The sludge in Darkwater doesn't just carry death. It digests it, slowly, like a patient stomach.

  I find a man face up in the swamp, his eyes open to the grey sky. Three holes puncture his tunic. A few feet away, a woman lies with an axe in her hand. Her head is two strides from her shoulders. Further on, the third body is a ruin of meat and butchered cloth.

  I strain my ears. The only answer is the drone of corpse-flies.

  My boots sink into the sludge with a squelch. The unfamiliar weight of this flesh hangs on my bones. Every step is a clumsy struggle with a body I don't own.

  The body had belonged to a merchant. Hugo.

  His greed is the reason I'm in this muck. A fool's errand for a rare herb.

  This skin has grown heavy. Discard it.

  The Voice arrives as a pressure in the skull, a presence older than any memory I own.

  There. The one in the reeds.

  I follow its command and my eyes find a slender figure half-swallowed by the reeds. Hooded. Fingers still curled around a dagger's hilt.

  Alistair. A hunter from Blackthorn. He walked the forbidden road to Greyhollow.

  Of course it knows. It always knows.

  I know. You act. That is the arrangement.

  Becoming Alistair is what matters. Survival. And the brief relief of purpose that comes with a new skin.

  Maybe this time the skin will fit.

  My hand falters as I reach for Alistair's body. This flesh remembers being good. Its sinews fight the command, their resistance taking the shape of memory.

  The rumble of laughter in these lungs, bouncing off Ashenbrook's stone walls. The warmth of bread in this palm, passed to a child's grubby fingers. The upturn of faces in the market through these eyes, a quiet joke earning a smile.

  To become Alistair, Hugo must be erased.

  Once I begin, he is gone forever.

  I take the last breath of Hugo. Then I lay my hand on Alistair's chest.

  I engulf Alistair's corpse. My flesh loses its form, sloughing off the bone in a wave of warm, grey slurry. His meat worms through me like eels through wet slate. His bones crack and splinter, piercing my melting flesh to fuse with my own. My jaw unhinges with a wet pop as my teeth are forced from their sockets, making way for his. My vision stutters between two sets of eyes, the world doubling and tripling until it tears apart. Then, it snaps into focus. Alistair's focus.

  For a moment, I am no one. A formless thing trapped between two men. A raw, guttural no tears itself from my throat, but a thick collar of alien muscle is already there, choking the sound to a wet, useless gargle.

  Then a will that is not my own pushes back. Alistair. His dying spirit lashes out, a final shard of hate aimed at its invader. The fight happens in a blind, wet darkness, a thrashing of two wills in a dissolving body. When it ends, there is only the ache of a wound that isn't mine and the taste of a stranger's blood.

  My new body revolts. Nausea seizes me and I retch, expelling the last of Hugo in a surge of bile and half-digested bread.

  The Echo of Hugo is extinguished. The Echo of Alistair is kindled.

  It is Steady, its flame a guttering spark.

  |

  A vertical line of silver light cuts across my vision. A shape that means stability, pillar, singular.

  A life consumed awakens the Blight, its pulse a wet, sickening squirm.

  ~~

  The silver line is immediately corrupted by a violent, thrashing scribble of black. A shape with a meaning I can only translate as hunger, chaos, wrongness.

  To cage the pulse, grow the flame. This is the balance. One rises, the other falls.

  I flex my new fingers. The movement is hesitant, then sure. Each motion lands exactly where I intend. Nothing like Hugo's clumsy grasp.

  Hugo's gifts are voided. In their place, Alistair's gifts are now yours.

  His watchful eye.

  His ghost step.

  His killing hand.

  But as the new strength settles in my limbs, a cold pressure forms in my stomach. A stone. And for the first time, the stone is not still. A tremor passes through it, the lurch of something waking up. The remnant of Alistair, his Echo, trembles at its presence. A faint shiver, quickly smothered. Then his memories bleed into me.

  A boy's voice calls 'daddy!', a name I have no right to answer.

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  A pair of brown eyes, watching me with a pride I never earned.

  The scent of woodsmoke and roasting apples from a hearth I have never seen.

  I rise, and the world comes into a new, sharper focus. Alistair's instincts are taking root. But the boy's voice loops in my head.

  His family. Will they search for him?

  I move through the swamp, my new feet finding solid ground where Hugo's would have sunk. Patches of corpse light fungus and ghost pipe flowers push up from the sludge, their brightness stark against the black. Ahead, a thick fog smothers the trees of Evershade, obscuring the silhouette of Greyhollow.

  A twig snaps in the trees.

  I freeze, my eyes hunting the treeline. The world sharpens. Bark texture at thirty paces becomes clear. Water beads catch light on every leaf. A hunter's focus takes hold, cutting through the murk and scanning the area as a map of threats and opportunities.

  There. A shape moves between the trunks. It advances with a broken, stumbling gait, its silhouette a collection of mismatched parts. The sound of its approach reaches me. A dragging slap of meat on mud. It devours the ground between us, each slap a heavy tremor in the muck. It is bigger than any man.

  A part of me, the old part, tries to claw its way out of this hunter's skin. To turn and bolt. But this skin has its own wisdom. A hunter's instinct uncoils in my limbs, sinking me behind a curtain of reeds before I could even think to command it.

  A thought slides in like honey. Smooth, warm, satisfying. I've done it. I am a hunter.

  My hand trembles.

  No. No, not now.

  The creature's head snaps in my direction. Its eyes find mine across the bog.

  Useless. It sees you.

  It opens its jaw. I brace for a growl. A high, thin wail escapes its chest, the cry of a newborn, a sound that didn't belong in a body that large.

  I bolt.

