The fire still roared behind us. Screams twisted in the wind, prisoners, soldiers, and creatures. I didn't dare look back.
We ran.
Lyra's hand was slick in mine, trembling, limp. Her steps dragged, her feet slipping in the blood-slick mud, but I pulled her anyway. Time had lost shape. The battle blurred behind us, but it wasn't over, not really. Not for us.
We weren't escaping.
We were fleeing.
Through smoke. Through bodies. Over the mangled, twisted ruins of what had once been people. I stepped on something soft, too soft. I looked down and saw a face crushed into the mud, eyes still open. I didn't have time to process. My mind wouldn't let me. If I thought too hard, I'd freeze. My heart thudded so hard I swore it was in my hands, echoing through my fingers, through my skull. I couldn't hear anything but my pulse and the breathless panic of our escape.
Lyra stumbled again, nearly falling. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out, just a dry hitch, like her body wanted to cry but forgot how. Her eyes didn't blink. Didn't move. Just stared straight ahead as if the world around her had turned to smoke.
She looked pale, washed out, her eyes glassy like something inside her had snapped. Was it what I did? What had I become? Or was it just the shock of it all?
I didn't know.
Didn't have time to ask.
A broken cage loomed in the smoke ahead. One of the creatures lay twitching beside it, dead or dying, I wasn't about to stop and check. We weaved around it, and the scent of its blood hit me, bitter and wrong, like hot copper and rotting citrus. The battlefield groaned with the dying. Bone cracked underfoot, half-melted bodies slumped in pools of ash and viscera. The air itself was thick with death, and something else… laughter.
That same brittle laughter I'd heard before the blackout.
It was louder now.
Calling.
I turned my head and saw movement between the trees at the edge of the camp, figures, slight and glowing, like the air bent around them. I knew them without knowing. The beautiful ones.
They were waiting.
Guiding us.
Lyra staggered behind me. I pulled her harder. "We're almost there," I whispered, not only to her but to myself, as we neared the treeline.
"WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?"
The captain's voice split the air like thunder. It was distant but growing. Close enough to taste in my spine.
We crossed the last line of firelight, and something in the air changed. The heat of the battlefield faded behind us. What lay ahead... felt colder than death.
We dove into the trees.
The forest swallowed us whole.
And then it went quiet.
Not the peaceful kind, this silence had weight. The kind that listens. The kind that waits. No birds. No wind. Just the blood pounding in my ears and the certainty that something else was listening too.
The moment the camp was behind us, the world changed. It was like stepping out of fire and into ice. The trees were black, gnarled things, too tall, too twisted. Their branches didn't sway, didn't move, just hung like claws against the dim sky. The air here was colder. Thicker. Breathing it in felt like sucking smoke through a wound.
We were running from the known and the unknown at once, from men, monsters, and something far worse. The forest didn't feel like an escape. It felt like a trap.
The deeper we ran, the more the forest changed. The ground pulsed, slow and steadily, like something beneath the roots had a heartbeat. It thudded softly through the soles of our feet, each beat louder than the last, as if the earth itself was listening.
Twice, I looked back and swore the trees had moved. Not bent, not swayed, but moved. Shifted a few feet to the left, closer than before. They watched without eyes, bark groaning like old bones.
A breeze blew through the trees. Warm. Too warm. It carried a smell I couldn't name at first, then it hit me: burnt flesh. Fresh. Sharp. Real.
The shadows between trunks seemed to twitch when I blinked. Branches hung lower than before. One scraped the back of my neck like fingers reaching down from above.
"Luell," Lyra gasped beside me, stumbling over a root. "Where... where are we going?"
I didn't stop. "The old man," I said between gulps of air. "He knows what to do next. He's waiting for us."
She yanked her hand free.
I spun just as she stopped short, chest heaving.
"No." Her voice cracked like frost underfoot.
"What?"
She backed up a step, arms hugging herself. "I'm not going. Not to him."
Her fingers dug into her sleeves, nails biting skin, but she didn't seem to notice. Her eyes weren't glassy anymore. They were focused now, sharp with something closer to terror than fear.
I reached for her. "Lyra, we don't have time. He's our only chance."
"No!" she screamed, voice raw. "He's one of them."
Her voice was quieter now. Hoarse.
"He was there... when they took my sister."
"What do you mean?" My voice cracked. "Lyra, you're not making sense-"
A sound cut through the trees.
Not the clicking.
Something else.
Heavier.
Breathing.
The kind of sound a predator makes when it's too close, when it wants you to know you're already dead.
We ducked instinctively, crouching beneath the tangle of thorn and root. Through the smoke, barely visible, something moved between the trees, a shape gliding silently over the ground. Tall. Wrong. Like a shadow pulled loose from a nightmare. It didn't walk. It didn't breathe.
