The innkeeper did not move.
He simply stood there in the moonlight, framed by the yawning black of the forest, his face lifted just enough for the cyan-purple glow to catch in his eyes. That same empty, patient smile rested on his lips, unchanged by distance or discovery. It was the expression of a man who believed, with absolute certainty, that nothing had gone wrong.
Inside the cramped second-floor room, no one spoke.
Alucent felt the moment stretch, thin and taut, like wire drawn too far. His mind was already moving, cataloging angles and possibilities, but his body remained still. He knew better than to break the silence first. Silence, here, was the only advantage they had left.
Then came the knock.
It was soft. Almost polite.
Not the hammering of authority or the urgency of alarm, but the careful, measured tap of knuckles against wood. Once. Twice. Three times. Each knock evenly spaced, deliberate, patient.
Raya's fingers tightened around the hilt of her Weaveblade. Gryan shifted his weight, boots barely whispering against the floorboards as he angled himself between the door and the rest of the room. His mechanical arm flexed, pistons drawing in with a muted hiss.
Alucent raised one hand.
Wait.
The knock came again, just once this time.
Then the voice.
"There is no need for fear, travelers."
It was muffled by the thick wood of the door, but perfectly clear all the same. Calm. Reasonable. Warm, even. The sort of voice that belonged behind a pulpit or across a dinner table, not in the throat of a man who ran a slaughterhouse disguised as an inn.
"The Vow of the Shared Seed teaches us to care for one another," the innkeeper continued. "You are in pain. We can help you let it go. Join us. Be at peace."
Alucent closed his eyes for half a heartbeat.
The phrasing was wrong. Not invented, not improvised. It was doctrine. Twisted, yes, but rooted deeply enough in Verdant Vale scripture that anyone raised under its teachings would feel the pull of familiarity. The Shared Seed was about mutual labor and shared burden. Pain endured together so that no one carried it alone.
Here, that principle had been inverted.
Not shared, but removed.
Not endured, but consumed.
Gryan reached for the heavy dresser with his organic hand, already beginning to drag it across the floor. The wood groaned softly, a sound far too loud in the suffocating quiet of the inn.
Alucent's hand snapped out, catching Gryan's wrist.
"No," he whispered.
Gryan frowned, confusion and frustration flickering across his face. "He's right outside the door."
"Yes," Alucent murmured. "And that's exactly why."
He leaned closer to the door, tilting his head. Past the wood, past the lock, past the measured breathing of the man on the other side.
He listened.
At first, there was nothing. Then, faintly, almost imperceptible, a sound like cloth brushing cloth. Bare feet against floorboards. Slow, uncoordinated movement. Not one set, but many.
A soft shuffling, gathering in the hallway.
Alucent pictured them instantly. The patrons. The farmer with his spilled ale. The woman by the fire. The men at the bar who could not finish a thought. Smiling. Vacant. Content.
A human wall.
"They're awake," Alucent said under his breath. "Or close enough."
Raya followed his gaze, her expression hardening as understanding settled in. "He's going to let them do it," she said. "Put them between us."
"Yes," Alucent replied. "And if we fight our way through them, we do the work for him."
Gryan's jaw tightened. "They're innocent."
"They're bait," Alucent corrected quietly. "And more importantly, they're full."
He forced himself to slow his breathing. Panic would help no one. Violence would help even less.
The tea sedated. The aroma softened defenses. But the creatures outside fed on what remained. On pain, on fear, on grief. On memory sharpened by suffering. A violent escape would flood the inn with exactly what those things wanted.
A feast.
Alucent looked down at his hands.
Then at Raya's blade, its runes faintly glowing beneath the skin of the metal.
Then an idea formed.
Precise. Terrible. Effective.
"Step back from the door," he whispered. "All of you."
The knocking did not resume. The innkeeper waited, certain of his victory.
Inside the room, Alucent moved quickly.
He knelt and reached into his coat, retrieving three small, flat stones he had collected earlier that day from the road. Unremarkable. Smooth from years of weather and passage. He set them carefully on the table, spacing them evenly.
"A synchronized disruption," he murmured, more to himself than the others. "Three points. They won't ignore it."
Raya stared at him. "What are you thinking?"
"They feed on emotion," Alucent said. "So we give them one. An echo. Something loud enough to pull them away, but contained enough not to drown us with it."
Gryan's eyes widened slightly. "You're not talking about a sound glyph."
"No," Alucent replied. "Sound would wake the inn. And it fades too fast."
He reached for his Runequill.
