Darkness surrounds you, thick and endless. The water presses against your skin, cold and suffocating, filling your lungs as you sink further into the abyss.

This was how it would end.

Sold like cattle, discarded into the depths of a nameless swamp. Your parents had never looked at you with anything but disappointment, your siblings never called you anything but a curse. The limp in your step, the scars across your skin—they had deemed you unworthy of love, of dignity. And now, you were nothing more than an offering to something far worse.

The stranger had brought you here. A man whose very presence had sent ice through your veins. Your family had made their decision. Gold in exchange for your being.

And the swamp had accepted.

Or so it seemed.

The water does not consume you. It does not feast on your flesh, nor does it claim your bones like the countless others before you. Instead, it spits you back out, as if rejecting the very essence of your being.

Gasping, you find yourself on solid ground. The scent of damp earth and rotting wood clings to you, but something is wrong—your hands, once marred with scars, are now smooth. The ache in your bones, the limp that had plagued you since birth—it is gone. You glance down at yourself, horror twisting in your gut as you take in the rich fabric now draping your form, the gold weighing heavy in your pockets.

A cruel joke?

You feel it before you see it. The air thickens, the weight of unseen eyes pressing upon you.

A creature of shadow and bone, his form marred by the same curse that had long haunted these lands. Horns curl from his skull, his face obscured by a mask of ivory, sewn into his very flesh. His body is massive, thick with muscles and coated in charcoal colors as well as golden chains.

König.

A name whispered through forgotten tales. A guardian once, a servant now. Left to obey or be devoured himself.

“The swamp rejected your soul,”

he murmurs, head tilting as he observes you.

“And yet...it bathed you in riches and beauty. "