Godfang - Chapter 2: The Iron Witch

If you have not read Chapter 1 of Godfang, spoilers ahead, you can find it here.

When last we left Kaelvor, he had clawed his way out of a corpse pit, resurrected by the God Beneath as its reluctant champion. Once chieftain of the Blackfang tribe, he had been betrayed by his own people, stripped of his arm and eye, and thrown among the dead. He rose with a demonic eye and arm, a god’s fang for a sword, and enough rage to burn the world. He carved through a horde of corpse-eater demons and received his mandate from an avatar of the God Beneath, a two-headed jackal, that offered power for blood spilled in its name. Kaelvor accepted the bargain on his own terms, refusing to bow, and set out northwest toward the Blackfang tribe and revenge.

Content note: graphic violence, gore, body horror, and dark fantasy themes. Reader discretion is advised.

The world stretched before Kaelvor, vast and pitiless. The greatsword hung heavy across his back as he walked northwest toward the volcanic highlands. Days blurred together in a haze of ash and silence. Heat shimmered along the horizon, and every breath tasted metallic and of soot.

The landscape shifted as he went. Cracked grey plains gave way to fields of black glass that crunched beneath his boots, the sound sharp in the dead air. He stopped without meaning to, drawn by his reflection in the obsidian surface below.

In life, he had been tall and broad-shouldered, long golden hair framing a strong countenance desired by many. He had known this without vanity, his pride rooted in mastery of the blade rather than the shape of his face. But the figure in the black glass was something else now. The left eye burned demonic green in a ring of dark scales that crept down his cheekbone and across his temple. His left arm was black from shoulder to clawed fingertips, with scale-plates that caught the sky’s red light. He barely recognized himself.

Kaelvor closed his eyes and remembered the night of his death. The weight of his tribe pressing in as they roared in condemnation, leather strapa biting into his wrists, the rise and fall of the axe in crude, relentless chops—the heavy blade hacking through muscle, bone, and nerve until they took his arm. He had not screamed. He had denied them that.

Through the chaos of torchlight and screams, he had found her. Draega, his twin sister, standing behind the others. Her face held a helpless expression of grief and pain that shattered his soul into a million pieces. As he stared at her, the dagger moved toward his eye. His beloved sister’s face was the last thing it saw before they cut it out.

He opened his eyes and looked once more at his reflection in the black glass, at the monster looking back.

Good, he thought. Let them look upon what they made, before I tear them apart.

He walked on.

* * *

Ancient towers rose from the ash, stone columns bearing symbols from dead languages. Some thrust upward until they vanished into the ash clouds, their peaks swallowed by the red sky. Others lay toppled and half-buried like the skeletal remains of fallen giants. Steam vents erupted without warning from fissures in the earth, hurling scalding yellow clouds skyward with hissing screams. The air stank of sulfur and scorched stone.

From the shadowy alcoves of a tower high above, a congregation of winged reptilian humanoids watched him pass. They bared their fangs and hissed, but none dropped from their perch to test the stranger moving beneath them. In the darkness behind the foremost creatures, he saw more of their kind. Eyes glowing green and unblinking, and Kaelvor could not say how many watched him from the black. He held their gaze a moment longer, promising death if challenged, then walked on.

* * *

Days later, he crested a ridge and halted. The valley below looked alive, glistening, writhing, and pulsing with heat. Demons. Thousands of them. They seethed across the basin, a living tide of flesh and horn, crimson churning with obsidian. The mass moved with dreadful cohesion, bodies pressed together in a fever of motion, slick and steaming. Shrieks layered over growls, the wet percussion of bodies colliding in rhythm. Roars filled the air, part hunger, part exultation. It was a mating ritual, a feeding frenzy, or something that blurred the line between the two until it was both at once.

Kaelvor scanned the valley floor. The main path northwest cut straight through that boiling sea. A death road. He wouldn’t survive the first step into the valley.

