Chapter 3-7...

70 Years Later...

...Following the events of the Battle for the Beacons at the end of The Crystal Keepers, Shawn and Manie continue their journey to rid Talmoria of all the evil Agatha wrought when she released the Gray Death. Now that the Torch-Wings are saved from Dukemot and Duncan’s extinction of the forests, Jarod and the Protectors turn their attention southward, to the dark heart of Talmoria where the man who began such unfathomable destruction lies in wait.

Sensing urgency, Jarod sends Manie and Shawn to Market Town, to deliver a wagon full of supplies to the desperate townsfolk there. Upon arrival, Manie and Shawn discover a graveyard of corpses being burned by the thousands to halt the spread of the Gray Death. As more wagons deliver dead to be disposed of, Shawn and Manie also learn that a load of food previously sent by the King before their arrival was laced with some type of experimental cure that killed everyone who ingested it.

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Following a trail of breadcrumbs, Manie, Silvan, and Shawn learn of a person called the Man of The Marsh who has been experimenting on people in an effort to discover his own cure, and so the three set off into the Sour Marshes to hopefully discover his location and learn what he knows about a cure.

During their journey through the marshes, they are stalked by Ketchers, a tribe of small and dangerous creatures called Iggy’s, and Silvan reveals a small piece of his past, about how he originally became a Protector himself. Upon finding The Man of the Marsh’s secret mansion hidden out in the swamps, Silvan, Shawn, and Manie are attacked by a monstrous creature who has been kidnapping residents of Market Town to be used in the Man of the Marsh's experiments.

Manie and Shawn are deposited into a tunnel that takes them to an underground river, leading to the basement of the mansion where the Man of the Marsh has been hiding, and there they learn his true identity. The Man of the Marsh is actually Jango, a mage from thousands of years before whose public death began the War of Light and Dark Magic. Jango then tells them of a possible way to save Talmoria from the Gray Death, and the story continues…