The trail out of Drownpost curved like a question no one wanted to answer. It narrowed as it passed the last scattered shacks and disappeared into the overgrown hush of the outer marshes. There were no road signs past the salt-stained fences, no lanterns lining the path, just the croak of old boards underfoot and the thick breath of fog curling low across the reeds.
Rin kept close behind Malri, stepping where he stepped, her boots sticking faintly with each pull from the muck. Her legs ached from training, but she said nothing. The air here was heavier than near the coast, dense with rot and something sharper beneath it, something briny and old. Insects should have been buzzing in swarms. But the marsh was quiet.
Malri said nothing, but his posture spoke. His hand never left the hilt of the short blade at his side, and his eyes moved constantly, searching the path, the edges, the water, the sky. He moved like someone who'd been hunted before.
Rin tried to match him, quiet steps, shallow breath, but her footfalls still felt too loud, her heartbeat louder. A few weeks ago, she wouldn't have dared come here. Now she was trailing a man into a swamp to look for a sailor who might already be dead. She should have felt fear. She did. But under it, deeper, something else stirred: readiness.
They passed a knot of thorned reeds, and a rusted shackle dangled from one. Malri didn't comment, just veered slightly around it. She did too.
Ahead, the marsh opened into a sluggish channel where mangrove roots webbed out into dark water. The trees rose on stilted legs, twisted and knotted together, their branches like hooked fingers clawing at the sky. There was no wind. Not even a breath of it.
Rin slowed beside Malri as they reached a warped dock built from mismatched planks and bent nails. One side dipped noticeably into the water, sagging with age. The lantern light flickered as he lifted it.
"There," he said quietly.
Half-caught in the mangrove roots was a skiff, no sail, just a small rowboat, one oar still lashed loosely at the side. Its bow was submerged, the stern high like it had tried to crawl out of the water. Moss had crept up the hull, and one side showed deep gouges, raw and ragged.
Rin stepped onto the dock, testing it with her weight. It groaned under her, but held.
She approached the skiff, noting the claw-like marks along the rail, as if someone had gripped it with nails and held on. There was something else floating nearby, and she knelt, reaching into the cold water to retrieve it.
A small metal flask. Dent on the side. Cork sealed. Tied with a faded ribbon, pale blue, almost white now.
Malri took it from her hands and turned it over once in his palm. He didn't speak, but he didn't let go. A silence fell then, heavier than before. The kind that felt built. Even the water seemed stiller than it should have been.
Rin shifted her weight. "No frogs," she murmured.
"No birds," he added. "No gulls. No biting flies. Not even a gnat."
A slow ripple passed under the dock. Neither of them moved.
"Sometimes," Malri said, "when something's used, the water remembers. Even when the words are gone."
He started walking again, stepping carefully along the waterline. Rin followed.
In the mud just beyond the skiff, something caught her eye, faint depressions. Not footprints exactly, but… round, like heel-marks. She crouched, brushing aside wet moss. The pattern circled back on itself again and again, the marks looping like someone had been pacing or... turning. They overlapped, but never broke stride.
"Here," she called softly.
Malri joined her, eyes narrowing. He crouched low, pressed his hand to the indentations.
"No stride variance. No retreat."
Rin looked out over the water. "So where did they go?"
He rose slowly. "That's the question."
A gust of wind finally stirred the reeds, but it came from inland, against the tide. The mist responded like a living thing, curling tighter around the trees. Somewhere out in the mangroves, a long, hollow creak echoed, like a board twisting under slow, impossible weight.
Malri straightened, flask still tucked in his coat.
"Stay sharp," he said. "This place hides more danger than people think."
The glade looked wrong.
They had left the clearings behind, such as they were in the marsh, and passed into a hollowed section of the mangroves where the trees arched away from a sunken basin like they were leaning from a bad memory. The branches twisted backward, and the air inside the hollow was too still.
Rin stepped past a curtain of hanging moss and froze. The clearing ahead was quiet as breath before a scream.
In the center, a patch of reeds lay flattened in a perfect spiral, tight and deliberate, as though something had been slowly wound inward like thread on a spool. The reeds hadn't snapped or bent. They simply... lay down. Folded flat in concentric rings.
Malri didn't speak. He crouched at the edge of the spiral, running calloused fingers over the edge of the pattern.
Rin stepped beside him, slow, cautious. Her boots didn't splash, the water here barely rippled.
The surrounding trees bore strange marks. One, directly across from them, had its bark peeled back in a half-moon of exposed pale wood. Beneath the mark, mud had hardened into a sunburst of cracked lines, like dried salt left from an old tide, but the tide hadn't reached this far up the bank.