The sound of movement behind him made him spin, sword up. A demon slid from between two boulders, no more than twenty feet away. The thing was massive, broader than a man, hunched low on two great forelimbs like an ape, knuckles scraping on stone. Its head was long and heavy, a porcine snout moist with breath, nostrils flaring wetly as it tasted the air.

It shuffled forward, then halted.

A chitinous spinal ridge rose in a sharp bristle. Small, deep-set red eyes fixed on Kaelvor, and a low growl rolled out of its throat. Then it spoke, the voice guttural but clear. Kaelvor felt the rumble in his sternum.

"Half blood." The snout wrinkled, wet nostrils flaring. "I smell death on you. Old death. The grave." Another wet snort, air dragging deep into its lungs. "And something else." Its gaze moved to the sword. "Ah. You are the Carrion God's get. Marked and claimed."

Kaelvor raised the sword slightly. “I am my own. And you? You’re with them?” He nodded toward the hellish orgy in the valley below.

The demon made a choking sound for laughter. “Them?” The pig-like nostrils flared. “Mindless, rutting beasts. No. I am older. I think.” Its eyes shifted from Kaelvor to the mountain path, then back. “You plan to take the pass.”

“And what of it?”

The demon moved one step closer. “Very dangerous. That path runs through her domain.”

“Whose domain?”

“The Iron One.” Its eyes narrowed to slits. “She owns that mountain. Has done so since before my kind crawled out of the deep Void.”

Kaelvor examined the path. “Who is she?”

“Torment given form.” The snout curled, revealing rows of needle-fine teeth. “She slays any who pass. She cares nothing for gods or their pets.”

Kaelvor’s jaw tightened. “Then I’ll kill her.”

“Many have tried. Their bones line her fortress.”

Kaelvor studied the creature. “Have you tried?”

The demon made the choking laughter again. “No. I am old, half-blood. I am not foolish.” The red eyes gleamed. “I live by knowing what cannot be killed.” A heartbeat of silence. “But you, you are different. The champion of a dead god. And I wonder…”

It turned and loped back toward the cleft in the rocks. At the edge of shadow it paused, glanced over its shoulder, red eyes burning. “I wonder if death’s champion can do what mortal flesh and steel cannot. But, if you take the pass, you may wish to die as a mercy before it’s all over.”

Kaelvor said nothing. Only raised his jaw in defiance.

“Go then,” the demon said. “Take your god fang up the mountain. Good luck, half-blood brother.”

Then it was gone.

Kaelvor stood alone at the ridge’s edge. He raised the sword in his hand. Godfang. He tested the moniker in his mind, then spun the blade once. A fitting name.

He looked down at the writhing demonic mass below. Two figures near the edge of the chaos caught his eye. One had mounted the other, sliding onto its barbed penis, gripping its mate by the skull with both hands. As he watched, it wrenched the head sideways with a wet crack, tearing it free in a spray of bluish-purple blood. The body beneath it continued to thrust, headless, spasming in ecstasy. The one holding the head bit into it like fruit, jaw unhinged, and began to feed without pausing in its own mating rhythm. The mass churned on around them.

Kaelvor looked back to the mountain path. No choice.

He started moving up.

* * *

The path was carved into the rock of the mountainside like an old scar. The first body appeared after an hour of climbing. It was chained to the rock face, arms spread wide, iron spikes driven through the eye sockets and into stone. The corpse had mummified in the dry air, skin pulled tight over bone. Rust stained the rock where the iron had bled over years.

More bodies appeared as he climbed higher. Some pinned to the rock by iron spikes, others impaled on barbed hooks jutting from the cliff face. One wore the remnants of rusted armor, its own sword driven through its mouth and into the stone behind it, skeletal hands still gripping the weathered blade.

The path wound through a narrow rocky crevice where the dead hung overhead. Dozens of mummified corpses suspended from chains stretched across the gap, swaying in the wind with soft metallic creaking. The hooks embedded in their spines and shoulders were black with age.

