The air grew thick, heavy, and wet as they descended from the last bony, broken foothills into the true wetlands that guarded the approach to the Drakespine Marches. This was not the trackless, predatory fen of the Sorrowflow. This was a settled, subdued misery—a vast, soggy plain of reeds, murky channels, and stagnant pools, all under a perpetually weeping grey sky. The land itself seemed hunched in resignation. They were in the Fringe Mire, the soggy buffer between the outer world and the iron-fisted dominion of Marquis Ralke.
Kestrel, her senses honed by the Verdant King's breath, pointed to a thin plume of grey smoke smudging the horizon. "A settlement. Fisher-folk, likely. Last outpost before the Marches proper."
Arrion nodded, his new height making him feel even more exposed on the flat, open bog. The thorn at his chest pulsed with a low, steady warmth, but it was a dulled warmth here, as if the pervasive damp and despair of the place muffled even the King's gift. Briar's hooves made sucking noises in the mud, his head low.
The village, when they reached it, was a cluster of a dozen hovels built on stilts over the dark water, connected by precarious plank walkways. The boats drawn up on the mud-flats were old, patched with desperate ingenuity. The people who emerged to watch them pass were thin, their faces etched with a weariness that went beyond hard labor. It was the look of prey. Their eyes flickered not with curiosity, but with a dull, assessing fear, quickly hidden.
An old man, leaning on a twisted staff of bog-oak, met them at the central platform. He was the village headman, Tharn. His back was bent, but his eyes, sunk deep in a web of wrinkles, were sharp and desperate.
"Strangers," he said, his voice a reed-dry whisper. "You come from the broken hills. We felt the… disturbance." He looked Arrion up and down, a flicker of something like agonizing hope in his gaze. "You are large. You carry weapons that are not for fishing."
"We are passing through," Arrion said, his voice rumbling. "To the Marches."
A collective, almost imperceptible shudder went through the few villagers gathered. Tharn's knuckles whitened on his staff. "Then you seek Ralke's eye. A foolish quest. But before that, you must pass the Watcher in the Deep Mire. It has taken our nets. Our traps. Two of our young men who went to reason with it." He swallowed. "Last night, it took my granddaughter's dog from the very platform. It is growing bold. Hungry."
Kestrel's eyes narrowed. "What is it?"
"We do not know. It moves under the water. It is… many-limbed. It shrieks like a dying bird. It smells of old rot and iron." Tharn looked directly at Arrion, all pretense gone. "You are the biggest thing to come through here in a generation. We offer you dry shelter, what food we have, safe passage knowledge through the deepest channels… if you face the Watcher. Please."
It was not a request. It was a drowning man's grasp at a floating log. Arrion saw the truth in the villagers' hollow cheeks, in the way mothers held children too tightly. This was Ralke's domain already—a place where terror was the local tax, and hope was a currency long spent. He looked at Kestrel. She gave a slight, grim nod. They needed the shelter, the knowledge. And the giant from Hearthstone had never been able to walk away from a plea for protection.
"We will face it," Arrion said.
That night, they prepared. The villagers gave them the driest hut, a pathetic feast of boiled roots and stringy fish, and a nervous, whispered description of where the attacks were concentrated—a deep, black pool at the end of the longest channel, where an old peat-cutter's shack had sunk long ago.
As dusk bled into a starless, moonless night, Arrion took his position on a wide, reinforced platform at the pool's edge. Kestrel was hidden in the reeds twenty yards back, a bone javelin she'd kept from the hills in her hand, her breathing slowed to nothing. Briar was safely stabled in the village center. The only sounds were the drip of condensation, the slosh of sluggish water, and the frantic beating of Arrion's own heart.
The attack came not with a warning, but with an eruption.
The black water ten feet from the platform simply exploded. What surged forth was a nightmare of the deep mire. It had the bloated, segmented body of a colossal lung-fish, but its flesh was pallid, studded with weeping sores. From this body thrashed six long, jointed limbs that were part crab-leg, part insectoid claw, ending in cruel, pincer-like grips. Its head was a distorted wedge, dominated by a circular maw lined with spiraling rows of needle-teeth. And set above that maw were two bulbous, perfectly black eyes that reflected no light—only a depthless hunger. It stank of stagnant water, rusted metal, and profound decay. It was no natural beast; it was a thing twisted by the same slow, corrupting seep that had caused the blight.
