Chapter 26: The Seventh Mouth
Krug heard them before he saw them.
Breathing. Shallow, rapid, arrhythmic — the sound of lungs working harder than they should. Multiple sets, overlapping, coming from a depression in the swamp floor thirty paces ahead, hidden by chest-high reeds that Genesis Bloom had fattened overnight.
He stopped. Planted the Shepherd’s Stick.
The gem pulsed. Once. Twice. A slow, warm heartbeat of golden-red light that pushed through the morning mist like a lantern through fog. The light didn’t flicker. It radiated — steady, patient, the visual equivalent of a hand held open.
The breathing stopped.
Silence. The wet, tense silence of creatures deciding whether to run or fight.
Krug waited. He’d learned to wait. Two months under the Grand Ordinator had beaten the urgency out of him — replaced it with the understanding that the right moment arrived on its own schedule and punished those who tried to drag it forward.
A head appeared above the reeds.
Small. Round-skulled. Brown-green scales mottled with mud, the pattern so close to the vegetation that the face seemed to grow from the swamp itself. Two eyes — large, amber, vertical-pupiled — locked onto Krug with the fixed, unblinking stare of prey assessing a predator.
Then another head. And another.
Three sets of eyes. All at the same height — roughly four feet above the waterline. All with the same expression: fear held together by discipline.
Krug looked at them. They were small in the way that made his chest ache — not the smallness of youth but the smallness of a race built to survive by being overlooked. Their frames were narrow. Their limbs were thin. The muscles beneath the scales were cable-dense but there was no mass behind them, no power reserve. These were bodies designed for speed and precision, not force.
One of them was holding a sharpened stick across its chest. The adolescent. The trained one, Runt had said.
Krug addressed the adults. Not the guard — the guard would react to the adults’ reaction, not to Krug’s words.
"I am Krug," he said. "Priest of the Grand Ordinator. I serve the god whose land you are approaching."
Nothing. The amber eyes didn’t blink.
"One of yours is wounded."
Something shifted in the nearest adult’s expression. Not hope — the precursor to hope. The flinch of a creature that expected pain and felt something else instead.
"I can help him," Krug said.
He didn’t move forward. Didn’t reach. Didn’t step into the depression. He stood where he was, staff glowing, and let the offer sit in the silence like a stone dropped into still water.
The two healthy adults looked at each other. A conversation happened in the space between their eye movements — a language Krug couldn’t read but recognized. The same language he’d seen between Vark and the enforcers when words were too slow for the decision being made.
Then the nearer one stepped aside.
Behind them, on the muddy floor of the depression, the injured Kobold lay on his back. His left flank was a ruin. Three claw marks, deep enough to show bone through the swollen tissue, the wound leaking a thin, yellowish fluid that stank of rot. His breathing was the worst of the group — fast, shallow, wet. The rattle of lungs fighting fluid.
Krug descended into the depression. Slowly. No sudden movements. The adolescent’s stick tracked him the entire way — the point following his center mass with the mechanical precision of someone who had been taught to aim for the torso, not the head.
Good instincts.
He knelt beside the injured one.
Up close, the damage was worse than it had looked from above. The infection had spread beyond the wound — the tissue around the gouges was dark, almost black, and the heat radiating from the area was enough to feel without touching. Three days of sepsis in a swamp. The Kobold was dying the way bodies died when the battle was already lost: slowly, and then all at once.
Krug set the staff down. Placed both hands over the wound.
And reached inward.
***
The divine magic lived in a place between his chest and his spine.
Krug had never been taught to name it. The Voice hadn’t given him a manual — hadn’t labeled the ability, hadn’t provided a tutorial screen or a skill description. He’d discovered it the way he’d discovered everything about his class: by needing it and finding it already there, like a muscle he’d always had but never flexed.
The first time had been weeks ago. A hatchling — one of the youngest — had gashed its hand on a piece of unshaped iron at the forge. A clean cut, nothing dangerous, but the blood had been bright and the crying had been loud and Krug had pressed his palm over the wound without thinking, and the warmth had come.
It wasn’t the Voice’s warmth. That was external — a presence that touched him from above, a heat that came from outside his body and flowed through him like light through glass. This was different. This was his. His faith, processed through his class, converted into something that his body could channel without permission, without cost, without the careful rationing that the Voice applied to every divine act.
