The Dagger's Wrath (BOOK 1)

Chapter Seventeen

A/N: You've vaguely seen the magic of Infusion. Now, it's time to see the magic of Decay. It's growing, this world, I swear. 

The Burnt Knight, the Forest of Kinchar, the Lightlands

The black woods made a sudden screech as the night turned as pitch as the one before. Their leaves made rustling sounds as if paper were against paper, and the sounds of dying men. A crow fled from its previous destination as it raced through the air over the forest, flapping its wings desperately as if wanting to get to someplace unknown, some place where the lands were not so vague, but more vivid than the eye could see. It landed on a tree's branch, watching the night unfold before its eyes until a shadow dashed through the leaves, the fallen branches and the mud of the forest.

The shadow beneath the crow and its branch shuddered through the cold, and took its footsteps slowly before dashing to the left, bare feet crunching leaves and snapping twigs that had been left from a group of Hunting Men, possibly. Eyes scanning the area with a deadly feeling of being killed as the night went on, the creature sprinted across the forest before unsheathing its dagger and stepping underneath the moonlight, looking up at the white outline of it.

It spoke in a language unknown to the forest—for a forest only spoke in rustles of leaves and snapping of branches, or the screams of men and the battle cries of warriors—like it was a chant, but a fluid one at that, as its words kept scattering across the night, echoing and bouncing.

The Forest of Kinchar was known for that: the unknown secrets of the Lands coming into one place before diminishing their ways before a man's eyes. Before discovering anything new and enticing, the creature lifted its head, a head of flesh and bone in bulging places often mistaken as some sort of demonic beast, but even the creature did not know what it was about itself that made it so... monster-like. Once it lifted its head, tilting up into the forlorn sky, it called out a bellowing cry that sounded like the wailing of a nightcat before dashing off into the crowded streets of the East. The creature's eyes had a seemingly scared look of discovery and fright in them, before it twisted its dagger in its hands, and plunged the blade through the ground.

Light shuddered beneath the blade, and opened up an arc like a dome covering the creature. Its Lightblade shuddered once more, and then covered itself with the creature's hands. The night moved on, until the creature howled and its eyes fluttered open before closing and crying tears of ashy snow-like flakes. They fell onto the ground in a hurry before the beast took its position near the Lightblade and smiled at it, before wailing and biting its slip and—

A moment of pitch black and snow passed until the creature screamed in an immediate cry of security and almost laughter, like it was terrified but completely into the moment. The ground rippled beneath its feet, like a rock skimming across the outline of the water. The creature wailed, and cried for help, but then the changing begun as its hands began to swell up and have some sort of blood blisters appear on the skin. Bulging parts of the hands and arms appeared across the creature's body, before its eyes flipped and then melted, the oozing liquid pouring out of the sockets. The fourth layer of skin it had on melted, also, from its sticky position before changing into its third layer of skin—its human flesh.

There was a final cry before the changing had finished. The creature looked up at the moon, and it seemed as if it nodded to him. The changing had finished, and the creature was now the man that had been trapped in the fourth and hellish layer of skin, but it had to go through it... it had to go through all of that pain to finally understand what it was like to be human, to be a dash of a shadow in the Forest of Kinchar. The man looked down at what he donned—his knight's uniform—and let out a sigh of relief before taking the dagger out of the earth, and pressing his hand against the ground. The arc that the Lightblade had created was no longer there, and the damned weapon went back into its sheath. The knight put his head down before feeling the skin wrap around him tightly, and liquid coming into his eye sockets before flipping around, bouncing and finally he could see through the Forest of Kinchar.