The Drowned
King's Mouth

A beleaguered necromancer arrives at the sunken outpost of Fennwater to reclaim a sealed relic—the Heart of the Mire—only to discover the dead already walking with a will not his own. The fog never lifts. Every corpse he raises turns on him with living eyes, accusation rippling through stilled lungs. The locals speak of a drowned king who collected debts in bone and breath before he sank, and the artifact pulses in rhythm with the rising water. When the necromancer tries to leave, the path behind him has already disappeared beneath black peat. Fennwater is not a place. It is a mouth that has been waiting—and it has swallowed the only thing that might stand against the hunger below.