NOVPUB"Go," she repeated.
They obeyed, half-lifting, half-dragging him across soggy ground. Vaelira stood, wiping crimson from her hand onto the torn hem of her cloak. Every gesture made her ribs ache; every heartbeat felt like another coin paid to strain.
She pivoted slowly, sweeping her gaze over the survivors. Near a cluster of smoldering logs, two archers knelt, binding each other's wounds with torn cloak strips, fingers trembling. A healer sat cross-legged between three unconscious elves, lines of old fatigue etched so deep across her brow they looked carved. Farther out, one lone vanguard member walked the edge of the treeline, spear held like a crutch more than a weapon. He paused every dozen steps to listen, head cocked—not expecting an ambush, merely needing assurance that the forest still breathed with them and not against them.
Vaelira's throat tightened. She wanted to speak—offer comfort, perhaps a lie that reinforcements would arrive by dawn—but the words lodged behind heavier truths. Instead she turned toward a small brazier where a pot simmered. The scent of pine-sap salve drifted on the steam. She scooped a cloth, soaked it, then dabbed dried blood from her temple. The cloth came away dark, but the wound itself was superficial—one of a dozen nicks she'd ignored during the fight.
Behind her, flames crackled louder, and sparks rose as an elf tossed another corpse onto the pyre. Flesh sizzled; the corrupted body vented a plume of violet smoke that made nearby soldiers cover noses and cough. Vaelira stepped closer, lifted a hand, and muttered a word older than her line's recorded history. The wind swirling around her palm condensed into a tight funnel, drawing the smoke upward and away from the living.
"Thank you, Princess," the cremation detail whispered.
"We don't breathe what we burn," Vaelira replied, voice barely above the hiss of fire. She pressed finger and thumb to the bridge of her nose, squeezing until the pounding there eased. Another corpse thudded onto the flames—this one human, features twisted into an expression of permanent disbelief. An ember popped, spitting hot ash against her greave.
She watched that ash twist skyward, and her thoughts drifted after Sylvanna. It had been years since she'd trusted anyone to strike into darkness and come out unchanged. She feared Draven would not. She feared Sylvanna would try to shoulder his burden and be crushed beneath it. Mostly, she feared there might be no road back from the place his cold eyes were determined to reach.
A tremor rippled through the ground, subtle as the shiver of a spiderweb in wind. Vaelira's head lifted, instinct snapping alert. For a second she wondered if it was memory—her body recalling the thunder of that titan's steps. Then it came again, faint yet distinct: a bass-level thrumming beneath her boots, as though something vast shifted in the deep roots.
The wound runs deeper… the dark has a heart beneath the forest… a nest of shadows…
The murmured warning slid through her mind not in words, but in the scent of loam and the creak of old bark, the language of living wood. She pressed her palm to the damp earth, focusing past the echo of dying fires. Beneath layers of soil she felt the rent in the ley-lines, raw and weeping, as if someone had driven a blade into the forest's living artery.
Her stomach knotted. Draven hadn't just tracked fleeing Reapers—he was heading for the source, the place where corruption pooled thickest. A place ancient roots now avoided.
She pushed to her feet, scanning for Sylvanna's disappearing path. The mist had swallowed all trace, leaving the treeline a ragged silhouette against bedraggled stars. She swallowed hard, the weight of command compressing her lungs.
Deep in the darkness, a wolf howled—no, not a wolf. Raëdrithar, calling back to his bonded. The sound was distant, distorted by trees, but it vibrated with warning.
Vaelira grabbed a passing scout's arm. "Triple the perimeter watch. Any movement from the east, sound the horn twice, then fall back to the fires." The scout nodded, sprinting away without question.
She turned a slow circle. Her soldiers worked like phantoms—lifting wounded, whispering blessings, dragging tar-stained tarps over corpses destined for the pyres. Every face she met carried the same question: Will it ever end? She had no answer, only orders and resolve.
Smoke stung her eyes. She blinked, but moisture clung to lashes, turning flames into halos. "Hold," she murmured to herself. "Hold until dawn."
Another tremor beat underfoot. She set her jaw. 𝓷ℴ𝓿𝓅𝓊𝒷.𝓬𝓸𝓂
Vaelira's breath caught. She looked to the treeline, where the mist thickened like a bruise. Somewhere in that darkness, Draven hunted the heart of the corruption. Or it hunted him.
