Rain came at noon, not as a storm but as a long, thoughtful exhale from the clouds. Naiarholl—a word the lizardmen used for their riverside camp that Blue Fang had started using in his head—blurred into a watercolor of reeds and smoke. The hydra pit lay behind him, already busy with egrets, beetles, and gossip. The lizardmen sang while they worked the meat, voices like flutes made of wet reed. Each time a child drifted too close to the drop-off, an elder clicked their crest and the child skittered back, grinning and chastened. The river remembered blood, but it also remembered feasts.
Blue Fang lay crosswise in a channel branching off the main flow, cooling the half-healed slashes along his flank. His body hummed with small labors that weren't his conscious doing—clotting here, knitting there, smoothing jagged edges of pain into bearable warmth.
[Savage Evolution: micro-repairs 67%.]
[Hydra toxin immunity: stable.]
The Voice wrote notes on glass somewhere behind his eyes. He didn't mind. The updates came like a competent nurse's touch—present when needed, quiet when not.
He slid forward to where the channel met the river proper and let his sail poke above the surface like a drowned flag. Even without sight, he could read the pressure script of the day: rainlight on water; carp stirring mud; a heron's needle-step; a canoe nosing slow along the left bank where the reeds grew thick. He lifted his head a fraction and saw it.
Not a lizardmen fishing skiff. He knew those now—woven reeds and bone-bent frames, paddles that made almost-no sound. This canoe rode lower, the hull cut from a single huge log, edges hard with use. The paddler was a head taller than any lizardman, shoulders broad as a door, skin the deep red of fresh clay. Horn stubs curved from his temples, and a half-cape of patched leather hung from one shoulder, rain darkening it to near-black.
An ogre.
Blue Fang eased lower. The ogre's gaze found him anyway, as if eyes and river-sense both had agreed he was there and should be counted. The paddle stilled. The canoe barely drifted—whoever held it there knew water intimately.
Another canoe slid from behind the reeds, and another. Six in all, keeping a distance that wasn't fear but honor. Spears rested across gunwales. A woman in the second craft had a sword too long to be sensible. The man in the lead wore no blade as big, but his knuckles were scarred and his collarbones mapped old breaks. His eyes were the color of burnt sugar—hard, then warm when light struck them straight.
The lizardmen on the bank saw the canoes and went from song to silence. Spears lifted, the tips quivering a little, not with fear exactly but with the weight of choosing. A child's clay fish slipped from their hands and burped into the mud.
Blue Fang rose. The river clung to his ribs the way a dog clings to a hand when thunder cracks. He moved to a midstream bar and stood with water pouring off him, bead clicking softly against his brow ridge. The ogres let their canoes drift, silent as stones on a hill.
"River demon," the scar-knuckled one said. His voice carried easily, not from volume but because it fit the rain. "Guardian of this water."
The title fit and didn't. Blue Fang inclined his head.
"We come as watchers," the ogre said. "There are rumors. A beast with a sail eats monsters and mercy in turns. A hydra died yesterday. And we smelled poison on the wind, then clean water this morning."
The swordswoman's eyes tracked the scars along Blue Fang's flank with a professional's interest. Her left hand flexed near her hilt. She wanted to test him—not out of malice but because that was her language for truth.
Blue Fang held their gaze and then deliberately dropped it to the children clustered behind lizardmen legs. He moved his head a little and the clay fish bobbled back into a small hand as if to say: there are notches in this story. There are small details that matter more than your rumor's outline.
"We honor guardians," the scar-knuckled ogre said. "We end tyrants." His chin lifted a fraction, as if offering the choice back to Blue Fang as a test: Which are you? Choose right now.
Blue Fang let his breath lower until the surface dimples flowed into one pattern—rain and river agreeing on texture. Then he spoke. Not in words, but in that resonance that had chilled the hydra—Dragon's Echo, the Voice had called it when it first whispered through him. He didn't pour fear into it. He folded meaning. The name the lizardmen had laid on him. The taste of hydra poison and the way it had broken. The image of a child's laughing eyes. The weight of duty learned late.
The ogres flinched, not from fear but because the river moved inside their bones for a beat like a second heart. The swordswoman's hand tightened on her hilt, then eased.
The scar-knuckled ogre smiled an inch. "A thinking one, then."
The swordswoman stood. "Thinking or not, he is power. Power untested is danger." Her voice carried a music Blue Fang recognized from the slow blade—the measure of someone who had spent long hours alone with practice.
"You want to duel him," the leader said without annoyance.
She didn't answer in words. Her eyes did the thing swords do when they are very honest.
Blue Fang considered refusing. He imagined himself a king who wouldn't dance on demand. But the ogres had come wary and straight. Their canoes kept space. Their spears remained across gunwales. People who live on war-water know when to throw first and when to lower blade.
A test, he thought. Pass it and we can speak. Fail it and I bleed and they decide I am flood, not river.
