From atop one of the stone pillars, a cougar with striped fur leaped into the clearing. The beast sprang toward him. Clive dove sideways, rolling across damp earth as claws sliced through the air where he'd stood moments before. He came up with paintbrush in one hand and sword in the other, ready to counter-attack.

  The cougar landed gracefully and turned to face him, but as it did, its form began to shift. The striped fur receded, the body structure reformed, and within seconds, what stood before him was no longer a tiger but a woman, though not entirely human. She retained feline ears atop her head, and distinctive markings along her exposed arms and face.

  A fitted top of woven fibers revealed her toned midriff and curved over her generous breasts, while strategically placed armor pieces of wood and bone protected vital areas. A short, wrapped skirt of leather and plant fibers left her long, muscular legs mostly bare, emphasizing both her mobility and the tribal markings across her bronze skin.

  “Light-seekers,” she hissed.

  She crossed to where her spear had fallen and stomped on it, flipping it up to her arms.

  "A druid," Lucia breathed. "I thought they were extinct."

  The catgirl circled Clive warily. "We are extinct. Your kind made sure of that. she replied, her voice carrying a growling undertone.

  “We did no such thing,” Lucia protested.

  The catgirl lunged suddenly, the spear a blur as it swept toward Clive's legs. He parried with his sword, but she used the momentum to spin, bringing the shaft around to catch him behind the knees. His legs buckled, and a second strike to his chest sent him sprawling onto his back, knocking the wind from his lungs.

  Before he could recover, the spear's tip pressed against his throat, pinning him to the ground.

  "I could smell your destruction from the heart of the grove," she snarled. "The plants you've burned, the life you've extinguished." Her gaze flicked to Lucia. "Move and he dies."

  Clive tracked her eyes as they moved to Lucia. When her attention left him, he wrapped both hands around the spear shaft and shoved hard to his left. The weapon scraped across his collarbone as it moved away from his neck.

  She hissed and yanked back on the shaft, taking a backstep, spear spinning in her hands until the tip pointed at him again.

  Clive rolled to his side and pushed himself up, dirt clinging to his shirt.

  "We've only defended ourselves," Clive said. "We seek no conflict."

  "Defended?" Her tone was poisonous. "Is that what you called it when you burned the Verdant Marsh?"

  Lucia frowned. “Look, we don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever you’re referring to, it wasn’t us.”

  "Different faces. Same lies." The catgirl raised her spear. "Your people promised us peace once. Then they brought torches."

  "We're not your enemy," Clive said.

  "No?" She leaned closer. "Then why do you all smell the same?"

  "We're not them," he said calmly as he looked her in the eye. "Judge us by our actions here and now, not by the sins of others."

  The tension left her arms and the spear tip sank toward the earth. Her mouth opened slightly, then closed, vertical pupils dilating as she searched his expression. But when Clive inched forward, the weapon jerked back up.

  “Stay back,” she yelled.

  “You saved us from the Risen. You could have let them take us. You didn't.” Clive dropped his weapon to the ground and raised his hands. His instincts told him the person in front of him was fundamentally not their enemy.

  She reminded him of a stray dog he'd encountered years ago in an alley behind his apartment—malnourished, hackles raised, showing teeth whenever he approached. But when a group of teenagers started throwing rocks at it, the same dog stepped protectively in front of an even smaller cat cowering behind a dumpster. The aggression hadn't been malice. It had been fear protecting something precious.

  "Shut up!" She thrust the spear point forward, stopping right in front of Clive’s throat.

  Clive didn’t flinch. Lucia raised her throwing knives, but Clive raised his hand to stop her. He continued forward, letting the spear draw a red line on his neck. “We mean no harm.”

  “Arrggg,” she snarled and yanked the spear back, muscles tensing as if to drive it forward. The thrust came fast, and buried itself in the earth beside his feet. She stood there, chest rising and falling. For several seconds, nobody moved until she finally spoke again.

  “Tch. I only saved you because the Risen were the bigger threat. What business do you have here, Light-seekers?”

  “People are suffering from a curse that turns them to stone. We believe the midnight blossom that grows in this grove might help them."

  She chuckled. “Midnight blossoms. You’ll never get to them. They grow in the deepest part of the groove, where the warden of the dead presides.”

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  "The warden of the dead?"

  As they spoke, the purple mist around them coalesced into wispy tendrils that reached toward them. The catgirl hissed and swept her spear through the mist, which dissipated momentarily before reforming.

  “It is the source of the mist, the heart of the corruption that has befallen us, and the reason my people cannot rest,” she spat.

  She stalked a few paces away, movements agitated. When she turned back, her eyes had shifted to their cougar aspect—vertical pupils expanded in the dim light.

  “It must be defeated to free the grove from this curse!” she growled.

  “Then it appears our goals are aligned. You bring us to Midnight blossoms, and we’ll get rid of this warden for you.”

  “Hphm, the arrogance of Light-seekers. You know nothing of the warden, yet you so easily claim you can defeat him.”

  “We won’t know until we try. What do you have to lose by letting us attempt it?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes shifted back and forth between human and feline. Finally, she planted her spear in the earth and leaned on it. “Fine, but your death is on your own hands.”

  “If we’re going to work together, we should know each other's names,” Lucia interjected. “I’m Lucia Thornwald, Apothecary of Marblehaven.”

  “Clive Weston, traveling artist.”

  "You speak to Nydalea," she declared with pride. "Daughter of the Verdant Hunters. The last of those sworn to protect what remains of the Verdant Marsh after your kind tried to destroy it."

