Mountain winds swept through the dense woods, carrying a choking stench of corpses straight into their faces.
Vale held his breath for a long moment before finally lowering his voice. "God, is that the Brood Hive... That's so, so disgusting."
He spoke softly, but his voice trembled uncontrollably, as though he feared disturbing the silent yet writhing world below the valley:
Below the slope lay a gash in the valley floor, as though the earth itself had been torn open.
Sunlight could not penetrate the canopy. Only dim, lifeless gloom remained, outlining a massive black shape that writhed like a living creature.
The Brood Hive lay in the deepest part of that shadow.
It resembled some enormous beehive or festering organ, sprawled across the mud. A pale, resin-like shell covered its surface, and every faint pulsation produced a wet, sticky sound.
The shell was studded with remnants of human faces, mostly adult men. Their expressions were twisted and desperate, as though forever frozen in agony, sealed inside nightmarish amber.
In the clearing nearby, ranks of insect corpses moved slowly.
Some had once been human, some had been magical beasts, and others still bore faint traces of the knights they had once been.
Their eyes were vacant and their steps orderly, as though pulled by invisible strings. In perfect unison, they lifted corpses one after another and cast them into the Brood Hive's open fissure.
It was like a ritual of the dead.
Silent, repetitive, without end.
This was no battlefield. It was more like a theater of sacrifice.
No one could find a word to say.
Even Duke Edmund, a veteran of countless battles who had seen his share of bloodshed, frowned slightly. Standing beside Louis, he gazed at the scene that defied all reason, a rare gravity settling into