The air was thick with the stench of old rot, a perfume that clung to Selene Nocturna's withered cloak as she moved through the ruins of the once-holy monastery. The last remnants of its former sanctity had been stripped away, replaced with the crawling whispers of the Hollowed—those empty things she had birthed from her plague-ridden will.
She hummed softly as she stepped over the bones of a fallen priest, his skeletal fingers still curled in prayer. The fool had thought his gods would save him.
"How charming." Selene tilted her head, trailing a blackened nail over her own lips, still cracked and wet with darkened blood. Her smile, barely contained, stretched wider.
The Hollowed shifted at the edges of her vision, their bodies little more than shadows stitched together by decay and suffering. They did not think. They did not question.
"Sing for me," she whispered, and the Hollowed obliged.
The sound they emitted was not a song in any mortal sense. It was a wretched wail, a dirge composed of shattered souls and tormented echoes. It scraped against the walls, peeling away what little reality remained.
The fabric of the world quivered beneath her will, and beyond the veil, she felt it again.
That watching presence.
Selene chuckled, biting into her own tongue just enough to taste the coppery tang of her own blood. It mixed with the rot in her mouth, an old taste, a familiar one.
She turned her gaze skyward, where the monastery's shattered spire still clawed at the heavens like a crippled hand. The moon above was pale and sickly, stained with something darker—something even the night could not conceal.
Her power was expanding, seeping into the land like an unstoppable infection.
And yet, she knew that something stirred against her.
The whispers of the dead carried rumors of Kruger.
Of the hollow-eyed hunter who had begun to trace her steps.
Selene licked her lips, smearing the blood across her teeth.
"Let him come," she murmured, stepping forward as the Hollowed lurched in unison behind her.
Her plague was no longer just a curse of the body.
It had become something greater.
Something even death could not cure.
As she walked, the monastery's walls crumbled into dust, swallowed whole by the darkness she had unleashed.
The dirge did not stop.
Not as the Hollowed expanded their reach.
Not as Selene's laughter danced upon the wind.
Not even as the first whispers of war began to take shape.