  Clive tested the unfamiliar name on his tongue. "Nyda... Sorry, could you repeat your name?"

  "Nydalea," she enunciated each syllable with exaggerated clarity. "Nigh-dah-LAY-ah."

  "Nydalea," Clive repeated correctly. “Just what is this warden of the dead?”

  "Words will not make you understand," she said, "See what I have seen."

  The shapeshifter's markings began to glow with a soft, blue-green light. She walked up to them and pressed her palms against their foreheads.

  The world around them dissolved into mist.

  Sunlight filtered through a canopy of vibrant green leaves. The air was thick with life, the sweet scent of flowering water lilies, and the distant laughter of children. This was not the Shadowfen they had entered, but a thriving wetland paradise.

  A village of woven reed huts stood on raised platforms above crystal-clear pools. There were people, some with feline features, others fully human, working together in perfect harmony with their environment.

  At the heart of the settlement stood an enormous tree, its trunk wider than ten men standing shoulder to shoulder, its branches creating a natural cathedral overhead. Spiral patterns, similar to those on the shapeshifter's skin, had been lovingly carved into its bark and filled with a glowing, emerald sap.

  "The Verdant Marsh," Nydalea's voice echoed in their minds. "My home. A hundred seasons past."

  The scene shifted. A young girl with cat-like ears sat beside an older woman with similar features, learning to carve the sacred patterns into a small branch.

  "I was but a cub then," the voice continued. "Still learning the ways from Hunt Mistress Lyara… my mother."

  The idyllic scene shattered as war horns blared across the marsh. Armored figures bearing the sunburst emblem of the Church of Light marched through the wetlands, setting fire to the reeds, cutting down those who opposed them.

  They witnessed three separate battles, compressed into mere moments. The marsh dwellers drove back the invaders with nature magic and shapeshifted warriors, only for the crusaders to return with greater numbers each time.

  The final assault was overwhelming. Priests in white robes followed the soldiers, chanting prayers that seemed to weaken the magic of the marsh. The great tree was surrounded, its bark blackening as holy fire was set at its base.

  A desperate Lyara, bleeding from multiple wounds, carried young Nydalea to a hidden grove untouched by the fighting. There, with her life ebbing away, she pressed her palm against her daughter's chest, transferring the sacred markings from her own skin to her child's.

  "To preserve what remains," Lyara whispered as light flowed from mother to daughter. "To remember what was lost. To one day restore what was broken."

  The vision blurred forward through seasons of solitude as Nydalea grew slowly, unnaturally, bound to the fading power of the marsh. They witnessed her practicing her shapeshifting abilities, and watching from hiding as the marsh began to change.

  First came the silence. Birds stopped singing, insects ceased their humming, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Then came the mist, seeping from the ground like blood from a wound, purple and thick with the stench of decay.

  A procession appeared through the mist—Church soldiers, but changed. Their once-proud armor was tarnished and broken, their movements stiff and unnatural. Behind them walked white-robed priests, their faces gaunt, eyes hollow with madness.

  At their center strode a figure whose mere presence caused the vision to waver. Tall and wrapped in black robes, the Warden's face remained in perpetual shadow beneath his hood. Where his feet touched the marsh, plants blackened and curled in on themselves; where his breath misted the air, it lingered as freezing droplets that shattered like glass when they fell.

  "From Vandiel he came," Nydalea's voice echoed, thick with hatred. "The emissary of the demon king."

  The Warden knelt at the stump of the great tree that had once been the heart of the Verdant Marsh. He pressed his hand against the charred wood, and veins of purple spread through the air like roots.

  "With the blood of my people still fresh on their blades," Nydalea continued, "they sought not just to destroy our ways, but to replace them with something worse than death."

  The scene shifted to the aftermath of a battle—Church soldiers lying dead in the swamp, having fought against the marsh-dwellers who had already fallen. The Warden moved among the corpses, touching each one. The dead eyes opened, now glowing with the same sickly light.

  "The first servants," Nydalea's voice explained. "Neither living nor truly dead."

  Years compressed into moments as they watched the Warden's power grow. The corruption spread through the marsh like a disease, transforming the vibrant ecosystem into the twisted Shadowfen. The water turned from crystal clear to stagnant and toxic, the lush vegetation became gnarled and predatory, and the wildlife either fled, mutated, or fell under the Warden's control.

  A particularly vivid memory surfaced—Nydalea as a young woman, tracking a deer through the less corrupted outskirts of the Shadowfen. The peaceful hunt shattered as she came face to face with a hunting party of the dead.

  "Khasaadin… Azirae…" Nydalea whispered, her young voice breaking.

  For just a moment, something flickered in the dead hunters' eyes—recognition, perhaps, or the remnant of the souls that had once inhabited their body. Then the Warden's influence reasserted itself, and the hunting party attacked.

  Nydalea fled, outpacing them through territory she knew better than they, though the knowledge that she ran from her own kind tore at her heart more deeply than their weapons could have.

  Lastly, they saw Nydalea's countless attempts to reach the heart of the corruption, sometimes in stealth, sometimes in desperate frontal assaults. Each time she was driven back by overwhelming numbers, or by the Warden's dark magic.

  "A hundred times I've tried," her voice echoed with centuries of frustration. "A hundred times I've failed. The corruption grows stronger every year, fed by the souls trapped between life and death."

  To be the last is to carry the weight of all who came before, and the hope of all who might come after. It is a burden no soul should bear alone, yet someone must

  -Goddess of Stories and theatergoing