CHAPTER 40B — Dawn Over the Marsh
The sounds changed first.
Inside the Academy, the air carried student chatter, bells, the muted rumble of distant training. Out here, the wind sounded bigger. Older.
Frogs croaked somewhere unseen. Insects hummed. Water lapped softly against something hollow.
The smell hit next.
Wet earth. Old leaves. Rotting reeds. The faint tang of something acrid and wrong under it all, like metal left too long in the rain.
The marsh stretched ahead in layers.
Low water pooled in flat, mirror-like sheets, broken by islands of dark mud and clumps of reed-grass. Trees rose in clusters—pale trunks, black trunks, some hollowed out and carved by time. Mist hugged the ground, coiling thickest in the hollows.
A narrow causeway of fitted stone slabs cut through the worst of it, runes etched along the edges, glowing faintly where they touched water.
Behind them, the ward shimmered as a curved line of light.
Beyond it, the Academy walls looked farther away than they should.
"Stay on the path," Veldt said. "Do not step on bare ground unless I tell you to. Some of it is not ground."
"Noted," Myra said faintly.
They started walking.
Every sound felt louder out here.
Aiden's boots on stone. Runa's armor shifting softly. Myra's knives clinking in their sheaths. Nellie's quiet breaths.
The pup trotted at his side, nose twitching constantly, lightning sparking more brightly now whenever it brushed the damp air.
Nellie pressed a hand over her Verdant mark. Her face had gone a shade paler.
"Pull?" Aiden asked quietly.
She nodded. "It's… everywhere. The threads are sunk into the water, the trees, the wrong places between them. But there's one that's…" She squinted into the mist. "…there."
She pointed—not straight ahead, but off to the left, where the water deepened into a darker pool.
Veldt's head turned. So did Lirienne's.
"Noted," he said. "Eyes forward for now."
They walked in silence for a while.
The causeway curved.
Birds startled from a nearby tree, wings slapping the air before they vanished into fog.
Somewhere in the distance, something large moved, water sloshing around it.
Aiden's storm leaned in that direction like a dog straining against a leash.
He forced it to heel.
A low ridge appeared ahead—broken stone, half-swallowed by roots and moss.
"The old Hollow edge," Lirienne said quietly. "We're close."
Close to where everything had collapsed.
Close to where the Warden had risen.
The causeway rose slightly as it reached the ridge, giving them a view over the lower flats.
Aiden's breath caught.
The landscape beyond the ridge was wrong.
The marsh looked… wounded.
Trees sagged at unnatural angles, bark greyed. The water in the nearest pools had a slick sheen to it, threads of faint purple-black drifting just under the surface like bruises. Runes had been carved into standing stones in a rough circle, their light dimmer than the ones near the Academy.
"Ward anchors," Meris murmured. "New ones."
"Struggling," Nellie whispered before she could stop herself.
Meris's gaze snapped to her. "So you feel it too," she said. Not quite a question.
Nellie swallowed. "They're… holding, but—" She winced, pressing fingers harder against her mark. "Something keeps pushing."
As she said it, the air in front of them shimmered.
It was subtle.
A ripple across nothing, like heat over stone, gliding along the line of the ward anchors before fading.
Veldt went very still.
"That," he said, "is the Warden testing how much pain the wards can take."
Aiden's storm slammed against his ribs in immediate, furious answer.
The pup growled, fur standing on end, tiny teeth bared at empty air.
Aiden's hand dropped automatically to its back, fingers tangling in crackling fur.
Easy.
Easy.
For half a second, something large loomed in the mist beyond the ward ring.
Not a clear shape.
A suggestion.
Height. Width. Motion that didn't belong to wind.
Fog condensed briefly into the outline of an impossible limb, barely there, barely seen.
Lightning flickered under the water.
Not his.
The storm in him roared.
Something in the mist turned.
Looked at him.
Nellie gasped, grabbing the railing of the causeway. "There—it's—"
"Eyes down," Veldt snapped. "Do not meet it."
Aiden tried.
He really did.
But for one heartbeat, his gaze locked into the whiteness beyond the wardline.
And the Warden looked back.
The world narrowed to pressure and pulse.
No words this time.
No clear whisper like in the Hollow.
Just a weight on his bones, on his storm, on his marks.
The feeling of being measured.
Then—
A single impression, sliding under his thoughts like fog under a door:
Not ready.
The pressure lifted.
The mist sagged, shapes dissolving.
Lightning under the water dimmed back to faint echoes.
Aiden sucked in a breath that tasted like marsh and iron and relief and disappointment burned together.
"Did it—" he whispered.
"Yes," Nellie said, voice thin. "It found you."
Myra's hand found his forearm, fingers firm. "And then it stopped. That's the important bit."
"Not entirely," Runa murmured.
She was staring past the ward anchors at the ground just beyond.
Aiden followed her gaze.
At first, he saw only more mud, more water, more reeds bending under the faint breeze.
Then the breeze shifted.
The mist moved.
And he saw it.
Something had carved a mark into the earth just beyond the wardline.
Not with a tool.
With weight.
Pressure.
Not deep—barely more than scraped mud and dragged reeds—but the shape was unmistakable.
A spiral.
A line.
A jagged, crooked bolt.
It looked disturbingly like the pattern that glows beneath his skin when his storm surged.
Nellie swallowed hard. "That wasn't here before," she whispered.
"Are you sure?" Meris asked.
"Yes," Nellie said. There was no hesitation in it. "I would have felt it. This… this is new. It's echo-threaded. Like someone took Aiden's mark and pressed it into the ground."
The pup whined, low and unhappy.
Aiden's throat went dry.
"It marked the marsh," he said.
"Or left you a message," Myra said quietly.
Veldt's jaw tightened.
"We're done here," he said. "We report. We don't linger near a Warden playing with symbols it should not know."
"But—" Aiden began.
Veldt cut him a look sharp enough to slice. "That is an order, Raikos."
The storm didn't like it.
But it listened.
Barely.
He tore his gaze from the mark.
As they turned back along the causeway, Aiden felt the weight of the Warden's attention recede—
—but not vanish.
In the distance, somewhere beyond the bruised pools and wounded trees, fog moved of its own will.
Watching.
Waiting.
The marsh wasn't just a place anymore.
It was a conversation.
And the next time the Warden spoke, he suspected it wouldn't be with scraped symbols in the mud.
It would be with something that bled.