A day has passed since our encounter with the Foglets, the forest lay behind us now, a wall of shadow swallowed by the horizon, we'd left Caed Dhu behind, and with it, the forest's oppressive hush.
The trees had thinned, giving way to Angren proper, a land of bog and ruin, where the air itself seemed to sweat.
Angren was Temerian land in name only. The crown claimed it, taxed it, even sent inspectors once a year to remind the locals of their loyalty but in truth, it was a frontier no one wanted. Too wet for farms, too wild for trade.
A half-forgotten province between Mahakam's stony heights and the Yaruga's wide, sluggish veins.
Its only widely-noted export was the deep woods; cedars, sycamores and pines known across the North as "Angren Gold.
Rhenawedd rode beside me, her posture stiff, eyes fixed on the road ahead. The last riderless horse, Bran, a black-tempered gelding with a scar down his flank trailed behind her, burdened with what was left of our supplies.
She hadn't continued our conversation since from before the foglet encounter. Not that I blamed her. I was obviously not myself since I'd drained those things.
Feeding on the Foglets… it was different. Despite their humanoid appearance, they weren't anywhere near the level of sapience of a human being. They were intelligent, yes, but not in a human way. Their minds didn't think, they reacted.
A kind of cunning born of instinct and hunger rather than reason. Closer to wolves than a hunter.
There'd been no rush of thought or dread as their blood hit my tongue, no regrets or fears, no flashes of who they'd been.
Just a cold stillness, deep and ancient, as though I'd drunk from the corpse of the world itself. What I took from them wasn't just instinct or life, but something else, a residue of the power that sustained them.
It started as a faint pressure in my chest, soft, almost imperceptible. Now it thrummed under my skin, steady as a second pulse I didn't have.
It wasn't hunger.
Not quite. It was… awareness. Like I'd grown a new sense that couldn't be shut off.
Chaos. That's what it was.
Since the feeding I could feel it everywhere in the air, the stones beneath the horses' hooves, the trees lining the road. It pressed against me constantly, shifting, moving, alive.
At first I thought it was just the world — wind, heat, sound — but no. This was different. This was power, and I could feel it noticing me.
I'd tried to touch it once.
Late the previous night, when we made camp and Rhenawedd was asleep, I'd reached for that pulse, that hum that seemed to hover just beneath reality's skin. A thrum that wasn't quite sound, wasn't quite touch.
It brushed against my mind like a whisper, faint but insistent, always there, just beyond reach.
The Foglets had used it to twist light and fog, to turn the world inside out, to make men question their own senses.
I could feel the pattern of it, the ebb and pull like trying to trace ripples on water with numb fingers. The shape was there, the method almost clear, but the mastery was not mine.
When I finally tried to touch it, the air had flickered — a shimmer, thin as glass, a ghost of what I'd seen them do — before pain bloomed sharp and hot behind my eyes, like someone driving a spike through the base of my skull.
Now, under the pale light of morning, that pain had dulled to a lingering throb behind my temples, a reminder that whatever I'd stirred last night, I wasn't strong enough to channel it.
The forest was gone, swallowed by distance and fog, but the world didn't feel any quieter. If anything, the air here in Angren was heavier, as if it carried the weight of unseen things.
The road ahead was little more than packed mud and stone, cut between low, mist-choked bogs. Reeds swayed in stagnant pools on either side, and every few paces, the hoofbeats sank with a wet squelch that set my teeth on edge.
The sky above was a pale, washed-out gray, the kind that never promised sun nor rain just the endless dull ache of another day surviving.
Rhenawedd rode a little ahead now, she had decided to don a cloak, when we hit open road, it was drawn tight around her shoulders.
The wind tugged strands of raven hair free from beneath her hood, like I said, she kept me at a distance since I killed those foglets.
She might have sensed it — instinctively, the way animals do when something in the dark is watching them. There'd been a feel about me since that encounter, something faintly predatory that clung no matter how I tried to school it away.
It wasn't hunger exactly, not the kind that gnawed at the gut or burned behind the fangs. This was quieter, a tension that hummed beneath the skin, waiting.
I caught myself staring more than once. Wanting to strike at her whilst her back was turned, distance, the subtle pulse at her throat, the rhythm of breath under her cloak.