_____
Draven slowed, letting the forest settle around him like water around a stone. A thin curl of vapor slipped from his lips, spun once in the moon-glow, then vanished—as though even breath feared to linger here. He tasted the damp on his tongue: loam, fungus, a metallic tang that reminded him of rusted iron left to stew in swamp water. Corruption had a flavor, and tonight it coated every inhalation.
He crouched to study a patch of moss. From a distance it looked healthy—emerald, springy—but up close each filament was webbed with gray threads, as if frost had settled only on this one living carpet. With the tip of a gloved finger he nudged a strand. It disintegrated, leaving behind a smear that clung to leather like tar and reeked of spoiled honey. He wiped it on a nearby fern; the fern's edge hissed, curling in on itself. Quick dissolution. New symptom.
Above him, branches shifted in a slow, uneasy sway, but no night breeze stirred the leaves. The movement felt deliberate, like creatures turning over in an uneasy sleep. He listened—truly listened—letting small sounds slot into place: the echo of distant water, the tick of woodborer beetles, the hush-click of fungus swelling inside cracked bark. All normal. And yet beneath those layers pulsed that second heartbeat: long intervals, thick thuds, as though the forest's capillaries pushed tainted blood.
Draven eased upright. The powder-fine soil depressed then rose again, erasing the imprint of his boot. Good. Stealth demanded no signatures. He flexed his fingers once to keep circulation nimble—a swordsman's habit—and let thumb and forefinger brush the twin hilts angled across his lower back. Leather straps shifted, silent.
A cloud bank slid past the moon, and the glade dimmed. In that half-light the air grew colder, the kind of cold that seeped into joints rather than skin. His cloak—Aurelia's handiwork, dense, rune-stitched—drank the chill, leaving only a prickle across the back of his neck. He rotated shoulders, loosening tension.
Nothing moved. Too little noise, too much hush. Predators made quiet; this felt curated, as if something large had folded the night into a cocoon. He stepped forward once, twice. With the third step, his skin prickled. Mana—thin, invasive—brushed him like a cobweb across the face. Wrong resonance: not the rolling harmony of deep earth magic, but a keen edge vibrating just off pitch.
He stopped. The weight of the forest pressed inward, as though every bough held its breath.
"Show yourself," he said, voice measured—neither loud enough to echo nor soft enough to tremble. Sound carried strangely; the syllables landed a pace in front of him and went no further, as if swallowed by fog.
Mist thickened in answer, roiling forward in cold eddies. It coalesced, shaping vague limbs, then a torso, then the rounded features of a boy no more than ten winters. Dirt smudged pale cheeks; eyes—too large, too glassy—stared up at Draven's face. Silver shackles bit into thin wrists, the metal etched with crude sigils that leaked a sick green luminescence.
Draven's gaze tracked the sigils first, mapping their lines: binding, leeching, a tether rune grafted onto a child-size restraint. Not sophisticated, which meant expendable. The boy's mouth worked, silent words tumbling forth like a prayer trapped behind mute glass.
Draven's expression did not soften. "Run," he ordered, a single syllable trimmed of everything but command.
The illusion hesitated. Then panic flooded the child's eyes—too quickly, too theatrical. Shoulders convulsed, arms lifted in plea. The edges of his form frayed. Ash blossomed along fingertips, tiny flakes drifting up in slow spirals. Another second and joints crumbled; the torso collapsed into itself, hollow as rice paper. The head sagged, stared sightless, then burst into powder that glittered once before dulling to gray.
Chains hit the ground with a metallic clatter that reverberated through the hush like a shout in a crypt. The links writhed a heartbeat longer, echoing the life that had animated them, then stilled. In their place hung a residue of mana, acrid and stinging, that made Draven's lungs tighten.
His eyes narrowed. The trap wasn't the apparition—it was the reaction the apparition sought to provoke: sympathy, rush forward, into the net. He rooted feet, spine loose, letting peripheral vision widen. Shadows to the left thickened darker than they should; to the right, a branch sagged with weight that hadn't been there.
Under the cloak, his muscles coiled—a loaded bow. He inhaled through the mouth, exhaled through the nose, and felt heartbeat settle into a hunter's cadence: slow, deliberate, ready for sudden sprint.
Draven's eyes hardened. A trap.
