The silver crown felt heavy in Kael's palm. Not in weight, but in meaning.
He stood in the dim, damp stone room of the Westford Guild outpost. A single oil lamp smoked on the quartermaster's desk. The man behind it, Gerrick, had a face like old leather and eyes that had counted coins for fifty years.
"Riverwatch contract," Gerrick said, his voice a dry rasp. He slid a scroll across the worn wood. "The 'Drowned Maid.' Seven dead. Standard fee, minus the Guild's share. Your advance."
A small cloth pouch followed the scroll. Kael picked it up. He didn't need to count it. The weight was always the same. Fifteen silver crowns. Enough for a month of food and stable fees. A pittance of the total contract price. The rest went to the Guild—payment for the mutagens, the training, the roof over his head as a child. Payment for making him.
"Sign the ledger," Gerrick said, tapping a massive book.
Kael unstopped the inkwell, took the quill, and wrote his name. Kael. Then, in the column marked 'Origin,' he wrote the two words that defined him before his own name did. Blood-Price.
Gerrick's eyes flicked to the entry. A snort. "Blood-Price. Still standard fee. Monster doesn't care how you got your swords." He said it like it was a joke. It wasn't.
Kael didn't answer. He tucked the scroll into his inner coat, the pouch into his belt. He turned to leave.
"Try not to make a mess, boy," Gerrick called to his back. "The Guild likes clean work."
The door shut behind Kael with a solid thud, cutting off the lamplight. He stood in the muddy alley behind the outpost, the cold evening air biting his face. Clean work. He touched the pouch at his belt. Fifteen silver crowns. The price of a child, paid eighteen years ago, was far more than this. But this was the echo. The tiny, endless reminder.
The road to Riverwatch was a ribbon of mud between skeletal trees. Dusk bled into night. Kael rode in silence, the only sounds the hoof-falls of his horse and the creak of leather.
His mind ran the steps. Assess the site. Confirm the Vilespawn type. Isolate. Eliminate. Collect proof. A clean sequence. Emotion was a potion he hadn't taken.
As full dark fell, he reined in. From a saddlebag, he pulled a small vial. The glass was cool. The liquid inside was the color of old moss.
A night-eye potion. Standard issue.
He uncorked it and drank. It tasted of bitter herbs and iron. It burned going down, a sharp, painful line of heat that settled in his gut. For a moment, his vision swam, his temples throbbed. The Toll.
Then, the world sharpened.
The dark forest became a tapestry of grays and deep greens. He could see the texture of bark on a tree twenty yards away. The potion was working, gifting him the eyes of a cat. The cost was a dull, permanent ache in his liver and a further flattening of the world's colors, its joys. A fair trade for survival.
A merchant's cart approached from the opposite direction, lanterns swinging. As it drew near, the driver saw the glint of Kael's Warden medallion—a sword pierced through a weeping stone. The man's eyes widened. His hand came up, fingers forming a crude warding sign—thumb between index and middle finger—as he hurried his horse past.
Kael looked straight ahead. The fear was part of the landscape, like the mud or the trees. He was a necessary evil. A poison that cured a poison. He nudged his horse forward.
Riverwatch's wooden gates were closed, torches guttering in iron brackets. A guard captain, his face lined with exhaustion, stepped forward as Kael approached.
"Halt! State your—" His words died as he saw the medallion. His posture changed from authority to wary deference. "Warden. You're… you're here for the Drowned Maid."
"I am," Kael said, his voice flat. "The gate."
"Right. Of course." The captain barked an order. The gates groaned open just enough for horse and rider. Inside, a few late townsfolk scurried away, casting fearful glances.
"The details," Kael said, dismounting. He didn't ask. He stated.
The captain swallowed. "Seven. All in the last three months. Found at dawn, on the riverbank near the main docks. Lungs full of water, but… but they're smiling. Like they're happy." He shuddered. "It's a curse, I tell you. A water spirit, a Rusalka, taking them for—"
"The first victim's name," Kael interrupted. He didn't need superstition. He needed data.
"Uh… Anya. A scullery maid. Disappeared a year back, then turned up first, three months ago."
"And the last? Two nights past."
"Bren, a dockworker. Strong fellow. Didn't matter."
"Exact location of the bodies. Show me."
The captain led him to a spot on the packed earth, using his boot to draw a rough map. "Here. Always here, by the old pylons."
Kael memorized it. "The client is Magistrate Vorlan."
"Yes. He's offered a bounty from his own coffers, on top of your Guild fee."
Kael ignored that. The fee was already paid. Bounties were for freelancers, not Guild property. "I need a stable. My horse is weary."
The request, so mundane after talk of curses, seemed to throw the captain. "Oh. Yes. Silas's stables, by the merchant manor. Best in town. I'll have a boy show you."
"No need. Point the way."
The captain did. As Kael led his horse into the torch-lit streets, he felt the man's relieved gaze on his back. They were always relieved when the Warden left. The monster was frightening, but the solution was just as monstrous.
Midnight at the river docks.
The water was a black mirror, broken by the jagged silhouettes of moored barges. The air smelled of wet wood, fish, and something else. A faint, sweet-sour tinge. Taint.
Kael stood still, his potion-aided eyes scanning. He closed his physical eyes and reached inward. To the Sigil branded over his sternum. He focused, channeling a trickle of the power that coursed through his veins—the metabolized, contained Taint that was his fuel and his curse.
Pulse.