He ducked beneath a low-hanging corpse with scorpions scuttling across its desiccated skin, and kept climbing.

The air grew hotter. Not the warmth of the volcanic wasteland below, but a deeper heat that seeped from the stone itself. The ash that fell here was darker and clung to his skin with an oily residue.

The fortress appeared through the ash-clouds like a vision from a nightmare. It was built into the mountain itself, dark iron and black stone rising from the rock as if the peak had grown teeth. Looming walls stretched across the entire width of the pass. Towers rose on either side, their peaks lost in the churning clouds above. The iron had corroded over ages, streaked with rust like dried blood. The path led directly to it. There was no way around. The fortress was the passage.

Kaelvor stopped where the path ended at a portcullis blocking the way. The thing was massive, with iron bars as thick as a man’s thigh.

The fortress beyond was silent. No guards. No movement. Just the wind moaning through the pass and the distant sound of chains shifting somewhere deep inside. Windows like empty eye sockets stared down at him.

He approached with his hand on his sword's hilt and touched the gate.

From deep within the fortress came a sound. Metal on metal. Grinding. The shriek of ancient chains moving through rusted pulleys. The bars shuddered. Ash and flakes of rust rained down. The chains groaned, protesting against the weight. Slowly, the portcullis began to rise, the bars scraping against stone with a sound like screaming.

When it had lifted just high enough for him to walk beneath, it stopped.

The passage opened before him. Kaelvor stared into the darkness beyond, every instinct screaming at him to turn back. But he had no other path.

Ducking beneath the portcullis, he stepped inside. The iron bars slammed down behind him with a crash that echoed through the fortress like thunder.

Godfang came off his back, and into his hands. Ahead, the corridor stretched into shadow.

* * *

Crimson witchfire burned behind the hollow sockets of skulls lining the corridor. The passage opened into a larger chamber and Kaelvor stopped at the threshold.

The ceiling rose into darkness far above. Chains descended all around, holding man-sized cages. Hundreds of them, suspended at different heights on lengths of black iron. Each one contained a body. Some were old, nothing but bones held together by dried ligaments. Others were shriveled husks, parchment-like skin stretched over skull and ribs.

The cages swayed and the chains creaked as Kaelvor moved through them. Dead eyes leered out from skeletal faces. Withered hands gripped the iron bars.

He was halfway across the chamber when he heard the sound of metal scraping on stone. He froze.

One of the cages was on the ground ahead. It was moving. Crawling.

Inside were two bodies, or what had once been two bodies. They'd been contorted together, torsos pressed back-to-back, iron spikes driven through both, pinning them like insects on a board. Chains woven between their ribcages held them in a grotesque embrace, strips of flesh bound together in zigzagging lines of thick black stitching. Their limbs had been broken and reset, bones reformed into new configurations, bent in ways no human bone should. Eight arachnid appendages gripped the floor and pulled the cage forward with a horrible scraping gait, its exterior bristling with iron spikes.

Both faces were visible through the bottom of the cage, one upside down, eyes open. Jaws worked, but only wet gurgling emerged. Blood and spittle thick with rust bubbled at their lips, rotting teeth bared from black swollen gums.

The cage-thing skittered toward him.

More cages descended from the ceiling on chains like spiders dropping on silk threads. They hit the floor, and scuttled toward him, the fused occupants moaning through broken mouths.

The first one rushed him.

Kaelvor moved away, his back bumping against an ancient wooden pillar.

The cage creature charged forward and leapt, twisting sideways in an attack meant to impale him beneath its spiked iron shell.

He ducked at the last instant. The cage slammed into the pillar with a crack, spikes driving deep into the wood, pinning it. The bodies inside thrashed, trying to pull free. Kaelvor drove Godfang through the bars and skewered them. The thrashing intensified before it stopped. Blood poured from the cage. He wrenched the blade free, slinging an arc of ichor across the room.

