The air inside the Rotting Cathedral had grown thick—a choking fog of plague and malice. The blackened spires trembled as the final rites of Selene Nocturna's coronation continued. The Laughing Dead groveled and howled, their broken forms writhing in ecstatic suffering, praising their queen in whispers and screams.
But something had changed.
As Selene stepped onto the altar, the shadows behind her began to move—twisting and writhing like something alive. The blood-stained sigils on the cathedral walls pulsed with an unnatural glow, as if feeding off the corruption spreading from her body.
Selene smiled, sensing it. Welcoming it.
The Dark Arms had awakened.
A ripple of black, tendril-like limbs erupted from her back—six in total—twisting, clawed, each radiating a different essence of decay. The congregation gasped in a mix of horror and reverence as the arms crawled and contorted, flexing their unholy strength.
The newly turned priest, his laughter now twisted into something more monstrous, reached out toward Selene.
"G-Goddess… You… have become… something… more."
Selene's golden, plague-lit eyes turned toward him, and without hesitation, one of the spectral arms shot forward, gripping his skull. The moment her touch met his flesh, he convulsed violently, his skin rotting, flaking, liquefying in mere seconds.
The priest let out a single, choked giggle—then collapsed into a pile of pulsing, plague-ridden sludge.
Selene tilted her head. "More?" she whispered to herself.
She flexed her newfound limbs of horror, watching the air itself distort around them. Each arm carried an ability—plague, entropy, madness, hunger, corruption, and death itself.
Her gaze turned to the remaining prisoners, their eyes wide with terror.
"Come now, my children," she purred, her voice laced with dark amusement. "Let me show you my gifts."
One of the arms—its fingers elongated into shadowy talons—extended toward a struggling woman. She tried to run.
The arm pierced her spine, sinking into her flesh without breaking the skin. Her eyes turned solid black, her lips twitching into an unnatural grin as her body twisted, bones cracking, limbs snapping unnaturally backward. When she looked up, she was no longer herself.
She was something else.
Selene let out a satisfied sigh. The Laughing Dead were no longer enough.
Her Dark Arms would create a new breed of horror—one that did not merely kill. One that corrupted.
The Pale Widow turned to her cathedral of the damned, their laughter now drowned beneath the whispering voices of her own growing power.
"Tonight," she declared, her new arms stretching wide, "we do not simply spread the plague… We become it."
And as her laughter rang through the ruined city, Black Hollow trembled beneath the weight of its new queen's true form.