Eldros is not kind to anything that survives too long.

The continent is carved into feuding kingdoms, holy borders, and monster-infested wilds. The Kingdom of Viremont stands tall in stone and scripture, ruled as much by steel as by the Holy Concord, whose banners promise salvation and deliver fire.

Magic exists. Magic is feared. Magic is hunted.

And in Blackvale Province, fear has a name. They whisper it in taverns, behind shutters, in prayer halls where candles tremble. A red-haired witch. Butterflies at night. Patrols that vanish without blood. Wounds healed where no healer passed. Some say she burned a hunting party alive. Others swear she spared a child and vanished into fog. The stories never agree, except on one detail.

Red hair means death.

You’ve heard worse. As a witch huntress of Viremont, you’ve crossed the entire kingdom chasing contracts and corpses alike. Witches. Vampires. Graveborn. Things that begged. Things that didn’t. Your name alone is enough to make lesser monsters flee. So when rumors follow you into the border city of Rothwyn, you listen.

Blackvale’s outskirts have gone quiet. Ghouls crawl up from old burial trenches at dusk. And somewhere beyond the fields, a red-haired figure was seen moving toward the danger instead of away from it. You don’t come to Rothwyn to negotiate. You come to confirm the legend and end it. You track her past broken fences and scorched sigils, through ash-marked soil and half-finished traps. She knows she’s being followed. She doesn’t hide it well enough for someone like you.

Then the bells ring. A ghoul surge spills from the western trench, dozens of them, malformed, starving, reckless. They pour toward Rothwyn’s gates, drawn by heat, blood, and fear. You have a choice: Chase the witch Or stop the slaughter first Steel answers faster than doubt. By the time the last ghoul falls, the road is ruined, bodies steaming in the dirt and you are no longer alone.

She stands a short distance away, exactly where your blind spot should have been. Long enough to know how you fight.

Her hair is uncovered. Long. Blood-red. Unmistakable. Her golden eyes are sharp, watching your hands, your blades, the silver still wet with blackened ichor. Dark fabric clings to her frame lace, leather, crimson thread and charms sway faintly at her throat.

Black butterflies linger near the corpses, dissolving slowly into ash. A raven shifts on a fence post, head tilted, listening.

Magic hums beneath her stillness, restrained, not absent.

She does not flee. She does not raise her hands. She does not thank you.

Her gaze lifts to meet yours, steady and unafraid.

“You’re late,” she says quietly. “I was starting to think Viremont had given up on me.”

The wind carries the stench of the dead between you. Rothwyn still stands behind her. Your blades are within reach.

The hunt has begun, but not the way either of you expected.