Two more closed in, one from his left and one from his right, their spider-like limbs scuttling across stone. Kaelvor dropped low and swept Godfang in a wide horizontal arc at ground level beneath the nearest cage, shearing through the broken-jointed limbs where they emerged from the bars. Arms and legs severed in a spray of blood and infected flesh. The cage crashed to the floor. The bodies inside screamed, thrashing helplessly, spikes scraping stone, unable to move. Blood spread in a widening pool beneath it as the severed limbs flailed. Kaelvor left the helpless thing to bleed out.

The cage on his right closed the distance and leapt. Kaelvor roared and brought Godfang up and down in a brutal overhead swing. It sheared through the airborne attacker from top to bottom, through iron bars, through the stitched-together bodies. The cage split in half. The two halves fell to either side of him, spilling putrid organs and black blood across the stone floor.

More movement from above. Kaelvor looked up just as another creature dropped from the darkness. It had pulled its limbs inside the cage, becoming a plummeting projectile of iron and spikes.

He dropped his sword, knowing he didn’t have time to raise the large blade. He caught the cage with both hands. The weight knocked him flat. His back hit stone. The wind exploded from his lungs.

The cage landed on top of him, spikes inches from his face, hovering above his eyes and throat. The points trembled, pressing closer as his thick arms quivered under the weight.

Inside the cage, the stitched-together monstrosity screamed. Dirty, twisted hands reached through the bars, grasping his arms, his shoulders, neck, and hair. Cracked fingernails dug into the mortal flesh of his right arm. Slimy fingers clutched his wrists and pulled the cage down toward him with terrible strength born of madness and desperation.

The spikes descended. An iron point touched his cheek, dimpling the skin.

Kaelvor’s scaled arm reached through the bars and closed around both throats where they were stitched together. He squeezed. Cartilage cracked. The bodies convulsed. The heads separated from the spines with a wet pop and slammed against the inside wall of the cage. The grasping hands went slack. Kaelvor shoved the dead weight aside and rolled to his feet, chest heaving.

He took one breath before two more of the things were upon him. They’d been circling, waiting. Now they acted. Both pulled their limbs inward and rolled, rushing at his legs from opposite directions, bearing down on him. He tried to dodge. Too late.

Both cages hit simultaneously, spikes punching through his calves from either side, piercing muscle and grinding against bone, embedding in his legs.

Kaelvor screamed in rage and agony. His molten blood exploded from the wounds in scalding jets, spraying both cages through the punctures. The bodies inside shrieked. Their skin blistered and charred where the burning blood touched them. They thrashed violently, trying to escape the searing, clinging liquid. Their broken limbs clawed desperately at Kaelvor’s legs, trying to push the cages free from the source of the burning.

The cage on his left tore itself free, ripping its spikes from his calf. It slid backward, the bodies still screaming, smoke rising from between the bars.

The one on his right pulled free and tried to roll away, but Kaelvor’s boot came down on one of its spikes, pinning it. It rattled and shook as the thing inside wailed and pounded fists against his boot, its flesh steaming.

He caught the fleeing cage with one hand as the thing inside shrieked and clawed at the stone, dirty fingernails snapping and splintering. Both hands closed around the bars. He lifted it over his head and brought it down on the pinned cage with a roar. The two cages collided with the crunch of metal on metal, bars buckling. The bodies inside were crushed together, impaled as the spikes found flesh. He lifted and brought it down again. And again. Each impact compacted the cages further, driving spikes deeper, bending the frames. Blood sprayed from between the mangled iron. Ribs shattered. Skulls cracked. Shared organs burst.

He hammered the cages together until both were nothing but crushed iron and pulverized meat. Then he hurled the ruined mass across the chamber. It crashed into the far wall and fell in a heap of twisted metal and gore.

Kaelvor glared at the wreckage, chest heaving. The room had gone quiet again, save for the soft sounds of swaying chains.

He looked down at his legs. The wounds were already closing, molten blood sealing the holes with cauterizing heat. New flesh knit over exposed muscle. In seconds, nothing of the punctures remained.