My gaze lingered there once too long, and I had to turn away, jaw tight.
The echo of the Foglets hadn't been as easily suppresed as the bears, probably due to the quantity I'd consumed.
Their essence was cold, empty, more instinct than thought and I'd taken that into myself. Even sated, the residue whispered. It made the world smell different, made movement itself a lure.
That was why I'd gone out again last night, long after my experiments with magic. The forest had thinned then, the trees sparse enough to let the moon through. I'd found an elk: young, broad-shouldered, with steam rising off its back in the chill — and followed it silently, drifting in and just out of its sight, for half a mile before bringing it down.
Not to feed, not really. Just to hunt. To bleed out the thing coiling inside my ribs before it found a different target.
The kill had helped, it had dulled the edge, settled the pulse but not completely. The echo was still there, a faint pulse behind my sternum, a reminder that the boundary between what I was and what I'd taken in had grown thinner.
Now, as the wind cut across the flats and tugged at Rhenawedd's cloak, I wondered if she could feel it too. The shift in the air when I drew too close, the quiet wrongness that lingered around me like heat off a forge.
"We should reach Dregsdon in before the end of the day, maybe if we're lucky we'll actually sleep indoors for a change." My attempt to cut the awkward tension.
Rhenawedd didn't look at me right away. Her hood shifted slightly as the wind pushed it back, the pale light catching on the edge of her cheek.
When she finally spoke, her voice was soft — not timid, just measured.
Rhenawedd didn't look at me right away. Her hood shifted slightly as the wind pushed it back, the pale light catching on the edge of her cheek.
When she finally spoke, her voice was soft. "I've never been," she said. "Dregsdon."
"Strange," I said, glancing over. "If you came from Toussaint, you lot should've ridden through it on the way to the forest."
I already knew the answer, of course. But I shouldn't, There were still some secrets I wasn't willing to voice.
Her fingers tightened around the reins. "They didn't take me into the towns," she said, voice carrying on the wind. "When we stopped to resupply, they'd make camp outside the walls. I was to stay put — guarded."
"By Milton," I said.
She nodded faintly. "Usually him. Sometimes de la Croix. They said it was to keep me from bringing harm to the residents, but…" Her voice thinned, almost lost to the wind. "It wasn't safety they were after. It was silence. Hard to explain away a bruised and half-starved girl chained to a horse."
I ignored the slip and let her continue on. Her words settled between us like dust. I didn't comment, not because I didn't have anything to say, but because there was nothing worth saying.
I'd seen the state she'd been in when I found her. Seen the fear, the defiance. The kind that didn't come from stories or noble upbringings, but from surviving cruelty too long to still call it by name.
She looked ahead again, jaw tightening. "They didn't want questions," she finished quietly. "People in towns ask questions."
"I'm sorry for what happened to you." She didn't turn to look at me. Her voice came out low, almost flat.
"Why? It's not like you were the one who tormented me."
No, I wasn't. But in a way, I was.
The thought hit before I could bury it. I still remembered it. The sneer, the strike, the sound of her breath catching as Louis's gauntlet met her face.
The sick satisfaction that followed. It wasn't mine, but the memory didn't care about that. It had his weight, his anger, his cruelty. It felt like mine.
For a moment, I saw her through his eyes — a captive, defiant and unbroken despite everything. A challenge. A witch.
The revulsion came quick and sharp. I forced my gaze to the horizon, jaw tightening. "Still," I said quietly, "I'm sorry all the same."
The road curved upward into a low rise, the first proper hill we'd seen since leaving Caed Dhu. Mud gave way to harder ground, packed clay streaked with ruts carved by cart wheels long gone dry.
At the crest, the land opened up before us in wide stretches of dull green and grey, where the swamp began to thin and the first hints of solid land clawed at the edges of the bog.
Below, the road wound onward like a scar — a narrow, meandering line cutting through half-drowned fields. In the distance, faint and hazy, a collection of roofs broke the monotony, smoke rising from somewhere near the horizon.
Dregsdon, maybe, or one of the outlying hamlets that clung to it like barnacles.
