Godfang Chapter 4: The Moon-Blooded Huntress

The Story So Far

In Chapter 1, Kaelvor clawed his way from a corpse pit in the wastelands of Etheroth, reborn after betrayal, mutilation, and murder at the hands of his own tribe, the Blackfang. A mysterious entity known as the God Beneath, called the Carrion God by some, found him in the afterlife and raised him as its champion, gifting him a black-scaled demon arm, a burning green eye, molten blood, and a fang torn from its own mouth, forged into a greatsword Kaelvor would name Godfang. He cut through a swarm of rhake, carrion demons of the burial grounds, before the god’s two-headed jackal avatar appeared to strike a bargain: power and legend in exchange for a debt to be claimed later. The Carrion God also gave Kaelvor what he desired above all else: the location of the Blackfang, and of his beloved twin sister, Draega.

In Chapter 2, the road to vengeance led him through a mountain passage into the fortress of the Iron Witch. She captured him and sealed him inside her spike-lined body, where he was meant to die slowly in agony. Instead, his burning blood liquefied her from within, and he tore himself free through her melting form, walking out the far side of the mountain.

In Chapter 3, Kaelvor passed through a settlement of the massacred dead, their bodies nailed to wooden frames in rows like a grotesque orchard, eyes and tongues harvested and strung from a banner bearing a crimson fist gripping a broken crown. After taking shelter in an ancient watchtower, dreams dragged him back through the blood-soaked history of his betrayal and mutilation at the hands of the Blackfang. He woke to find a lone figure sprinting across the wasteland below, riders on large insectoid mounts in pursuit, bearing the same crimson fist emblem he had seen at the massacre. He climbed down from the tower and ran to meet them—eager for a fight.

Welcome to Chapter 4: The Moon-Blooded Huntress

The six insectoid creatures scuttled across the ash flat, chitinous legs churning as their riders drove them hard. An arrow skipped off a rock two feet from the runner’s heels.

Kaelvor closed the gap, slipping into a dry creek bed to mask his approach. He crouched low, smooth stones rattling beneath his boots as he moved toward the pursuit. The mounts thundered closer. He felt the rhythm of their legs through the earth.

He stopped. Waited. Poised like a predator ready to strike.

Now.

He burst from the creek bed between runner and riders, sprinting to intercept the lead pursuer.

The rider had half a heartbeat to register the man erupting from the earth beside him before Kaelvor drove his scaled shoulder into the insectoid mount at an angle. Nineteen stone of demon-blooded warrior slammed into the creature’s right foreleg. The limb exploded in a spray of translucent green fluid and splintered chitin.

The rider was flung from the saddle and struck the ground hard. He reached for his sword, but Godfang tore through his torso before he could draw steel.

Five more.

The runner stopped, breathing hard. A woman. Kaelvor took her in. Obsidian-colored skin traced with silver-white markings across her arms and collarbone, climbing her throat. Hair pale as moonlight, bound in a loose braid over one shoulder. Ears tapering to sharp points. Lean and hard-muscled, built like a hunting cat. Clad in tattered dark leathers. She studied him in turn, eyes flicking between his black-scaled arm and burning green eye.

The dead rider’s severed arm still clutched the hilt of the half-drawn sword, fingers twitching. Kaelvor ripped the weapon free and threw it to her. She caught it one-handed.

“Who are you?”

“Ask me later,” he said. “Kill or be killed.”

The remaining riders closed in.

The first swung a morning star at Kaelvor’s skull. He ducked beneath the blow and came up within arm’s reach of the mount. His scaled hand seized the rider’s boot and hauled. The man tore free of the saddle and struck the earth just before Kaelvor’s boot crashed down on his chest, crushing his ribcage flat and pulping his heart. His lungs ruptured with a wet, muffled pop.

Four more.

A spear punched through the meat of Kaelvor’s right shoulder, spinning him half around. He roared, closed his scaled hand around the shaft and ripped it free. It came out in a spurt of molten blood that hissed against the ground. The wound sealed almost immediately, muscle knitting shut as the molten blood cauterized the flesh.