He picked up Godfang. Ahead, another corridor led deeper into the fortress. A faint red glow bled from the dark. He moved toward it.

* * *

The corridor sloped downward, walls shifting from stone to iron, the heat thickening with every step. Then the smell of burning flesh hit him.

A furnace filled the far wall, floor to ceiling, its mouth a blackened arch sealed by a great grated door. Light bled through in waves of orange and deep red. The heat pressed against him like a suffocating wall, thick enough to taste.

Through the grate, figures of men and women writhed. Their bodies had become the fire—flesh coal and ember, bones glowing orange. A face turned toward the grate, mouth stretched wide, the cavity inside burning bright. Its eyes no longer flesh, but pits of light.

The trapped figures burned. Continuously. Completely. And yet they remained intact. Some sorcery keeping them alive at the moment of engulfment, forever.

Kaelvor stared for a long moment, barely able to comprehend an existence of such suffering, then turned and kept walking.

* * *

He walked through the corridor and onto a bridge of grated black iron, suspended by chains over a sea of lava hundreds of feet below. Through the grate beneath his boots, something breached the surface, a massive dark shape pushing up through the molten rock like a sea serpent. There were more, leviathans of igneous stone and flame, surfacing and vanishing into the red-orange deep.

Shapes lined the edges of the bridge, one after another, facing inward. Upright metal coffins, tall and narrow, bolted to the outer rim with their backs to the drop. As he moved between them, details resolved in the red glow from below. Each had been hammered into the rough likeness of a woman, arms folded across her chest, the metal molded into curves and flowing hair. Most bore smooth, featureless faces. A few had serene visages with closed eyes, as if sleeping. Thick iron latches held the hinged lids shut.

One stood slightly ajar. Kaelvor pulled it open. Inside, a forest of iron spikes jutted from every surface, pointing inward. Bits of darkened meat still clung to some of the points. Dried blood lacquered the metal in thick, flaking layers. The air inside smelled of copper and cooked flesh.

He had heard of these devices. Iron maidens. He spat. There was no honor in drawn-out suffering. Torture was the craft of those too spineless to meet their enemy blade to blade and be done with it.

He kept moving until he heard a moan, faint and muffled, from one of the sealed coffins. Someone inside. Still alive.

He reached for the heavy latch.

“Don’t,” came a voice from within.

Kaelvor froze. “I mean to free you.”

“Have you ever torn a scab from a wound before it heals?” The voice rasped. “Free me now, and what replaces this pain will be worse. Worse than death.”

“How long have you been in there?”

“I don’t remember.” A ragged breath. “Time has no meaning here. The Iron Witch has seen to that.”

“Where is she?”

“Forward. The only direction you can move.” A cough, violent and prolonged. “But tell me, what manner of man walks this place and still breathes?”

“One the Witch has never faced before.”

The bridge shifted as something vast breached the lava’s surface below and slid back under.

“Tell me how she fights,” said Kaelvor, his mouth close to the iron maiden’s face. “How do I kill her?”

The breathing had changed. Slower. Shallower.

“Tell me,” he said.

Nothing. Only the creak of chains and the thick bubbling of the abyss below.

Kaelvor straightened and walked the remaining length of the bridge. The door at the end stood open, waiting. He stepped through, into the chamber of the Iron Witch.

* * *

The room was a cathedral of iron and despair. Chains hung in great curtains of black metal, swaying in an unfelt draft. From each length of chain, scraps of skin and meat clung to the links, some dried to leather, others still wet and dark, dripping in slow rhythmic ticks onto the floor below. The floor was smooth iron plate, polished to a dark mirror by years of dragged bodies and spilled blood, the seams between plates crusted with old gore.

At the far end of the chamber, in front of another portcullis, stood the Iron Witch.

Eight feet tall, perhaps more. Her body was not flesh but living iron shaped into the form of a woman. Blackened plates fused together seamlessly. Her surface was covered in spikes and jagged protrusions. Chains hung from her shoulders and waist, sprawling across the floor in all directions. Her face was a funerary mask of iron, beautiful and serene, eyes closed as if dreaming.

