The weeks collapsed into each other like carcasses piling in a pit, and with them the seam between waking and dream split wide, spilling rot into both. Sleep gaped like a maw of iron teeth, tearing the former huntsman until each morning he rose gasping, his lungs clamped in the grip of unseen hands that refused to let go.
Day offered no reprieve either. Visions surged through it with the cruelty of a tide.
At the council table, beneath torches that guttered like eyes on the verge of extinction, Shanane's ruined face hovered in the corners of his sight. Her lips moved, pale and broken but her voice carried through the mouths of his advisors, weaving itself into their speech until every word dripped with her cadence. It dug into him, a whisper that rattled his bones and pounded through his veins until the room itself trembled with it. His pulse roared like a war-drum drowning the council's voices into a flood of meaningless sound and still her voice coiled tighter, a silken noose pulling him into the dark.
When his palm pressed against the table, and for a long, terrible moment he let himself believe it was solid wood beneath his fingers. But the truth clawed through him: it was not the table je was touching. It was her hand, cold and unyielding, sinewed with a cruel intent that pressed against his flesh, as if testing the boundaries of his own body.
Nothing remained as it should in the forest either. When he moves, the trees bent toward him, leaning low as if to murmur secrets he was never meant to hear. Branches shivered, sagging under invisible weight and he imagined eyes watching him from the dark hollows of bark. The wind carried no comfort; it whispered, dragging its syllables raw and ragged across his mind, shaping her name where no voice had ever been.
What gnawed at him now was the very method once loosed upon Shanane. And now, that same slow corrosion crept through his days, a patient, insidious drip of shadow that hollowed his waking hours, leaving him unmoored, every thought teetering on the brink of ruin.
These creatures never conquered with brute force. They worked quietly, bending the world around its victim, turning familiar things into mirrors of menace, warping the certainty of sight and sound until the mind itself trembled on the edge of fracture. Every step carried its subtle corruption, and the will, once steadfast, lay exposed, as though waiting to be claimed.
A question pressed against him with relentless insistence. Was this Atheramond's return? They had failed to kill him after all. The cruelty now reaching for him moved with deliberate purpose, each intrusion guided by design. But the pact bound him to Shanane, not to Eoghan. She was the vessel the demon coveted, her spirit and strength pliant to his whims. And yet here he was, chosen for torment, marked for vengeance, subjected to the slow undoing of the man who had defied him.
Another possibility, darker still, clung with desperate tenacity. What if Shanane lived? What if the grotesque shapes haunting him were not mockery but a call, a cry forced through the demon's grasp into forms his mind could scarcely endure? The thought burned through him, explaining the intimacy of the visions, the way her presence infused every space he occupied. She suffered in captivity, and these intrusions demanded his attention. She waited, and he could not remain idle.
Whatever the truth, one certainty remained: the forest no longer ended at the village walls. Its echoes had followed him into his home, his council chamber, his very skin. They had crossed the threshold of daylight and would not recede. He was being called by love or by vengeance and the summons could not be ignored.
He resolved to find the truth, to follow the traces of what had been done and uncover any sign that might explain the horrors he had endured. The decision had taken root in his bones, relentless and absolute.
So, he rose before dawn, long before the manor stirred with life. The air was sharp with the promise of cold, dew clinging to the grass like scattered jewels, his boots pressed into the soil silently. He walked toward the place where Shanane had been taken, the place where the veil between worlds thinned, where the world of men brushed against the demonic.
He carried no weapon, only the steady pulse of fear and determination that beat through him like a relentless drum. Each step drew him closer to the scar in the land where she had been wrenched from him, closer to the memory of what had been stolen. His chest tightened with every turn of the path, and even the familiar air betrayed him, carrying a subtle accusation as though the world itself had learned to distrust his presence.
The forest, in its wider stretches, was alive and breathing. Birds sang cautiously, leaves shimmered in the morning light, and streams whispered over stones polished smooth by centuries of passage. Life thrummed here, vibrant and insistent.
