The line went dead, the silence ringing louder than the croaking marsh frogs outside. Isolde’s fingers clenched around the ebon-sheathed phone, a shudder coursing through her. Relief, cold and sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, cut through the knot of dread in her gut. He had woken. And now he slept again. The man who had almost choked the life from her, the formidable stranger to whom she’d sworn a desperate lie of 'bound-kin' – he was trapped in an unpredictable cycle, a gift from the infernal powers that governed this land. From the manor’s shadowed library, the voice of the old physician, Elara, had been laced with a weariness Isolde recognized. Elara, a woman of the Moors’ older ways, owed Isolde a substantial debt from a botched blood-letting, a debt Isolde was now collecting in information. Elara’s face, etched with lines of perpetual worry, had remained perplexed. She couldn’t reconcile Isolde’s initial panicked demand for updates with her current, almost serene, acceptance. Isolde had simply uttered her thanks, then ended the exchange, severing the last thread connecting her to the physician’s medical observations. She moved to the large, mullioned window, mist swirling beyond the ancient panes. Her gaze drifted across the crumbling battlements of Thorne Manor, then out to the skeletal trees of the Whispering Moors. The man, a vessel of untold power and danger, had stirred from his two-year slumber in the subterranean vault. A miracle, Elara called it. A curse, Isolde knew. He had returned from the precipice of death with a vital strength, his frame surprisingly robust despite the long inactivity. Initial recovery had been swift, his movements fluid, almost predatory, according to Elara’s hushed reports. But that unnatural vitality had waned. After a week, he’d fallen into a profound torpor, sleeping for twelve days straight, and waking only to lapse back into slumber. His mind, already a fractured landscape from the trauma that had sent him into his initial coma, remained clouded. Elara hadn’t dared hope for full lucidity. A head injury of his magnitude left indelible marks. This new affliction, the Stygian Sleep, was merely another consequence, a particularly cruel one. Despite her pragmatic deductions, Elara’s tone carried a persistent undercurrent of unease. “Can you tell me your name?” she had asked him, her voice low and patient, during one of his brief waking periods. “Can you hear me, my lord?” Elara pressed, leaning closer to the slab where he lay. “Speak whatever comes to your mind.” A guttural sound escaped his lips, a raw, primal syllable. “Se…” Elara had offered a strained, encouraging smile. “Yes, good. Just like that.” Later, she couldn’t dislodge the man’s subsequent utterances from her memory. “Do not…wake…” he had murmured, again and again, even as consciousness receded. “Please, do not wake.” Elara had relayed this with a tremor in her voice. Isolde had felt a chill that had nothing to do with the moorland damp. Walking the empty corridors of the ancient infirmary beneath the manor, Elara rubbed her chin, brow furrowed. The man belonged to a powerful, secretive bloodline, one that once held sway over vast tracts of the blighted lands. Baron Riven, the current head of that house, was a man of cold calculation. He had sent his younger brother, this broken vessel of raw magic, back to the desolate Thorne lands – an ancestral right, perhaps, but a peculiar one given his condition. Any other lord would demand treatment in the grand clinics of the southern territories, not a remote, decaying manor watched over by a reclusive herbalist. Elara’s position was untenable, her silence bought at a heavy price. She would not question the Baron’s decrees. “Ah…” Elara had paused abruptly, snapping a gnarled finger. “I forgot to tell her…” The Stygian Sleep, as Isolde had termed it, was not merely oversleeping. It was a curse with deeper roots, a manifestation of the trauma combined with something ancient and volatile within him. A condition akin to the old legends of the ‘Thorn-Kissed Slumber,’ often accompanied by grotesque behavioral aberrations: an insatiable, consuming hunger, sudden bursts of uncontrolled aggression, and a disturbing, primal desire that transcended carnal lust, morphing into a yearning for power, for disruption. “He will be still for today, at least,” Elara had yawned, reassuring herself. “Just one day. What harm could come in a single day?” — Isolde hummed a tuneless, low sound, the relief a fragile, potent thing. She had navigated a precipice, staring into the eyes of a wolf and claiming him as kin. Now, a temporary reprieve. A chance to shore up her defenses, perhaps even to unravel the binding magic that held the vault in its brittle, failing state. She moved through the manor’s lower levels, the stones cold beneath her worn boots. A familiar sense of unease settled as she neared the service entrance, a heavy oak door reinforced with iron, leading to the rear grounds. Her fingers went to the crude cipher etched into the frame, ready to key in the sequence for the ancient locking mechanism. Then she saw it. *Creak. Snap. Crash.