The plateau at the centre of the Geode was not made of rock, but of calcified bone—a white island surrounded by a violet void and the constant hum of the crystals. At its centre, the Heart of the Source pulsed.
Seen from up close, it was a geological horror: a thirty-meter-high mass of fused quartz and flesh, crisscrossed by veins as thick as tree trunks pumping black liquid into the ground. The sound was deafening: THUMP-SQUELCH. THUMP-SQUELCH. It was like being inside the ribcage of a dying god.
But before they could touch the Heart, they had to bypass the Guard.
There were three of them. They stood motionless before the pulsing mass, their weapons planted in the ground. As the company stepped onto the plateau, the three turned their heads in unison with a screech of corroded metal. They were not demons. They were not Skinwolves. They were Knights.
They wore full plate armour in the ancient Bretonnian style of centuries past. But the once-shining steel had become a crust of orange and green rust, oozing foul oil. Their banners, hanging from their lances, weremouldyy rags, yet the faded symbol of the Grail could still be glimpsed. They were the Paladins of Rust. Knights who had descended here to purify the source centuries ago, only to fail. Nurgle, in his cruelty, had kept them alive, fusing them into their armour and turning their devotion into eternal despair.
"Do not approach!" Elara shouted, nocking an arrow with a silver tip. "They have an aura of entropy. Anything that draws near them ages and rots."
The central Knight, the most imposing of the three, took a step forward. His visor was welded shut by rust. "Brothers..." a voice gargled, sounding as if it came from underwater. "Have you come to join the choir? The Mother sings such a sweet lullaby..."
Geneviève drew Vespers' Light. The sword shone, but its light struggled to pierce the greenish mist surrounding the three warriors. "We have come to wake you," Geneviève said. "Or to grant you silence."
The Knight of Rust laughed, and black moths fluttered from the slit of his helm. "Sleep is a myth. There is only rot. Accept it."
The three were charged. They were not slow like zombies; they moved with the oily fluidity of gears well-lubricated by blood. The leader lunged at Geneviève with a two-handed greatsword that dripped venom. The other two split off to encircle the group.
"Wedge formation!" Geneviève yelled.
The clash was immediate and brutal. Gaston fired his crossbow point-blank at the second knight. The bolt struck the breastplate, but instead of piercing, it crumbled into wood dust and instant rust. "My crossbow!" the sergeant cursed, throwing away the now-useless weapon as it disintegrated in his hands. He drew his axe. "Curse this magic!"
Tristan parried a spear thrust from the third knight. His sword, made of good steel, sizzled upon contact with the enemy's weapon. "Don't let them touch you!" the boy cried, dodging a thrust that would have turned his flesh into compost.
Geneviève intercepted the leader's strike. CLANG. It wasn't just the sound of metal; there was an explosion of sparks. Geneviève's blue aura collided with the Paladin's green aura. The air around them began to crackle. She felt her knees buckle under the inhuman weight of the blow. The armour of the Rust Paladin weighed tons, heavy with sin and sickness.
"Your light is weak," the enemy whispered, pressing his blade against Geneviève's. "It is the light of a candle in a storm. We are the storm."
Lothar and Elara, unable to engage in close combat without rotting, danced at the edges of the fray. "Elara! The joints!" Lothar shouted. The elves loosed simultaneously. They did not aim for the heart or head—useless against such beings—but for the joints of the knees and elbows where the rust was thinner to allow movement. Thwip-Thwip. Two arrows sank into the knee of the knight attacking Tristan. The monster stumbled. "Now, lad!" Gaston yelled. Tristan launched into a desperate slide, severing the monster's back tendon with his sword. The Knight of Rust fell to one knee with a heavy thud.
Geneviève was locked in a duel of static strength with the leader. She felt her Gromril armour begin to heat up—not from fire, but from the metallurgical fever the enemy transmitted. If she didn't break the contact, hearmouror would fuse to her skin.
She looked into the enemy's rusted visor. She didn't see a monster; she saw a man who had lost hope. "You have forgotten," Geneviève panted.
"Forgotten what?"
"That steel is forged in fire. Not in slime."
Geneviève closed her eyes. She did not call upon the Grail to defend her; she called upon it to attack. She withdrew all the energy from her body and concentrated it into the blade. Vespers' Light became incandescent, white as a dying star.
With a throat-tearing scream, Geneviève shoved the enemy's blade aside and delivered an ascending strike. She did not aim for the head. She aimed for the chest, the corrupted heart. The sacred blade sliced through the rusted plate like butter, penetrating the knight's thorax.
