Moss held her like a cushion. Light filtered through leaves in thin, shifting bands. Her glasses were damp. She wiped them with the heel of her palm and saw the world come into focus one sharp detail at a time. Fern ribs. Ants moving a seed. The stitched seam of bark on a fallen trunk.
She sat up too quickly and the trees tipped. Breath caught in her throat. She waited for the spin to pass and only then pushed to her knees. The body that rose to meet her did not match the one she remembered. Weight settled along hips and stomach, not the hollow angles she knew. Her hands looked the same when she turned them over. Clean nails. No tremor. The steadiness felt wrong.
Hair slid forward across her cheek. Brown. Heavy. Cut straight across her brow. She tucked it behind an ear and the motion was so familiar her chest tightened. Familiar and wrong at once.
Memory came in pieces. A desk under a window she never opened. Pages that blurred late at night. Food she set aside and forgot. A long hour she could not name. The sound a room makes when a body finally drops. She drew a breath that did not rattle. The air smelled of wet earth and crushed green.
No bag. No jacket. No phone. She checked the ground. The hollow in the moss traced the curve of her shoulder and hip. No footprints circled it. No scrape of dragged weight. She had arrived the way a stone arrives when a river lets it go.
"Hello," she tried, quiet, to no one. The sound fell into the trees and did not come back.
She stood and took inventory without the comfort of a plan. Clothes that fit well enough. Shoes with decent tread. Glasses that sat straight once she cleaned them. Nothing else. The forest pressed close but not unfriendly. Bird calls ticked in short syllables. Somewhere ahead, water chimed against stone.
She moved. Small steps, toes feeling for roots under the leaf litter. A wedge of bedrock rose through the soil and gave her a landmark. A line of saplings narrowed the clearing to the east. To the north, ferns parted around a shallow run of water bright as glass. She marked those things the way a traveler marks the face of a clock. If she needed to run, she would not choose blind ground.
Her heart had begun to thud in a way that reminded her of work alarms and missed trains. She swallowed and pressed a hand to her sternum. The beat steadied. She did not feel strong. She felt present. That would have to be enough.
The first sign that she was not alone came as a change in the silence. Birds stopped in a neat line as if a string had been plucked through the canopy. Leaves rustled against the direction of the breeze. Something large shifted its weight and then held.
She did not call out again. She scanned for anything she could use. The fallen trunk offered a length of branch that had dried into toughness. She set a foot against the wood, pried until the grain gave with a crack, and tested the piece for balance. It fit her hands well enough to be a staff if she pretended that was what it was.
She backed toward the wedge of rock. One step. Another. No turn of the shoulders that would invite a rush. The stream flashed between trunks ahead, a thin ribbon of light. The ground dipped near its bank. That would be a bad place to slip. She kept to the firmer line and set her heel against the tangle of roots at the rock's base.
Her mouth had gone dry. She counted three slow breaths and forced her shoulders to lower. The noise in the brush did not repeat. The quiet returned in layers. She told herself to move toward the water and find the sun. She told herself anything that sounded like a decision.
She took one step out from the stone. Brush whispered to her left, low and steady. Not wind. A body easing forward to test distance. She froze. A patch of fern trembled and stilled. Then two indentations in the loam showed where weight had come down and shifted. Round. Deep. Close together. She pictured a broad chest and shoulders behind the green.
Her grip on the branch tightened until her knuckles ached. She did not know what she would do with it. She did not know what would happen if she broke and ran. She kept her feet where they were and let the breath she had been holding go, slow and quiet.
A head moved in the brush. Eyes caught a sliver of light and turned it back. Old scars crosshatched the hide above the ridge of a cheek. The animal did not show its teeth. It studied her as if she were a question it had not been asked before.
"Please do not," she whispered, not sure which of them she meant.
The wind shifted and carried her scent into the green. The gaze sharpened. The brush bowed and settled. It took one silent step and the space between them did not feel large anymore.
She set the branch across her body and found the place where her feet belonged. Root ridge under the heel, firm soil under the ball of the front foot. The stream sang to itself without caring. The leaves held their light.
Whatever happened next would not be a choice she made with words.
The brush held the gaze for a long breath. Then the wolf came through.
It was the color of wet stone, broad across the shoulders, old scars laid in faint white lines along the ribs. It did not snarl or bristle. It trotted into the open with the quiet certainty of an animal that had never needed to pretend at fear. Its head stayed low. Its eyes did not leave her hands.
She raised the broken branch across her body. The bark bit into her palm. She edged her right foot back until her heel found the root ridge at the base of the rock. The stream ahead flashed bright between trunks, a strip of silver that would be treacherous if she had to turn and run.
The wolf shifted to set her between itself and the water. It studied the ground, found the line that would take it through without giving up footing, then looked at her again, weighing.
