Chapter - 13 Berserker

The ground gave a grinding shudder a second before the mountain itself seemed to tear open.

Two funnels erupted from opposite ridgelines at once, climbing impossibly fast into the morning sky. Wide enough at the base to swallow the clearing whole. They weren't wind alone. Dark shapes turning within the churn of each vortex, limbs and armor and the pastel gleam of exposed bone spinning in slow, sickening orbits inside walls of screaming air.

“That's not weather, right?” Duna said, backing away from the nearer funnel with the calm of someone who'd survived worse by never panicking first. “Weather doesn't carry bodies.”

“Her work?” Corra called, moving into position, sword drawn.

“Has to be,” Shgrove said. “Formation. Now.”

The twins moved, Josen and Peyt falling into a matched stance with their shields raised in an overlapping wall, bracing as the outer edge of the nearest tornado's wind reached them. A battering pressure that staggered even their combined weight back half a step. Debris came with it: rock fragments, splintered branches, worse things they didn't let themselves look at too closely, all of it shattering past at a speed that would have opened a man from throat to belly without the shields to catch it.

“Ilse!” Shgrove shouted. “Can you dispel it?”

The young mage raised both hands, weaving a quick pattern of light between her fingers, throwing a probing pulse of her own wind magic into the base of the funnel. It struck the swirling wall and simply dispersed, absorbed without resistance, without the telltale backlash of a spell meeting a counter-spell.

“It's not a construct!” Ilse called back, backing away, breathing hard already. “There's no casting signature on it at all—this isn't magic holding it together, or if it is, it's nothing like anything I've ever tested against.”

“Then what is it?” Corra demanded.

“I don't know! It's just—wind. Wind and bodies. Whatever's spinning them, it's not a spell I recognize. Or more like, it is casted to be not recognized as aether. Probably either miasma or mana.”

Tomas had found high ground on a jutting shelf of rock, bow drawn, loosing arrow after arrow into the funnel's outer edge in an attempt to slow whatever fed it—each shaft vanishing into the turmoil without visible effect, swallowed the way a stone disappears into a river causing a ripple.

Flare stood at the center of the chaos, watching two towers of wind and dead climb higher by the second, and felt something old and familiar rise up in her, sharper now than it had been in months.

“Not again.”

The thought arrived whole, unbidden, dragging Hercules's face up behind her eyes before she could stop it. The horror. His hand gone, his throat opened, his body dropping into red snow while she knelt there powerless to reach him. She had promised herself in that nightmare.

Never again. Not one more person, not while I'm still standing.

She didn't wait for Shgrove's orders. She was moving directly at the twin tornados.

She hit the outer wall of the nearer tornado at a dead sprint, and the wind took her like it had taken the debris. A battering, disorienting force that should have thrown her clear across the clearing. She dug in anyway, forcing one foot forward and then the other, muscling through a pressure that would have crushed an ordinary body flat; teeth gritted against a howl of wind that filled her ears with a sound close to screeching.

Inside the outer wall, the world narrowed to gray pandemonium and spinning shapes. A rotted arm spun past close enough to graze her shoulder. A rusted helm, still fused to whatever remained of the skull inside it, tumbled by a foot from her face. She kept moving, kept forcing herself deeper, some part of her mind coldly aware that this was reckless past the point of sense and unable, for once, to care.

“If it takes someone,” she thought, half a prayer, half a threat, “it takes me first.”

“Flare!” The strict man Shgrove's voice, distant and furious, cutting through the roar. "Fall back, that's an order—"

Flare was bemused. This was the probably the first time Shgrove give up formal title, and ordered a Solmere. Both feats impressive.

But she didn't fall back. She drove her sword into the churning wall in front of her and used the resistance to haul herself another step deeper, and another, blood roaring in her own ears louder than the wind around her.

From outside, she knew this must have looked like exactly what the court already whispered about her. Neither courage nor strategy. A girl throwing herself bodily into the enormous and unknowable because some broken part of her had decided her own survival didn't matter as much as everyone else's. The rage of a berserker.

She didn't care how it looked. She only cared about what came out the other side of that wind alive.

It was Corra who reached her first, forcing her way through it with a grim, wordless determination that matched Flare's own, shield raised to deflect. Shgrove came a heartbeat behind her, cutting a path through the debris with the same brutal force he brought to everything, shouting something Flare couldn't fully hear over the wind's roar.

