Victor woke to pain.
Not all at once—pain didn't do him the courtesy of a clean return. It arrived in layers, like someone turning volume knobs one by one until the world finally decided to be loud again.
First: the ache in his ribs, deep and blunt, like a bruise wrapped around bone.
Second: the sting in his forearm, hot and pulsing, each heartbeat a small argument with torn flesh.
Third: the scrape of his throat, dry from breathing dirt and fear.
He didn't open his eyes immediately.
He listened.
Wind through leaves. A few birds calling from a distance. The soft, constant movement of a stream nearby.
No growls.
No padding steps.
No breathing that wasn't his.
Victor let out a slow breath, then regretted it as his ribs answered with sharp protest. He tightened his jaw and forced the next inhale to be shallow.
Okay.
Alive.
He opened his eyes.
Green canopy above. Sunlight fractured through branches in thin blades. Dust motes drifted in lazy spirals like the forest had nothing better to do.
He tried to sit and hissed through his teeth as his side flared. He rolled instead, using his good arm to push himself up in stages. His vision swam. He waited for it to settle.
When it did, he looked around.
Three bodies lay where they'd fallen.
The wolves were still. Heavy. Wrongly heavy. Their limbs rested at angles that made the outcome impossible to pretend away.
Victor stared at them for a long moment.
There was no triumph in him. No satisfaction.
Only a quiet, exhausted fact: he had been forced to make them stop moving, or he would not be breathing right now.
He looked down at himself.
His forearm was torn in a crescent where teeth had found purchase. Blood had dried in dark streaks along his skin and soaked into his sleeve. His shin was smeared red. Dirt clung to everything.
His hands.
His clothes.
His breath.
And in his fist—
His knife.
He hadn't remembered closing his fingers around it. But the blade was there, slick and ugly in his grip, as if his body had decided it would not let go until it was certain there was nothing left to fight.
Victor loosened his fingers slowly. Pain flaring in his joints from overuse.
He didn't drop it. He set it down beside his knee like he was placing a live wire on the ground.
Then he looked at it.
The steel was scratched. Notched at the edge, as if it had met something harder than it should have. A tool abused and still standing.
His mouth tasted like iron.
His body wanted to collapse again. He could feel it—muscles heavy, joints slow, head floating.
But he didn't.
Not yet.
Victor's number one rule wasn't a philosophy. It wasn't a motto. It was survival made simple.
Don't pass out where you can't control what happens next.
Victor forced himself upright. He stood slowly, weight shifting carefully onto his good leg. His ribs stabbed at him. He paused, breathing shallow, letting the pain become background.
He scanned the tree line.
Nothing.
The forest had already moved on. Predators and prey had retreated to their routines. The world didn't care that he'd almost died.
That was useful information.
He picked up the knife and slid it into his belt without haste. No flourish. No comfort.
Just reality.
Then he did the next necessary thing.
He moved.
Each step was controlled. Each movement an argument with his own body. His shin protested. His ribs protested. His bitten forearm throbbed like it was filling with heat.
He followed the sound of running water until the stream came into view.
Victor sank to his knees at the bank and stared at it for a moment. The water moved clean and fast over stones. It looked like mercy.
He didn't trust mercy.
He checked upstream and downstream anyway, eyes narrowing, listening.
Still nothing.
He leaned down and drank, careful not to gulp too hard. The cold shocked his system. It hurt in a way that felt good, because it meant his body was still responding.
He splashed water over his forearm and flinched hard.
The wound burned. The skin around it was angry red.
Infection, a distant thought, slid closer.
He didn't have bandages.
He didn't have antiseptic.
He had water, cloth, and time—none of them in abundance.
Victor tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt with his teeth and free hand. The fabric ripped reluctantly. He wrapped it around his forearm tight enough to apply pressure without cutting off circulation.
He tested his fingers.
They moved.
Good.
He cleaned his shin next, washing blood away until the scratch revealed itself as shallow but raw. He wrapped it too, less tightly.
When he was done, he sat back on the bank, breathing shallow, letting his heart rate slow.
He looked at his reflection again.
Same young face.
Same hard eyes.
Now with blood and exhaustion making him look even older than he should.
He hated the mismatch, because it meant something had been taken from him. Not the memories—that gap was already a wall. Something else.
Context.
Reason.
A map of why.
Victor pushed that thought away.
If he couldn't access the past, he would build forward.
He stood, tested his weight again, and started moving downstream.
Water always led somewhere and it usually meant life. Life meant people, or at least the signs of them.
And if there were people—
There was information.
He walked for what felt like an hour, maybe two, keeping the stream close. His pace was slow. He stopped often, not for rest—rest was a luxury—but to listen and make sure he wasn't being followed.
His ribs stayed angry. The pain wasn't worsening, but it wasn't fading either. He knew what a cracked rib felt like.
At some point, the trees thinned again and the ground leveled out. The stream widened slightly and the bank softened into mud.
Victor stepped onto the softer earth and immediately paused.
He stared down.
There were tracks.
Not his.
Not animal.
Human.
A boot print with a heel. The tread faint, but real. Overlapping marks—someone had walked here, then someone else, maybe lighter, maybe smaller, following the same route.
Victor's breath caught.
Not relief.
Not safety.
Just the first hard proof that he was not alone in this world.
He crouched and pressed two fingers into the print.
Not fresh. The edges were softened. But not ancient either.
Recent enough.
Victor stood slowly and followed the direction they pointed.
Careful.
Quiet.
Because now the forest had more than teeth in it.
It had eyes.
The prints drifted away from the stream toward firmer ground. Grass replaced mud. Stones replaced roots. The terrain opened in thin patches where sunlight reached the floor without being shredded by branches.
He kept the stream within earshot as long as he could.
Then he lost it.
The moment the water sound faded, the world felt bigger. Less anchored. More willing to swallow him.
Victor slowed and forced himself to mark direction by the sun, by slope, by the feel of the air against his face.
He adjusted his knife in his belt so the handle sat clean against his palm if he needed it.
Not because he wanted to use it.
Because wanting didn't matter.
His forearm itched under the cloth wrap. His ribs complained with every deeper breath. The injury wasn't healing—it was only being carried.
He kept moving anyway.
He crested a low rise and the landscape changed beyond it.
Not drastically. Not like stepping into another world. Just enough to break the pattern.
The ground ahead was packed flatter, as if it had been walked and wheeled over many times. Grass grew shorter there, stomped down. Stones were pushed aside. The earth held shallow ruts.
A road.
Dirt, worn hard. Wide enough for carts.
Victor stared at it like it was a door.
He didn't step onto it immediately.
Roads meant people.
People meant rules he didn't know yet.
He moved parallel to the road instead, keeping to the tree line, using brush for cover. His ribs punished him for it—every crouch a flare, every detour a pull—but he did it anyway.
Because direct paths were for people who believed in friendly intentions.
Victor kept the road in sight as he moved, never close enough to touch it, never far enough to lose it entirely. He measured distance by sound—boots would scuff differently on packed dirt, carts would creak, voices would carry farther than they should.
He heard none of that.
Which meant either no one was nearby—
—or someone was being careful.
He slowed further, every step deliberate, letting the ache in his ribs dictate pace instead of pride. Pain was information. Ignoring it had already nearly killed him once.
He picked a line of travel that kept him screened by brush and uneven ground, places where sightlines broke and movement could be paused without notice. If he was being watched, he wanted the watcher to work for it.
Victor didn't know the rules of this place yet.
But he knew one thing with certainty.
The road wasn't safety.
It was exposure.
And when he chose to step onto it, it would be because he had decided the risk—not because the world had forced his hand.