The months bled together in the Blightlands. Time had no meaning here. Snow and ash fell from the sky alike, choking the dark forests and valleys in white and gray. The sun itself grew weaker with each passing week, until it barely cast light, and the horizon glowed with nothing more than cold memory.
Cairon had changed. The boy who had stumbled into this cursed land in chains, seventeen and half-starved, was gone. What remained was carved from steel and rage. He had become a killer with callused hands and a stare that made grown men flinch. His skin was pale beneath grime, his black hair long and knotted. His eyes had turned hard as chipped iron.
Hunger no longer swayed him. Pain had become routine. Fear, once a cruel master, had grown quiet in his shadow. The bastard had become a warrior.
Among the damned of the penal levy, Cairon rose. Not because he sought leadership, but because others survived when they stood behind him. He had become the one they followed into the marshes where bloated corpses rose on brittle legs. He led them down into the corpse-mines, where the air whispered in dead tongues and torches burned blue. He had fought monsters that did not bleed and men who served dark gods.
And he had not died.
"The Blightlands were the richest kingdom in the world once," Ser Daric said one night, as the three of them sat beneath the broken bones of a fallen tower. "Back in the elder days. Before they opened something they could not close. They reached for godhood. Found damnation instead."
Shaku scoffed as he sharpened his blade. "That's not how I heard it. The river cities say this place always belonged to dark gods. Men came here thinking they could build without blood. They forgot their offerings, and the old ones came to collect."
"Whatever happened," Cairon muttered, staring into the dying fire, "the price was paid in flesh."
The Blightlands were poison. That much was clear. Nothing here was natural. The ground festered. The water choked with rot. Trees grew twisted and leaned toward the screams that echoed after midnight. But in that poison, treasure still lay buried. Cairon had begun with rags and a rusted dagger. Now he wore patchwork bronze plate over leathers, and at his hip hung a cold steel sword pulled from the corpse of a dead king. It had not lost its edge even after centuries.
He had slain walking dead in the snowfields. He had burned nests of flesh-beasts that burrowed into corpses and wore them like cloaks. He had crushed mad cultists whose eyes were sewn shut, their tongues split like snakes. He had drowned a priest in a pool of black ooze in the temple of some nameless god.
Shaku had started calling him Warhound. The others in the penal levy had taken to using it as well, muttered with fear and respect in equal measure. Ser Daric never used the name aloud, but in battle, he looked to Cairon for orders. Not the other way around.
Cairon had earned his place in the Blightlands. Not by birth or favor. By blood and steel.
Then came the siege.
The penal levy had claimed a ruined outpost at the edge of an old battlefield. They called it a castle, though it was little more than rotting timbers nailed atop broken walls. Men slept in rusted cages or under tarps nailed to the stone. They had held the ruin for four weeks, repelling smaller threats. Cairon had started to believe they might survive the winter.
He was wrong.
The enemy came at dusk. Not men. Not anything close to mortal. They poured from the treeline with no sound but the crunch of snow beneath them. Their bodies twitched like puppets. Some had too many arms. Some none at all. Their eyes, when they had them, glowed with the pale light of dead moons.
And they screamed. Not with mouths, but with their skin. A long, thin wail that peeled sanity from bone.
The levy broke within the hour.
Cairon fought at the breach. Then again at the barricade. Then on the steps of the broken tower. Blood covered him, none of it his own. He split a monster from neck to navel and watched something crawl out of its guts with too many fingers.
He saw Shaku vanish into the fog, dragged by something black and writhing, screaming curses. Cairon tried to follow, but could not.
He saw Ser Daric overrun at the rear gate, pulled down by pale limbs. The old knight fought like a butcher, but there were too many. They ripped him open like a sack of meat.
Cairon screamed. He fought until the walls collapsed and flame licked the night sky. He fought through the stench of death and the stink of burned magic. Something hit him from behind, hard as a battering ram. Bone cracked in his side. He dropped to one knee. Blood filled his mouth. He spat and crawled forward.
He reached the inner yard, dragging himself over the corpses of men he had bled beside.
Then the dark took him.
When Cairon woke, he lay naked on smooth stone beneath the earth. Warmth pressed against his skin, thick and unnatural, like the breath of something sleeping just out of sight. The air smelled of spice and rot, clove and blood. The chamber flickered with dim green light, not from torches but from carvings that pulsed faintly across the walls.
Serpents. Coiled around thrones. Slithering through forests of bones. Their eyes were suns, their mouths filled with pearl-white teeth and long, curling tongues that shimmered like silk.
Naked human figures danced in friezes carved into the stone, their bodies writhing in impossible poses, pleasure and agony fused into one. Women lifted their thighs for serpents and moaned with lust as they were filled. Another mural showed a human woman birthing a serpent with a human face. There was a perverse pleasure in her expression, not fear.
