Satyr’s Children | Book 1: Siren
So… did I dream of becoming Claret?
Triton sat at the head of the long conference table in a meeting room on the second floor of the Guild, his gaze quietly drifting toward Claret, who was speaking with Argentum across from him.
This was the first time he had ever seen her dressed as a Trailblazer.
The girl wore a crimson-purple fitted tunic that reached to mid-thigh, with slits along the sides. The collar and hem turned outward, revealing thick woolen lining beneath, like layer upon layer of cream frosting on a cake. Beneath the skirt-like tunic were a pair of tight dark-brown leather riding breeches, followed by a pair of ivory lace-up boots. Her dark-brown fur cloak hung meticulously from the back of her chair, looking dry and warm.
Triton remembered that around the holidays, his mother had occasionally mentioned preparing gifts for her “godchild.” From time to time, she would also visit the Morningdew estate to attend to various matters.
But Triton had never imagined that his mother’s goddaughter was Claret. Perhaps Solin had never deliberately tried to keep it from her children. It was simply something no one had ever really stopped to notice.
Triton and his sister had been born in the same year as Claret.
The twins were born in the latter half of Flower Moon, during the brief lull between two great festivals. By the beginning of the month, the “flower pillars” made from the strange trees of the Forbidden Zone and ribbons during the Fireworks Festival had already been taken down and chopped into firewood. The grand Sunblaze Festival of Berry Moon had yet to arrive.
Perhaps they had been luckier than Claret.
She had been born during the Farewell Festival of Hunter’s Moon, one of the most important holidays in all of Halcyon—and by far the most solemn. On that day, people commemorated relatives and comrades who had died in the Forbidden Zone. They placed lanterns carved from turnips outside their homes to guide wandering souls and keep evil spirits from the mists of the Forbidden Zone at bay.
The Trailblazers’ Guild would hold a grand memorial ceremony. And whenever it was presided over by Lord Marcus, the closing words were invariably:
“Today is the birthday of my daughter, Claret Morningdew. On this solemn day, House Morningdew wishes to pray for peace together with all of you. May every person here, and everyone you hold dear, remain safe and healthy.”
Perhaps being born on an ordinary day was better than being born at a moment when everyone around you was mourning.
This year, on the first day of Beaver Moon, immediately after the Farewell Festival had ended, Gilbert Morningdew was murdered. And now, the year had entered its final month—Cold Moon. In just a few days would come the Dawnlight Festival, when Halcyon would reach the shortest day and longest night of the year.
The year was almost over.
Triton looked toward his sister. String was showing her his weapon—a longbow called the “Dragonspine Horn Bow,” its limbs curving backward at the tips to form an elegant arc taut with restrained power.
Triton vaguely remembered hearing several rapid twangs of bowstrings just before the mutated Hound knocked him down. Yet the monster’s momentum had not shifted in the slightest after being struck by the arrows. It had still come barreling forward and sent him crashing to the ground.
Ali did not seem to be listening to String at all. Her gaze unfocused as she slowly nodded.
David had tracked down Maria’s fiancé through his network of contacts—a fifty-eight-year-old pure-blooded Siren named Lucian Corundum, a “gem merchant.” He was indeed a noble from the royal capital, coming from a family that had been in the gemstone business for generations. Yet from a young age, he had shown little interest in ordinary minerals, becoming obsessed instead with “biological gemstones”—bones, horns, teeth, pearls, amber, coral, and other such materials.
In his youth, he had frequently posted commissions throughout the frontier cities, sending teams to search for what he called “monster gemstones.” Later, he was taken to court in Celadon for refusing to take responsibility for the deaths of team members on one of his commissioned expeditions. Combined with the enormous gambling debts he had already accumulated, the charges nearly resulted in his expulsion from the royal capital.
According to rumor, he managed to retain his royal-capital residency thanks to a remarkably well-connected guarantor, though even the older friends and associates of House Featherflight knew very little about this person. After that, the notorious miser underwent a dramatic change in personality. He began to present himself as generous and charitable, even purchasing a residence in the Northwatch and personally taking part in the very “monster gemstone hunting” expeditions he had once looked down upon.
“This man is strange.” David summed up. “He has some sort of backing. Powerful backing in the royal capital.”
“So… are we supposed to give up, then?” Ali asked in a trembling voice.
David looked at his daughter and remained silent for a long time.
“We have to proceed carefully.”
That evening a few days ago, Ali had apparently lingered on Market Street for a long time. When she returned, she was carrying a bowl of stew that had gone completely cold. After dinner, she had gone unusually quiet and returned to her bed without curling up beside her brother as she normally did at night. For the next few days, she barely spoke to him at all. It was as though the string that had been drawn tight inside her for so long had finally snapped, leaving behind nothing but silent dejection.
