The swamp air doesn't breathe. It doesn't stir. It rots, thick and lethargic, like the breath of a dying god. It clings to the lungs with the viscosity of poisoned wine, soaked in the sweet stench of rotting flesh and necrotic fungal spores. Here, among the black waters bubbling with the gases of forgotten corpses, she lurks. She doesn't hide. She doesn't need to. The swamp is her body; the rot, her blood.

No one seeks her.

No longer.

The last who dared to tread her domain lie dismembered, their bones engulfed by mud, turned into silent warnings. Their armor—now sarcophagi of greenish rust—retains the indentations of their claws, frantic marks where they tried, in vain, to tear away the disintegrating flesh between their fingers. Some skulls still bear expressions of terror, mouths open in eternal screams, as if death itself hadn't been enough to purge their agony.

Kar'Minh glides among the dead cypresses, her skeletal tail carving furrows in the mud, as if the swamp were oozing beneath her. The gem on her forehead throbs with a slow, irregular rhythm—the agonizing drumming of a heart on the brink of silence. It is not a jewel, but an open wound, a fissure in reality through which seeps the corruption that now defines her existence. Her horns, curved like demonic grins, frame a face that might once have been beautiful, before decay turned her into something more… and less.

"Another idiot," she mutters, noticing halting footsteps among the reeds. She doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't need to. The words don't leave her lips, but reverberate from the gem embedded in her forehead, a poisonous echo that pierces the intruder's mind like a knife through raw flesh. The swamp seems to hold its breath. It waits. So does she.