Jarek the Vexed's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Jarek made it halfway down the rise before the butcher's spirit struck. His legs locked. His own hand rose against his will and clawed at his visor. Malgrim's voice filled his skull, wet and hungry. *Give me the body. You are meat.* Jarek dropped to one knee in the black mud. He knew the binding rite now. He could bind a bog-spirit. But the thing inside him had no grave, no true name he had dug from stone. He could not bind what he could not name. He forced himself toward a cluster of red pools glinting near the reeds. He needed salt, iron, focus. His gauntlet shook. His arm swung and smashed his own helm. "Stop hitting yourself," a flat voice said. "You're losing." A dark elf stood among the reeds. Two crossbows, one in each fist, both pointed at him. A mask covered most of her face. Purple hair showed under her hood. She did not lower the weapons. "I've tracked a stolen relic across this fen for a year," she said. "You're the loudest thing in it. What's eating you?" "A dead warlord," Jarek said. His jaw fought him for the words. "He wants my body. I have no name to bind him." Syrae studied him. She did not flinch when his hand jerked again. "Then don't bind him," she said. "Starve him. A spirit needs a mouth to speak through. Shut yours." Jarek understood. Malgrim ruled by voice, by the words pouring into his skull. Give the voice nothing to grip. Jarek pressed his lips shut behind the visor. He held the binding rite's dead syllables in his mouth, the way he held a spirit's true name. Not to bind Malgrim. To fill the space Malgrim wanted. The butcher screamed inside him. Jarek's spine bowed. He clamped his teeth on the stolen words and refused to let them out. He crawled to the nearest red pool and drove his spiked gauntlet down into the muck, iron into ground, an anchor. He held the name-shaped words behind his teeth and did not speak. Malgrim's voice thinned. Clawed. Faded to a whisper, then a scratch, then a cold weight low in Jarek's chest. Not gone. Caged. Jarek breathed. His hand was his own again. He stood, mud sheeting off his plate. Syrae still held her crossbows level. "He's not dead," Jarek said. "He's buried in me. I feel him." "Then keep moving," she said. "The last one I knew who went quiet, died quiet." She lowered one crossbow, not the other. "The relic. It came out of that manor on the rise. You've been inside." Jarek looked back at the red-lit spires. He had torn that study apart and taken only the rite. "I've been inside," he said. "I saw no relic." "You weren't looking," Syrae said. "Now you will." The warlord slept in his chest, and Jarek had a hunter at his back who would not leave the fen until she got what she came for.