The forest swallowed the road the way a mouth swallows a scream.
Ryo stood where the knights had shoved him into the mud, blinking at the treeline that looked less like trees and more like a congregation of black spires. The last rattle of carriage wheels dwindled into the distance. Then there was only wind, and the sound of something big moving through brush he could not see.
"Okay," he whispered to no one. "Tutorial skipped. Great."
He touched his chest, half-hoping to feel a smartphone tucked inside his blazer. Nothing. His pockets held a few coins the priest had thrown at him like he was a beggar, a crumpled pack of gum, and the dignity of a kid who'd just been called 'filth' by a man wearing a chandelier on his head.
The treeline breathed—a sigh from branches rubbing, leaves exhaling moisture—and the smell of wet bark and something metallic drifted out to meet him. He could still see where the knights' horses had churned the mud; their hoofprints filled slowly with water the color of old tea.
He could also see the wolf he'd killed. And… not killed.
It stood ten paces into the shadows, watching him with eyes that burned a faint, unnatural violet. Ten minutes ago it had leaped for his throat. Ten minutes ago a pressure had broken open inside him like a punctured lung, and black smoke had come out. It had smothered the wolf and soaked into it the way rain soaks dry soil.
Now the wolf waited. Not crouching to leap. Not baring its fangs. Waiting.
Ryo swallowed. He held his hand out, palm down, the way you hold out a hand to a skittish dog. "H-hey, buddy. We… good?"
He expected a snarl. What he got was a twitch in the thing's ear and the weirdest sensation he'd ever felt: a thread. As if somewhere behind his sternum, a string of cold was tied, and the other end had been knotted to the wolf's spine. When he thought "stay," the thread thrummed. The wolf's muscles tightened, then stilled.
Ryo pulled his hand back, wiping the cold sweat on his blazer. "Okay. We are absolutely not freaking out."
He took a step toward the forest, because the last bit of day was decaying into blue, and standing on the road felt like standing on a plate in front of a hungry diner. The wolf turned, padded deeper between the trees. It looked back, pupils briefly narrowing like a cat's, as if to say: Follow.
"That… works for me."
The Forest of Shadows was quieter than it should have been. No birdsong. No insect choir. There was sound—things moving in leaf mold, wood creaking, a distant, hooting call that set Ryo's teeth on edge—but it didn't feel like nature's noises. It felt like a cathedral's empty echo. The trees were old and thick, their bark blackened like they'd been charred and then kept growing anyway. Moss crawled over roots in a slick, dark pelt. In places, the earth glistened with silver threads that might have been spider silk or might have been something else entirely.
He stumbled over a root and caught himself against one of the trees. The wood was colder than stone. Moisture slicked his palm. When he pulled back, something like ink clung to his skin and then sank into it, leaving his hand tingling.
"Fantastic," he muttered. "Absorbing weird tree juice. That'll be useful when I mutate."
The wolf led him by a narrow path that wasn't a path so much as a repeated decision to put a foot in a specific place. Ryo kept moving, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant hearing again the words the king had said. Filth. Heretic. Throw him away.
He found water before he found shelter. The sound was shy, a silver whisper under the roots. The wolf pushed aside a curtain of ferns with its muzzle, and there was a rivulet, clear as glass and cold enough to make his teeth ache when he cupped it in his hands. He drank until his stomach protested. The wolf lapped. When Ryo splashed water onto his face, the reflection that looked back from the pool had eyes rimmed red, hair sticking to his forehead, and a line of dirt across his cheek that made him look like some street punk from a bad drama.
"Hello, otherworld self," he said. "You look like you're doing great."
The wolf's ears flicked. He glanced at it. "Do you eat… souls? Or just… squirrels?"
Another thrumming of the thread. A taste in his mouth that wasn't a taste, like stale pennies. He grimaced. "That better not be a 'souls are fine'."
