The river spoke long before they saw it. At first it was a low rush under the trees, then a steady rumble that filled the spaces between their footsteps. By the time the forest thinned, the sound pressed on Rowan's ribs like a second heartbeat. Spray hung in the air, cool on his face, smelling of stone and wet iron.
The bridge rose out of the mist—three wide arches of pale rock, blocks fitted so tight that moss only found a home in the hairline seams. Carts had chewed shallow grooves into the approach stones. Old marks—chisel cuts, worn sigils—ran along the waist-high wall that guarded the edges. Beneath, the river threw itself through the arches and broke white against the central pillars, flinging cold breath up over the span.
"Walls," Brennar said, voice low with something close to relief. Stoneford sat beyond the far bank, huddled roofs and thin threads of smoke, the faint clink of metal on metal riding the air. He rolled his bad shoulder and flexed the good hand around his axe. "Sleep and ale. I could love those words."
Ari didn't answer. She'd slowed ten paces back, bow in hand, eyes tracing shadowed pockets where the parapet met the arch. Her jaw set. "Stop."
Rowan stopped. His fingers found the rope at his hip without being told, thumb pinning the three loops she'd made him practice until his palm ached. The river clawed at him from below, a steady pull that made it hard to breathe evenly.
Shapes moved at the far end—four at first, then more, sliding out from the lee of the last arch. The light took them, and he wished it hadn't. Their skin crawled with dark veins that pulsed like worms under wax. Nails had thickened into hooked points; joints bulged wrong. The worst was their eyes—milk-pale and hungry, but not blind. They saw him. They wanted him.
Corrupted Flickers.
Rowan's throat closed. Ari's voice from the campfire ran back through his head, clear and cold. There are good Flickers… and corrupted ones. Our job is to destroy the corrupted.
"Left," Ari said, and her string sang. The first arrow took a throat. She stepped, drew, loosed—another dropped. Her feet were as quiet as when she hunted deer, but her eyes were different now: all edge, no warmth.
The rest came on, fast in a jerky way, like their limbs didn't agree with each other but their hunger drove them forward anyway.
Brennar burst from the near side of the arch, a shout ripping from him as if his lungs were made of forge bellows. He met the first with the flat of his axe, smashing it off its feet, then turned his body to give his bad shoulder shelter and brought the blade down with a clean, short stroke. It wasn't show. It was simple and brutal, and the corrupted didn't get up.
Rowan raised the harpoon. His hands were slick. The rope bit his palm and reminded him it was real.
One of the corrupted sprinted straight at him, low and fast. He thrust, but his arms were slow, the point dragging in the air. The iron glanced off a shoulder ridge and thudded into the stone. He yanked, the rope burned, and before he could free the head the thing was on him—hot stink of rot in his face, teeth bared.
He threw himself sideways. Claws raked his sleeve and bit skin. He gasped and got his feet under him because Ari had drilled that into his legs until they moved before his head did. The harpoon came free with a pop. Another body hit Brennar and bounced like it had run into a wall; Brennar's boot turned, his swing short and mean again. He was winning his part of the bridge, but there were too many parts.
"Keep them at the waist-high!" Ari called, and the next arrow snapped into a corrupted's temple so cleanly it looked placed there by hand. She shifted two steps, never wasting motion, eyes cutting from threat to threat, fingers a blur. A shadow lunged for her blind side; she didn't look—she felt it, rolled a shoulder, and the claw passed through air where her hair had been a breath earlier.
Another came for Rowan. He got the point up and stabbed for the gut. The iron skated over skin that didn't want to take it. The thing's weight hit him anyway. They slammed into the parapet together. The stone dug into his back. It leaned in, breath hot and wet, and the world narrowed to claws and the line of its teeth.
Rowan pushed. The harpoon didn't move. His arms had nothing left in them. The rope sawed his palm open another line. The corrupted's nails scraped stone next to his ear and clicked on it like beetle legs, searching for his throat. The river roared under everything, not sound anymore but pressure.
I'm going to die on this bridge.
The thought was simple and clear. He tried to draw a breath that wasn't there. His vision tightened to a small ring with teeth in it.
The river pushed harder.
He had fought it since the village. He had clenched against it, feared it, tried to make it quiet with will and rope and practice. Now he stopped fighting. He let it take him.
The pouch at his belt tore. Water leapt upward like a thrown rope and wrapped the harpoon head. It didn't roll off. It stuck, thick as glass. Frost skated over the metal in a breath, crawled down the shaft toward his hands, and then shattered into white vapor that scalded his cheeks. The weapon hummed in his grip like it was alive.
Rowan drove it forward because there was nowhere else to go.
The point split the corrupted cleanly, the path through it lit by the shock of frozen water and then ripped wider by a burst of steam that tore flesh where iron would have lodged. Black fluid spat and hissed on stone. The weight fell off him as both halves slumped, sliding down the parapet to leave a smear like tar.
Ari's head snapped toward him. For the first time since he'd met her, surprise cracked her face. "He's awakening… already!"
Rowan didn't hear all of it. The river had his ears. He stood because his legs decided to. The harpoon dragged water out of the very air, sheathing itself again in that impossible layer that flipped from glaze-cold to breath-hot between one heartbeat and the next. He moved. It felt like a current had his joints and pulled them in the right order.
