The smoke from the oath-fire still clung to Sky-Torn's hair when he woke. His dreams had not been his own: pale figures in iron helms had marched across the dark fields of his mind, their boots crushing corn sprouts, banners painted with red suns dripping like wounds. Above them, the Villain System's sigils had gleamed, cold and merciless.
[Villain Points Earned: +25]Prophecy Twisted: Binding oath reshaped into hidden bargain.
He sat up, heart hammering, and listened. Outside his lodge, the village stirred with a wrong-angled quiet. Children did not laugh. Women spoke in clipped whispers. Somewhere, a dog barked at emptiness, then fell into a whine as if a shadow had passed a hand across its back.
The colonizers had left before dawn, their interpreter smiling stiffly, eyes darting like a fox's. They had carried away the words of the oath, convinced of their victory—that the council had pledged loyalty, that Sky-Torn had been a convenient stylus for their iron scripture. But words are rivers, and rivers can be poisoned. Sky-Torn had bent the oath on its second breath, grafting ancestral syntax into its ribs, a twist only a native ear could hear.
He stepped into morning light, cloak tight. Wounded Bear was waiting at the edge of the yard, a carved post of a man.
"You dream too deeply," the warrior said, arms folded. "Your eyes look like they've stared into smoke too long."
"Smoke shows what fire hides," Sky-Torn answered.
"The people murmur." Wounded Bear's mouth tightened. "They ask: why was the oath spoken in secret tongue? Why did the colonizers smile when you spoke, yet the council shivered? Tell me, brother—did you bind us, or betray us?"
The words struck harder than any spear. Sky-Torn felt the System stir.
[New Quest: "Survive Suspicion"]Objective: Redirect mistrust from yourself onto another. Reward: +50 Villain Points, Passive: Serpent's Tongue (I).
He almost laughed. The System never gave him the choice of truth. It only hammered lies into tools.
"Betray?" he said softly. "I swore nothing but to keep our river from barbed chains and our children from ghosts with iron teeth. Do you think I trust those pale men? I twisted their oath into one they cannot read. When they come to claim us, the words themselves will rise and strangle them."
Wounded Bear searched his face, suspicion wrestling with old loyalty. "They will come again," he said at last. "If your twisting proves false, I will gut you before they do."
He turned away. Sky-Torn was left alone with the cough of wind in the lodge-thatch and the thin cry of a hawk.
[Villain Points Earned: +10]Suspicion Redirected: Temporary reprieve gained.
Reprieve was not safety. He would need to weave the people's fear into something sharper.
That evening he gathered the youth on the riverbank. Water caught the dying sun like a copper blade. He painted his face with ash and red clay; when he spoke, the current carried his voice to every ear.
"You ask why the colonizers smile," he said. "Because their gods are liars. They promise peace, but in their peace the wolf lies beside the lamb only because the lamb is already dead."
He cast herbs into the water. Smoke rose, curled into shapes—shapes he willed with breath and a nudge from the System's dark whisper. In the smoke they saw men in steel helmets burn granaries; mothers dragged by hair; rivers turned red. Over it all, a pale sun blazed like an infected wound.
Gasps shivered the bank. Fear was a seed; Sky-Torn planted it carefully.
[Villain Points Earned: +40]Prophetic Illusion: Destiny shaped through fear.
Hawk-of-the-Dusk, too thin for his height, edged forward, jaw clenched. "What should we do, Shaman? If they bring such ruin, where do we hide?"
"Hide?" Sky-Torn cut the word in half. "No. We bend the river. We sharpen corn stalks into spears. Their iron is heavy; our anger is light. Even gods bleed when a knife finds the heart."
They carried those words back, slipped them into lodges like coals. Fear turned to anger; anger to conviction. The tribe began to split: those who believed Sky-Torn's warning, those who feared his ambition, and those who tried to pretend there was still a third path.
That night, sleep took him like a trap. He walked in a forest of bones, the ribs of mammoths arching like white trees. The ground pulsed underfoot. Ancestors appeared, faces veiled with ash.
"You walk a path that ends in shadow," one said. "Every step stains your feet."
Behind them, colonizers bowed with empty eyes, worshipping. He saw himself on a throne of broken drums, feathers torn and bloodied, hands dripping black water. His people lay in chains. Their mouths cursed his name.
