Devourer

I flew above the mountains, wings slicing through thin air, and looked down at the narrow valley. The whole place was lighting up like a flare. Ether contamination was heavy; whatever hit this land had to be powerful enough to carve a valley straight through a mountain range.
I banked lower, folding my wings slightly to control the descent, and dropped into one of the worst spots, a jagged offshoot branching from the main valley, probably an ether arc that had punched through the mountains. The ground shimmered with that eerie ether blue, the kind that clung to irradiated rock. No wildlife, not even moss. It made sense: adaptation here would be random, pointless. At least the Primordial Font is a full ecosystem sealed inside a mountain range; this was just a wound left to rot.
I slowed, hovering above the broken terrain, and scanned the walls, their glow sharper through my ether vision.
“Nasty place. Might be worth figuring out what happened here,” I muttered, angling downward before darting toward the nearest wall. Alone, unmonitored, I could shift freely. My upper right arm rippled, bones shifting under the skin before reshaping into a spike. I braced against the uneven rock and drove it in with a sharp thrust. Ether signatures flared in my mind, overwhelming for a moment. The attack that scarred this valley was ancient, very ancient, judging from the script woven into the residue.
Chaotic. Crude. More brute force than finesse. Classic old world magic. They never had to be inventive the way the younger, weaker races did. Efficiency is a tactic born of scarcity, not strength; the ancients had no shortage of power.

Nafas asked through the hive mind.
“Ritual magic. This wasn’t fired by a Firstborn,” I said, turning and brushing dust from my arm as it shifted back to its normal form. My gaze swept across the blasted terrain, measuring distance, tracing scars in the rock.
“This might be how the old races managed to kill the Firstborn,” I added, mapping the signature deeper into my mind.
The old races had forced ether to obey by brute assertion, cramming it into jagged scripts that bled power from every seam. It should have collapsed under its own instability, but instead the waste became part of the weapon. Every leaking thread turned into pressure, every break in structure became another spark feeding the surge. The spell burned itself alive, and in doing so unleashed devastation that no efficient script could hope to match.
Even after centuries, the rock carried the echo of the strike, the ground itself etched with its memory. The chaos still lingered in the residue, unstable, like a fire that refused to burn out. It was like a crude cannon, thrown together without care for efficiency and fired as if it were a doomsday weapon. Wasteful, but devastating.
I scanned the valley, its straight scar cutting clean through the mountains. The trajectory was easy to follow. The spell had been unleashed in a single brutal line, with no precision and no control, only overwhelming force.
This must be what killed the Firstborn in the Vulpina Wastes.
I flexed my wings, feeling the cords of power coil tight within them, then poured Essence into every vein and sinew. The world blurred as I fired into the air like a arrow loosed from a bow. Wind screamed past me, as I ripped through the sky and angled toward the wastelands of the desert.
Below, the valley yawned open, unnerving in its unnatural geometry. It ran in a ruler-straight line that no river or hand of nature could have carved. Its walls shimmered with a sickly sheen, jagged slopes of obsidian irradiated by lingering Ether. The black glass caught the light in odd ways as if it was simultaneously reflective and yet not at the same time.
As I flew, I noticed some movement below and engaged my active camouflage, dont want anyone noticing me. Might cause a panic. Then I spotted this crumbling city in the distance, huh, this is a big one.
I darted toward it, wings beating in short bursts of power that kept me streaking across the horizon. From a few kilometers out, the outline of the city came into view, crowned by a rusted sign hammered into the outer wall: Risen City.
Huh. So this was the so-called largest city in the region. Bigger than the border towns, bigger than the half-sunken settlements that clung to the fog’s edge. Close enough to the Ether fog that it could creep close eventually, but far enough that the death-haze didn’t choke it outright. A precarious balance.
