The Madman's Guide to Miracles

The winding stone path leveled out onto a wide, desolate plateau carved into the mountain’s flank.

Through a tear in the crimson-tinted fog, the jagged crags below parted to reveal Blackbriar Manor. It sat like a black iron spike driven into the ribs of the earth, its gothic spires thrusting toward the septic sky. Surrounding the estate was a slow, revolving vortex of ash-colored mist, dense, metallic, and deadly. Even from a mile up the ridge, the suffocating pressure of its domain pressed against my chest like a lead weight.

Aurelia’s breath caught in her throat as her eyes adjusted to the looming silhouette. Sir Richard and the two guards froze in their tracks, their eyes widening in a mix of profound awe and terror.

"By the gods..." Thomas breathed, his voice barely a squeak. "Is that... Blackbriar?"

"The seat of the Steel Empress," Sir Richard whispered, a deep, instinctual reverence bleeding into his tone despite the nightmare surrounding us. "The Unyielding Sovereign. She who broke the Siege of the Seven Gates and carved the Eastern Marches out of raw chaos..."

Aurelia stepped forward, her eyes wide as she stared down at the dark estate, a sudden, desperate glint of hope igniting in her face. "The Lady of Steel... the stories say her army was invincible! She was the grand protector of the High Houses! She was already at the peak of the Superior rank, wasn’t she? Word was she isolated herself down in the manor grounds to refine her catalyst, trying to complete her Ascension Rite and break through to Arbiter!"

She looked at Sir Richard, then back to the distant estate. "If she succeeded... if she’s down there as an Arbiter, her power could clear this corruption! We could ask for sanctuary!"

I blinked, staring at her for a second. Superior rank? Arbiter? Refining a catalyst?

As a transmigrator still trying to piece together the rules of this twisted world, half these titles sounded like gibberish to me. I knew jack about the High Houses or whatever grand hierarchy they assigned to people, but I knew enough about the power system.

I turned my head slightly, giving her a cold, unblinking look over my shoulder.

"Are you out of your mind?" I said flatly. "I don’t care if she was a Superior or an Arbiter or whatever other rank you throw around. She’s corrupted, just like half the things I’ve met here. At least from what an old man told me and what I’ve read on this map, her catalyst refinement went completely wrong when she probably absorbed a piece of the Heart. Whatever is inside that manor now isn’t an a grand warrior, it’s a mutated horror. You walk into that estate looking for sanctuary, and the only thing she’ll do is turn your spine into a hat rack. It’s a total death wish."

Aurelia flinched, the color draining from her face once more as Sir Richard swallowed hard, pulling her back.

I pulled the yellowed leather map from my coat and unrolled it against my forearm.

Under the dim red light, the faint ember representing the Ferryman was crawling north along the perimeter of Blackbriar Manor, barely half a mile ahead of us. He was almost there.

"We can’t bypass the lower slope," I said, rolling the parchment tight and shoving it back into my pocket. "The ridge dead-ends up ahead at a sheer drop. The only path to the mountain pass forces us straight down through Blackbriar’s outer grounds."

"Through the edge of her border," Sir Richard muttered, his voice grim.

"Right through it," I said, looking down at Aurelia. "Keep your eyes on my back and step exactly where I step. If you touch the rusted iron markers on the manor boundary, you won’t survive the night."

We descended the winding slope toward the manor grounds. The air grew ice-cold, smelling of wet rust, scorched hair, and cold blood. Broken iron fences lined the perimeter, twisted like jagged fingers reaching out of the black soil.

Suddenly, the pale ring on my finger burned white-hot against my bone.

Aseren, the priestess rasped in my mind, her voice laced with sharp tension. Look up.

Fifty yards ahead, right where the path intersected the manor’s wrought-iron gates, a tall, cloaked figure stood motionless in the middle of the road.

He wore a tattered black oilskin coat that dripped dark, foul water onto the gravel. In his right hand, he held a long lantern pole; at the end of the chain swung an iron birdcage containing a glowing, twitching human heart that cast a sickly amber light across the fog.

The Ferryman.

He slowly turned his head toward us. Where his face should have been under the deep cowl, there was only a hollow, void-black mask carved with three weeping eye-slits.

Beside me, Thomas and the other guard drew their swords with a sharp metallic clatter. Sir Richard stepped in front of Aurelia, his single eye wide with horror.

The Ferryman raised his free hand, pointing a long, skeletal finger directly at me.

"Aseren voric azthal," a raspy, waterlogged voice echoed from beneath the mask, sounding like two grinding millstones. "You travel with dead meat... on a road that ends in slaughter."

The air around the Ferryman didn’t just feel cold; it felt dead. A crushing, suffocating weight settled over my lungs, so heavy and dense that my knees gave a sickening wobble beneath me.

Every instinct in my body screamed at full volume, a primal alarm firing across every nerve: RUN. HIDE. DIE.

I wanted to throw up. My stomach lurched violently, and a cold sweat instantly drenched my back under my coat. I’d fought horrors before, but this... this was something else entirely. The gap in our Existence was an endless chasm. I was a broken Lesser Beast in a borrowed shell; whatever this thing was, it operated on a scale that made my instincts want to curl into a ball and wait for the end.

I squeezed my eyes shut for half a second, my chest heaving as I tried to force air into starved lungs. Breathe. Just fucking breathe.

"How..." My voice came out as a thin, pathetic rasp. I cleared my throat, forcing my hands to stop trembling as I gripped the worn handle of my heavy cleaver, though deep down I knew the iron chunk was nothing more than a toothpick against him. "How do you know my name?"

