The dawn smoke curled like wounded serpents above the council fires. Sky-Torn stepped from the sweat lodge, skin damp with the mingled heat of ritual and dream. His breath carried the taste of ash and iron. Behind his eyes, the Villain System's glyphs still shimmered—burning brands on his soul.
Villain Points: +5. Fate has shifted in your favor.Trial Event Unlocked: "Manipulate Outcome." Reward on success: [Fate-Twisting Tongue]. Cost to activate: 20 VP.Warning: Excessive manipulation corrupts Destiny Threads. Side effects: estrangement, scapegoat aura, accelerated mythmaking.
The words pulsed like a hidden drum. Fate-Twisting Tongue wove meaning into the breath itself; truth and falsehood would both turn like reeds in wind to point at him. Power seductive as a snare.
He walked into the trial circle. Elders sat in a crescent, the oldest draped in wolf pelts, the younger gripping war-clubs across their knees. The morning light cut their faces into relief: creases like riverbeds; scars like lightning captured in skin. Women with swaddled infants stood behind them, and children climbed the shoulder poles of the palisade to see better. Everyone had come. A tribe doesn't ignore the smell of storm.
Wounded Bear stood to the right of the elders, arms crossed, scars stark in the firelight. He had always seemed carved, as if flesh were a temporary disguise for stone. His eyes, dark as flint, measured Sky-Torn with a hunter's calm and a brother's rage.
"Sky-Torn," intoned White Antler, the eldest. His hair pooled like winter milk down his shoulders. "You spoke of visions. You warned of pale-faced strangers across the wide river. Today you will prove whether you speak for the ancestors—or whether you weave shadows to seize power."
A murmur rolled through the circle. If a tribe breathes together, doubt is a second set of lungs.
Sky-Torn inhaled and tasted the smoke's secret. The Villain System coiled closer, purring in the cadence of strangers who wore ancestors' voices like masks: Twist them. Bind them. The world remembers villains. Heroes disappear into their own expectations.
He raised his hands. "If doubt is my trial," he said, "then let the fire itself be judge."
Before anyone could forbid him, he stepped into the ash pit at the circle's navel. He crouched and reached bare palms into the embers. The pain was a red river—he stepped into it and kept walking. The hiss of searing flesh sang in every ear. He did not flinch. He pressed his burned hands to the earth and dragged blackened ash into wide symbols: a broken sun; two lines that crossed like spears above a ripple.
He drew with the precision of someone writing a message to an enemy who spoke in prophecy. The glyphs glowed—not a witch's green, nothing a frightened aunt could conveniently point at—just a breath of brighter grey, the way stones sometimes whisper light before dawn. The glow was for him alone. To others, the shapes looked like ordinary ritual marks.
Villain Points: +3. Hidden Knowledge invoked.You have inscribed a concealed System Sigil ("Crossing"). Attunement: 27%.
The ash stirred. A shape rose from it like breath on glass; the crowd leaned forward and the noise of living bodies stopped. Pale sails formed, bone-white wings on a dark horizon. A hull shouldered through the river fog. Voices faint as gulls. Then the vision collapsed into smoke and sank into the coals.
Someone cried out. Someone whispered prayer. Someone spat to break a charm.
"Lies," Wounded Bear said. Not shouted. Said. A word can be flint when you say it correctly. "Heat shimmers. Smoke tricks. He toys with spirits to fill his belly with the tribe's fear."
The people tilted. Some toward belief, some away. Sky-Torn felt the lean, the way a canoe feels when a body shifts. He could spend the twenty points. Loosen tongue from honesty; yoke the breath to destiny. One command, one promise, and they would hang their hopes on him while calling it their own decision.
The power hovered, a blade he could hold by the handle or the edge. He thought of his dream—the ancestors' faces hollowed, lit from within by some torch that did not warm, warning that shortcuts tether you to the very hands you cut off. He thought of Wounded Bear as a boy: both of them climbing the same pine, Wounded Bear higher by one branch, laughing, calling down that the world was a tree and he was already part eagle.
