The stain did not move at first.
It just lay there beyond the fence, a smooth patch of black earth where no black should be, as if someone had poured ink into the soil and ironed it flat.
Wind brushed over it.
The grass on either side swayed.
The black patch did not.
Art's fingers dug into the top of the fence post.
He forced himself to breathe.
[ ENVIRONMENTAL CHECK ]Ashen activity: Low → Stirring
Source state: WakingResponse trigger: Proximity • Warmth • Mana
Leon's weight shifted beside him, boots planted firm in the dirt. The captain's shield hung at his left arm, not yet raised, but ready.
Riss stood slightly behind, sword in hand, eyes narrowed.
Mae watched the treeline and the edges of the seep, bow half-raised, an arrow nocked but not drawn. Brenn had planted the butt of his spear in the ground, grip loose but steady. Harrow hovered nearer the middle, one hand on his satchel, the other on the Radiant symbol pinned crookedly to his chest.
"Smell that?" Riss murmured.
The air had changed.
Less like metal left in the rain now. More like the inside of a burnt-out forge—heat long gone, but the memory of it baked into stone.
Leon's jaw tightened.
"I smell it," he said.
Art swallowed.
He could almost taste it on the back of his tongue, a faint bitterness that made his teeth ache.
"Any movement?" Leon asked quietly.
Mae squinted.
"Edges are… twitching," she said. "Very slow. Like something breathing through a blanket."
Art saw it then.
Not a dramatic ripple. Just a tiny, almost imperceptible shiver along the line where black met ordinary soil, as if the stain were testing the shape of its own boundaries.
Curiosity uncoiled inside his chest, hot and sharp.
"What are you?" he whispered, under his breath.
The System didn't answer.
The stain did.
A tiny bulge formed at the center, rising a finger-width above the surface before sinking again. When it fell, the faintest ripple spread outward, like a drop in a very thick pool.
"Captain," Harrow said quietly. "It heard us."
"It doesn't hear," Brenn muttered. "It… smells. Or feels. Or whatever Ashen things do."
"Doesn't matter which word we use," Leon said. "It's aware."
He took half a step closer to the fence.
Art's heart lurched.
"Careful," he said, voice a little too quick.
Leon didn't look back at him.
"I am being careful," he said. "If it could leap from there, Darren's farmhand would be bones."
That was true.
But the drip in the game had never rushed.
It crept.
It waited.
It made you think you were safe until you weren't.
Leon crouched, staying outside the fence, and picked up a dry twig.
"Don't," Art breathed.
Leon glanced up now, brows drawing together.
"I'm not running through it barefoot," he said. "I want to see how it reacts to dead wood at the edge."
His tone was calm. Not mocking. Just explaining.
Art forced himself to exhale.
Right.
This was not him pressing keys. This was a man who had seen battlefields. Leon wouldn't hurl himself face-first into the stain out of curiosity.
He hoped.
Leon extended the twig slowly over the fence, arm steady. The tip hovered a hand's breadth above the black.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the stain swelled.
Not much.
Just a finger-width rise directly under the twig, as if drawn by a magnet. The surface pushed upward, thick and smooth. It didn't splash. It reached.
The twig dipped.
The tip brushed the black.
It did not sink.
It vanished.
One heartbeat it was there; the next, there was just a slightly deeper indentation in the stain where it had touched.
Brenn hissed through his teeth.
Mae's fingers tightened on the bowstring.
Leon withdrew what was left of the twig.
There was no "left".
The wood ended in a frayed, raw-looking nub where the last inch or two had been eaten cleanly away.
"Light," Harrow whispered. "Radiant guard us."
"Salve?" Leon asked.
Harrow dug into his satchel with quick, practiced motions and pulled out a small clay jar. He popped the lid one-handed and dabbed two fingers in, coating them with a thick, pale paste that smelled faintly of herbs and something sharp.
He smeared it carefully over the damaged end of the twig.
The wood didn't grow back, obviously.
But where the salve touched the fresh mark, the grain stopped… bleeding. The rawness dulled, hardening.
Harrow grunted.
"At least it stops the spread," he said.
Riss exhaled slowly.
"So it's hungry," she said, eyeing the stain. "But lazy."
"For now," Leon said.
He straightened.
Art's mind was spinning.
In the game, this had all been numbers: corrupted tiles, damage-over-time if you stood too close, tooltips warning about "experimental hazards."
Here, each test meant something could be lost.
He tore his gaze from the stain long enough to study the ground around it.
The black patch sat in a slight hollow, as if the earth had sunk. The field sloped gently down from the village, then flattened before rising again toward the treeline. The seep lay just before the lowest point.