* The tell-tale groans of splintered wood and tortured iron. The door hung askew, ripped from its upper hinge. The oak was fractured, the heavy iron binding twisted like damp twine. It looked as though a siege engine, or something far more ancient and powerful, had rent it open. Her breath hitched. A cold dread, far more potent than the earlier relief, seized her. The man. He was gone from the vault. He was gone from his appointed 'repose'. “Where…?” The word rasped, dry and brittle. For more than an hour, Isolde traversed the periphery of the manor grounds, pushing through the thick, clinging mist. The few ancient warding stones along the perimeter lay askew, their faint protective glyphs dimmed, nearly impotent. She considered calling Elara, considered contacting the Baron’s distant seneschal, the 'Lord A' who had forced Isolde, 'Lady B', into this precarious pact. But she resisted. Any report would tighten the noose around her, confirm her complicity in the man’s escape, and justify further control. She tightened the leather tie holding her practical braid, forcing her pace faster, her eyes scanning the churned earth. The Dogs of the Moor, spectral hounds known for their keening cries, remained eerily silent. Even the hoot of the sentinel owl was absent. Just the sucking sound of her boots in the damp soil. Then, a trace. Not the delicate tracks of the moorland deer, nor the heavy prints of a wild boar. This was a wide, disturbed swath of earth, as if something immense had dragged itself, or been dragged, across the ground, scoring deep furrows into the mud. It was too broad for any local beast, too deliberate for a simple fall. “He truly is…,” she muttered, the absurdity almost making her laugh, a dry, humorless sound. Horrible. Primal. This new manifestation of the Slumbering Sickness was worse than Elara had let on. Far, far worse. She followed the grotesque trail, moving deeper into the gnarled thicket of the Old Yew woods, which bordered the back of the manor. The mist grew denser, tasting of damp earth and the metallic tang of something foul. A fluttering sound, desperate and weak, reached her ears. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum in the suffocating quiet. “You! Put that down!” she shouted, the words tearing from her throat, raw with shock. He stood by a skeletal Yew, its ancient branches like arthritic fingers against the mist-shrouded sky. The man, tall and stark, was hunched over, his broad back to her. A mangled moor-hen, its feathers soaked with a dark, glistening fluid, dangled from his grasp. His jaw worked, slowly, sickeningly. A tearing sound, then a gulp. His eyes, when he turned his head slightly, were vacant, unfocused, reflecting nothing but the grey light of the dawn filtering through the mist. His jaw muscles flexed again. He groaned, a deep, animalistic sound, and spat a chunk of raw, bloodied flesh onto the fallen leaves. Isolde clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting back the surge of bile. The moor-hen, what remained of it, was dead. Its neck was broken, its small body ravaged. Her hands trembled, fear a cold serpent coiling in her belly. This was the man who had claimed her with a brutal touch, now standing nonchalantly, blood smeared across his lips and jaw, utterly unaware. This was the Stygian Sleep. The primal hunger. The unthinking aggression. He was a creature of instinct now, unmoored from reason or memory. “It must be difficult for you to move,” Isolde said, forcing her voice level, a careful balm over the terror. She edged closer, feigning concern, her mind racing. The lie. The 'bound-kin' lie. How would he react? Could she subtly retreat from it, or would it be better to lean into the illusion for her own safety? “Why did you come out? You shouldn’t be here. Let’s go back.” The man dropped the mangled bird, the wet thud sickening. He turned fully, his unfocused gaze sweeping over her. The air crackled with a disturbing energy. He was taller, broader than she remembered, his form appearing to swell in the obscuring mist. He had moved, or perhaps crawled, through the undergrowth, for his sleeves, trousers, and chest were all caked with damp earth and dark streaks. His movements were not smooth, but a series of disjointed lurches, like a puppet whose strings were being jerked by an unseen hand. A sudden gust of wind tore through the clearing, whipping his clothes around his frame, momentarily revealing the stark, defined musculature beneath. A flicker of an old memory, a half-forgotten illustration from a forbidden tome, surfaced: the ‘Heartwood Trees’ of the Blighted South, their bark weeping a crimson sap, thick as blood. He had always been touched by blood, Isolde recalled, from the first time she saw him, to the reports of his waking, and now, stained anew. “Kaelen…” she whispered, using the name she’d overheard from Elara’s reports, though she knew it was barely a name to him now. He took a step towards her, slow and deliberate, his gaze still unsettlingly blank. “Name…” His voice was a rasp, deeper, more guttural than before. “What?” Isolde’s throat tightened. “What’s your name?” His cold, unfocused eyes settled on her, unblinking. It was impossible to discern thought, or cunning, or memory, behind that empty stare. Her mind screamed. She had to respond. But what? The lie she had woven, the false identity she had claimed, now hung like a death sentence in the mist-filled air. She was at a loss, utterly without a word to save herself.

Chapter 10: Blood and Stygian Sleep