The Thorn-Wombed Queen did not stir at first.
She hung as she always had. A cruciform colossus of rot and reverence, vines coiled around her limbs like ceremonial bindings, her crown of bone petals tilted just slightly toward the horizon. The paladins stood in their circle, spears lifted, lips moving in rigid devotion. Their prayers sounded like waves breaking over stone: rhythmic, trembling, hollow. So had grown bolder. A few had even begun to approach, step by armored step, beneath the illusion that the thing was harmless, or maybe even spent and utterly useless.
What ca instead was a shift in the air, subtle at first, a pressure behind the lungs, like the mont before thunder. The paladins closest to the root-ring took half a step back, their armor clinking, their discipline montarily frayed. Sothing about the Queen's stillness had changed. She no longer hung limp like an offering or a grotesque relic. The vines that held her were tense now. Drawn taut
Then her head moved.
Not much. Not enough to be dramatic. Just a subtle tilt. A motion that would be imperceptible unless you had been watching her long enough to know that she should not move. Then ca a sound, it wasn't a scream, it was a rupture.
Dozens of paladins cried out as roots beneath their feet exploded upward in snarled, bloody coils. They didn't burst from the ground like arrows they blood. Petals of fibrous muscle split stone and sacred sigils, sprouting thorns the length of daggers. So roots wrapped around legs. Others pierced through shields. One drove straight through a man's torso, lifting him into the air with such force that his armor split at the seams.
"Formation! Hold…" one shouted, only to be dragged beneath the soil by a vine that had slipped through his greaves.
His screams were all that the battlefield could hear until they were no more.
The Queen's arms uncurled.
Her ribcage twisted, peeling open with a wet, groaning sound. From the crevice blood thorns not in dozens, but hundreds like razored petals extending out in all directions. The ground quaked, and in one shuddering motion, a wave of corrupted rootwork surged outward from beneath her, tearing through the blessed wards etched by the Order, shattering their periter with ease.
Paladins scread as vines burst through the ground beneath them. Thorns erupted from within their boots and split mail from inside their greaves. One man, radiant in white gold, was lifted screaming into the air, impaled through the gut by a spine of bark that kept growing twisting, coiling until he resembled a grotesque marionette of at and vine.
Barbed fingers rose into the air, elongating like glass-blown spears. Her spine straightened with a crunch that echoed like a cracking mountain. A new ring of roots blood outward, desecrating the remaining glyphs the Order had etched. Holy symbols flickered once and then went dark, choked by petals.
Then she sang.
A humming resonance that vibrated in the marrow, not the ears. The Queen had no mouth, no lungs, but the music still poured forth, not as voice, but as presence. It crept into the folds of cloth, into the chinks of armor, into the soft wet cavities between thought and mory.
Several of the younger paladins began to scream.
One stabbed himself in the thigh just to keep from listening to her.
Clerics tried to raise their wards. Thin dos of golden light flared to life for a mont, only for thorns to slide through the barrier's edge like knives through silk. One cleric fell backward, shrieking, as sothing invisible burrowed beneath her skin. Her body twisted once and went limp.
The Queen didn't react. Her head simply swayed, ever so slightly, as though enjoying the rhythm of the slaughter.
And still, the Order hesitated.
Their sacred formation had broken. Half the outer ring was gone, consud or turned inside-out by the flowering curse that now spread like roots under the battlefield. Their chant had collapsed into whimpers.
Only the Cardinal remained steadfast.
He stood at the heart of the collapse, surrounded by carnage and unraveling faith, his crimson and gold mantle unmarred by the gore around him. His staff of was driven into the ground at his feet, glowing faintly with consecrated symbols, and he had not moved an inch.
Her chest tore wide once more not as a reaction to pain, but as if enacting a rite she had perford before. The fleshy ribs split along old seams, blooming outward like wet petals, and from that raw, cavernous wound ca a surge of white light. It was not divine. Too bright to soothe and too slow to kill, it pulsed outward in a silent bloom of radiant pressure that swept across the field like a wave of judgnt. The forward line of paladins halted mid-charge. Their knees buckled as though gravity had betrayed them, and their screams rang out not from wounds dealt by blade or claw, but from sothing deeper, a pressure that burst forth from within their skulls. Blood stread from their nostrils, ears, and under their fingernails, eyes rolling white as they collapsed in heaps of twitching steel.
Across the line, clerics attempted to cast their barriers, hands rising, prayers already trembling from their lips, but the wards failed as quickly as they were ford, fading into shattered halos of broken glyphs. The air refused them. The ground no longer recognized their authority.
While the paladins charged in, maces in hand and great swords willing to carry divine justice, but they found no justice in this field, only death and decay, and the blood of their brethren and their spilled wantonly and aninglessly.
With her next stride, the Queen left behind a trail of scorched earth. The moss curled and blackened, flowers wilted into ash, and even the light itself around her limbs bent and dimd. She stepped again. From her body sprouted fresh vines tipped with jagged thorns, each limb arching forward like coiled serpents. One lashed out, impaling a paladin clean through the throat and lifting him from the ground in a wet jerk of motion. His legs kicked once before going limp. The vine dragged him backward into the canopy of flesh and thorn behind the Queen's shifting form, his corpse cradled like a prize.
Another flare of light rippled along her back, a pulse traveling down the tangle of roots buried in the earth.
The echoes of her singing, screaming for a child to co ho. Each ti she would sing, her words would dig deep into the minds of the paladins that seed to find no solace in their prayers.
And suddenly, the barbed roots that had lain dormant across the battlefield began to glow with red-orange veins, faint at first, then searing. The earth heaved a mont later as a dozen of them erupted, not upward, but outward, petals of force and pressure exploding in every direction. The air cracked with sound, and the sll of burnt steel filled the clearing. Paladins were thrown from their feet like toys, their armor peeled away in molten ribbons. So did not even scream; they simply vanished, shredded mid-motion in the heat and force.
There didn't seem to be any hope for the Holy Order, the Queen was taking over the board.
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