Beyond it, a small stream cut through the soil, silver water flashing in the light.
Art's stomach dropped.
If it reaches the stream…
The seep pulsed again.
This time, he saw it.
Thin lines of darker soil, almost invisible unless you knew to look, creeping outward along tiny cracks in the ground—veins searching for paths.
Not toward them.
Toward the water.
He went cold.
"Captain," he said. "It's moving downhill."
Leon glanced at him. "Everything moves downhill."
"No, I mean—" Art pointed, careful to keep his hand inside the fence. "Look. The cracks. Here, here, and there. They're heading for the stream."
Leon's eyes followed his finger.
His face changed.
"Mae," he said. "Distance from seep edge to water?"
Mae judged it with a quick glance, eyes flicking between the black patch and the shimmer of the stream beyond.
"Twenty strides," she said. "Maybe less. Hard to tell with the hollow."
"Brenn," Leon said. "If it sinks and spreads through the groundwater?"
"Fields go bad," Brenn said grimly. "The hamlet with them. Anything that drinks from that stream gets tainted." He spat to the side. "We'll have sick cows, sick kids and a lot of angry farmers."
Art's fingers tightened on the wood.
He remembered, from one of the uglier routes, watching a cutscene of black veins in a well, villagers coughing, the screen hinting at "potential Ashen plague branch." He hadn't let himself play that branch twice.
"We need a barrier," Harrow said. "Something it can't crawl through."
"Or something it doesn't want to," Mae added.
Leon's gaze swept the field.
"Riss," he said. "Ideas that don't involve jumping on it with your sword?"
Riss snorted, but she, too, looked around.
"Digging a trench might help," she said slowly. "But it'd take more time and hands than we have. And if it spills into the trench, we've just given it a new shape."
"Fire on the water side might stop whatever reaches there," Mae suggested. "If we soak a log or something with oil, set it burning across the stream—"
"Fire near the seep is still fire near the seep," Harrow warned.
Art's thoughts skittered.
In the game, the trick had been to provoke the seep carefully, just enough to make it "test" its edges without fully waking, then push it back with Radiant wards until it shrank to a hardened core that could be removed.
Radiant wards.
His gaze flicked to Harrow's pin. To Elara's token in his pocket. To the faint, almost invisible script carved into the fence posts nearest the seep—the farmer, Darren, had tried something; there were clumsy Radiant shapes cut into the wood.
"Radiant marks slowed it in the reports," Art heard himself say.
Leon tilted his head.
"From your reading," he said.
Art nodded.
"Not just blessings from a distance," he added. "Lines. Circles. It doesn't like patterns that… don't belong to it."
Harrow frowned, thinking.
"We could try," he said. "It's better than waving our arms and hoping."
Leon's jaw tightened.
"All right," he said. "Harrow, start scribing a ward line between the seep and the stream. Use whatever Radiant mix you have that can sit on the soil. Riss, Brenn, you're with him. Guard and dig what you can without breaking the earth too deep. Mae, I want your eyes on that stain and on the treeline. If anything climbs out, it gets an arrow in whatever it uses for a head."
"And you?" Mae asked.
Leon looked at Art.
"I'll see how close we can get before it decides to wake up," he said. "Art—"
"Yes," Art said. His throat felt dry. "Behind you. Watching."
"You speak if you see something I don't," Leon said. "Even if it doesn't make sense yet. That was our bargain."
Art nodded.
His heart hammered.
Leon stepped a little closer to the fence, shield half-raised now.
Harrow knelt and opened his satchel fully, pulling out a small pouch of pale, granular powder that smelled like church air and crushed herbs, mixed with something metallic. He sprinkled a little onto his palm, muttered a short prayer under his breath, and the granules glowed faintly.
"So," he murmured, "let's see if you hate this as much as the old stories say."
He began to walk a line parallel to the seep, a good ten strides back, scattering the Radiant dust in a steady stream. Riss paced just behind him, sword ready. Brenn moved ahead, using the butt of his spear to scratch a shallow groove in the soil to catch the powder.
As the Radiant mix fell, the ground answered.
The faintest shimmer rose from the dust, like heat off stone, but cooler. The line of light wasn't bright, but it was… ordered. Straight where the seep was spreading in crooked tendrils.
Art watched those tendrils.
They hesitated.
At the seep's edge, the creeping lines of dark earth slowed as they approached the new glow.
"Captain," Mae called quietly. "It's… reacting."
Leon didn't look away from the stain.
"Describe," he said.
"It was pushing along those little cracks," Mae said, brow furrowing. "Now it's… pooling. At the edge. Like it tried the air and didn't like the taste."
Art saw it.