He needed fire. He needed somewhere to sleep that wasn't the forest's damp mouth. He remembered a Boy Scout camping trip from when he was ten, and how he'd spent an hour trying to make a bow drill out of a shoelace before giving up and eating chips in the van. He had no lighter. No matches. He had a belt, a blazer, dress shoes with slick soles. Survival YouTubers would have unsubscribed from him on sight.
"Fine," he said to the forest. "I get it. We're doing Hard Mode."
He collected dry things: bark that curled like fingernail shavings, twigs that snapped clean, leaves dead enough to crunch. Everything wanted to be wet, but under a fallen log he found a pocket of tinder: fuzz from a fungus, shredded by beetles into something that felt like cotton. He built a little nest in a hollow between roots, because the tree's mass would block some wind, and because the hollow had a roof of sorts. Then he looked for a way to make spark.
Rocks. He needed rocks. His dress shoes squelched over loam while he picked through the edges of the streambed for anything that could pretend to be flint. The wolf padded after him, occasionally stopping to stare into the undergrowth like it could see frequencies Ryo couldn't.
He found two stones with promise. They promised disappointment. He scraped them together and got flakes and a noise like someone grating a plate. He tried again, and again, until his fingers stung and the little tinder nest looked at him with damp contempt.
Ryo lay back on the root, put his forearm over his eyes, and laughed. It came out hysterical and high and not at all heroic.
"Hey," he told the wolf, "you breathe fire by any chance?"
The wolf tilted its head. The thread plucked. Something cold inside his chest flexed, like a muscle he didn't know he had.
Ryo sat up slowly. He stared at his hand.
The shadows pooled between his fingers as if they were water and his palm a bowl. They thickened, glossy and dark, a miniature night captured in skin. It didn't burn. It didn't feel like heat at all. It felt like the opposite. It felt like the air around the little pile of twigs had gone still to watch.
"Please don't explode," he told everything. He lowered the little handful of night to the tinder nest and… pressed.
The shadow bled into the fungus like ink into paper. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then the tinder curled, darkened, and a single ember blinked to life with a glow the color of old blood.
Ryo held his breath, fed the ember with the careful, reverent breaths of a supplicant, and was rewarded with a thread of smoke. The ember grew, glowed, exhaled orange. Tiny flame licked. He added twigs, then a little more, and finally a thin stick that caught with a sigh, and he sat back, eyes watering, and laughed again—less hysterical now, more relieved, though still tinged with the feeling that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing.
"I'll take it," he croaked. He held his hands out to the small, stubborn heat. "Welcome to life, Fire v1.0. Please don't eat the forest."
The wolf lay down three paces away, not too close, not too far. It watched the flames like it remembered them in another life. The violet in its eyes waxed when the fire flared and waned when it died back. The thread hummed. Ryo experimented.
"Sit," he said aloud, thinking the shape of the word at the same time, pushing it down the cold string the way you might slide a bead down wire.
The wolf sat.
"Roll over," he tried, because he was a teenage boy and compelled by universal laws to do dumb things with power.
The wolf looked at him like he'd asked it to recite a poem.
"Right. We'll work on tricks later."
He fed the fire and looked up. The sky beyond the trees was a thick soup of cloud. Through a rent between branches, he thought he saw not one moon but two: a pale, fat disc and, farther away, a smaller, red smear like a thumbprint. He blinked, and the clouds slid, and both were gone. Maybe he hadn't seen them at all. Maybe this world's sky just liked art.
The smell of the fire was everything. Smoke. Sap. A sweetness from some resin that made the back of his throat ache. He held his hands to the flames and felt the feeling return to his fingers one taste-bud at a time. The thread tugged; the wolf's consciousness brushed his like a cold nose on a wrist. He didn't get words. He got impressions: watchful, bound, hungry.
"Yeah," he said softly. "Me too."
Hunger was a bully. It elbowed other thoughts aside and took up the best seat in his head. He hadn't eaten since a convenience store bento. The forest did not have a FamilyMart. He eyed the wolf. The wolf stared back as if to say, Do not even consider it.
