The Counting
of Fires

✳Spun by @veinofgold·refined with the Roleverse engine

Veteran mercenary commander Jaren Voss leads a hardened caravan through the drowned lowlands of Tatalia — a shortcut the locals call the Whispermarsh. When the column fails to emerge, the legend writes itself: lost to the fen. But Jaren wakes each dawn with fresh wounds, each matching a tattoo he watched fade on a dead man's arm years ago. The water is wrong — black, flat, refusing even ripples. Faces drift beneath the surface, mouths moving, eyes fixed on the living. When Jaren counts the campfires on the seventh night, the numbers don't match. One more than he deployed. The man sitting at that fire seems to know him intimately — wearing the face of a soldier Jaren buried with his own hands. The dead are not done with him. And the marsh means to keep its visitors.

Heat

Sweet

Length3 scenes · ~20 min

Read by854 readers

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3 scenes18+

FantasyHorror

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Cover · generated, then hand-graded

(01) — Who you'll be locked in with

Meet the cast

human (but touched)

Eriq The Corpse-Singer

The antagonist. A figure from Jaren's past — a battlefield scavenger and death-cultist Jaren once drove out of a camp for carving up the dead before they were cold. He was hanged for it. The rope broke. He crawled back into the fen and was never seen again — until now. Eriq is not entirely alive, not entirely dead. He has become something the marsh shaped: a shepherd of the drowned, a keeper of the count. He sits at the extra fire on the seventh night, wearing the face of a dead soldier, and he knows every name Jaren has tried to forget. He does not want revenge. He wants Jaren to finally finish counting.

human

Jaren Voss

The protagonist. A veteran mercenary captain who learned to count dead men by the tattoos on their arms. He took the Whispermarsh shortcut out of desperation — supplies low, morale lower. Now he wakes with wounds that match tattoos he watched rot on corpses. He is pragmatic, superstitious beneath a layer of cynicism, and carrying a guilt he has never named aloud. He does not believe in ghosts. He is beginning to be wrong.

human

Sable Corvane

The love interest. Jaren's second-in-command for the last six years. She is the only one in the caravan who does not flinch at his midnight wounds — because she has seen them appear, and she has watched him lie about them. She is from the fenlands originally, though she fled them as a girl and never looked back. The marsh waking disturbs her in ways she will not explain. She is pragmatic, dry-humoured, and loyal in a way that looks like indifference. She has been in love with Jaren for three years and has never said a word about it. The marsh knows this, and means to use it.

(02) — 3 scenes