They stepped off the boat in staggered silence. Water lapped faintly against the hull behind them, and yet it sounded distant, like it didn’t belong in this world anymore.
Boots met the shore with a soft crunch, but it wasn’t the coarse resistance of sand beneath them. The texture was wrong. Muffled. Too brittle. Too light.
Ludwig crouched low, brushing two fingers across the strange white terrain, and lifted a pinch between gloved fingers.
It flaked instantly—dusty, soft, like powdered shell. But finer. It didn’t cling like sand would. Instead, it shimmered faintly under the ghost-light of the massive eye above them.
He didn’t need to speak to know what it was. Bone. Crushed and washed, aged and crumbled into something that now passed as earth. This entire stretch of beach—if it could be called that—was made of it.
Not sand. Not stone.
Remains.
‘How many millions of pieces of bone are needed to make something like this…’ Ludwig’s mental question was answered by The Knight King.
“It isn’t bone of this world, it descended along with the thing that now rules this place…”
Ludwig nodded in understanding as he stood slowly. His gaze traced the rest of the terrain.
The trees that bordered the beach loomed with unnatural weight. Their trunks were twisted, not with age but with torment. Bark cracked in long gashes like dried wounds, pitch-black sap weeping from some of them in slow, syrupy lines. The roots clawed out from beneath the bone-dust shore, writhing in shapes that suggested movement—though none visibly stirred.
Above them, the branches clawed skyward, warped and thorny, as though straining to rip down the eye overhead.
Vines slung low between them, heavy with strange, swollen growths. Some glowed with a dim, pinkish hue—throbbing faintly like hearts struggling to beat. Others leaked viscous, milky fluids that dripped with an audible hiss where they struck the ground.
A scent wafted in. Subtle, but unmistakable.
Putrid sweetness.
The kind of aroma one might find in an abandoned greenhouse—floral rot, overripe fruit fermenting in its own decay. Cloying, thick, and laced with the undertone of something spoiled just out of reach.
One of the vampire hunters grimaced and sniffed the air.
“What the hell is that smell?”
The other glanced sideways, his brow furrowed. “Rot. Mixed with… perfume.”
The Sai-wielder crouched beside a patch of disturbed ground and poked it with the tip of his blade. It collapsed inward easily, revealing a soft impression—footsteps, or what might’ve been. Nothing human. Nothing that walked in straight lines.
“There should be a road,” he muttered. “Last time we landed, there was a path. Markers. Campsites. We even left torches behind…”
Ludwig rose from his crouch beside the shoreline and turned toward them.
“Then you should ask where all of it went.”
The words fell like stone into a still pond. The hunters didn’t reply. They didn’t need to.
They could see it themselves.
There were no torches. No paths. No remnants of structure. Even the broken boats—if there were any left—had been swallowed by the mist and the trees. Erased. As if time had rushed forward here without witness, and memory had been rewritten beneath the Queen’s gaze.
The third hunter, older and more composed, stepped forward, his falchion lowered but not relaxed. He scanned the tree line slowly, carefully, his jaw clenched.
He didn’t speak right away.
But when he did, his voice was lower. Heavier.
“I don’t like this,” he said. “This feels like the energy of a Dungeon. This whole place-it’s as if it was imprinted upon the Dawn Islands.”
Ludwig tilted his head. His eyes narrowed as the sense of weight deepened again. The kind that sat in the ribs. Behind the eyes.
He could feel it.
Not something watching.
Something waiting.
“We’re being watched,” he said as he drew the broken Shard of Durandal.
None of the others argued. Not now.
Because even the most prideful among them—hunter or not—could feel that they’d passed into something different.
One of the sailors, still holding the oar he’d brought ashore, let it fall from trembling hands. It hit the ground with a hollow tap. He looked pale. Sweating, despite the cold. His eyes darted between the trees, fixated on shadows that hadn’t moved.
He took a shaky step back.
Then another.
Ludwig’s hand twitched near his chain, not drawing it yet—but feeling.
Feeling that familiar crawl up the spine, that warning which came not from instinct, but from the curse animating his very soul.
The forest was watching.
Not with eyes.
But with breath.
And heartbeat.
And desire.
The Sai-wielder was the first to break the stillness.
“We need to move,” he said. “Standing here like idiots makes us easy targets. If anything still lives here—anything intelligent—it’ll already know we’ve landed.”
The oldest hunter nodded. “Fan out. Keep five-meter spacing. We move until we find high ground, or something worth reporting. No fighting unless you’re forced.”
He glanced to Ludwig.
“You included. Don’t go swinging spells at everything that moves. Not until we know what’s what.”
Ludwig didn’t answer.
But his expression was enough.
They trudged forward, one by one, past the line where bone-dust beach became warped root and twisted vine. Each step they took left only the faintest imprint behind. And even that began to fade within seconds, as if the ground refused to remember them.
Somewhere in the trees ahead, a single thorned branch shuddered without wind.
A bulbous growth pulsed once. Then twice.
And deep in the forest, far beyond their hearing—something smiled.
***
A small group of people huddled up together at the inside of a small cave inside the Dawn Islands. The cave itself was barely wide enough for two men to walk into side by side, and slightly large enough to host about half a dozen people inside it.
Four men and two women were staying inside the cave, Only one man among the group wore the Vampire Hunter leather and clothes, while the rest were soldiers and help that wore the robes of the Baltimore Barony and crest the Blue Boar.
“Yall think we’ll get some help?” one of the women asked.
“The baron will definitely send someone to check on us Beatrice, don’t worry,” one of the soldiers of the baron spoke, though his tone lacked any conviction, not even enough to convince himself.
“Yall give too much credit for nobles,” the Vampire Hunter said, “You lot are probably already struck off as a collateral and loss.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” the other woman said, “The baron definitely sent help!”
“Well, sent it or not,” the Vampire Hunter said, “If you keep shouting I doubt they’ll find us if they even come here.” He said as he peered through the cave’s entrance.
The Red Moonlight was washing all over the island, and deep where the cave was, things were much different than the outskirts or the shore.
Here, was where the monsters roamed, hundreds of them, all weeping, crying, sorrowfully, desperately, and most of all, wholeheartedly for their queen, the Queen that moved through the shadows of the night, the Queen that wept and cried.
All the party at the cave could hear was her resounding cries as she called.
“My children…bring me my children…”