Another corrupted came high over the wall, hands hooked to catch his face. He cut across the wrists. Ice locked hands into fists mid-grab; steam blew the brittle claws apart. He reversed the thrust and drove the point under the rib line, and the body broke around it.
Brennar barked a laugh that sounded half shocked and half thrilled. "Ha! That's it, boy!"
Rowan spun at the sound, rope whistling. It wasn't a move he knew. It was a move his body remembered from a place that had nothing to do with memory. The line snared an ankle; he pulled and the corrupted hit the stones hard. He stepped and put the point down through the eye. Steam coiled out and made a low, ugly hiss.
Ari kept shooting, but now she was watching him too, measuring, counting beats between his strikes like she was learning a song she didn't trust. "Mind your left!" she snapped, and a shaft blurred past his shoulder and buried itself in something he hadn't seen yet.
A spray of boiling droplets burst from his last cut and misted the stones. Brennar swore and dragged Ari backward with his good arm as the cloud rolled their way. It struck the wall where they had stood and whitened it with a rime of frost, then flashed to wetness with a cracking sound like cooling pottery.
Rowan didn't stop. He couldn't. The river had him and he had the river for three beats and then ten. He felt it reach into the joints of the corrupted and pry them apart. He felt it stiffen skin and then turn it soft again. The bridge complained under his boots with small, shocked sounds as hairline cracks ran like little lightning between flagstones.
One of the corrupted made it past him and threw itself at Brennar's back. Brennar pivoted and let the thing spend itself on his shoulder, then beat it to the stones with the haft and ground its head against the lip of the parapet until Ari's next arrow pinned it still. He grinned over the mess at Rowan and then flinched because a seam in the stone at his feet coughed steam.
"Careful!" he shouted, but Rowan was already gone, the harpoon leading like a hooked fish leads a line.
Then, suddenly, there were no more. The last corrupted tried to retreat along the rail; Rowan cut its hamstring and it dropped. He stood over it, chest heaving, every part of him shaking, the tip of the harpoon steady anyway. He drove it down because his body said finish it. The water flared, and the noise it made was ugly and final.
Silence came on in pieces. First the hiss faded. Then the ringing in his left ear. Then the small drip of water off the edge. The river's roar was still there, but it had stepped back half a pace.
Rowan's knees went out from under him. He hit the stones and didn't catch himself. The harpoon slipped from his fingers and clanged once, twice, then lay. A thin curl of vapor rose from the head and vanished.
His hands were a map of new hurts—red blisters in the grooves, rope burns shiny as wet leaves, patches where cold had kissed too hard and left ache behind the skin. Meltwater ran down his wrists and hid in his sleeves. He could feel the heat and the cold at once, and both were wrong.
Brennar slid to a knee beside him, breath coming like he'd run hard. Sweat tracked lines in the road dust on his face. He laughed, but the sound had edges. "By all the broken oaths, lad… you tore through them."
Ari stood five paces off and didn't move for a count of three. Her bow hung loosely in her hand, arrow notched and forgotten. The surprise in her face was already cooling into thought, but it hadn't gone all the way yet. "His power has awakened," she said, and then, with a tiny shake of her head that admitted more than she liked, "already."
Rowan tried to answer and got a mouthful of copper. His chest hitched. The river in him surged once more, not loud now, just present, like a big thing watching from the deep. It made it hard to find words that weren't water.
Torches flared at the Stoneford side. Lantern light bounced along shields and helmets as a dozen figures came out from the shadow of the gatehouse. Their boots struck the stones in a practiced pattern, slow and careful. The front rank carried spears. The second rank kept hands near sword hilts. Their tabards showed a split river around a stepped stone—the town's mark, simple and stern.
They took in the bridge in a sweep: the cracks running like pale threads between flags, the scorched patches, the frost blooms already melting, the bodies—if bodies was the right name for things that were turning gray at the edges and giving off a smell like wet ashes. Then their eyes found Rowan kneeling in the middle of it, hands raw, weapon smoking gently where it lay.
"Hold," the lead guard said, not quite a shout. He raised his free hand, palm out. "No sudden moves." His gaze jumped from Brennar's broad shape to Ari's bow to Rowan's scorched harpoon. "By whose leave did you bring this kind of trouble onto our bridge?"
Brennar's grin came back on like a mask, quick and bright. "We brought the end of it, not the start."
The leader's eyes flicked to the split thing at Rowan's feet, then to the burned rope marks on Rowan's hands, then to the thin steam lifting from the iron. Wariness dulled into something closer to fear. "What in the abyss are you?"
Rowan blinked slow. The world had narrowed to the circle of light around them and the black lines at the edges of his sight. The river was all he could hear. It muffled footsteps, voices, the creak of leather. It pulled at him, not down this time, but inward, like it wanted him to lie still and let it pass through until nothing important was left.
Ari's voice reached him from far off, cool and steady as ever, even with the surprise still threaded through it. "He's awakening," she said, softer now, more to Brennar and to herself than to the guards. "Already."
Rowan swayed. The lanterns smeared into long gold strokes. Stone went soft under his knees and then hard again. He tried to breathe past the river and found only the river.
The last thing he knew was water in his ears and the scrape of boots as someone stepped closer. The world narrowed to a pin. He tipped forward, cheek striking the cool, wet stone, and the light went out.