"I will go," Patryk said, his voice slicing through the sullen murmur of the courtyard.
Commandant Rost froze mid-stride, his gray brows knitting together as he glared at the boy who had spent an entire term hiding behind practice dummies. Beside the dais, Zorian sat on a field bench while two chirurgeons bound his splinted forearm with boiled linen. Blood seeped through the gauze, matching the crimson veins spidering across Zorian's sclera. His gaze lingered on Patryk like a butcher assessing a hanging carcass.
"You?" Rost barked, spitting a fleck of dried pipe weed onto the flagstones. "A scout runner died two leagues past the border ditch this morning. A patrol from the Northern Palisade saw three pack-beasts dragged into the sinkhole ridge. You can barely parry with a wooden lath, Sova."
"Which makes me disposable, sir," Patryk replied. He kept his shoulders slightly hunched, maintaining the posture of a groveling cur, but his chin remained level. "The garrison needs the perimeter beacons lit before the evening fog gathers. If you send third-year veterans, you risk losing combat rankers before the harvest tourney. Send me. If I trigger an ambush, the watchtowers will see the flare."
"Patryk, have you lost your wits?" Anja emerged from the medical pavilion, her smock spattered with tincture of arnica. Her fingers gripped the strap of her satchel until the knuckles showed white. "The Gloomwood canopy has thickened three leagues past the boundary line. Even fully manifested escutcheons fail out there."
"The lady worries for our clown," Zorian murmured, each syllable dragged out with deliberate malice. He did not look at Anja; his fixed stare stayed pinned to Patryk. A tiny twitch pulsed beneath his left cheekbone. "Let him serve, Commandant. Patryk has always possessed... hidden depths. Let him show us the measure of his courage."
Patryk bowed low, concealing the thin smirk curving his lips. Zorian believed he was sending an insect to be crushed by nature. Zorian had no concept of the blueprint.
"Grant the charter, sir," Patryk urged Rost.
Ten minutes later, Patryk passed through the iron spikes of the South Sally Port.
The sun hung low, a blistered copper coin sinking behind the black spines of needle-pines. The transition from the garrison's cleared soil to the forest edge was abrupt. Grass gave way to pale, rubbery moss that wept a milky sap under his boots. The stench reached him immediately—rotting timber mixed with the sharp, vinegar tang of bile-moss.
A soft weight settled on his left collar. A leathery snout nudged his earlobe.
"Easy, Flicker," Patryk whispered, reaching up to scratch the tiny membrane beneath the Murkwing's ear. "Keep high. Track the scent of crushed charcoal."
The bat-thing chittered, its throat vibrating against his skin, then dissolved into the dim gloom like spilled ink.
Patryk moved with swift, calculated certainty. In his old life, hunched over a keyboard at three in the morning, fueling his petty spite with lukewarm dregs of chicory, he had written this forest as a caricature of misery. He had plotted every trench, every fungal hollow, every predatory nest to serve as cheap obstacles for Zorian's triumphant parade.
He knew that fifty paces past the third birch grove, the ground yielded to an ancient limestone fault. He knew that the hollow under the roots of the weeping ash did not house vipers, but an abandoned border shrine built during the First Partition.
And inside that shrine lay the Heartwood Shard.
In the original draft, Zorian was supposed to discover the shard during his second year, using its raw resonance to overwrite the limitations of his divine brand. Marek had penned it as an absurd power-up—an artifact capable of cleanly cleaving an individual's spiritual conduit or binding it into permanent servitude.
*He will never touch it,* Patryk thought, vaulting over a rotting trunk covered in shelf fungus.
Branches clawed at his woolen tunic. The light died completely beneath the ceiling of interwoven boughs. Only faint blue ribbons of phosphorescent mold marked the contours of the gully.
Then the air grew heavy, thick with the smell of wet feathers and warm iron.
Above him, the boughs groaned.
A low, guttural rasp echoed down the draw—a wet sound like leather scraping over gravel.