Sky-Torn let go of the blade.
"If my visions are trickery," he said, "then walk with me."
Silence sucked the sound from the world for a heartbeat. Even fire seemed to hesitate crackling.
"Walk—where?" White Antler asked, wary as if Sky-Torn were a river flooding at the wrong time of year.
"To the river," Sky-Torn said. His palms throbbed as though the fire still had its teeth in him. "At dusk, Wounded Bear and I will go together. If we find nothing but fog, call me liar and whip me from the circle. If we find what I've seen, we move before the strangers make their laws our sky."
Wounded Bear barked a laugh sharp enough to draw blood. "A fine stage you've built, shadow-speaker. I'll stand on it with you. And when the river shows me only water, you'll beg for darkness to hide your face."
The elders murmured among themselves. "Dusk," White Antler decreed at last. "You two will go. You two will return, witness or confessed. The tribe will hold council then."
Quest Updated: Rivalry Entwined.Primary Objective: Provide undeniable omen to convert Skeptic Faction (threshold 60%).Failure Condition: Public Humiliation (status: Oathbreaker). Brand gain: +30 Villainy (passive).Reward on success: [Shadow of Authority]—your silhouette lingers in decision-making spaces, turning tie-votes into your momentum.
The Villain System loved a bet. It slid the stakes into neat slots and grinned through arithmetic.
The crowd exhaled, conversation flurrying like sparrows. Some spoke Sky-Torn's name with awe, some packed fear into it like cotton in a wound. Children practiced saying "pale-faces" so it would feel like a story and not a problem. Sky-Torn breathed shallowly; the ache in his hands had become a steady chant.
White Antler rose. "Till dusk, you are both to keep peace. Any who break that peace will share their punishment."
Wounded Bear nodded without taking his eyes off Sky-Torn. "Peace, then," he said. "Till the water answers."
They broke the circle. Women drifted away to cook the noon meal with that pretense of ordinary speed that people use when the day is not ordinary at all. Men inspected their bows as if checking their teeth. Young warriors painted lines on their faces in case the day turned into a song.
Sky-Torn walked to the shade of the cedar and sank against its bark. Cedar has a way of seeing you at your worst and not telling anyone. The Villain System sank down cross-legged in his mind like a tutor imbued with questionable ethics.
Side Quests available:— Coax a sign from the river spirits (risk to sanity: Low-Moderate). +2 VP per omen; cap 10.— Seed a rumor into the Skeptic Faction (effectiveness improved by [Fate-Twisting Tongue]). +6 VP if rumor converts one leader.— Bargain with your rival's ancestor-line (danger: High). Outcome volatile; potential reward: [Shared Dream].
"Shared Dream?" he whispered. The cedar kept the secret. "Why would I braid my sleep with his?"
Because, the System said, finally dropping the ancestor voice and speaking in its own clean, carved tone, the world believes what it has already half-imagined. Give Wounded Bear an image he cannot deny, and denial becomes superstition rather than argument. He will resist superstition; he will fight the argument. Consider your audience.
"Or," Sky-Torn said, "I could do nothing and let the river be my witness."
Yes, the System replied with cheerful malice, and then the river could be fog, and fog could be nothing, and nothing could be your new name.
He closed his eyes. On the other side of his lids, the dream-paint he carried inside flickered. Shapes passed: a woman with hair like a wing of crows; a deer with its ribs inset with stars; sails like teeth; a boy climbing a pine. The tribe's songs usually braided these pictures into comfort. The System braided them into a noose.
Footsteps approached. Sky-Torn opened his eyes to find Lark-Between-Thorns there, smiling as if the world were a rare animal that had just allowed her to touch its head. She carried a clay bowl steeped with willow bark and unknown things.
"Your hands," she said, setting the bowl beside him. "Give them."
"You should be with the other healers," he said. The tribe had rules about who tended whom when politics slipped its knife between ribs. Lark preferred to ignore rules the way birds ignore fences.