"What is this place?" Rin asked. Rin stepped toward the spiral, knees tight with caution, and crouched at its edge. The flattened reeds whispered under her fingers like brittle paper. She didn't like how they felt.
There was movement at the corner of her eye, a tiny shift, and she turned to see a marsh sparrow hopping across the edge of the glade. It paused at the spiral's boundary. Then stepped forward. A single hop into the center, and it instantly dropped dead, as if its breath had simply vanished.
Rin flinched. Malri hissed.
"The spiral pattern is a sign that a verse manifested here; this lingering aura of death must have been a present left by whoever got here first." he said quietly.
They moved further in. Near the center of the spiral, beneath a clump of reeds, Rin spotted something out of place: a small glass bottle, stoppered with black wax and partially buried in muck. She knelt and pulled it free.
Inside was seawater, and a shard of white stone, scorched around the edges and wrapped in a fraying thread of crimson string.
Rin held it up. "A charm?"
Malri took it from her hands, turned it once, and frowned. "A poor one. Superstition. Marshfolk sometimes bury these."
"Did it work?" Rin asked.
He dropped it into a leather pouch and tied it shut. "If it had, we wouldn't be standing here."
The wind chose that moment to return, but it came from the wrong direction. The reeds rustled like whispers too soft to catch.
Then came the crunch of movement, feet on old roots.
Malri's hand went to his blade.
Rin dropped into a crouch without thinking, slipping sideways into the crook of a tree. Her breath stilled. Her grip found the belaying pin.
Two men emerged from the fringe of mangroves. One held a lantern, its light flickering in the marsh mist. The other carried a pike slung over his shoulder and a net bag half-filled with metal scraps. One wore a breastplate two sizes too small, the other had a crab in a bone cage hanging from his belt.
Not local.
"Scavengers," Malri said under his breath. "And not the kind that leave empty-handed."
They hadn't spotted them yet.
Rin's fingers tightened on the handle of the pin. Her heart beat fast but steady. She felt it in her shoulders, her knees, her breath.
She looked to Malri.
His expression didn't shift. But he was already watching her.
Waiting to see what she'd do.
One of the scavengers slipped on a knot of algae-wet root, grunted, and thumped a boot hard against the bark to catch his balance. His curse echoed low through the still air. The other chuckled, rough and rasping, before lifting his lantern higher and casting a gold halo through the marsh mist.
They moved lazily, but there was a rhythm to their movement.
Malri's fingers brushed Rin's shoulder briefly, a signal, then silence.
She crouched lower behind a split trunk, watching them carefully. The man with the pike glanced around, and she recognized the kind of predator that always expected its prey to be slower, smaller, and silent. Her hand was already on her hip, fingers resting against the grip of her dagger.
She could still hear Malri's voice from the nights in the shack:
"Keep your elbow tight. Step soft, don't rush. If they're bigger, go low."
The scavengers muttered something between them, too low to catch. Then one kicked at a knotted clump of reeds, and stopped.
"Spiral's still wet," he said. "Fresh."
The other swore. "So someone's been nosing."
That was enough.
Malri rose from the mist like a man painted from shadow.
"Evening," he said evenly. "You're a long way into something you don't understand."
Both men jerked, the one with the lantern fumbling it upward like a shield. The pike-wielder grunted and dropped into a half-ready stance, weapon angled toward Malri.
"This here's salvage," said the taller man, eyeing him. "You aiming to stake a claim?"
"No claim," Malri said. "Just advice. Walk back the way you came."
The pike carrier snorted. "That advice comes with a map?"
Rin moved silently behind them, emerging from the tangle with both daggers drawn, crouched low, just as Malri had taught her.
She didn't hesitate, not this time.
The shorter scavenger spun to face her, raising a rusted cudgel too slowly. Rin ducked beneath it, slashing low with her left dagger. Steel bit into the side of his leg, not deep enough to sever, but enough to stagger. He screamed and stumbled backward, dropping his weapon.
He wasn't finished though.
Snarling, he lunged again, swinging wild and clumsy. Rin pivoted, twisting out of range, and kicked a clump of mud directly into his eyes. He reeled, roaring, and that's when she moved in close and placed the point of her second blade right to his throat.
He froze.
Across the clearing, Malri hadn't drawn his blade, but he hadn't needed to. He'd disarmed the pike with a fluid motion, letting it clatter to the roots, and pressed his palm into the taller man's chest hard enough to stagger him back against a tree.
"Leave the cage," Malri said. "And whatever else you've stolen."
