The fire in the longhouse hearth had burned down to a bed of pulsating coals, casting a deep, bloody light and dancing shadows on the solemn faces gathered around it. Aunt Maren slept in her chair, the glowing moss clutched loosely in her hand. Her breath was easier, the sleep deeper and less fraught than it had been in weeks—a small, miraculous mercy that now felt tragically timed. Upstairs, the girls were abed.
The men of the house held council.
Borryn, Orryn, and Arrion. The tavern-keeper, the headsman, and the hunter. Borryn had sent the last of the tavern's stragglers home with a grim finality hours ago, his jovial mask gone. He had seen the two men in black. He had seen his nephew follow them into the dark. Now, he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, the grey in his hair seeming to shine in the ember-light.
"Out with it," Borryn said, his voice a low rumble. "No more silence, boy. That time is past. Who were they?"
Orryn, sharp and strategic, watched Arrion's face. "They carried themselves like soldiers. But not any lord's I'd want to swear to."
Arrion sat on a low stool, his massive frame hunched, the purple-wood bow across his knees like a talisman. He looked from his uncle's worried, determined face to his cousin's calculating one. The secret he had carried for five years, a cold stone in his heart, now had to be laid before them. It was no longer his alone to bear; the danger had come to their doorstep.
He spoke. He told them of the letter, of the ledger, of the pact with mountain shamans and the whispering stone. He named Marquis Ralke not as a distant villain, but as the specific, hunting shadow that had found them. He repeated the threat, verbatim, in his low, unflinching tone: *"Consequences will bloom here like poisonous flowers."*
When he finished, the only sound was the crackle of the coals and Maren's soft, even breathing. Borryn's face had gone ashen beneath his weathering, his hands clenched into fists. Orryn's jaw was tight, his mind already mapping the village's defenses, finding them woefully insufficient against professionals of that caliber.
"You cannot go," Orryn stated flatly. "It's a trap. They don't want to 'talk'. They want to disappear you and be done with it."
"And if I don't go," Arrion said, his storm-grey eyes lifting to meet theirs, "they will make an example of Hearthstone. Starting here. With us." His gaze flicked to his sleeping aunt, towards the ceiling where his cousins dreamed. "They are not bluffing. The ring… the beheaded serpent. It is a sigil of finality."
"Then we fight!" Borryn growled, the tavern-keeper replaced by the frontier warrior he'd once been. "We rally the village. We set watch. We—"
"And how many fathers and sons die for a secret that isn't theirs?" Arrion interrupted, not with anger, but with a weary, terrifying clarity. "This is my mother's fight. It has always been mine. I brought this to your door. I must lead it away."
"So you just walk to your death? That is your plan?" Orryn's voice was sharp with frustration.
"No." Arrion's hand stroked the smooth curve of his bow. He looked into the coals, as if seeing the deep green of the forest cathedral within them. "I walk into *my* domain. They named the standing stones north of the black creek. They think it is a neutral, isolated place." A faint, hard light kindled in his eyes. "But the forest is not neutral. And I have just petitioned its King."
Borryn stared, his practicality warring with the evidence of the glowing moss in his wife's hand. "The stag? You'd rely on… on a story?"
"It is not a story," Arrion said softly. "It is a power. Older than Ralke, older than any marquis. It granted a boon without me asking. It *saw* me. Not as a threat, but as…" he searched for the word, "a part of the Weald. If I go to that place not just as a man with a secret, but as a petitioner in peril, as a son of the forest they are violating… it may intercede. Or it may grant the forest itself to be my ally."
He laid out his true plan, then. He would go. He would draw them deep, past the stones, towards the sacred groves. He would use the terrain as a weapon, his knowledge against theirs. He would be the hunted turning hunter. And he would pray, with every fiber of his being, that the Verdant King, guardian of that deep green heart, would look upon the violation of black-clad killers in its realm with displeasure.
"And if it doesn't?" Orryn pressed. "If it's just you, your bow, and two axes against a greatsword and the serpent's sting?"
"Then I will make the price of their 'consequences' more bitter than they can imagine," Arrion said, his voice dropping to a whisper that vibrated in the still air. "And you will have time. Time to get everyone—Maren, the girls, the village—to Oakhaven, or into the deep trails only we know. You must swear to me you will run. Not fight. *Run.*"
The ultimatum hung in the firelit space. Borryn looked broken. Orryn looked furious, but the strategic mind in him knew the brutal truth of the choice: a doomed stand here, or a chance, however slim, in the forest with an unknowable ally.
Finally, Borryn reached out a calloused hand and gripped Arrion's forearm, his eyes shining. "You are your mother's son. Stubborn. Brave. And carrying a weight meant for smaller shoulders." He swallowed hard. "We will be ready. To run, if we must. But by all the old gods and the new, Arrion… you come back. You hear me? You petition your King, and you *come back*."
Arrion placed his own hand over his uncle's, the promise unspoken but hanging between them. The plan was madness. It was faith in a myth against the cold steel of reality. But it was the only path that did not lead directly to the slaughter of his second family. He would go to the standing stones not as a lamb to slaughter, but as a woodsman, a hunter, and a supplicant, to turn the forest itself against the serpent's brood.