But at the center, the green of spring faltered. Moss grew thin and brittle, leaves yellowed before their time, and the soil rejected warmth. The trees curved at impossible angles, their branches blackened and gnarled as if fire had licked them long ago. Sunlight, when it pierced the canopy, fell in dull, trembling gray streaks, trembling against the earth as if reluctant to touch the cursed ground.
Here, life had stopped. The air itself seemed arrested, heavy and stagnant, as though the forest held its breath in reverence or fear. The insects remained motionless, the birds fell silent, and the wind itself refused to move the branches; the clearing lay in a perfect, suffocating stillness, as though life had been commanded to pause and witness the absence. Even shadows lay rigid, frozen in silent witness. The center was a void masquerading as a clearing, a wound in the world where the pulse of life had been leeched away, leaving only the residue of absence and the echo of cruelty.
As he approached, the world pressed close, whispering along the edges of his awareness, tugging at his thoughts, reminding him that the shadows of that hollowed place had never released him. The air carried weight, thick and deliberate, as if hundreds of unseen eyes scrutinized his every move. He felt the pull of the other side, the thin veil ready to yield, ready to reach, and every instinct screamed both warning and invitation.
He stopped at the edge, inhaling shallowly, his heart aching with the immediacy of loss. For a fleeting instant, he wanted to fall to his knees, to pour grief into the soil that had once belonged to her. Yet he remained upright, scanning the scarred clearing, seeking signs, traces of what had been, anything that could explain the persistent tug at his senses.
He moved deliberately, brushing his fingers over the bark of trees that had not healed, feeling its roughness bite into his skin. Grass, once soft and springing, lay flattened under unseen pressure, stubborn and unyielding beneath his touch. Stones bore cracks that no natural force could have left, fissures that seemed to whisper of deliberate malice.
He searched the clearing with careful eyes, tracing shapes that might hide a trace of magic or a mark of Atheramond's presence but the earth offered no answers. The silence pressed upon him like a living thing, heavy and suffocating. The world remained stubbornly mute, indifferent and unyielding, and the absence coiled around his chest, its weight absolute and inevitable.
A bitter frustration coiled in him, sharp and unrelenting, tightening around his chest like iron bands as he rose slowly, his eyes tracing the twisted trees that marked the scarred boundary, each gnarled trunk a testament to the violence that had been done here, each shadow a reminder that the forest would offer no answers, no relief, no mercy. Despair pressed upon him with the weight of inevitability, unyielding and merciless, reminding him that he had come seeking signs, seeking proof, seeking hope, and that the world had chosen to grant him none. The invisible presence pressed against him still, brushing the edges of his awareness with a patience that mocked his every attempt to grasp it, just beyond comprehension, just beyond proof, unrelenting and indifferent to his suffering.
He turned his back to the scarred clearing, but its weight pressed into his spine with a tangibility that made each step away a struggle; he left the forest carrying nothing but the memory of what had been stolen, the ache of absence that clung to his bones, and the certainty that the unseen hands that haunted his nights remained at work, patient and cunning, ready to strike again.
As he emerged into the green, sunlit world beyond, the contrast tore through him like a blade, making the absence of life in that clearing scream sharper and more painful for the life that continued unabated around him, for the laughter of birds and the shimmer of leaves that mocked the void he had left behind.
He understood with grim, unflinching clarity that the path forward would offer no guidance, that the answers he sought would not be handed freely, and that if Shanane lived and called to him, he would have to follow the faintest traces himself, step by careful step, even when they were almost imperceptible beneath the oppressive weight of shadows and silence. And if Atheramond had returned, he would be there too, patient, cruel, lurking in the spaces between life and nightmare, mocking his helplessness with deliberate intent and unwavering attention.
But Eoghan had always hunted. He had always followed, endured, and he would go on, propelled by unyielding resolve, guided by memory, sharpened by loss, and undeterred by the patience of demons or the oppressive silence of the world itself.
♦️♦️♦️♦️🪔♦️♦️♦️♦️