The crack of steel clashing against steel rang out before the door had fully closed behind him.
Eraqus halted just past the threshold, his senses sharpening as he took in the cavernous space. This was no military fortification, not anymore. It was a sepulchral ruin, a forgotten mausoleum where stone and shadow had long ago swallowed any trace of order. The floor was a jigsaw of shattered tiles, their edges softened by centuries of moisture, and every depression held a stagnant pool of rainwater that had dripped through the crumbling vaults overhead.
Moss and pale, sickly vegetation wormed through the cracks, reaching toward the faint gray light that bled down from the ruined ceiling. The walls were lined with rows of shallow alcoves, each one cradling an ancient funerary urn, their surfaces thick with dust and cobwebs.
Flickering candles, set in rusted iron sconces, cast a trembling amber glow that did little to push back the oppressive darkness pooling in every corner, leaving the far reaches of the chamber a realm of dancing shadows.
Insects—silverfish and skittering beetles—fled into fissures as Eraqus and his summoned ally stepped forward, while fat, glistening rats abandoned the corpses littering the floor to vanish into the gloom.
The dead were everywhere, armored figures sprawled in the repose of violent death, their blood congealing in dark, viscous pools. None stirred. The two intruders advanced through a shroud of cobwebs so thick they seemed spun from the dark itself, strands brushing their faces like the fingers of ghosts. And then they saw it—the source of the sounds.
On the far side of the chamber, two figures faced each other. They were unnaturally tall and gaunt, stretched into proportions that felt fundamentally wrong, as if a human frame had been drawn out on a torturer's rack.
Their armor was ancient brown leather, a patchwork of cracked hide held together by a labyrinth of belts and frayed seams, reinforced by greaves, gauntlets, and pointed helmets the color of dried blood. Dirty crimson cloaks draped from their shoulders, hoods pulled low to shroud their faces in shadow, the fabric torn and trailing behind them like the ragged wings of carrion birds. They moved with a liquid, almost choreographed lethality.
The conflict was brief.
The one to Eraqus's left parried his opponent's strike with a casual flick of the wrist, a spray of sparks erupting into the gloom as the blades met. In the same motion, he seized the other's shoulder, yanked him forward, and drove his greatsword through his chest. The blade punched out between the shoulder blades with a wet, grinding crunch of leather and flesh.
There was no scream—only the dull, sick sound of tearing meat and the patter of black blood hitting the dusty floor. The dying Watcher stiffened, a brief spasm running through his limbs before he went limp, his life guttering like a spent candle. His killer withdrew the blade with mechanical indifference, let the body crumple, and turned. The empty hood fixed on Eraqus.
The twisted dagger, held in a reverse grip, rose above the outstretched arm, while the greatsword pointed forward in silent challenge.
Eraqus and his summon fell into fighting stances, weapons raised, every muscle coiled. And yet nothing could have prepared them for what came next.
In the span of a single heartbeat, faster than their eyes could track, the Abyss Watcher closed the distance. He lunged forward into a full-body spin, his greatsword sweeping a lethal arc through the air. It met nothing but empty space. Eraqus and the summon had thrown themselves in opposite directions, rolling across the cold stone as the wind of the passing blade whistled overhead. But there was no respite.
Eraqus barely regained his footing when he was forced to raise his shield to intercept the follow-up strike. The impact was cataclysmic—a shockwave that juddered up his arm and into his shoulder, the force of it skidding his boots backward across the broken tile. It felt as if a charging bull had driven its entire weight into his forearm.
He bit down on a cry, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached, and in that instant he silently thanked every soul he had painstakingly woven into his body's strength. Had he been even a fraction weaker, the blow would have shattered his guard and carved him in two.
There was no time to recover. The Watcher was already airborne, greatsword raised overhead, descending like a meteor. The spinning strike cracked the floor on impact, stone shards and clouds of dust exploding outward.
The opening was razor-thin, but it was there—the heartbeat of recovery as the Lord's momentum bled away. Eraqus and the summon surged forward together, blades flashing, and a torrent of strikes painted the air with arcs of dark blood. The Watcher grunted, a raw, hollow sound, and retaliated with another spinning slash as he rose, forcing both attackers to leap back.
The summon, a phantom in dark cloth with twin swords glinting like slivers of night, tried to press the advantage. With a motion too precise to be anything but instinct, the Watcher caught one of the twin blades with his twisted dagger and parried it aside, then brought his greatsword up in a savage rising cut that sent the summon staggering. But Eraqus had not been idle.
He had felt how little his current weapon bit into the Lord's unnatural flesh. With a flicker of thought, he banished the frost-rimed sword into his bottomless box, swung his green shield across his back, and drew forth the curved greatsword he had claimed from one of the warriors in the swamp.