The man looked down at the small crab cage swaying on his hip, then back at Rin, who still held her dagger steady despite the tremor in her calves.
"You marsh ghosts are getting bolder," he muttered.
"Last warning," Malri said.
They backed off. One spat a glob of blood-mixed phlegm into the water before limping out of sight. The quiet rolled back in behind them, dense as velvet.
Rin straightened, letting her arms drop, the daggers still warm in her hands. Her chest heaved, but she wasn't gasping. She wasn't shaking. Not much. Malri looked at her for a long moment.
"You held," he said simply.
Rin didn't speak, only nodded once. Her eyes drifted to the smear of blood in the reeds. Her first real wound given. And still, the only thing she felt was a thrum, something between pride and fear and proof. Proof she didn't have to be helpless anymore.
They lingered in the clearing after the scavengers vanished, letting the stillness settle again. But it didn't return the same.
The silence felt deeper now, like it had absorbed the echo of what just happened and buried it under waterlogged roots. Wind whispered through the hanging mosses, brushing the back of Rin's neck like a warning.
The spiral of reeds hadn't unfurled. If anything, the pattern looked more deliberate, its coils tighter, its center darker. A hollow with no sound, no ripple, no life. Malri crouched at its edge again, his expression heavier now.
"Something's been disturbed," he said, voice low.
Rin kept a step back, her eyes still on the glade's perimeter.
Malri didn't clarify further. Instead, he knelt, fingers brushing the edge of the spiral like he was feeling for temperature or breath. Then he rose and moved to the base of a leaning mangrove. His boot struck something submerged, soft but solid. He reached down, pulled it from the muck.
It was a thin carved whistle of sun-bleached bone, its string torn, one end cracked.
Rin said nothing, but she knew from his expression who it had belonged to.
"Jahran was one of ours," Malri said. "A whisper-runner. He didn't hold a verse, but he knew how to feel their echoes, could feel them before they surfaced."
"He came to Drownpost for mine?"
"He was already stationed here. This was an emergent zone. Stable enough to hide in plain sight. Close enough to the Heartwood currents to matter."
He turned the broken whistle in his palm.
"He sent word two moons ago that a ripple had begun. Said something was humming below the tide. Then nothing."
Rin folded her arms, unsettled. "And then I found the verse."
"No coincidence," Malri said. "But we weren't the only ones listening."
She glanced at the spiral again. "The second verse… someone took it?"
"Claimed it," he said. "Look at the signs, the spiral's crooked in places, mud kicked through the lines, bark gashed like something scrambled. That wasn't just an emergence. There was a struggle."
Rin's eyes traced the damage with fresh weight. "So this Jahran must have been involved."
Malri nodded. "That's my guess. Someone else wanted the verse, and they fought for it."
"Fought, and won."
"Looks that way," he said. "Took their prize and vanished before the spiral finished cooling."
She crouched lower, touching the warped reed line at the spiral's edge. "Then whoever has it now… they were willing to bleed for it."
"Or make someone else bleed," he muttered.
She looked up. "You think it was the Crown?"
He shook his head. "No. Too messy. If they were here, we'd already see dock patrols and ledger ships combing the bay."
He glanced toward the dark tree line. "This was smaller. Quieter. But not without purpose. Someone knew what to look for, and they got here first."
Rin's brow furrowed. "You think they're still here?"
"I think they're close. Someone caused this spiral to form. That means they're learning."
She crouched beside the reeds, brushing her fingers across the edges. They felt brittle, wrong, like paper left too long in saltwater.
"If this was the second verse," she asked slowly, "does that mean more are coming?"
Malri hesitated. "Verses usually come in sets of three most often. There is no way to know for sure, but for the second to have manifested so quickly, I believe this Shanty may have four or more verses in total."
"But now someone's trying to steal the rest."
He nodded grimly. "You've felt the pull. The harmony. Imagine someone using that to bend storms, or worse."
The weight of it hit her then, not just the bond, but the danger. Someone had already moved. And she was behind.
"Why didn't the Crown ever want this kind of power loose?" she asked.
Malri looked toward the trees. "Because it doesn't obey. Shanty magic doesn't care for bloodlines or decrees. You earn it by standing shoulder to shoulder. By singing as one. That terrifies tyrants."
She exhaled slowly. "So what do we do?"
He looked back at her. "We train. We listen. We find who holds the next verse. And we build you a crew, before they build theirs."
She didn't reply. But she didn't flinch either. As they turned to leave the glade, the mist returned behind them like a veil closing. The spiral remained, silent and watching.