Njiru’s laboratory was alive with its own foul heartbeat. The air clung thickly to his throat, a miasma of arcane discharge, antiseptic, and the unmistakable perfume of decay. Most would gag, but Njiru inhaled it with a satisfaction.

  Rows of glass jars lined the walls with terrifying elegance. Inside each, Njiru’s failures and successes floated silently in preserving liquids. Faces contorted in eternal screams stared outward, stitched limbs twisting in impossible, artful configurations. These were not merely trophies—they were testament to the audacity of a mind unbound, and the cruelty of someone who had long since abandoned the frail confines of morality.

  At the center of this hellish gallery, Njiru hunched over his workbench, the marble surface cold beneath his gaunt fingers. A recent cadaver, pristine in its flesh and unblemished save for the glowing mushrooms threaded through its veins, pulsed with life of an unnatural sort. Njiru adjusted the silver wire threading through the chest cavity with a precision born of decades of obsessive refinement. Its eyes, vacant until moments ago, now glowed faintly—a quiet acknowledgment of his mastery.

  A thin, almost sly smile curved his lips. These were not the laborers forced into mines and fields by the King’s orders. These were creations capable of something greater. Faster. Stronger. Resilient in ways his previous experiments had never dared to be. Each movement carried a hint of autonomy, a spark of contained chaos, a promise of devastation.

  A shift in the air made him pause. The hairs on his arms prickled. He didn’t turn immediately; he knew the lab, knew its spirits and echoes. But the presence persisted, undeniable, almost expectant.

  From the shadows, a figure stepped forward with absolute silence. A girl, no older than thirteen, cloaked in dark fabric that seemed to drink the lab’s glow, moved like a predator in a jungle of death. Her black staff absorbed the light around it.

  “I see the mushrooms are working, old man,” she said.

  Njiru’s eyes narrowed. He felt a flicker of irritation at the intrusion. “Indeed, Imani,” he rasped, returning to his work. “Your fungi have proven… remarkably effective. These cadavers are stronger than anything I’ve achieved before. Potent, resilient… perfect.” He sighed. “It is a pity the King relegates my work to the fields and mines. He squanders their potential… as always.”

  Imani tilted her head, the dark hood slipping just enough to reveal a glint of mischief in her eyes. “A shame, isn’t it? Such talent, bound by a king’s whims. Imagine what you could accomplish, free from constraint. Recognition, glory… power unmeasured.” Her voice wove around him, a silken thread in a tapestry of temptation.

  Njiru’s fingers stilled. The thought of being unbound was intoxicating, a slow, creeping fire in his chest. For months he had honed his craft within the confines of Rega’s decrees, twisting life and death alike, yet always tethered by the need to answer to a mortal king. Freedom, true freedom, whispered to him now.

  “And yet,” Njiru murmured, almost to himself, “Rega provides resources, a laboratory, autonomy… more than most would grant. My creations thrive here because of him. Betrayal would be inconvenient. Dangerous. Not without consequence.” His voice hardened, a defensive reflex against the seduction of ambition.

  Imani did not press. Instead, she let her staff tap the stone floor lightly, her subtle movements echoing like soft percussion. “The King,” she began, “is venturing into the Dark Forest. Seeking dryads for his schemes. A specialized endeavor… beyond mundane eyes, beyond ordinary threats. Perhaps your creations could demonstrate their true capabilities there—beyond the prying gaze of peasants and their fields.” She leaned slightly closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “It would be a chance to prove their worth… not as simple guards and laborers, but as instruments of something far greater.”

  Njiru’s mind raced. The Dark Forest—a place of raw, untamed magic, home to creatures beyond his necromantic calculations. Sending his newest creations there was risky, unpredictable. Yet the temptation to prove himself, to demonstrate mastery over forces not yet fully understood by the King… it was magnetic. His eyes flicked to his cadaver, to the subtle pulse of light within its veins.

  “And,” Imani added, her tone softening, “if one were to acquire a certain… asset along the way… a young Green à??born, for instance, imagine the potential. A commander for your undead forces, his innate powers complementing your creations. With him, your horde would not simply obey… it would strategize, anticipate… evolve.”

