The small boats cut through water thick as blood, oars slicing waves that reflected no light and seemed to swallow sound itself. Each stroke felt like pushing through liquid shadow, and more than one man muttered prayers to gods who felt very far away.
Krystof's men looked less like soldiers and more like a butcher's ledger—each scar an entry in some war-keeper's ledger.
There was Voss with his melted cheek from Redrock's boiling oil, young Taren whose missing fingers still twitched for a sword that wasn't there, and old Harwik—that walking testament to bad decisions—his earless left side giving him the permanent look of a man turning away from another stupid idea.
The Dreamweaver dwindled astern—not shrinking so much as being swallowed by the hungry dark between waves. That last stubborn glow from her lanterns looked less like hope and more like a drunkard's final coin glinting in gutter mud.
Each oar stroke carried them deeper into waters where the trees didn't just grow wrong, but watched. Branches twisted like broken fingers of men Krystof had watched drown at Bluewater Ford, forever reaching for a surface they'd never breach.
"Eyes like you're getting paid to use 'em," Harwik rasped, his perpetual ear-flick making him look like he was winking at death. "That stench? Like the gods themselves pissed on a week-old battlefield." His fingers scratched at phantom cartilage—the same nervous tic he'd had since that Vaelthorne axe left him half-deaf and full of regrets.
Krystof let the warning stand. The air hung thick with crimes against nature—sweet rotting blossoms choking on butcherhouse stench, the ocean's breath gone rancid as week-old battlefield dressings. That stink of powdered bone brought back Grimrock's plague vaults, where he'd learned dead nobles smell no sweeter than beggars when the rot sets in.
Silence.
No wind.
No gulls.
Just twenty men and the wet, guilty sounds of oars moving through what was no longer quite water.
Young Trommin—still baby-faced despite the scar splitting his left eyebrow—choked back a whimper. "S-ser... the sea... it's..." His oar dripped thick strands of blackish fluid that stretched like cobwebs before snapping. "Like rowing through warm blood."
Krystof plunged his hand in before thinking.
Mistake.
The liquid clung like a widow's final kiss—that desperate, suffocating grip that lingers too long. His hand came up shimmering with iridescent slime that writhed between his fingers, seeping into the cracks of his sword calluses with a burn like cheap whiskey on an open wound.
"Oars up, you bastards!" Krystof's voice shredded like old sailcloth in a gale. He clawed at the oily stain on his hand—the damn thing spread faster than panic in a brothel raid, clinging like a debtor's promise.
The boats didn't beach—they miscarried onto the shore, their battered hulls shrieking like a bonesaw through green wood. Krystof vaulted over the gunwale first—because that stubborn shit never learned to let another man test the depth of hell—and the hungry black sand gulped his boots down with the obscene schlop of a tavern drunk swallowing his own vomit.
This wasn't a shoreline. This was an open wound, and they were the infection.
This isn't sand. Sand doesn't whisper, Krystof thought. Sand doesn't pull like a wharfside strumpet trying to drag drunk sailors into alleyways, and true sand sure as the depth of hells doesn't leave this itching, crawling sensation between his toes, like maggots writhing in a week-old battlefield corpse.
The whispers came next. Not from the men. Not from the sea. From the gods forsaken ground itself—a susurrus of half-formed syllables that slithered up his legs and settled between his shoulder blades like a lover's cold breath.
Krystof had heard that sound once before.
At Redwatch.
When the earth swallowed three companies whole.
Along the tideline, the shells breathed.
Not shells.
Never shells.
Pulsing things veined with capillaries of phosphorescent rot, their spiral patterns writhing when viewed sideways. Krystof blinked, and for one heartbeat the nearest one unfurled into something resembling a human ear before collapsing back into its spiral.
Trommin vomited over the side.
No one mocked him.
"Sweet light of Aetheris," whispered Trommin, his voice cracking like a boy's despite his attempts at soldierly composure. "The very ground feels... hungry. Like it's trying to pull me down."
"Stay close to me, lad," rumbled Brex, a mountain of a man whose arms bore tattoos from a dozen campaigns. "And keep your sword loose in its sheath. Something tells me we'll be needing steel before this is over."
With hand signals learned in a dozen campaigns, Krystof led them into the jungle that breathed wrong. "Gods, it feels like the fucking thing is alive."
Krystof felt it first in his teeth—that wet, spore-thick draft rolling through the trees like a drunk's exhale. No wind. Should've been wind. But the leaves? Yeah, those bastard leaves wouldn't shut up. Clicking. Always clicking. Like the bone dice they'd tossed for his father's sword the star-time the fever took him."
A vine brushed his neck. He didn't flinch. Fifteen years of war taught him that much—let the rookies jump at shadows. The welt it left smelled of vinegar and old battlefields, the kind where they'd burned the corpses come dawn.