Where the unseen roots of corruption had been threading towards the stream, they now seemed to bunch at the border of where Harrow's dust would fall, rippling and stopping.
Relief tingled under his ribs.
It was working.
For now.
Of course, the seep noticed the other source of warmth.
The bulge at the center rose again, higher this time. The surface swelled, then sank in slow, viscous motion. The patch's very skin seemed to thicken, as if something underneath were pushing up.
"Back," Art said quietly. "Just a little."
Leon shifted half a step away from the fence.
The bulge subsided.
He stepped in again, just a fraction.
The seep responded, rising once more.
Art's stomach turned.
"It's tracking you," he said. "Not just… anything warm. You."
"Good," Leon said.
Art stared at him.
"Good?" he echoed.
"If it watches me, it watches less of them," Leon said. "If it crawls toward me instead of Harrow, we will see it first."
There was logic to that.
Art still wanted to grab him by the cloak and drag him back.
He didn't.
No save files.
No safe distance.
This was what came with real people.
"Captain," Brenn called quietly, eyes flicking between his work and the stain. "The Radiant line is nearly across."
Harrow sprinkled the last of the powder, finishing in a shaky but mostly straight line between the seep and the stream. The faint glow held, a half-circle of ward-light that didn't look like much but felt like a wall inside Art's teeth.
"Done," Harrow said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist.
The stain shivered.
All at once, the small ripples at the edges stopped.
For a moment, the entire patch went unnaturally still.
The air above it thickened, the heat-shimmer more pronounced.
"Something's changing," Mae murmured.
Leon's fingers tightened on his shield strap.
"Art?" he asked quietly.
Art didn't answer at first.
He was too busy watching.
The seep wasn't spreading along the ground now.
It was… gathering.
The black at the center deepened, going from flat coal to something more like liquid obsidian. Tiny lines of not-quite-light appeared along the surface, in shapes that hurt the eyes if you stared too long—patterns trying to be runes and failing in ways that made his skin crawl.
It was concentrating.
Like a muscle tensing.
"It's going to test the line," Art said, voice low.
"How?" Riss asked.
The answer came a heartbeat later.
A thin column of black pushed upward from the center, stretching like an arm made of tar. It rose, trembling, then bent, tip angling toward them, tasting the air.
Mae swore under her breath.
"Does that count as a creature?" Brenn muttered.
"Form up," Leon said sharply.
They shifted instinctively, training taking over—Riss to his right, sword ready; Brenn a half-step behind, spear leveled; Mae back and to the side, arrow pointing at the rising tendril; Harrow just behind Art, one hand on his shoulder, the other ready to grab his collar if he fell.
Art's mouth went dry.
The tendril reached its full height—taller than Leon now—and hung there for a moment, swaying.
Then it snapped downward.
Not at Leon.
At the ground in front of the ward line.
It hit like thick slime, splattering.
Where drops of it touched the normal soil, the earth hissed, darkening, small pits forming. Tiny fingers of black shot outward along cracks, racing toward the glowing dust.
They stopped short.
Where they met the Radiant line, the corruption recoiled, edges crisping like frostbitten flesh. Smoke rose—thin, grey, smelling of burnt iron.
The tendril jerked, the rest of its length rippling as if in pain.
Art flinched.
"It doesn't like that," Harrow breathed.
"Good," Leon said. "Let's make sure it likes us even less."
The tendril withdrew into the main body, shrinking.
In its place, the entire patch of black seemed to… bristle.
"Captain," Mae said. "You might want to see this."
He didn't move his feet.
"What?" he asked.
"Little pieces," she said. "At the edges. They're… separating."
Art followed her line of sight.
She was right.
Where the stain met the untouched soil, small bubbles formed and popped, leaving behind tiny droplets of black that wobbled, then began to inch away from the main body like slug-sized pieces of night.
Drips.
Ashen Drip.
He almost laughed, the name surfacing at a stupidly inappropriate moment.
Several of the little beads started creeping along the ground—not toward the stream now, blocked by the Radiant line, but off at angles, testing new directions.
One headed straight toward the fence post beneath Art's hand.
"Riss," he said sharply.
She had already seen it.
"On it," she said, stepping forward.
She swung her sword down in a clean arc, striking the ground just in front of the creeping droplet.
The impact shook the earth. The droplet rolled, touching the blade.
Metal sizzled.
Riss jerked the sword back with a curse.
A shallow notch marred the edge where the black had kissed it. The droplet itself shuddered, then rejoined the main patch with a wet, sucking motion, as if pulled back by invisible threads.
Harrow flung a pinch of Radiant dust at the place where the droplet had passed.
The dust flashed, then settled, glowing faintly.
