The Madman's Guide to Miracles

Aurelia froze, a half-chewed piece of monster meat still clamped between her teeth. For a second, the grease smudged across her cheek made her look less like a pampered noble and more like a mud-caked child playing dress-up in silk.

Slowly, she swallowed, wiping her chin with the back of a torn, filthy sleeve.

"It was an official decree," she said, trying and failing to inject some of her earlier aristocratic pomposity into her tone. "My father, Lord Cassian of the High House of Astoria, personally selected me to head the Eastern Border Inspection. The court needed someone of blood lineage to oversee the quarantine zones and coordinate the evacuation of the lower fiefs before the corruption spreads any further into Dunwall."

She puffed out her chest slightly, a flicker of genuine pride breaking through the grime on her face. "It’s a vital assignment! The King’s Council specifically requested an Astoria to prove to the outer territories that the Crown hasn’t abandoned them!"

I stared at her through the low, blue flicker of the campfire, my face completely expressionless.

"Are you completely fucking stupid?" I asked flatly.

Aurelia gasped, her jaw dropping. "W What?!"

"Look around you," I said, pointing the greasy tip of my cleaver toward the fog churning outside our rock ledge. "Look at where we are. This place is a death trap. Monsters are practically crawling out of the dirt, the fog is thick enough to choke you to death, and you came out here with three guards and a fancy golden carriage?"

I took a slow breath, shaking my head at the absolute absurdity of it.

"In a place this dangerous, nobody sends a girl with three men unless they want her dead," I said, leaning forward. "You didn’t get chosen because you’re special. Someone wanted you out of the way, stripped you of a real escort, and dropped you in the middle of a monster nest so the fog could do the dirty work for them."

The silence that followed was suffocating.

Sir Richard stopped chewing. He looked up slowly, his single working eye widening as he stared at the dirt, the brutal reality hitting him like a physical blow. Across the fire, the two injured guards exchanged a silent, horrified look.

Aurelia’s face went entirely white, stripping away what little color the hot food had given her. "No... no, that’s ridiculous. My father... my uncle... they wouldn’t..."

"They gave you three broken guys in shiny armor that rattles like a dinner bell," I cut in, my voice deadpan. "You don’t need to know anything about how this world works to see a setup. They dumped you out here to die."

"Shut up!" Aurelia snapped, standing up so fast she nearly tripped over her ruined skirt. Her hands were shaking violently, the grease on her fingers smearing against her palms. "You don’t know anything about Dunwall! You’re just a... a feral, dirty wanderer!"

"My lady..." Sir Richard whispered, his voice cracking into a hollow, broken tone. He looked down at his shattered shoulder plate, then at the dark fog. "The guide... Lord Vane hired the guide for us."

"Richard, don’t listen to him!" she cried, her voice squeaking into a desperate pitch.

"The guide led us straight off the paved road into the fog on day one, my lady," Sir Richard said quietly, staring into the blue embers. "And when the horses went mad... he didn’t try to stop them. He ran off before the carriage even flipped."

Aurelia stood there, frozen, the harsh reality sinking into her chest.

She sank back down onto the cold stone, her knees giving out. She stared blankly at her mud-caked boots, all her posture completely shattered.

"It... it doesn’t make sense," she whimpered, her voice barely audible over the crackle of the ironwood bark. "Why would anyone do this... why would they do something like this in a place like Dunwall?"

"Because people are people," I muttered, hacking off another chunk of the mystery bug meat with my cleaver. "Doesn’t matter what world you’re in. The monsters out there in the mist are simple. They see meat, they try to eat it. But humans? Humans will send you straight into a bloodbath just to take your spot. This isn’t the terrain or the corruption trying to kill you, little girl. It’s just people being rotten."

I tossed another piece of meat into my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and pointed my cleaver back toward the dark valley floor.

"So what’s the actual situation out here? If you were supposed to be evacuating people, where the hell are they?"

Sir Richard took a shaky breath, clearing his throat. "It’s... it’s chaos, stranger. The Monastery at Saint Aldren was supposed to be the main gathering point for the refugees, but three days ago, the sky over the peaks turned a foul shade of red. The mountain pass is choked with people from the lower villages, but nobody is getting through. Whatever is happening deeper in the forest... it’s driving every living thing straight toward the mountains."

He looked at me, his eyes filled with a grim, desperate pleading.

