Alaeth was already on her feet when Caelen emerged from the Well, though she leaned heavily on the trunk of a split tree, breath shallow, eyes unfocused. Her skin shone with sweat, not feverish, but drained—like someone who'd walked too long under a dead sun.
She didn't look at him first.
She looked at the glyph glowing faintly beneath his collarbone, golden and soft like dying firelight. Then her gaze met his, sharp and wary, and she took a single step back.
It was small. But it was enough.
"You're different," she said, her voice hoarse but even.
Caelen said nothing.
Her eyes flicked to the stone spiral behind him, then back. "You went down there," she said. "And something came back up with you."
He nodded.
She drew in a breath. Not deep. Not steady. "We should move. Before the air here forgets we're alive."
They walked in silence, northeast through old woods. The land sloped upward, thick with moss-wrapped roots and narrow, half-forgotten trails where the undergrowth peeled back in unnatural ways, like animals had avoided the soil.
The Well behind them didn't make a sound. No echo. No wind. Just weight. Caelen could feel it in his spine, in the tightness of his ribs.
Alaeth walked slower than usual, not limping, not weak—but careful. She kept touching the edge of her cloak, where the relic was wrapped tight against her ribs. Her eyes didn't scan the horizon like they used to. They searched the shadows.
Not out of habit.
Out of anticipation.
They stopped beside a fallen tree as the sun fell low behind the ridge. The clearing was narrow, ringed by standing stones too weathered to read. Some still bore glyphs, scorched to fading. One had a bone loop nailed to it—a broken prayer to a forgotten saint.
Alaeth sat on a dry log and drank from the waterskin. Caelen took the last of the rootbread and broke it between them.
They ate quietly. The air was cooling fast. Dusk settled like a sheet over the forest, turning the trees blue-black and long-shadowed.
Caelen chewed without thought. He hadn't felt hunger since the Well. Not like before. There was no emptiness. Just motion. Like eating was something his body did because it remembered how, not because it needed to.
Alaeth finished her bread and stared into the fire.
He watched her.
She looked tired.
But not sick.
Not yet.
She caught him looking and raised one brow.
"What?"
"Nothing."
She looked back at the flame.
"If you're going to speak, speak truth."
He hesitated. Then: "What happens now?"
Her fingers tapped her knee. Not anxious. Just counting.
"We find the road east. There are ruins. Old guild routes, from before the Concord purged the stone paths. If we're lucky, there's a watchpost. Shelter."
"And if not?"
Her smile didn't reach her eyes. "Then we learn what's left of luck in a world that forgot its gods."
That night, the forest fell too still.
Caelen lay with his back to the fire, watching the trees. The glyph on his chest pulsed faintly in rhythm with the night insects, a second heartbeat humming beneath his skin.
Then the sound changed.
Not loud. Just new.
A low hum, just above the range of breath. It vibrated through the dirt, not from the wind, but through the bones of the ground.
He sat up.
Alaeth stirred behind him.
"Do you hear that?"
She didn't answer.
Then it stepped into the firelight.
Slow.
Measuring.
Its body moved like a drawn bow—coiled, stretched. The fur along its back was streaked white and black, ragged but thick near the spine. Where the fur gave way, pale skin shone, pulled tight over ridged muscle. Its limbs were long, tipped with talon-like claws that clicked softly against the stone. It moved low to the ground, belly brushing earth.
Its face was the worst of it.
Long and skull-shaped, with one eye socket stitched shut. The other eye glowed dull silver-blue, reflecting firelight like oil on water. Its jaw opened too wide, revealing teeth that didn't look like they belonged in any beast.
Alaeth rose behind him. She didn't draw her blade, but she reached for it.
"Caelen."
He stood.
The creature didn't growl.
It lowered its body.
It knelt.
Long forelegs folded beneath its chest, head bowed. The stitched eye faced the dirt. The glowing one stayed on him.
Then it crawled forward—three steps.
And stopped.
Waiting.
Alaeth's voice was barely more than breath. "That's not an animal."
Caelen stepped forward.
The glyph beneath his collarbone flared gold, casting light across the creature's back.
It didn't flinch.
He reached out.
Touched its brow.
The skin was warm. Smooth. A slow tremor passed through it—then stilled.
The Mirefang closed its eye.
And for the first time since the Well, Caelen felt something in the world that didn't fear him.
It had been waiting.
The creature followed them.
Not like a beast follows scent. Not with hunger. It moved as if it had been tethered to Caelen by some old rite, one neither of them had chosen but both accepted without protest.
It made no sound. Its steps were soundless on root and stone, and its breath, when it came, came slow and without steam. The forest gave way before it. Even the mist coiled from its path.
Alaeth did not look back at it once.
She walked in silence for nearly an hour before she spoke.
"It's called a Mirefang," she said.
Caelen looked at her.
"They used to guard the inner reliquaries," she went on. "When the gods still had mouths. Bred in pits, fed the tongues of the dead, so they couldn't speak the names they heard."
He glanced at the creature behind them. Its stitched eye didn't blink. The other glowed faintly in the deepening dark.
"They were sacred once," Alaeth said. "Then feared. Then hunted."
"It found me."
"No," she said. "It recognized you."
The trees grew denser, the light more ragged. Roots began to rise from the soil like ribs, forcing their path into narrower and narrower threads. Alaeth paused by a gnarled outcrop and pressed two fingers against the bark of a crooked birch.
She scraped away some moss.
Beneath it, carved deep into the wood, was a shape Caelen hadn't seen before. A curled glyph—like a sleeping eye inside a blade.
