Dark Parasyte
Chapter 41: Of Fanatics and Revenants

Chapter 41: Of Fanatics and Revenants

General Kaelen Dros had traveled under heavy escort for two days without pause, his command carriage flanked by mounted Veilguard outriders and banners of the Northern Front. The highland wind hissed against the reinforced steel of the carriage, whispering through arrow slits and armor seams alike. The roads had grown too quiet for his taste and quiet in the Iron March seldom meant peace. It meant aftermath. And Dros had learned, long ago, that aftermath carried no banners. Only smoke.

Inside the carriage, he reread the final field transcript, its ink smudged by cold and urgency. Halberreach, reduced to rubble. Thornvault, blackened stone and ash. Greybarrow and Saint Edrin’s Hold, abandoned, desecrated. Churches in Hightarn, Barrowreach, and Saint Lavellan left in silence, their clergy slaughtered.

The reports had been gathered by scouts, couriers who had passed too close to the locations o notice the strange eeriness and smoke. The enemy left nothing behind. Not even motive.

He hadn’t waited for permission to come to Blackspire Bastion. No formal request, nor a heralded entrance. His arrival was not announced by trumpets but by the rumble of wheels against stone and the creak of carriage joints stiff with frost. When the doors opened, Kaelen stepped out like a shadow stitched to iron. His cloak snapped in the wind and his boots clanged once, twice, against the flagstones.

Blackspire rose before him like a scar the earth had tried and failed to heal. Its runed arch was no gate of welcome. It was a warning. He passed beneath it with the weight of ruined bastions on his shoulders.

The Assembly Chamber had already convened.

A ring of commanders, fortress liaisons, and Veilguard operatives sat around a black iron table scored with decades of marks and burn scars. The High March Assembly. Less a council, more a war engine waiting to be aimed. At its head sat Grand Marshal Varkos Thorne, unmoving, banner draped behind him in place of a throne. Its threads soaked in victories and vows.

Veilguard dossiers lay in the center, sealed in bone thread wax. Just the kind of truth that could not be archived without fire. Black parchment for black deeds.

The Veilguard themselves did not speak. They watched. Their masks were blank, their presence heavier than armor. The agents had no names, no insignias, only clearance levels and the silence of death warrants. Most in the room had once feared becoming subjects of a Veilguard investigation. Today, they feared being excluded.

Kaelen placed his own report beside theirs. It was thinner. But the blood in its folds had not yet dried.

The Grand Marshal read first. Others waited. Rank in Iron March wasn’t measured by epaulettes or dress uniform. It was measured in what you could carry through hell and whether you came back walking or dragged.

"Had it been the Feralis," Brigadier Venholt said at last, her voice low but firm, "we’d have heard war drums. Seen movement on the southern ridges. Jackalkin don’t loot quietly."

"Nor demons," said Admiral Velcross. He had already begun drawing up coastal wind patterns for scent traces. "If Nefrath moved, we’d taste brimstone on the tide."

"And elves..." Thorne’s voice came slow, grave. "Elves do not murder in silence. They mark their kills with memory. And pride."

Silence pressed the chamber flat.

It wasn’t what had been found that disturbed the Assembly. It was what hadn’t.

No banners. No symbols. No captured enemy corpses. No patterns from any known playbook.

Three actions were authorized before the table grew cold:

First, launch Operation Echo Watch, a Veilguard deep sweep using embedded, untraceable agents to sweep the March’s outer zones and unseal dormant surveillance glyphs in known approach corridors.

Second, command access to the Deep Vaults, retrieving threat models from the last twenty years. Any instance that showed signs of cognitive suppression, magical masking, or surgical decimation.

Third, dispatch an envoy to Goldhaven under diplomatic pretense to quietly question the Gilded Dominion whether any "accidents" or "unexplained silences" had touched their outer provinces.

In Iron March, war was expected. Brutality, planned for.

But this... this was something else.

Whatever had walked through their borders had left no tracks. And in a land of stone and steel, that was the most frightening thing of all.

--

It had been five days since Corvin’s assault began.

Twelve forts. Nine chapels. Three minor towns. A dozen garrisons. Over two thousand dead, and not a single messenger left behind to warn the next. He moved like plague through the veins of the Holy Verranate, and the faithful never saw him coming. Not even the alarm wards had time to blink, half of them were corrupted before activation, the others simply... bypassed.

The scale of the devastation wasn’t just physical. It was psychological. Entire towns woke to find their outer defenses gone, their priests slaughtered, their neighboring towns slaughtered or shattered beyond sanctification. There was no pattern, no prophecy to predict it. Corvin had become something worse than a nightmare. He was noise without signal. Death without doctrine.

Now he sat cross legged inside a dripping cavern nestled in a granite bluff west of the ruins of the Church of the Crimson Chalice. The floor glistened with cold mineral wash, and faint phosphorescence clung to the jagged walls, casting sickly blue light over the sigils he had drawn in a perfect circle. Each rune had been etched with meticulous attention and surrounded by a lattice of bone dust and spirit wax. Precise, intentional, heavy with silent intent.

He wasn’t here for beauty. He wasn’t even here for conquest.