It simply searched.
Its head twisted slowly, like it could smell us.
Run.
That word wasn't spoken. It wasn't even thought.
It was primal.
It moved us.
The forest didn't open for us. It swallowed us. Ducking low beneath the canopy. The branches clawed at our skin, tore at our clothes. The trees creaked, not with wind, but with weight. Like they were leaning in, listening. Watching.
Lyra didn't speak again.
Neither did I.
Because I could feel it, something behind us, giving chase. Not with footsteps, but with intent. A pressure in the back of my skull. A weight between my ribs.
We weren't running through the forest.
We were being herded through it.
There were no birds here. No insects. No life.
Only our footsteps, our gasps, and that bone-deep clicking. Sometimes far, sometimes close. Sometimes too close.
I couldn't tell if it was coming from the creatures or something else entirely.
Twice, I thought I saw one of the glowing figures, off the path, deeper in the trees. Watching. Waiting.
Were they guiding us, or were they leading us somewhere worse?
The trees grew denser. The light dimmed to nothing. The forest was swallowing the night, and us with it. I didn't know where we were anymore. North? South? Back to the Ashes? Towards Veridion?
I didn't know.
All I knew was that we had to keep moving.
We slipped down a slope, mud sucking at our feet. My foot hit something soft, a body, half-buried, arms twisted the wrong way. Old or new, I couldn't tell. Lyra gagged behind me but didn't stop.
"Keep going," I whispered. "Just don't look."
We passed trees with carvings in them. Names. Warnings. Faces scratched into bark that bled sap the colour of ink. One tree had bones hanging from its branches, small, childlike bones, swaying in the breeze we couldn't feel.
One of the faces in the bark had teeth, real teeth, wedged into the wood like they'd been bitten there. Another had a single eye embedded in the grain, wet and unblinking.
It followed us as we ran.
We kept running.
Branches clawed my cheek. Thorns tore my palms. Somewhere in the dark, a scream echoed, warped and too long. It didn't sound human. Or maybe it did, and that was worse.
Lyra was falling behind.
I grabbed her hand again.
"I can't", she panted.
"You can."
"I'm not like you."
I stopped.
Turning to her.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You killed him," she said, voice barely a whisper. "You didn't even blink."
"I had to."
She flinched at my tone.
"I had to," I repeated, quieter.
She didn't answer.
We didn't have time to fight.
She started walking again, but her voice broke the silence behind me.
"They cut her hair, you know?" she whispered suddenly. "Said she looked too much like her mother…"
I stopped. Turned.
Lyra blinked hard, like shaking something loose from her mind. "What?"
A sound rose again, closer. Clicking, but wrong. Like teeth on glass. A figure moved to our left. Another to our right. Not human. Not quite a beast.
I didn't want to see more.
I didn't want to become their prey. All I knew was we had to run and run, and we did.
We stumbled forward, breath ragged, until our muscles screamed. Until my thoughts were nothing but one word:
Survive.
The forest thinned for a moment. A clearing.
At its centre, a stone altar, old and cracked, covered in moss and dried blood.
The beautiful ones stood behind it.
Three of them.
No mouths. No eyes. No features at all. Just shapes wrapped in veils of light.
They didn't move, not at first. But their heads...
They turned.
Not slowly. Not quickly.
Just wrong.
They turned their heads without moving their bodies. I don't know how I noticed.
I wish I hadn't.
Then one flickered. Like a reflection in broken glass still standing, but scattered, like pieces of it were unsure whether they were here at all.
Another opened its mouth, or what should've been a mouth and for a breath of a second, I heard Lyra's voice come out.
"Run."
They raised their hands.
And pointed.
Not at us.
But past us.
We turned.
Our captors were back.
They hovered into the clearing.
And the forest screamed.
The trees groaned, split. Wind whipped through the clearing like a howl of the dead. The shadow lifted its hand.
Lyra screamed.
I grabbed her, pulled her with me.
We didn't look back.
We didn't breathe.
We tore through the thorns like hunted animals running into the woods again, blindly.
Branches snapped. Roots clawed. The ground gave way beneath us, and we tumbled down another hill, into a ravine thick with fog and bones.
We fell hard.
I couldn't breathe.
I thought I was dead.
But I wasn't.
I rolled over. Gasped.
Lyra was beside me, her eyes wide, chest rising in short bursts. She didn't speak.
Neither did I.
Above us, the forest howled.
Something was coming.
But for one moment, just one, we lay still, side by side, breathless in the hollow of the earth.
And in that silence, in that pause between running and dying, I realised something.
Whatever watched us now... had been waiting.
Before I could think what it could be. The forest echoed the howls of the clicking again, closer than ever this time, calling for me, searching for us, waiting for our mistake.