The wind met us at the top of the rise, cool and sharp, carrying with it the smell of wet earth and decay. I let the reins slacken, letting my horse take the lead while I glanced toward her.
"You were quiet last night," I said then, as we made our way forward. "Ever since the foglets."
Rhenawedd didn't answer right away. The wind pushed her hood back again, exposing a strand of dark hair that clung to her cheek. Her eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead.
She gave a short shrug, not meeting my eyes. "Thoughts to myself. Nothing you need to know."
I could take a hint, so I sequestered the conversation. "Have you thought about what you'll do when we reach Dregsdon? I'll sell off the horse and extra supplies, and give you enough to come up with something."
She turned her head slightly, brow furrowing beneath the hood. "Why would you give me anything at all? Wouldn't you rather keep the money for yourself?"
"I don't need it," I said. "Not much I can spend it on. I don't eat. Don't sleep. Inns are wasted coin on me, and food just rots in my mouth."
She turned to me then, looking me in the eye for the first time in a day "So…since you've turned, you've been wandering around, hoarding nothing, eating nothing, sleeping… nothing."
"Not as much of a gift as you thought, is it?" I said, letting the sarcasm hang in the air.
She shook her head slightly, voice quiet but firm. "This is why I have been avoiding talking to you."
I met her gaze."What… do you feel guilty about what you've said?"
She gave a short, humorless exhale.
"No," she said, her voice cool but edged. "I'm frustrated by the pity party you're throwing for yourself. You've been brooding since the moment I met you."
She turned her gaze on me then, eyes hard, steady. "You speak of your vampirism as though it's some unbearable torment — but all I see is power wasted. You hiding in shadows, mourning what you've lost instead of using what you've been given. Why you? Why not me?"
Her voice caught, but she pressed on. "I prayed to every god I knew, begged every spirit that might listen — even the ones that shouldn't be named. I was ignored by all of them. Yet you are the one given strength, eternity — and all you do is sulk beneath it."
She drew a sharp breath. "So what if you have to kill to live? How is that any different from a peasant who slaughters a pig for his supper? You've had years to come to terms with your… blessing, and still, all you do is brood."
She met my eyes then, her voice steady despite the tremor beneath it. "You cry about needing to take life to sustain your own — how does that differ from a peasant dispatching a pig for his supper? You've had ample years to reconcile yourself with your condition, yet all you do is brood."
"Should I call it a blessing?" My voice sharpened before I could temper it.
She flinched — barely, but enough.
"I can no longer walk among people in sunlight. The rest of a long night's sleep is denied to me. I can only drink the blood of others that were once my kin and be despised for it."
She said nothing. She didn't have to.
I stared at her for a long moment, the words cutting deeper than I expected. Then, quietly:
"You believe it to be an advantage?"
The edge in my voice surprised even me. "It has separated me from my home — from everything I knew, everything I had. What use is my strength, my so-called eternity, my beauty, when none of it will bring back what I've lost? When all it does is drive me further from who I once was?"
I drew in breath out of habit and stopped, the emptiness of it mocking me.
"I am sorry for what happened to you," I said, more quietly now, though the bitterness still clung to the words. "But that doesn't excuse reaching for power at any cost — or comparing human life to livestock."
Her head snapped toward me, eyes flashing — hurt, furious, something else beneath it. For a moment, I thought she might strike me, or run. But she didn't. She just stared, wounded, looking suddenly older than she had any right to — older in spirit, as if the weight of too many disappointments had settled on her all at once.
Look at you, a voice whispered in the back of my mind, dry and cruel. Arguing with a child.
And she was right in her way. Every word she'd spoken had been a blade of truth I'd chosen to walk into. I was wasting what I'd been given. Brooding, pitying myself, feeding on humans because I refused to do otherwise and thought myself better for it, because some hollow part of me thought remorse made it alright.
But what did regret change? Did it cleanse the blood from my hands, make the dying breathe again? Of course not. A remorseful murderer is still a murderer.
Yet still, I clung to it because the alternative, to feel nothing, to become what I feared, felt like a final surrender.
She looked at me for a long moment, her expression caught somewhere between anger and pity. When she finally spoke, her voice was quieter, but no less steady.
