'The walls tried to eat me.
I kept running.'
Barefoot on cold stone slick with blood and memory. Her breath came out in short, shaky gasps, and her heart pounding with a rhythm not her own.
She wasn't sure how she had gotten out.
There had been no guards outside her prison, no spells binding those iron bars. There was only the door, slightly open. As if waiting for her to run and disappear.
As if it wanted her gone too.
Now? Sylvera's body ached, her magic curled inside her like a dying ember. But worse than the exhaustion was the emptiness―a hole carved beneath her ribs, still longing for Lorain.
He hadn't come that morning.
Or the day before.
And a part of her hated how terrible that felt.
'He's a monster,' Sylvera had reminded herself. All over again, but something never listened. She wanted to be with him even though she knew it would end in a disaster.
With one of them dead.
Or worse.
'You're still wondering,'
'How I did it.'
'How deep it goes.'
His voice slithered through her memory like a blade through silk. That smirk. That breath. That impossible power that bent the air to his will and made even her magic whimper.
She had kissed a dead man.
And something ancient had kissed her back.
'No.' Sylvera clenched her fists tight.
'Stop thinking about him.'
She shook her head hard, forcing the thought out as the castle narrowed around her. Arched ceilings dipped lower, walls pulsing faintly with veins of violet light. The deeper she went, the more it felt like walking through a creature's throat.
She counted her steps. Not to calm herself—just to remind herself she still existed.
'One. Two. Three. Left turn.'
THUD.
A stone door slammed shut behind her.
Sylvera flinched, turning around. There was no one and nothing but the ruins of a castle trapped somewhere in time. Her eyes flicked toward the window.
The sky was bleeding shades of rust and wounds.
And all around the castle, stretching into the endless unknown, a forest loomed. Hungry. Moving.
'...waiting.'
The castle didn't take her escape quietly.
As soon as Sylvera had reached the final hallway, the one that led to the last gates, shadows peeled from the walls like skin from bone.
They came in waves—first the courtiers, lurching from doorways and alcoves, faces half-rotted but still painted in powdered white and noble rouge.
Stitch-lines pulled their mouths into smiles they could no longer feel. They twitched like broken marionettes, their heads snapping toward her with an unnatural jolt.
Once human. Once titled.
Now only puppets.
Lorian's puppets.
'Don't stop.'
'Don't look at them.'
Sylvera forced herself to keep running.
Behind them floated the Ghostly Handmaidens—silent, glowing figures with hollow eyes and mouths opened in eternal screams. Black tears slid down their translucent cheeks, hissing against the stone. They drifted soundlessly after her, weeping death, trailing memories.
And then came the Husk Knights.
The sound hit first—metal on bone. A screech, high and jagged.
Then the smell—rust, rot, and the sourness of long-dead men.
They marched in formation. No flesh. No breath. Just haunted armor, leaking mist from broken visors. Their blades dragged against the walls, carving sparks like war had returned to the castle.
'You waited too long. You trusted the silence. Fool.'
Sylvera ran faster.
Arches twisted into fanged maws. Hallways narrowed, lengthened, buckled. Walls slammed shut behind her with deafening finality. The floor cracked beneath her feet, trying to hurl her down into a pit of teeth and memory.
But Sylvera didn't stop.
Pain screamed through her legs. Her magic flickered, raw and unreliable. Every heartbeat felt like borrowed time.
Still, she ran.
'I am not his. I will not die in that cage.'
'I will not become one of them.'
Ahead—light.
The final gates were only a few steps away now, etched in blackwood, carved with screaming faces that twisted as she approached.
She didn't hesitate.
With a feral cry, she slammed her shoulder and her magic into the doors. They exploded open with a sickening crunch—like thunder breaking bone.
Cold air slammed into her lungs.
She stumbled out, gasping, trembling—
—and froze.
The Cursed Woods stretched before her. But they were wrong. Unnerving. No moonlight filtered through these trees.
They were black, not with shadow but with malice—bark like wet obsidian, leaves whispering in a language that twisted her stomach. The ground writhed beneath twisted roots. The forest didn't feel alive.
It felt sentient. Watching.
Behind her, the castle screamed.
Not a cry of pain.
'A command.'