He stepped off the bar and sank until the waterline cut his vision in two—world above, world below—and moved to a shallow where he could stand with his chest out and tail free. He planted there.
The swordswoman slid from her canoe without a sound. She waded forward until the water kissed her thighs. The blade came out of its sheath with the sigh of oil. She didn't posture. She didn't shout. She looked him in the eye.
"On my honor," she said. "If you are guardian, I will tell my people. If you kill me, my honor is yours. If I kill you, the river decides what to do with your bones."
It was an absurd covenant and a perfect one.
She moved.
Fast, but not beyond his new reflexes. Her feet cut a V in the water; her shoulders quieted their own wake. The blade flicked for his left eye—a test—and then flashed low for the meat of his foreleg when he bit at air. He felt the kiss of steel. Pain popped like a berry, sharp and sweet.
[Notice: New stimulus. Recording.]
He didn't snap for her head. He drove water.
River Lord was a humble thing in him yet. It could not call storms or walls. It could change how a current thought about a bend. He let his tail sweep with intent. The water around her calves thickened, more like honey for a heartbeat. She sank half an inch, not enough to trip a child—more than enough to make a swordswoman's timing turn into a mispronounced word.
He moved in that dropped syllable. His head lowered and shouldered. He didn't throw his weight to crush—her body would break and the test would be lost. He bumped like a boat nudging a pylon, enough to send her sliding with grace into deeper water where her footing became improvisation.
Her eyes widened, and she smiled. That expression made her look very young.
She pivoted in the water and came up with a cut angled to flay his jaw. He turned so the blade kissed scale. The strike rang, sparks falling like rain that had forgotten how to be wet.
"Again," she breathed, delighted. It wasn't taunt. It was prayer spoken to a new shrine: the joy of finding another craftsperson.
He obliged her.
They danced badly and beautifully. He was a cathedral of muscle learning how to bow. She was a needle sowing wind through water. He used the river where he could—small thickenings, a flicked current that made her foot slide a breath past where she wanted it, a line of draw where the sword's edge wanted to stick just long enough for a dinosaur to move a face away.
She nicked him three more times. He learned where his sail made a shield. He found that if he drove a wedge of pressure under the blade near the hilt, it would no longer sing the way she wanted. He discovered a pleasure he had not had in a very long time: a contest with rules, where losing was possible and dying wasn't the point.
They stopped because rain slackened and both of them were laughing.
The ogres did not cheer or groan. Their canoes rocked gently, and their faces held an open, quiet thing Blue Fang recognized from funerals—the stance of people ready to carry weight. The scar-knuckled leader inclined his head to the swordswoman. She sheathed her blade with two fingers cleaning the water from it, then saluted Blue Fang with palm to hilt and forearm across chest.
"Guardian," she said, and this time the word carried no test in it.
The leader stood. "I am Haru." He tapped his chest. Then gestured to the swordswoman. "Kuroi." He tapped the air between them and Blue Fang. "We apologize. We have lost too much to monsters we treated as kings."
Blue Fang lowered his head. The bead clicked. It sounded like agreement being notarized.
Haru's gaze sharpened over Blue Fang's shoulder toward Naiarholl. "We smelled something else with the poison yesterday. Not hydra. Not river rot. Something like wet bone and strings pulled too tight." He glanced at Kuroi, whose mouth worked once around a word she didn't want to say.
"Puppetry," she said at last. "Clayman's stink clings to that word in our tongues. We have heard he is dead. We have also heard men wear masks and names like cloaks."
The river dimmed a little. The hydra had been ugliness, but it had been honest ugliness, born of stagnant water and time's boredom. Strings and wet bone sounded like intention, and intention was a worse thing in a swamp than teeth.
Blue Fang felt his back lift until water slid from him like polished glass. "Where."
Kuroi pointed upstream, where a fringe of willow swayed in the slow water like hair. "Two nights ago, a patrol didn't return. The village on the ridge heard singing at dusk and crying at dawn. We found footprints that walked wrong. To the river. Into the river. Not out."
The children behind the lizardmen clutched their parents, crest feathers slicking flat. The elders' spears leaned a fraction toward the upstream shadow. Songs that had been making jokes about hydra meat went thin and turned to scales that fit prayer better than laughter.
Blue Fang tasted the current—really tasted it, not with tongue but with the lattice of pressure-sense the eels and hydra and fights had flowered in him. There it was: a coolness beneath the cool, a pattern too regular to be current. A tempo like a heartbeat that belonged to anything but a heart.
He wanted to smash it the way he had smashed the hydra. He wanted to be the kind of king you point at problems because the problems disappear in spray and teeth.
He looked at Haru and Kuroi. Haru's knuckles were very still. Kuroi's fingertips rested against her scabbard as if it were a pulse point. Both had canoe-calluses old as river stones.
"We will go with you," Haru said simply.
