The thaw did not come gently to Hearthstone. It arrived as a siege lifted, a slow, muddy, and inexorable surrender of winter's grip. The air lost its knife-edge, trading it for a damp, cool cloak that smelled of wet pine, rich earth, and the promise of life returning. For Arrion Haelend, it was a call he could no longer ignore. The walls of the village, the watchful eyes of the diminished garrison before they left, the quiet tension in the longhouse—it had all become a cage for his restless spirit. He needed the forest's silence to think, to move, to be something other than a secret waiting to be found.
He slipped out at false dawn, his reforged bow across his back, its living tusk cool against his neck. *Nightshade*'s weight at his hip was a familiar comfort. The Whispering Weald greeted him not as a king's domain, but as a homecoming. The scent was intoxicating: rain on last year's leaves, the moist, fecund soil, the sharp tang of sap rising in a million trees. Life pulsed visibly. Rabbits, grown fat and bold over the winter, darted through the underbrush. Deer moved in small, skittish herds, their sides no longer gaunt. The forest was a larder waking up, and Arrion's own blood sang in answer to its vitality.
He moved with a hunter's reverence, not just for the prey, but for the balance. He was not here to cull the weak, but to take a piece of the abundance, a tithe to his family's table. He tracked a group of does for an hour, his grey eyes missing nothing, his seven-foot frame moving with a silence that defied his size. He chose his target not out of hunger, but out of respect: a giant, mature doe, her coat thick and grey, a matriarch who had weathered many seasons. A clean kill was a gift to such a creature, a swift end in the midst of life's renewal.
He drew the purple-wood bow. The motion was seamless, the mighty draw of the tusk-enhanced limbs a strain even for his shoulders, a testament to the power he now commanded. He released. The ***WHOOM*** was a soft thunderclap swallowed by the forest. The iron-headed arrow took the doe cleanly through the heart. She dropped where she stood, her death instantaneous, a single shudder before the stillness.
Arrion approached, kneeling in the damp moss beside her. He murmured a quiet thanks to the forest, to the spirit of the doe, the old ritual feeling more potent now, connected as he was to the Verdant King. He drew a skinning knife, its edge honed to a whisper. The morning sun finally pierced the canopy, dappling the scene in gold and green.
He made the first incision, a precise cut to begin the bleed. The blood that welled up was not the rich, crimson red he expected.
It was tinged with black.
A deep, oily, wrong black that swirled through the vital fluid like venom. The coppery scent of blood was overlaid with something else—a sweet, cloying odor of overripe fruit and damp rot. Arrion froze, his knife hovering. He watched, horrified, as the black tinge spread from the wound, crawling through the doe's vasculature in visible, corrupting threads under her skin. Her grey coat dulled, then began to slough off in patches. Healthy muscle beneath turned grey, then black, collapsing into a foul-smelling slurry.
The corruption did not stop with the carcass.
Where the tainted blood dripped onto the vibrant green moss, the moss shriveled and died in an instant, leaving a patch of black, smoking earth. The infection spread radially, a silent, accelerating blight. The lush ferns nearby curled inwards, their fronds turning to brittle charcoal. The scent of spring was utterly vanquished by the reek of profound decay.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through Arrion's hunter's calm. This was no natural disease. This was an *unmaking*.
Instinct took over. He stumbled back from the spreading circle of death, his mind racing to the only power he had that felt relevant—the raw, explosive force of his newfound Adept rank. He focused not on his sword, but on the **intent** he had learned to channel. He drew upon the simmering fear, the protective fury, the **Dominion Over Self** he had forged in the winter's crucible, and pushed it outward.
He slammed his fist, not into a tree, but into the very air above the epicenter of the blight.
A pulse of concussive force, visible as a shimmering distortion, erupted from the point of impact. The sound was a deep, hollow **THOOM** that shook the trees. The corrupted carcass of the doe vaporized into a cloud of black ash. The top layer of blighted soil was scoured away, thrown back in a circle twenty feet wide, revealing bare, sterile clay beneath.
For a second, Arrion hoped. He stood panting, the echoes of his thunderous blow fading.
Then he saw the roots.
Exposed by his blast, the root systems of the great trees at the edge of his cleared circle were visible. And they were *infected*. The black corruption ran through them like sinister veins, pulsing slowly upward into the trunks. The blight hadn't been a surface phenomenon. It was systemic, a poison in the bloodstream of the forest itself. His localized strike was like cutting off a single gangrenous finger while the rot raced towards the heart.
