A Brush with Annihilation

Their new silver plates gleamed in the candlelight of the Gilded Gryphon, heavy in their palms not just for the metal but for what they represented. Even after the cheers faded, the weight of expectation clung to them like a second skin. The guild wasted no time testing the limits of their new station, handing them a sealed assignment scroll stamped with black wax.

A Silver-rank scouting mission—deep into the Dark Forest. Reports of strange activity. Unknown threat level. Return with evidence, or don’t return at all.

Ronan broke the silence first, as always. “Dark Forest, eh?” he said, swinging his helm under one arm. “We’ve burned our way through goblins, ants, and fire-breathing mutts. This’ll be a stroll in the park. Little bit of shade, maybe some moss.”

“Gods, you’re loud,” Nira muttered. She was tightening her bowstring, eyes flicking to the line of black trees visible from the guild hall’s upper windows. “That place isn’t shade. It’s a tomb. The silence is wrong even from here.”

Catherine, pale in the torchlight, folded her hands as if in prayer. “She’s right. It feels like the Goddess’s light is… repelled. Like something there has teeth.”

Cyras closed the assignment scroll with a snap. His normally measured tone was faintly strained. “Reports of vanishing caravans. Mana readings spiking off the charts. If the guild’s sending Silver plates in, something’s gone badly sideways.”

Kael, who’d been leaning against a post listening to them all, pushed away and spoke at last. “Gear up. No swagger, no jokes. Nira up front, Ronan second. Catherine middle with Cyras. I’m tail. Call out anything. We don’t separate.”

The road to the Dark Forest wound through marsh and fog. With every mile, the daylight dulled, as if the forest itself exhaled ash. By the time they reached the treeline, the world had gone unnervingly still—no birdcall, no insects, just the faint crack of brittle branches under their boots.

Inside, the trees were tall and sickly, their bark dark as coal. Roots arched like ribs. The miasma hung low, making each breath thick and metallic.

“Feels like walking through a lung full of smoke,” Ronan muttered, quieter now.

“Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open,” Nira hissed. “Something’s pacing us. I can’t see it but I can feel it.”

Catherine’s fingers trembled against her staff. “I can’t even sense the Goddess here. It’s like she’s turned her face away.”

Cyras crouched, pressing a glowing palm to the soil. When he rose, his expression was grim. “The mana’s stagnant, coagulated. This isn’t just a monster’s nest. It’s a wound in the world.”

Kael nodded once. “We move slow. Everyone ready a retreat path if it goes bad.”

They pressed on until the trees abruptly thinned, giving way to a frost-crusted clearing. Their boots sank into brittle grass turned white as bone. A hush fell heavier than before. Even the air felt brittle, like one wrong word could shatter it.

Then came the growl—low, vibrating through the ground and up their bones.

On a jagged outcrop above them stood a wolf out of nightmare. Grey and white fur spiked with frost, shoulders high as a warhorse, eyes glinting with ancient malice. The very air bowed under its presence.

Ronan’s usual grin vanished. His fingers clenched his shield straps until the leather creaked. Nira’s pupils narrowed, her bow sagging by an inch. Catherine whispered a prayer she didn’t believe would reach anyone. Cyras went chalk-white and mouthed a name Kael barely caught: “Fenrir…”

Kael felt it too—raw, annihilating power. Everything they’d faced before now looked like a training drill. This creature belonged to a different tier of existence.

The Fenrir moved first. One blur of muscle and frost and it slammed into Ronan’s raised shield. The steel disintegrated into shards. Ronan flew backwards like a rag doll, landing in a heap twenty feet away, his arm twisted at an unnatural angle.

“RONAN!” Catherine’s voice cracked.

Kael’s instincts moved before thought. He reached past matter and motion, slipping into the threads of meaning itself. Concept Manipulation. His focus snapped to the inert gases drifting unseen in the forest air—colorless, harmless, waiting. With a single mental twist, he rewrote them; Concept: atmosphere inert gas. New Concept: spiraling vortex.

The atmosphere shuddered as the invisible gases condensed into a dense, whirling mass, their properties transmuting under his will. What had been inert now burned with strange potential, silver light streaking through the spiral like living veins. The forest floor trembled as the newborn vortex roared to life, a column of shimmering force that rose around the Fenrir. It wasn’t an attack so much as a desperate wall of noise and light—an interruption to something far beyond them.

Nira didn’t hesitate. She drew and loosed in one motion. Her arrow sliced the tip of the wolf’s ear clean off, a sliver of white-rimmed flesh spinning into the frost.

The Fenrir reared back, not in pain but in mild surprise. That was all they got.

The vortex buckled. Kael’s power slammed back into him like a hammer, blood bursting from his nose and ears. He fell, gasping, the world tilting.

“Grab him! MOVE!” Nira shouted, her voice almost breaking.

Cyras hurled up a shimmering wall of force as the beast lunged again. Catherine poured healing into Ronan just enough to drag him upright. Together they hauled Kael between them, stumbling toward the treeline.

Branches whipped their faces, roots snagged their boots, but they ran. The Fenrir followed for a time, then stopped—perhaps bored, perhaps toying with them. Its growl echoed long after they’d left the clearing, fading only when the forest thinned enough to see daylight again.

Hours later, the Gilded Gryphon’s doors banged open. Greta looked up from polishing a tankard and froze. Ronan’s arm was splinted, Catherine’s robes scorched and torn, Nira’s hands trembling on her bow. Kael hung unconscious between Cyras and Catherine, his shirt soaked red at the collar.

“Gods alive,” Greta breathed. “What in the hells happened?”

“We found your anomaly,” Nira rasped, leaning on the counter as though it were the only solid thing in the room. “Fenrir. Diamond-rank.”

Greta went still. “A Diamond… you’re sure?”

Nira opened her hand. Frost rimed her glove where she held a small, torn scrap of wolf ear. Even that sliver radiated killing cold.

Greta swore softly, then tightened her jaw. “Alright. I’ll file it. But know this—no one at headquarters will swallow that without proof. You’re going to have a storm of questions coming your way. Don’t expect thanks.”

She called for the in-house healer, and Kael disappeared upstairs on a stretcher.

A week crawled by. Their wounds scabbed but the tension did not ease. Just as Greta predicted, two guild officials arrived from the regional office. Black cloaks, silver insignia, the kind of bureaucrats who’d never seen a monster up close but wielded power like a cudgel.

They ushered the party into a private room, stone walls closing around them.

“A Diamond-rank Fenrir,” one of the directors repeated with a dry laugh. “Do you realize how absurd that sounds? You’re Silver plates, barely minted. It’s a miracle you’re not dead, which is precisely why your claim reeks of fabrication.”

Cyras bristled but kept his voice even. “We’re telling you what happened. Nothing less, nothing more.”

The other director leaned forward, eyes hard. “We’ve already alerted the capital. False reports waste resources. This is your last chance to withdraw the claim quietly.”

Nira, silent until then, reached into her satchel. She laid something on the table with a soft, final thud.

A wolf’s ear. Larger than a man’s hand. Rimmed with frost that refused to melt even in the warm room. The air around it went cold enough to sting their lungs.

Silence stretched. The directors’ smirks faded. One reached out a tentative finger, then recoiled as the frost bit him.

“This…” he whispered. “This is impossible.”

“No,” Nira said quietly. “This is what we ran from.”

The first director swallowed hard, all his bluster gone. “How in the gods’ names did you survive?”

Kael, still pale but awake now, spoke for the first time since the forest. His voice was hoarse but steady. “We didn’t. We escaped. There’s a difference.”

No one in the room found a reply.