He looked at the spear. Looked at the rider who threw it. Then hurled it back. It skewered the rider clean through, ripping him from the saddle.

Three more.

Behind him came the sound of fast, efficient strikes. The woman knew how to fight. He turned in time to see her wrench the short sword free from a rider’s gut as the man toppled from his mount.

Two more.

Her eyes met his. “Keep your distance. I don’t trust you.”

“You don’t have to.”

The next rider circled wide. He had a battle axe and the good sense to keep his distance, waiting for an opening.

He did not get one.

Kaelvor stepped to the corpse of the man he’d crushed underfoot. He seized the head with his scaled hand and wrenched it free in a gout of blood, then hurled it like a trebuchet stone. The head struck the rider full in the face, caving in his skull with a wet, hollow crack.

One more.

The last rider pressed toward the woman, spear in hand—an effective weapon at range, but clumsy up close. She sidestepped a thrust, caught the haft, then snapped a high kick into his ribs, knocking him from the saddle. The insect creature bolted.

She stepped forward and drove the spear through the downed rider’s forearm, pinning it to the ground, then planted her foot on his other wrist.

“Leave him,” Kaelvor said. “He can tell us about that symbol. Who they serve. What they are.”

She glanced at him, expressionless, then drove her blade into the rider’s throat. The man flailed, gurgling, then went still.

Kaelvor turned his palms upward, mouth twisting in annoyance. “I could have made him talk.”

She crouched, pried open the dead man’s mouth with two fingers, wet heat still lingering inside, revealing the blackened stump of a tongue burned away.

“No. You could not. They don’t speak. They have no reason to. They live only to obey.” She stood. “Besides, I can tell you everything you need to know about that banner and who it represents.”

He held her gaze a moment before something flickered at the edge of his vision. He looked skyward. Clouds rolled in, low and yellow-brown, the color of a healing bruise, moving fast against the wind. The air took on a metallic tang.

“Tears of the Gods,” he hissed. Acid rain, lethal to anything it touched.

“We don’t have long.”

“There’s a tower,” he said, pointing back the way he’d come. “We can shelter there.”

They stripped the dead quickly, without discussion, taking only what was useful: waterskins, dried meat, rope. The woman crouched over one of the riders and drew two crescent-shaped blades from a satchel.

“Star-metal blades. The weapon of my people. I never thought I’d hold one again.” She turned them in her hands almost reverently, examined their edges, then sheathed them at her belt.

They made for the tower.

***

The first drops struck the stone of the watchtower’s outer wall. The two sat on opposite sides of the upper floor, watching the rain through the gap where the wall had fallen away. The downpour hissed against the earth, a low, steady sound like fat sizzling in a hot pan.

The woman turned her eyes to him. “Who are you?”

“I’m Kaelvor. Chieftain of the Blackfang tribe.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “Or at least I was. My title is… uncertain now.”

"I am Saelira of the Osskari."

The Osskari. Kaelvor knew the name. Children of the Moon. A mysterious nocturnal race of the wastelands. He'd never seen one in the flesh.

Her silver eyes moved from his green eye to the scaled arm and back again.

“And what are you?” she said.

He touched the black skin beside the glowing eye with one finger and smiled. “Oh, this? I had an accident.”

“An accident?”

“Yes. I fell into a corpse pit.” He glanced down at the scaled arm, then back at her. “And came out like this.”

A long pause.

“A corpse pit,” she said flatly.

“Yes. Terrible place. I don’t recommend it.”

Sensing he would offer nothing more, she looked back to the rain beyond the wall.

“The banner with the clenched fist,” he said. “Tell me what you know of it.”

“It is the Warlord’s mark. He leaves it wherever he passes. In every settlement he slaughters.” She pulled her knees closer to her chest. “For reasons unknown, he chose to enslave my people rather than kill us.”

Outside, the rain hissed louder against the stone.

“He travels in a moving fortress,” she said quietly. “My people called it the Colossus.”

Kaelvor barked a short laugh. “What madness is this? A fortress that moves? Speak plainly.”