The world shifted. Not in sight, but in sense. The cool night air became a canvas of living heat. He felt the scuttling life of a rat in the shadows, the slow, cold pulse of the fish in the river. And he felt the other thing.
A patch of cold, swirling… sorrow. It emanated from the riverbed near the old pylons. It wasn't the sharp, aggressive spike of a predatory Vilespawn. It was diffuse. Lonely. It pulsed like a slow, dying heart.
Wrong.
He opened his eyes. As he did, the black water near the pylons shimmered. Not with light, but with a distortion, like heat haze on a desert. It rose, coalescing into a humanoid form made of water and gloom. A woman's shape, features blurred as if seen through a rain-streaked window. The Drowned Maid. A Wailing Echo.
It turned its head toward him. No eyes, but he felt its attention. A wave of profound, hollow sadness washed over him. It wasn't an attack. It was an emission. Like a sigh.
Then it moved.
It flowed across the surface of the water, silent, arms outstretched not to claw, but to embrace. The air around it grew cold and damp.
Kael's training took over. Emotion was a liability. He planted his feet.
Aegis.
He shaped the internal Taint and pushed it out. The air in front of him thumped, solidifying into a shimmering, invisible shield. The Echo reached him. Its watery hands met the Aegis.
SSSSSSHHHHH—
The sound was steam on a hot plate. The creature recoiled, its form rippling. The sadness sharpened into a spike of pain. It opened its mouth in a silent scream.
Kael didn't hesitate. He clenched his left fist, fingers contorting into the form for Ember. A spark of corrupted energy ignited in his palm. He thrust his hand forward.
A whip-crack of crimson fire, thin and hot, lashed from his fist. It struck the Echo's center.
The creature didn't burn. It evaporated. A section of its torso vanished into a cloud of foul-smelling mist. It let out another soundless cry, a vibration of pure despair that made Kael's teeth ache. Then, it collapsed back into the river, dissolving into the black water.
The fight lasted eight seconds.
Kael stood, breathing steadily. He hadn't drawn his steel swords. He analyzed. It hadn't tried to rend him. It had tried to hold him. To pull him into the water, into its sorrow. To share its final, peaceful moment.
This was not a hunt. This was an elegy.
He looked at the now-placid river. The diffuse sorrow was still there, fainter, buried deep. He hadn't killed it. He had just… hurt it. Sent it back to its misery.
A clean kill was impossible if you didn't understand what you were killing. Protocol said find the physical anchor, the corrupted remains, and burn them. But first, he needed to know why. He needed the dock records, to trace Anya's last days. The merchant, Silas, would have them.
The merchant's manor was the largest building in Riverwatch not owned by the magistrate. Stone and timber, with a high wall. The main gate was unlocked. Kael pushed it open and entered a wide courtyard.
A well-kept garden slept in the winter cold. A line was strung between two posts, and a woman was hanging laundry by the light of a lantern hooked on a nail.
She was humming.
The tune was simple, folk. She shook out a linen shirt, her movements efficient, practiced. She was in her forties, her brown hair streaked with gray, tied in a simple braid. Her face, lit by the lantern, was unlined by the hunger and fear Kael saw every day. Her clothes were plain but well-made, clean, and warm.
She was the picture of hard-won, simple comfort.
Kael stopped. His boots on the gravel were the only sound.
The woman heard it. She turned, the shirt in her hands.
Her eyes found his. They were brown. Familiar.
For a fraction of a second, there was nothing. Just a woman looking at a stranger in intimidating, travel-stained gear, a stranger with two sword hilts over his shoulders and cold eyes that saw too much in the dark.
Then, something flickered in her eyes. A tremor of… something. Not recognition. Not quite. It was deeper, more primal. A sense of dissonance. Like a note played out of tune in a familiar song.
Her polite, wary smile faded. Her brows drew together slightly. Not in fear, but in confusion. A deep, unsettling confusion that touched her soul.
She opened her mouth.
"Can I help you, Warden?"
Her voice. It was older. Softer than in his memories. But it was the voice that had sung lullabies. The voice that had said a final, hurried goodbye to a confused four-year-old boy in a dusty village square, a lifetime ago.
Elara.
The world did not shatter. It froze.
The clinical process in his mind—ask for Silas, request ledgers, ascertain facts—evaporated like the Echo on the river. The numb shell he lived inside cracked open.
He saw the silver crown in Gerrick's pouch. He saw the scroll with the contract. He saw the Echo's sorrowful embrace. All of it, every single step that led him here, collapsed into this single point in space and time.
His mother. Alive. Healthy. Happy.
He could not move. He could not speak. The breath left his lungs and did not return. All the deadened emotions, the rage boxed away, the grief buried under layers of mutagen and pain, surged against the dam. It was a silent, internal scream that paralyzed him.
He simply stared.
Elara took a half-step back, the shirt clutched to her chest now, a shield. His silence, his intensity, was frightening. But beneath the fear, that uncanny, nagging feeling remained in her eyes. Do I know you?
From inside the warm, lit house, a young boy's voice called out. "Mother? Is the laundry done?"
The sound broke the spell over her, but not over Kael. She glanced toward the house, then back at this terrifying, silent Warden.
Kael turned.
He didn't walk. He moved like a mechanism unspooling. He turned his back on her, on the lantern light, on the humming and the laundry and the new son. He walked out of the courtyard, into the dark alley, leaving the gate swinging open behind him.
He made it ten paces before he stopped, his hand against a cold stone wall for support. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, alien rhythm.
The contract. The monster. The silver.
It was all different now.