Well, I've decided to set up a Discord server again. Feel free to join if you like. For those who don't know, I usually post my drafts there.
https://discord.gg/dJBazsWY
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Qohor had always been a city of shadows, a labyrinth of black stone surrounded by forests and the cradle of undoubtedly the finest smiths in the known world—a city rich in history and culture. Under Caspian's command, however, the city now breathed under the shroud of death. No one could blame them; every day, dozens died only for their bodies to be tossed into massive pyres by the sorcerers of the Red Temple. Caspian's mission had been clear: to instill a far greater fear, to the point where death itself felt like a blessing.
But none of that compared to what was approaching. It was something no one was prepared for—no one in the world was ready for them.
The true purge did not begin with soldiers storming houses and dragging out discovered faithful, despite their attempts to hide. Nor did it begin with war cries or beatings. Instead, it began with a very strange sound. It was a noise exactly like the one heard when placing a seashell to the ear. People covered their ears, unsettled by a sound that, while not inherently painful, felt entirely unnatural.
What they did not know was that the denizens of the End were already within the city. The Endermen did not enter through the city gates; they were simply there. They appeared in damp alleys, on the rooftops of houses, and in the deepest chambers of Qohor's palaces. Soon, the sound shifted into an electric hum—a static that made the hair on the back of the neck stand up and even caused the ears of some stray dogs to bleed. Caspian had ordered it: "Find the essence of the parasite and eliminate the sustenance; force it out of its burrow."
The Endermen—beings that did not belong to the architecture of known life—needed no map. Nor did they ask for permission. And with that, it began.
The massacre did not start with a bang, but with the disappearance of that sound. In the Weavers' Quarter, a cell of the Black Goat's faithful met in a basement reinforced with plates of Qohoric steel. They believed the thickness of the metal and the secrecy of their location would keep them safe from Tyanna's inquisition. They were wrong. At that precise moment, the very space in front of them began to fracture into purple particles within milliseconds. Three Endermen appeared in the center of the room. The leader of the faithful gathered there—a man whose robe was stained with the blood of a recent sacrifice—raised an obsidian dagger as a desperate measure of security.
But before he could bring his arm down, the nearest Enderman stretched out an unnaturally long arm. With a movement that defied physics, its fingers closed around the man's wrist and, in a blink, teleported only the faithful's arm to the street surface, three floors above. The man stared at his clean stump, which had not even begun to bleed from the shock of the vacuum, before a second Enderman pried his jaw open with such force that his skull split in two like dry wood.
In the plazas, the cruelty became massive. The Endermen possessed a macabre fascination with the order of blocks. They began to "reorganize" the faithful. In the Plaza of Offerings, hidden citizens were snatched from their beds by invisible hands. The Endermen did not kill them immediately; they used them to build. Witnesses watching from the cracks in their windows, wetting themselves in terror, saw these eight-foot-tall beings stacking living bodies, intertwining limbs with geometric precision to create writhing towers of human flesh. If someone attempted to scream, an Enderman would simply "move" a stone block from the street directly into the victim's throat.
The ability of these beings to manipulate the dark matter of their bodies was absolute. A group of former city guards, still loyal to the old rites, charged a lone Enderman on a city bridge. The being did not flinch. As the swords were about to touch its dark skin, the Enderman emitted a distorted shriek that caused the soldiers' eyes to explode in their sockets. Then, with a casual gesture of its long hands, it made the floor of the bridge vanish, leaving a single block in its right hand.
This caused the former soldiers to fall, but as their waists were passing through the gap created by the Enderman, the bridge floor magically reappeared. The block in the Enderman's hands vanished, and with it, the stone was relocated to its place of origin. The result? Everyone who had attacked him was left livingly embedded in the stone floor of the bridge. Their bodies contorted in pain and suffering, fused with the granite, until they died a slow and agonizing death.
