Lord of the Foresaken

The air reeked of blood and burning flesh as Reed crested the final ridge overlooking Goblin’s Hollow. What had once been a hidden sanctuary now stood exposed like a festering wound against the mountainside, besieged from all sides by armies bearing the colors of six different lords. Smoke billowed from structures Reed had personally helped build mere weeks ago, and the desperate screams of the dying carried on the wind.

"Gods’ mercy," Kalia whispered beside him, her knuckles white around the grip of her sword. "They’ve brought everything."

Indeed they had. Siege towers loomed against the eastern wall, while battering rams hammered relentlessly at the northern gate. Arcs of magical fire rained down from the coalition’s battle-mages, countered sporadically by the primitive but effective shamanic defenses Reed had helped establish. Three separate armies had established camps around the perimeter, methodically strangling the settlement.

Reed felt the dual fragments within him pulse in response to his rising rage. The Warden and Sovereign fragments, impossibly merged within his flesh, resonated with a power that made the very air around him shimmer with distortion.

"They’re dying in there," Eris said flatly, her assassin’s eyes calculating losses with cold precision. "Your little experiment in governance is about to end, Reed."

"No." The word emerged as something more than speech—a declaration that bent reality around it. "Not while I draw breath."

From below, a battalion of armored soldiers assaulted the western barricade where the goblins’ defense appeared weakest. Reed could make out the distinctive silhouette of Shia, the goblin matriarch, directing her forces with unprecedented discipline. Gone was the chaotic scrabbling of typical goblin warfare—in its place, a coordinated defense that spoke of Shia’s rapid evolution as a strategic mind.

"The fragment in her is changing her," murmured Thorne, the ranger who had joined their party after the encounter in the Venom Marshes. "Just as yours changed you."

Reed didn’t answer. The Harvester-bearer’s attack in the marshes had nearly destroyed them all. Only by fully embracing the merged fragments’ power—letting it remake him in ways he still didn’t fully understand—had Reed managed to counter her dark magic. They had escaped, but not before witnessing horrors that would haunt their dreams forever: the undead thralls of previous victims tearing themselves apart at their mistress’s command, the living darkness that consumed flesh and soul alike.

Now, barely recovered from that ordeal, they faced this.

"We go in through the tunnels," Reed decided, focusing on a nearly invisible fissure in the mountainside. "The ones we built as emergency exits."