The amber ink inside shifted sluggishly, responding to his intent with reluctant awareness. His hand trembled, just a little. He ignored it.
"This is Thread Three," he continued. "Bloodmark work. Replication, not projection."
Raya's expression darkened. "You've never done that cleanly."
"I know."
He took a breath, then pressed the edge of the quill against his thumb.
Pain flared, sharp and immediate. A bead of dark blood welled up, warm against the cool air of the room. The scent of iron cut briefly through the cloying sweetness that permeated everything.
Alucent did not hesitate.
He pressed his thumb to the first stone and began to etch.
The rune was not simple. It spiraled inward, looping back on itself, lines intersecting at precise, unforgiving angles. This was not a symbol meant to create fire or force or light. It was an inscription designed to hold an impression. A fragment of experience. A preserved imprint of thought and feeling.
As he worked, he focused inward.
On the memory.
The guilt came first. Familiar. Heavy. The weight of choices made too late or not at all. Faces he could not forget. Consequences that clung to him like residue.
Then the fear. Not the sudden terror of battle, but the slow, gnawing dread of failure. Of knowing that the system was broken and that understanding it might cost him everything he had left.
He poured it into the stone.
The rune flared, glowing a sickly crimson before settling into a dull, unstable light. Alucent swallowed and moved to the second stone.
His vision blurred briefly. He forced it back into focus.
Raya watched in silence, horror and reluctant respect warring in her expression. She moved only to prepare three lengths of Weavefiber cord, knotting them quickly, efficiently.
Gryan turned away from the table, focusing instead on the window. He produced a length of thin wire and began working at the crude latch with practiced ease, his mechanical fingers steady even as the tension mounted.
The second rune took longer.
The third nearly broke him.
By the time he finished, his breathing was shallow and his hand slick with blood. The three stones pulsed faintly, their glow uneven, unstable.
"They won't last long," Alucent said quietly. "Minutes, at most."
"That's all we need," Gryan replied. The window gave a soft click as the latch yielded. He pushed it open just enough to test the air outside.
"Support beam's here," he added, tapping the floor with his heel. "Common room ceiling. I can punch through."
"Good," Alucent said. "On my count."
The silence outside deepened. No more shuffling. No more voices. The inn felt like it was holding its breath.
They moved to the window.
The turquoise moon hung high above the clearing, bathing the massive tree behind the inn in unnatural light. The shapes clinging to its bark were still there, pulsing in slow, synchronized rhythm. Waiting.
Alucent raised his hand.
"One," he whispered.
"Two."
"Three."
They threw.
The stones vanished into the darkness, arcing away from the inn in three separate directions. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the night screamed.
Not sound. Something deeper. A psychic reverberation that Alucent felt behind his eyes and along his spine. Raw anguish, condensed and amplified. Fear, guilt, despair, stripped of context and hurled outward like bait.
The reaction was immediate.
The shapes on the tree shuddered as one. Then they detached, peeling away from the bark in a shimmering torrent, flowing toward the false signals with impossible speed. The sweet aroma thickened for a moment, then thinned as the mass moved away.
"Now," Alucent hissed.
Gryan struck.
His mechanical arm slammed down, piston-driven force punching through the weakened floorboards in a single, brutal motion. Wood splintered silently, collapsing inward. He kicked the edges aside, widening the opening just enough.
One by one, they dropped.
The common room was empty.
The fire still burned. The chairs were still scattered. The patrons were gone, drawn upstairs or out into the night. The air felt hollow, stripped of its false warmth.
They landed lightly, moving fast.
The front door stood open.
And in front of it stood the innkeeper.
His smile was gone.
In its place was something worse. Sorrow. Genuine, profound disappointment etched into every line of his face.
"You would choose to hurt?" he asked softly. "Why?"
Alucent did not answer.
He moved.
The Runequill flashed in his hand, amber ink flaring as he etched a simple Coppermark glyph directly onto the man's forehead. Sleep. Crude, fast, effective.
The innkeeper swayed, eyes rolling back, and collapsed bonelessly to the floor.
They did not stop.
They ran.
Out into the forest, boots pounding earth and root, branches whipping past as the sweet scent faded behind them. The cold night air burned their lungs, sharp and real.
Raya slowed suddenly, pointing to the ground near the inn's entrance.
Tracks. Deep. Treaded.
A Steamwagon.
"He wasn't alone," she said grimly. "He had a delivery."
Alucent looked back once, toward the dark silhouette of the inn and the great tree behind it.
This was not an anomaly.
It was a system.
And it was spreading.