  The swamp sucks at my boots. I risk a glance over my shoulder. A mistake. Its flesh is a weeping, muscular knot, stretched taut over a frame that no longer fits. Its jaw hangs open, a ruin of shattered bone. All the monsters I have faced existed to kill. This one exists only to be wrong. It gains on me, the air growing hot and foul at my back. A gnarled root snags my foot. I crash to my knees in the muck. My fall sends a spray of black water into the air. When it settles, something glints in the gouge my knees made. Alistair's dagger.

  My fingers close around the hilt. I watch my hand as if it belongs to another man. Its grip is impossibly tight, yet the knuckles show no strain. A hundred knife fights I never had settle into my bones as the hand pulls me around to face the thing.

  It stops.

  In the stillness, its eyes find mine. They are human eyes. Gods, they are human. But they burn with a fury no person could survive feeling.

  The wind shifts, and a foulness rolls from the creature, the thick smell of offal and meat left too long in the sun. From the corner of its left eye, a drop of moisture gathers, then spills, tracing a clean path through the grime on its face. It's the only clean thing about it.

  It sees me notice. Sees me see its vulnerability. Its mismatched frame shudders. Its hand lurches up, crooked fingers scraping across its cheek, missing the tear by an inch. The sorrow in its eyes hardens into something else.

  It lunges.

  My body wants to curl up, to make itself small, to vanish. But a sharper instinct rises to meet it. My arm moves with a will of its own. The blade slashes upward in a blur of motion, an arc my own arm doesn't know how to make.

  Steel splits weeping flesh, but the cut is shallow. The creature shrieks and recoils as dark fluid oozes from the gash.

  It is wounded. That is enough. Flee.

  I turn, hurling my new legs forward until they burn and the muck gives way to solid earth. Ahead, the first wooden houses of Greyhollow tear through the fog.

  I don't stop.

  Greyhollow is still. A dog barks once, then yelps as if silenced. I have no memory of being this far north, not in any skin I can recall. I move with a hunter's caution, my eyes tracking every shadow, every curtained window.

  A notice board is the only thing standing in the village square. A squat, weathered shape in the failing light. Missing person posters cling to its surface, their paper faces curled and blurred by rain.

  My eyes jump from one poster to the next. I know these faces.

  Not some of them. All of them.

  My victims.

  I am the monster responsible.

  One photograph catches my attention. Catherine. A mother from Ashenbrook, missing for three weeks.

  You were this one. In her, you tasted purpose. A life beyond hunger.

  I remember.

  Before I took her, I watched. I saw her children's eyes light up when they ran to her. Shared meals, bedtime stories, belonging. It was a life I thought could be mine. And when I became her, for a short time, I was more than this thing that wears and discards lives. I remember the heat of her youngest child asleep on my chest.

  Catherine, you had a name. A life. A face of your own. Did I? Was there ever a me to begin with? Or have I always been this hollow thing, waiting to be filled?

  These feelings are not yours. They are remnants of a fading Echo. Let them die. You are a Vessel. Your purpose is to endure. Nothing more.

  Her children looked for their mother and found only a hollow shell staring back. After that, I ran. I buried Catherine's memory beneath Hugo's ambitions, letting the Voice's logic drown out the sound of her children's cries.

  Survival was always just a matter of one life. But here, they have added up. Was my face the first one on a board like this?

  My eyes skip past the faces I've stolen, hunting for the one I've lost. The original.

  Felix. A musician from Riverfield, missing for nine months.

  His songs still play in my head sometimes.

  Lysander. An adventurer from Larkvale, missing for two years.

  His memories are fading fast.

  Then, a face I do not recognise.

  Eli. A labourer from Blackthorn, missing for five years. Longer than anyone else on the board. His face stirs nothing. No memory. No trace of a life I touched.

  Could this be me?

  A word on the poster catches my eye. Blackthorn. A thread of Alistair's knowledge surfaces. The village is less than a day's walk from here.

  My fingers brush the worn photograph of the man who might be me. I press, searching for a spark, for anything to answer my touch. Nothing. Only the grain of the wood beneath my fingertips.

  Alistair's mind is a library of Blackthorn faces, but when it reaches for this man, Eli, it finds only a smooth, featureless wall.

  My hunter's instincts surface, pulling my focus from the board. Across the street, an old woman stands motionless. The fine wool of her black robe, with gold embroidery swirling at the collar and shoulders, is clean despite the street's filth.

  Her green eyes fix on me, sharp and knowing as a crow's. The skin on my face feels thin, stretched over bones that are not my own.

  She blinks, and the stare between us breaks. Her hands clutch her robe, pulling it tight as she scurries into a nearby building, slamming the door behind her. The sound cuts through the empty street.

  I start walking, the scrape of my boots loud in the quiet. With every house I pass, a curtain twitches. A lock clicks into place.

  A child's laugh rings out, bright and jarring, then cuts off as if smothered. I turn. In the tight gap between two houses, a boy stands rigid, watching me watch him. A woman's hand slides over his eyes from behind. Her other hand finds his mouth. The boy doesn't struggle. In seconds, the gap between houses is empty again.

  A village where children cannot laugh.

  My instinct is to shrink away, but a splinter of Alistair's anger lodges in my throat, choking the impulse to run. Any sane creature would vanish into the fog. But Alistair's bones have a different sort of gravity. Before I can think to run, my feet are already moving.

  Alistair came here for a reason, and it killed him.

  I have to know why.

  Find the purpose he died for, or

  A purpose, even one stolen, is better than the emptiness.

  Alistair's raw need for answers draws me to the tavern at the end of the street.

  The light begins to fail. The shadows deepen. As I approach the tavern, windows go dark one by one, plunging the street into twilight.

  I reach for the tavern door. Carved into the weathered wood are small, vertical lines. A tally. Most are worn smooth with age. Several are fresh, raw cuts.

  My hand hovers over the handle.