For Arrion, there were no dreams. Only a deep, velvet blackness, the profound silence of a well after the stone has sunk. His body, pushed beyond the limits of endurance and knit back together by primordial magic, demanded absolute stillness. He lay a mountain range under a quilt, his breathing a slow, tectonic rhythm. For two days and two nights, he did not stir, while the world turned outside. He lay on a cot by the hearth in the longhouse, a mountain of bandages, salves, and restless power. The deep sleep was not mere exhaustion; it was a cocoon, his body and spirit wrestling with the lessons of the lightning-wrought giant and the brutal alchemy of the glade.
Borryn stood guard. The jovial tavern-keeper was gone, replaced by a chieftain of old. He gathered his family in the firelit main hall—Orryn with his headsman's grim focus, Maren pale but alert in her chair, Elara and Lyra wide-eyed and unnaturally quiet. He did not soften the blow.
"The shadow that took your aunt Liana has found us," he began, his voice a low, steady drumbeat of truth. He told them everything Arrion had confessed: the ledger, the blood pact, the whispering stone, the Marquis Ralke's true face. He spoke of the two men in black, of the threat that had forced Arrion into the forest. And then, his own voice thickening, he told them of what he had pieced together from the blood on Arrion's armor and the haunted look in his own eyes before he collapsed.
"He went to their meeting. They were not two. They were a dozen. And he… he met them." Borryn's gaze swept over them, letting the terrible arithmetic hang in the air. One against twelve. "He came back. They did not."
Elara's hand flew to her mouth. Lyra's eyes filled with tears, not of fear, but of awful understanding. Orryn's knuckles were white on the arm of his chair. Maren closed her eyes, a single tear tracing the line of her cheek—for her sister, for the boy she'd helped raise, for the peace now shattered.
"The secret is not a hidden thing anymore," Borryn finished, his tone final. "It is a war banner, and it is planted at our gate. We stand with Arrion. We are all targets now. We must be ready."
***
Far away, in the high stone fastness of Marquis Ralke's keep, a different kind of silence festered
Marquis Ralke stood in his solar, a room of elegant torture: sharp-angled furniture, windows of leaded glass that sliced the sunlight into prison bars, a room lined with rare books and darker artifacts, tapestries depicting hunts where the prey was always torn apart. A hawk-like man with silver hair and eyes the colour of a winter lake, he wore his nobility like a skin of polished ice.
The report had just been delivered. A sending-stone, twin to one carried by the older Vindicator, had gone dark two nights prior. Not a flicker of failure, but a sudden, absolute void. Like a candle snuffed in a sealed vault.The silence from the Whispering Weald was absolute, and in that void, his anger grew.The injustice of it was an acid in his veins. It was not the loss of the men—tools could be replaced. It was the insult. The ledger was a canker in his past he had thought safely cut out. Now, the scalpel had turned in his hand and infected the whole limb. The secret was not just loose; it was fighting back. It had grown teeth in the dark, teeth that had bitten deep into his own flesh.
Ralke was not a man of shouts and thrown goblets. His fury was a cold, tectonic pressure. He stood before a great map of his holdings, his fingers—adorned with rings of office—steepled. His gaze was fixed on the region labeled 'Oakhaven & The Whispering Weald.'
"Twelve," he said, his voice a soft, venomous thing. "Ser Joric, a Vindicator of no small skill, and eleven seasoned blades. Eradicated. Not a single survivor to whisper how."
His spymaster, a gaunt man named Velyn, stood in the shadows. "The boy could not have done it alone, my lord. Not even a Haelend."
"No," Ralke agreed, turning. His eyes were the colour of a winter sky, just as barren. "The forest intervened. The old stories are true, it seems. The Verdant King has chosen a side." He walked to a shrouded object on a pedestal—a smooth, obsidian stone that seemed to swallow the light. The Whispering Stone. The whispering stone, a shard of obsidian that pulsed with a faint, hungry light on its velvet cushion, seemed to hum a little louder. It showed him not the future, but the fragility of his present. One loose thread, pulled by a dead woman's son, and the entire, glorious tapestry of his power threatened to unravel. He did not touch it, but gazed at its depthless surface. "The Haelend boy is no longer a loose end to be trimmed. He has become a symbol. A rallying point. He has been… anointed. By the old powers of the wood."
He turned back to Velyn, the decision hardening in his glacial eyes. "This is no longer a retrieval mission. It is an extermination. And the forest that shelters him is complicit. Send word to the Drakonspine. Tell the Shamans the price for the next quintet of souls has just doubled. But in return, I do not want whispers. I want a blight. I want a sickness that hates green, growing things. Something that can make a sacred grove wither and a mythic stag bleed."
A cruel, thin smile touched his lips. "If the boy has made a pact with a king of trees, then I will send a king of rot. Let us see how well the Warden's son stands when the very earth he defends turns to poison beneath his feet."
The order was given. The war, once a hidden hunt, was now an open, and chillingly personal, crusade. He would salt the earth where this boy had walked. The quiet, surgical strike had failed. Now, the Marquis would bring the hammer. And the world would learn the cost of plucking a feather from a serpent's tail.