But there was no blood. Light exploded from the wound. Geneviève's purifying energy invaded the monster's body, burning the corruption from the inside out. The Knight of Rust screamed—a scream that began as a gurgle and ended as a human cry of liberation. "I SEE IT! I SEE THE SHORE AGAIN!"
The knight's body disintegrated. The armour fell to pieces, empty, leaving behind only a heap of iron dust and a faint scent of lilies.
Seeing their leader fall, the other two Knights hesitated. The bond of shared despair had broken. "Finish them!" Geneviève ordered, staggering back, exhausted.
Elara planted an explosive arrow into the helm of the second knight, already on the ground. The blast sent the empty helm flying. Gaston, with a war cry, charged the third knight from behind, burying his axe in its back while Tristan struck its chest. Without the leader's aura to sustain them, the monsters' bodies gave way quickly, crumbling into dust like the first.
Silence returned to the plateau. Only the THUMP-SQUELCH of the Heart of the Source remained. Geneviève leaned on her sword, breathing hard. The air was toxic, but the victory had cleared the immediate vicinity. She approached the remains of the enemy leader. Amidst the iron dust, something shimmered: a gold medallion, intact. Inside was a miniature portrait of a woman and a child.
"They were heroes," Geneviève whispered, picking up the medallion. "They resisted for three hundred years before yielding. We didn't kill them. We discharged them."
She turned toward the Heart of the Source. Now that the guardians were gone, they could see an opening at the base of the pulsing mass of flesh and crystal—a dark, damp fissure leading inside the Heart itself. From the opening came a sickly green light and a voice. Not a monstrous voice, but a feminine one—sweet, mad, humming a wordless song.
"We are at the end," Geneviève said, putting her helm back on. The light in her eyes was hard, determined. "Whatever is in there is the root of all the evil on this mountain." She looked at her companions. They were wounded, filthy, at the limit of human endurance. "One last effort," she told them. "And then, we shall see the sun."
The interior of the Heart of the Source was no cave. It was a cathedral of living flesh and diamonds. The walls throbbed with a dark, sickly red, illuminated by veins of liquid Warpstone that flowed like rivers of venom. The air was so thick with magic and spores that every breath carried the metallic tang of blood.
At thecentrer of this organic chamber, suspended above a pool of absolute black liquid, sat She: The Matriarch of Tears. Once, she must have been the Abbess of the monastery, a woman of unshakeable faith. Now, she was a tumorous growth—both beautiful and terrible. The upper half of her body remained human, pale as ivory, with long hair floating in zero gravity. But from the waist down, her body fused with the crystal roots of the Heart, becoming one with the infected mountain.
She kept her eyes closed and sang. It was a sweet, motherly melody that made one want to lay down their arms, lie in the mud, and sleep forever while the mould grew over one's eyes.
"Are you tired, my little ones?" the Matriarch asked, without opening her eyes. Her voice came from every direction. "The world above is so cold. So cruel. Here, there is warmth. Here, there is eternity."
Tristan took a step forward, his eyes glazed, his sword lowering. "It's... it's warm..." Gaston slapped him violently on the back of the neck. "Wake up, boy! It's the warmth of a fever!"
Geneviève advanced to the edge of the black pool. "The sleep you offer is death, Mother," she said, her voice amplified by her helm. "You have turned a sanctuary into a mass grave."
The Matriarch opened her eyes. They were completely black, filled with green stars. "Life is pain," she whispered. "Nurgle loves us because he takes away the pain. I filter the venom of the world and transform it into new life. Look at my children." She pointed to the walls. In translucent cocoons, thousands of new creatures—hybrids of man, insect, and plant—were growing, ready to be released into the waters of Bretonnia.
"You do not filter the venom," Geneviève retorted, raising Vespers' Light. "You create it."
"Ungrateful," the Matriarch hissed. The roots hanging from the ceiling came alive. They transformed into barbed tentacles that lashed out at the company.
"Defend the Maiden!" Gaston yelled.
The final battle was not a duel; it was a siege. The company formed a circle around Geneviève. Gaston used his axe to shear through the root,s trying to seize them. Tristan fought with desperate ferocity, protecting the sergeant's flank. The Elves, Lothar and Elara, were a whirlwind of twin blades, dancing between the tentacles, cutting and dodging with lethal grace.
Geneviève did not fight the roots. She watched the Matriarch. She knew that killing her with a sword would not be enough. If her body died violently, all the corruption accumulated over centuries would explode, poisoning Athel Loren and Bretonnia forever. She must not kill her. She had to purify herself.