I slowed, circling high overhead. From above, the sprawl was obvious, a patchwork shanty of rusted metal sheets, sun-bleached tarps, and rotted planks stitched together into homes. Smoke rose from crooked chimneys, curling against the desert wind. The outer line was ringed by a wall, tall and ugly but solid: scavenged girders, broken stone slabs, boulders mortared in with black pitch. A fortress born not of design, but of desperation and sheer necessity.
The city pulsed with life even from this distance, a raw mass of movement and noise contained within its rough shell. It looked alive, but uneasy, like a beast with its back pressed to the wall, baring its teeth at the wasteland around it.
The steel sheets stood out immediately. In every other land I had crossed, walls were stone, timber, or layered with enchantments. That was the rhythm of this world, magical logic, not industry. Yet here, jagged plates of steel had been hammered together into barricades and roofs, an appearance ripped from somewhere else entirely. To anyone born here it might only look crude, but to me it was hauntingly familiar. Steel sheets like these belonged to my past life, the world I had left behind. The way they bent, the way rust ate into their surface, all of it carried the mark of industry. The kind of thing that spoke of furnaces, presses, and machines that should not exist in this world at all.
It gave the Vulpus a kind of unique edge. Their use of guns was not just a strange cultural quirk, it was tied to this visual truth. Where others leaned on runes and steel-forged blades, the Vulpus inherited the remnants of an industrial age, however fractured it had become. Guns, steel plates, scavenged machines, these were not accidents, they were the natural continuation of a society that reached for tools no other people even considered. To the wider world, they looked like an aberration. But circling over Risen City, I saw the real divide: a culture born of industry surrounded on all sides by a world still bound to stone and sorcery.
The more I looked, the more it made sense that the Vulpus might actually be the most technologically advanced of all the peoples I had seen. I did not sense the hum of enchantments or the quiet glow of wards that marked most cities. If the rest of the world moved forward on magic, then the Vulpus had walked the opposite road, one of grit and machines.
Fascinating stuff really.
Were the Vulpus simply not well suited to magic? That possibility lingered as I circled, watching the smoke drift upward from crude furnaces scattered across the sprawl. If their bloodline carried little affinity for the arcane, it would explain why their culture turned so completely to steel and powder. Where others leaned on wards, charms, and runes, the Vulpus were forced to innovate in different ways, trading spellcraft for machinery. What might seem like weakness could just as easily become strength.
Regardless of the cause, their technology would be useful to me. I had my own modernisation efforts to push forward back in my Empire, and scraps of industry like this could accelerate that vision. Even from the air I could make out the shapes of crude factories, squat and ugly things belching black smoke into the desert sky. They were primitive, but not insignificant. To build steel in bulk meant supply chains, furnaces, and workers who understood process rather than craft. It was a degree of industrialisation, however raw, and in this world that already set them apart.
I had already toyed with the idea among the dwarves, but they resisted at every turn. Their minds were chained to the pursuit of perfection, obsessed with crafting artisanal masterpieces one at a time. Effective in their way, yes, but piecemeal, slow, and utterly incapable of scaling. I had to push them hard for compromise, and even then stamping machines and full industrial lines remained absent. To them, anything that did not carry the mark of the master’s hand was a desecration of their craft.
The Vulpus, though, seemed different. They were not trying to create the perfect sword or the flawless shield, they were trying to produce what they needed in bulk, to keep a people alive against scarcity and danger. That was a mindset I could work with. The more I studied the smoke rising from their workshops, the more I wondered if the Vulpus might be more than just gunslingers. They could be the industrial arm I needed, the missing piece that would let my Empire move from experiments and compromises into true modernisation.
Thus far I have been compromising with the Hive, churning out mass produced soldiers and beasts to mimic an industrial army. Artillery, heavy armour, shock troops, all standardized and stamped out in numbers that make the battlefield predictable, with a few aces hidden in reserve. It works. It wins fights. But it is still imitation, a factory floor that copies what other worlds do without changing the rules of the game here.
A true industrial revolution with magic on the table changes everything. Imagine production lines where rune-smiths and foundry hands work side by side, where a press not only stamps metal but imprints a basic ward into every plate that comes out. Mix the dwarves precision with Vulpus scale and the Hive workforce and you get volume, quality, and the uncanny boost of enchantment.