  Njiru blinked.

  His fingers stilled over the silver wire.

  A commander. Not a soldier — a mind set above the horde. The gap between what he had and what that would make possible opened quietly in his thoughts. His cadavers could overwhelm. They could not outthink. A living à??born could.

  "Leonotis," Imani said.

  Njiru knew that name. Not from the wanted posters.

  From further back.

  Sadia. A brief thing, years ago. Sharp-minded, guarded, smelled of black ink and iron. She hadn't stayed long. He hadn't expected her to. He'd heard later she had a son, filed it away. Then whispers reached him of a boy in the palace who might carry Black à?? — her signature in a child. He'd sent men to collect him quietly.

  They came back empty. Nothing there, they'd said. The boy has nothing.

  He had closed the drawer on it.

  And now Imani was telling him the boy with nothing had become the Green à??born.

  Njiru set down the wire. Green. Not Black. Not what he'd half-imagined. Something had changed in the boy — something he didn't understand, and what he didn't understand he didn't trust. An unreadable commander was a variable, not an asset.

  And yet.

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  He looked at the cadaver. The fungi pulsed with cold, borrowed vitality. It would follow orders. It would not improve them.

  He thought about the Dark Forest — the way his calculations frayed at its edges, the environment refusing predictability. He had compensated with volume. But volume was slow. Wasteful.

  A living mind that could read terrain, sense à?? signatures, make decisions in half a second —

  His gaze drifted to the canvas-covered slab at the far end of the room.

  "You make it sound simple," he said.

  Imani leaned closer. "Leonotis. Young, capable — with guidance, a perfect extension of your will. You could shape him. Have him serve as your right hand."

  Shape him. Njiru turned the phrase over carefully. The boy had defied the tournament, broken into a royal lab, survived Silas. That was not a mind that bent easily. Capturing him would be complicated. Bending him would require something subtler than chains.

  Njiru had patience. And a laboratory full of reasons why subtlety, applied correctly, was more permanent than force.

  "The à??born will move toward the Dark Forest," Njiru said, mostly to himself. "His pattern is predictable. He moves toward what he wants to stop." A thin smile. "Rega's expedition gives him the reason."

  He picked up the silver wire again. He was no longer thinking about the cadaver beneath his hands.

  He was already planning.

  "Predictable," Imani said, "if one knows the path." She tapped her staff lightly against the stone. "Heroism is often suggested by circumstance. Perhaps you are the hero of your own story, Njiru. A tale written in bone, fungi, and fire."

  Njiru listened. And while he listened, he watched.

  She was good. The staff rhythm, the dropped hood, the careful escalation from flattery to vision — all of it textbook manipulation, and she was young enough that she probably believed he couldn't see it. But the interesting question wasn't whether she was guiding him. It was why she wanted him to take the boy rather than deliver him to Rega.

  Iku's followers had a use for the Green à??born. Njiru knew that much. Imani's superior — whoever they were — would want Leonotis whole and packaged for whatever ritual they had planned. And yet here was Imani, steering him toward capture and command rather than capture and delivery.

  She wanted the boy kept out of her superior's hands.

  Interesting.

  "Heroes seize the opportunities presented to them," Imani finished.

  Njiru let the silence sit for a moment. Then he straightened, and allowed the words to settle over him with something that was not quite sincerity but was adjacent to it.

  "A hero," he repeated quietly.

  He was not embarrassed by the word. He had spent a decade in the King's dungeon because he had dared to imagine a world that worked better than the one he'd inherited. His methods were ugly — he had never pretended otherwise — but the vision behind them was not. A kingdom where death was not waste. Where the labor of the living was not ground down to nothing by hunger and war and the indifference of rulers who confused power with purpose.

  He looked at the rows of jars. The faces inside them had not asked to be there. He knew that. But the world he was building with their remnants — that world would not need to fill jars. That world would have enough.

  That was going to be his legacy. Not the Kings. Not Iku's rebirth. His.

  "Perhaps it is," he said.

  She stepped back, satisfied — and that was the tell. Too satisfied. She had gotten what she came for and she knew it, and the slight easing of her shoulders gave her away. Njiru filed it carefully.