“A fortress… that moves,” she repeated, firmer. “It rides on spiked iron wheels the size of city gates. Witch-fire burns in chambers deep within its belly, driving the machinery. Slaves, most of them my people, and demons work the mechanisms inside. Great cogs screaming as they turn. Pistons hammering like a giant metal heart.”

She went still for a moment.

“I know this because I was inside.”

Kaelvor’s expression hardened. “You escaped from it?”

She nodded once. “There were five of us. Two died in the underbelly.” She shuddered. “We three made it out, but the riders hunted us down one by one. By the time you found me, I was the last.”

“How long were you inside?”

“Long enough. Too long.” She swallowed.

“This Warlord,” Kaelvor said. “Tell me of him.”

“I know little of him, save that he is to be feared. And that is not something I say lightly. I saw him only once, from a distance. He was wreathed in shadow. There was a weight to his presence that made the air feel heavy and… wrong.”

“And where is the Colossus now?”

“It was moving northwest when we slipped out.”

Toward the volcanic highlands. Toward the Blackfang. Visions of bodies nailed to wood in the settlement flashed through Kaelvor’s mind. Smaller frames among them. Crucified children. The Warlord’s banner flapping, cords of severed tongues and eyes hanging from it. His teeth ground together.

“How many of your people are enslaved?” he said.

“All of them. Hundreds.”

“And how many of them are warriors?”

Her silver eyes narrowed, something between confusion and curiosity. “Warriors?” she tested the word.

“Yes. Warriors. Fighters.”

“They are Osskari. They are all born to battle. We do not have words for those who fight and those who do not.”

Kaelvor nodded, slow and thoughtful. “And magic?” he asked. “Can your people wield the arcane powers?”

“Aye. The Nightweavers. Our sacred sorceresses. Osskari women who draw power from moonlight and darkness.” Her jaw tightened. “But I have not seen them since we were taken. The Warlord separated them from the rest of us from the very beginning. They are held somewhere inside the Colossus, apart from the others.” She paused. “Where, or for what purpose, I cannot say.”

Kaelvor dwelt on that for a long moment. If the Nightweavers were alive and could be freed along with the others, they would be worth more to him than a hundred swords when he faced the Shamanka.

“I am going northwest as well. I have business in the highlands.” He let that settle. “I offer you a bargain, Saelira. Come into the Colossus with me. I will kill the Warlord and free your people.”

He held her gaze. “When it is done, the Osskari will march with me. They fight when I need them to fight.” He raised his scaled arm. “They will help me take vengeance on those who did this to me. They will help me free my sister.” His voice dropped low. “I will leave nothing of my tribe behind but ash.”

Her eyes bore into his. “You, a stranger to me, ask much of my people.”

“Yes. And I risk much to walk into that Colossus and kill whatever rules it. But I choose to do it because the bargain serves us both.”

“If I free my people only to lead them into slaughter for an outsider’s vengeance, then I have traded one cruel fate for another.”

“Do you think I came this far to throw my life away?”

“I think you are so full of rage that you do not care whether you survive. Anger like yours does not see odds. It sees only targets.”

Silence stretched between them while the rain hissed against stone.

“Can this war of yours be won?” Saelira asked at last.

“Yes. With the strength of your people behind me, it can be won. If I did not believe that, I would not ask it of you, or of them.”

“Only a fool would accept your offer,” she said. The despair behind her eyes was fleeting, but he caught it. “Yet there is nothing for my people to return to. The Warlord burned our home before he chained us. Everything we once held is gone.”

She straightened. “One condition, before I agree to anything. If at any point I believe you are sending my people into a fight they cannot survive, if I decide your vengeance asks more of them than it has any right to, I take them and I walk. No argument. No pursuit. The pact ends there.” Her gaze did not waver. “Agree to this, or we have nothing more to discuss.”

Kaelvor stared for a long moment. “Agreed.”

“Very well, Kaelvor of the Blackfang. I accept your proposal.”

“One more thing. When you ask your people to follow a Blackfang stranger into a highland war that is not theirs, do you think you can convince them?”

“I will not need to convince them. They will agree because it is my will.” The corners of her mouth lifted slightly. “I am the Moon-Blooded Huntress. The War Queen of the Osskari.”