She’s not doing well. Triton thought.
Perhaps she should have gone with their father to carry out the security cordon around the outskirts of the Stone Church Forbidden Zone, rather than waiting here with him in the Guild for their mother, who had yet to arrive because she was applying for relics, preparing to enter the cordoned zone that had been opened exclusively to them.
What arrived before Solin was the deafening crash of the Guild’s front doors being forced open.
“Move! Get out of the way! Doctor! Get a doctor—!”
A panic-stricken yell tore through the air.
Everyone in the meeting room rose to their feet and hurried into the corridor overlooking the main hall.
A squad stumbled into the hall, their bodies smeared with mud and dark-red blood, their armor covered in scratches. A burly young Felin wearing brass knuckles was helping his human-looking captain carry a makeshift stretcher hastily assembled from freshly cut tree branches and a cloak.
Lying on it was a mangled, horrifyingly mutilated body.
“Doctor—!” The Felin girl supporting the stretcher from the side screamed again, her cat ears flattened against her scalp, her bushy tail tucked tightly between her legs, all color drained from her face.
The uproar in the hall died instantly. Every conversation, every clink of glasses, every word of haggling vanished. Hundreds of eyes fixed on the corpse, and the only sounds left were the Felin girl’s ragged breathing and the crackling of firewood in the hearth.
The corpse had been torn apart from the waist down, with his internal organs and intestines spilling out, coagulated blood mingling with filth and filling the air with a thick, fetid stench. Both of his legs and one arm had been stripped down to bare bone, marked with unmistakable tooth wounds left by Fallen Hounds.
Yet the most horrifying thing of all was his face, which had remained more or less intact.
The expression frozen upon it was one of absolute terror at the moment of death. His eyes were stretched wide, the eyeballs almost bulging from their sockets, the pupils gone slack, yet somehow they still seemed to reflect the incomprehensible horror he had witnessed. His mouth hung open in a grotesque contortion, as though he had been screaming a terrible cry in the final moments before his death.
“Wait… it’s… it’s him!” Someone in the crowd recognized the dead man’s face. With a loud r-rip, they tore the largest wanted poster from the wall, their shrill voice shattering the silence.
“He’s the bastard who killed Young Master Bert!”
What?
The declaration was like a drop of water fallen into boiling oil, and the entire hall erupted at once. Screams, curses, and cries of disbelief surged through the room like a wave.
The murderer who had killed the lord’s heir had actually turned up like this?
The Guild physicians and several clerks hurried over at the news and forcibly pushed the crowd back. With practiced efficiency, they laid the corpse flat on the floor and began their examination. Dim diagnostic magic flickered to life, sweeping rapidly over the body.
Triton felt Ali grab his arm. He could not tell whether the expression on his sister’s face was anger or fear. He held his breath as well. Even from the second floor, the stench rising from the corpse was already enough to churn his stomach.
So this was… the man whose hands were stained with Bert’s blood?
Claret’s slim shoulders trembled. String immediately shifted half a step, discreetly placing his body between her and the corpse. From the side, Triton could not make out her face. He only noticed that her hands had clenched tightly into fists at her sides.
“Oh. I seem to have arrived at an unfortunate time.” Solin had appeared behind them at some point. “The paperwork took a little longer than expected—What happened?”
A moment later, one of the Guild physicians finally stood up. His face was filled with baffled disbelief. He raised his voice and announced to the crowd waiting for an answer.
“Most of the external injuries were inflicted after death, likely from being gnawed on by smaller monsters—most probably Fallen Hounds. There are no wounds from penetrating weapons, no comminuted fractures. We detected no traces of elemental magic or residual curses also…”
He paused, seemingly weighing his words. Then he sighed.
“… He was frightened to death. His heart stopped from extreme terror before the monsters could get him.”
The hall fell silent once more. Then uneasy whispers began to spread through the crowd.
Frightened to death? A ruthless fugitive who had murdered a Crystal Rank Trailblazer and successfully fled into the Forbidden Zone despite a massive manhunt had ultimately been… frightened to death?
A chill ran up Triton’s spine and all the way to the crown of his head. Instinctively, he looked through the Guild’s narrow, high windows toward the gray Forbidden Zone in the distance, wrapped in protective barriers beneath the morning light.
Was it the “birdman”? Or the “mist-woman”? Or perhaps… the “antlered man”?
Yet even those terrifying entities had not been able to frighten David and Argentum’s party into backing down when they encountered them.
So what, exactly, could have made a cold-blooded murderer wear an expression like that before his death—as though he had stared straight into the depths of hell?