Cairon's heart thundered in his chest. His mouth was dry, his limbs heavy. He tried to move, but the strength had left him.
He had survived the siege. Somehow. But he had not been rescued.
He had been claimed.
The cult that held him called themselves the Suthari, and they served something older than gods. The Great Serpent. The Whispering Coil. The Father of Venom. He heard the names in murmurs, in chants, in the rattle of bone flutes and the hum of forked tongues.
Their priests wore masks carved from human skulls, faces bleached white, eye sockets hollow. They walked in robes of black silk, embroidered with scales of gold thread. Their acolytes were even more disturbing. Eyes sewn shut with silver wire. Tongues split to the root. They moved silently and always in pairs, like ghosts caught mid-prayer.
Cairon had no blade. No armor. No strength. But he had his rage.
And that was why they had not killed him.
"You are from the penal levy," hissed the High Priest. A tall, emaciated man whose skin gleamed like marble, veins black beneath its surface. His voice slid into the air like oil. "You defied our great master. You killed many of his servants. At first, we thought to skin you and offer your flesh to the pit."
Cairon tried to speak, but his throat was raw. His body refused to obey.
"But then we saw it in you," the priest hissed, leaning close. "Hatred. Old and rotting. Desires choked in silence. Rage without end. Lust that coils in your belly like fire. The Great Serpent does not want your death. Not yet. He wants your suffering. He wants your soul to be broken, reshaped. Offered. And then used."
They carved symbols into his skin with obsidian knives, black as the void between stars. They bled him slowly, licking the blood from his arms like wine. They bathed him in oils that reeked of anise and iron. They fed him broth thick with red powder that tasted like clotted blood and left his vision smeared with dreams.
He slept. He screamed. He shook with fever.
In the dark, he dreamed of castles burning. Of silk ropes binding his limbs. Of women moaning under him and monsters whispering in his ear. He saw Isolde's face in fire, her mouth wide with laughter. He saw her stepping toward him with a serpent coiled between her breasts. He screamed her name in hatred. In hunger.
Time dissolved. His skin grew numb to pain. His eyes learned to see in the dark.
He heard voices. Not from the priests. Not from the walls. From inside.
Coil tighter. Grip deeper. Want more.
On the seventh day, they led him to the pit.
It was a vast hollow beneath the temple, ringed with stone altars and oil-fed fires. The cult gathered there, a hundred hooded figures humming in a language older than memory. The air shimmered with heat. Cairon stood naked on a slab of black granite, arms bound in golden chain.
The High Priest raised his arms. "Let the offering be consumed. Let flesh be uncoiled. Let the venom take root."
A serpent rose from the pit. Massive. Scaled in shades of crimson and emerald, its head crowned with a ring of bony spines. Its eyes were golden, burning, infinite.
Cairon felt the heat of it. The hunger of it. The desire to be eaten, to be used. It coiled toward him.
But something in him broke. Or bloomed.
No.
He was not a sacrifice. Not food. Not some whimpering victim for their god of lust and hunger.
He was rage. He was pain. He was hatred sharpened into a knife.
With a scream, he ripped his arms free. The golden chain melted in his hands. His skin burned with glyphs that shimmered and hissed. Serpent runes twisted across his chest and shoulders, glowing green and black.
He spoke, not in his own voice, but in the voice of something deeper. Words curled from his tongue like smoke, wrapping around the cultists like vines.
The serpent froze. Then bowed.
The High Priest gasped, stepping back. "He speaks the tongue. He commands-"
Cairon lifted a hand. And with that gesture, the stone around the pit cracked.
He whispered again. The fire flared.
The priests screamed as their robes ignited. Flesh melted. Masks cracked. Blood steamed on the altar stones. The serpent reared back, then vanished into the pit like a fleeing god.
Cairon stood amid the ruin, his skin marked, his hair slick with sweat, his eyes glowing faintly in the dark. He felt it. In his blood. In his breath.
Power.
He saw through flesh and lies. He could hear desire like a heartbeat. He spoke words that curled down the spine and made men obey. The Serpent whispered behind his skull, coiled and silent. Waiting.
The survivors of the cult fell to their knees and pressed their faces to the ground. They named him Sath-Cairon. The one who returned from death with venom in his veins.
They dressed him in black and gold. They kissed his feet. They begged him to lead them.
But he did not stay.
When the moon rose full and the firepit hissed with sacred oils, Cairon donned the cloak they gave him and walked into the wild.
Alone.
The Blightlands bent away from him. Beasts fled his path. Corpses refused to rise where he stepped.
He returned not as a man, but as a weapon shaped by hate. His eyes were colder. His voice softer, yet heavier. He no longer needed a blade to hurt someone. He could break minds now. Seduce the cruel. Terrify the brave.
And he had not forgotten Isolde.
Nor his father. Nor Alrik. Nor Toman.
He would return home one day.
And when he did, he would not come as a bastard.
He would come as something far worse.