Seraphine knelt by the corpse of a fallen stag, one hand tracing arcane sigils in the blood-soaked earth. Her other hand gripped a jagged bone wand, etched with runes of binding and memory. A raven, eyes glinting like obsidian, perched on her shoulder.
"Too clean," she muttered, her voice muffled beneath the leather beak of her mask. "No natural predator did this."
The beast had no visible wounds, just hollow sockets where eyes once gleamed, and a mouth stretched into an eternal scream.
“Soul eater,” croaked the raven.
“Or worse,” Seraphine replied.
In the distance, a bell tolled, a single, low gong that echoed across the veil. No village bell had rung in Hollow Veil since the plague.
Which meant one thing: someone had trespassed.
She rose with a grace that belied her armour’s weight. Her long black cape fluttered behind her as she strode toward the sound. Spiked gauntlets clinked softly as she adjusted her gear. Magic pulsed through her veins not the bright, healing kind she once knew, but a colder, hungrier kind. A curse she had chosen.
She crossed the rotting bridge over the Graven Mire, where bodies once floated like driftwood. Seraphine remembered them all. She had tried to save them before the villagers turned on her, before they burned her clinic to ash and called her a witch.
They were right, in the end. But it wasn’t her alchemy that cursed them.
It was something older.
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