"If we don’t reach the Monastery’s outer wall soon... the fog will trap us down in this valley permanently. And nothing human survives when the fog settles."

I stared into the blue flames, feeling the pale metal ring on my index finger throb with a slow, faint warmth against my skin.

Saint Aldren is choked. The forest is spilling over. And I’m stuck babysitting a target and three broken guards.

"Get some sleep," I grunted, leaning back against the cold cliff face and resting Mercy across my lap. "We move at first light. And if any of you scream during the night, I’m leaving you as monster bait."

The fire flickered low, casting a dim blue glow that barely cut through the creeping violet mist. Beside me, the four of them curled up on the hard stone ledge. Aurelia huddled under her ruined silk dress, shivering softly, while Sir Richard and his men slept with their hands still clutching the hilts of their rusted, dented swords.

I didn’t sleep. Sleep was an expensive habit for someone stranded in a nightmare.

Instead, I sat with my back pressed against the cold rock face, resting Mercy across my thighs. I pulled the yellowed leather map from my pouch and unrolled it over my knee, staring down at the faint, glowing markings under the light of the embers.

The Ferryman’s dot was still moving, a slow, crawling ember tracking north along the jagged line of Blackbriar Manor. Further up, nestled right in the mountain cleft, was Saint Aldren Monastery, the territory of the Shepherd.

A thick cluster of faint crimson smudges clung to the pass surrounding it.

Refugees? I almost sneered at the thought.

Sir Richard was living in a total fantasy world if he thought those people were safe. The Shepherd was one of the four Regents, a monster I eventually had to hunt down and kill. And after absorbing a piece of the Heart from Beneath, there was zero chance the bastard was sitting up in his abbey keeping the peace. He was mutated. Corrupted to the core.

Hell, based on what I’d read in the Broodmother’s diary, the Shepherd was out of his mind way before the Heart even started taking over, far earlier than any of the other Regents. If he was already raving mad back then, what he’d become after digesting the Heart’s influence wasn’t even worth thinking about.

Those poor bastards packed against the mountain gates weren’t waiting for salvation. They were sitting in a slaughterhouse, already rotting, mutating, or waiting to be harvested by whatever grotesque creature the Shepherd had turned into.

The pale metal ring on my index finger gave a subtle, rhythmic pulse against my bone. The priestess’s voice drifted smoothly into my mind, light as a feather, yet cold enough to raise the hair on my arms.

"You plan to march a pampered child and three half-dead cripples straight into the domain of a mad Regent?" she asked, her tone tinged with amused disdain. "The Shepherd’s corruption will have taken the pass long ago. They will only slow you down. The moment a turned horror catches their scent, they will scream, panic, and draw the whole swarm down upon your head."

I know, I thought back, not bothering to move my lips. I’m not running a charity.

"Then why carry dead weight?"

Because she’s got a name that people in this world recognize, I replied mentally, staring at Aurelia’s dirty, sleeping face. She knows the geography, she knows the layout of the fiefs, and if any human outpost is left standing along the border, a noble badge might buy us a way through. And if the pass is as fucked as I know it is... well, four extra meat shields give me four more seconds to react.

The ring throbbed once, a faint vibration that felt suspiciously like a soft chuckle. "How delightfully pragmatic of you, Aseren. You adapt to the cruelty of this world far too easily."

I ignored her, rolling the map back up and shoving it deep into my coat.

I looked down at my hands. My knuckles were scarred, stained with dark bug blood and dirt. Bloodburst had stripped away my rank, dragging me back down to a Lesser Beast, but my physical shell was still Mature. I could feel the dense, unnaturally heavy muscle under my skin, the heightened pulse of a body built to survive things that should have killed me six times over.

I was weaker than I wanted to be, but I wasn’t fragile.

A sharp, wet crunch echoed from the woods below the cliff, somewhere deep in the spore fog. It was followed by the low, dragging sound of heavy metal sliding across wet mud.

My eyes narrowed. I slowly wrapped my fingers around Mercy’s leather bound grip, easing the heavy blade an inch out of its scabbard. The steel gleamed faintly in the blue firelight.

The sound dragged on for a few seconds, then faded into the whisper of the wind. Whatever it was, it was heading north toward Blackbriar, following the same path as the Ferryman.

I let out a slow, quiet breath and leaned my head back against the stone wall.

Morning was going to be brutal.

