The Revenant’s Mark - Chapter 1: Dead Man’s Ground

Jacob Hawthorne clawed his way out of the grave like a man only half-born. His fingers tore through frozen dirt, and his lungs strained for air that no longer tasted like breath. Blood crusted his navy coat, the fabric stiffened by cold. When he coughed, the tang of iron and ash clung to his tongue. Darkness still surrounded him—he knew that much—but the moon hung high, and the sky shimmered like cut glass in winter.

He rolled onto his back, chest heaving, and stared at the sky as if it owed him an answer. The stars looked too bright, too still—unmoved by the fact that he had died. Snow caked his beard and eyebrows, his face more frost than flesh. His hands trembled as he wiped grime from his skin. They hadn’t buried him deep, just far enough to forget him.

Jacob sat up. His muscles groaned like wagon wheels over frostbitten ground. Every joint ached. Every breath burned. The battlefield stretched before him—wide and broken, a scar carved into the earth by men who had long since stopped being men. Fog drifted low, thick as wool, curling around splintered muskets and torn flags half-buried in blackened snow. Ash still hung in the air, warm from fires that had long gone out. The ground exhaled steam like an open wound. Heat rose from corpses not yet cold, mingling with the stench of blood, powder, and scorched leather. At the field’s edge, trees had burned down to their roots. Their charred limbs reached into the gray sky, as if they had tried to claw their way free from the flames. Nothing moved except the smoke. Nothing lived but the silence.

He should have ended up as just another name scratched into a rebel ledger—one more soldier in a tattered coat, fighting for freedom with frostbitten toes and an empty stomach. But Jacob Hawthorne had stood with the Continental line at Black Hollow Ridge, shoulder to shoulder with farmers and sailors—men who barely knew how to hold a musket but believed that dying was better than kneeling. Smoke and screams thickened the air in a battle where you fired blind and prayed the next bullet wasn’t yours. The line broke—it always broke. British steel sliced through like fire through straw. They captured Jacob with powder on his hands and a rebel mark stitched to his coat. The redcoats didn’t ask questions. They called him a traitor. Called him the enemy. Then they marched him to a bare-limbed tree just past the ridge and hung him like a warning. No burial. No rites. Just rope, splinters, and a hard snap as the world went dark.

Jacob rubbed his neck with dirt-caked fingers, tracing the raw line where the rope had burned into his flesh. The skin still throbbed—not with pain exactly, but with something deeper, like a memory turned to heat. The mark wasn’t visible in the moonlight, but he felt it burning clear as fire. Every swallow scratched like broken glass. Every breath reminded him he shouldn’t be breathing at all. He could still hear the creak of the branch above him, the groan of the rope as it took his weight, the split-second between air and nothing. The heat hadn’t left. It lived in his throat like a second pulse—a reminder of where he had been left to rot… and where something else had found him first.

His hand drifted lower, trembling as it slipped beneath the torn collar of his shirt. Just above his heart, he found the Mark. It wasn’t a wound, though it had burned like one. It wasn’t a tattoo, though it looked carved into him—etched deep, like old ink soaked into raw skin. It felt alive in a way skin shouldn’t be: a twisting shape that shimmered under the moonlight, its edges never quite settling, as if waiting to become something final.

Jacob didn’t know where it had come from. He hadn’t seen it before the hanging. He remembered nothing between the snap of the rope and the first breath he’d drawn full of dirt. But he felt it now. Deep. Wrong. Like something had branded him from the inside out. His gut told him no man had made this. No army, no church, no backwoods witch. This was older. Wilder. Something that rose from beneath. And whatever it was, it hadn’t let him die.

Jacob's fingers brushed the center of the Mark—and his breath caught.

Suddenly, he wasn’t in the field.

He stood in the forest again—not walking, but floating, or being pulled. The trees towered above him, their trunks wider than houses, their bark oozing sap that glowed like moonlight poured through stained glass. The air carried the scent of moss, wet stone, and bone ash. Fog clung to his boots like a living thing. And there, in a clearing—antlers. Dozens of them. Not mounted, but worn. They rose from the earth like roots turned skyward, cracked and red, as if blood still clung to the bone.

