Page 67 of Tethered In Blood

Focus.

The notes I had taken throughout Vaelwick were a mess of half-scrawled observations, fragmented warnings, and scrawled sigils. It was there, but disjointed, scattered, a puzzle with pieces missing their edges.

I rewrote everything with a clean sheet of parchment, breaking it apart piece by piece.

First, the trinkets. Bones, wood, twine. Carved with intent. Symbols of protection, warnings, prayers. But against what?

Second, the sigils. Crude but deliberate markings on doors. The older woman said each family had its own, passed down through generations. It wasn’t just superstition, but something rooted in history, in survival.

Third, the field.The black wheat.Cursed, they had called it. No one said why. No one explained what it meant. But one villager had let a detail slip, quiet, half-muttered, before silencing herself.

‘The crops feed on it.’

Feed on what?

I frowned, tapping the quill against the table. My gaze swept over the notes, retracing the words as I searched for the missing link. The trinkets, the sigils, the field—protection, warnings, a curse, a secret they refused to name.

Something didn’t make sense.

Or maybe I was just too late to see the pattern.

Maybe the roots of the field held the answer I sought, the truth Vaelwick concealed.

Waiting. Growing. Feeding.

Tearing off a small piece of the black wheat loaf, I absently chewed as I sketched a rough map of the village. The bread was dense, heavier than I expected, with a bitter aftertaste that lingered on my tongue. It didn’t taste spoiled but had an unpleasant aftertaste—an elduven sharpness, damp soil after rain, but darker. Stranger.

I ignored it and pressed on, marking the locations of the sigils I had seen, the houses with more trinkets than others, the general layout of the field. The quill followed the patterns I had traced throughout the day, but my restless and jagged thoughts churned beneath the surface.

Straightening, I scanned my messy scrawl.

People protected the houses closest to the fields the most, carving more sigils, trinkets, and desperate prayers into their walls. It wasn’t random or tradition. It was defense.They weren’t just superstitions or old customs. They werebarriers.

The bite of bread I had been chewing went down dry, sticking in my throat like dust. My hand gripped the charcoal tighter. The man’s warning echoed back to me, creeping through the cracks in my mind in a whispered omen.

“You don’t belong here, Herbalist.”

Notus.Not Oberon.

Me.

A heavy pounding started in my chest.

Why?

Herbalists weren’t threats. We worked with plants, studied the land, and healed the sick. We helped. So why did a withering village—its crops struggling, its land sickly, its people desperate—see me as something that didn’t belong?

The charcoal stilled between my fingers.

Unless… it wasn’t wilting.

I sat up straighter, my breath unsteady.What if they weren’t afraid of me being useless here? What if they were worried I would interfere?

Tearing off another piece of the loaf and chewing, my gaze fixed on my notes, though I wasn’t seeing them anymore. The creatures that the travelers spoke of in whispers, the ones Oberon and I had seen, were in the fields where animals refused to venture. Where the deaths happened and where people vanished if they ventured too far into the wheat. Everything was connected to that field.

Setting aside the charcoal, I exhaled and swept my hair back.

But why?When I looked at it earlier, it had seemed… normal. Strange in its endlessness, eerie in how the wind moved through it with breaths, but otherwise, it was just a field. Or at least, it was on the surface.

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