The swamp had changed.
It wasn't something you could point to—not an event, not a scream. But every morning, every evening, every beat of shadow felt heavier.
The frogs had gone quiet.
The wind no longer rustled the reeds.
The mist clung to the trees like a curse.
Volneth had fallen silent.
And that silence wasn't empty. It was filled with things unseen. A waiting. A tension. Something that, without ever revealing itself, had taken root.
Even Saran had felt it. But he never spoke of it.
He made me rise before dawn, without a word, and led me into the dry heights where the mist had yet to reach. He made me run, hunt, crawl through mud. He taught me to survive when food ran out, when water turned foul, when pain became routine.
One morning, he led me beyond the carved stones, further than I'd ever gone. We spent three days away from the garrison. He handed me an empty flask, a dull knife, and said, "If you come back alive, you'll have learned something."
During those three days, I ate whatever I could find: roots, small lizards, a fish I managed to club in a stream. Hunger made my thoughts slower, rougher, but sharpened my instincts. Every crack, every breath of wind became a warning. On the second night, I had to sleep in a hollow tree to avoid a landslide triggered by torrential rain. Before climbing up, I built a crude shelter against a fallen stump, covered in wet leaves. Fire was out of the question, but I found a rock still warm from the day's sun. I leaned against it, back sunk into moss, muscles taut.
For the first time in what felt like forever, I looked up at the sky. The clouds had parted after the storm, revealing a pale clarity, speckled with rare stars. The mist, chased away for a moment, let me see the constellations: the Spear, the Crooked Stag, and farther off, the Crown. I didn't know all their names, but my mother used to tell me the stories tied to those stars.
The silence no longer felt heavy. It pulsed with a kind of ancient beauty. And in that nearly solemn stillness, something in me began to relax.
I stayed there until the cold reminded me of the ground, and sleep, at last, took me.
On the third day, at dawn, while mist still kissed the grass, I stumbled upon a massive creature—a mire tusk, as they're called around here. A sort of boar with long legs, caked in mud and bony plates. It rooted through the soil with heavy snorts, just meters from where I was gathering moss. The wind hadn't betrayed me. But my breathing had.
The beast charged. I barely managed to roll behind a dead trunk. Its flank struck the bark with a dry crack, splitting the tree in two. I had no bow, no spear. Just my knife, and the slope of the terrain.
I ran. Not far, just enough to lure it toward the marshy patch I'd crossed the day before. A pocket of soft peat where I had almost sunk. I ran, leapt, and turned at the last second. The creature followed, heavy, relentless.
Its legs sank. Not fully, but enough to slow it. I used the momentum of its head to slip to the side, climbed onto its back with a roar, and drove my knife just beneath its skull, between two bony plates. It thrashed, threw me off. But it was bleeding. I rolled, got up, and hurled a massive stone—one I had spotted stuck in the mud. It landed on the beast's side. And that time, it didn't move again.
I stood there for a while, breath short, arm trembling, covered in filth and blood. It wasn't glory. It was pure survival.
When I returned, boots torn, eyes feverish, Saran tossed me a dry apple. Then, without a word, he made me resume training like those days had been nothing more than another routine drill.
"The swamp will never love you," he had said one morning, snatching a blade from my hands.
"But if you become part of it, it will forget you. And that's already something." Then, softer, "You did well."
It was the first time Saran had ever complimented me.
I sparred with him often, and lost nearly every time. He didn't teach me to win. He taught me to endure, to stay upright, to know the exact moment to flee.
The rest of the time, I trained alone.
In a forgotten clearing, between two moss-choked ruins, I had carved out a circle. A space of silence and sweat. There, I experimented. I stretched my fingers, whispered the words scrawled in my notebook, and let the shadow answer.
Sometimes, it took the shape of a blade—thin, clear as black glass. Sometimes, a skinless hand, or a serpent biting its own tail.
But each form vanished too quickly.
Unstable. Incomplete. Uncontrolled.
I wrote down everything. In a battered old journal, I drew symbols, impressions, spells I kept adjusting. It was a language I had never learned, but somehow, it resonated in me.
I barely slept.
When I did, they weren't dreams—they were visions. Black waters, slit-pupiled eyes open in the silt.
Mouthless voices.
Names I didn't recognize, but understood all the same.
I would wake in a sweat. Resume training. Fight off sleep through exhaustion.I felt myself slipping.
But I refused to stop.
