The Weight of Ascension
The tunnels groaned beneath her feet like dying throats. Cracks spiderwebbed along the ceiling, dust drifting down like the ash of ancient prayers. The very stone seemed to recoil from her passage, shrinking into itself as if the rock could feel her—and feared her becoming.
Eliana walked with the silence of a thing that should not be. Her body was breaking itself apart again, then reforging stronger. Ligaments thickened like cables pulled taut beneath her skin, bones grinding against themselves in silent agony. Her flesh itched with growth, new muscle writhing beneath the old. Veins glowed faintly with magic, pulsing like the heartbeat of some buried god. Her claws, now longer, dragged along the stone as she passed, trailing sparks.
And the whispers followed.
Some hers.
Most not.
They scratched at her skull like nails tapping glass. They laughed without mouths. They remembered things she had not yet done.
"Monster."
"Breaker."
"Unmothered."
"You will never be enough."
But she kept walking.
Her eyes had changed. No longer human, no longer goblin. Not quite orc. They burned from within—gold rimmed with red, as if flame lived behind the irises. Her scent had changed too. The goblins could smell it. Death. Fire. The marrow-deep stench of something rising from the dirt that should have stayed buried.
They fled before her.
Pale, sharp faces turning.
Slipping into cracks in the walls.
Hiding beneath bones.
Praying to gods that had long since choked on their own blood.
Her name spread like a sickness through the tunnels.
Broken Flame.
Corpse-Eater.
The Becoming.
They spoke it not as prophecy.
But as warning.
As curse.
Yet not all fled. Some watched.
There were eyes behind walls. Slits in stone. Reflections in pools of black water that never rippled. The old ones—the survivors, the kings of rot, the murderers of murderers—watched her with interest. With hunger. With something else… something colder.
They remembered the rites. They remembered what it meant when the blood spoke first.
And they wondered…
Could she truly become one of them?
Or would she become something worse?
Far beneath the city, the dark pulsed with breathless anticipation. The forges were still. The war drums silenced. The city itself seemed to exhale.
Because in the deepest parts of the tunnels, in places where light dared not linger and the walls wept with old gore, they all felt the shift.
A tremor in the food chain.
A crack in the hierarchy.
A storm was building in the bones of the world, and her name was etched into its eye.
Eliana did not smile.
She only walked.
And behind her, the shadows dragged the corpses of cowards into the dark.
Korgath the Wall
The first to strike was Korgath.
No whispers followed him. No schemes. He did not kill with poison or politics. He was war—pure, thunderous, unapologetic. The tunnels called him "The Wall" because nothing had ever moved him. Not beast. Not blade. Not betrayal.
Until now.
He emerged from the smoke-choked depths like a god of old—one carved from meat and blood, not marble. Seven feet of muscle pulled tight across ancient scars, each one a name buried, a rival erased. His armor was made from skulls stitched with sinew, his breath like a forge belching iron heat. And his axe—taller than most goblins—was not a weapon. It was an execution.
The crowd parted in silence, not out of reverence—out of survival.
He looked at Eliana and grinned, teeth filed to jagged stumps. Not mockery. Appetite.
No words passed between them.
They were beyond words.
This was not a duel.
This was history screaming itself into flesh and bone.
Korgath moved first, and the tunnel shuddered.
His axe descended like judgment. A single, obliterating arc that shattered a stone pillar into gravel. The shockwave hurled lesser goblins from their perches, bones snapping like dry twigs against the walls. Dust and blood filled the air like fog.
But Eliana was no longer bound by flesh alone.
She moved.
Fast—too fast.
Her body a blur of shadow and claw, slipping between the tremors of his strikes, a whisper gliding past a scream. Her counter was surgical—two slashes across his abdomen. Shallow, but precise. Enough to draw blood. Enough to make him feel.
He didn't roar. He laughed.
And then the fight truly began.
Steel met claw. Fire met fury. The world narrowed into a blur of violence. Korgath fought like an avalanche, crushing everything in his path. Walls cracked. Ceilings caved. Blood-slick stones split beneath his boots. His strikes turned the cavern into a war drum, each blow ringing with the weight of extinction.
