He did not rush.
That, above all else, was new.
The Land of Barrows stretched endlessly, its low hills and burial mounds repeating themselves like a bad pattern. At first glance, it all looked the same — stone, ash, broken markers. But slowly, painfully, he began to notice the differences.
Subtle slopes.
Wind patterns.
The way sound carried — or didn't.
He followed the Roman's marks whenever he could find them.
They were not everywhere. Sometimes they vanished for days. Other times they appeared suddenly, carved into stone or half-hidden beneath layers of ash, as if the land itself had tried to swallow them and failed.
Arrows.
Symbols.
Short phrases.
Warnings, more often than directions.
He learned to read them like instincts rather than instructions.
Do not linger.Do not climb.Do not enter.
The ruins were the worst.
They appeared without warning — broken walls rising from the earth, collapsed arches, fragments of structures that suggested something once lived here. Something organized. Something that had believed in shelter.
He never went close.
Even from a distance, the ruins felt wrong. Too still. Too quiet. As if the land around them held its breath. He circled wide every time, heart tight, ignoring the temptation of shade, cover, or whatever answers might be buried inside.
Whatever lived there now was not something he wanted to meet.
Survival became routine.
Not easy — never easy — but familiar. He ate when he could. Drank sparingly. Slept hidden, wedged between stones or pressed into shallow depressions where his silhouette broke against the ground.
His mind followed suit.
The fractures didn't heal, but they stabilized.
He remembered more of himself now. Not everything — maybe never everything — but enough to feel like a person again. He knew his thoughts. His humor. His fear. He even recognized the way he coped with it: dry, distant, refusing to panic until panic was the only option left.
Sometimes he spoke to the Roman in his head.
You really did plan this, didn't you?Paranoid bastard.
Then came the chase.
It started with a sound.
A low vibration through the ground, barely noticeable at first — like distant thunder without a sky to match it. He froze, instincts screaming too late.
Something moved behind him.
Fast.
He ran.
This was not the Burned Forest. There were no towering trunks to hide behind, no familiar deadfall to navigate. The terrain here was uneven, treacherous, unfamiliar — and he knew, with sudden clarity, that whatever hunted him knew it far better than he did.
Stone tore at his boots. His breath burned. His chest tightened as panic finally broke through whatever restraint he had built.
He didn't look back.
He didn't need to.
The sound was enough.
Closer. Heavier. Wrong.
His thoughts scattered.
Pray.Run.Don't fall.
He nearly missed it.
A stone marker — old, cracked, half-buried — marked with symbols he recognized. Roman. Urgent. He swerved toward it without thinking, crossing the invisible line it marked just as something slammed into the ground behind him.
The world lurched.
A sharp crack echoed as the earth shifted. Stone collapsed inward, chains or weighted slabs snapping into place beneath the ash. A trap — ancient, brutal, precise.
The creature screamed.
Not in pain — in rage.
The sound punched the air from his lungs. He didn't stop running. He didn't slow down. He fled until his legs failed and his vision blurred, collapsing behind a mound of broken stone where the sound could no longer reach him.
He lay there shaking, face pressed to the dirt, laughing weakly through clenched teeth.
"…You really did," he whispered. "More than one trick."
The Roman had been careful.
Careful enough to survive longer than most.
Careful enough to leave a path — not to safety, but to possibility.
And as he lay there, heart still racing, one thought settled clearly in his mind:
He was not the first to walk this land.
And if he wanted to live, he wouldn't be the last to learn its rules.