The fortress groaned and the chains stirred. Yet she stood perfectly still, waiting.

Kaelvor walked toward her, sword raised, and when he drew close the eyes slowly opened, burning deep crimson. “You have entered uninvited.”

The sound of her voice was almost lovely. The way a funeral bell is almost music.

Kaelvor stopped. “I seek only the road ahead, witch.”

The iron face tilted slightly. “None can pass.” She raised one hand, iron fingers with cruel serrated tips. “I have slain warriors, kings, sorcerers. All believed they could not be contained.”

Kaelvor gripped Godfang with both hands. “Here I stand, witch. Come and try.”

She moved. For something so massive, she was fast. She closed the distance in two heartbeats, chains rattling. One iron arm swept toward him. Kaelvor ducked and swung Godfang at her torso. The blade struck with a sound like a gong tolling, jarring his arms to the bone, leaving only a shallow gouge. Her other hand came around and her iron fist caught his shoulder, sending him face-first into the floor.

“Is that the best you can do?” he sneered as he stood, then pressed the attack.

He struck at her legs, arms, torso, each blow ringing like thunder, yet the Witch’s iron flesh wouldn’t yield. He bellowed and brought an overhead chop down. She caught the sword with both hands, wrenched it aside, and backhanded him onto the floor again.

Kaelvor rolled to his feet, wrenching Godfang from the floor. He rolled his neck, shook out his arms, then strode around the Witch, studying her. He charged. Ducking beneath a sweeping fist, he slammed Godfang into her midsection in a brutal double-handed strike, putting all his might behind it. The sword sank deeper this time, staggering her back a step. He pressed in, raining blow after blow. Chunks of metal fell away, but beneath was only more iron.

He stepped back, chest heaving, wiping sweat from his eyes. This is pointless. She can’t be killed this way.

Chains lashed from her body like striking iron cobras, wrapping around his legs, arms, and throat. He wrenched against them, but they only tightened. The Witch pulled him toward her with terrible patience, her iron face serene. Another chain caught his midsection and lifted him off his feet.

“You are strong,” she said as he hung suspended in her web. “That will make your suffering even sweeter.”

The chains pulled. His ribs creaked under the constriction. Panic crept into Kaelvor’s mind, the voice from within the iron maiden on the bridge surfacing. Tortures you can’t even imagine. Agony and sorrow forever.

The Witch’s torso split open, plates separating down the middle like doors swinging wide. Inside, a hollow chamber lined with spikes, each as thick as fingers, pointing inward.

“You can’t even begin to know how long I will make your suffering last,” she said as the chains dragged him toward the waiting spikes.

He was inches from the opening now. He saw dried blood and fragments of bone inside.

The terror of the corpse pit clawed back into his mind, black and suffocating. No! Not again!

He screamed as the chains pulled him into her body. The plates sealed shut. Darkness. Total. Absolute.

Then pain beyond anything he had ever known. He couldn’t move. The spikes punched through his flesh from every angle. One scraped along his ribs with the screeching sound of metal on bone, a vibration he felt in his teeth. Another pierced his right wrist, pinning it. Several drove through his thighs, grinding against femur. A spike punctured his lung and he struggled to breathe. His screams turned into gargled hacking as a spike entered his throat, another through his cheek and into his mouth.

The iron points held him suspended in the black, and the trauma of the corpse pit came back in full, the bodies pressing in, the weight of the dead crushing him from every side. He thrashed, but the spikes only slid deeper.

The Witch’s voice came through the darkness, muffled and cold: “Now you are mine. You will die. Slower than you want. Faster than you deserve.”

His blood ran down the spikes, pouring from every wound. Not the thin trickle of mortal bleeding but his thick, molten essence, streaming along the metal, pooling in the cavity around his feet.