[Villain Title Progression: 35% — "The Oathbreaker"]Your legend takes shape. History sharpens its knife.
He woke drenched. For a moment he clawed at the ash on his face as if he could scrape off destiny. But guilt was a luxury. If the world demanded a villain, he would carve the mask and speak through it.
Before dawn the drum for council sounded—three long beats, a pause, then three short. The elders were calling an emergency gathering.
The council lodge was a belly of smoke and woven shadows. Antlers hung from the rafters. The sacred fire rooted the room. Elders filed in: Willow-Mother with her cloud of hair and eyes like frozen rivers; Flint-Against-Flint with his nose broken twice by history; Bent Crane, who owed his limp to a bear and his patience to surviving it. Wounded Bear stood behind them like a stormcloud that had put on a man-skin. On the women's side, Song-of-Marrow rolled tobacco between her fingers and watched everyone with a midwife's cold kindness.
The empty place near the door belonged to Little Ash, who had died last winter of fever. Sky-Torn's gaze caught on it. A chair gone silent carried more weight than a chair filled with the wrong voice.
The interpreter from the colonizers had not attended; only a square of blue cloth he had "gifted" to Willow-Mother lay folded on a mat like a tame sky.
Willow-Mother raised her staff. "The fire hears. The earth remembers. Speak truth."
Flint-Against-Flint went first, voice like gravel. "The oath yesterday was unclear. Some words too soft, some too twisted. My ears are old; perhaps they are cowards. But my fear is not." He glanced at Sky-Torn. "What did you promise? What did you poison?"
Bent Crane cleared his throat. "We cannot pretend we face boys playing with painted wood. We face iron that can bite through bone. If the oath buys us time, we must hold it like winter meat."
Song-of-Marrow rolled tobacco, pinched it. "Time to do what? To gather corn that will be stolen? To teach children how to die pretty?" She looked at Sky-Torn. "He sees shadows. I catch babies; I know what the first breath costs. I ask what the second costs."
Wounded Bear stepped forward. "We will not be cattle in their pens. Their interpreter smiles with a butcher's eyes. If the shaman truly knotted their oath, then I will hold my spear for him. If he knotted us instead, I will cut him loose."
A rumble of assent and worry moved through the room. Sky-Torn felt the System's cursor blink at the edge of his mind, waiting for input.
[Quest Reminder: Survive Suspicion — 2 days remaining.]Optional Bonus: Turn council against external pawn. Reward bonus: +30.
He bowed to Willow-Mother and then addressed the fire, because lies prefer witnesses that don't interrupt. "I promised that we would greet them as neighbors," he said. "But I spoke the verb that means 'to greet like a flood greets a rotten tree.'" He let the corners of his mouth suggest a smile. "Their ears do not have the cartilage for our meanings."
A few elders chuckled despite themselves.
He went on. "And I named our river as our 'first mother' and their god as our 'third cousin.' In our tongue, that makes the river kin above their sky. Their interpreter thought I praised him when I said his name means 'one who gathers flies.' In our old speech it is a title for a man who stands between the world of bones and the world of rot."
A stir. Flint-Against-Flint rubbed his jaw. "Are you telling us you cursed their tongue with our grammar?"
"I am telling you the oath is a fishhook I carved," Sky-Torn said. "If they swallow, I will pull."
He could feel the council rolling toward him, not yet in his hand but within reach. The System purred.
[Villain Points Earned: +20]Rhetoric (Lesser) Check: Success.
Willow-Mother lifted the blue cloth. "They gifted this. Cloth has its own tongue. It says: 'We have looms; you have hands.' They think their threads are destiny."
Song-of-Marrow snorted. "Then we cut destiny with knives." She tipped her tobacco into the fire; the smoke rose with a sharpness that cleared throats and illusions alike. "The question is whether we cut the right throat."
Flint-Against-Flint gestured at Sky-Torn with two fingers. "What of this talk among the youth at the riverbank? My granddaughter came home with eyes like lightning. She said spears were growing from the corn."
Eyes slid to Sky-Torn. He let them. "I showed them what comes if we sleep," he said. "Fear is a horse. It can trample you or carry you out of a burning lodge. I put a bridle on it."
