Fiendhunter

Bai Lang's gilded slits pierced the newly revealed tableau. "Too narrow," he concluded, tracing the light-shifting crevice. His medallion thrummed against sternum bone—a silver moon gone feral. Steel unsheathed, he followed its arrhythmic pulse to where shadow and illumination performed their eternal tryst. 

The wolf effigy emerged as dawn might from night's womb—obsidian eyes kindling. Twin gazes locked: mutated felid versus lupine idol. Yrden's backlash flung him backward as the medallion tore free, embedding itself in stone with the finality of a tomb seal. 

Dust devils swirled where the monolith parted. A cough escaped him—too human a sound. The Aard Sign scattered particulates, unveiling a blade buried to its crossguard, frost patterns whispering forgotten metallurgy. His medallion burned. 

"Correlation," he murmured, tracing lupine motifs on both relic and sword. 

"Your vigilance falters, Wolf Cub." 

Steel arced toward the voice. It bisected only air before coalescing—a specter wearing a medallion's ghost. "Florreg of Norton," the wraith bowed, "once Grandmaster." 

Bai Lang's Yrden-ready fingers tightened. Memory shards surfaced: annals speaking of a kingdom drowned in dragonfire centuries past. 

"A transaction," the phantom proposed. "Deliver correspondence to Princess Juliette. Recompense: Thousand-Petaled Steel and Bloomweave Armor." 

"Your princess," Bai Lang countered, "is ash beneath Duvellia's spires." 

The cavern wept hoarfrost. 

"Yet her essence lingers," Florreg's form flickered, clawing at his spectral medallion. "In the between places... in the..." 

The confession shattered with the prism sustaining him. Bai Lang caught falling shards with his cloak, Bloomweave's enchantments humming to life—Yrden and Axii now twin serpents coiled in his marrow. 

The map fragment revealed half-legible truths: *"...through moonlit cypress groves... seek the Half-Elven Forgemaster..."* 

Dawn's breath carried grass-sweet promises through the dissolving illusion. His medallion sang—not warning, but elegy. 

The nightmare courser materialized as storms do: sudden, violence-cloaked. Its eyes held the same madness he'd seen in the Swamp Hag. Axii's azure web flew— 

—and passed through nothingness. 

Three heartbeats later, the truth arrived on woodsmoke and iron-sweat: thirty riders closing through pines. The stallion's terror mirrored his own calculus. 

Bloomweave stiffened as the first arrowhead glinted beyond treeline. Bai Lang's lips shaped a forgotten curse—or perhaps a prayer—to whatever gods watch over witchers and dead kingdoms both.