At their center stood a figure—smoke and shadow shaped like a man, crowned with antlers so wide they scraped the canopy. Its eyes blazed white-hot, like coals left too long in the hearth. It raised a hand—claw, branch, or something between—and pointed straight at him.

Behind the figure, through the trees, Jacob glimpsed something he couldn’t explain. A sky without stars. A city built from flame and feather. A cathedral of ash, suspended in gold. It looked like Heaven—almost—but felt wrong. Twisted. Not divine, but wild.

Then it vanished.

Jacob staggered back, heart pounding, breath jagged and cold. The air knifed into his lungs. The Mark beneath his shirt flared hot, blurring his vision.

The symbol etched into his chest didn’t belong to any known alphabet. It wasn’t runic, though it carried the weight of something ancient. It curled and forked like a root system, yet held the symmetry of design—deliberate, but somehow off. A spiral sat at the center, surrounded by branching lines that resembled antlers, veins, or lightning bolts splitting outward. The skin around it had darkened like old bark or scorched earth, pulsing with a rhythm slightly out of sync with his own heart. Its edges shimmered gold when caught in the light, like bronze aged by time—yet the glow always faded the moment it was truly seen.

Deep in his mind, something stirred—a half-remembered story. Not scripture. Not folklore. Older. A whisper, once told by a trader’s wife beside a dying fire. She had called it the Horned One. A god of balance, not of men. A guardian of the thresholds—between life and death, war and peace, man and beast. The Celts named him Cernunnos, lord of the wild places. The Iroquois spoke of Skagwae, the Watcher Beneath the Pines. Others knew it as the Forest King. The Stag at the Edge of the World. Every people had a name. None dared claim it.

He wasn’t just marked.

He had been chosen.

And whatever had chosen him was still watching.

Jacob pushed himself upright, bones groaning like a door warped by storm weather. His limbs shook from the cold, from the grave, from whatever had passed through him. Dirt and frost clung to his clothes like a second skin. His boots were long gone, his toes numb where they pressed into the frozen mud. Every step became a negotiation—pain, memory, and willpower dragging each foot forward. But the Mark throbbed beneath his ribs, pulling him westward, toward smoke on the horizon and the dim lantern-glow of a nearby hamlet.

He moved through what remained of the battlefield as dawn broke, the light weak and gray beneath a ceiling of low clouds. The fog clung stubbornly to the ground, refusing to rise, smothering everything it touched. Corpses lay scattered across the blood-slick earth—British redcoats and American rebels alike. Their coats were blackened with soot, their mouths open to a sky that would never answer. Broken bayonets jutted from the soil like crude gravestones, and the shattered wheels of a cannon lay half-buried in ash, one still glowing with fire.

Some men had died with weapons drawn, jaws locked in snarls. Others had fled—musket balls or blades piercing their backs. A drummer boy lay sprawled nearby, his face untouched but his drum crushed beneath him, ribs punched in like paper. Jacob forced his gaze away. He recognized some of them—faces he’d shared stew with, names he’d barely learned. This hadn’t been a clean battle. It had collapsed into slaughter.

No birds had come. No wolves. Just silence and smoke.

He stepped around the corpse of a rebel sergeant, the man’s coat still pinned with a crude pine badge—hand-carved, rough at the edges. A memory stirred: they’d trained together two months earlier. Shared a flask the night before the march. Jacob kept silent. There was no one left to speak to.

The Mark tugged at him, like a string tied to his spine, the pull growing stronger as he neared the tree line. The hamlet waited beyond the ridge. He didn’t know what he’d find there—rest, fear, or another fire to walk into. But he understood the ground behind him was cursed now, soaked in more than blood.

Jacob followed the narrow road as it twisted through frost-covered brush and dropped into a hollow where a small cluster of buildings huddled against the cold. No more than a half-dozen homes stood there, squat and built from rough timber, their chimneys puffing lazy trails of smoke into the iron-gray sky. Chickens scratched in silence behind a leaning fence. A dog barked once, then whined and disappeared beneath a porch. The hamlet felt frozen in place—as if the entire village had drawn a breath when the battle began and never let it go.

He stopped at the first door, a crooked thing of warped planks and rusty hinges, and knocked—two firm raps. The sound echoed louder than it should have in the quiet.

