Malachar Bonecrusher's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Malachar Bonecrusher walked away from his first fight with the goddess with a split lip and a slow drip of blood down his black breastplate. He had no hatred for Voracia the Insatiable. He simply believed no one should hold a world in one fist. He had come to kill her and eat what was left, and she had nearly killed him instead. The moose skull on his head still rang from her last blow. He needed more power before he tried her again. He found the cat girl an hour later, in a small stone shelter shaped like a dome. Crystals grew from its walls in jagged clumps. A rusted cage sat outside the doorway, wrapped in glowing vines, the kind of marker a creature leaves to claim ground. He stopped at the threshold and rested the tip of his black sword in the dirt. Greta Bellwise sat inside on a flat stone, belly bare and round above her shorts. She was drinking from a soda bottle with both hands. She lowered it, burped, and looked up at him without surprise. "You're big," she said. She burped again. "You hunting?" "I need power," Malachar said. "I lost a fight today." She took another pull from the bottle. "Lots of folks lose fights." Burp. "Not my problem." She rubbed her stomach and squinted at him. "You want the soda?" "No." "Then move. Sun's behind you. I'm trying to nap." Malachar studied her. The pendant at her throat caught the light, a polished stone in a setting cut with runes he did not know. He had seen marks like that once before, on a shrine the goddess had burned. Power clung to small things sometimes. He had learned that the hard way. He stepped into the shelter. Greta drained the bottle, set it down, and burped one last time. "Don't," she said, quieter now. She did not run. She watched him the way a cat watches a closing door. He took her by the shoulders and swallowed her whole. The shelter was tight around them. Her tail flicked once at his lips and was gone. The pendant came loose against his tongue and he pulled it out before it went down with her. The soda bottle rolled across the stone floor and stopped against his boot. Malachar stood in the doorway with the pendant in his fist and felt heat spread out from his belly into his arms. His split lip closed. The ringing in his skull stopped. The runes on the pendant warmed and shifted color in his palm. He hung it around his neck under the moose skull's jaw. Outside, the vine-wrapped cage still glowed where she had left it, marking nothing now. He turned toward the ridge where the dark palace waited and started walking. Voracia would feel him coming this time.