“…can't fight the whole thing!” His voice, fragmented, finally cutting through. “Has to be a core … something holding the shape together…”

Flare understood what he meant. She'd felt exactly this kind of thing before, in a much smaller, much more human body: the black curtain threaded through Fen's veins, foreign and unmistakably present once she knew how to look for it.

She closed her eyes against the chaos, trusting Corra and Shgrove to hold the wall of debris back around her for the few seconds she needed, and reached for the current the way Hercules had once taught her. Breath first, heartbeat second. Blood flowing beneath her skin like a compass pointing toward something she hadn't consciously known how to find until this exact moment demanded it of her.

She found it but this time—nothing so small, so contained. A knot. A dense, writhing tangle of miasma at the very center of the vortex, thick and black and pulsing with the same eeriness she remembered from the Frostveil Forest’s lifeless heart, except vast now, scaled up to two entire funnels of bodies spinning in perfect, obedient orbit around it.

“There's a core,” she shouted, eyes snapping open. “It's miasma. If I can reach it—“

“Reach it!” Shgrove's blade cut a body clean out of the air before it could crash into her. “We'll hold the wall!”

She didn't need to be told twice.

Corra and Shgrove fell into position on either side of her without discussion, forming a rough triangle of steel and will against the storm, buying her the handful of seconds she needed. Flare closed the last of the distance on legs with effort, wind tearing at her from every direction at once, and finally, at the vortex's heart, found the knot of miasma made visible: a black, transparent tangle hanging in the eye of the storm like something suspended in dark water, veins of it threading out into every spinning body around it, feeding the whole grotesque machine.

She reached for it the way she'd reached for the curtain in Fen's blood, except this time there was no careful, gentle drawing-out. This time she simply seized it with both hands and pulled with her all might.

It fought her. It fought her like a living thing fights for its life. Tendrils of black smoke lashing back around her wrists, her throat, trying to drag her down into the same orbit as everything else in its grip. She felt her own strength bleeding out against it, the same suffocating pressure she remembered from the village gates, and for one dizzying second genuinely believed it might win.

Then she thought of Hercules's hand detached from him. How she was too late, too weak to save him.

Flare bellowed, and pulled harder than she had ever pulled at anything in her life, and the knot tore free all at once.

The effect was instantaneous and total. Both funnels lost their shape in the same breath, wind collapsing inward on itself with a concussive violence that Flare felt in her teeth before she consciously understood what was happening. Air rushing to fill a space two towering columns of stolen dead had occupied only a moment before.

The ground took the brunt of it. Flare had time only to throw herself flat, Corra and Shgrove doing the same on either side of her, as the collapsing air slammed downward with the force of a falling mountain, driving itself into the earth in twin, thunderous impacts that shook the whole range and sent a wave of displaced snow and rock rolling outward in every direction.

Silence followed, vast and ringing, broken only by the settling patter of debris still falling from the sky.

Flare lay in the snow for a long moment, chest heaving, the torn-free knot of miasma already dissolving between her fingers into something thin and harmless, and let herself simply breathe.

“Champion.” Corra's voice, hoarse. “Due respect, you are completely out of your mind.”

Flare managed a laugh and a cough. “Probably.”

She pushed herself up, and the sight that greeted her stole whatever half-formed joke she might have made next.

Where each funnel had stood, the mountainside had two enormous craters gouged into the rock and snow. Deep enough that Flare couldn't see their bottoms from where she stood, the scorched, displaced earth around their rims still smoking faintly in the cold air. No trace remained of the bodies that had spun within either storm. No trace of the woman either, if she'd ever truly been the cause of it at all.

Shgrove climbed to his feet beside her, surveying the twin scars in the mountain with an expression she couldn't fully read.

“You could have died in there,” he said, quiet enough that only she and Corra could hear it. “Reckless doesn't begin to cover what that was.”

Flare looked at the craters instead of at him, still catching her breath, the ghost of Hercules's face lingering somewhere behind her eyes.

“Nobody else had to, though,” she said. “That's all that mattered to me.”

Shgrove studied her a moment longer, something in his expression shifting. No longer the suspicion he'd carried since the first night of this mission.

He said nothing more. He simply turned back toward the rest of the party, who were picking their way down through the settling snow to regroup, and left Flare standing alone at the crater's edge a moment longer, staring down into a darkness that offered no answers at all about where the woman had gone, or what was her intention.