The stone wall was cold against his forehead.
Kael leaned into it, his breath leaving his lungs in sharp, controlled gasps. The professional mask was gone, shattered in the courtyard. In its place was a silent, howling static.
She lives here.
The thought was a blade, twisting.
She has a new son.
The image of the boy's voice calling from the warm house. Mother.
She didn't know me.
That was the deepest cut. Her eyes had held nothing but polite, wary confusion. The face he had carried for eighteen years—a face etched in guilt, in sorrow, in the angry fantasies of a child—was gone. Replaced by the face of a comfortable stranger.
A wave of feeling rose in his chest. It was hot, chaotic, and violent. Rage, grief, a child's desperate loneliness. It felt like physical sickness. His stomach clenched. His hands, resting against the rough stone, trembled.
No.
He slammed a mental door shut. The emotions were a luxury his body could not afford. They were a poison his mutations had been designed to purge.
Focus.
A basic drill. From his first year at Grimwatch. Mentor Rook's voice, iron-hard, cut through the static.
Name five things you can see.
His eyes, squeezed shut, opened. He forced them to register, to report.
"Moss on the stones. A broken wagon wheel. A puddle reflecting torchlight. A black cat on a wall. A chipped clay pot."
His voice was a gravelly whisper, but it was a start.
Four things you can touch.
"The cold stone. The leather of my glove. The wool of my cloak. The hilt of my steel sword."
He pressed his palm flat against the wall. The chill bit through his glove. Real. Present.
Three things you can hear.
"The cat licking its paw. Distant water from the river. My own breathing."
He listened to his breath. In. Out. He slowed it. He counted. Four beats in. Hold for four. Four beats out.
The hammering of his heart against his ribs began to slow, forced into a steady, metronomic rhythm. The tremble in his hands ceased.
He pushed off the wall. He straightened his coat. He ran a hand over his face, wiping away nothing—there were no tears. The Warden's face settled back into place, a blank slate of scar tissue and resolve. But his eyes, in the dark alley, held a new kind of fracture.
The mission remained. The monster was real. The contract was paid.
He walked into the morning.
The Rusty Pike tavern smelled of stale ale, woodsmoke, and boiled cabbage. It was late morning, and the only patrons were a pair of old men nursing mugs and a traveling merchant studying a map.
Kael took a seat in a corner, his back to the wall. The tavern keeper, a woman with a tired face and capable hands named Mara, approached.
"Ale?" she asked, her eyes flicking to his medallion. Her tone was neutral, carefully devoid of emotion.
"Water," Kael said. He placed a copper coin on the table. "And information."
Mara brought a tin cup of water. She didn't take the coin. "What kind of information?"
"The last one taken. The baker's apprentice."
Mara's expression closed. "Bad business. Don't like to talk of the drowned."
Kael reached into his belt pouch. He didn't remove the advance silver. He had a few smaller coins for expenses. He selected a silver crown—a week's wages for her—and placed it next to the copper. The coin gleamed dully on the scarred wood.
Mara stared at it. Fear and want warred in her eyes. She glanced towards the door, then back. She leaned in, her voice dropping.
"His name was Bren. Good boy. Strong. Worked hard. Found him two mornings past, just like the others. Smiling." She shuddered.
"And the first. A year ago. The servant girl, Anya."
Mara's face went pale. She made a subtle warding sign with her fingers, under the table. "That's… that's older business. Not part of your contract."
"Everything is part of it," Kael said, his voice devoid of threat. It was a simple statement of fact. "Tell me."
Mara licked her lips. Her eyes darted again. "Anya was pretty. Sweet thing. Worked for the Magistrate's household. She… she caught the eye of the younger Vorlan. The Magistrate's son."
She paused, gathering courage. "There were whispers. He'd give her little gifts. Then, she'd have bruises on her arms the next week. She stopped smiling. Then she vanished. The Magistrate said she ran off, stole some silver. Most believed it." Mara's voice dropped to a whisper. "I saw her, the night before she went missing. By the river. Crying. She had a locket he'd given her. She was trying to throw it in the water, but she couldn't bring herself to do it."
Kael absorbed this. A story as old as power. "And the bodies are always found by the old docks. Where the deep water is. Where things are weighed down and forgotten."
Mara's eyes widened. She nodded once, sharply. She snatched up the silver crown and the copper, turning away. The conversation was over.
Kael left the water untouched.
The riverbank was a desolate strip of mud and reeds in the gray daylight. A town guard stood fifty paces away, pretending not to watch. The air was thick with the smell of damp decay.
Kael stood where the captain had drawn his map. The exact spot. He closed his eyes, breathing in the Taint-tinged air. He reached inward, to the sigil. The power responded, a cold current in his veins.
Pulse.
The world of heat and life bloomed in his mind's eye. The guard was a blob of orange anxiety. Fish were cool, blue streaks in the dark green of the water.
And there, soaked into the very mud and reeds, was the stain. The emotional residue. It was a deep, bruised purple, throbbing with a sorrow so profound it felt like a physical weight. Anya's sorrow. The Echo' anchor.