"I am," she said. "I'm healing the most wounded fool among us." She took his scorched palms in her cool fingers and guided them toward the bowl. "What did you write in the ashes?"
"The river," he said. "The river and something that will swallow it."
Her eyes found his and held them, calm as a lake that has eaten storms. "Will you use the thing that eats a different way? With your mouth?"
"You mean Fate-Twisting Tongue." He tried to smile. A laugh escaped instead, a little lost animal that didn't know how to be born. "You almost make it sound like a Tekapo herb."
She dabbed paste over a blister and did not wince at the hiss. "You know I am not afraid of the things you name. I am afraid of the thing you can't name and still want."
"I want the tribe to live," he said.
"You want to be the hand that holds their living," she said quietly. "It is not the same."
He almost yanked his hands away, but the cedar's shadow held him. Lark's touch never lied. "If I don't hold, someone else will," he said. "Perhaps someone who thinks the strangers' gods smell better."
"You think you can choose the scent of the sky?" She smiled, not unkindly. "Take care you do not end by perfuming the noose."
Behind them, laughter rose near the lodge—too loud to be innocent. Some of Wounded Bear's cousins were practicing victory sounds. Good men. Strong men. Their horses loved them. They would also enjoy building a scaffold out of his reputation.
"Walk with me tonight," she said, and for a heartbeat he thought she meant the river and felt something winged lift in him. But she added, "In your mind. Share a dream with him."
"You sound like the System."
"No," she said, mouth tilting. "The System sounds like me when it has stolen my better idea. I am asking you to share burdens. The System is asking you to share leverage."
He closed his eyes and let the paste cool the memory of fire. Share dream with a rival: a risk with teeth. A vision forced into another's skull becomes a curse even if it saves him. But he could invite rather than force. Invitation is a door that still groans on its hinges.
Bargain with your rival's ancestor-line, the System purred. I can open the smoke roads. You have the ash sigil already. The fee is nominal.
"What fee?" he asked aloud.
Twenty VP, said the System. Or a personal vow the size of a future betrayal.
He pictured the point counter: carefully hoarded through ritual, through good lies told to protect people from the bad ones, through the slow harvest of omens. He could spend twenty now and have the Tongue as well—but the debt would thread through him like winter through a thin shirt.
"Nominal," he murmured. "Like a bite is nominal to a deer."
He stood, palms wrapped in strips of willow bark and cloth that smelled of river stones. "I need the river's answer," he told Lark. "And I need him to hear it with me."
"Then bring him something he cannot refuse," she said. "Most men will refuse truth if it embarrasses them. But few refuse a story if they think they are the hero inside it."
"You want me to tempt his pride."
"I want you to use it," she said. "Pride is a horse; it runs whether or not we saddle it. Better you ride than be trampled."
By late afternoon the sun pulled long shadows from the lodges like threads. The trial circle transformed into ordinary space again, but the ordinariness felt like a lie everyone had agreed to for polite reasons. Children who played at river-watching could not quite make themselves laugh. The scent of venison stew tasted like a reminder to eat, not a desire.
Sky-Torn found Wounded Bear down by the paddocks, checking the horns of a bull that had decided fences were a theological error. The bull snorted; Wounded Bear laughed and pushed its forehead until it huffed away, scandalized.
"Dusk soon," Sky-Torn said.
"Is it?" Wounded Bear replied, not looking at him. "I would not want you to miss your cue."
They started for the trail together. Warriors whose opinions were whole forests of reasons fell in behind them either to guard or to witness; it is not always easy to tell the difference. The path ran out of red earth and into roots that rose like the backs of sleeping beasts. The trees kept their counsel.
"Do you remember the pine?" Sky-Torn asked after a while.
"I remember you pretending you could fly," Wounded Bear said. "I remember catching you by your ankle."
"I remember you laughing," Sky-Torn said. "I remember wanting to be the branch that held you."