When morning broke, the violet fog hadn’t cleared. It had only turned a sickly, pale lavender under the dim gray light filtering through the canopy.

I nudged Sir Richard’s boot with my toe.

"Time to wake up," I said softly. "Mist is thinning just enough to see."

The guard jolted awake with a sharp intake of breath, his hand instantly darting to his sword before a wince caught in his throat. His dislocated shoulder was swollen dark purple beneath his leather undergarment.

Aurelia stirred next, rubbing her eyes with muddy knuckles and smearing dirt across her nose. She looked cold and exhausted, her fine dress ruined beyond recognition, but she pushed herself up without complaining and looked around the camp.

"How is your shoulder, Richard?" she asked, her voice raspy from the chill.

"Manageable, my lady," Sir Richard lied through his teeth, though the cold sweat on his forehead gave him away. He looked up at me, his one good eye grim. "We need to set it before we march. If a fight breaks out, I can’t hold a shield like this."

I crouched beside him. "It’s going to hurt."

"Just do it," he grunted, bracing his good arm against a root.

I grabbed his wrist, braced my palm against the joint, and drove my weight forward with a swift, firm twist.

SNAP.

Sir Richard let out a muffled groan, sinking into the mud as tears pricked his eyes, but he kept his jaw shut. He panted heavily, slowly testing the arm as the joint popped back into place.

"Here," one of the uninjured guards whispered, stepping forward to offer a strip of torn linen from the carriage wreckage. "Hold still, Captain. I’ll bind it tight to your chest."

"Good man, Thomas," Sir Richard wheezed, nodding in thanks.

Once the gear was packed, I unrolled the map for a brief second to confirm our heading. "We go east along the upper ridge. The terrain is rough, but it keeps us off the main valley road."

"That’s smart," Sir Richard agreed, testing the weight of his sword with his left hand. "The valley road is a natural funnel. If anything comes down from the peaks, anyone on the lower road gets trapped."

We set out ten minutes later, picking our way along the broken cliff edge. The environment was suffocatingly bleak. Gnarled roots slick with black sludge coiled across the rocks, and the air smelled sour, thick with sulfur and decay.

Ten minutes onto the trail, we passed an old ironwood tree. Hung from its thick upper branches were three human torsos, stripped naked and bound together at the spine with rusted wire. Swarms of fat violet maggots wriggled beneath their translucent skin.

Aurelia covered her mouth, taking a ragged breath and turning her head sharply away.

"Keep moving, my lady," Thomas said quietly, stepping slightly in front of her to block her view. "Don’t look at it."

"I’m fine," Aurelia whispered, forcing her eyes back onto the path ahead, though her hands were trembling violently. "Just... keep moving."

As we crested the eastern incline, the trees thinned, revealing the jagged line of the mountain pass far in the distance. Above the peaks, the sky churned a dull, unnatural crimson through the gray mist, casting a sickening red hue over the entire ridge.

"Look at the sky..." the second guard murmured under his breath, his voice laced with genuine dread. "That’s not natural fog."

"Down!" I hissed, catching the edge of Sir Richard’s armor and pulling him toward the basalt rocks.

Everyone dropped into the brush without a second thought, pressing themselves flat against the damp earth.

Fifty yards below us on the lower path, the mist parted.

A tall, towering Husk shambled along the trail. Jagged, rusted plates of iron were fused directly into its festering, gray muscle. Where its skull should have been, the bone had split wide open like a flowering mouth, lined with rows of tiny, twitching human teeth.

Dragged behind it by coils of pale, cord like tissue were three skinless corpses, their lower bodies mutated into writhing tendrils that scraped wetly against the mud.

SCREEECH.

SCREEECH.

The creature dragged a massive executioner’s blade along the dirt, the sound of grinding metal echoing up the slope.

It stopped near the lower trail marker. The split, tooth lined cavity where its face used to be snapped sharply in our direction. Four hollow sockets burned with a dull blue light as it inhaled, its exposed chest expanding with a wet gurgle.

Beside me, Aurelia clamped both hands over her face, her eyes wide with terror. Sir Richard placed a steady, gentle hand on her shoulder, pulling her further into the shadow of the rock while keeping his own eyes glued to the monster.

None of us dared to breathe.

For ten long seconds, the creature stood motionless, its needle like teeth clicking endlessly as it sampled the mist.

Then, deep down in the valley ravine, a distant, human scream cut through the silence, followed by a sickening tear.

