Chapter Twenty: The Hunt Begins
The longhouse lamps guttered low when they pushed through the door.
Burrel sat at the council table. Grain reports stacked at his elbow. His face was the same stone it always was, but his eyes moved over the numbers without reading them. He was waiting.
He looked up. Tracked the mud on their boots. The scratches on Zack's face. The color missing from Bram's cheeks.
"Report."
Zack placed the logbook on the table. Open to the entry.
"The Blackroot stand is active. The corruption node trapped a deer and was draining it. I disrupted the trap. The deer got free. The node is intact." He kept his voice flat. "Something else was there. Watching. It made contact. One thought. Then it pulled back."
Burrel read the entry. His jaw tightened on the word "observer."
"You engaged the corruption directly."
"I stopped it from feeding. I didn't touch the node."
"And the observer."
"It spoke. Then left."
"Left." Burrel looked up from the page. "Or waited."
He asks this every time. The answer he wants is "left." The true answer is "I don't know." The answer I'm afraid of is "it never went anywhere."
"Left."
Burrel held the stare. Three beats. Four. Five.
Then he stood and walked to the window. The tree line pressed dark against the glass. He stood there for ten seconds. When he turned back, the grain reports were forgotten.
"The council wants to wait. Let the Greenfall assessors handle it. Let the capital send their people."
His hands flattened on the table.
"We don't have time for the capital. If this thing is feeding and something intelligent is watching it feed, we need to know what we're facing." His scar caught the lamplight. "Tomorrow. Dawn. Survey team."
He pointed at Zack. "You."
At Bram. "You."
Then he straightened. "Kael. And Arin."
Bram blinked. "Arin leaves the plateau?"
"He will for this. He knows the smell of old magic. If there's something on the board we can't see, he'll find it."
Four of us. A Husk with a void. A clerk with a signal horn. A Body Path prodigy with an eyebrow problem. And a scarred hermit who killed a forest with his bare hands. Walking into woods where something smart and hungry is watching.
This is either a survey team or a very specific kind of sacrifice.
Burrel's eyes found Zack.
"Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow you hunt."
Hunt. Not patrol. Not survey. Hunt. Because Burrel doesn't believe in being prey.
The walk home was quiet. The village slept around them. Doors shut. Lamps dark. The sounds of settled life leaking through thin walls. A cough. A child turning in sleep. Hearthstones ticking as they cooled.
These people don't know what's under their floors. They sleep and they breathe and they trust that tomorrow looks like yesterday. My job is to keep that true.
Bram peeled off at his door. He paused with his hand on the latch.
"For what it's worth, you're the scariest scout I've ever filed paperwork for."
"That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."
"Don't get used to it." He went inside.
The loft was dark. Mira slept on her side, one arm thrown over the edge of the pallet, fingers dangling. Her wrapped wrists glowed faint in his void sight. Strained channels. She'd been hauling double again.
He lay down. Pulled the blanket up. The ring bit cold against his finger.
The voice came. Quiet. No frost. No sarcasm. Clear as water.
"You were observed again."
I know.
"Not by corruption. By something that thinks. The voice in the clearing."
It said I play with toys.
"The Shattering created fragments. You hold the Black. Somewhere, someone holds the Crimson. Or the Gold. Or something twisted between."
Another heir.
"Another heir. The paths of heirs converge. That is not choice. That is architecture."
Architecture means someone built it.
"Yes."
Who?
Silence. Long. When the voice returned, the frost was gone. What sat underneath it was something Zack had never heard from the ring before. The footnote, the ancient sarcastic presence that lectured him about technique and mocked his progress, was afraid.
"I do not know. That should concern you more than anything in the Blackroot."
The voice faded. The ring settled to its hum.
Mira shifted. Her elbow found his ribs. Not a punch. Proximity. The unconscious reaching of someone who slept better with her brother close.
He pulled the blanket over her shoulder. Careful. His fingers touched the wool. Nothing drained.
Tomorrow I walk into the forest with Kael and Bram and Arin. We hunt something that hunts us. Something that spoke in my head and sounded amused.
You play with toys.
Maybe. But I'm learning to break them on purpose now. And tomorrow I find out what kind of toy you are.
His fist closed around the ring.
Sleep came in pieces. Thin and sharp-edged. Between the fragments, the forest breathed, and beneath the forest, through channels older than the kingdom, the thing that had spoken settled into patient stillness.
It had found what it was looking for.
Now it waited for him to come closer.
And at dawn, he would.