“Are you staying?” String spoke softly to Claret. “After all, this concerns—”
“No. My sister will handle this.”The pink-haired girl’s amber eyes flickered, and she slowly turned her gaze away from the grotesquely mutilated corpse.
She went back into the room and put on her cloak.
“Everyone’s here. We should head out.”
Her voice was not loud, but there was an unmistakable force of command beneath it.
No one questioned her. They simply shouldered their packs and followed silently behind her.
“Let’s go, Trit.” Ali took Triton’s hand.
…
Everything in Stone Church Sector 3 seemed untouched by time, it was as ruined and desolate as ever. There was a smell of earth in the wind. The ground was wet and sticky, staining everyone’s boots with a layer of brown mud that carried a faintly meaty tang.
The scenery in front of Triton faded into lines of varying light and shadow, then reassembled itself once more. Argentum’s gaze first swept rapidly across several kilometers of wasteland surrounding them, then contracted to a radius of a hundred meters around the team, vigilantly screening every approaching energy signature.
“There are no mobile sources of corruption within the monitoring range.” His fingers brushed the long, thin braid woven into his hair. “We may begin.”
“Everyone, get ready.” Solin crouched down and wound up the magic-infused “toy frog” in her hands.
Croak, croak, croak…
The toy frog’s eyes lit up as it began emitting a mechanical, rhythmic call, hopping across the muddy ground like a real frog.
Ali held her lantern mace horizontally across her chest, ready for combat.
String placed an arrow against his bow, his fingertips lightly tapping the family crest inlaid in mother-of-pearl along its body.
Claret gripped her slender silver staff and used its bottom to draw a complex magic circle on the ground. She murmured an incantation under her breath, the opal set into the tip of the staff flickering faintly with each movement.
It was too quiet around them, which only made the artificially produced “croaking” all the more uncanny.
Croak, croak, croak…
Triton could faintly feel the ground beneath his feet trembling in rhythm with the toy frog’s hops, regular and steady, like the increasingly loud beating of his own heart.
He pressed the mechanism. The curved blade concealed within his arm bracer sprang out with a sharp click.
A faint, skin-crawling sound of footsteps came from nearby.
It’s coming.
Puff. Puff. Puff.
A mushroom nearly as tall as a person appeared at the edge of the clearing.
Then a second.
A third.
More and more followed…
Some of the mushrooms’ brown caps were covered in lace-like fungal webs. Others had layers upon layers of white growth sprouting from beneath their caps, while some were already shriveled, withered, and blackened. Each mushroom looked as though it were wearing a tattered skirt. And beneath every cap protruded a pair of long, deathly pale “human legs.”
Drawn to the vibrations in the ground, the mushrooms began a grotesque dance of death. Their slender legs rose high into the air, then came crashing down. Every time they struck the ground, a small splash of dark-red fluid sprayed outward.
They felt no pain. Even when their “feet” were scraped raw against the earth until they split open and “bled,” they never stopped dancing.
The brown caps trembled wildly with their frantic movements, releasing clouds of spores so dense they were almost visible as smoke.
A sickly sweet stench of decay filled the air.
Triton could not stop his mind from imagining lungs slowly becoming fibrotic after inhaling too many spores, eventually suffocating as the tissue died.
They were “Red-Shoe Dancers,” a species of mobile fungus found in the Forbidden Zone. They possessed long, slender human-like legs and red “feet,” as though wearing a pair of crimson dancing shoes.
Before reaching maturity, Red-Shoe Dancers were indistinguishable from ordinary mushrooms. But once mature, they would pull their “legs” free from the earth and begin to “dance,” dispersing their spores until their bodies became completely dehydrated and died.
They were not aggressive plants. They had no eyes, no arms, and no intelligence of any appreciable degree, merely dancing according to instinct in order to spread their spores.
The danger posed by Red-Shoe Dancers lay primarily in the sheer density of their spores. Anyone who approached without protective equipment was at serious risk of suffocation or developing pneumoconiosis.
Perhaps it could not be said that Red-Shoe Dancers possessed absolutely no intelligence. Triton thought.
They were attracted by vibrations in the ground. Perhaps the instincts of these fungi simply told them that such places would be more favorable for spore dispersal, driving these mindless creatures forward one after another.
Croak… croak… croak…
The spring-loaded toy frog gradually fell silent, its hopping finally coming to an end.
“That’s enough. I’m going to retrieve the ‘sound bait.’” Solin reached out, grabbed the frog, and quickly stuffed it into her pocket. “Any more than this… and we won’t be able to kill them all.”
Who would ever want to capture something so dangerous and troublesome?