"It's still here," she said softly.
"What is?"
She glanced at him, then looked away. "The map."
Caelen stepped closer. "You can read it?"
"I can feel it."
She took out her knife and scored a line just beneath the glyph—clean, fast.
"See the cut? If it bleeds sap dark as pitch, it means a warding mark. If it bleeds clear, it's directional. This one leads northeast."
She wiped the blade. "Follow that path three times, and you reach the outer ring."
"Of what?"
She didn't answer right away.
"The old city," she said at last. "What's left of it."
She didn't say the name. She didn't need to.
Even the Mirefang looked up then, ears twitching at something unseen.
They made camp near a ring of toppled stones where a small stream ran shallow and red with clay. Caelen fetched water. Alaeth built the fire. The Mirefang sat just beyond the light, unmoving.
When he returned, she handed him the knife.
He blinked.
"It's not a toy," she said. "It's old bone. From a mountain beast the Concord wiped out two generations ago."
The handle was rough. The blade narrow, dark, and ridged with shallow etchings. Caelen turned it in the firelight. Each line caught the glow like ink in wet paper.
"It doesn't cut like steel," she said. "It slips between things. Bone, armor, skin. You don't slash with it. You find the spaces. The ribs. The tendons. You stab. You pull."
She demonstrated on a strip of dried bark.
The knife went in with a wet click and split the bark down its center without effort.
Caelen watched. Took it back. Felt the balance. The weight.
"It was mine," she said. "Before I had you."
He didn't ask why she was giving it up.
She didn't explain.
Later, as the fire burned low, Caelen found the Mirefang standing at the stream's edge, its body long and low, head dipped to the water.
It wasn't drinking.
It was watching the reflection.
Its own, or his, he couldn't tell.
He stepped closer. The creature didn't move.
He reached out.
It leaned into his palm.
Not affection. Not submission.
Recognition.
Behind him, Alaeth watched from the shadows.
She said nothing.
But her hand rested lightly over her ribs.
Where the relic lay.
Where it had always lain.
Behind him, Alaeth moved.
He turned just enough to see her crouched by the fire, her cloak drawn tight around her. She hadn't spoken in some time. The way her shoulders were set told him she was still watching—not him, not the creature, but the shadows at the edge of the clearing. Listening.
The wind shifted.
The Mirefang stiffened.
Its head rose a fraction. The stitched eye twitched. The hum beneath its breath stopped.
Caelen froze.
Alaeth stood slowly.
"What is it?" he asked.
She was already reaching for her knife. "Get your things."
The fire crackled behind them, but the forest had gone still. Not silent—still. The kind of stillness that comes when everything living holds its breath at once.
Caelen didn't ask again.
They moved through the trees in a line—Alaeth first, Caelen behind, the Mirefang ranging out to their left like a shadow drawn in muscle and teeth.
It didn't make a sound. Didn't sniff. It just moved. Deliberate. Measured. Alert.
Caelen kept his hand on the bone blade Alaeth had given him. The handle felt warm, like it remembered being wielded. Each step felt longer than the last, as though the world had stretched.
Alaeth raised one hand, palm back. Stop.
She crouched by a tree. Bark stripped at eye level, a small red smear across the trunk, curling in on itself like a coiled tongue.
She didn't touch it.
"Concord sign," she said. "Kill claim."
Caelen leaned close.
The smear wasn't fresh. A day, maybe two. But not more than that.
"They purge the woods seasonally," she whispered. "Every marked ruin, every unsealed glyph. They think if they keep cutting off the limbs, the tree won't remember its shape."
Caelen's eyes stayed on the mark. "How do you know?"
"I used to make them," she said. "A long time ago."
He looked at her. She didn't elaborate.
They circled wide.
By the time the firelight of their old camp was long behind them, the Mirefang halted without a sound and stared into the dark ahead. Its shoulders twitched. Its back legs coiled low, like it was preparing to spring—but it didn't growl.
Alaeth looked to Caelen. "It smells something."
"I can't feel anything."
"Not yet," she said. "But that's how they get close."
She pulled him to the side and knelt by a patch of moss-covered stone, pulling a handful of twigs from her cloak. Her hands moved quickly, shaping the sticks into an odd pattern—a triangle with its top point cracked outward.
"What is that?"
"It's a blind sigil. Not magic—just memory. Hunters used to leave them to mark a safe path."
"Does it work?"
She placed the last twig with care.
"Sometimes," she said. "If the thing watching remembers how to fear it."
They stopped again by a gully veined with glowing moss. The Mirefang circled once, then lay down at Caelen's feet, curling its tail tight around its legs. It faced outward, toward the dark.
Alaeth sat on a low rock and exhaled slow.
"You should sleep," she said.
"So should you."
She glanced at him. "That's not how this works."
He sat near her anyway.
The quiet between them stretched long and uneasy.
Finally, she said, "You remember the glyph I showed you. On the tree?"
He nodded.
"Next time you see one like it," she said, "trace it three times with your left hand, then walk backward five steps."
"Why?"
"If it burns, it was meant for someone else. If it doesn't, you're already inside the ward, and there's nothing left to run from."
Caelen blinked. "What if I forget?"
"Don't."
They didn't speak again that night.
The Mirefang didn't sleep. It watched. Hummed low and long in its chest. Once, Caelen thought he saw light flicker in its open eye—not from firelight, but something else.
In his dreams, there was no fire.
Only a room of bone. A chair carved of antlers. A figure seated in shadow, wearing a crown of broken teeth.
It looked up when he entered.
And the Mirefang sat at its feet.