnatural.

  They had barely travelled more than a bell’s distance from their makeshift camp before Daine was forced to admit, with some disquiet, that she no longer had any sense of where they were. The landscape had become a blur of snow-capped peaks and winding trails, each one seemingly identical to the last.

  Worse still, she realised with a creeping unease that she had no idea how to retrace her steps, or even if she wanted to.

  She glanced around, her eyes scanning the unfamiliar terrain, but the mountains offered no answers. The path they had taken, winding like some great snake through the hills, was now nothing more than a fading memory, swallowed up by the vastness of the wilderness.

  And the thought that she might be hopelessly lost, with no way to find her bearings, struck her with a deep sense of dread. She couldn’t decide if it was the mountains themselves that made her feel this way, or if it was the recognition that for one of the first times in her life, she was at the mercy of something far greater than her own strength or will.

  Donal, on the other hand, seemed entirely unaffected.

  His calm demeanor never faltered as he continued his methodical pace, each step purposeful and assured. It was as though the very earth whispered to him, guiding him with a knowledge Daine couldn’t quite grasp.

  If nothing else, she thought with a wry bitterness, Donal's Class was indeed impressive. Far too impressive for her liking.

  As if aware of her growing nervousness and seeking to tease, Donal kept bounding forward out of Daine's sight, his energetic movements wholly at odds with his aged physicality.

  "I wonder if he’d be quite so frisky if I accidentally took his leg?" she muttered to no one in particular.

  She was starting to realise that despite her evolved Class – despite the strength and speed it afforded her – she was still over fifty.

  It was a sobering thought.

  As far as Daine understood these things, Donal's preternatural youth was exceptionally unusual. Regardless of the god providing patronage or the powers that the adopted Class possessed, there was relatively little to be done to still the usual ravages of time.

  While Daine’s immense capacity for Healing, honed as a Knight of the Road and later as a Templar Ascendant, could mend nearly any mortal wound, it offered no protection against the steady passage of time.

  The years, though invisible to the naked eye, worked their quiet toll on her body, leaving marks that no amount of magic could erase. Despite the remarkable resilience her Class granted her, Daine knew, deep down, that the sands of time would not be so easily ignored.

  Even the mightiest of warriors, however ageless they seemed in the heat of battle, could not outrun the inevitable pull of age.

  “What do you expect, girl?” Old Gant had asked her, his voice thick with both amusement and an edge of something else—something unspoken. Daine had been mortified to her core when she sought him out, desperate for answers about the unexpected changes she was feeling in her body.

  His gaze, sharp and knowing, had pierced through her embarrassment. “You thought you were going to stay a child forever? No such luck, I’m afraid. We’re no different from anyone else in that regard. We grow old, our hair turns white, and, before you know it, they decide we’re no use to them anymore.”

  He had paused then, mouth working in a way that suggested he was chewing on a particularly painful memory—perhaps a tooth. Then, in his usual blunt manner, he had thrown a handful of linen cloths at her and gruffly waved her off. “I’m good for many things, Daine Darkhelm. But for this? Trust me, you want someone with lived experience.”

  As he turned away, she had stood there for a moment, the cloths still in her hands, realizing that even the unflappable Old Gant had his limits.

  The world didn’t stop for warriors, not even the greatest of them. Everyone grew old, and eventually, the world would move on.

  A brief smile played across Daine's weathered face at the memory, which vanished as she recalled her most recent encounter with a man who had, once again, become the Stonehand. Any way she considered it, his arrival at the gates of Swinford simply did not make sense.

  He had been an old man—on his deathbed—when she had last seen him, two decades before.

  Though still remarkably strong for his age, the sharpness that once defined his mind had all but collapsed in on itself. In Daine’s experience, it should have been only a matter of time before his body followed suit, a slow, inevitable surrender to the decay that had claimed his thoughts.

  But instead, here there he was at Swinford’s walls—alive, still in command of his Skills, still as formidable as ever. The very notion of it was a cruel mockery of time's usual course, a contradiction she couldn’t reconcile.

  The image of him, decades older yet not diminished, gnawed at her. She knew, with an uncomfortable certainty, that should she still be alive in fifteen years' time, she would not be found wielding a sword at the head of a mercenary company.

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  No, she would be fading, her hands shaking, her body giving up in ways that even her greatest Healing powers could not fix. And that, more than any blow she had ever taken, was the bitterest truth she had yet to face.

  Her Class—especially now that it had evolved—might continue to smooth out some of the loss of Strength and Speed that had inevitably crept in during the last decade of fighting. However, that only went so far. There was a reason why there were no legends of elderly Knights . . .

  That thought gave her pause, and she reached out to the sides of the mountain pass to steady herself.

  She was becoming obsolete.

  Of course, this was not a wholly new thought to her. She had spent so long on the Road, and on her own, that it was only natural that her thoughts tended towards the morbidly introspective. However, since her most recent series of reversals—first at the hands of the Trellecs and then in the retreat from Swinford—it had become crushingly clear that she was not what she used to be.

  And yet you are precisely what I need you to be right now, the Goddess chimed into her mind.

  "And what exactly is that?" Daine said, more tartness in her voice than she had intended putting there.

  Durable.

  Daine was spared making a response as Donal suddenly appeared in front of her. "Found them!" he said, white teeth glinting in the sun. However, his face was formed into a deep grimace, not in his customary, twinkling smile.