But Eliana didn't block. She didn't meet force with force.
She moved.
Twisting around each strike like smoke through a broken cage. Her claws tore at ligaments. Her magic lashed out like serpents, biting into exposed nerves. She danced in his blind spots, carving ruin into his body—bit by bit—until the great Wall began to bleed from too many places to count.
And then he roared—not in rage.
In recognition.
Because for the first time in an age, Korgath understood fear.
He lunged in desperation, reckless, wild. His axe screamed through the air in a final cleave, a death sentence swung wide. But Eliana was already above him, her body riding the air like a curse.
She landed on his shoulders, her claws sinking into the meat of his neck.
And with one savage twist—
Rip.
Blood geysered skyward, splattering the walls in arcs of arterial crimson. Eliana didn't stop. Her fingers, hooked like blades, dug deeper. She found the spine—and pulled.
A sound like wet wood snapping echoed through the ruined corridor.
Korgath's body collapsed a moment later. No scream. No defiance. Just a heavy, meaty crunch as he hit the earth. A monument reduced to carrion.
Then, silence.
Not stunned.
Paralyzed.
Dozens had watched. Hundreds. Hobgoblins. Warlords. Elders. Slayers. And not one of them moved.
The torches flickered against stone slick with blood, and her silhouette—drenched, gasping, glowing with evolution's fire—towered over the broken husk of their champion.
Something ancient shifted in the air.
A predator had stepped into their ecosystem.
Eliana looked up, slow, deliberate. Her eyes met the crowd.
No words.
No mercy.
Only hunger.
And in that breathless moment, they knew.
The Wall had fallen.
The old ways were dead.
And something far worse had taken root.
Eliana Valerius was not a rumor.
She was coming.
And she would not stop until the tunnels ran red.
The Cunning of Mogrin
They came in waves.
But not all carried axes.
Not all wanted a fight.
Some wanted her undone by inches.
Mogrin was the whisper between executions. The shadow behind promotions. The strategist no one remembered seeing, only the consequences of his plans. His face was always in half-darkness, his eyes too still, too knowing. He didn't kill with weapons. He killed with anticipation.
And now, he hunted Eliana—not as prey, but as a puzzle.
The tunnels he led her through were narrow, suffocating. The walls pulsed with mildew and old blood, the air choked with rot and the faint scent of death left too long in stillness. Strange glyphs marked the stone—traps disguised as scripture. Pressure plates nestled like teeth beneath dust. Strings thin as spiderwebs stretched across the path, waiting for a single misstep.
She stepped over them all.
Mogrin watched from afar, wrapped in shadow, convinced she would falter.
But Eliana was not walking.
She was listening.
Every grain of stone that shifted. Every trembling of bowstrings hidden above. Every tiny heartbeat above her head.
The ambush triggered.
Dozens of arrows screamed through the air like insect swarms, raining death from hidden alcoves above. A perfect killing storm—relentless, silent, efficient.
But the arrows passed through nothing.
She was already gone.
A whisper of old magic lit her fingertips, the stones answering her like loyal hounds. With a growl in a language no longer spoken by men, she raised her hand—and the ceiling obeyed.
Collapse.
The rock above screamed as it split and caved in. Mogrin's hunters—a dozen skilled assassins—vanished beneath tons of crushing weight. Limbs cracked. Blood sprayed through fissures. Some tried to crawl out. The stone was not done. It swallowed them whole, sealing them inside a stone womb, their death cries muffled into stillborn silence.
Mogrin turned to run.
He made it five steps.
A clawed hand erupted from the shadows, snapping around his ankle. With inhuman force, it ripped him from the ground. He slammed into the dirt, teeth shattering. Again. Again. His limbs flailed. She dragged him back into the darkness—not for mercy.
For message.
He screamed once—shrill, high-pitched, humiliating. It echoed like a child's death cry. She didn't kill him clean. She peeled him open, inch by inch, his bones scraping along the floor. His blood left streaks on the wall—writing in a language made from agony.
His final moments weren't heard.
They were felt.
The darkness devoured him whole.