The first rush was not a lunge. It was three silent strides, a slide, and a final coil of muscle that pushed it forward with sudden weight. She jabbed with the branch on reflex. The wood glanced off the cheekbone and scraped an ear. It changed nothing.
Teeth flashed. She twisted. The wolf clipped her thigh with a hooked fang as it passed. Heat ripped down her leg. She staggered, caught herself on the rock with one hand, and brought the branch down two-handed on the wolf's shoulder as it turned. The strike landed hard and slid. The animal bared its teeth, more in focus than in anger, and came again.
She planted her feet, but there was not enough space to set the length of the branch for a clean stop. The wolf slashed for her hands. She jerked them back. Wood barked against muzzle. The animal dropped low and went for her knee.
The world narrowed to three points. The stone under her heel. The wet river light on her left. The instant of ground before the wolf's paws.
Her palm hit soil without thought, and her will ran out into the ground reactively.
The earth heaved like a chest taking a breath. A blade of stone drove up from the loam with a dry crack. It took the wolf across the foreleg and threw it off the line it wanted. The animal hit on its side, slid in leaves, and came up with a snarl pulled tight by pain.
She stared at the spike, clean and pale against dark soil, then at her hand. A pulse of pressure moved along her arm and sank back into the ground as if it belonged there.
The wolf circled. Blood striped its fur from shoulder to knee. It tested the leg, found it would bear weight, and began to angle for her blind side. She moved with it, keeping the rock at her back. The branch shook in her grip. She told it to stop and it did not listen.
The animal feinted. She flinched. It came for real, fast and low. She brought the branch down again. Wood cracked. The wolf slid under and raked the outside of her thigh with a tooth as it passed. The cut opened clean and long. Warmth ran to her knee and into her boot. Her foot slipped. She caught herself with one hand on the ground and looked up through a veil of breath that did not feel like hers.
The wolf wheeled for the finish.
Her free hand went to the wound. It was not a plan. It was want, fierce and simple. Stop.
Soft green light rose through her skin. It spread beneath her palm, warm and steady, and took the pain with it. The edges of the cut found each other and closed in a line that grew paler as she watched. The blood slowed, then ceased. Her breath came back in an even count.
The wolf checked. Animals know when prey stops bleeding. Its head cocked a fraction. It saw her hand on her leg, the way her eyes had changed, and it did not like either.
She placed her unbloodied palm flat to the soil. The earth answered with a smaller spike, not a spear but a stub that pushed up between the wolf and the line it wanted. The animal flinched from the sudden shape and put weight on the injured leg by mistake. It snarled at the ground as if the insult had come from there, not from her, then stepped clear with stiff care and measured the space again.
They regarded one another across the new angle. Her heartbeat slowed enough that she could hear the stream ticking across stones. The green glow faded from her skin and left a faint warmth. The branch hung at her side. The cut tingled. Her hands steadied.
The wolf lowered its head without committing. It looked at the spikes, then at her face. It had learned something and did not want to learn it twice. It stepped back, weight even, eyes still on her. When the brush touched its flank, it turned and went into it with the same quiet it had used to emerge.
Leaves fell back into place. The light returned to the forest as if a hand had lifted from a lens. A jay scolded from a high branch and then decided against it. Somewhere upstream, water took a breath over a shallow rim and spilled clean.
She watched the place where the gray had vanished until she was sure the quiet was honest. Then she looked down. Blood had soaked the cloth in a deep stripe, but when she peeled fabric from skin she found only a pink seam and dried red. No tenderness when she pressed around it. No heat. The green light had left no mark but a memory.
She touched the first spike. It was cold and smooth where the soil had polished it in a heartbeat. She put her palm to the ground again and felt the pressure there, the river that had risen to meet her without being summoned. It waited, calm as a held breath.
She let her hand rest and let the pulse settle. The branch looked smaller now. The forest did not. She wiped her palm on a clean patch of cloth, set her shoulders against the rock one last time, and listened until the ordinary sounds were all that remained.
The first blood had been hers. The ground had taken the second. The knowledge that both answers had come from her hands sat in her chest like a new weight. She was not ready to name it.
She stepped out from the stone and tested the leg. No catch. No throb. The stream still flashed between trunks. She made for it at an easy pace, eyes on the ground, branch balanced like a walking stick, thinking of water and sun and a place where she could sit with her back to a trunk and breathe without waiting for brush to move.
The stream ran clear over a skin of pebbles. She rinsed her hands until the water stopped clouding and drank until the cold set a neat ache along her jaw. The cut on her thigh held as a thin seam. The fear had stepped back far enough that thought could stand upright again.
She breathed and took stock. The weight at her hips. The steadiness in her legs. The way her center sat low and sure. A memory rose with it, small at first, then precise. A character sheet. Constitution bumped by two. Strength average. A note in the margin that read, test build for balance. She had made this body on paper. Healthier. Sturdier. A walking baseline for all the spell math.