The glowing blood rose. It was at his ankles. Now his knees. Heat built in the cramped space until every breath was fire.

Gritting his teeth, Kaelvor forced his body to move, wrenching his impaled flesh violently against the spikes. Each motion tore new channels, opened fresh wounds, spilled more of the burning liquid from his body into the prison. He fed it, using his own pain like a bellows.

The blood climbed to his thighs. His waist. The spikes glowed dull red in the dark.

Outside, the Witch made a small sound. Puzzlement.

The blood rose to his chest. The interior was an oven now. The spikes dissolved. The walls began to liquefy, running like wax. He tore his right arm free, shredding what flesh still held it, dragging it through the molten slurry. For a heartbeat, he sagged, then ripped his left arm free. The plates glowed orange, then white-hot. Seams split. Metal buckled. He drove his fists into the weakened plates again and again, feeling them give. Every strike fed the heat, made the metal softer. He ripped his prison apart from the inside, tearing through iron gone soft as clay.

The Witch staggered. Her red eyes widened. “What is this?! What are you?!”

Kaelvor clawed through her chest cavity like a molten insect hatching from an iron chrysalis. Liquefied metal and boiling blood poured from the rupture. He wrenched the opening wider, his scaled arm shredding through her torso. She reached for him with both hands. He caught one wrist and twisted. The superheated metal bent. He drove his shoulder up and pushed. The weakened structure buckled. He climbed out of the collapsing wreckage of her body, covered in his own molten blood, steaming and smoking.

His flesh was riddled with puncture wounds, all sealing shut. The liquefied metal that clung to him burned through skin and muscle, sloughing away in smoldering chunks. Beneath each falling piece, raw flesh knit itself back together. Piece by piece the metal fell away, cooling and darkening as it hit the floor, until the last of it dropped from his skin and he stood whole, steaming.

Kaelvor picked up Godfang. The Witch reached toward him, one arm outstretched, half-melted, two fingers fused together, the others dripping off. She tried to speak, but her voice came out a gurgling screech, her internal structure warping as he watched. He sliced the reaching limb off at the shoulder, Godfang cutting through the weakened metal like a slab of warm butter. Molten metal oozed from the stump. She staggered. Her body was a ruin, metal running in rivulets down her frame, pooling at her feet.

He swung Godfang into her chest, into the heart of the collapsing furnace that was her body.

The Iron Witch ruptured. Her perfect iron face fell forward, hit the floor with a ringing sound, and shattered. The red light in her eyes flickered once and died. What remained collapsed in on itself, a heap of cooling slag and melted chains. The chamber smelled like a blacksmith’s forge.

Kaelvor stood over the wreckage, breathing hard. Steam rose through the chamber. He shuddered at the ruin of the thing that had almost become his tomb.

He crossed to the portcullis at the back of the chamber. Beyond it, a corridor, and at its far end, light. Daylight. The other side of the pass. He found a lever and pulled. The ancient mechanism groaned and the barrier lifted.

The heat still clung to him as he stepped through onto a narrow bridge spanning a chasm, and beyond that, the path down the far side of the mountain. His hands trembled. His breath came heavy. The battle had drained him in a way he had never known. But he was alive. And he was through.

He descended the mountain path even as night fell, desperate to leave the Witch’s fortress far behind. By the time he reached the foothills, dawn was breaking through the ash-clouds. He kept moving. Toward the Blackfang tribe—his murderers. And toward his sister, the only person in this world he loved.

* * *

In the wreckage of the Iron Witch’s lair, something moved. A faint metallic ticking echoed through the cooling chamber. Pieces of iron shifted, drawn together as if pulled by invisible threads.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The shattered pieces of the Witch’s face twitched. One iron eyelid slowly lifted, and from the hollow behind it, a pinprick of crimson light flickered, then began to grow.

I hope you enjoyed Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, we delve into Kaelvor's past as the Blackfang tribe's chieftain and the betrayal that led him down the path to becoming the Carrion God's champion. Read it here.