He looked up, his storm-grey eyes sweeping the sun-dappled woodland with new, dreadful understanding. The signs had been subtle, masked by the exuberance of spring. A cluster of budding flowers on a nearby hawthorn that were just… black at the tips. A patch of mushrooms that seemed to wilt as he watched, melting into inky puddles. The cheerful chirping of birds was noticeably absent in this particular grove.
This was not an isolated incident. The blight was here. It was active. And it was far, far larger than a single spoiled deer.
The Verdant King's warning echoed in his mind: *"The serpent's nest will stir."* This was the stirring. Not an army of men in black, but a silent, creeping death. Ralke's delayed vengeance. The Marquis hadn't been idle over the winter; he had been planting a different kind of soldier.
Arrion didn't need to know the magical theory, the nature of the Drakespine Shamans' plague-seed. He knew poison when he saw it. He knew an attack on the land that sheltered him. This was a declaration of war not just on him, but on everything the Verdant King represented, on the very concept of Hearthstone's safety.
He turned and ran.
It was not the graceful, loping run of the hunter, but the desperate, ground-eating sprint of a man carrying a warning that could mean life or death for everyone he loved. He crashed through underbrush he would normally skirt, his mind a whirlwind of terrifying realizations. The game was plentiful because the forest was trying to *flee* the sickness in its heart. The moist, rich smell was the last gasp of health before the rot set in. How far had it spread? Was it already at the palisade? Were the roots under the longhouse turning black?
The journey back, which had taken him an hour of mindful tracking, was covered in half the time. He burst from the treeline near the village's eastern gate, his chest heaving, his face a mask of stark alarm. The two villagers on day watch, used to Arrion's comings and goings, startled at his violent emergence and his expression.
"Arrion? What's wrong?" one called, lowering his spear.
Arrion didn't answer with words. He held up his hand. It was stained, not with red blood, but with the drying, black-tinged filth from the doe. The reek of decay still clung to him.
"Get the Headsman. Now," he commanded, his voice a low, urgent rasp that brooked no argument. He didn't wait, striding past them towards the longhouse.
He found Borryn in the back of The Stubborn Stag, inventorying ale casks. His uncle took one look at him and the ledger in his hands was forgotten.
"Out with it," Borryn said, his voice dropping into the gravelly tone he used for grave matters.
Arrion leaned against a barrel, trying to order his thoughts, to find words for the visceral horror he'd witnessed. "The forest… it's sick, Uncle. Not a blight. A *rot*. A deliberate one."
He described it all in terse, brutal sentences: the healthy doe, the black blood, the rapid, unnatural decay, the roots like poisoned veins. He showed his stained hand. "I tried to burn it out with… with my will. It only scratched the surface. The sickness is deep. It's in the ground. It's spreading."
Borryn's face, usually ruddy with health and ale, went pale. He understood the implications instantly. Hearthstone's walls were meaningless against this. Their food, their water, their very safety depended on the benevolence of the Weald. If the forest died, or turned against them in its death throes, they were finished.
"Ralke," Borryn breathed, the name a curse. "This is his spring offensive."
Orryn arrived then, summoned from the militia drill field. He listened, his strategic mind already mapping the disaster. "We need to find the extent. Scout the perimeter. If it's localized, we might contain it by fire…"
"Fire in the Whispering Weald?" Arrion interrupted, a flicker of the King's amber eyes in his memory. "You'd bring the forest's wrath down on us ourselves. And it won't work. This isn't a fungus on a log. It's in the *life* of the place."
"Then what do you suggest?" Orryn shot back, frustration edging his voice. "We cannot fight a sickness of the soil!"
"We warn the King," Arrion said, the idea solidifying as he spoke. "He felt it. He must have. But he may not know its source is *man-made*. He may think it a natural plague. I have to go to the glade. I have to tell him this is Ralke's work."
"And if the King can do nothing?" Borryn asked, the pragmatic fear in his eyes.
Arrion was silent for a long moment. He looked at his black-stained hand, then out the tavern window towards the towering green wall of the Weald. "Then we are not just besieged," he said, his voice terribly calm. "We are already dead. We just haven't stopped breathing yet."
The warmth of the spring morning outside felt like a grotesque mockery. The crisis had shifted shape, from steel and shadow to spores and sap. Arrion Haelend, the giant with the star-dusted sword and the thunder in his fists, felt a new kind of helplessness. He could split a tree or slay a man, but how did he fight a thought made into poison, a hatred for green, growing things sown into the earth itself? He knew only one thing with absolute, chilling certainty: something was profoundly, catastrophically wrong. And the time for hidden strength was over.