And when Eliana emerged from that shadow-choked tunnel, her eyes glowed like coals sunk in frost, her breath steaming with rage and revelation.
No more traps.
No more schemes.
They would come at her now with blades, because minds had failed.
And they would die just the same.
The Dance of Vryz
Then came Vryz.
The dancer.
He didn't walk. He glided—like silence sharpened into a blade. His eyes held no fear, only arrogance, the kind born from too many easy kills. Twin daggers rested in his hands like extensions of thought. The metal shimmered, whispering of poisons too old to name, too cruel to describe.
He circled Eliana like a serpent tasting blood in the air.
"Let's bleed a little," he said, grinning, voice like silk dragged across bone.
And then he moved.
Faster than breath, faster than comprehension.
The first slash tore through her thigh—shallow, clean.
The second whispered past her shoulder, parting flesh like paper.
He vanished.
Reappeared behind her.
A cut bloomed across her back.
Then another.
And another.
He didn't fight to kill. He fought to humiliate—to carve her open slowly, to force her onto her knees, to make her crawl before the end.
Blood trickled from her limbs. Dripped from her chin.
Vryz danced, his blades singing a dirge.
"You bleed well," he whispered, eyes gleaming. "How long until you stop moving?"
But Eliana didn't bleed like prey.
She bled like a storm waking up.
The tunnel darkened—not from lack of light, but from the weight of her fury. Her body slackened, pretending weakness. One eye closed as if dimming with fatigue.
He lunged in for the kill.
And she struck.
A snarl exploded from her throat—raw, primal, not human.
Her body twisted with impossible speed. One clawed hand lashed out, catching his wrist mid-strike. Bones crunched. Vryz's smirk shattered into a howl.
She didn't stop.
Her other hand drove upward, a flash of talons and bone—piercing through his ribs, rending cartilage, puncturing his heart with a sickening wet crunch. His body convulsed, caught mid-dance, frozen in a grotesque final pirouette.
He stared at her.
Not with rage. Not even fear.
Just disbelief.
Like a god who'd been betrayed by his own myth.
His daggers clattered to the floor, still slick with her blood.
Then his body followed—folding inward, limbs twitching, throat gurgling nonsense prayers as the life drained from his eyes.
The silence afterward wasn't quiet.
It was thick—a living thing, heavy with dread.
The walls seemed to draw back, the stone itself shrinking away from her. Her wounds steamed. Her breathing slowed. And slowly, the blood that dripped from her flesh began to burn—searing away weakness, cauterizing pain.
She didn't just kill Vryz.
She ended his legacy.
No more whispers of "the Dancer."
Only the echo of claws through bone.
The Culling
One after another.
The names once spoken in reverence—Grek the Iron Maw, Doma the Flame Binder, the Crimson Twins, Ulnak of the Thousand Eyes—were now etched into the stone not as praise but as epitaphs, scraped into blood-wet walls by trembling hands.
Eliana didn't hunt them.
She culled them.
With the slow, deliberate efficiency of something less than merciful, more than mortal.
Grek fell first. A titan of bone and iron, his jaw had cracked skulls by the dozens. He waited for her in the arena pit—a mockery of tradition, where death was performance. He roared, voice shaking stalactites loose from the cavern ceiling.
Eliana stepped through his shadow and ripped out his jaw.
Not clean.
Not quick.
She pulled, fingers digging into the hinge as his body thrashed, screaming with no voice. His iron teeth clattered against the stone floor like coins offered to a god that had already turned away.
Doma came next, her breath a serpent of fire, her body cloaked in molten chains. She fought with the fury of the old rites—summoning flame, wielding sacred ash, calling down curses that had once melted tribes.
Eliana smiled through the blaze.
She walked through the inferno with blistering skin that refused to peel, with a gait that spoke of inevitability. The flame bent around her like it remembered something older—something darker.
She tackled Doma into her own summoning pit.
The screams lasted days.
And the Twins? They died together. Not from blades. Not from claws. But from belief—Eliana turned their ritual against them. She infiltrated their shrine, whispered forgotten truths into their dreams, made them see the truth of what she was.
They lit the pyre themselves.
They burned, singing to her name.