"You think feeling sorry makes you better than the ones who don't," she said. "That regret somehow redeems you. But it doesn't, does it? You still drink. You still kill. The only difference is you make a ritual out of hating yourself for it."
Her words were sharper now, though the edge came not from cruelty but from frustration. "Maybe you want to hold on to what you were, to remember you were once human. Fine. But if all that memory does is make you wallow, then what's the point of keeping it? You're not honouring the man you were. You're burying him, over and over again."
She shook her head, turning away as if the sight of me pained her. "You think you're cursed, Matthias. Maybe you are. But at least you were chosen for something. The rest of us?" She gave a short, bitter laugh. "We pray, and bleed, and beg and nothing answers."
For a heartbeat, I thought she might cry. But she didn't. She just drew her hood tighter and muttered, to herself, "If I had your 'curse,' I'd make those who left me, pay until there was nothing left to take."
I pretended not to hear her.
We rode on. The road narrowed and then widened again, reed and bog giving way to scrub and harder clay.
Hours passed by the slow, blunt measure of the land sun shifting, a hawk circling somewhere out of sight, the horses' backs slick with sweat.
Bran's pack creaked; Épine's flank rubbed mine with a steady, companionable thump. Conversation petered out into the kind of quiet that isn't empty so much as full of things you don't want to say.
At last we crested a low rise and the world opened.
Dregsdon lay in the distance like a stain on the flatness—smoke thin and gray from a scatter of chimneys, a few wooden roofs, a crooked tower failing to inspire the awe I'm sure its builders intended it to.
The settlement clung to higher ground, a rough palisade, more for keeping wolves and drowners out than any army in. Fields of flattened reeds and half-fallen fences marked where the land fought itself and lost.
From here it looked small, almost petty. Up close I knew it would be a different sort of claustrophobic.
Faces peering from ajar doors, questions folded into glances, the slow, sharpening interest of people who don't see strangers often.
A trading post, at best: one inn, a smithy with a lean-to for saddle repairs, a pair of stalls likely to sell dried fish and reed-bread. The road into town was a cord of mud lined with leaning posts for tethering.
Dogs barked in the yards below; a child ran out and chased a hoop until she noticed us and froze.
Rhenawedd's shoulders eased a fraction. Relief was honest and quiet with her—small muscles relaxing, hands no longer white around the reins.
I watched the town with the same dispassion I used on a map. People's movements translated into patterns I could read: a baker carrying loaves, steady; a pair of men arguing by the well—danger to avoid; an armed patrol ahead with questions to answer.
My armor felt loud in that light; even without the sun marking me, the plates still picked up glints that would draw eyes.
We started down toward it.
As we dropped from the rise the road tightened into a rutted lane, and the smell hit, less marshes and more the business of living in a wet land: smoke, sweat, the sour tang of fish, and under it the ever-present damp.
Someone had dragged a carcass somewhere near the edge of town; the flies clustered like black punctuation marks.
A group of three men watched us from a cart by the lane; one with a spear, the others with nettled faces used to poor sleep.
They straightened when they saw us, more curiosity than threat, but in a place like this curiosity can turn fast into trouble if your story doesn't line up.
Rhenawedd nudged her horse closer and murmured, "We should look for a buyer for the horse first."
Practical as always. I gave a subtle nod. We'd do that. I already had a half-formed plan for the tack and tools—sell what we could, keep only what's useful for travel.
The coin would buy her food, clothes that actually fit, and a roof over her head. For me, it wouldn't buy much of anything I'd really need or want.
Although...
If the fight with the foglets had taught me anything, it was that my steel sword wasn't worth much against them. I'd have done better tearing them apart with my bare hands. Maybe I could find a smith in Dregsdon willing to plate it in silver — though I doubted there was enough of the metal in the town to coat a spoon, never mind a blade.
Still, it was something to think about. Something to do besides brooding.
We entered the lane. Heads rotated, small talk died, a dog yelped and ran to bark at Bran. Men with work-smudged faces watched an armored stranger and a ragged girl approach.
Questions were queued to be asked; I could feel them like prickles along my skin.
This was Dregsdon—small, watchful, and already deciding what kind of trouble we were worth.