Monsters' Cave

The possessed cultists have grown feral, loping on all fours and tearing into anyone within reach. As one lunges for Farnese, Azan pulls her clear at the last instant and guesses narcotics are behind the madness. Farnese takes the explanation, though it stirs memories of the possessed dogs that once hounded her during the chase for the Black Swordsman. The frenzied heretics prove tenacious climbers, scaling the walls toward Isidro, who has to hurl heavier stones to knock them loose. He recalls how the living smoke sank to the cave floor to claim its hosts moments before the knights broke in.

Spotting one of the beasts closing on Casca and Nina, Isidro cannot risk a throw that might strike the girls, so he leaps from his ledge to intervene, only to trip over a heretic's jutting head and tumble down. He crashes squarely onto the back of their attacker, saving them both, though his monkeyish sprawl undercuts the heroics. He introduces himself, promises to get them out, and, flustered at Nina's nakedness, sheepishly offers his vest while shielding himself in embarrassment.

Now cut off from the exit by a churning mass of heretics and knights, Isidro notices the goat-masked leader ascending a narrow trail with a few followers. From his angle he cannot see that the man is heading toward a shadowed cleft in the rock, where only the eyes of the mysterious being and a single spike-tipped tentacle are visible. The tentacle drives into the leader's chest. Soon after, the heretics scatter from what the man has become, and it lets out a booming bleat before plunging into the middle of the fighting.

The transformed creature is far more than a man in a severed goat's head now. Its legs end in hooves, its hands bear an extra finger, the mounted head has come alive and fused to its body, and its lengthened limbs leave it looming over everyone around it. It gores the nearest knight on its curved horns and flings him aside, its next bellow scattering the soldiers toward the cave mouth. In the turmoil Isidro loses sight of Casca, who is soon ringed by possessed heretics.

At the entrance, the waiting knights grow uneasy for their comrades inside. Jerome observes Joachim's obvious distress and correctly reads it as a personal tie to someone within. A dark shape then blurs past them all and bolts into the cave. Unable to break the ring of heretics around Casca, Isidro can only watch as they part solely for the beast, which licks her face and voices its intent to claim her. It hoists her by the arms as a snakelike appendage rises from its groin, poised like a predator over its prey. The chapter closes on that threat just as the black form makes its entrance.