…
Zahken drifted slowly back into consciousness. The dark waters of the lake pressed heavily against his scaled form, grounding him in the lonely reality of his survival.
He sank gently to the muddy floor of the lakebed. There, resting silently among the swaying aquatic weeds, lay the severed appendages of Sartan. The heavy claws and broken legs still pulsed with a faint, residual divine light. Driven by a desperate need to preserve his brother, Zahken reached out to gather the remains. But as his fingers wrapped around the thick shell, he found it entirely immovable. The heavy limbs had fused perfectly with the bedrock, permanently anchored by the immense weight of Sartan's final sacrifice. Zahken wept silently into the dark water, eventually letting go.
He swam slowly toward the surface, kicking his heavy legs. He did not breach entirely. He lifted only the very top of his head above the ripples, peering cautiously through the lingering mist.
The ruined mortal village was no longer empty. Dozens of afflicted men and women wandered aimlessly through the muddy, decaying streets. Their skin was cracked and mottled with grey. The Stone Men had arrived.
Submerging once more, Zahken swam to the absolute furthest edge of the dark lake. He pulled himself out of the water, dragging his exhausted body onto the damp earth. He could not walk among these doomed mortals as a god. Closing his remaining eye, he forced his massive, iridescent green shell to aggressively shrink and soften. The divine turtle plating retreated into loose, wrinkled skin. The terrible wound where his eye had been violently popped healed over into a milky-white, blind orb. He deliberately manifested the cracked, petrified patches of greyscale across his own face and arms, fully adopting the frail guise of an aged mortal man. He became Hazkar.
He walked haggardly toward the ruined village, leaning heavily upon a wooden staff he pulled from the underbrush.
As he crossed the shattered threshold of the town, an older man approached him. The stranger's face was half-consumed by petrified stone, yet his expression held a tragic warmth.
"Welcome, tired traveller," the afflicted man spoke softly, offering a weary, comforting smile. "The mist has claimed you, but you are not entirely alone here. Come, share our fire."
It was a gentle, heartbreaking greeting—one that Hazkar would perfectly mirror centuries later when welcoming Hadrian and Hermione.
For the first few days after joining the doomed villagers, Hazkar spent his time silently roaming the muddy perimeter of the lake and the decaying ruins of the town. His ancient soul was profoundly restless. While he kept a watchful and sorrowful eye on the villagers, his sheer desperation to reach Chroyane continually drove him back to the misty borders.
He began to venture deeper into the suffocating fog. To his profound surprise, the mist did not aggressively attack him as it had before. By burying his immense divine essence deep within a frail, mortal coil, he had effectively blinded the corruption. The fog merely treated him as another dying human, allowing him to navigate the shifting maze without his magic being instantly devoured. Even so the mist played its games with him, meandering and confusing him in ways no mortal should suffer, not letting him traverse it as others could.
During one of these prolonged, silent searches, the grey veil suddenly parted. Hazkar stumbled into a vast, ruined clearing, his breath catching painfully in his throat. Before him stood the shattered remains of an ancient temple. He was immediately accosted by a vision, standing amidst the absolute destruction of sunken Chroyane, was a towering, ethereal vision of Mother Rhoyne.
"My child, come to me," her voice echoed, a haunting, melancholic wail that vibrated in his very marrow. She reached out toward him, her divine form weeping over the drowned city, before the vision violently collapsed back into the swirling grey fog.
Driven to his knees, Hazkar wept into the mud. He had finally seen her, but the path remained closed, guarded by a labyrinth he could not fully map.
When he eventually returned to the village, a new, dark determination settled over him. He began to observe the afflicted mortals with a much keener, clinical eye. He noticed that as the greyscale aggressively consumed their flesh, the Stone Men were inexplicably able to wander much deeper into the fog without becoming hopelessly turned around. The terrified villagers whispered tales of the afflicted marching deep into the mist in search of the famed, mythical Shrouded Lord.
Hazkar realized the terrifying truth: the curse itself was a twisted key. The greyscale actively carried traces of Mother Rhoyne's magic, allowing the infected to navigate her flooded domain. Desperate to return to the temple and answer his mother's call, Hazkar began secretly experimenting with the diseased flesh. He studied the corruption not to cure it, but to harness it. It was a dark obsession that slowly blinded him to the escalating tragedy around him.
Every single day, he ventured deep into the grey fog, frantically searching for a hidden path to Chroyane. And every single day, the mist completely confounded his senses, effortlessly spitting him back out at the edge of the village. His divine strength remained hopelessly trapped.
Then, one bitterly cold evening, a new arrival emerged from the gloom.