The blade was immense—a massive, crescent-shaped slab of metal that any ordinary man would have struggled to lift, let alone swing. But the souls he had gathered sang in his sinews, and the weapon felt almost weightless in his grip.
With a battle cry that echoed through the mausoleum, he swung.
The Watcher tried to block. His own greatsword rose, but the impact of the curved blade shattered his guard, the force of it flinging his arm aside as if it were a child's. Before the Lord could recover, Eraqus pivoted on his heels, a dancer's grace in the brutal turn, and brought the blade around in a second devastating arc that carved a deep, diagonal gash across the Watcher's chest.
Armor split. Flesh parted. For the first time, the Abyss Watcher visibly reacted. His eyes, visible for just a heartbeat beneath the hood, went wide. Whether it was surprise or agony, Eraqus could not tell. It did not matter.
The summon recovered, and the three combatants stood poised on the knife's edge once more.
Then a bell tolled.
The sound rolled through the fortress like the voice of some buried god, deep and mournful, vibrating in the stones and in Eraqus's bones. For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath. From deeper within the keep, two more Watchers emerged, dressed exactly like their wounded brother—the same leather, the same stained cloaks, the same gleaming blades.
The tide of the battle, already hanging by a thread, had just become impossible. Eraqus's mind raced, cold calculations flashing behind his eyes: how to survive against three Lords of Cinder? But before he could act, the Watcher they had been fighting broke away from them entirely and charged toward the newcomers. The other two did the same.
It was almost absurd. The Master and his summon found themselves suddenly ignored, bystanders to a sudden, fratricidal clash. The three Abyss Watchers collided in a maelstrom of spinning steel and snapping cloaks, recreating the very scene Eraqus had walked in on—brother against brother, locked in an incomprehensible cycle of violence. The hesitation lasted only a heartbeat.
Fire.
Thunder.
Blizzard.
Waves of flame rolled across the Watchers, followed by searing bolts of lightning and razor-edged gales of ice, crashing into them again and again. They paid him no heed, absorbed entirely in their internecine butchery, even as his magic charred and froze and electrocuted their flesh.
The summon darted in like a shadow, twin swords flashing, carving wounds into any flank left unguarded. The newly arrived Watchers proved weaker—less seasoned, perhaps, or already wounded from earlier battles.
The first collapsed when a lightning bolt struck him square between the shoulder blades, his body convulsing before it slammed into the ground. The second lost his head to a savage, sideways sweep from his stronger brother; the helmeted skull tumbled across the stone floor with a series of hollow, metallic clangs.
Now only one remained. The original Watcher turned, and a strange, strangled cry escaped him as Eraqus's curved greatsword punched through his chest.
They stood face to face, the length of the blade transfixing the Lord. The Watcher's face was hidden, but he felt the fury radiating from Eraqus behind the silver helm, a heat that had nothing to do with fire.
The twisted dagger slipped from numb fingers, clattering away. One trembling hand rose, inch by inch, toward the blade buried inside him, but it never reached. With a grunt of raw effort, Eraqus drove the sword deeper, feeling the grinding resistance of bone. For a moment, it seemed over. The Watcher's posture sagged, his strength bleeding out.
Then fire erupted from his chest.
The explosion was a blooming inferno that hurled Eraqus backward, slamming him to the ground, the impact driving the air from his lungs. And then the blood began to flow. Every drop spilled in that chamber—from the fresh corpses, from the rust-brown stains painting the stone—stirred, then streamed toward the wounded Watcher in glistening rivulets.
It gathered around him in a swirling cyclone of darkness and crimson, a vortex of concentrated death. When it cleared, he was on his feet again, the dagger back in his grip, his greatsword now wreathed in roaring flame. He assumed the same stance as at the battle's start, an unspoken, blazing challenge.
Eraqus stepped forward. The Watcher answered.
A trail of fire blazed in his wake as he launched another charge, faster now—much faster. It was as if the strength of his fallen brothers had been poured into his limbs, a dark communion that made his movements blur with supernatural speed.
Eraqus failed to evade. A burning gash tore across his chest, shearing through armor and flesh alike. The pain was a white-hot lance, but the heat of the blade cauterized the wound instantly, searing the torn vessels shut before blood loss could become his end. He stumbled, gasping, as the Watcher completed his pass and skidded to a halt, already spinning for another attack.
CLANG!
A shower of sparks burst in the dark. The summon had planted himself directly in the Lord's path, twin swords crossed to intercept the blow, the impact sending him skidding backward—but he kept his feet, and with a grim tenacity, he lunged back into the fray.
The opening was just enough for Eraqus to bring his Estus Flask to his lips. Warmth cascaded through his body, a liquid golden glow that reknit flesh and soothed screaming nerves. He rose, healing still tingling in his veins, and rejoined the fight. A wave of ice burst from his palm, driving the Watcher back and granting them a fleeting breath to regroup.