  "Is something wrong?" Daine asked, hand drifting to her sword.

  "I don't think I can do it justice. You better come see," he said, turning and walking back up the trail.

  *

  At Donal's insistence, the two of them dropped to their hands and knees to creep through the dense underbrush, their laboured breaths audible over the wind as they neared the end of the track. Daine was worried their loud arrival would be noted, but Donal grimly dismissed her concerns.

  "They're too busy to be worried about a little thing like setting scouts," he had said, refusing to elaborate further.

  As they drew closer, Daine sniffed the air, finding it thick with the scent of pine and earth, mingling with a more acrid, unsettling odour—one she knew all too well. Then, as they approached the edge of the clearing ahead, the home of the mountain men came into full, dreadful view.

  "No. This makes no sense," Daine breathed.

  "And yet," Donal made an expansive gesture and spoke no further.

  The camp was a crude assembly of makeshift tents and lean-tos constructed from animal hides and branches. Despite the well-known building Skills of those who chose to dwell in the mountains, the structures sagged and slumped, looking more like the lairs of beasts than the homes of men. Dark smoke curled up from several fires scattered around the clearing, their flames casting a sickly, flickering light that seemed to dance malevolently on the surrounding trees.

  Bones, both human and animal, littered the ground in a chaotic scattering, picked clean and left as hollow reminders of something primal. The remnants of recent meals mingled with them—gutted entrails and torn scraps of flesh, abandoned to rot where they fell, their decay testament to the cruelty of the place. Flies swarmed in thick, buzzing clouds, drawn to the festering mess, their incessant droning filling the air and amplifying the suffocating, oppressive stillness.

  "This cannot be right," Daine said to herself as much as Donal. "The West was my Tour. I would have known if such practices were common. This is not the way the men of the mountain as I knew them lived. They had simply chosen to move out of the Towns and Cities. They were not . . . monsters."

  Donal didn't respond, jutting his chin towards a large, flat stone in the centre of the camp, stained dark with old blood. It appeared to serve as a grisly altar where these people performed brutal rituals. Fresh blood still glistened on its surface, dripping slowly into the dirt, mixing with the charred remains of offerings long since burnt to ash.

  "I don't know, my dear," he said. "They're seeming pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing right now."

  The figures who moved in the flickering light of the flames were a sight to behold. Hulking men and women cloaked in tattered furs, their faces obscured by grimy masks made of hide and skulls. Their eyes were dull, containing none of the awareness that came with humanity, peering out from deep, shadowed sockets. Some were sat around sharpening crude, jagged weapons, while others tended to the fires or mended their ragged attire.

  Towards the far left of the camp, one colossal man stood over a fire, turning a spit on which a grotesque figure was impaled. Daine squinted, her heart sinking as she recognised the twisted, contorted shape of a human body, charred and blackened by the flames. The scent of burning flesh filled the air, mingling with the other foul odours to create a nauseating miasma.

  Beyond the fire, several prisoners were bound to stakes, their faces gaunt and eyes hollow with despair. None of them, Daine was pleased to see, were familiar to her from the flight from Swinford. But then she angrily dismissed that thought. It did not matter that she did not recognise them; she would not wish to see her worst enemy in such a state. The prisoners's wrists and ankles were raw and bleeding from the too-tight bindings, and their clothes, where they still had them, hung in filthy tatters. They were silent, save for the occasional whimper or groan, their spirits crushed by the relentless torment of their captors.

  Barely constraining her rage, Daine's gaze shifted to the edge of the clearing, where a shallow pit had been dug. The ground around it was dark and wet, and she could see the glistening forms of maggots writhing in the decomposing bodies heaped within. Nearby, a tree had been adorned with severed heads, their lifeless eyes staring blankly into the void. The flesh on the faces had begun to slough off, revealing grinning skulls beneath.

  To one side, a skinning post stood with fresh pelts hanging from it, blood still dripping from the edges. The skins were of varying sizes, suggesting the mountain men made no distinction between their human and animal victims. A small figure, likely a child, lay crumpled near the base of the post, the flesh flayed from its bones, leaving a raw, red ruin.

  In her long life, Daine had been unfortunate enough to confront the excesses of some of the very worst of humanity, but the sight of the camp gave even her pause. It was as if visceral evil had solidified to permeate the very earth.

  As Daine and Donal silently surveyed the horror before them, they saw a particularly gruesome display: a figure, still twitching, had been nailed to a wooden frame. The body had been meticulously stripped of skin, the exposed muscles glistening wetly in the dim light. Runes had been carved into the flesh, the symbols seeming to pulse with energy.

  "The Dark God," Donal spat. "They're sacrifices to the Dark God."

  Everywhere the two looked, there was evidence of dire cruelty. A cauldron bubbled over a fire, filled with a thick, greasy broth that reeked of decay. Floating in the stew were recognisable body parts—fingers, toes, an eyeball that stared up lifelessly. Those crowded around it dipped their crude wooden bowls into the pot, slurping the vile concoction with apparent relish.

  Daine's stomach churned as she took it all in, the scenes of horror and brutality far worse than anything she had seen on recent Tours. This was a place of nightmare where humanity had been abandoned in favour of primal savagery.

  What had the West become?