The woods breathed in ragged whispers, heavy with the stench of rot and wet soil. Moonlight, fractured by the canopy above, spilled across the battlefield in strips of silver and shadow. Figures lurched through the dark—bones jutting from paper-thin skin, eyes clouded with a dim, unnatural hunger.
Brianna and Kendra pushed forward toward the yawning spatial rift, cutting a bloody path.
Brianna's glaive sang through the air, each arc a clean, merciless sweep that tore the dead apart. Spears shimmered into her grip as if born from the air itself, skewering those who strayed too close. Beside her, Kendra—the second knight I had summoned—rode with cold precision, her sword cleaving through rotted flesh as if it were little more than wet parchment.
"Lady Brianna," Kendra called after splitting a revenant neatly down the center, "I believe we might need more help."
Brianna's eyes flicked over the horde. "Hmm. You might be right—they're… strange. Not like the others."
From the treeline, Regina finally spoke. "We should go to them."
Khadijah, the knight whose horse I shared with Regina, gave a single nod. My stamina had mostly returned thanks to the energy potion Regina had pressed into my hands earlier. I'd named them both—Kendra and Khadijah—because you don't fight beside someone, even a shadow-forged summon, without giving them a name.
The System's chime cut through the din.
The creatures at the heart of this are different. That leopard-man beast may have been a warden.
My chest tightened. "Regina…" I whispered, the sound barely carrying over the groans of the dead. "We might have helped with a cosmic jailbreak."
Her silence was an answer in itself.
Khadijah spurred her mount forward, and we plunged into the fight. Four blades now worked in concert with a flood of magic, and the tide began to turn. Our path carved straight to the center—
—and there, three figures moved among the chaos.
They were wrong. Not wrong in the way of the dead, but wrong in the way a dream feels when you realize something is staring back at you. One was a corpse with hair like a river of pitch, moving with eerie grace. One was little more than a dust-pale skeleton in faded silks, their joints clicking like wind chimes. The last had skin the color of ash and eyes that gleamed with a cold amusement. They did not fight. They only watched.
Sometimes they drifted through the melee untouched, the undead parting around them without so much as a hiss. Once, a lich glanced their way and bowed before returning to the slaughter.
And then… they were gone.
We fought on until the last undead fell, a headless knight collapsing into rust and dust. The rift shuddered and folded into nothingness, pulling the cold out of the air. Dawn broke, sunlight spilling across the torn earth, and a long, weary sigh seemed to pass through every survivor.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The survivors sank to the ground, their chests heaving. Regina's face was smeared with ash, her shadow-glove having dissolved into wisps of nothingness. She looked at me, a silent question in her eyes.
That was when the girls stepped out from behind the light. It wasn't a dramatic entrance. It was just… there. As if they had always been there, waiting.
Three of them—young, delicate, and impossibly beautiful. One with night-black hair pinned with a silver rose. One with hair the color of drifting ash. One with hair white as frost-kissed snow. They wore gothic dresses edged in lace, stockings striped or spiderwebbed, with parasols folded neatly at their sides.
They didn't speak. They didn't need to.
The black-haired one tilted her head, eyes glimmering with amusement. The gray-haired one licked sugar from a macaron, her gaze half-lidded. The white-haired one stood silent, but there was something in her stillness that made even battle-hardened warriors clutch their weapons tighter.
They were not merely Order. Or Chaos. Or Balance.
They were all things that come in threes—the trinity of life, existence, and death. The trinity of crown, scepter, and throne. The trinity of past, present, and future.
The black-haired one drifted forward, close enough that her scent—sweet like crushed violets—cut through the stench of blood. She reached out, fingers brushing through Regina's hair as if she were appraising silk. Her smile was lazy and feline.
"I like this one," she murmured to her sisters, her voice warm in the way a predator's purr is warm.
The gray-haired one chuckled softly. The white-haired one didn't move at all.
And as their shadows lengthened in the sunrise, it became clear:
The battle had ended.
The war had just found its arbiters.