"Don't hit it with bare steel," he snapped. "Or at least don't leave the blade there."
"Brilliant advice," Riss muttered, examining the damage. Her wince was more offended than afraid. "That will be fun to explain at inspection."
Another droplet oozed toward Brenn's boot.
He stabbed in front of it with the spear.
He was faster pulling back than Riss had been.
The droplet recoiled from the point, then tried to go around.
Harrow hit it cleanly this time with a more focused handful of Radiant dust.
The tiny black bead froze, edges boiling, then hardened.
For a moment, it looked like a small, rough pebble.
Then it cracked down the middle and crumbled to grey powder.
Everyone stared.
"Elara is going to be insufferable about this," Harrow said under his breath. "Her lectures were right."
"The Radiant mix hardens it," Art said, the words tumbling out. "It doesn't like ordered patterns. If we force it into them, it… loses cohesion."
Leon glanced at him.
"Can we do that to the big patch?" he asked.
Art's mouth went dry.
"In the records," he said carefully, "they said the surface seep is just… the skin. The real 'body' sits deeper. You can't harden it all without more Radiant than we have. But we can stop the drips. Force it to curl inward. Make it… smaller."
"Containing instead of cleansing," Harrow said.
"For now," Leon replied.
Riss stabbed another creeping droplet, this time letting Harrow hit it immediately with dust. It crackled and died.
Mae's arrow sang.
It hit a third bead just as it reached a small dip in the ground, pinning it briefly. Harrow's dust turned it to brittle slag around the shaft, which Mae carefully snapped off later with a grimace.
The larger stain writhed.
It tried again and again to send thin lines outward, each one burning slightly where it touched the ward line or Harrow's scattered dust. Each time, it recoiled.
"Is it… shrinking?" Brenn asked after a while, breathing a little faster from the constant stabbing and retreating.
Art squinted.
He thought of the minimap back home, how the corrupted tiles had slowly receded if you did everything right. Here, there was no color overlay, only his eyes.
The edges of the stain didn't reach quite as far toward the stream as before.
The black at the very center was thicker, the sheen on its surface less diffuse.
"It's pulling its feelers back," Art said. "Doesn't like losing pieces."
"Good," Leon said again. "We'll starve it."
Harrow tossed more Radiant dust, reinforcing the line and salting any small cracks where black tried to pry through. His face was pale with concentration; sweat darkened his hair at the temples.
"Careful," he warned. "I don't have endless bags of this."
"We're not cleansing the Frontier," Leon said. "Just keeping this stain from learning new tricks."
The seep pulsed again, harder.
Art stumbled, dizzy.
The System pinged.
[ AURA CHECK ]Localized Ashen resonance: Increased.Mental intrusion: Minimal (resisted).
Recommendation: Limit exposure time.
"There," he said quickly, pointing at the heart of the patch. "It's… trying something else."
"What?" Riss demanded.
Art shook his head.
"It pushed… up," he said. "Not like before. Deeper. Like it wanted to… look. But it's not awake-awake yet. Still thinking through mud."
Leon stared at the black center.
"If we leave it?" he asked quietly.
"In a few days or weeks, it will find a way past the line," Art said before he could stop himself. "Or it will sink, and the roots will show up somewhere else, in a well, or under someone's house, and we'll think it's a new stain."
The words hung in the air.
Mae's hand tightened on her bow.
Harrow swallowed.
Leon nodded once.
"Then we don't leave it like this," he said. "We mark it, we report it, and we get people with more Radiant and more time to bleed it out properly."
He stepped back from the fence at last.
Art's shoulders sagged with a relief so sharp it almost hurt more than the tension.
His legs trembled.
Harrow's hand on his shoulder tightened.
"Sit," the healer said quietly. "Before you decide to kiss the dirt."
Art looked down.
His hands were shaking.
Adrenaline. Mana. Fear.
Maybe all three.
"I'm fine," he said, then heard how thin that sounded.
Harrow snorted.
"You've been standing near a waking seep, watching it try to taste your captain," he said. "Sit, Art."
Leon didn't argue.
"That's an order," he said. "On the grass, not in anything black."
Art obeyed.
He sank down a safe distance from the fence, the earth cool under him. His vision wavered at the edges; the System flashed a quick warning about VIT strain creeping upward again.
[ CONDITION ]HP: 42 / 100VIT strain: ElevatedMana channels: Stable (buff assisted)
Riss planted her sword in the ground and leaned on the hilt, watching the stain.
"It's… uglier up close," she said.
"It's ugly enough from here," Mae muttered.
Brenn wiped the spearhead carefully with a scrap of cloth, smearing a little salve where the Ashen had kissed it. The metal stopped hissing.
