Six years is a long time to carry a secret. Long enough that the weight of it stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like bone—something structural, something you'd collapse without.
At thirteen, Draven Whitlock stood a head taller than most boys his age, lean and sharp-edged in the way that serious training produces: no wasted muscle, no wasted movement. The Whitlock silver ran through his hair at the temples—faint, like frost threatening a window—and his eyes had taken on that particular quality common to soldiers far older than him, the kind of stillness that made strangers uncomfortable without knowing why.
He had reached mid-grade warrior three months ago.
Gareth had noted it with a single, quiet nod—the highest praise the man was capable of—and then immediately doubled the training load. That was fine. Draven had expected it. What he hadn't expected was the transfer order that arrived two weeks later, stamped with the southern garrison's seal: a temporary assignment to the barracks at Ashveil, forty miles from the front of what the commanders were calling the Corruption.
He stood now at the edge of Ashveil's southern wall, watching it.
The Corruption did not announce itself the way fire did. There was no dramatic boundary, no clear line where the world ended and the wrongness began. It crept. That was the only word for it. The trees nearest the wall had started losing their color first—bark fading to a dull, ashen grey before darkening entirely to black, as though something beneath the surface was drinking the life out of them from the roots up. Up close, Draven could see the veins. Thin at first, then thickening as they climbed—threads of deep crimson that pulsed faintly beneath the blackened bark, tracing the shape of the tree's old life like a mockery of it. At night, they glowed. Not brightly. Just enough to be seen, a slow red throb in the dark, steady as a diseased heartbeat.
The creatures that wandered out from the deeper Corruption glowed the same way.
Draven had watched the garrison soldiers drag a corrupted wolf carcass through the gates two days ago. What had once been a large animal was barely recognizable—its fur burnt to black ash that flaked off with every movement, its body swollen in wrong places, the skin stretched thin enough to see the red veins branching underneath like cracked earth after a drought. Its eyes, even dead, held a residual crimson light that faded slowly, unwillingly, as though the Corruption inside it didn't understand that the body had stopped.
Nobody touched it without gloves. Nobody stood downwind of it if they could help it.
Draven had stared at it for a long time, remembering.
In his previous life, by the time he was old enough to understand what the Corruption was, it had already consumed the entire southern region. The scholars of his era had theories—demonic contamination, a failed ritual, a wound in the world that had never closed. None of them had agreed. None of them had solved it. And the demon army, when they finally came through those crimson portal gates in 1371, had come from the direction of the Corruption first.
He turned from the wall before anyone could notice how long he'd been standing there.
Midnight found the garrison quiet.
The southern posting attracted veterans too worn for active combat and green recruits too new to know where they'd been sent. Neither group slept lightly—the veterans from habit, the recruits from fear. But habit and fear both had edges, and at the third hour past midnight, those edges dulled. Draven had timed it over four nights of careful observation.
He slipped out through the drainage passage on the eastern side—too narrow for a grown man, barely manageable for him—and landed in the wet grass beyond the wall without a sound. No sword. A blade catches moonlight. Instead he carried two short daggers, a pouch of medical herbs, and the kind of alertness that only comes from having already died once.
The tree line swallowed him immediately.
The forest south of Ashveil had no official name on any garrison map. The soldiers called it the Tangle, and within his first dozen steps Draven understood why. The canopy sealed overhead like a closed fist, cutting the moonlight to nothing. Roots rose from the ground at irregular angles, slick with moisture, crossing and recrossing each other until the forest floor became something to be navigated rather than walked. The air was thick and humid, carrying the smell of rot—but not ordinary rot. Something sweeter beneath it. Something wrong.
He activated Mana Sense immediately.
Corrupted signatures lit up around him like embers in the dark. A beetle the size of his fist moved across a nearby root, its shell entirely black, red light seeping through the cracks in its carapace. A bird sat motionless on a low branch above him, its feathers burnt to ash, its small body threaded so densely with crimson veins that it glowed like a coal. It tracked him with one eye—flat, burning red—and did not move. Something large shifted in the undergrowth to his left, its mana signature so saturated with Corruption that his Mana Sense blurred trying to read it. He stopped. Controlled his breathing. Angled away through the roots with the careful patience of someone who understood that running was how you died in the dark.
He kept moving south, deeper, and he paid attention to something that a less experienced mind might have dismissed as background noise.