He opened his eyes and began to search, his movements slow, methodical. He sifted through the reeds with his boot, his gaze missing nothing.
A glint. Half-buried in black mud near the water's edge.
He knelt, ignoring the damp seeping through his trousers. He pried the object free. A small, tarnished silver locket, caked in filth. His heart gave a single, hard thump. The locket.
He wiped it clean on his cloak. The catch was rusted, but it opened with a soft crack.
Inside, on the left, a tiny portrait. The water had blurred the paints, but the face was clear enough—a young woman with dark hair and sad, hopeful eyes. Anya.
The other side held not a portrait, but a curl of dark hair, tied with a minute silk thread.
As his gloved fingers brushed the lock of hair, something happened.
His Pulse, still active at a low level, surged. It wasn't his command. The Taint within him reached out, connecting to the emotional charge trapped in the locket.
For less than a second, he didn't sense emotion.
He felt it.
A wave of warm, giddy affection. The thrill of a secret gift from someone important. Then, a crushing spike of betrayal. The cold fear of a hand closing around an arm in a dark corridor. The desperate, final sadness of standing by this river, wanting to let go.
It hit him like a punch to the throat. He gasped, a short, sharp intake of breath.
The connection broke. The locket was just a cold piece of metal again.
Kael snapped it shut, his hand closing around it so tightly the edges bit into his palm. His pulse raced. What was that? A glitch. An echo within the Echo. His control had slipped, that was all. The stress of the day, the shock. It meant nothing.
But his hand didn't loosen its grip. The locket was proof. The Echo was Anya. And Anya had been murdered.
Grimwatch Keep. The Ascension Hall. Twelve years ago.
The memory erupted, unbidden, violent. Triggered by the locket's touch, by the surge of foreign feeling.
He was eight. Naked to the waist, shivering on a stone slab. The room was hot, filled with the acrid smell of herbs and searing flesh. Braziers glowed. The Guild Alchemist, a hooded figure, held a glowing sigil-iron. The design was a complex, angular rune—the mark of the Pulse.
Mentor Rook stood at his head, a solid, unmoving presence. His hand was on Kael's shoulder, not to comfort, but to immobilize.
"The pain is the point, boy," Rook said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through the stone. "It burns away the child. What remains is the tool. Do not scream. Do not faint. Hold onto the price."
In Kael's small, white-knuckled hand was a single silver crown. The coin from his Blood Price. The physical token of his sale. The Alchemist had given it to him before the branding. "So you never forget what you are worth," the man had said.
The glowing iron descended.
Agony. A white-hot brand that felt like it was searing his soul, not his skin. The smell of his own cooking flesh filled his nose. His vision went red, then white.
He did not scream. He did not cry. He had learned that lesson in the years between the village square and this stone slab. Crying changed nothing. It only wasted strength.
He focused everything on the coin in his hand. He imagined the silver melting in the brazier's fire, dripping, losing its shape. Becoming nothing. Becoming him.
The iron lifted. The Alchemist murmured an incantation. Cold ointment was smeared over the blistering wound, a shock that was its own kind of pain.
Rook's hand left his shoulder. "Good. The first sigil is the hardest. The next will be easier. You are less a child now."
Kael lay on the cold stone, trembling from shock, the coin welded to his palm by sweat. The pain was a furnace, burning away the last whispers of a boy named Kael. What was left was a vessel for the Taint, a tool for the Guild.
That was their love. Brutal. Practical. Transformative.
Kael blinked. He was back in the stable loft, sitting on his bedroll. Dusk was falling. The memory faded, leaving behind the ghost of searing pain on his collarbone and a hollow coldness in his gut.
He had the locket. He had the story.
He spread a rough piece of parchment on the floor—a map of Riverwatch he'd sketched. He placed the locket in the center, by the river.
The Facts.
Anya was murdered, likely by Magistrate Vorlan's son.
Her spirit, fused with Taint from the river, became the Wailing Echo.
The Echo was compelled to share its final, drowning peace, killing others.
The Guild contract: Destroy the monster. Burn the physical remains.
Standard protocol was clear. Find Anya's body—probably weighed down in the deep water by the docks—haul it up, burn it. The Echo would have no anchor. It would dissipate. The killings would stop. Contract fulfilled.
He saw the Echo's sorrowful embrace. He felt the ghost of Anya's betrayal in the locket. He saw Mara's fearful eyes.
He saw Elara, hanging laundry, calling for her new son.
A sacrifice imposed.
Anya had been sacrificed to hide a noble's crime. He had been sacrificed for fifteen pieces of silver.
The Guild's way was to manage the symptom. Kill the monster, ignore the disease. Take the silver, ignore the cause.
His hand closed around the locket again. The metal was warm from his grip.
No.
He would find the body. But not just to burn it. He would find out exactly how it was hidden. He would pull the truth into the light. This was no longer just a contract. It was an answer. A test.
If the world was built on buried crimes and silent sacrifices, he would start digging. For Anya. And for the boy he had been.
He looked at the map, his eyes sharp in the gloom. Tomorrow, he would go to the river. Not just as a Warden. But as the first, fragile form of something else.