*The Bristle-Hulk.*
Patryk froze, pressing his back against a slab of mossy shale. In Chapter Nine of his original manuscript, this beast—a four-legged horror with overlapping plates of bone and long, quilled forelimbs—was scripted to rip Patryk Sova's ribcage open in front of Zorian, proving to the reader that the frontier was lethal.
He heard the wet thud of heavy paws striking loam. Leaves drifted down through the dark.
Fifty yards ahead, between two dead oaks, a pair of milky, lidless orbs caught the faint blue glow. The creature stood nine feet tall at the shoulder, its snout elongated into a notched beak lined with needle teeth. Black quills along its spine rattled against each other, producing a sound like dried corn husks shaking in a gale.
Patryk slid a hand to his belt, thumbing an iron flare tube. His palms were slick. The prose on paper had been cold, detached, almost flippant. Facing the stench of its breath—stale carrion and damp fur—his knees threatened to fold.
*Move, you miserable hack,* he scolded himself. *You wrote its blind spot. Thirty degrees below the left ear where the skull plate fused improperly.*
A sudden shriek pierced the canopy.
Flicker dropped from the upper leaves like a falling stone, snapping its wings wide right before the monster's left pupil. The Murkwing let loose a piercing sonic pulse that rattled Patryk's eardrums. The beast reared back with an ear-splitting howl, raking its hooked claws through empty air and splintering an alder sapling into kindling.
"Now!" Patryk lunged forward, dodging beneath the creature's sweeping foreleg and sliding into the narrow fissure beneath the ash roots.
The rocks scraped his elbows raw as he tumbled down the slope, landing on a bed of dry, brittle needles. Above, the beast thrashed in fury, but its broad frame could not wedge into the limestone crack. Quills shot into the dirt mouth of the burrow like iron bolts, vibrating with terrible force.
Breathing raggedly, Patryk scrambled down the passage into the hollow cavern beneath.
At the center of the chamber, wedged between the calcified ribs of an ancient altar, rested an uneven piece of petrified wood no larger than a dagger. It glowed with a dull, bruised violet luminescence, pulsing like an exposed artery. The Heartwood Shard.
He reached out, his hand shaking. The moment his fingers closed around the cold, glass-like grain, a dull hum vibrated straight into his marrow.
[Resonance detected. Vessel unregistered.]
[Tether potential: Severance / Binding.]
Patryk pulled the relic free, wrapping it in a swath of oilcloth and tucking it into his vest. A tight, manic grin pulled at his mouth. "One less miracle for your crown, Zorian."
"Patryk?"
The voice came from the mouth of the tunnel.
Patryk whipped around, drawing his iron skinning knife.
Anja stumbled down the dirt incline, her cloak torn, her pale face streaked with soot and leaf-mold. Her breathing came in short, harsh gasps, her fingers clutching a field-medic's bone saw like a weapon.
"Anja?" Patryk stared at her, the knife trembling in his grip. "What are you doing here? Are you insane?"
"You came out here to die!" She scrambled to her feet, her voice trembling with raw, furious terror. "I saw your eyes when you answered the Commandant! You were throwing yourself away because Zorian threatened you! I couldn't... I couldn't let him push you into a pit!"
Patryk stared at her, his cynicism cracking against the sheer absurdity of her presence. She had abandoned the safety of the perimeter out of basic, irrational decency. She was a construct he had designed to be a trophy, yet here she was, bleeding from thorn scratches because she refused to let a useless side-character die alone.
"You fool," Patryk breathed, though the venom lacked teeth. "You absolute fool."
Before she could speak, the roof of the cavern shook. A shower of dirt rained over their heads.
The snarling outside stopped. In its place came a dull, rhythmic grinding as stone cracked under relentless, inhuman leverage.
A colossal, clawed forearm punched straight through the limestone ceiling above the tunnel mouth. Dirt and boulders caved inward with a deafening crash, sealing the narrow escape route they had used.
From the fresh opening above, the Bristle-Hulk lowered its heavy, quill-crested head into the chamber. Its milky eyes locked onto Anja, its jaws parting to reveal rows of glistening, serrated teeth, completely blocking the only remaining path to the surface.