He waited.

Then the door creaked open, just an inch, and a single bloodshot eye peeked through.

“We’ve got nothin’, traveler,” the man said, voice taut with fear. “No food, no coin. And we ain’t takin’ in strangers, not after what just happened.”

Jacob didn’t flinch. He didn’t blame the man. “I’m not here for charity.”

His eyes blinked, sizing him up—bare feet, dirt-caked skin, a tattered coat half-black with dried blood, and something burning low behind his eyes that no longer belonged to the living. The door opened a little farther, revealing a wiry man with shaking hands. A hunting knife hung from his belt, but he hadn’t touched it.

“You’re from the battle,” the man said slowly. It wasn’t a question.

Jacob nodded once.

“They said everyone was killed.”

“They were right,” Jacob replied, voice low and steady. “But not everyone stayed that way.”

The man paled. His grip tightened on the edge of the door. He glanced past Jacob, toward the tree line, as if expecting something worse to follow.

“There was screaming,” he muttered. “Last night. Just before dawn. Like animals—but not. We stayed inside. Didn’t even light the lanterns.”

Jacob looked past him, into the gloom of the house. A fire smoldered inside. A child’s boots rested by the hearth.

Jacob didn’t turn to leave. He stood there for a moment, shoulders rising with a long breath that fogged in the cold air. Then he looked the man square in the eye—calm, quiet, steady.

“I need a fire,” he said. “Just for an hour. I’m not askin’ for food. Just warmth.”

The man hesitated, fingers drumming against the inside edge of the door. He looked down at Jacob’s feet—bare, bruised, caked with dried blood and ash. Then up at his face—pale as the grave, eyes rimmed with the shadows of sleepless nights. Something about the man unsettled him. But something else—maybe the exhaustion in Jacob’s voice, or the fact he hadn’t begged—twisted his gut with guilt.

“God help me,” he muttered, and opened the door wide enough to let him in.

The inside was dim and cramped. A low fire crackled in the hearth, casting flickering shadows across the plank walls. A little girl, no older than six, peeked from behind a curtain with wide eyes, a worn doll clutched tight in her arms. Beside her, an older woman sat by the fire, stirring a pot with shaking hands. Her eyes narrowed as Jacob stepped inside.

“Shut the door,” she said, without looking away from the pot. “Cold’s already taken the corners.”

The man closed it behind him. “He’s from the ridge,” he told her. “Says he just needs to sit.”

Jacob didn’t wait for an invitation. He moved to the far corner of the room—closer to the heat, but still out of reach—and lowered himself to the floor with a grunt. Every bone in his body creaked like dead wood. The warmth hit him like knives at first—his skin too numb and slow to catch up. He held his hands out toward the flames, watching them shake, watching the soot flake off in patches.

“What happened up there?” the woman asked, voice clipped and cold.

Jacob didn’t answer right away. The fire crackled.

“There was a battle,” he said. “Then a hanging. Then somethin’ worse.”

The man swallowed hard. “And you…”

“I’m a man that survived,” Jacob said.

The woman crossed herself. The man stepped back, pale.

“And now you’re—”

“Not the same,” Jacob said flatly. “But not here to cause harm.”

The room fell silent again. Only the fire spoke.

After a while, the woman ladled some broth into a tin bowl and slid it across the floor toward him. Jacob didn’t say thank you. He just nodded once and took it with both hands, warming his fingers on the sides before drinking.

For the first time since waking beneath the earth, he felt almost human again.

But deep inside his chest, the Mark still burned—quiet, watching, waiting.

The fire had faded to a low glow by the time the broth was gone. Jacob set the tin aside with care and leaned back against the wall, legs stretched out, eyes half-lidded. The man sat at the table now, shoulders hunched, hands clasped like he was praying—or trying to hold something back. His wife sat across from him, stirring what little remained in the pot, though her eyes never left their guest.

After a long silence, the man spoke. “They say General Washington’s still holdin’ line near Valley Forge,” he muttered, voice low and gravel-worn. “Winter’s killin’ more men than the redcoats are. Ain’t got shoes, let alone powder.”

Jacob nodded slowly. “That’s the truth of it. Cold’s got no side.”

