He looked at his dead fire. He looked at the hollow's back wall, roots knitted like ribs. He looked at the earth.
"Please work," he mouthed.
He set his left hand flat on the soil and reached for the cold muscle inside him, the place the shadow had poured from earlier. It was terrifying how natural it felt to flex it. A tingle in his fingers. A weight, like a cat kneading into a blanket.
Darkness bled from his palm into the dirt. It wasn't smoke this time. It wasn't visible at all. It was the light in the hollow deciding not to exist. It was the edges of objects losing interest in being edges. The smell that went with it was faintly… old. Like a basement that had never been opened. The temperature didn't change. But the air got heavier. The tiny orange tongues of torchlight that had been licking the hollow's threshold wavered and thinned as if trying to decide whether this place was worth illuminating.
Footsteps paused. A torch wagged. A man's voice, uneasy: "Did you feel that?"
Ryo held his breath until stars strobed behind his eyes. The wolf didn't breathe at all. He had no idea if wolves could hold their breath on command, but his did. The thread buzzed like the world's smallest beehive.
Another voice: "Beasts. This place's damned. Keep moving."
He wanted to sag with relief. He did not. The figures moved past, torches sauntering off between trees as if to say, We could come back. We will come back.
He waited until the sound was to the left of distant. He waited longer. He let the shadow slowly seep back into him, and when it did it was like a returning tide, carrying with it grit and a fossil. He shuddered. The wolf relaxed by increments. Ryo realized only then that his hand had started to shake. He sat down hard enough on the root that his tailbone would file a complaint.
He breathed. In. Out. He counted because counting was a firm thing.
In the spent fire's ash, something glow-wormed. Not light. A faint pattern. As the gloom receded, he could see that the inner curve of the root hollow had… writing. Not letters. Runes. Carved so shallowly that the groove edges were moss-soft. Had they been there before? Had the shadow he'd poured out woken them the way rain wakes old smells?
He crawled closer, careful not to smear. The runes were loops and hooks, corners stitched to curves. In the center of the pattern was a circle that had once held an inlay. The inlay was gone, but around its absent edge the wood was less black, as if protected. He pressed his finger there. It was warm.
Ryo's mouth went dry. He looked at the wolf.
"Someone used this hollow," he whispered. "Like I'm using it."
His heart did a funny leap that wasn't fear. It was the feeling you get when you find a note under an old desk—I was here, too.
He wasn't alone, not just because of the wolf, but because once, maybe years or centuries ago, someone had sat in this exact shelter and done exactly what he had just done: pulled night out of their skin and shaped it so the world slid around them like water around a stone.
"Dark mage," he said, the words tasting of taboo. Saying them out loud felt like lighting a match in a church. "Or… dark something."
He lay back against the root, careful not to crush the faint carvings. The knights' bootprints were already being eaten by the forest floor, water filling their negative shapes.
The thread hummed, softer now. He sent along it a thought without words: gratitude, shared breath, the image of the wolf as it had looked when it was not his and then when it was, the way violet had replaced yellow. He didn't know if the wolf understood images. It sent back a feeling with a warmth at the center, like fur under sun, which was ridiculous because there was no sun here, but that was the point—memory of sun.
"Okay," he said finally. "Night one: alive. Me: still me. You: not a hench-wolf."
The ears flicked: acceptance.
He let his eyes fall shut. Sleep crept up like a thief who'd decided to be merciful. He slid under, and the last thing he thought before the forest tucked him in was not the king's disgust or the Church's punishments or even the knights' torches. It was the smoothness of that circle in the wood and the way it had felt warmed by a presence that had long since stepped out of the world.
When dawn came, it did not look like dawn. It looked like the forest had decided to be mildly gray instead of very gray. A milky light filtered between the branches. Water beaded on spider-threads and did not fall. Somewhere, a thing with too many joints climbed where Ryo could not see, its feet making a sound like someone cracking their knuckles one by one by one.
Ryo sat up, bones complaining. His blazer had become a wet towel. His hair felt like a small animal had died in it. The wolf yawned without sound, jaws opening in a hinge of knives, and shook itself, the motion sending a rippling tremor down the thread that made Ryo hiccup.
He rebuilt the fire small, more for psychological warmth than practical, and chewed two of the suspicious berries while he waited to see whether they tried to assassinate him. They didn't, but his tongue numbed a little, and he considered his life choices.
"You need a name," he told the wolf, because names make things real and less lonely. "Something cool. Shadow… no, that's lame. 'Violet'? Kind of on the nose. 'Nyx'?" The wolf blinked, unimpressed. "Uh… 'Mochi'? Because I am extremely hungry and your head looks soft."
The ears flattened. Message received.
"Right, no food names. 'Kurogane Junior' is off the table too. 'Umbra'?" A pause. A slight forward tilt of the head. The thread gave a tiny agreeable hum.
"Umbra," he said, and smiled for the first time since the light spat him into this world. "Okay. Umbra, today we find food, and then we figure out why the tree has secret magic graffiti, and then we avoid all men with torches, and we try not to die in a hilarious manner. Deal?"
Umbra stood, stretched like a cat that had read a manual on how to be elegant, and set off along the not-path.
Ryo took one last look at the rune-faint hollow and, on impulse, pressed his fingers to the circle. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know if it mattered. He whispered, so soft even the forest had to lean in: "Thank you."
Then he followed his wolf into the gray.
He did not see the handprint he left behind—a shadow of shadow, five petals of darker wood—sink into the circle and vanish as if accepted.
As he walked, hunger was a drum. Fear was a violin string plucked now and then by a breeze that smelled like iron. But between them, there was a third instrument he hadn't expected: a small, bright brass thing that played a jaunty note whenever Umbra glanced back to check if he was keeping up. Hope is rude like that. It shows up in places where it has no right to be, tracks mud onto your carpet, and still makes you feel better.
They pushed deeper. Somewhere far above, something vast and silver turned its head and watched the forest as if remembering a different age, a different kind of story. It almost smiled.
Ryo didn't see that either. He just saw, finally, the broken-tooth angle of stone through trees: a ruin, shouldered by roots, its doorway promising shelter and maybe the bones of secrets to gnaw.
"Dungeon?" he breathed, half thrilled, half ready to run.
Umbra's violet eyes reflected the ruin's darkness like twin lanterns.
"Let's not call it a dungeon," Ryo amended. "Let's call it… 'Breakfast.'"
The forest laughed quietly in leaves, either kindly or not at all.