Blue Fang almost refused. The river in him swelled and tugged; it wanted to handle itself. But pride had already put a flood through a city he remembered dimly, and pride was the small god that demanded the largest offerings. He lowered his head.
He turned upstream. Naiarholl's elders spoke quickly to the ogres in a shared trader's patter that bent around nouns like nets around eels. Small bundles were handed to warriors; smoke was banked; children were scooped up and kissed into stillness. Nymera—he knew her name now, the crest-singer—touched Blue Fang's torn flank with the end of her staff and sang a note that made coolness sit on his skin.
[Notice: External resonance—minor regeneration support.]
They moved. Blue Fang took the channel the way a prow takes a lead. The ogre canoes slid into his wake, where water ran easiest. The lizardmen scouts skipped along the banks on feet that had memorized every root.
Rain lifted. The river narrowed into trees shouldering in close. Their leaves drooled long strings of water. Bird calls knifed the air and then were swallowed by the hush that lives where something is wrong. Twice, fish spooked hard enough that their backs flashed silver, then went still as if embarrassed.
Blue Fang felt the wrongness before he saw the place. The water thickened as if it had been taught bad habits. The current's tidy grammar slurred. Up ahead, a willow's long hair had caught bodies. Three lizardmen, mouths open, eyes shut as if surprised by sleep. Strings of pale stuff ran from their tongues and noses into the water. The willow leaned away from them as if even a tree could flinch.
Kuroi swore very softly. Haru set his paddle down and reached for a cloth to cover the faces, then stilled with the restraint of a man who knows not to disturb a trap.
The strings moved. Not with the river, but against it, pulling down, down, like a hand under blanket seeking a foot. The pressure pattern shivered into focus for Blue Fang. It came from beneath. A knot in the silt that had learned to pretend to be mud, learned to fish with grief.
He didn't roar. He sank.
The river welcomed him like a lover who had been waiting in a doorway. Silt took him in up to the jaw. His sail flattened. He moved forward with only eyes and nostrils and the first ridge of his back breaking the flow.
The thing under the bodies didn't have a shape so much as a habit. It was slime and tendon and old curses packed around an idea: make more string. As he approached, it tightened its pull as if thinking fish—come here—eat this. It didn't know he had teeth the size of its prophets.
He struck the way the river strikes when a log breaks loose in flood. His jaws sank into what passed for trunk. The flavor was wrong in five different ways. His belly lurched. He swallowed anyway.
[Predator's Maw: Extracting.]
[Result: Puppet Filament—consumption cancels and reverses active threads. Resistance acquired: Mindwire Immunity.]
The strings snapped like harp hair, then recoiled into him. His stomach cramped, then heated, then sighed as if something tired had finally found a bed. The filaments retreated from the lizardmen's mouths and dissolved into the water with angry glitter. The bodies floated freer. Haru caught them with a paddle, face working as he did so, and drew them gently toward the bank. Kuroi waded to help, eyes bright but steady.
Blue Fang could have left it at that—cut the line and called the job done. But the knot under the silt still quivered with hunger. He dug his claws in and pulled up a pale, shaking mass that looked like a brain someone had taught to hate. It writhed and tried to slide back under the mud.
"Don't," Kuroi said, a little too sharp, as if she half-expected even a guardian to keep a trophy.
He didn't. He laid the thing in the shallows and drove his foreclaw through it, pinning it like a beetle while the current did the washing. It dissolved slowly, not into rot but into nothing, like a bad word losing its usage.
Haru bowed—not from the waist, which would have been ceremony, but from the back in a way that let water run off his shoulders like grief processed into motion. "You are welcome in our territory," he said. "You will be told if you are unwelcome, so you do not have to guess. We will send word to others. The river has a guardian."
Kuroi stepped close enough that Blue Fang could have taken her in one hateful bite and reached up a hand without touching him. It was the offer of contact, not the demand. He lowered his head until his brow ridge rested against her palm for a single breath. The bead clicked between bone and skin.
"Do not grow lazy with our praise," she said, which was the kindest blessing a swordswoman could give.
He rumbled. The sound meant understood, and try me, and thank you all at once.
They carried the bodies with care to a place where reeds grew in a pattern the lizardmen used for burial. The crest-singer's voice threaded itself under the leaves; even the river softened its shush to listen. When the last song fell into silence, Blue Fang eased backward a pace and let the current take his weight again.
The river was larger than it had been that morning. Not in gallons but in meaning. It had more people in it now—the ogres' canoe lines and the lizardmen's reed beds and a guardian with hydra-sour breath and a bead. It had less of the wrong strings. It had a new word in its lexicon: we.
As they turned back downstream, rain began again, patient and long. Naiarholl would smell of smoke and cooked hydra and wet clay toys drying on flat stones. Blue Fang swam at the head of the little procession and let the current crumple against his chest in a way that felt, oddly, like an embrace.
He had expected, when he asked for strength in another life, that strength would feel like leaving things. It turned out it also felt like coming home heavy with a thing you carried for someone else.