“They say the French are comin’ to help,” the woman added, cautious, like she didn’t believe her own words. “That they’ll send ships, men, money. That maybe it’ll turn the war.”

Jacob rubbed his fingers together near the fire. “They’ll send what they can. But France ain’t doin’ it outta love. They hate England more than they care for us. And they’ve got their own wars brewin’ back home.”

The man grunted. “We’re all pawns, then. Just pieces on a board between kings.”

Jacob looked at him, tired and sharp all at once. “That’s all we ever were.”

The woman finally let her spoon rest. “You fought with the rebels?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Was it worth it?”

He didn’t answer right away. His eyes drifted back to the fire, where shadows danced like ghosts caught mid-march. He thought about the ridge. The men who died there. The cause they believed in. The letters some of them had clutched when they fell.

“Some days,” he said finally, “I think so. Other days, I just remember the dying.”

The man leaned forward, uncertain what Jacob meant. He rested his elbows on the table. “You were a soldier?”

“Was,” Jacob replied. “Marched under Gates for a time. Saratoga. Later got sent down to defend the border towns. Command collapsed after we got flanked near the Delaware. The regiment scattered.”

The man nodded, brushing off the story like a rumor he'd already heard. “Heard about that. British used German mercenaries. Hessians. Fought like dogs.”

“They were dogs,” Jacob said. “Paid to kill. Didn’t care whose land they bled on.”

The woman looked away. The child behind the curtain had gone silent.

“And now?” the man asked. “Where does the war go?”

Jacob shook his head. “Now it creeps. North to south, east to west. Not in straight lines. Just fire, smoke, and graves. The redcoats still hold the cities. We hold the woods and what’s left of the towns. And in the middle…” He paused, jaw tight. “There’s worse things now. Things the war stirred up.”

The man paled. “You mean ghosts?”

“No,” Jacob said. “I mean men who think they’re gods. Men who found old powers and think they can chain them. They call themselves nobles. But they’re just butchers with fancy names.”

The woman crossed herself again. The man sat back, hollow-eyed.

Jacob leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“The war ain’t just muskets anymore,” he said. “It’s rituals. Bindings. Blood pacts. They’re tearin’ into the land, callin’ up things best left buried. And if they finish what they started, the British won’t need an army.”

The fire popped.

“No one will.”

The fire crackled, the warmth dulled by the creeping chill that seeped up through the floorboards. Jacob’s breath hitched—sharp, involuntary—as a stabbing heat ripped through his chest, like a hooked nail dragging under his skin. He winced, clutched his ribs, and leaned forward with a grunt, his knuckles tightening white against the boards.

The woman stood quickly, her chair scraping across the floor. “What is it?” she asked, voice taut.

Jacob didn’t answer at first. He gritted his teeth, feeling the burn spread outward from the center of his chest, each heartbeat pounding like a hammer against the brand. Sweat beaded on his brow despite the cold. He curled an arm across his chest, as if trying to hold it still.

The man moved behind the table, uncertain but not yet afraid. “You hurt?” he asked, glancing toward the woman, then back at Jacob.

Jacob nodded slowly. “It’s my chest. Feels like a mark of death,” he said, letting the truth slip.

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What mark?”

Jacob hesitated. Then, drawing a slow breath, he peeled back the front of his shirt.

The firelight caught the symbol etched into his skin—a twisting, antlered spiral that shifted subtly under the light, pulsing like it had a life of its own. The flesh around it was dark and inflamed, not healing like a wound should, but raw and alive, like earth scorched by a lightning strike.

The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. “Dear God,” she whispered, backing away. “That’s not a wound. That’s a curse.”

The man’s face went pale. “Where did you get that?”

“I didn’t,” Jacob said. “It got me.”

For a moment, no one spoke. The fire crackled. The girl behind the curtain whimpered—barely audible.

The woman’s fear hardened into fury. She stepped forward, pointing a trembling finger. “That’s witchcraft. You brought it into my house. Into my home—with my child under the roof!”

“I didn’t ask for this,” Jacob said, rising slowly. The pain had dulled, but pressure remained—the heat still throbbed beneath his ribs. “I didn’t bring harm.”

“You don’t have to,” she spat. “It clings to you. You’re a vessel for something foul. You should’ve stayed out there in the cold with the rest of them.”