The corrupted mana was getting thicker.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. But with each hundred steps the signatures around him grew denser, more saturated, the red glow in the roots and bark incrementally brighter. He told himself, at first, that it was simply because he was moving deeper into the Tangle—further from the garrison, closer to whatever natural spread of Corruption had taken hold here. That was the logical explanation. The garrison's own scholars maintained that the Corruption radiated outward from the southern badlands, a slow tide moving north.
But Mana Sense didn't lie, and what it was telling him didn't match a tide moving north.
It was telling him he was moving toward something.
He slowed his pace without fully stopping, recalibrating. A tide spreads uniformly, thinning as it travels. What he was reading felt more like a gradient—a concentration that increased with direction, as though the corrupted mana in every root and creature and vein of glowing soil was not spreading outward from somewhere far away, but draining inward toward somewhere close. The trees here were not infected at their edges and clean at their cores. They were more corrupted the further south he walked, their bark blacker, their veins thicker, their red light brighter and steadier, pulsing with an almost rhythmic intensity.
Something is producing this, he thought, and the thought arrived quietly, the way realizations do when they've been building for longer than you noticed.
He filed it away and kept moving.
The ground began to slope downward.
As it did, the forest changed. The Tangle thinned—not because the Corruption eased, but because nothing could grow properly here anymore. The trees were fewer and further apart, their trunks so blackened they looked carbonized, their forms twisted into shapes that had stopped resembling trees and started resembling something else. Limbs curled inward. Roots rose from the earth and arched back down like ribcages. The red veins here were no longer thin threads. They were thick ropes of pulsing crimson light that ran along every surface, pooling in the hollows between roots, bleeding slowly into the soil until the ground itself seemed to breathe with a dim, sick luminescence.
The corrupted mana pressed against his Mana Sense like heat from an open furnace.
He almost didn't see the cave. Not because it was hidden, but because by the time it came into view, his attention was fractured between the readings flooding his Mana Sense and the effort of keeping his footing on the slope. It was only when he paused to recalibrate that he looked up and saw it.
A cave mouth, wide and low, set into the base of a rocky hillside where the slope leveled off. No carved edges, no architecture—just rock, ancient and unhewn, the opening dark as a held breath. The hill above it was solid black, every centimeter of stone and soil so thoroughly consumed by Corruption that the rock glistened like obsidian in the red light. The veins here were not threading through anything. They were the surface. Dense mats of crimson, tangled and layered, pulsing in slow, heavy waves that emanated outward from the cave mouth the way heat emanates from a fire—steadily, in all directions, without end.
Draven stopped at the edge of it and pressed his Mana Sense forward carefully, the way you'd extend a hand into dark water to test the temperature.
The pressure that came back was immense.
Not like the forest above, where the Corruption was a texture in the air, a contamination layered over existing mana. This was different. This was the source—concentrated, ancient, and utterly indifferent to the distinction between inside and outside. It poured from the cave the way water pours from a cracked vessel: continuously, naturally, without effort. Every red vein in every blackened tree in every kilometer of Tangle he had walked through tonight traced back, he understood now with cold and absolute clarity, to this opening in the earth.
This is where it comes from.
Not the southern badlands. Not some distant demonic contamination spreading slowly northward across generations. Here. This cave. This hill. The scholars in his previous life had spent decades arguing over the origin of the Corruption, drawing maps and constructing theories and dying before they reached conclusions, and the answer had been sitting in a forest forty miles from an undermanned garrison the entire time.
He stood very still, breathing slowly, letting the realization settle into him the way cold settles into stone—thoroughly, without drama.
Within the flood of corrupted mana pouring from the cave, his Mana Sense caught other things beneath the surface. Something vast and slow, breathing in intervals too long to measure. Something smaller and numerous, moving in repetitive, deliberate routes through the dark inside. And beneath both—far beneath, deeper than his sense could properly reach—something that produced no signature at all, something that simply drew everything around it inward like a drain, silent and patient and very, very old.
He did not go in. He was thirteen years old with two daggers and a Mana Sense that had just redlined trying to read the cave's entrance. Whatever was inside had been there long enough to rot an entire region of the world from the inside out, and it would still be there when he was ready. He will come back, tomorrow, with better equipment.
Alone? I must go alone, no one should know, that's the best.
He turned and walked back up through the red-glowing dark, his mind already moving ahead to the question that now outweighed every other plan he had carried into this second life.
What is inside that cave?