700 Years Later
The jungle breathed.
Morning mist clung to woodsman's shoulders like a shroud as his axe bit into another ironwood trunk. The rhythmic thunk of steel on wood usually lulled him into something like peace. Today, it did nothing to quiet the unease between his shoulder blades—the same itch he'd felt the night before the Vein-Touched came for his wife.
He wiped sweat from his brow, fingers brushing the old scar notching his left eyebrow. The village elders claimed he'd gotten it during the raid, but he remembered the truth: the rusted nail in the cellar door, tearing into flesh as he clawed his way free.
The axe struck stone.
Kael cursed, examining the fresh notch in his blade. He knelt to dig out the offending rock—and froze.
The jungle had gone silent.
No birds. No insects. Just the whisper of leaves as if the trees themselves leaned closer.
Beneath decades of moss, the stone's surface bore deliberate grooves. Not weathering. Letters. His calloused fingers tore at the vegetation, his scar prickling like a hot needle jabbing into bone. The morning light revealed not just writing, but a map, its edges worn smooth by time. A jagged line cut northeast, past the Blackwater Fork, through the Valley of Withered Trees, to a single symbol:
A dagger plunged into a mountain's heart.
The Betrayer's Dagger.
Every child knew the stories—the last weapon that could kill shadows true, forged from a god's broken oath. Seven hundred years of fools had died searching for it. Seven hundred years of bones left to bleach in the Dead Ridges.
Yet here it was, carved in stone that had no right to survive the jungle's hunger.
The map pulsed under his fingers—a heartbeat thrumming through the rock.
A shadow fell across the carving.
Old Man stood behind him, the village priest's milky eyes wide with something between awe and terror. His gnarled fingers clutched his holy symbol—a twisted thing of bone and onyx that always seemed to move when no one was looking.
"They'll come," Harkin wheezed. His holy symbol writhed in his grip, the bone clicking against onyx. "The map sings to them. Last seeker? His veins turned black by dawn. His screams woke the dead."
Kael stood abruptly. "It's just an old stone."
"Then why do your hands shake?" Harkin's chuckle dissolved into a wet cough. His veins stood too thick under his papery skin—too many for a man, not enough to be fully Touched. "That's the path to the Dagger. The one weapon that—"
"I know the stories," Kael snapped. He turned to leave, but Harkin's skeletal hand gripped his wrist with feverish strength.
"You've got maybe three days before they scent it on you," the priest whispered. His milky eyes darted toward the tree line, where the shadows seemed to coil thicker than they should. "I carried a piece of that map once… before the cost grew too heavy. The Vein-Touched always know."
Kael shook him off. "I'm burying it and going home."
But when he knelt to dig, the map pulsed again, hotter this time. A single drop of blood welled from his palm where the stone had bitten into his flesh.
The dagger was calling.
And damned if he'd let the Vein-Touched take another thing from him.
The Village's Whispers The elders gathered outside his hut at dusk. Their murmurs slithered through the wattle walls:
"Found the Accord Map, just like the others."
"Last seeker came back hollow, his veins black as tar."
"Better to burn it now, before the Watchers come."
Kael's fingers clenched around his axe. He'd spent ten years cutting timber for these people, his back bent under their pity. Now they'd rather see him cower?
His wife, Lira's voice hissed in his memory: "You let fear choose once. Look where it got us."
By dawn, his pack held three days' rations, a whetstone, and the knife he'd pulled from his father's ribs.
The map burned against his chest.
The First Sign The jungle resisted him.
Vines curled around his ankles like grasping fingers. The air thickened with the scent of rotting blossoms, sweet enough to choke on. Every rustle in the undergrowth sent his hand to his knife, but nothing emerged—not yet.
At the Blackwater Fork, the river ran sluggish and dark, its surface shimmering with an unnatural sheen. Kael hesitated. Legends spoke of things that lurked beneath, waiting to drag down the unwary.
A whisper cut through the trees:
"Kael."
His blood turned to ice. That voice—he hadn't heard it in ten years. Not since Lira's last breath.
He spun, but the jungle was empty. Only the wind sighed through the leaves, carrying the faintest echo of laughter.
The map pulsed again, hotter now. The scar over his eyebrow burned.
The dagger wanted him to follow.
And something else wanted him dead.
The Watchers in the Dark
Night fell like a blade.
Kael didn't dare light a fire. He crouched in the hollow of a rotting log, ears straining. The jungle never slept, but tonight, its sounds were wrong.
Too rhythmic. Too deliberate.
A branch snapped.
His breath stilled. Shadows shifted at the edge of his vision—too tall, too thin. Figures with too many joints, their limbs bending where they shouldn't.
The Vein-Touched.
They hadn't come for the map.
They'd come for him.
And the dagger's call grew louder in his skull, a drumbeat of war.