The entire city was a state of controlled chaos; there was no corner left to hide. The Endermen, perhaps due to their place of origin or their affinity for the dark, could sense the stain of the Black Goat on the bodies of the people. In luxury brothels, where Qohoric nobles believed their gold could buy silence, the Endermen stepped through walls as if they were smoke. They did not discriminate between men, women, or the elderly if the "essence" was there. The extermination was total. One Enderman was seen carrying the still-throbbing heart of a High Priest, moving it from one hand to the other as if carrying a block as they were accustomed to doing, before simply crushing it between its bony fingers.
By the time the moon reached its zenith, Qohor was a necropolis of the absurd. Heads were floating in the city gutters and severed bodies whose internal organs hung in the air, suspended from walls and pillars as if they had joined the city's architecture in a display of gruesome gore. But above all, what was felt most was the silence... a silence so dense it ached in the bones of the few who were lucky enough to survive. The Endermen had finished their first phase. They had severed the threads of faith that fed the abomination that called Qohor its lair. Now, it was the work of the Red Priests to stack the remains into bonfires that did not burn with orange fire, but with a massive red flame that seemed to laugh and delight in the bodies of those who followed their enemy.
While the night in Qohor turned into a poem of horror, Caspian was in one of the three stables of Vaes Yeraan, where the scent of the nearby forest drifted over the great stone walls. He did not know exactly what was happening in Qohor—at least not yet—but he had an idea. He knew that what he was doing in Qohor was necessary, but the coldness with which he accepted the certain carnage the Endermen were carrying out reminded him that less and less remained of the man he once was in his old life.
Before, giving an order like that might have led him to a court-martial or a military trial, but here, nothing like that existed. The rules were dictated by the strongest, and he wondered if it had always been this way, and only norms and laws had kept him contained.
He cleared his mind as he reached the center of the massive stable. Endaxia's presence filled the place. The dragon of the End was not an animal; she was a conscious entity. Her beige and copper-colored scales reflected the light from the lanterns, and her eyes—two green pools with black slits—watched him with a mixture of curiosity and indifference.
"Endaxia," Caspian said, his voice firm yet respectful. "Qohor is being purged. It is a city where I have unfinished business. The Endermen are sowing terror and fear there right now. But the creature... the Black Goat... that thing is not something my soldiers can kill. I don't know how powerful it is; I only know it is a parasite that feeds on the decay this world has to offer. That is why I have come. I need your help. Not as my mount, but as someone I know can be of aid in the hunt ahead of me."
The dragon exhaled a cold vapor that seemed to crystallize in the air. Her voice did not come from her throat but blossomed directly in Caspian's mind, vibrant and ancient.
"That being... the one they call the Black Goat... is a rotten echo, Caspian. I felt it the moment I crossed the portal. There are several more, but this one repulses me. It reminds me of Notch. Using everyone for his grotesque benefit. I agree to help you; perhaps that way I can breathe without continuing to inhale that nauseating scent."
Caspian coincided with a nod, feeling an electric connection with the dragon. "Then, let us depart. The sooner I finish him, the better."
The flight to Qohor was a new experience for Caspian. Though he could fly by his own means, this time he flew upon the back of a dragon—something that, in his old life, was nothing more than myths and fables in children's books. But here he was, flying on the back of a dragon from a strange dimension. How strange his new life had become.
As they approached the city, the view was peculiar. Qohor was not burning with the fire of flaming buildings or explosions, but with columns of smoke stretching toward the sky from bonfires that glowed brightly, even in the dense night. From the air, the plazas looked like altars of carnage for profane rituals. Caspian decided to take Endaxia to the Main Plaza, where they were met by Tyanna and a group of witches. Tyanna's robe was splattered with stains of blood and ash. She bowed immediately.
"My Khal," Tyanna said, her voice steady but full of reverence. "The city has been purged. The... Endermen have executed over twelve thousand identified faithful. There seems to be no one left to pray to the Black Goat. But the creature... it still has not appeared."
"It has lost its sustenance," Caspian murmured. "It is starving in its own burrow. Wherever it is, it will come out soon."