Of course there are problems. You need to bend tradition into assembly lines. But those are solvable problems. The Vulpus give me the bones of industry. The dwarves give me the engineering eye. The Hive gives me production capacity. With those three aligned I would not merely field armies. I would manufacture a new order. My oh my, the things I could do with that.
Alright, let’s file that away for later. For now, I need to check on my hive as it scours the fog. Truth be told, I had no idea where the gate was before I came here. All I knew was that it lay somewhere in Vulpina Maxima, or more accurately, what people now call the Vulpina Wastes.
With half the continent shattered before my arrival, the gate could just as easily have sunk beneath the drowned half of the land. That was where Montis came in. Trying to comb through every scrap of Vulpina Maxima myself would have taken years.

“Vulpina Maxima” had always been a catch-all phrase. In truth, it referred to the Wastes’ mainland, the Harrowed Waters, and the Land of Shattered Bones. That was enough territory to swallow Zarima, Elysia, and Western Voleria combined. Finding the gate, roughly the size of a building, would have been like hunting for a needle in a haystack the size of a castle. Not exactly efficient.
Fortunately, Montis’s expedition and O’Neer’s intelligence narrowed it down. The gate was somewhere on the mainland of the Vulpina Wastes. Good news, yes, but that still left me with an area larger than Elysia, and not exactly easy ground to cover. With the desert sands swallowing half the ruins, the gate could easily be buried, blending in with the rubble.
My hive was spreading out regardless. If nothing else, it gave me a chance to map the land and maybe get lucky. Besides, I did not want Montis’s expedition slaughtered the moment they set foot inside the fog. Reports said the fog hid vicious, Ether-mutated beasts, and my hive was already taking heavy losses. Not surprising, really. Ether-mutated creatures have always been nightmares to fight.
I shot toward the fog, following the coordinates that marked one of the battlefields. My hive was already locked in a brutal fight with an Ether-mutated monstrosity.
When I landed heavily on the torn ground, the creature’s shape came into full view. It stood on four limbs, each one elongated and bent at unnatural angles, the joints bulging outward as though calcified over repeated breaks. The weight of its body pressed deep craters into the soil with every step, leaving a film of moisture that seeped from open pores along its legs.
Its hide was bare, the skin stretched taut and translucent in places, revealing thick networks of blackened veins that pulsed visibly beneath the surface. Across its frame were numerous growths, spherical and irregular, inflating and collapsing in a rhythm that did not match its breathing. Some of these masses twitched as if animated independently, distorting the musculature around them.
The head carried three eyes, though not in any symmetrical pattern. Two protruded high on the left side of the skull, slightly misaligned, while a solitary, larger eye bulged from the right, its surface cloudy and veined. The jaw was set crookedly, slanting across the face as if broken and never healed, with teeth that varied wildly in size and placement. Some were needle-thin and packed too tightly, others long and uneven, growing sideways as if there had been no space for them.
Along its spine, portions of bone had pierced through the skin, forming ridges that resembled splintered armor plates. The back was fissured with lesions that leaked a thin vapor when strained, the mist dispersing into the fog around it. The odor that drifted from its body was acrid, a mixture of iron, damp soil, and a faint chemical sharpness that lingered.
Its movements were irregular, lacking the smooth coordination of natural musculature. The legs jerked in sudden bursts, followed by pauses where the entire frame seemed to twitch as if uncertain of its own balance. Even in stillness, the body quivered in small, involuntary motions, as though the flesh had not fully agreed to hold together.
This one was tough, my senses told me as much, but even if that wasn't the case, the piles of dead hive soldiers next to it were more than enough proof of what it is. I told Nafas to kill as many as she could find, their essence would be useful, mutated and ruined it may be.
I raised my arm blades and the beast locked its gaze on me.
I grinned its been awhile since I had a good fight.