Bent Crane tapped his cane, twice. "We could send a delegation to their fort to test this 'fishhook.' Take gifts. Listen with both sides of the head. If the oath is as twisted as he claims, we will hear them stumble."
"No delegation," Wounded Bear snapped. "Their fort is a throat you walk into."
A low debate flickered and sparked: hunting quotas for winter, patrol routes along the river, whether to fortify the old burial mounds as eyes for sentries. All the while the System kept offering him little doors: Say this, lean there, place that fear in that man's pocket.
He chose a door.
"Elders," he said, and waited until the room turned to him. "The interpreter who came—a man named Duarte, with teeth like an otter and hands too clean—he is the soft thread in their cloth. He is the only one among them who hears even the ghost of our meaning. He smiled yesterday not because we bent but because he thought he had found our weak seam." Sky-Torn turned to Willow-Mother. "Let us write him a letter. In the old script. A blessing, to 'seal friendship.'"
Murmurs. The old script had not been painted in decades, not since the plague had taken the last of the reed-painters to the far meadow.
"What would it say?" Willow-Mother asked, eyes narrowed.
Sky-Torn inclined his head, reverent as a thief in a sacred house. "It would say: 'We gift you friendship. May you walk into our village by the path of your names, may your soul arrive before your body, may your words be tied to our hearth by the short rope.'" He lifted both hands. "To their ear, a blessing. To our river, an invitation. If Duarte comes alone, we can measure him. If he comes with soldiers despite the etiquette of guest-right, then we know the shape of their god's honesty."
Wounded Bear's nostrils flared. "And if the letter lures him, what then?"
"Then," Sky-Torn said gently, "we ask the river if it wants a new fish."
The council breathed in; the fire popped a seed pod into glow. Song-of-Marrow's mouth did not smile, but her eyes considered a kindness with sharp edges. Flint-Against-Flint scratched the split ridge of his nose. Bent Crane's fingers drummed the cane like weather on bark.
[Quest Update: Optional Bonus Accepted — External Pawn Identified (Duarte).]Timer reduced: 1 day remaining for primary quest.
Willow-Mother set the blue cloth down. "The old script," she said. "Can you still write it?"
Sky-Torn allowed a thin humility. "I can write enough to be understood by spirits who prefer curves to angles."
"Then fetch reed and pigment," she said. "But understand this, Sky-Torn: if your pen becomes a blade turned inward, I will see your blood with my own eyes."
He bowed. "You will not have to squint."
They sent for reeds; they mixed soot with oil and berry. Sky-Torn knelt near the fire, the old board laid across his knees, and drew the first curve like a river's memory. His hand did not shake. As he wrote, the System's interface fluttered into view, faint as a heat mirage.
[Skill Unlocked: Serpent's Tongue (I)]Passive — +10% success on Persuasion checks when stakes involve betrayal, oaths, or guest-right. Side effect: +5% suspicion accumulation per day among close allies.
A fair trade. Power always arrived with hooks. He pressed pigment into the second curve, the part of the blessing that meant crossing a threshold. Halfway through the character, a lazy thought brushed his mind: it resembled the sign painted on his throne in the dream.
He did not falter. The lodge watched in silence as he finished the letter and bound it with braided grass.
"Wounded Bear," he said. "Carry this to the edge of the colonizers' trail at midday. Leave it in the open at the bending oak with a string of beads and a piece of smoked meat. Duarte will find it if he is the kind of man I think."
Wounded Bear took the letter but did not take his eyes off Sky-Torn. "If this brings soldiers, I will count them. If it brings treachery, I will remember your words like I remember the face of the man who killed my brother."
"Then we are in accord," Sky-Torn said.
They broke for food and pissing and a short walk in cold air to cool hotter thoughts. When they reconvened, Flint-Against-Flint presented the question everyone had been circling. "What if the oath—twisted or not—binds us to their god in a way we cannot break without breaking ourselves? What if our river has already been named by their priests? Names matter. Names catch."
Sky-Torn felt a flick of genuine fear, ridiculous and real at once—that in renaming their world the colonizers had already taken half its bones. He went very still until his fear turned from a blade into a handle.
"Our first names were mistakes," he said. "We renamed ourselves when we learned not to eat the red mushrooms. We renamed ourselves when the mammoths left. We will rename ourselves again when iron arrives. Their priests can drape titles on our river like ribbons on a bear. The bear does not read."
