The swamp stretched endlessly in every direction.
Six trudged forward, each step accompanied by the soft schlorp of her boots pulling free from the silty bottom. The water was only ankle-deep—a small mercy—but it made every mile feel like three. Gnarled trees rose from the muck at irregular intervals, their roots twisted and exposed like arthritic fingers grasping at nothing. Spanish moss hung in grey curtains, brushing against her shoulders as she passed.
Fwip.
Six slapped her neck, pulling her hand away to find a smear of blood and mosquito. She grimaced and wiped it on her already-ruined clothes.
"Of course there are mosquitos," she muttered. "Why wouldn't there be."
Fwip. Fwip.
Two more on her arm. She killed them with growing irritation.
Her mind wandered as she walked—cycling back to the same questions that had been gnawing at her since she'd arrived in this nightmare.
The Wolf King. The twisted creatures. This whole world.
She frowned, stepping over a submerged log.
What's the connection? Is there a connection? The fairy tales back home were stories—just stories. But here they're... wrong. Broken. Like someone took the originals and cracked them open and let something else crawl inside.
She chewed her lip.
But why? How? And where the hell even am I?
The questions spiraled, looping back on themselves, leading nowhere.
Six exhaled slowly and let them go.
I don't have enough pieces yet.
She needed information. She needed to find someone—or something—that could actually give her answers.
Assuming it didn't try to kill her first.
Fog clung to everything.
It rolled between the trees in pale curtains, swallowing the distance, muffling sound. Six could barely see thirty feet in any direction. The world had become a grey-green blur of murky water, dead wood, and silence.
Fwip.
She killed another mosquito on her forearm.
Fwip. Fwip.
Two more on her neck. She crushed them without thinking, flicking the tiny corpses into the water.
"Bloodsucking little—"
She froze.
Something was coming.
Six felt it before she heard it—a pressure change in the air, a thrumming vibration that resonated in her chest. Then the sound reached her: a deep, resonant hum, like a hundred tuning forks struck in unison.
It was getting closer. Fast.
Six spun just as something massive burst through the fog.
"—!"
The creature halted ten feet from her face, hovering in place. Wings—four of them, each as long as her arm—beat in a blur, displacing air in rhythmic gusts that rippled the swamp water beneath it.
A mosquito.
A mosquito the size of a large dog.
Six's breath caught as she took it in. The thing's body was segmented and chitinous, gleaming wetly in the diffused light. Compound eyes—hundreds of hexagonal lenses—reflected her image back at her in fractured multiples. Spindly legs dangled beneath its thorax, twitching.
But the proboscis.
Gods, the proboscis.
It extended from the creature's head like a silver spear—long, elegant, and wickedly sharp. Six could see the tip clearly despite the fog. It wasn't solid. Inside the gleaming outer sheath, six slender needles were bundled together, each one catching the faint light like surgical steel.
The Mosquito Queen hung in the air, watching her.
Analyzing.
Six didn't move. Didn't breathe.
"She's deciding if I'm prey."
The Queen's wings shifted pitch—the hum dropping lower, almost thoughtful. Her compound eyes seemed to focus, narrowing in on Six with alien intelligence.
Then the creature's head tilted.
Six saw the proboscis angle toward her.
"Oh no."
The Queen lunged.
Six threw herself sideways.
The proboscis speared through the space where her head had been—close enough that she felt the displaced air kiss her cheek. The Queen's momentum carried her past, wings screaming, and Six hit the water hard on her shoulder.
She rolled, came up spitting swamp water, and ran.
"Shit shit shit—!"
The hum intensified behind her. Closing fast.
Six ducked. The Queen shot overhead, banking hard between two dead trees, her wings clipping moss as she wheeled around for another pass.
"She's fast. Too fast."
Six's boots churned through the ankle-deep water as she sprinted, every step a struggle against the silty bottom. The fog parted around her, then swallowed her again. She couldn't see more than twenty feet ahead.
The hum returned. Louder.
Six glanced back.
The Queen was diving straight at her—a silver-tipped missile cutting through the mist, compound eyes gleaming with predatory focus.
Six planted her foot and pivoted.
"Veil Step!"
Fiery smoke erupted around her as she vanished, leaving behind an afterimage that stood with one hand on its hip, head tilted in mock confusion.
The Queen's proboscis punched through the decoy's chest.
The afterimage burst into embers and scattered.
Six materialized fifteen feet to the right, already moving, her heart hammering. She watched the Queen hover in place for a moment, wings buzzing with what almost sounded like irritation.
"She's learning."
The creature's head swiveled, compound eyes scanning the fog.
Six held her breath.
"Don't move. Don't—"
The Queen's antennae twitched.
Then her head snapped directly toward Six.
"She can smell me."
The Queen shot forward.
Six barely got her arms up in time. She crossed them in front of her face as the proboscis came down like a lance—
CLANG.
The silver needles struck her reinforced forearm guard and shrieked across the metal, throwing sparks. The impact sent Six skidding backward through the water, boots carving furrows in the muck.
The Queen pressed the attack.
Thrust. Thrust. Thrust.
Each strike came faster than the last, the proboscis jabbing at Six's face, throat, chest. Six deflected, dodged, gave ground—water splashing around her knees as she retreated desperately.
Too close. Can't get distance. Can't—
One of the needles sliced her bicep.
Six hissed through her teeth as blood welled up, hot and red.