He grinned at that, then nodded. She nodded back.

Outside, the world dissolved into night.

“We leave at sunrise.” Kaelvor set Godfang across his lap, closed his eyes, and was asleep against the wall within a minute.

She watched him for a long time, gazing on the black scales of his arm and face, the faint green glow beneath his left eyelid, and the strength in the curve of his body. A soft smile touched her lips. Then she closed her eyes and slept.

***

The storm stopped before dawn, and they left the tower at first light. The rain had eaten the dead riders down to pockmarked bone, marrow seeping out.

The pair moved across the plain in silence, toward a horizon of fractured crimson and venomous green roiling above the distant black hills.

After walking for hours, Saelira pointed. The ground ahead had been pressed flat. Two long, parallel lines cut across the earth, running north as far as the eye could follow.

The Colossus had passed this way. Even the heavy rain had not erased those deep marks.

They followed the tracks.

***

Saelira heard them before Kaelvor. She raised a fist and they stopped. Then she motioned for him to hide.

They slipped behind a rock just as five riders emerged through the gloom in a loose line. The legs of their insectoid mounts clicked across the broken stone. Two riders carried long whips. Two bore pronged iron brands on poles, the tips glowing dull orange. The fifth held a heavy crossbow across his lap, scanning the path ahead.

Roughly twenty figures shuffled before the riders, driven onward by the crack of a whip or the jab of a hot brand. Ash and filth caked their skin and armor. Crude iron helmets were strapped beneath their chins, studded with short spikes. Strings of foul spittle hung from their mouths, dangling from bared, yellowed teeth. They shambled forward with a twitching, animalistic tension coiled beneath their movements.

Kaelvor guessed these creatures had once been people. Whatever they were now, that humanity had been beaten, burned, or carved out of them, leaving behind only hunger and violence.

Saelira looked at Kaelvor. “The mounts of the ones we killed yesterday,” she whispered. “They must have gone back to the Colossus. They know someone is behind them. Someone who killed those riders.”

Her silver eyes moved across the five riders, calculating. “They’ll find us eventually. Better to hit them first and end this quickly.”

Kaelvor grunted in approval. “We start with the riders. I’ll take the right flank. You take the left.”

***

Saelira came in low and fast, a blur of motion crossing the ground in near silence. The mounted warrior had no time to turn before she was on him.

She planted a foot on his boot in the stirrup and vaulted into the saddle behind him. One hand clamped over his mouth as the crescent blade drove through his throat. When his body went slack, she dropped lightly to the ground.

The second rider wheeled toward the commotion. His mount saw her first. She slipped beneath the snapping mandibles, rolled between two chitinous legs, and came up beside the rider. Her blade punched into his thigh. He let out a guttural howl, folding toward the wound. She seized the back of his helmet and drove her blade into his tongueless mouth. It burst from the back of his neck, severing the spinal cord. His body went limp and slid from the saddle.

The third rider had his crossbow up. Saelira lunged left, then right, forcing the shot wide as she slipped beside the mount. She tore the crossbow from his grasp and drove the butt into his gut. He folded. She seized his chest harness and jerked him forward into the snapping arc of the mount’s mandibles. They closed on him, shearing his upper body in half.

Then she slashed across the creature’s compound eye. Warm, acrid fluid splattered her face. The thing shrieked, abandoning the attack as it bolted into the gloom.

***

Kaelvor moved along the right flank.

The first rider came at him head-on. He planted his feet, Godfang in both hands, and let the gap close. At the last instant, he hurled the sword forward. The ivory blade spun end over end, tearing through the mount’s head and neck before splitting the rider clean through the torso.

Striding forward, he seized Godfang by the hilt and ripped it free from the ruin of gore and shattered chitin.

The next rider bore down on him with a leveled spear. Kaelvor raised his scaled arm and took the strike. The spear shattered against the black demonic scales as though it had struck iron. The impact rocked Kaelvor back a step, but the rider fared worse. The haft jolted violently from the resistance, nearly knocking the man from the saddle.