The man stepped beside her now, his hand resting uneasily on the hilt of his belt knife. “I don’t know what you are,” he said, eyes fixed on the floor. “But you can’t stay here.”

Jacob nodded once, his voice calm, his expression cold. “I understand. I’ll go.”

He reached for his coat—still damp, still crusted with dried blood and dirt—and shrugged it on with a wince. The Mark pulsed again, as if agitated by the rejection… or satisfied with it. He pulled the collar high to hide it from view.

“I thank you for the fire,” he said, voice low. “And the broth.”

The woman didn’t answer. The man just opened the door and stepped aside in silence.

The wind outside howled, low and mournful, as Jacob stepped into it, the chill biting at his skin like punishment. Behind him, the door slammed shut, the lock clicking into place.

He didn’t look back.

The Mark didn’t stop burning.

The cold hit him like a slap. Jacob stepped into the night, breath rising in clouds, the stars hidden behind low, roiling clouds. The hamlet behind him sealed itself like a coffin—no lamps, no warmth, no welcome. He didn’t blame them.

As he turned back toward the ridge, the ground seemed to pull at his feet, like it remembered him. Each step grew heavier than the last. The battlefield lay ahead, stretched across the hills like a torn flag—charred, broken, half-swallowed by fog. Ash drifted upward in lazy spirals, rising from the earth like smoke from a fire that never fully died.

Then he saw it.

At the far end of the field, past frozen corpses and shattered cannon wheels, a figure stood beneath the twisted limbs of the old hanging tree.

Tall.

Still.

Crowned in antlers that reached to the sky like branches dipped in shadow.

It didn’t move.

Jacob froze, heart hammering. He knew that shape. He had seen it once before—half-dead in a dream, stitched into memory like a scar. It was the figure from the forest. The one that appeared when he first touched the Mark. A shape carved from night and ash and bone. It radiated something ancient. Something wrong. Not evil. Not good. Just beyond.

“Hey!” Jacob called out, voice cracking. “You!”

The wind carried no answer.

He stepped forward. Then again. His boots crunched over crusted frost, the Mark in his chest burning hotter with every step.

“You’re the one that pulled me back,” he growled. “You marked me. You chose me. So what the hell am I?”

The horned figure lifted its head.

Its eyes flared—twin embers in the fog.

Jacob barely had time to shout before the world erupted.

A pulse of force—soundless but crushing—slammed into his chest like a battering ram. He flew backward, feet lifting from the ground, body twisting midair before crashing into the frozen earth. His breath vanished in a gasp, stolen like a thief in the night.

He coughed. Tasted blood. Blinked through tears and stars.

The figure was already there.

It stood over him now, backlit by the faint orange glow of the ever-burning field, its antlers splitting the sky like branches cracked against firelight. Its body wasn’t flesh—it was formed from earth and shadow, bark and bone, blood given shape. Its voice didn’t come from a mouth. It spoke through the wind, through the trees, from deep beneath the ground.

“You are Revenant.”

The word struck deeper than a blade, vibrating through his bones.

“You are anchor and knife. You walk between breath and burial. You are what remains when kings fall and gods forget.”

Jacob gritted his teeth, body shaking. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“You were chosen.”

“I didn’t want to be.”

“Want is not part of the old order.”

The horned figure lowered itself, its antlers brushing the scorched ground, its ember-eyes locked on Jacob.

“You belong to the earth now. You are its reminder. Its punishment.”

Jacob swallowed hard. The Mark pulsed—not with pain, but with something deeper. Recognition.

Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the figure turned and walked away—its steps silent, fog curling in its wake.

And Jacob lay there, flat on his back in the cold, uncertain whether he’d seen a god, a ghost, or something worse.

Jacob lay still, breath shallow, body trembling against the hard earth. The horned figure vanished into the mist, swallowed like a dream at dawn, but the words it left behind echoed through every corner of his mind.

You are Revenant.

The Mark smoldered beneath his ribs, like coal buried under wet ash. He didn’t know what it meant—not yet. But something had claimed him.

Not by death.

Not by war.

He wasn’t alive.

And he sure as hell wasn’t dead.

He was something else.