Jurok’s breath was a shallow rasp, a wet friction in his throat that sounded less like a living man and more like a water-logged sack of gravel. The pulse under Kavrin’s fingers was a hesitant flutter, a dying moth’s wing. He needed to be fed again. Soon. But for now, Kavrin had done all he could. The rough chains bit deep into the patriarch's distended flesh, anchoring him to the crypt’s unyielding stone. Jurok’s eyelids, swollen and ridged, fluttered open for a moment, revealing milky, bloodshot orbs that seemed to plead with Kavrin even as the new mouths on his neck whimpered for a quick demise. Kavrin met the gaze with the cold, flat stare of a man observing a particularly resilient beetle. He then shifted his attention to the other two: Jurok’s son, Farlon, a gaunt youth whose face was now a patchwork of twitching muscle, and his daughter, Livia, who wept silently, a steady stream of tears carving tracks through the grime on her cheeks. They too were bound, their thrashing having subsided into weary tremors. Kavrin had filled a wooden pail with water and left it within their reach, a crude concession to their suffering. He had also left the remaining strips of dried venison, though Farlon had only spat his portion onto the cold floor. Let them suffer. Let them live. He checked the wick of the solitary lantern, trimmed it, and placed it on a low stone ledge, its flickering light casting monstrous shadows that danced with the geometry of the crypt. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth, Jurok’s rank, sweet decay, and the metallic tang of fear. Kavrin didn't linger. The beast’s command, an echo not in his ears but in the hollow space behind his eyes, was an engine driving him forward. *The bloodline must persist. The ritual must complete.* And the ritual required a brain, a crystalline cortex now in the hands of a mainland poet. Above ground, the graveyard had changed. The moss-covered headstones leaned at impossible angles, some appearing to melt into the earth like wax. The massive, gnarled roots of the primeval ironwood trees, usually a dark, static tangle, now seemed to pulse, their shadow-selves stretching and contracting independently of the light. Kavrin’s shovel, leaning against the crypt entrance, had a new, faintly iridescent sheen. He ignored it. Piyol was twisting itself inside out. The familiar path to the village square now veered sharply, as if pulled by an invisible hand. Houses that stood square and true yesterday now listed, their roofs bowed, their windows staring like empty, accusing eyes. A faint, high-pitched keening carried on the wind, the sound of a mind fraying at the edges. Kavrin pulled the hood of his coarse wool cloak tighter, obscuring his face from the dissolving reality. He walked towards the village edge, towards the border with the Dusk-Wilds. The village gates, once stout timbers reinforced with iron, now sagged, one hinge torn free, leaving a gaping maw. Beyond, the trees of the Dusk-Wilds loomed, a wall of skeletal trunks and dense, shadowy foliage. The usual drone of insect life was absent. Only the sigh of the wind through the branches, a sound like a chorus of murmured voices. The mind-feeding flora of Othkar. Without the Chanda-Beast's mental shielding, the wilderness was a hungry, open maw, ready to feed on any exposed mind. Kavrin stepped through the broken gate, his boots crunching on fallen leaves that seemed to writhe beneath his weight. Within moments, the forest began its work. The air grew heavy, thick with a scent like damp earth and forgotten memories. A rustle in the undergrowth wasn't just a rodent; it was a child’s murmured name, not his own, but one that felt intimately familiar, a name long buried. Kavrin kept walking, his gaze fixed on the uneven path ahead. The tree trunks, once solid and unyielding, now seemed to ripple, their bark forming faces – weeping, accusatory faces. A woman’s silhouette, frail and trembling, materialized between two towering firs, her hands outstretched, her face obscured by a veil of leaves. Her voice, thin and reedy, called out, a melody of sorrow and betrayal. *“Why did you leave us? Why did you forget?”* Kavrin’s pace remained steady. His mind, scoured clean of its past, offered no echo, no response to the flora’s cruel projections. He remembered nothing of a life before Piyol, before the gravedigging. The weeping phantom held no power over him. It was just another twisted branch, another trick of the light. He saw the sorrow, the pain, the accusation, but felt nothing. His apathy, a shield forged in the fires of oblivion, deflected the invasive barbs. The phantoms grew bolder. Children, their faces tear-streaked and pleading, flickered at the edge of his vision, their small hands reaching. A man, his face bruised and broken, stumbled from behind a thicket, his eyes wide with terror, silently mouthing words Kavrin couldn't hear. They were ghosts of a life he did not remember, and therefore, could not mourn. The canopy overhead thickened, twisting into a dense, oppressive ceiling of dark green and shadow. The sky, which had been a pale, overcast grey when he left Piyol, vanished entirely. Day became a permanent, claustrophobic twilight. The air grew colder, heavy with unseen pressures. The path narrowed, the gnarled roots of the ancient trees rising like grasping claws from the earth, threatening to trip him with every step. The murmurs intensified, weaving into a chaotic chorus that tried to find purchase in the silent spaces of his memory. He felt the forest pressing in, squeezing the very air from his lungs. It wanted him to break, to succumb, to remember and regret. But Kavrin, a blank slate of a man, gave it nothing. Hours passed, marked only by the deepening gloom and the relentless, mental assault. His legs ached, his teeth ground together, but he pushed onward, an unfeeling engine. He could feel the proximity of the mainland, the subtle shift in the forest's texture, less wild, more cultivated, even in this psychic-ravaged state. Then, through a gap in the trees, he saw it. Not a manor, not a house, but a fractured, impossible edifice. Sathid’s estate. It hung in the air, a good three hand-spans above the churned earth of its former gardens. The structure itself was a nightmare of warped angles and impossible geometries. A stone chimney spiraled upwards, then bent sharply inward, its bricks seeming to melt into a single, flowing mass. Windows, some shattered, others intact, were now oval, hexagonal, or simply gaping voids. The front door, a heavy slab of dark wood, was no longer flush with the frame; it bulged outward, as if the entire house was inhaling, slowly, agonizingly. Tendrils of faint, shimmering light, like frozen smoke, leaked from every crack and seam, pulsating with a sickly, iridescent glow. The predatory flora in the surrounding, manicured hedges was not just projecting phantoms; it was actively distorting the physical world. Sathid hadn’t just received the Chanda-Beast’s brain. He had already cracked it open.

Through the Dusk-Wilds