"Do you love this, too?" Riss asked suddenly.
Art looked up.
"What?" he said.
"All this." She nodded toward the field, the stain, the line of Radiant dust, the distant village. "You look at it like someone who can't decide if he wants to hug it or set it on fire."
Art blinked.
He thought of his tiny room, the glow of the monitor, the times he'd stared at places like this on the screen until his chest hurt with wanting to be there.
"Yes," he said, before he could stop himself. "I… love it. Even the ugly parts."
Harrow made a soft noise.
"That's… concerning," he said, but his voice was gentle.
"I hate this stain," Art said. "But I love that there are people who will stand in front of it with Radiant salt and a half-ruined sword."
Silence fell for a heartbeat.
Then Riss huffed.
"If you're trying to flatter us," she said, "you're very bad at it."
Art smiled, brief and tired.
"I'm not," he said. "You're all very flawed."
Mae snorted.
"That's better," she said. "He's definitely not from a storybook."
Leon watched him for a moment.
There was something in his gaze that hadn't been there before. Not warmth, exactly. Not yet. But less distance.
"Can you walk back to the hamlet?" he asked.
Art rolled his shoulders experimentally, then pushed himself up with Harrow's help.
His legs held.
"For now," he said.
"Good," Leon replied. He looked at the stain one last time. "We'll leave a mark and send for a proper purging team."
He turned to Brenn.
"Post a warning marker by the path," he said. "Use the standard sign. Darren and his people will stay away if they see it."
Brenn nodded, already reaching for a small roll of cloth in his pack—the kind with a universal "don't step here unless you like losing limbs" symbol painted on it.
They walked back toward Briar's Edge with slow, measured steps.
Art let his eyes linger on the village as it came back into view. The crooked sign of the inn. The dog scratching itself under the cart. The girl with the cowlick from Redmill's lane, visiting a cousin and running along the fence, only to be called back sharply by her mother when she saw the squad.
Alive.
All of it.
Darren met them near the same spot as before, wiping his hands on a rag.
"Well?" he asked.
Leon didn't sugarcoat.
"It is Ashen seep," he said. "Surface level, for now. We've placed a Radiant line between it and the stream and marked the area. Do not let anyone cross that line. Not child, not beast."
Darren's throat worked.
"And later?" he asked.
"Later," Leon said, "the Crown will send a dedicated purging team. They will shore up what we started. For now, your people are safe as long as they obey the warnings."
Darren looked at him, then at Art, then back.
"Thank you," he said. The words were rough, like he wasn't used to saying them. "We don't have much, but if you need food, water—"
"No," Leon said. "We won't empty your larders. Keep what you have. Just keep your people from poking the black earth."
A ghost of a smile touched Darren's mouth.
"I'll nail their boots to the floor if I have to," he said.
His gaze slid to Art again.
"You," he said. "You from under the lab."
Art swallowed.
"Yes," he said.
Darren's eyes were steady.
"You looked at that… thing like you'd seen it before," he said softly. "And you looked at my fields like you'd missed them."
Art's throat tightened.
He didn't answer at first.
Then he said, quietly, "I've seen… other fields. Ruined. I'd rather keep yours like this."
Darren held his gaze for a long heartbeat.
Then he nodded.
"You do that," he said. "And you'll be welcome at my table any day, mage or no."
The word "mage" sat strangely in Art's chest.
He nodded back.
"We have to report to the capital," Leon said. "If anything changes before they send the purging team—if the line fades, if the stain moves faster—you send another runner immediately."
"I will," Darren said.
They left Briar's Edge behind as the sun started its slow move toward late afternoon.
Art's legs ached with every step on the road back.
His chest, oddly, hurt less.
[ QUEST – "First Deployment – Ashen Drip" ]Primary Objective: Survive initial contact – Completed.Bonus Objective: Contain seep to current size – Condition: Holding.
Pending: Report to Solaris.
Note: The world remembers the first stains you choose not to run from.
He glanced once over his shoulder, just before the village dipped out of sight behind the rise.
He couldn't see the stain from here.
Just fields.
Wind in the crops.
Smoke from chimneys.
He loved it so much it scared him.
He turned back to the road.
Leon walked steadily at the front.
Riss and Brenn traded low remarks about sword edges and spear points. Mae hummed a half-tune under her breath. Harrow muttered something about needing more Radiant dust and fewer suicidal captains.
Art walked among them, tired, curious, his head buzzing with images and possibilities and the quiet, stubborn vow he'd made in the dark.
No save files.
No restarts.
But for today, in this one small place, the story had gone better than he remembered.
That would have to be enough.