"And now?" Wounded Bear asked. He kept his eyes forward in that way men do when they decide that to look at a particular someone is to admit something private. "Do you want to hold me still?"
"I want the tribe to move," Sky-Torn said. "Sometimes a thing that holds is a thing that saves a life." He paused. "Sometimes it breaks a neck."
Wounded Bear's mouth flicked. "Listen to you. You speak like a snare that has read philosophy."
Sky-Torn almost smiled. The river's first smell reached them: rot and sweetness, the way old stories rot into new ones and sweeten anyway. The bank grew soft. Birds changed their song. A line of fog lay low over the water; the sun turned it into a road you might believe you could walk if you didn't mind drowning.
River Proximity: High, the System noted, prim as a scribe. Omen probability increased to 43%.Optional Activation: [Fate-Twisting Tongue]—improve persuasion of witness party by 22%. Cost: 20 VP.Optional Ritual: "Fog-Loosing." Material components: burned willow bark, ash from morning sigil, blood (own), word (true). Expected effect: reveal submerged silhouettes.
He felt the twenty points like a weight in the pouch of his chest. He heard Lark murmuring afar in the cedar shade, though she was nowhere near him. He heard the children who would grow up into the story this evening would become. He heard a future that called him villain because history loves a clean dartboard.
"Stand here," he told Wounded Bear, and pointed to a forked root that jutted over the slow current. Wounded Bear stood on it like a statue that had decided to walk and then decided to reconsider.
Sky-Torn took a coal from his medicine pouch, the smallest ember he had stolen from the trial fire like a secret. He smeared its ash with the paste on his palm. He nicked his thumb with a flake of flint. "Word," he whispered, and spoke his truest one.
"I am afraid."
Wounded Bear glanced sideways. It is not nothing to hear your rival say a thing like that to the river.
Sky-Torn raised his bleeding thumb and drew a circle in the air, then broke it with a line—the old sign for let the truth come through even if it arrives drunk. He blew the ash from his palm into the fog.
The fog breathed back.
First it seemed only to thicken, the way a man puffs up to make himself look wider before a fight. Then its surface furred like the back of a beast rolling in snow. Silhouettes swelled inside it—fuzzy-edged as memory, then sharper. A prow shouldered through the whiteness. Sails unfolded. The river flinched against their insistence.
When the prow split the fog, the light struck something hammered, something the color of worn bones, something too straight to belong to the river. The ship was not yet close; it was the idea of closeness that landed first—the promise that time had learned how to run, and was sprinting toward them.
Wounded Bear's breath snagged. "A trick," he said, but the word lost its teeth.
Sky-Torn swallowed. He did not want to spend the points. He wanted the world to be enough. But the men behind them shuffled and muttered; a few rubbed their eyes, another few grinned nervously the way people grin when a bad story is about to be proven funny after all. The ship swam in and out of fog like a thing half-stolen from a future. Doubt remained, a stubborn rock with a good grip.
Convert threshold not met.Skeptic Faction belief: 48%.Recommendation: Expend VP to secure witness testimony. Activation will not alter the omen; only the hearing of it.
Sky-Torn closed his eyes. The pouch of his heart opened. He paid.
−20 VP. [Fate-Twisting Tongue] acquired (Rank I).Passive effect: your breath takes the shortest path to belief when it speaks of witnessed realities.Side effect accrued: +1 Estrangement (stacking).
He spoke gently, so the words would travel far without breaking. "Wounded Bear," he said, "speak what you see, and let the river make your voice heavy."
"I see fog," Wounded Bear said, reflexive, stubborn. He leaned forward. The prow shouldered closer. A shout echoed across water, human and foreign. A bell rang, wrong as a square wheel. "I see—"
He choked on the end of the sentence as if the river had reached up to pinch his windpipe and remind him what oaths feel like when they're endangered. He made a sound as if he were giving birth to the word. "—a ship."
The men behind them inhaled in the same startled tone. Someone said a prayer to the old river-woman who lives under the roots. Someone else said the first foreign word they had ever heard and didn't know that's what it was.