Red-Shoe Dancers were poisonous throughout their entire bodies and entirely inedible. Their toxins were nothing unusual either, no different from those found in common poisonous mushrooms growing in ordinary forests.
But Solin and her colleagues believed that by dissecting and cultivating Red-Shoe Dancers, they might be able to study their ability to filter corruption within the Forbidden Zone. The fungi could convert the corruption they absorbed into nutrients, even transforming it into ordinary plant toxins. If research into Red-Shoe Dancers could make a breakthrough, then perhaps, one day…
Triton collapsed. Both hands flew to his throat, squeezing desperately.
Then Ali, then Claret, then String.
At last, even Argentum and Solin lay motionless on the ground.
There was a simple way to render Red-Shoe Dancers harmless. All one had to do was—
Slash.
A sword swept through the air. One of the Red-Shoe Dancer’s deathly pale legs was severed cleanly, spraying thick red fluid into the air like a living human limb being hacked apart.
Rust-red hair, bright golden eyes. “Bert” was still wearing his unmistakable armor, genuine warmth and concern spread across his face.
“Friends, hang in there!”
His amber eyes swept rapidly across the scene, immediately taking in what had happened—a team of Trailblazers had been brought down by the Red-Shoe Dancers’ spores.
He doesn’t need any protective equipment at all?
Triton drew in a trembling breath.
The fully enclosed protective mask provided by House Morningdew sealed his face completely, its dark lenses perfectly concealing his eyes. Only the respirator valve remained visible, giving off a faint, steady hiss.
Claret’s pink-haired head lay right at “Bert’s” feet. Yet he acted as though he did not know her at all and rushed straight toward Triton, who lay farther away, apparently intending to drag the boy out of the area where the spores were thickest.
Now!
Triton abruptly twisted away from the hand reaching for his shoulder, and the curved blade in his arm bracer cleanly severed the stalk of a Red-Shoe Dancer beside him. At the same time, Ali rolled to her feet. Her lantern mace came crashing down with a whistle of air, smashing another Red-Shoe Dancer to pieces.
“Target in position! Everyone, move!” String hooked a finger around the bowstring. The sting thrummed as a blazing arrow shot forth like a venomous snake and struck the edge of the magic circle behind “Bert.”
Triton and Ali leapt aside in response. Their hurried breathing fogged the lenses of their protective masks.
With a sudden whoomph, the magic circle erupted into flames, raising a wall of fire between “Bert” and the rest of the team, trapping him inside the burning ring.
Around them, countless Red-Shoe Dancers were scorched dry by the flames. They withered and collapsed, consumed by the fire. Others caught alight yet continued to dance, flailing wildly as Triton and Ali cut them apart and smashed them to pieces one after another.
“At least the humidity’s high enough here.” String let out a breath of relief, his voice muffled beneath his mask. “If the air were any drier, we’d have a dust explosion on our hands…”
“Friends…?” “Bert” looked around in confusion. His expression had frozen into an unnatural mixture of concern and shock. He stared at the “companions” who had moments ago appeared to be on the verge of death, only to transform instantly into a team of seasoned fighters.
He watched them work together with flawless coordination, while their cold, wary gazes struck him mercilessly through the thick, dark lenses of their protective masks.
“Oh… I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were prepared. And I’ve ruined your hunt.”
“Bert” scratched the back of his head sheepishly.
“You’re… a team specifically here to capture Red-Shoe Dancers, aren’t you? I heard that ‘sound bait,’ and when I got here and saw you all lying on the ground, I thought—”
“Brother.” Claret stepped forward.
Ignoring Argentum’s warning, she tore the mask from her face. The flames of the magic circle came dangerously close to singeing the hem of her clothes.
“Tell me my name.”
“Your… name?” “Bert” stared at her through the flames in bewilderment. “Brother… Oh, you’re… my sister, indeed…”
He paused, as though frantically searching through his memories for the answer.
“Ahh, you’re… Julia.” “Bert” smiled as recognition finally dawned.
“My favorite sister, Julia.”
“That’s what he told you, isn’t it?” Claret whispered in a soft voice.
“But… I’m Claret, not my brother’s ‘favourite’ sister Julia.”
The younger Miss Morningdew had a desperate, chilling smile on her pale face.
“And you… you’re not my brother.”
“Claret, you’re too close to the fire—” Solin tried to reach out and pull her goddaughter back, but Claret raised a hand, motioning for her not to interfere.
“I’m actually rather curious.” Claret swept the disheveled strands of pink hair back over her shoulder, then lifted her eyes again and stared directly into those amber irises identical to her brother’s.
“Why didn’t those spores suffocate you to death…”
“... Imposter?”
