Naomi Darkwater's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Naomi Darkwater crouched in the reeds and watched her staff dim from purple to a sick gray. For six weeks the bog hags had stepped around her boot prints like she was a fire they would not touch. She was an elf princess of the wetlands, and she had decided their fear was a throne. She wanted every crawling thing in the mire to whisper her name and choke on it. The staff was supposed to feel the pulse of the swamp for her, since she could not yet feel it alone. Right now the staff felt nothing, and that was the first thing wrong. She followed the dead spot back to her camp and found the sign nailed to a cypress trunk above her bedroll. It was a slab of wet wood, bound with braided root, painted in red that was still tacky. The letters were cut in her own people's script, which meant a hag had taken the time to learn it. We are coming. Be prepared. She had walked this trail at dusk and the trunk had been bare. They had come within arm's reach of where she slept, and they had wanted her to know it. Naomi pressed her palm to the wood and felt the staff jump once in her other hand, a single hard beat, like a frog kicking inside a fist. The hags were not avoiding her paths anymore. They were drawing lines across them. She did not run. She drove the staff into the mud at the center of the camp and waited, because a sovereign does not flee her own ground. The water behind her broke without a splash. What climbed out was not a hag. It was an alligator the length of three men, its hide split open along the ribs, its eyes burning red and yellow in a face that should have been dead a season ago. It did not lunge. It walked past her bedroll, turned, and lay down between Naomi and the trail home, blocking the only dry path out. The staff in her fist flared purple again, steady now, reading something she could not. The hags had not sent a warning. They had sent a keeper, and they had decided where she would meet them next.