𓆩♱𓆪

The barrier’s shards still drifted in the air behind him, glittering like dying stars, but Excalibur didn’t look back. His lungs burned with cold fire as he plunged deeper into forbidden ground, each breath a dagger in his chest. The teachings of his order rattled in his skull with every pounding step: Stay within the bounds. Beyond them lies corruption. Beyond them lies death.

But the whispers had followed him into sleep, into waking, into every corner of thought. They coiled through his marrow, pressing so close that even silence felt alive, suffocating. Tonight, he had fled, and now he ran where no knight was meant to go.

His boots struck the ground with a hollow crunch, frost cracking beneath him. The warmth of his body turned against him; the wind gnawed at his skin until the exposed flesh of his face stung raw, and the fine gilding of his armor bloomed with lace-like frost. His stride faltered as the world ahead unfolded into shapes he did not know.

The trees rose first — not the pines and oaks of the kingdom he swore to protect, but blackened spires twisting upward, their bark slick and scarred, their crowns clotted with ice that glimmered like shattered glass. The forest breathed. He could hear it. A long, endless exhale that seemed to come from the roots themselves, carrying on its current the same name, the same call:

Feverspwn.

Excalibur swallowed against the tightness in his throat. His gauntlet brushed the frost-rimmed hilt at his side as he stepped forward. Snow cracked beneath him, though here it did not behave like snow at all. The drifts gleamed with a glassy sheen, throwing back the moon’s light in cold, blue fire. The air wavered. Shadows stretched, bent, broke into angles that the eye could not follow.

His reflection followed him too. In every shard of ice at his feet, his figure stretched thin, elongated until it barely resembled a man. His armor’s gold dulled to the color of tarnish, his face warped into something long-jawed, hollow-eyed. His stomach twisted. He forced himself not to linger on it, gripping the sword tighter until the leather bit into his palm.

The forest stirred.

A sound rose, soft at first, then unmistakable: wet, fibrous, peeling. As though skin itself were being shed. He turned sharply, muscles coiling, and there — between two twisted trunks — it stood.

A figure. Tall, impossibly thin, its frame blurred at the edges. Even the air around it seemed to recoil. Its body quivered with indecision, each limb subtly lengthening, then shortening again. Its face… faces. They rolled across its head like masks: a child’s innocent blink, a soldier’s scowl, a woman’s grief, a beast’s snarl. One upon another, seamless, endless.

Dysmorphivore.

The word alone churned in his stomach. The order’s scrolls had warned him, but no ink on parchment could capture the weight of that sight. These were not beasts but eaters of what made beasts and men themselves. Predators that did not kill for flesh but for the soul beneath it. Ironfan’s kind.

And yet—

It tilted its head, and its flesh stabilized. For a single, shattering moment, it was his own face staring back at him.

Excalibur staggered, armor scraping against frozen bark as he backed away. His sword came free in a flare of gold, its edge trembling in his grip. He glanced downward instinctively — to the ground, to the frost — and saw another shape stir there.

His reflection was no longer still. It rose, dragging itself out of the snow like a body breaking through thin ice. Another him. Its eyes were his eyes, yet hollow, gleaming with a light the fire of men could not hold.

The whispers rolled thick through the air, curling through his ears, his lungs, the very marrow of his bones:

Nothing but what you see, Excalibur. So see us now.

The warrior’s breath came hard and fast, fogging the air until it seemed even his breath might be stolen from him. His blade — once a certainty, once the symbol of his order — felt suddenly like a fragile thing, a toy of polished gold held against a tide that could not be cleaved.