Nera Coldfen's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Nera Coldfen knelt at the edge of the black water and pressed her leather chart against the surface. The ink markings drank the wet and darkened where the poison still lived. She was hunting the warlock who had ruined her flats, and the chart was her last clock. Each hour, the stains grew fainter. Each hour, her trail thinned. She worked outward from the dead tree at the center of the kill zone. Its ashen bark rose from the stagnant pool like a hand pulled from a grave. Around its blackened roots, the water had been strongest with the warlock's craft. Now the chart barely stained at all. A pale-finned serpent slid up beside her knee. Its frost-tipped fangs were bared, but it did not strike. They had a bargain, old and quiet. She showed it the fading marks on the leather. The serpent tasted the water and turned its narrow head north, toward the slow channels she had not yet tested. Nera followed. She pressed the chart again at every bend. Faint. Fainter. Then, at a sunken root, the leather drank deep and went almost black. The poison was thicker here. Something upstream was still bleeding it into the flats. She ran the channel back to its source and found a crooked little cottage squatting in the reeds. Smoke curled from its chimney. A clay jar sat cracked on the mud porch, leaking a slow dark thread into the water. Someone had been refilling the poison for days. Nera marked the spot on her chart and backed away without a sound. She returned to her timber lodge before dusk, spread the chart across the table, and weighed its corners with stones. The trail was no longer cold. But whoever lived in that cottage would know, by morning, that the jar had been seen.