The marsh village had settled into a strange, tense rhythm. The air, thick with the scent of damp earth and the lingering fear of the Watcher, was now also charged with the crackle of frustrated power and the low, patient voice of an ancient teacher.
Arrion stood in a cleared area on the soggy ground behind the stilt-huts, the livid lightning scar on his chest exposed. Before him, a shallow, murky pool of water rested, its surface a dull mirror to the grey sky. Master Lo leaned on his darkwood staff a few paces away, his flint-grey eyes missing nothing. Kestrel watched from the doorway of their hut, sharp eyes wary, a half-peeled root forgotten in her hands.
"Again," Lo said, his voice a dry rustle. "From the core. Not a push. A guide."
Arrion closed his eyes, focusing inward. He could feel it—the Vindicator's power, a storm contained within the vessel of his flesh. It was a torrent of lightning-blue energy, restless and potent. In the fight with the Watcher, he had tried to dam this torrent and redirect its entire force outward. The backfire, the scar, was the result.
Now, he tried to follow Lo's teaching. He visualized not a dam, but a channel. A gentle sluice gate. He sought a single drop from that inner storm.
Sweat beaded on his brow. He extended a hand over the pool, palm down. He focused on a single point on the water's surface. He willed a tiny current of energy to leave him, to gently depress the water.
A spark, jagged and wild, snapped from his fingertip with a sharp crack. It struck the water not with a gentle depression, but with a violent, hissing explosion, sending a plume of steam and muddy water a foot into the air. The recoil jolted up his arm, making his teeth ache.
He let out a frustrated breath, smoke curling from his fingertip.
Lo sighed, a sound of profound, weary disappointment. It was the tenth such failure that morning. "Your body," the old man said, not unkindly, but with devastating clarity, "was tempered in a crucible of planar fire and divine favor. It ascended. It holds the rank of a Vindicator. But your mind, boy. Your thoughts. Your instincts." He tapped his own temple with a bony finger. "They are still the instincts of a hunter from a backwater village. A powerful, clever hunter, but a hunter nonetheless. You see a problem as something to strike, to outmuscle, to ambush. Power, to you, is still just a bigger bow, a sharper axe."
Arrion opened his eyes, the truth of the words a colder blow than any physical strike. He thought of the Delver, of the desperate, catastrophic rip in reality. He thought of the backfired aura. Lo was right. His body had been thrust into a higher league of existence, but his mentality lagged behind, trying to apply the simple, direct physics of Hearthstone to the fluid dynamics of cosmic energy.
"I am trying," Arrion ground out, his voice tight.
"Trying is what children do when they first hold a sword," Lo replied. "You do not have the luxury of 'trying.' You are holding a sun in a glass jar, and you are shaking it because you think the noise is impressive." He gestured at the still-settling pool. "A child of the Storm-Scribes, with a tenth of your raw potential, could have made that water dance in a perfect, rising spiral without breaking a sweat. Because they were taught. They were raised with the metaphor of flow, of current, of harmony. You were raised with the metaphor of the kill-shot."
He walked closer, his staff sinking slightly into the soft ground. "Time, which was already a tightening noose, is now fraying at the end." His flinty eyes grew distant, as if listening to a distant, discordant music. "The breach in the Chorus has been felt. The sanctioned… adjustment."
Arrion and Kestrel both stiffened. "The what?" Kestrel asked, stepping out of the doorway.
Lo ignored her question, his focus on Arrion. "The Verdant King is fading. To hold his line against the blight, he has invoked a loophole, tapped a primordial well using the Ghost-Orchid and the Dream-Weaver as conduits. It is a perversion of the Covenant, a bending of the rules that govern the world. Necessary, perhaps. But it has sent a tremor through the hierarchy of things. The other Beasts are divided. Some are furious. The stability of the cosmic order, which depends on those rules being absolute, has been compromised."
The air seemed to grow colder. Arrion understood, viscerally, what this meant. His desperate act in the hills had drawn eyes. The King's desperate act in the chorus was now drawing… scrutiny. And retaliation.
"The Powers that watch," Lo continued, his voice dropping, "are now impatient. A Warden walks the earth—you, Arrion Haelend, though you barely comprehend the title—wielding power that can touch the planar walls, aligned with a Mythic Beast who is now breaking the very laws he is sworn to uphold. You are not just an anomaly. You are becoming a symbol of unraveling."
He planted his staff firmly in the mud. "Therefore, your grace period is over. The theoretical lessons end. You have one week."
"One week for what?" Arrion asked, a cold knot forming in his gut.