Wounded Bear swore, a sound like chopping wood inside a skull. "I said it," he muttered. "I said it because you bent my tongue."
"I didn't bend the water," Sky-Torn said, struggling to keep triumph from frosting his voice. "The river did its own speaking."
Wounded Bear didn't answer. His eyes went far away, as if he were tracing the line from this minute to all the minutes that would come to eat it.
"Back," said one of the warriors, voice shaking. "Back to the council. Now."
A second ship's shadow thickened behind the first. And behind that, small things like beetles—boats with oars—swarmed near the lead prow. The river made room and resented it.
"Back," Wounded Bear agreed, voice low. "We go back, and we tell them the world has grown a new kind of bone."
They turned from the water. Sky-Torn's hands throbbed a separate heartbeat. The Villain System sat in his chest with folded legs, pleased as a crow that has stolen something shiny.
Objective achieved: Omen witnessed.Skeptic Faction belief: 71% (unstable).Reward queued: [Shadow of Authority]. Unlock condition: Survive council vote.New Trait: Estrangement I—your edges harden; friends experience you as knife and scripture.
They took two steps up the bank.
"Wait," Wounded Bear said, and caught Sky-Torn's wrist. His grip was not hostile. It was the grip of a man who has just met his enemy's best argument and wants to know if it is also his own.
"Make no mistake," Wounded Bear said softly. "You are still the kind of man who would feed the sky a lie when there isn't enough truth to sate it. But this—this is enough truth to start a war. Walk carefully with me into it."
"I intend to walk in front of it," Sky-Torn said before he could stop himself.
"Then I will walk beside you," Wounded Bear replied, "so I know where to place the spear when you forget where roads end."
They climbed the path with the river's wrong new sounds at their backs. Birds took notes; the trees adjusted their ghosts. The village roofs lay ahead, low and familiar, and seemed suddenly fragile—like lids on pots too small to hold what was coming.
Halfway up the slope, the Villain System chimed again, voice bright with opportunity.
World Event: First Landing (T-hours: unknown).Arc Milestone Approaches: "Seeds of Betrayal—Sowing."Immediate Offer: [Council Gambit]. Spend 10 VP to implant a conviction in one undecided elder: "Delay parley; prepare ambush under banner of talk."Historical Shadow: In some timelines, you are the architect of the first blood. In others, you are the blood.
Sky-Torn stopped. The path narrowed here, choked by roots; the tribe would sometimes pause to let the youngest climb. He stared at the words only he could see.
"Not this," he whispered. Whether to the System or to himself, he could not tell. "Not this first."
You wanted the hand that holds their living, the System said, amused. Hands don't get to stay clean.
The village drum beat once—twice—three times. The signal for council. People would already be gathering; stories would already be knitting themselves into facts. Lark would be folding herbs into unsettling shapes. White Antler would be arranging his face into a weather that would suit what came next. And Sky-Torn would walk into the circle with the river on his breath and the taste of choice in his mouth like iron.
He lifted his eyes from the invisible words.
On the ridge opposite, a shape stood against the reddening sky. For a heartbeat he thought it was a stump. Then it moved, and a glint caught—glass or metal or something that had never grown on any tree. A figure watched the village as a hawk watches field mice.
Wounded Bear saw it too. He hissed like a kettle. "They are faster than your dream."
"No," Sky-Torn said, cold. "My dream is merely late to its own telling."
The figure on the ridge raised a hand. Whether a greeting or a measurement, Sky-Torn could not tell. It turned and vanished over the lip of the world.
The drumbeat doubled. The air thinned, the way it does before a storm learns the village's name.
Sky-Torn looked at Wounded Bear, then at the village, then at the path that had never felt so much like a blade. He took a step forward.
The System whispered, bright and terrible: Choose your first betrayal.
He did not answer. He let the word hang, a hook without bait, and walked into the council fire's rising smoke as if into a story that had already decided his shape. The drumbeat became the chapter's spine.
And the river behind them kept coming.