Lireth often lingered on the fringes. She'd appear without warning, then vanish just as easily. Sometimes I'd find her perched on a stone, chin resting on her knees, staring at an insect or a twisted root, as if waiting for something to speak. She didn't ask questions. She looked — and that was often worse. Her silence wasn't ignorance. It was something else. Something knowing. One day, as I packed away my training gear, she handed me a half-eaten fruit without a word. Then she walked away. Like a breath on the wind.
She seemed connected to the marsh in a way I couldn't explain. I once saw her place a hand on a tree, as if listening for its heartbeat. Another time, she traced slow circles in the mud with her bare foot, eyes closed. Nothing she did had a clear purpose, but everything felt heavy with meaning. She rarely spoke to me. But now and then, she murmured in passing:
"Roots listen. Stones remember."
And then she'd disappear again. I never understood how she could be the daughter of one of the Empire's greatest heroes. She was the opposite of everything you'd expect from a man like that. Like she belonged to a different world entirely.
Maerel burned with a very different fire. Where Lireth drifted like a shadow, Maerel carved space around her with the edge of her gaze and the stiffness of her posture. She had started watching me with a cold, unwavering intensity. Not out of curiosity. Out of suspicion. Maybe rivalry.
Every time our eyes met, something growled just beneath the surface. A silent tension. One morning, I caught her staring from behind a mossy pillar as I practiced an invocation with the shadows. She didn't hide. She didn't even look away.
Later, I found her alone in an abandoned training hall, crouched over a chalk-drawn circle. Her lips were tight, her hand trembled. She was trying to summon fire. Only a few sparks came, flickering and dying in the damp air. She tried again. Failed. Tried again. Still nothing.
When she noticed me, she turned slowly, shoulders squared like armor.
"If you laugh, I'll strangle you."
I didn't laugh. I didn't speak. I just left.
A few days later, I heard her voice snap like a whip through the gardens of the garrison. I couldn't see clearly, just vague outlines in the dusk, but I recognized the sharpness in her tone. She was arguing with a man — probably a family member. An uncle, maybe. Her voice was cutting; his, low and cold. I only caught fragments, but they were enough: he scolded her for her obsessions, her readings, her interest in "things that don't belong to us."
She didn't answer with words. She struck. A clean, fast blow. Her blade sliced the man's cheek. He staggered back, more wounded in pride than flesh.
Maerel said nothing more. She turned and walked away.
After that, no one from her bloodline spoke to her with any reverence. She didn't seem to care. She moved through the halls like solitude was something she'd long since learned to wear like a cloak.
The next time she crossed my path, she didn't avert her gaze. She wasn't looking at me like a threat anymore. She looked like she was trying to dissect something she didn't quite understand.
Kaelen, finally, had stayed apart since the incident with the pendant. He didn't speak to anyone — not even to the other nobles. He trained alone, relentlessly, every day. Repeating the same movements: strikes, parries, footwork. His discipline bordered on obsession. He reeked of control, of self-mastery. But underneath it all, I sensed something deeper — an old tension, a fear of failure rooted in his name.
One evening, just as the sky turned copper behind the battlements, he came to me. Two training swords in hand. He offered one.
"Fight."
It wasn't a challenge. It was a request. A need.
We crossed blades without speaking.
At first, his strikes were sharp, exact, deliberate. He moved without emotion, but with a terrifying precision. His blade didn't dance — it carved space, every motion trimmed of excess, refined to purpose.
I let instinct lead me. More flexible. Less predictable. Where he cut straight, I twisted. Where he tried to control, I bent and redirected. I didn't match him blow for blow — I shifted, flowed around him.
The clang of steel echoed through the yard like a heartbeat. Our steps drew circles on the damp stone. No shouts. No grunts. Just breath, footfalls, and the ring of contact.
He clipped my shoulder. Just enough to sting. I nicked his side with a pivoting slash. He didn't flinch. I didn't blink. We kept going.
Sometimes our swords locked and we stood there, breath mingling, inches apart. His eyes didn't burn with fury — they burned with something colder. Harder.
He tried to overwhelm me with brute strength. I let him burn himself out. I gave him space to miss, watched for cracks in the armor of his technique. He adjusted fast. Too fast.
Sweat trickled down our necks. Breathing grew heavier. Our moves got messier. He slipped slightly on a broken edge of stone. I struck. He parried — barely.
Then, like some silent agreement had passed between us, we stopped.
A step back. Two fighters, chest heaving. Neither lowering their eyes.
He tossed the sword to me with a flick of his wrist, almost carelessly. Then turned and walked away without a word.
But I saw it. That tiny twitch in the back of his neck. The loosening of a jaw clenched too long.
There was no winner.