Song-of-Marrow laughed, not kindly. "I like a bear who doesn't read."
Bent Crane sighed. "We should double watches at the burial mounds. Send runners upriver to warn the elm village. If their fort empties in the night, we will hear feet on leaves."
Resolutions settled like ash. Tasks grew mouths and walked out under hand and foot: runners sent; a granary tally; talismans reblessed with smoke and old song. All the while Sky-Torn felt suspicion recede from his skin and look for new heat to settle on.
[Villain Points Earned: +30]Council Swayed: Blame vector shifted to External Pawn (Duarte).
As dusk wove night into the roof-thatch, a child's cry snapped the lodge into rigid attention. A young boy burst in, breath hitching, hands on knees. "From the north path," he gasped, voice scraping. "Strangers—two, no, three—spotted near the bending oak. One carries a flag."
Wounded Bear was already moving. "My scouts?" he demanded.
"Shadow-Elm sent me," the boy said. "He watched from bracken. The men wore skin like winter. One carried a blue cloth on a stick." His eyes darted to Willow-Mother's lap where the square of colonizer cloth sat like a captured sky.
"Duarte," Bent Crane said.
"Or bait," Flint-Against-Flint muttered.
The council cracked into speed. Wounded Bear chose ten and melted into the night. Song-of-Marrow packed herbs, tucking death beside life in the same pouch. Willow-Mother pressed the blue cloth flat, then, in an old gesture, smeared it with ash until it was the color of a storm. "If they bring guest-right, we will not be careless," she said. "If they bring a flag to stab into our yard, we will not be polite."
Sky-Torn followed them to the edge of the palisade where the night grew a spine. Fires along the path were doused one by one until only willing darkness lay across the village. Stars gathered like salt.
At the bending oak, torchlight bobbed and died and bobbed again. Shapes moved against the tangle of branches: three men, one with the blue flag, another with a book pressed to his chest like a shield, the third a soldier whose armor glinted like a beetle's back. They stopped at the border where guest-right demanded waiting and laid down their weapons—or what they wanted the watchers to think were weapons.
Wounded Bear's silhouette appeared behind them, silent as a knife considering a throat. He made the sign for wait.
Sky-Torn felt the System widen all options at once, dazzling and cold.
[Dynamic Event: Guest-Rite Gambit]Outcomes branch here. Your choices in the next scene will permanently alter Duarte's loyalty and Wounded Bear's trust.Hidden Modifiers: Serpent's Tongue (I) active; Suspicion Accumulation ticking.
A second shape separated from the bracken—Hawk-of-the-Dusk, too eager, too young, too much fire in the bones. Sky-Torn's stomach sank. The boy crept forward with a spear held like a question he wanted to force into an answer.
"Hawk," Sky-Torn hissed under breath, but night swallowed names whole.
The soldier by the flag shifted, hearing something. Wounded Bear's hand flashed, a command to stillness. For a heartbeat the world sat at the edge of its own knife.
Then the interpreter—Duarte—stepped forward, palms open, mouth building a word.
Sky-Torn did not hear the word, because the System unrolled a choice in letters the size of stars across the inside of his skull:
[Choose:]
Honor the rite. Welcome Duarte under witness, bind him to hearth with the short rope.
Test the hook. Pull hard: isolate Duarte from soldier, break the flag, see which man bleeds first.
Mask of Mercy. Offer help to a feigned injury, sow debt.
Let the boy strike. Let Hawk-of-the-Dusk spill first blood and make the river choose.
His breath went cold. Every choice was a map with cliffs hidden as meadows.
Somewhere behind him, Willow-Mother whispered a prayer that tasted like bitter tea. Song-of-Marrow rolled a leaf between her fingers and watched the boy with a mother's unsentimental calculation. Bent Crane shifted his weight and the cane said one more step will cost you. Flint-Against-Flint looked at the soldier's hands and counted fingers that twitched.
Wounded Bear's eyes found Sky-Torn's in the dark. A question in them, and under it a promise.
[Quest Timer: 00:23:44]Survive Suspicion: Final phase imminent.
Sky-Torn raised his hand, and his shadow grew long across the earth, the way a man's legend grows long before his bones are ready.
He opened his mouth to choose.