Her mouth went dry, not from thirst. She pushed her hair back and looked down at her hands. The fingers that had typed those numbers. The same hands now.
She tried a small thing. "Shield," she said, as if naming a tool on the bench. The word did not conjure a window. It tugged a shape out of her memory and laid it in her mind the way a stencil drops over a page. Radius, thickness, feed. Her palm warmed. A thin pressure curved over her chest like a pane of cool glass. She let a pebble fall. It skittered aside as if it had struck a soap bubble pulled tight. Magic Shield thinned and faded when she stopped thinking about it.
She lifted her hand from the water. "Water Manipulation." The instruction did not come as a chant. It surfaced as a clean diagram. Three vectors, one focus, release on the inside of the wrist. The stream obeyed and curled up her knuckles in a clear ribbon before she let it fall back. The warm hum in her body did not dip. It did not even blink.
Fire would be foolish near dry leaf, so she set a spark on wet stone instead. The formula arrived the way a remembered recipe does. Heat gathered to a single point, then breathed out across a safe surface. A match-head flare danced, blue to orange, and died when she opened her fingers. No smoke caught. No smell of char. The river in her blood stayed level.
Wind came next, a controlled push rather than a shove. She pictured the little lattice for a Wind Burst that she had scribbled in a margin months ago. The saplings bowed, then stood straight. The air smoothed her hair back from her face and put it down again as if weighing it.
She knelt and set her palm to the soil. The ground did not jump this time. It listened. The form for Earth Spike drew itself behind her eyes, spring and wedge and release. She coaxed up only a nub of stone, rounded as a bead, then smoothed it flat again. The memory of the earlier lance flickered in her mind and resolved into the exact frame she had once designed. Vector angle. Depth draw. The way pressure should vent so the spike would not shatter itself.
There was a rhythm beneath all of it, steady as a metronome. Boundless, she had written in a test note when she broke her own points cap. The pool that fed the spells now felt like that. Endless was not the same as careless. She swallowed and let the shapes settle.
Downstream, white showed through gravel. A stag's ribs lay fanned and clean. One antler had wedged in a root. The other had broken into a crown of points. She crouched and touched cool bone. Her branch lay across her knees, useful but temporary. She could walk away and cut another, or she could try something that would answer more than one need.
She laid her palm along the antler tines and thought of Creation the way she had framed it for players. Do not conjure from nothing if a better material sits in front of you. Ask the world to take a new shape it already understands. Light traced thin lines along the bone. The point softened to workable firmness. She bent and cooled by degrees until two lengths curved into hands that met palm to palm, fingers neat, tips touching.
The shaft came from the branch. She pared the bark with a careful twist of Creation, fitted a bone sleeve so wood and bone would not grind each other, then seated the praying hands at the crown and locked the join with a pin she made to measure. The staff balanced sweetly in her grip. Weight through the center. A clean line from heel to crown.
She lifted it and tested motion. "Grip." The spell for animation answered from Necromancy in the exact cadence she had once drafted. Not flesh. Not life. A learned movement nested in bone. The fingers opened and closed. They turned from prayer to mirrored fists and back again. She tapped a fist against her shoulder and felt a satisfying knock echo through wood into muscle.
Channel test. She drew a thread of Light into the seam where the palms met. The glow pooled there and ran into her hands, sharpening focus. When she lowered the crown and breathed low, Darkness gathered in the small cup the knuckles made, smooth and quiet. The staff held both shapes well, then let them gutter without complaint when she stopped feeding them.
She set the butt to stone and cast Detect Magic in a small circle. Ripples spread from the contact point. Residue clung to the place she had raised the spikes. A faint green still slept under her skin where she had closed the cut. The stag bones held only the memory of instruction, not a soul. It was as if her old notes had been poured into the world and had found purchase where they touched the ground.
She stood with the staff across her palm and admitted the conclusion she had been avoiding. The body was her test build. The spell shapes were her own. The world honored them, not because she owned it, but because it could meet her halfway if she asked with the right language.
"This is mine, and not mine," she said, quiet, to the run of water and the trees that did not care. "Not the map I wrote."
She looked upslope where sun cut a bright seam between trunks. From there she would see farther. She would choose a line to follow that led to smoke or field or the order of a road. Find could point her at the nearest town when she had cover. She would keep the miracles small until she knew what shape the consequences took here.
She walked with the staff in her right hand, the praying hands tilted forward. The fingers would clamp if she needed a catch. The shaft would take her weight if she vaulted a log. Above the line of the trees, hills stepped back into blue. Far off, a darker band scored the landscape where forest met something made by hands.
She set three points on the horizon in her head and went for the first. The formulas that had once lived in notebooks now sat quietly in reach. The river under her skin did not waver. The rules mostly matched. The world would teach her where they did not.