"Relax," Ryo told it, then, as if to the universe: "I'm not going to eat my… uh, shadow buddy. Minion? Familiar? Hench-wolf?"
The wolf's ears flattened at "hench-wolf." He made a note.
He scouted while the fire grew from fragile to adolescent. He didn't go far. He broke a branch and dragged it behind him to scuff the ground, just in case he had to find his way back by stupidity alone. Five minutes of cautious poking produced a bush with berries like glossy black pearls. Every cartoon he'd ever seen flashed a skull over his vision.
"Poison?" he asked the wolf.
It sniffed, sneezed, and gave him an impression that tasted like bitter bark and a vague No. He picked one, pressed it to his tongue, waited. Nothing immediate. He chewed half, waited. His lips tingled. He spat. "We'll… revisit."
He found fungus glowing faintly in the dim beneath a log, green and soft. He left it alone. He found a skeletal heap of something deer-shaped. He decided that tonight, hunger would win a draw.
Back at the fire, he fed it more sticks and arranged larger branches into a lean-to that was mostly insult to architecture. The tree's root hollow shielded his back. He had warmth on his front, wood at his side, and a wolf guarding the door like a decorative gargoyle. For a kid who'd been condemned to die two hours earlier, it wasn't bad.
He curled on his side with his blazer as a blanket and listened to the forest think. The thread hummed, and the wolf's steady not-breath beat like a second pulse against his own. When sleep came, it was a slide down wet stone.
He dreamed of the throne room's light—but when it broke, it didn't pour out a boy. It poured out tar. The nobles clapped while the tar climbed the walls and covered the windows. The king's crown floated like a lily pad. When Ryo reached for it, something silver and vast moved outside the glass—an eye, lidless, looking in on him as if he was an aquarium exhibit. It narrowed, not with hatred but with… appraisal.
He woke with a gasp to cold beyond the fire's reach and the sudden certainty that the thread had slackened because the wolf had moved.
Ryo sat up. The fire had collapsed inward into red islands floating in black ash. The trees were ranks of silent soldiers. The wolf stood with its head raised, ears pointed toward the path that was not a path, body a poised bow.
The thread brought him a flavor like copper. Alarm.
Ryo tossed a twig on the coals, coaxing flame. "What is it?" He didn't expect an answer. He got a thought anyway—more sense than speech. Not-beast. Not-wolf. Metal. The impression came with the faintest outline of a shape, like a smudge in fog. Tall, armored, torchlight cupped in a hand like fire had been trained to kneel.
Knights.
He was out of the blanket and on his feet before the thought finished forming. His heart went as fast as a hummingbird pretending to be a jackhammer. A stupid, stubborn part of him wanted to say, Maybe they're here to apologize. The rest of him picked up the belt he'd taken off to use in fire-making and cinched it hard enough to make himself grunt.
The fire was a betrayal now. The flame was a flag. He scooped a double handful of dirt and smothered it until it was only a smear of heat and smell.
The wolf slid to the hollow's mouth and became a darker darkness within dark. Ryo put his hand on its shoulder because it made him feel less like his bones were going to vibrate out of his skin. The fur was chill but there, anchored in the world.
Bootsteps. At first so distant he wasn't sure they were real. Then closer, equipment clinking. Torches came before men, floating edges of orange that made the trees look like they had bleeding mouths. Three figures, maybe four. He saw the suggestion of a surcoat with some sigil. He saw the glint of a visor, down.
Words, low. He strained to hear.
"…said the High Captain… as a hunt. Beasts, my ass."
"…if we find the boy… silver for heads."
"…Church gets the head."
Ryo's stomach dropped into his shoes. The wolf's hackles rose beneath his palm. The thread was a taught wire now, singing with the urge to spring.
He held it back with a thought so hard it made his teeth hurt. No. Not yet.