Elmsfall stank of death that morning.
Not the quiet kind that slipped away in sleep, but the kind that left blood on the walls and whispers in the wheat.
Kael heard the screams before he saw the body.
He was walking past the east fields with a basket of dead roots—cover for another visit to his Shadow Root—when a woman's wail shattered the morning calm. A crowd had gathered near old Harlan's hut, muttering, crossing themselves, staring at the doorway with eyes wide as harvest moons.
Goran the watchman stood at the threshold, face pale beneath his stubble.
"Back! Back, I said!" he barked, waving his good arm. "No one enters! Not even the priest yet!"
But the villagers pressed close.
Kael slipped through, quiet as a shadow. He didn't need permission—he needed **answers**.
The moment he crossed the threshold, he knew.
Something ancient had touched this place.
---
The inside of the hut was wrong.
The air was too cold. The light bent strangely around the cracked beams. And the smell—iron and rot, thick enough to choke—curled around Kael's senses like a memory he couldn't place.
Harlan was slumped against the far wall.
Or what was left of him.
His skin was dry. Cracked like sun-baked clay. His eyes were wide open, lips parted in a silent scream. But there was no blood. No wounds.
No signs of struggle.
Kael stepped closer, crouching.
> "Drained," he murmured.
Not of blood. Of **essence**.
The old man's soul core—however weak it had been—was gone. Hollowed out like a fruit.
A **leeching spell**. But far more brutal than any he had seen before.
> *No signs of external spellcasting,* Kael noted. *It came from inside. Or underneath.*
He touched the floor. Cold.
Then something pulsed—soft, faint, but real—beneath the wooden planks.
His eyes narrowed.
> "The leyline fracture…"
The corruption that had seeped from the obelisk was spreading. Slowly, invisibly. It had likely reached Harlan through his well or the very soil beneath his home.
And it fed.
> *Which means it's awake.*
---
"Out, boy!" barked Goran as he stepped inside. "This is priest's business now."
Kael stood. "You'll need more than prayers to stop what's coming."
Goran glared. "Don't talk riddles. You're too clever for your own good."
Kael met his gaze. "And you're too blind to see your own death coming."
He left the hut without another word.
---
The priest arrived an hour later.
Dalan wore his usual black-and-gold vestments, a relic from some long-faded temple. He smelled of incense and self-importance. His face twisted in mock grief as he blessed Harlan's home, muttering rites in the Old Tongue.
Kael watched from a distance, standing beneath the willow tree, fingers twitching with restrained power.
> *He knows something,* Kael thought.
Dalan didn't look surprised. Concerned, yes. But not surprised.
Then their eyes met across the crowd.
And Kael knew.
> *He's seen this before.*
---
That night, Kael returned to his Shadow Root beneath the willow. He knelt in the circle of blood and ash, eyes closed, soulcore humming with quiet heat.
> "The Warden is not alone," he whispered. "Something else is stirring. Feeding."
He pressed his hand to the ground.
A glyph bloomed beneath his palm—black on black, barely visible.
It pulsed once.
And a second **voice**—deeper, colder—echoed in his mind.
> "You are marked."
Kael didn't flinch.
> "So is the land."
> "Then you are doomed."
He smiled thinly.
> "I've been doomed before."