The respite vanished in a heartbeat. Steel met steel in a grinding shriek. Neither combatant could gain the upper hand—until a bolt of lightning, hurled with pinpoint precision, struck the Lord square in the chest.
Electricity danced in white-hot arcs across his armor, seizing his muscles in a paralytic grip. His body locked rigid, his greatsword still embedded in the parry, but his twisted dagger moved. The blade flew toward Eraqus's throat, a flash of cold death.
It never arrived.
A hand—Eraqus's own—caught the Watcher's arm, and frost spread instantly from his grip, encasing the limb in a glittering sheath of ice. The onslaught that followed was absolute. Eraqus attacked from the front, the curved greatsword rising and falling in brutal, hacking arcs; the summon attacked from behind, twin blades a whirlwind of silvered death. Blood coated their weapons, soaked into their armor, spattered across the floor in a spreading constellation of black and red.
Still the Watcher endured, wound layered upon wound, his body a torn tapestry of agony—yet he would not fall. Perhaps they had lost themselves in the fury of the assault. Perhaps they had underestimated the depth of his tenacity.
Whatever the reason, the paralysis faded. The Watcher roared, a sound of pure, undiluted rage. He drove his flaming greatsword into the ground, and a blazing shockwave erupted outward, hurling them all backward like ragdolls.
Before Eraqus could rise, the Lord was airborne, descending in a diving attack wreathed in a comet-tail of fire. He rolled aside. The sword struck the floor, and a second explosion bloomed, the blast wave catching him mid-roll and throwing him across the chamber once more.
Pain and disorientation clouded his senses. His head spun, the world a smear of shadow and flame. He could not retaliate. He could only do the one thing left to him: he raised his weapon, braced himself, and endured.
Blow after blow rained down. Cut after burning cut. The Watcher advanced relentlessly, alternating between the greatsword's crushing sweeps and the dagger's viper-quick thrusts. Each blocked strike left another searing wound.
Each step drove Eraqus farther back, his boots skidding on the blood-slick stone. The next attack shattered his guard entirely, the impact nearly buckling his knees. The fiery follow-up slash swept toward his neck, a horizontal arc of orange death.
Eraqus knew that this would not be the end. He knew he would awaken at the bonfire, wiser and stronger, ready to try again. But that knowledge did nothing to quiet the primal terror that surged through him as the flame approached. It did nothing to lessen the fear of the creeping Hollow that waited on the other side of too many deaths.
Then fate intervened—or perhaps it was simply the advantage of having a capable ally. The summon launched himself through the air, a dark comet of motion, and crashed down upon the Watcher, burying one sword into each shoulder with a wet crunch of metal and bone. The Lord staggered, his balance shifting, and the trajectory of his deathblow wavered by inches.
Inches were enough.
Instead of severing Eraqus's head, the flaming blade scraped along the armor protecting his neck, leaving a thin crimson line that welled with a trickle of blood. There was no time to waste. Ignoring the chorus of agony screaming from his body, Eraqus surged forward. His curved greatsword spun in a sweeping arc, the first strike carving a massive wound across the Watcher's torso.
He followed through with the motion, a second devastating blow that opened an equally brutal gash. The Watcher struggled to remain standing, blood pouring from countless wounds. His legs trembled. His strength, that borrowed fury, ebbed at last. One final time, he tried to raise his flaming sword.
He was too slow.
When the weapons met, Eraqus's blade moved first. The final strike landed—a deep, cleaving blow that sundered the Watcher's body. It crumbled, dissolving into a cascade of drifting souls that streamed into Eraqus, one among them shining with a fierce, brilliant light. And, as with every battle before, there was no triumph. No glory. Only the heavy, echoing silence of a tomb.
Where the Watcher had fallen, a pile of ashes remained, pale and fine as dust. Eraqus remembered the words he had been told: Return the ashes to their thrones.
Gently, he gathered the remains and stored them within his bottomless box. He turned toward the fading summon and offered a grateful nod, a silent acknowledgment of a debt he could not repay. The phantom warrior returned the gesture, and then, like mist under a rising sun, he faded away.
When the silence reclaimed the fortress, absolute and unbroken, Eraqus allowed himself to breathe.
A long, shuddering sigh escaped him, then another.
Exhaustion and pain crashed down together, a crushing weight that threatened to buckle his knees. Slowly, he sat upon the cold, blood-slick floor, drew his Estus Flask once more, and drank. The warmth spread, sealing the last of his wounds, but it could do nothing for the deep, bone-weary ache that had settled into his very core. Only one thought occupied his mind as he stared at the ash-strewn chamber where a Lord of Cinder had fallen.
'So... this is the power of a Lord?'
END OF CHAPTER