"To master the fundamental channeling of your power. Not to perfection. To basic, reliable competency. And to use it to seek out and kill the beast in the deep mire—the true source, not just its Watcher puppet. The corruption there is a tributary of the same poison afflicting the King. Sever it. Prove you can be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. That you can mend a small part of the weave, not just tear it."
Lo's gaze was unforgiving. "Or," he said, the word hanging in the damp air like a blade, "you give up. You turn around. You go back to your village, to your tavern-keeping father and your blighted fields. You lay down Nightshade, you let the Thorn go dormant, and you live out your life as a very large, very sad man. You let the bones of the world—the Mythic Beasts, the Azure Emperor, the forces you are too ignorant to fight—do their jobs, even if that job is now a war. You remove yourself as a volatile variable."
The ultimatum was stark. Mastery or surrender. Death at the hands of the marsh-beast, or a living death of irrelevance.
Kestrel stepped forward, her face pale with anger. "That's impossible! A week? You saw him! He can't move a drop of water! You're sending him to his death! That's not teaching, that's… execution!"
Lo turned his flinty eyes on her. For the first time, she saw not just patience or wisdom in them, but a glimpse of something terrifyingly ancient and ruthless. "Little Warden," he said, and the title was a lash. "You were charged with his safety. Do you think 'safety' means coddling him while the cosmos decides he is a threat to be eliminated? The Powers he has attracted are not patient teachers. They are custodians of reality. If he cannot learn restraint, they will impose it. Permanently. They would sooner shatter the Covenant of Non-Interference entirely—unleashing forces that would make the Glutton-From-Below look like a gnat—than allow an untrained, unstable Warden to continue blundering through the delicate tapestry of the Chorus. His next mistake could be the one that snaps the thread holding back the Aether-Behemoth."
He looked back at Arrion, who stood rigid, the weight of cosmic stakes crushing down on him more heavily than any physical burden. "Harsh? Yes. This is not a sparring match. This is triage. I am here to give you the one, desperate chance to become something other than a casualty or a catalyst for apocalypse. In one week, you either demonstrate you can be a responsible wielder of the power fate has shoved into your hands, or you prove you are too dangerous to be allowed to wield it at all. The marsh beast is your test. Pass, and you earn the right to continue toward the Marches, to face the true crack, with more lessons to come. Fail…" Lo shrugged, a gesture of devastating finality. "Well, the beast will have done the world a service, and saved the Powers the trouble."
He turned and began to walk back toward the village. "The lesson for today is over. Your training now is survival. The beast is in the deepest sinkhole, where the old peat-cutter's shack vanished. It festers there, drawing strength from the Glutton's seepage. Find it. Channel your power. Kill it. Or die. The clock," he said, without looking back, "started the moment the Verdant King bent the rules. You have seven days."
Lo disappeared between the huts, leaving Arrion and Kestrel in the silent clearing, the only sound the drip of water from the trees and the frantic beating of their own hearts.
Kestrel walked to Arrion's side. She looked at the lightning scar, then at his face, which was set in an expression of grim, overwhelmed determination. "He's a bastard," she said, but there was no heat in it, only fear.
"He's right," Arrion said, his voice hollow. He looked at his hands, the hands that could draw the monstrous bow, that could wield Nightshade, that had torn a hole in the world. They were trembling. Not with fatigue, but with the terrifying awareness of his own profound inadequacy. "I'm a child with a lit torch in a powder magazine. And everyone who understands what gunpowder is, is telling me to put it out or get out."
He closed his eyes, not in meditation, but in a moment of sheer, crushing despair. The journey from Hearthstone had been one of external threats: stalkers, guards, chimeras. Now, the greatest threat was himself. His own power, his own ignorance, was the enemy. And he had one week to conquer it, or be dismantled by forces that saw him not as a person, but as a dangerous glitch in the system.
He opened his eyes, the grey-blue irises hardening. The despair was still there, a cold pool in his gut, but over it, the stubborn, unyielding will of the Haelend line was rising. He was a Warden's son. He had made a vow to protect.
"We find the sinkhole," he said to Kestrel, his voice regaining a shred of its usual gravel. "We map the approaches. You will be my eyes. And I…" he looked at the pool, at the spot he'd explosively failed to gently touch, "…I have to learn to move a river, one drop at a time, before the week is out. Starting now."
He didn't wait for her reply. He turned back to the pool, knelt before it, and extended his hand once more, his entire being focused on the impossible, gentle task. Not a blast. A current. Not a release. A channel.
The fate of more than he knew depended on a hunter from Hearthstone learning, in seven days, the first lesson of gods: how to touch the world without breaking it. The pressure was absolute, the teacher merciless, and the exam was a fight to the death in a festering sinkhole. The education of Arrion Haelend had entered its final, desperate phase.