  She vanished between one breath and the next, leaving nothing.

  Njiru stood still for a moment.

  She wants to protect the boy. He turned it over slowly. From her superior, presumably. From whatever Iku's followers intended to do with a Green à??born child. She had come here and wound him up and pointed him at the Dark Forest because a necromancer pursuing the boy for his own purposes was a complication her superior could not easily unravel — and a complication that kept Leonotis breathing.

  He almost admired it.

  He crossed to the far slab and peeled back the oiled canvas.

  The form beneath was nothing like the fungal cadavers on the other tables. Pale, almost translucent skin. Veins that glowed gold in slow, rhythmic pulses, the fungi not threaded through the skin but integrated into the tissue at a cellular level. It had taken him more failures than he would ever record. It was the proof of concept for everything he believed was possible.

  He picked up a silver-tipped tool and held it over the form without touching it yet.

  The Dark Forest was the right stage. Rega would be there hunting Dryads for his own diminishing schemes. The Green à??born would come — predictable, as Njiru had said, moving always toward the thing he wanted to stop. And Njiru would be waiting, not as the King's instrument but as his own.

  Capture the boy. Study the Green — that alone was worth the expedition. Then, if the boy could be guided rather than broken, give him the horde to command and see what living strategy did to dead strength.

  And if he couldn't be guided... Well he could always use another corpse.

  Either way, the legacy held. A kingdom that did not need to grind its people to dust. An army that did not need to eat or sleep or lose faith. A necromancer who had not rotted in a dungeon for nothing.

  He lowered the tool to the form's sternum and began.

  "The Dark Forest," he murmured, almost to himself. "And whatever you're planning, little girl — thank you for the push."

  The fungi pulsed gold beneath his hands.

  The sterile silence of the hidden chamber was a sharp contrast to the thick, corrupted atmosphere of Njiru’s lab. The room was small, with walls of polished black basalt that seemed to absorb all light.

  A ripple of displaced air, silent and immediate, marked Imani's arrival. She materialized from the shadows, her dark traveler's cloak swirling around her, and stood before the room's only occupant.

  The woman stood with her back to Imani, gazing into a swirling pool of black water set into the floor—a scrying pool reflecting only darkness. She was tall and slender, draped in robes of deep velvet that swallowed the light.

  "Sister," Imani said, her voice formal, laced with a tired obedience.

  The woman didn't turn. "Did you secure the necromancer?"

  "Yes," Imani confirmed. "He is motivated. He believes he is venturing into the Dark Forest to serve the King, but he will be hunting."

  "And the asset," the woman continued, her voice low and even, "did you sufficiently motivate him to capture the Green à??born, Leonotis?"

  "Yes, Sister," Imani replied, a hint of defeat coloring her voice. She had successfully guided Njiru's ambition, pushing him toward the idea of capturing Leonotis to command his new fungal army. She did not want to put Leonotis in danger, but she knew the woman—her sister—had suspected her involvement in Silas's death. It was apparent Imani needed a tighter leash, and engineering Njiru's pursuit was the only way to satisfy the suspicion while simultaneously giving Leonotis a target she could predict.

  "Good," the woman finally said, her head inclining slightly. "Soon that Njiru will kill that Green à??born, or capture him. He will then infuse the body with the fungi, creating a proper vessel for our Orisha, Iku, to be reborn in this world."

  "Yes," Imani said, but her heart was not in it. Her interactions with Leonotis, witnessing his compassion and loyalty, had changed her. The Green à?? was a powerful, unpredictable force, but its purity unsettled her belief in the inevitable triumph of Iku's corruption.

  The woman in black finally turned, her face obscured by deep shadow cast by the basalt walls. "You sound distressed, Imani. Do not forget your purpose. We are the architect of the new age."

  "My purpose is clear, Sister," Imani said, bowing her head.

  She knew what she had to do next. She had orchestrated the necromancer's hunt; now she must ensure the prey knew the true nature of the pursuit.

  She must find a way to warn him before Njiru uses his undead to kill him, even if it cost her everything.

  The darkness of the room seemed to press in, urging her toward the next move on the cosmic board.