The Acolyte’s gift. The priest’s inheritance. Small magic — healing, purification, the mending of flesh. Not miracles. Not the earth-shaking interventions that bent the rules of the world. Just the quiet, fundamental repair of what was broken, drawn from a well that refilled itself as long as his faith held.
He pressed his hands tighter against the Kobold’s flank.
The warmth surged.
It moved through his palms and into the wound — a heat that didn’t burn but *cleaned*. The infection registered first. Krug felt it the way a blacksmith felt impurities in iron: a wrongness in the material, a contamination that needed to be burned out before the metal could be shaped. The divine warmth found the infection and ate it. Cell by cell, the yellow-green corruption turned clear, the fluid thinning, the swelling deflating like a punctured bladder.
Then the tissue. The three gouges were deep — muscle torn, connective tissue shredded, one rib cracked. The warmth followed the damage like water following a channel, filling the gaps, encouraging the cells to rebuild. Krug could feel the process: agonizingly slow by divine standards, impossibly fast by biological ones. Flesh knitting. Bone fusing. The body remembering what it was supposed to look like and finding the blueprint still intact beneath the destruction.
The Kobold screamed.
Not pain. The sound was thinner than pain — sharper, higher, the involuntary response of a nervous system that had been preparing for death and suddenly found itself reversing. The body didn’t know what to do with healing. It had been marshaling resources for a final stand, sealing off systems, conserving energy for the organs that mattered most. And now, without warning, everything was being rebuilt.
The amber eyes snapped open. Wide. Wild. Locked onto Krug’s face with an expression that Krug had seen before — on Grak’s face, when the old lizardman had watched his god outsmart a goddess. The expression of a mind reorganizing itself around new information.
The two healthy Kobolds lunged forward. Not to attack — to reach their wounded. They crouched beside him, hands on his shoulders, voices rapid and low. A language Krug didn’t understand — clicks, chirps, tonal shifts that moved faster than his ear could parse. But the meaning was clear. The same meaning in every language.
You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re alive.
Krug withdrew his hands. The wound was closed — three pale lines where the gouges had been, smooth and tight, the scar tissue new and clean. The infection was gone. The breathing had steadied — deep, even, the rhythm of lungs that had room to work again.
He stood. His hands tingled. The warmth retreated, folding back into the place between his chest and spine where it lived, replenishing itself like a spring that had been tapped and was already refilling.
The adolescent’s stick was on the ground.
His hands were at his sides. His amber eyes were wet.
"Come," Krug said. It was the only word that mattered. He pointed north — toward the territory, toward the palisade, toward the hearth fire and the food stores and the growing camp where thirty-five lizardmen were building something that these seven strangers didn’t yet have a name for.
"There is food. There is shelter. There is a god who sees you."
He picked up the Shepherd’s Stick. The red gem pulsed — warm, steady, patient.
He turned and walked north. He didn’t look back. The invitation was either enough or it wasn’t. Looking back would have been persuasion, and persuasion was for merchants. Krug was a priest. He showed. He offered. He left the door open.
Behind him, he heard movement. Footsteps. Fourteen of them — small, uneven, the stagger of exhausted bodies following the only light in the swamp.
They were following.
***
The moment they crossed the territory boundary, Zephyr’s interface lit up.
Seven contacts. Full resolution. The fog of war peeled back from each one like a curtain drawn, revealing the data that his limited divine sense had only hinted at.
[NEW CONTACTS DETECTED — ENTERING TERRITORY]
[Species: Kobold (Reptilian Variant) — Confirmed]
[Count: 7]
[Divine Affiliation: None]
[FAITH EVENT TRIGGERED]
𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮
[Healing of unaffiliated sentient by ordained priest — conversion threshold reached]
The conversions hit in a cascade. Not all at once — the system processed them individually, each one a separate calculation based on the sentient’s faith threshold, prior exposure to divine power, and current emotional state.