He had been here once before. The Church of the Crimson Chalice had been the target of his second task from the Synod. An earlier slaughter, clean and decisive. That mission had been quieter, more surgical. A target had been marked, and he had erased it along with a most of the cathedral’s inner sanctum. He remembered the silence of the aftermath, the way the incense smoke turned grey in the light of the shattered stained glass, the way the murals peeled when the blood reached the rafters.

This time was different. There were no names now. Only numbers.

The destruction he left behind would set back the Verranate for a generation. But that wasn’t why he continued. He need more people, resources, supplies. Most importantly though it was personal.

Corvin still remembered the whispers in Farsi. The muffled boots in darkened alley. The mechanical sound of the trigger. The moment when the lights blinked twice and the world changed forever. The Quds Force had ended his life on Earth, sanctifying their bullets with scripture.

He reminisced a lost life’s memories. Another planet, another religius fanaticism. He can still see the burned bodies of ’infidels’ set on fire by the extremists in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan... Same mindset of the thousands of bodies in his inventory once had. He did not felt like he slayed intelligence life forms. Even his first hund of Orcs had left more weight in conscience.

He used Mind Walking on most of the priests and purifiers. The atrocities he witnessed were enough to give him reason to invent napalm and use it on this cursed place.

Returning to his ’new’ reality, he felt good. He wasn’t complaining. Verthalis had been... generous. Generus enough to give him resources to raise his power level to above an Archmagus in less than a year. His hunts were nearly meaningless with the prey he needed to increase his level and move to his second evolution. He needed more, much more archmagi, and soon planarchs.

But killing the fanatics, extremists, zealots, or in polite terms the devout? That still scratched an itch nothing else could reach. This wasn’t a simple vengeance of a fantastical reality. But some instincts were deeper than belief. And this one? It had teeth.

Behind him, Bob waited silently, arms folded across his broad, armored chest, boots sunken slightly in the damp clay. His monstrous bulk was partially obscured by shadow, but his eyes gleamed faintly with obedience and something else, something halfway between awareness and anticipation.

It was Bob who had convinced him to what he was going now.

Corvin hadn’t intended to rebuild a unit. He wasn’t sentimental like that. But Bob’s effectiveness, how he moved without needing orders, how he blocked the spellfire that should have torn Corvin’s spine in Ardencross, how he knew when to end a scream and when to let it echo.. had stirred something.

He missed his old team.

Their jokes, their flaws, their friction. But most importantly: their function. Their silence in chaos. Their rhythm. The way each one knew their role without speaking it aloud.

So he had begun selecting corpses with more care.

He took out the first now. A High Priest from Ardencross. The man’s robes were still torn from when Bob had threw him ten feet into the air and crushed his chest against the altar. The ceremonial silver filigree embedded in the priest’s scapular still bore a crack from the impact. His hands, now stiff, had once held the flame of doctrine. Now they were just tools.

Corvin laid the corpse in the center of the ritual circle. The air grew still.

"One down," he murmured. "Hundreds more to go."

Each ritual was calibrated. The rise of each revenant reinforced not just the spell, but the intention. With every reanimation, he wasn’t just building an army, he was reconstructing a rhythm. A pattern. A mirror of the unit he once trusted with his life.

They would walk again. Not as men of faith. But as revenants of vengeance.

And this time, they would not be buried so easily.

--

Magistra Valyne Yrithis sat alone in the upper terrace of the Umbraxis Arcanum, her lesson notes abandoned beside a half finished spell array. The missive still flickered above her desk. Sent to Umraxis Arcanum from the Triach about her role as an Envoy of Synod.

Find Corvin Blackmoor. In the Gilded Dominion.

She scoffed aloud, the sound sharp against the carved obsidian balcony rail. "Find a mercenary in a merchant kingdom," she muttered. "Might as well ask me to pluck starlight from a fishpond."

Her sarcasm dried the moment four shadows stepped into view.

Not a metaphor, nor an exaggeration. Actual shadows, moving without wind, without weight.

The Hands of the Triach.

Everyone knew the stories, Shadows were their designation. Agents who served the Triarch directly. Beyond doctrine, beyond hierarchy. They were whispers made flesh. They were the ones who came when the Synod didn’t want evidence of having sent anyone at all.

One of them approached. Not taller than a common scribe, but the air around him folded like water around a blade.

"When will you be ready to move Magistra?" he asked, voice like silk draped over iron.

Valyne did not flinch, but her fingers curled slightly.

"I’ll need another instructor assigned to cover my lectures," she said evenly, "and a full day to prepare. Travel rations, lesson notes for the next instructor... appropriate attires."

The shadow gave a silent nod. Then he vanished.

Not walked away. Not stepped back. Vanished.

So did the others. One blink, and they were no longer in her reality.

Valyne stood still for a long moment, her breath shallow, her posture suddenly too aware of itself.

"If that’s the effect they have on me," she whispered, "may the Dark Mother judge our enemies with tenfold wrath."

She began packing immediately.

She paused, then sighed. "And it would be nice," she added, "if I had a space mage’s luxury of internal storage."

Her eyes drifted to the long shelves in her study, each one precisely organized, each one a liability on the road. "When I first learned space affinity allowed personal storage, I nearly turned green with envy. I suppose if I had someone to teach me to bend Aether that way, I could make it. Only if i could find a person good enough to understand the concept itself.." She sighed again and continued her packing.