The Ferryman didn’t move. The cage swinging from his lantern pole creaked softly on its rusted chain, the glowing heart inside giving a wet, rhythmic twitch that sent waves of amber light pulsing through the ash-colored fog.

"The mud remembers the boot that steps on it," the raspy, waterlogged voice ground out from beneath the black mask. "The stream remembers the blood poured into its depth. You bear the stench of a fallen rank and a stolen shell, Aseren voric azthal. You cannot hide what the Sigil has already marked."

Behind me, Sir Richard collapsed onto one knee, his face gray, his hand clawing at his chest as if the air itself had turned to glass. Thomas and the other guard were bent double, dry-heaving into the black dirt, completely immobilized by the sheer, unbridled aura radiating off the cloaked entity.

"My... my lady..." Sir Richard choked out, his single eye bloodshot as he tried to shield Aurelia with his body. "Don’t... look at it..."

Aurelia was hyperventilating, clutching Sir Richard’s leather tunic with white knuckles, her eyes wide, glassy, and completely dazed. "I can’t... I can’t breathe... Richard, I can’t..."

Aseren, the priestess’s voice cut through the static in my head, cold, sharp, and stripped of all levity. Do not raise your weapon. Do not channel Ether. If you provoke him, he will erase all five of us before your heart beats twice. You are nothing to him right now.

Channel Ether? I thought back through sheer panic, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached. If I knew how to channel Ether in the first place, that’d be fucking great—but I’m unawakened! I don’t have a clue how to use Ether!

My body refused to move. Everything I had my cleaver, my raw physical strength was utterly worthless against an entity that warped the air just by standing in it.

I swallowed a mouthful of bile, staring straight into the three weeping eye-slits of the void-black mask.

"What do you want?" I managed to force through my teeth, every syllable feeling like dragged gravel. "If you came to kill us, we’d already be dead."

The Ferryman slowly lowered his skeletal hand. The heavy, suffocating pressure eased just an inch enough for an agonizing gulp of air to scrape down my throat.

"I do not harvest meat before its time," the entity whispered, the three eye-slits flickering with a faint, ghostly blue light. "I carry the toll. I watch the descent. The Shepherd awaits at the pass... but the Lady of Steel stirs beneath the iron. Choose your crossing wisely, Lesser Beast."

Before I could even force a single word past my dry, frozen lips, the world stopped.

The wind died instantly. The crimson mist hanging over the pass froze mid-swirl, coiling into rigid, motionless spirals.

Then came the weight.

If the Ferryman’s presence was a suffocating pressure, what descended next was a total crushing of reality itself. A suffocating, bottomless aura washed over the plateau, so heavy and absolute that my knees didn’t just wobble they buckled.

A sharp, hot wetness ran down the inside of my thigh. Shame never even registered. There was only terror, raw and absolute, swallowing every other thought. My chest tightened until I could barely breathe, each breath coming out thin and broken. My heart seemed to lose its rhythm entirely, stumbling in my chest while I stood there frozen.

Behind me, Sir Richard crumpled into the black mud. Whatever force held him upright was simply gone, his consciousness snuffed out beneath the sheer weight of her existence. Thomas and the other guard had already fallen, eyes rolled back, bodies completely still.

Aurelia let out a tiny, strangled squeak. Her knees gave way, and she slipped sideways against the basalt rock, her body going limp.

From beneath the wrought-iron archway, the shadows began to move. They spilled across the ground like ink, gathering around a pair of pale, bare feet as they stepped onto the gravel.

Above us, the crimson sky trembled. The color slowly drained from it, darkening into a bruised black. Even the air seemed to grow heavier, as though something about her arrival had forced the world itself to bow.

She walked out from the ash-colored fog.

I looked up, completely mesmerized.

She was terrifying.

Yet, somehow, she was magnificent.

Middle-parted black hair fell in smooth, dark waves over her shoulders, framing a face carved with impossible, cold perfection. Her eyes were ethereal a pale, translucent white that bled into a faint, freezing ice-blue at the irises, glowing like dying stars in the gloom. She wore a heavy black cloak, draped over one shoulder and pinned with a gleaming golden emblem shaped like a shattered anvil.

And her skin...

It wasn’t just metal armor. Sheets of polished, dark steel were literally embedded into her flesh, seamlessly fused as though her body had grown around the iron itself. The metal spiraled up her left arm, trailing along her collarbone, wrapping around her pale neck, and creeping up the sides of her jaw—tracing both her left and right chin in delicate, terrifying veins of cold steel.

She carried the terrible grandeur of a fallen deity, her form seeming hewn from the bones of the earth itself, ancient and beautiful in a way that made the sight of her deeply unsettling.

Those... they’re people. I actually have to kill somehow?

The Ferryman slowly turned his head toward her. For the first time, the cage hanging from his lantern pole stopped swinging. The glowing heart inside went completely still.

Her gaze remained fixed ahead, utterly indifferent to him and to the fallen guards scattered behind her.

Her ethereal, white-blue eyes settled entirely on me.

"A stray mongrel, groveling in the mire, daring to breathe my air and gaze upon my visage unbidden. Sever your own eyes, primate, ere your mere existence offends my sight further."

Her voice descended like an iron decree crystalline, frigid, and dripping with supreme, unshakeable sovereignty.

The heat pooling beneath my clothes only intensified, spreading further with every passing second.

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