[Kobold #1 (Adult Male — Healed): CONVERTED → Casual Believer (1 FP/day)]
[Kobold #2 (Adult Female): CONVERTED → Casual Believer (1 FP/day)]
[Kobold #3 (Adult Female): CONVERTED → Casual Believer (1 FP/day)]
[Kobold #4 (Adolescent Male): CONVERTED → Casual Believer (1 FP/day)]
[Kobold #5 (Adolescent Female): CONVERTED → Casual Believer (1 FP/day)]
[Kobold #6 (Juvenile Male): CONVERTED → Provisional (0.5 FP/day)]
[Kobold #7 (Juvenile Female): CONVERTED → Provisional (0.5 FP/day)]
**[TOTAL BELIEVERS: 42]
**[FP/day: 196]
Forty-two believers. A twenty percent increase from the thirty-five he’d had yesterday morning. And the FP cost of acquisition: zero. Krug’s priestly healing had triggered the conversion event entirely from his own class abilities. The food and shelter would seal it.
*Free believers.* The phrase felt wrong — reductive, cynical even by his standards. But the math was the math. Seven souls, zero expenditure, immediate return.
He pulled up the individual profiles.
[Kobold #1 — Adult Male]
[Height: 4’1" | Weight: 68 lbs]
[Stats: STR: F | AGI: C | INT: D | PER: C | WIL: D]
[Innate Trait: Burrow Specialist — Tunnel excavation speed +40%, structural integrity of dug tunnels +25%]
[Status: Healed (recently). Malnutrition (moderate). Morale: Low → Rising.]
The leader. The one who’d taken the claw marks. His stats were balanced for a Kobold — not exceptional in any single category, but competent across the board. The kind of spread that indicated experience rather than talent. And the Burrow Specialist trait was the one Zephyr had been hoping for.
[Kobold #4 — Adolescent Male]
[Height: 3’5" | Weight: 42 lbs]
[Stats: STR: G | AGI: D | INT: D | PER: B | WIL: D]
[Innate Trait: Keen Ear — Ambient sound detection range +60%. Can identify species by footfall pattern.]
[Status: Malnutrition (mild). Morale: Guarded.]
Perception: B. At his age. The adolescent guard — the one Runt had noted for his trained watch rotation — had a sensory trait that made him a natural sentry. Paired with Runt’s Nightstalker capabilities, this Kobold could become the second half of a scout team that covered both visual and acoustic detection.
Zephyr filed the profiles. Tagged the Burrow Specialist and the Keen Ear as high-priority development targets. The rest were standard — useful, convertible, productive in the aggregate.
Now the logistics.
Housing first. He pulled up the camp layout. The lizardmen’s living area was clustered around the hearth and the forge — structures that radiated heat, which the cold-blooded lizardmen gravitated toward naturally. Kobolds were also cold-blooded, but they were burrowers. Surface housing felt wrong for the species. What they wanted — what their biology craved — was a hole in the ground.
The eastern bank of the camp, where the soil was dense clay compacted by centuries of sediment pressure, was ideal. Deep enough for a burrow. Stable enough to hold without reinforcement. Close enough to the camp center for integration, far enough for privacy.
He flagged the location. Sent an impression through the bond to Krug: *the eastern bank, dig there.* Krug would understand. The Kobolds would understand better.
Food was simpler. Genesis Bloom had tripled the resource regeneration. The surplus could absorb seven small mouths without anyone noticing.
The real question was the one that didn’t have a system answer.
What clawed your leader?
Three parallel gouges. Deep. Consistent spacing — not the ragged, random scratches of an opportunistic predator, but the clean, equidistant marks of something with retractable claws built for precision killing. Big claws. The spacing suggested a paw the size of a dinner plate.
The Kobolds had come from the southeast. The deep swamp-forest — unmapped territory that Zephyr’s divine sense couldn’t reach even at its new extended range. Whatever lived there was outside his sensor radius, operating in the grey zone beyond the map’s edge.
He needed the story. He needed the Kobold leader — rested, fed, coherent — to tell him what had driven seven people out of their home and into a dying march through unfamiliar swamp.
Through the divine sense, Zephyr watched the seven small shapes arrive at the camp gate. Watched the lizardmen stare. Watched Vark’s hand rest on his weapon — instinct, not hostility — and then drop when Krug raised a palm.
Watched the Kobold leader sit by the hearth fire. The flames reflected in his amber eyes. His hand rested on his closed wound — the three pale lines where death had been reversed by a priest who had walked out of the mist with a glowing staff and asked for nothing.
The Kobold looked at Krug.
And spoke.
"We were twelve."
Three words. Five missing.
Krug sat down across from him. The hearth crackled between them. The Hydra’s gold eyes watched from the lake.
"Tell me," Krug said.