And she watched—eyes black as pitch, smile empty.
The strong no longer gathered. They hid. Their war halls stood abandoned, the banners of conquest reduced to silence and rot. Shrines grew quiet, the old songs of goblin triumph replaced with the low sobbing of acolytes too afraid to pray.
And all the while—Eliana changed.
Each death was not an end but a devouring.
She fed.
On their bones, yes. On their blood, yes. But more than that—on their power, their purpose, their evolution.
She drank their will like wine aged in agony.
Magic wound itself tighter in her flesh, threading through tendon, stitching horror into sinew. Her spine cracked and reformed. Her skin grew thicker, darker, touched by something that whispered beneath the skin of the world.
She no longer walked like a goblin. No longer smelled like prey.
Her voice—when she used it—carried the resonance of ancient things that didn't belong in tunnels. The kind of voice that made lesser goblins fall to their knees, vomiting fear they didn't understand.
She was no longer rising.
She was becoming.
Something the world had forgotten how to name.
And the tunnels—those endless, winding guts of the earth—quivered with a truth the survivors dared not speak:
The culling was not over.
It had only just begun.
The Flesh of a New World
Her flesh pulsed with change.
Not growth—mutation. Unholy inheritance.
Veins throbbed black and gold beneath her skin like serpents trying to escape. Her blood no longer whispered with heat; it burned cold, alchemical, unnatural. It sang of old gods buried under bone, of rituals long forgotten by sane races. Her shoulders split open as her body broadened, muscles knotting over muscle like a strangler vine. Her ribs snapped—splintered like dry wood—only to knit themselves anew, broader, stronger, armored beneath layers of darkened meat.
Her fingers cracked, popped, and stretched. Nails lengthened into claws—not decorative, not dainty, but instruments of rending. Her skin bruised, bled, then hardened, turning from pale flesh to mottled shades of ash and rust, textured like leather left to rot in a war zone.
Her face… changed last.
Cheekbones sharpened. Jaws widened. Teeth pushed free from her gums—no longer white, no longer human, but yellowed and jagged, shaped for tearing and holding and feasting.
And her voice—
It died.
The soft lilt of a noblewoman's tongue, the gentle grace that once held poetry and prayer? Gone. Burned out. What emerged was not speech. It was the echo of stone cracking under pressure, the thunder of a war drum in a burial chamber, a growl birthed not from lungs but from deep beneath the soul.
She roared once. Just once. It echoed through the tunnels for hours.
And then, when the silence returned, she wept.
Curled in a hollow carved by her own violence, bones scattered around her like discarded thoughts, Eliana shook—shoulders heaving, throat convulsing. She wept not for her body. Not for the pain. But for the last flicker of memory that escaped her like smoke through broken fingers.
A hand in her hair. A mother's voice. The smell of rose oil and summer. Laughter at a dinner table. Soft bread. A name whispered in love.
Gone.
Devoured.
That was the final offering. The last sacrifice to the furnace of her evolution.
And then… she laughed.
Low. Bitter. Loud.
Not the laugh of triumph.
Not the laugh of joy.
It was the laughter of a cathedral collapsing.
A scream dressed in mirth.
Because she understood, now.
She was not broken.
She was being reforged.
Every torn ligament, every dead memory, every blood-soaked scream had not unmade her—they had sculpted her. With a chisel made of agony. With a hammer forged in hate.
She was not Eliana Rooin Valerius anymore.
She was something else.
Something new.
Something the world had no name for.
But it would learn.
And it would tremble.
The Queen of Slaughter
By week's end, the upper halls of the goblin city were paved in bones—not arranged with care, not honored like relics, but trampled, broken, pressed into the stone like mosaic tiles made of suffering.
The scent was beyond rot. It was chemical, spiritual—a stench of erased lineage, of goblin ancestry scraped raw and burned into vapor. Even the tunnels themselves—those ancient arteries of the underworld—seemed to writhe, bleeding filth and old curses, unable to digest what she had become.
Torches no longer burned.
She extinguished them personally, shoving her hands into the sconces until oil ignited across her arms and she shrieked, not in pain, but in triumph. She replaced the light with soulfire—green and screaming, coiling like tendrils of the dead trying to crawl home.