Geneviève sheathed her sword. "Lothar! Elara! Cover me! I must touch her!"
"It's madness!" the elf cried, decapitating a tentacle. "That pool will melt you!"
"Trust me!" Geneviève stripped off her metal gloves, tossing them into the black liquid where they sizzled and sank. Her hands, still marked by the burns from the pump room, were bare. She stepped into the pool. The pain was excruciating. The black liquid was as cold as the void and as acidic as bile. She felt her armor corroding, the skin of her legs burning. But she pressed on. The Grail within her pulsed frantically, pumping light through her veins to counter the darkness trying to invade her body.
She reached the suspended Matriarch. The monster-woman looked at her with hatred and pity. "Poor child of iron. You will burn."
"No," Geneviève panted, raising her bare hands to the Matriarch's face. "I am only the channel."
Geneviève took the Matriarch's face between her hands. She did not use force. She used compassion. She thought of all the sorrows she had witnessed: burned Parron, the dead soldiers, Tristan's fear, the sacrifice of the Knights of Rust. She offered it all to the Lady.
"TAKE IT!" Geneviève s'écria. "TAKE IT ALL!"
From Geneviève's hands came no fire. Outcome: after. Pure, luminous, blessed water. The water of the Sacred Lake. It poured into the Matriarch, invading her pores, her black veins, her heart of stone.
The Matriarch screamed. Not in pain, but in surprise. Nurgle's corruption is built on despair and stagnation. The water of the Grail is hope and flow. They are incompatible. The Matriarch's ivory skin began to crack. From the fissures came not blood, but blinding white light.
The light exploded outward. It struck the black pool, instantly transforming the putrid liquid into crystalline water. It struck the walls of flesh, calcifying them and turning them into pure amethyst. It struck the cocoons of the monsters, causing them to dissolve into stardust.
"I... I remember..." the Matriarch whispered, as her monstrous body fell away, revealing for a second the spirit of a gentle, elderly woman dressed in white. "Thank you." The spirit vanished in a pillar of light that pierced the cavern ceiling, rising through the mountain, up the pipe, up the well, unto the very sky.
"Everything is collapsing!" Tristan shouted. The cavern, deprived of the "glue" of corrupted flesh holding it together, began to quake. Crystal stalactites as large as palaces began to fall.
"OUT! OUT!" Geneviève ordered. They fled the Heart, which was transforming into a crystal tomb. They sprinted across the plateau as the Geode resonated no longer with a diseased hum but with a crystalline sound, like a thousand glass bells. They scrambled toward the exit, aided by the Elves who knew the paths of the stone better than anyone.
The ascent was a blur of exhaustion and terror, with the mountain roaring behind them, trying to bury its purified secret.
They emerged from the portal of the Monastery of the Black Rose just as the sun rose in the east. They collapsed onto the fresh snow, coughing, alive. Behind them, the monastery did not crumble. It changed. The black, greasy stone turned white. The shattered spires shimmered in the sun. And from the portal, no longer came the smell of death. A river emerged. A torrent of clear, cold, potable water began to gush from the entrance, cascading down the mountain, washing away the filth, bringing life to the valley below.
Geneviève took off her helm. Her face was pale, exhausted, marked by new, thin scars. Her ash-blonde hair was wet with sweat. But the light in her eyes was calm. The furious blue of combat had given way to the serene colour of a morning sky.
Gaston approached the new stream. He cupped his hands and drank. He paused, incredulous. "It's sweet," the old soldier murmured, laughing through tears. "By the gods, it's sweet."
Lothar and Elara approached Geneviève. For the first time, the Elves of Athel Loren did not look at her with suspicion or superiority. They placed their hands on their chests and bowed deeply. "The Forest has felt it," Elara said. "The roots are drinking clean water. You have saved our home, Lady of Light. Your name will be sung beneath the boughs for ten generations."
Tristan sat beside Geneviève, watching the sunrise. "Is it over?" the boy asked.
Geneviève watched the water flow toward Carcassonne, toward Bretonnia. She knew the King awaited her. She knew the nobles would plot. She knew there were other monsters. But for now, the mountain was healed. And she was alive.
"No, Tristan," Geneviève replied, a tired but true smile touching her lips. "It has only just begun. But at least, today, we have a beautiful view."
She lay back in the snow, closed her eyes, and for the first time since leaving her burning village years before, she slept without dreams, cradled by the sound of the water she had set free.