The ground beneath Kavrin’s worn boots felt like a poorly laid sheet, rippling and buckling. A nearby cottage, its roof now touching the ground, seemed to snarl at him with its shattered windows. The air itself was a thick, viscous thing, humming with the contained torment of the beast-essence now coursing through his own veins. The villagers were closer now, their ragged chanting growing louder, coalescing into a single, insistent drone: “End it! End it! End the rot!” Kavrin had to move. The direct path was blocked by a cascading waterfall of what used to be a stable’s roof, now pouring down into a sinkhole that pulsed with unnatural light. He glanced at the impossible angles around him, the upside-down well, the road that spiraled vertically into nothingness. His feet found purchase on the buckling siding of a collapsing granary, the timber groaning under his weight. He scaled it, scrambling up a wall that had become a floor, then leaped across a chasm that was once a narrow alley, landing on the inverted steps of the old temple. The beast’s essence within him, a living, writhing thing, seemed to guide his movements, showing him the paths through the broken reality. He watched the mob from above, a river of derangement flowing towards the crypt. Their voices, once just a drone, sharpened into pleas, accusations. “The Blight-Tongue! It feeds on us!” a woman shrieked, her face smeared with mud and tears. “His evil twists our dreams!” another cried, holding up a crude wooden effigy with Jurok’s distorted features. They were breaking, truly breaking, their minds eroding under the constant drip of the curse. Their desperation was a raw, aching wound, and Kavrin felt a flicker of something akin to pity, quickly extinguished by the cold logic of the situation. Their suffering was real, but their solution would be the end of everything. He dropped down from a precarious archway, landing silently behind a group of stragglers. The scent of fear and madness was heavy, almost sickly sweet. He felt the beast-essence roil in his gut, a heavy, resonant hum building in his chest. It was a pressure, an undeniable force. Kavrin focused, drawing on the raw, primal energy, letting it flood his senses, then pushing it outwards in a concussive burst of mental force. It was not a gentle touch. It was a hammer blow. The closest villagers staggered, their eyes rolling back in their heads. Their torches clattered to the ground, scattering sparks. One by one, then in clusters, then in a sweeping arc, the mob collapsed. Their limbs buckled, their chanting sputtered into gurgles, and they crumpled into the mud and debris of the buckled street, unconscious. Their faces, slack in repose, still held the etched lines of fear and torment. The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the crackle of forgotten torches and the subtle, sickening creak of the shifting timber. Kavrin moved through the fallen bodies, his boots squelching. He did not look at their faces. He could not afford to. The crypt gates, massive iron slabs, loomed ahead, their surface dull with age and rust. They had not been spared the rot; the right gate was bowed inward, as if suffering from a massive impact, and the left was partially submerged in what appeared to be solid stone. The iron was cold under his palm. He heaved, muscles straining, the ancient hinges groaning in protest. The air around the crypt, thick with despair and the beast’s raw agony, intensified. He forced a gap wide enough to slip through, squeezing past the jagged, broken iron. The darkness inside was immediate, absolute. Only a sliver of bruised light cut through the gap, illuminating the damp, earthen floor. The chill was profound, seeping into his bones. A faint, high-pitched whine vibrated in the air, a sound that grated on his teeth and rattled his skull. It was the precursor, the warning. The sound of a curse reaching its apex. The sound of impending detonation. Kavrin’s eyes adjusted, seeking out the familiar stone pillars and the forms chained to them. The air thrummed, growing colder, the whine sharpening. He saw them, the hunched shapes. Jurok’s children, whimpering masses of flesh, their chains taut. But Jurok himself was slumped against a pillar, his monstrous form still, too still. The whine intensified, a keening shriek in the crypt. Kavrin rushed forward, breath catching in his throat. Jurok had chewed through his own bound wrists. A dark, viscous pool had spread beneath him, staining the packed earth. The blood was still seeping, slow and steady, a final, defiant act of self-destruction. And the air, now a vibrating sheet of noise, screamed with the imminent, valley-wide blast of madness.

The Warped City