Chapter 540: The Old Guard

The elder remained on one knee long enough that Hendrik’s entire perimeter seemed to forget how to breathe.

Arion did not.

He watched the enormous infected figure carefully, aware of every weapon trained toward it and every warning Victor was already beginning to issue through the medical channel, yet the pressure touching the edge of his mind carried none of the frantic pain he had felt from Elias.

This was different.

You finally came.

Arion went still.

There was no need for his mind to translate instinct into words this time, no uncertain impression shaped by hunger or pain, because the voice inside his head carried structure, intention, and enough weary intelligence that Arion immediately understood why Elias had called this one an elder.

You can speak.

The creature’s head tilted slightly.

Not with my mouth anymore.

Arion almost smiled.

"That is inconvenient."

Hendrik glanced toward him.

"You heard something?"

"Yes."

"What?"

Arion kept his attention on the elder.

"He says speaking normally has become difficult."

The huge figure slowly lifted one clawed hand and touched the distorted structure of its throat as though confirming the problem.

Dean’s voice entered Arion’s private channel from home.

"That thing understands you?"

"Better than Elias did when he was transformed."

"That is somehow not comforting."

Arion looked toward the elder again.

What do you want?

The answer came immediately.

What you gave the younger one.

Arion’s expression changed.

The elder shifted slightly, and soil fell from the armored plates along its back while the remains of roots dragged from its shoulders.

I remember my hands.

Another thought followed, quieter.

My face.

Then, with an ache so old it barely felt like urgency anymore:

Give them back.

Arion exhaled slowly.

Victor heard enough through the open channel to understand.

"No."

Arion closed his eyes briefly.

"Victor."

"You are not transforming a subject this old without establishing baseline organ structure."

"He has been waiting longer than any of us have been alive."

"That does not improve his cardiovascular resilience."

The elder looked toward the direction of Victor’s voice coming through Arion’s earpiece, then back at Arion.

The physician is irritating.

Arion’s mouth twitched.

Dean started laughing through the private channel.

"I like him," he said, not realizing that he could hear the knight too.

Hendrik looked between Arion and the kneeling infected man.

"What did he say?"

"Nothing important."

Victor continued objecting.

Arion stopped listening after the third sentence.

He understood the risk.

That did not change the fact that the elder had come because Arion called, had knelt instead of attacked, and was asking for the same thing Elias had begged for without even possessing enough of a human body left to say it aloud.

Arion stepped closer.

Hendrik immediately followed one pace.

"Arion."

"He wants to change back."

"We can deduce."

"And I am going to try."

Hendrik’s jaw tightened.

"You don’t know whether he will survive."

"No."

The answer silenced everyone for a moment.

Arion looked toward the elder.

Do you understand that?

The black eyes remained fixed on him.

Yes.

You could die.

I have been this for longer than your father has been alive.

Arion paused.

That was an extremely efficient argument.

The elder lowered his head again.

Try... I beg you.

Arion released his pheromones.

Vetiver spread first, followed almost immediately by the darker metallic current now familiar enough that nobody on the perimeter mistook it for an uncontrolled surge. Black lines surfaced beneath Arion’s skin, tracing his glandular pathways while the air around the clearing seemed to tighten.

Arion was, this time, thinking only of the person beneath everything the forest had built over him.

The elder shuddered.

A deep cracking sound rolled through the clearing.

Several soldiers shifted their aim.

"Hold," Hendrik ordered.

The armored ridge across the elder’s spine began to collapse inward.

Years of compacted soil broke apart as the black plates softened beneath it, sliding down in heavy clumps while roots tore free and young branches snapped from the changing surface. The creature’s enormous shoulders narrowed, long arms drawing back toward human proportions as claws receded into fingers and the bent spine gradually straightened.

The transformation took longer than Elias’s.

Much longer.

Arion felt the resistance in a way he had not before, as though decades of corrupted tissue had settled so deeply into the man’s body that restoring him required convincing each part to remember what it had once been.

Still, the elder did not scream.

He shook violently, one hand pressed into the frozen earth while muscles contracted, bones shifted, and the remnants of black armor disappeared beneath increasingly human skin.

Then the last hardened growth along his shoulders vanished.

The man collapsed forward.

Arion took one step toward him.

Hunter moved faster.

He reached the restored man first, thermal blanket already being pulled from an emergency pack by one of the soldiers.

Only then did everyone become aware of a practical complication nobody had considered.

The infected form had not been wearing clothes.

There had been fragments fused beneath the corruption, perhaps once part of a uniform, but nothing survived the transformation.

The man was completely naked.

Dean’s voice came through Arion’s earpiece.

"Oh."

Arion looked toward the nearest drone.

"Do not."

"I wasn’t going to say anything."

"You were."

"I was thinking."

Hendrik removed his field coat while one of the medics wrapped the thermal blanket around the man’s shoulders and another requested clothing and shoes from the support vehicle.

"Male, approximately one ninety," the medic reported. "Lean build. Bring the largest available boots."

The restored man barely seemed to notice any of them.

He was staring at his hands.

Human hands.

Large, scarred, trembling slightly in the cold.

His hair was black, long enough to fall well past his shoulders in tangled waves that looked as though a century of forest had somehow remained in them, while his face belonged to a man perhaps in his late forties.

Then he lifted his head.

Brown eyes.

Ordinary brown.

Arion let his pheromones recede.

The black lines disappeared beneath his skin.

The man looked directly at him.

His mouth opened.

At first, nothing came out.

Then a rough voice emerged.

"Your Highness."

Arion stared.

Hendrik noticed too.

"What is your name?"

The man looked toward him but answered Arion.

"Matthias Roe."

His accent was wrong.

Not foreign.

Old.

The vowels belonged to an Alaminan dialect Arion had only heard reconstructed in historical recordings.

Hendrik’s expression sharpened.

"Rank?"

Matthias pulled the blanket tighter around himself.

"Captain."

Arion felt something cold settle beneath his ribs.

"Under whom?"

The man’s brown eyes remained on him.

"His Imperial Majesty Dominic of Alamina."

Nobody spoke.

Even Victor went silent.

Dean’s voice was the first to return through Arion’s private channel.

"Oh, fuck."

Arion could not disagree.

The man in front of him had not merely remembered Dominic.

He had served him.