The stones trembled. Somewhere, something massive stirred.
Sylvera didn't look back in fear. She looked back in fury.
"I'm not yours," she whispered.
And she stepped into the woods.
The trees closed behind her like a mouth.
As Sylvera ran deeper into the forest, the trees grew darker and more twisted, their blackened branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers. The light behind her faded quickly, swallowed by the thick canopy above.
Every breath she took was cold and sharp, like breathing in smoke and frost.
Her feet, cut and raw from the stone floors of the castle, sank into damp soil with each step.
But she didn't stop. She couldn't.
Yet the deeper she ran, the more the forest seemed to shift around her. Trails that looked solid one moment disappeared the next, turning into overgrown paths or looping back to where she had just come from.
It was as if the forest wanted her to stay lost.
And then came the shadows.
Too tall. Too thin. Moving where nothing should move. She didn't see them. She felt them. A presence brushing the nape of her neck. A phantom hand ghosting her shoulder. A whisper of cold air when the wind didn't blow.
Every time she turned, nothing.
No footsteps. No breathing. Just trees—and that suffocating certainty that something was close enough to touch her.
'Keep moving. Don't stop. Don't… think.'
She forced her legs forward, even as dread coiled in her chest like a second heartbeat. She had escaped the castle. She had escaped him. There was no going back.
Whatever the forest was, it had to be better than Lorian's cage.
Then she saw it.
A corpse lashed to a tree. Not by rope.
By its own entrails.
Skin clung to bone in sick, dry patches. The skull lolled toward her—its hollow eyes fixed, deliberate. And its hand—its hand—was raised.
Pointing behind her.
Pointing back.
Sylvera stopped breathing.
'It's a message…'
'Go back.'
Her feet itched to turn. But no. No. She knew this trick. Fear, dressed up like reason. She'd danced to that song before—with golden lies, and kisses that tasted like fate.
He called that love. She called that a fever dream.
And maybe the forest was worse. Maybe it chewed up anything that dared leave his grasp. Maybe the skeleton had once thought she could run too.
Sylvera looked it dead in the face.
"I'm not turning back."
She stepped around it, breath sharp, fists clenched. Her legs trembled, but she kept walking. Past the bones. Past the warning. Into whatever wanted her blood next.
Because she wasn't just the girl who had healed a dying man once. She wasn't soft anymore. She remembered the cage. She remembered what love cost.
And then the forest breathed around her, thick with power, and sighed in Lorian's voice—soft, loving, and full of hunger.
"Come home, little witch," it said. "The woods always give me back what's mine."
Sylvera stood still, heart pounding, caught between nightmare and nightmare, and knew—this was not an escape.
Sylvera's lungs burned as she broke through the forest's tangled grip, stumbling into a moonlit clearing where, for one breathless moment, she dared to hope.
The sky opened above her, stars cold and bright, and the oppressive whispers of the woods fell silent behind her like a curtain dropping at the end of a nightmare. She drew in a shaking breath, her chest rising with relief—and then the air turned to ice.
The temperature plummeted so fast it stole the breath from her throat. Every hair on her body stood on end as the clearing filled with a presence too massive to ignore.
A figure emerged from the far side, towering and wrong—eight feet tall, maybe more, its body a shifting, seething mass of black shadows and twisted antlers that curled like dead branches. Its eyes glowed like embers sunk into the hollows of a face that didn't fully exist, constantly flickering, changing, never quite solid.
It stopped, looming just beyond reach, and sniffed the air. "You… smell of Lorian," it rasped, the voice low and scraping, like bone dragged over stone, the sound wrapping around her like vines.
Sylvera opened her mouth—to speak, to deny, to scream—but the creature moved with inhuman speed.
A clawed hand lashed out, striking her across the clearing.
Sylvera hit the ground hard, the breath knocked from her lungs, pain blooming in her ribs as hot blood trickled down her temple.
Her vision swam, and above her, the monster loomed even closer, its hunched form casting long shadows that slithered like living things. Its breath reeked of rot, of meat left too long in the sun, of earth freshly turned over a shallow grave.
"His little pet," it hissed, taloned hand rising for the killing strike. Sylvera could only stare—helpless, bleeding, and terribly awake. "You should have never come here."