The Queen froze.
Her wings still beat, holding her aloft, but her compound eyes had locked onto the wound. Onto the blood. The creature's entire body seemed to shudder with sudden, desperate hunger.
A sound escaped the Queen's throat—not a hum, but something closer to a moan.
"Ohhh..."
Six's stomach turned.
"That's disgusting."
The Queen's proboscis extended further, the six internal needles spreading apart like the petals of some horrible flower, each one glistening with anticipation.
"More."
She lunged.
Six dropped low and drove her palm upward into the Queen's thorax.
"Witch Fire!"
FWOOM!
A concentrated burst of flame erupted from Six's hand, scorching chitin and sending the Queen tumbling backward through the air with an ear-splitting shriek. The creature crashed into the water twenty feet away, wings sputtering, smoke rising from her blackened underside.
Six stood in the swamp, breathing hard, blood dripping from her arm.
The Queen lay still for a moment.
Then her wings began to beat again.
Slowly, the creature rose from the water—damaged, burned, but very much alive. Her compound eyes found Six once more.
And now there was something new in them.
Rage.
The Queen rose like something out of a nightmare.
Water cascaded off her chitinous body as she lifted into the air, wings beating in a ragged, uneven rhythm. The burn on her thorax was ugly—blackened and cracked, leaking something pale and viscous—but it hadn't slowed her down.
If anything, it had made her worse.
"You BURN me."
The voice was wet, buzzing, wrong. It vibrated in Six's skull like a migraine.
"I will drink you SLOW."
Six shifted her stance, feet planted in the muck, blood still dripping from her bicep. Her arm throbbed. Her lungs burned. She was running out of tricks.
"Think. Think."
The Queen shot forward.
Six dove right, narrowly avoiding the proboscis as it punched into the water where she'd been standing. She came up running, splashing through the shallows, weaving between gnarled tree trunks.
The hum followed.
She's faster than me. Stronger. I can't outrun her and I can't trade hits.
Six ducked behind a tree. The proboscis slammed through the trunk six inches from her head, showering her with splinters and rotten wood.
I need to pin her down.
The Queen ripped her proboscis free and circled, wings droning.
Six's eyes darted across the swamp. Water. Fog. Dead trees.
There.
Twenty feet to her left—a jagged rock jutting from the muck. Big. Heavy. Sharp edges.
That'll work.
The Queen dove.
Six spun to face her, planting her feet, raising both hands. Smoke curled from her fingertips as she began to trace symbols in the air—burning sigils that hung in the fog like dying embers.
"You cannot escape—"
"Wasn't trying to."
Six slammed her palms together.
"Hex of Chains!"
The sigils exploded outward.
Chains erupted from the water—not metal, but something older, something forged from shadow and spite. They were black as tar and burned with faint crimson runes along their length. They shot upward like striking serpents, wrapping around the Queen's legs, her wings, her thorax.
The Queen screamed.
"NO—!"
She thrashed, proboscis slashing wildly, but the chains held. They tightened, pulling her down toward the water, pinning her wings against her body. The terrible hum of her flight sputtered and died as she crashed into the shallows with a massive splash.
Six was already moving.
She sprinted through the water, ignoring the burn in her lungs, the ache in her arm. The chains wouldn't hold long—she could already see them flickering, weakening, the runes dimming as the Queen fought against them.
Ten feet.
The Queen's head thrashed, compound eyes rolling wildly until they locked onto Six.
"I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL DRINK EVERY DROP OF—"
Five feet.
Six's hand closed around the rock.
It was perfect. Heavy. Jagged. The edges bit into her palm as she lifted it.
The Queen saw it. For the first time, something like fear flickered across those alien features.
"Wait—"
Six didn't wait.
She brought the rock down.
CRUNCH.
The first blow caved in the left cluster of compound eyes. Hexagonal lenses shattered like glass, spraying outward in a glittering arc of amber and black. Something thick and yellow-green burst from the wound—not blood, but some kind of viscous ichor that splattered across Six's arms and chest.
The Queen shrieked.
Six hit her again.
CRUNCH.
Chitin cracked and splintered. The Queen's head dented inward, the exoskeleton collapsing like a crushed eggshell. More ichor. More fragments. A piece of compound eye lens the size of Six's thumb spun through the air and landed in the water with a soft plop.
"EEEEEE—"
Again.
CRUNCH.
The proboscis snapped at the base, the silver sheath crumpling. The six internal needles scattered like broken quills, some splashing into the water, others embedding themselves in nearby tree roots.
Again.
CRUNCH.
The Queen's head split.
Six stared down at the ruin she'd made. The creature's skull—if it could be called that—had cracked open like a melon. Inside was a nightmare of alien anatomy: pulsing grey organs she couldn't name, bundles of fibrous tissue that might have been nerves or muscles, translucent sacs filled with dark fluid. Fragments of shattered eye lens glittered among the carnage like broken jewels.
One of the organs was still twitching.
Six raised the rock.
CRUNCH.
It stopped.
She stood there in the swamp, chest heaving, arms trembling. The rock slipped from her fingers and splashed into the water. Ichor dripped from her elbows. Fragments of chitin clung to her hair, her clothes, her skin.
The chains flickered one last time and dissolved into smoke.
The Queen didn't move.
Six stared at the corpse for a long moment.
Then she turned and spat into the water.
"Drink that."