She fed it with the voices of the fallen.
Each warband she crushed became kindling. Each shaman silenced added color to the flame. Screams weren't heard anymore; they were trapped in the fire, endlessly looping, echoing through the tunnels like choirs from hell. The goblins who still lived crawled in the darkness like vermin blinded by apocalypse. They didn't speak. They didn't whisper her name.
They bowed.
Some flayed their own skin in worship. Others tore out their tongues, offering them like gifts at her feet. One carved her face into his chest with broken bone—laughing, sobbing, praying for death.
She did not grant it.
Her throne was no seat. It was a monument of extinction—a pyre of skulls, stacked high, fused with blood and bile, the crowns of war chiefs still etched with runes now blackened and defiled. Ribs jutted from its sides like spikes. Jawbones hung like ornaments. Eyeless sockets stared outward in frozen horror.
She did not sit.
She perched, crouched like a carrion bird, watching her kingdom bleed beneath her, watching the filth she had conquered worship through silence.
They called her nothing.
Because nothing they could say could capture her.
She was not a queen.
Queens wore gowns. Queens held courts. Queens ruled with law.
She ruled with butchery.
She was not a goddess.
Goddesses inspired. Uplifted. Demanded offerings of gold or prayer.
She demanded screams, demanded organs, demanded fear so pure it made flesh forget how to breathe.
She was something older.
Something worse.
A beast of vengeance, wearing the hollow mask of a woman long dead. A face that once held hope now twisted into a snarl frozen by evolution and agony. The woman who once danced in sunlit gardens had drowned in her own blood long ago.
What remained was an echo of wrath and ruin.
And in the silence of the tunnels, in the cold stillness of victory, her eyes opened wider.
Because now that she ruled this pit of monsters…
She needed more.
Above. Beyond. Blood not yet spilled. Names not yet carved into bone.
The Queen of Slaughter had risen.
And the world had not yet screamed enough.
Orc-Blood Dream
That night, sleep did not come gently.
It clawed at her.
Dragged her down like a corpse pulled beneath still waters. There was no warmth, no peace, no velvet black. Only visions twisted like shattered bones, tangled in rot and prophecy.
She dreamt of towers—not of stone, but bone, spiraling like vertebrae into a sky choked with ash. The towers screamed with wind, and the wind was filled with voices—guttural, ancient, hungry.
Tusks of obsidian split the earth in jagged rows like the jaws of a buried god. Eyes opened in the sky—red, lidless, judgmental. Something beneath the soil breathed. Each exhale warped the land, each inhale pulled at her bones, whispering truths her soul had no name for.
And in a mirror of still black water, she saw herself.
Not the woman she had once been. Not even the monster she was now.
An orc's face. Broad. Brutal. Beautiful in its horror. Skin like iron bark. Eyes like molten coal. Tusks curling from her jaw like declarations of wrath. Her hair was gone, replaced by threads of smoldering ash, drifting around her head like smoke from an altar never meant for gods.
She did not flinch.
She did not cry.
She only looked… and nodded.
Because it no longer felt unfamiliar.
Because it felt like home.
Then came the voice.
Not heard. Felt.
Inside her marrow. Beneath her skin. Older than gods, older than time, older than death.
"You are not done."
"You are not yet whole."
It spoke in every tongue she had ever known—and in many she didn't. A choir of hunger. A hymn of becoming. Each syllable peeled something away from her. Her fear. Her sorrow. Her name.
And in its place… clarity.
She woke with a gasp. Not of fright.
But of need.
Blood still slicked her skin, dried beneath her claws, clotted in the creases of her lips. Flames licked the cavern walls in broken halos, shadows dancing in reverence. Her muscles twitched. Her eyes burned.
And she smiled.
Wide. Toothsome. Unnatural.
With teeth she had not been born with.
Because now, she understood.
This wasn't the end of her ascension.
It was the womb.
She was still forming.
And the world above?
The sunlit cities? The noble houses? The men who knelt behind lies and law?
They would see her return.
They would see her rise.
And they would drown in blood trying to stop it.