The Husk jerked its split head toward the sound. With a heavy, joint snapping turn, it dragged its blade around and slithered down into the dark ravine, disappearing into the fog.

Sir Richard let out a long, quiet exhale, slowly easing his hand off his blade. "Gods above..."

"Is everyone alright?" Aurelia asked in a breathless whisper, looking around at the guards.

"We’re intact, my lady," Thomas replied, wiping sweat from his eyes.

I stood up slowly, keeping Mercy low at my side while checking the treeline ahead. "It heard something else down in the valley. We need to move while it’s distracted."

"Lead the way," Sir Richard said, getting to his feet and helping Aurelia up. "We’re right behind you."

We moved fast and low, keeping to the jagged lip of the ridge where the basalt crags offered cover against the open sky.

The crimson light spilling over the mountain peaks grew thicker as the morning wore on, staining the lavender fog a bruised, heavy purple. Every breath tasted like old iron and wet copper.

"How far to the pass?" Aurelia asked, her voice barely carrying over the crunch of dead foliage beneath our boots. She was keeping pace surprisingly well now, her eyes constantly darting between the thick brush and the drop off to our right.

"Two miles as the crow flies," Sir Richard estimated, his left hand resting on his sword pommel while his right arm remained strapped tightly against his chest. "Though on these roads, it’ll feel like five."

"If the main road is blocked, where does this trail drop down?" Thomas asked, glancing back toward the lower ravine where the Husk had vanished.

"Near the old toll bridge at the mouth of the gorge," Sir Richard replied, his tone grim. "If the bridge is intact, we can bypass the lower refugee camps entirely and hit the incline leading up to the outer gate."

"And if the bridge is down?" I asked without turning around.

Sir Richard didn’t answer immediately. The silence between us was heavy enough to state the obvious.

"Then we climb," he said quietly. "Or we find another way across."

Suddenly, the pale metal ring on my finger throbbed against my bone, a sharp spike of cold heat that made my hand twitch.

Aseren, the priestess’s voice whispered in my mind, smooth and urgent. Ahead. On the wind.

I held up a hand, dropping into a low crouch behind a moss draped boulder. Behind me, Sir Richard immediately signaled the guards, and the four of them melted into the shadow of the rock face without making a sound.

I closed my eyes and listened.

Beyond the low hum of the wind, there was a strange, wet rhythm. It sounded like dozens of heavy, sodden blankets being slapped against wet stone, accompanied by a faint, metallic clicking.

Click click click.

SLAP. SLAP.

I crept to the edge of the boulder and peeked around the granite lip.

The ridge path ahead narrowed into a natural stone bridge spanning a steep, hundred foot drop into the ravine below. Sprawled across the middle of the stone bridge was a mass of dark, glistening tendrils, an tangled web of thick, pulsating black veins anchored to the rock on both sides.

Bound within the web were half a dozen bodies, all wearing the faded silver tabards of the Astoria house guard.

Their armor was crushed, their eyes milky white, but they weren’t dead. Their chests rose and fell in unnatural, synchronized shallow breaths, their mouths twitching in silence as tiny, translucent stalks grew from their lips, releasing faint puffs of spores into the air.

In the center of the web sat something else.

It looked like a massive, skinless spider the size of a carriage, but its legs were made of fused, elongated human limb bones, stripped white and capped with rusted iron spikes. Where its head should have been, a cluster of five human faces hung upside down, their eyes closed, their mouths opening and closing in rhythm with the clicking sound.

A Weaver.

Thomas swallowed hard, his face turning pale. "Are those... are those our men?"

"They were," Sir Richard whispered, his jaw tight, his hand trembling slightly against his belt. "Three days ago."

"We can’t go through that," Aurelia whispered, her voice tight with suppressed panic. "We’ll never get across that bridge without waking it."

I inspected the bridge, my eyes tracing the rock face above and below the web.

"We don’t need to fight it," I said in a quiet rasp, looking up at the overhanging cliff face directly above the sleeping Horror. Heavy, cracked basalt shelves jutted out over the bridge, held together by thick roots and years of erosion. "We just need to make a path."

"What are you thinking?" Sir Richard asked, turning to look at me.

"Look at the cliff overhang," I said, pointing Mercy’s sheath toward the cracked rock shelf above the monster. "If we drop that ledge onto the center of the web, it’ll crush the creature and clear the span in one move."