"Tight formation," he growled. The words came out rusty. Too many star-time watches, too much cheap whiskey.
Moldric—bony fingers drumming the hilt of his dagger—flinched at the sound. Good. Fear kept men alive here. "Trust nothing. Not the ground—" His boot sank into the moss, came up sucking at his heel like a beggar's child. "—not even your own shadow. Saw a man strangled by his once. Took three of us to pry it off."
Above them, the canopy swallowed the twin moons Luxora and Tenebris' light in great gulping spasms. The trees weren't right. Too many joints. Knuckles where branches should bend, their bark etched with glyphs that squirmed if you stared too long. Krystof's scar twitched—a souvenir from the bastard at Redrock. Felt like ice cracking under his skin.
"Ser—" Moldric's whisper was all dry bark and fear. His throat clicked. That damn apple in his neck jumped like a spooked hare. "The trees. They're watching us."
Krystof didn't turn. Let the kid sweat. Instead, he thumbed the notch in his sword where the steel had kissed bone at Falkrest. "Aye. And they're hungry." The spores tasted of burnt sugar. Of dead things left in the sun. "Keep walking."
Somewhere deep in the green dark, something laughed. Or maybe it was just the wood, splitting itself apart.
"I feel it too," admitted Harwik, his remaining ear twitching like a hound's. "Like being stalked by something that knows these woods better than we know our own names."
Somewhere ahead, rustling began. The sound started soft—like stolen kisses behind the barn. Then louder, bolder, like a tavern drunk slamming his tankard down. Before long it swarmed them, crackling through the brush like an entire regiment ghost-marching through brambles.
Harwik's fingers found his sword before his brain caught up. "Got a shadow." Harwik choked on the words—like his throat forgot how to work. That old sword-callus on his palm flexed before his brain caught up. Old instincts. Older fear. "Coming from all sides. Multiple contacts, moving in coordination."
"How many?" Krystof asked, though he suspected the answer wouldn't matter.
"Can't tell. Could be three, could be thirty. The sound... it doesn't make sense. Like it's coming from everywhere and nowhere."
"Form the Croyton Circle," Krystof commanded, his voice steady as temple stone despite the ice forming in his veins. The twenty fell into line without thinking—shields locking with the crack of ale mugs slamming down. Steel jutted at ugly angles, a beast baring its broken teeth. Every man knew his brother's weak side better than his own.
They'd done this drunk. Done it bleeding. Done it half-asleep after three days' march.
Cold bit deep, but sweat still ran—the kind that stings when it hits your eyes. "Steady, lads. Hold until my mark." Krystof's hand found Dawnbreaker's hilt—the leather grip worn smooth by three generations of calluses. The blade whispered free, heavy with ghosts.
"Together," he growled. Not a promise. A last prayer. "Aye, sir," came the whispered responses, voices tight with controlled fear but steady with trust. These men had followed him through hell before; they'd do it again if he asked.
Voss' sword gleamed dully, like a fish's belly in shallow water. His grip tightened—knuckles popping, that old scar from the River Fens pullin' taut.
"Something's been matching our pace since the tall pines." His thumbnail worried at a chip in his sword guard.
Krystof held his ground. Dawnbreaker's weight sat familiar in his palm, the leather wrap of the grip worn smooth where his thumb rested. That quiet certainty in his voice when he answered: "Felt it in the roots of my teeth."
Brex rolled his shoulders—a sound like pebbles grinding in a sack. "Fucking finally," he rumbled, broadsword already hungry in his hands. His grin showed too many teeth. "Was starting to think this piss-pot forest had no fight in it."
Trommin's blade trembled—not the controlled shake of a man bracing for impact, but the sick flutter of a gutted fish. His lips moved soundlessly. Prayers or curses, it didn't matter. The gods hadn't listened since the first leaf crunched underfoot.
The forest inhaled around them.
Harwik spat. The glob landed near his boot, dark as old blood in the half-light. "Surrounded," he growled, and the word hung there, ugly and final. His shield arm burned where the scar from the Battle of Blackreef pulled tight—always did when death got chatty.
A rustle. Then another. Not wind. Never just wind.
Krystof felt it first - that cold prickle at the base of his neck, the one that used to wake him screaming back in the war. As his eyes caught the movement, his sword hand was already sweating.
The shadow didn't step out so much as thicken, the way blood pools under skin before a bruise shows. Slow. Inevitable.
Voss let out his sword from its sheath. "About fucking time," he growled, flexing his neck. "My steel's been lonely."
The thing took another step in the dark.
They fell into a tight circle without speaking, shoulders nearly touching. The jungle's wet heat clung to their faces while they waited - for the scream, the charge, the damn thing that had been stalking them since they set foot on this cursed shore.