It shrieked—the sound Tharn had described, a high, tearing noise that felt like icicles dragged down the spine.
Arrion met its charge. Nightshade flashed, severing the tip of one lashing limb in a spray of foul ichor. The creature recoiled, then came again, impossibly fast for its size. A pincer clipped his armored shoulder, the impact shuddering through him. He slammed the pommel of his sword into its head, feeling chitin crack. It backed into the deeper water, then surged forward, using its bulk to ram the platform.
The timbers groaned. Arrion staggered, fighting for balance on the now-tilting planks. The creature was strong, tougher than the Fen-Lurker, more aggressive than the Stalkers. It fought with a mindless, relentless fury. A claw caught his thigh, not piercing the leather but bruising deep. The tail-end of its body whipped around, slamming into his chest and knocking the wind from him.
He was being pushed back. Hard. For the first time since his ascension, he felt his strength being matched, his endurance tested. Panic, cold and sharp, sliced through his focus. He couldn't lose. Not here, in this forgotten bog, to this corrupted thing.
Falling back on the new, raw power within him, he did what he had done in the hills, but consciously now. He reached for the Vindicator's Aura.
He planted his feet, ignoring the groaning timbers. He drew not on the specific, planar-key of his bloodline, but on the raw, ascended energy of his rank—the storm-force he had bonded with. He sought to project it, to create a shell of crackling, repelling force that would blast the creature back, stun it, give him an opening.
The power answered. It surged up from his core, a torrent of lightning-blue energy. It flooded his meridians, gathered at his skin, prepared to erupt outward in a wave of concussive thunder.
But he did not understand the channels. He did not know the principles of release. He was a novice trying to fire a cannon by lighting the breech.
The energy backfired.
Instead of radiating out in a controlled wave, it met the resistance of his own untrained flesh and the oppressive, magic-deadening damp of the mire, and rebounded inward. There was a deafening CRACK that was silent to the outside world but echoed like the end of time within his bones. A searing, white-hot agony, a thousand times worse than any physical wound, exploded at the center of his chest.
The force of the internal detonation blew him off his feet, hurling him backward off the platform to slam into the muddy bank. He lay there, gasping, the world a red haze of pain.
The creature, confused by the sudden flash of light and the violent movement, hesitated, churning the water.
Kestrel didn't hesitate. She rose from the reeds, drew back her arm with all her strength, and hurled the heavy bone javelin. It was not a killing shot, but it was true. It struck the creature in one of its bulbous black eyes, sinking deep.
The Watcher shrieked again, this time in undeniable pain. It thrashed, retreating into the black depths of the pool, leaving a trail of bubbling foulness behind.
Kestrel was at Arrion's side in moments. "Arrion! Look at me!"
He couldn't speak. He could only clutch his chest. The leather of his jerkin was smoldering. With shaking hands, she cut the laces and pulled it open.
Beneath, on the tanned skin of his massive chest, centered over his sternum just above the Verdant King's thorn, was a new mark. It was not a burn, but a scarification of terrifying, beautiful clarity. A single, jagged, lightning-bolt pattern, etched as if by a celestial brand. It was raised, the skin a livid, permanent blue-white, like captured lightning frozen in flesh. Tiny, fractal branches splayed from its main trunk, crawling over his pectorals. It pulsed with a faint, angry light that slowly faded to a dull, aching throb, leaving only the stark, sculpted scar behind.
It was the physical manifestation of his backfired power—a permanent warning etched into his very body. A testament to untrained might and the price of ignorance.
He coughed, tasting ozone and blood. "It's gone?" he managed to rasp.
"For now," Kestrel said, her eyes wide with horror at the scar. "But you… Arrion, what did you do?"
"I tried… to use what I am," he gasped, each breath sending fire through the new scar. "I don't know how."
He allowed her to help him sit up. The pain was subsiding from an inferno to a forge-fire, deep and constant. He looked down at the lightning strike on his chest, a brand more definitive than any tattoo. The Verdant King's thorn lay just below it, the warm wood now juxtaposed against the cold, electric scar.
The message was undeniable. He had the power of a Vindicator. But he wielded it with the understanding of a child, and the world—or his own body—would punish him for it. The path ahead, into Ralke's domain, was now marked not just by external threats, but by the volatile, self-destructive storm sealed within his own skin. The scar was a failure, a lesson, and a permanent reminder: he needed a teacher, or the next backfire would not just scar him; it would shatter him.