Sir Richard studied the rock face, his single eye narrowing as he calculated the angle. "The drop is solid, but we’d need enough force to crack that main root anchor holding the shelf. A single blade won’t do it."

"I have a cleaver and a bad attitude," I muttered, easing Mercy into my left hand and pulling the heavy iron cleaver from my belt. "Thomas, you and the other guard keep your eyes on the ravine below in case the noise draws company. Richard, protect the girl."

"Wait," Aurelia said, reaching out to catch my sleeve. Her fingers were trembling, but her grip was surprisingly firm. "If you miss... if that thing wakes up while you’re above it..."

"Then run across while it’s eating me," I said flatly, pulling my sleeve out of her grasp. "Get moving."

I didn’t wait for her reply. I scaled the damp granite wall to the left of the bridge, jamming my boots into narrow fissures and hauling myself up the crag with steady, practiced movements. The rock was slick with foul smelling grease, but my hands held firm.

Below me, the Weaver remained still, the cluster of upside down human faces twitching silently in their sleep.

When I reached the narrow ledge thirty feet above the monster, I balanced on a jutting root and surveyed the stone shelf. A thick, gnarled ironwood root, fat as a man’s torso, was wedged tight into a massive fracture in the cliff face, acting as the sole anchor keeping tons of loose basalt from avalanching onto the bridge.

I shifted my stance, gripping the heavy cleaver in both hands. I raised the blade high over my right shoulder, breathing in slow, measured rhythm.

One.

Two.

I brought the cleaver down with everything behind it.

CRACK.

The steel bit deep into the dense wood, sending a shower of dry splinters and black sap spraying across my face.

The sound cracked like a gunshot through the misty gorge. Below, the Weaver’s central head snapped open five pairs of milky, pupil less eyes simultaneously. The fused bone legs twitched, iron spikes scraping against the stone as the creature let out a high pitched, wet shriek that vibrated straight through my teeth.

SHRIIIIEEK!

"Aseren! It’s awake!" Sir Richard shouted from the rocks below.

"I can see that!" I growled.

The web twitched violently as the Weaver lunged upward, its iron tipped bone legs slamming into the cliff face, carving deep gouges into the granite as it began scrambling up the stone wall directly toward me. The upside down faces on its brow peeled open their mouths, screaming in six different human voices.

I didn’t waste time looking at it. I yanked the cleaver free, shifted my grip, and drove the heavy wedge of iron into the exact same notch with all the brute force my body could muster.

THWACK.

The root severed with a violent, wet snap.

For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. Then, the entire cliff shelf groaned, a deep, deafening rumble tearing through the mountain as a massive slab of basalt detached from the wall.

"Move!" I yelled toward the rocks below.

I threw myself backward off the ledge, catching a lower handhold on the main wall just as tons of shattered rock and earth plummeted past me.

BOOM!

The avalanche slammed directly into the ascending Weaver, crushing its bone legs and dragging the screaming horror straight down onto the bridge. The heavy stone slab caved in the center of the web, flattening the monster under thousands of pounds of rubble and snapping the thick tendrils holding the bridge bound.

Dust, pulverized spore pods, and shattered bone blew outward in a thick gray cloud.

I dropped the remaining ten feet to the ground, landing in a hard crouch. The air was blinding, choked with dust and the stench of crushed monster blood.

"Across! Now!" I barked, grabbing Aurelia by her ruined sleeve and hauling her out of the brush.

Sir Richard and the two guards fell into step behind us. We sprinted across the remaining span of the bridge, stepping over severed, twitching tendrils and scrambling around the massive pile of fallen basalt burying the Weaver’s crushed husk.

As we hit the far side of the gorge, a low, wet gurgle echoed from beneath the stone pile, but the creature didn’t rise.

We didn’t stop to check. We pushed up the winding incline until the bridge vanished into the lavender fog behind us.

Aurelia was panting heavily, her face flushed red despite the cold, but her eyes were sharp, filled with a sudden, desperate adrenaline. "We made it..."

"We made it across the gap," Sir Richard corrected grimly, looking up at the trail ahead.

The path upward widened, carved directly into the mountain stone. Half a mile ahead, looming through the crimson tinted fog, stood the colossal outer gates of the Saint Aldren pass. The towering iron portcullis was slammed dead shut.

It looked nothing like a monastery from the outside. And standing before it was something even more terrifying.

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