Kaelvor rushed forward before the man could recover. Godfang came down in a chopping arc across the saddle, severing the rider’s legs above the knee. The man fell screaming into the ash to bleed out.

The mount lurched sideways in panic, Godfang still buried in the saddle’s leather and exoskeleton beneath—the weapon ripped free from his hands. The creature made it only thirty feet before collapsing with the sword jutting from its body.

Frenzied by the violence, the slavering horde broke into a run for Kaelvor. He faced them empty-handed.

Two came at once, arms spread, mouths snapping. He caught them both by the throat, one in each hand, planted his boots atop their feet, and wrenched upward. Their necks separated with a wet, grinding pop, and spines ripped free with a sucking resistance. Two feet of vertebrae tore up through the length of their bodies before bursting from the ragged stumps of their necks in a spray of dark fluid and shredded tissue.

The mouths kept biting for several moments after the bodies fell still.

He shifted his grip to the base of each bloody spine. They would do. They would have to.

The rest of the horde reached him.

He swung one spine-flail into the first attacker’s chest, caving the ribcage in. The other makeshift flail came around in a rising sweep that caught one of the creatures beneath the chin with a slimy crunch, lifting it off its feet.

Kaelvor moved through the pack in a storm of violence, both spine-flails carving deadly arcs through flesh and bone. Bodies broke apart beneath the blows of the dangling skulls. Dark blood spread across the grey earth. Chunks of flesh, teeth, and brain matter scattered underfoot.

One flail snapped apart when a vertebra cracked. Kaelvor drove the jagged length of broken spine into an attacker’s chest, then kept fighting with the other until none of the horde remained standing.

Breathing hard, he surveyed the sea of gore and broken bodies around him. Blood covered his skin. He let the final spine fall from his hand, then turned to find Saelira.

The last rider was on the ground, and Saelira was not finished with him. He tried to crawl away, but her boot slammed down between his shoulders, pinning him as the crescent blade punched through the base of his skull.

She wiped her blades clean on the dead man’s leather and looked across the bloody wreckage to where Kaelvor stood amid the remains of the horde.

Godfang still jutted from the dead mount’s body. She tore the great blade free, crossed to Kaelvor, and offered it back. He took it with a nod.

One of the fallen horde creatures caught her attention. Silver markings patterned the exposed skin of its throat and forearms. Saelira told herself she was not seeing what she thought she saw.

She crouched, unstrapped the crude helmet, and set it aside.

Obsidian-black skin. White hair. Pointed ears.

The face was wrong, jaw slack and eyes filmed over, the features contorted into something feral, but it was still a face she knew. She had seen that face her entire life, worn by her kin, worn by herself.

Her fingers gently closed the ruined eyes. She remained crouched, one hand resting on the dead thing’s shoulder.

When she finally stood, her voice came out numb.

“These were my people.”

Her tone invited no response, so Kaelvor gave none.

“He did this. And he is still out there. Still breathing. Still moving through the world, breaking whatever he touches while my people are tortured, driven mad, and left dead in the ash.”

She looked north, where the Colossus tracks split the earth and vanished into the distance.

“No longer.”

She sheathed her blades. The rage still burned in her chest, but she forced it down into the depths of herself, swearing that when the time came, she would unleash all of it without mercy.

“Come on.”

Her stride was longer than it needed to be, and she didn’t look back at the broken body. Kaelvor caught up, and fell in beside her. Neither spoke for a long while.

***

By dusk, they crested a ridge and stopped.

The Colossus filled the northern horizon, a monstrosity of black metal against the burning heavens. Bristling towers rose above its battlements. Chains and rusted iron cages hung from the walls, swaying with the weight of countless skeletons and rotting corpses. Beneath those sheer iron walls, titanic wheels turned in thunderous revolutions, grinding the earth into ruin. The rumble traveled through the stone beneath their boots and into their bones.

For the first time, Kaelvor felt the enormity of the task ahead, and wondered whether the Colossus would become a monument to their victory or their tomb.

Who, or what, is the mysterious Warlord? What horrors will Kaelvor and Saelira face in the quest to free the Osskari? Find out next time when we enter The Colossus. Chapter 5 of Godfang, coming soon.