The poison roared in Soren's veins, a final, violent surge that sent a gout of black bile into the back of his throat, yet he didn't succumb.
He gritted his teeth until his gums bled, forcing his lungs to draw in the stagnant air of the log, one shallow, agonizing breath at a time.
Slowly but surely, the peak hours of the poison passed. The white-hot spikes faded into a dull, throbbing ache, and the kaleidoscope of violet light receded to the edges of his vision once again.
He was still dying, still freezing, and still starving, but he was awake.
He lay there in the silence of the hollow log; his eyes fixed on the tiny patch of gray moonlight visible through the opening.
He was a seven-year-old boy in the Forest of No Return, armed with a piece of junk and a heart full of poison.
He reached out his free hand and felt the floor of the log.
His fingers brushed against something hard and smooth; not wood, and not stone.
He pulled it closer, his vision flickering as he tried to focus in the dark.
It was a shard of white bone. It was old, and seemed to have been polished smooth by time, but a jagged notch had been carved into it.
Staring at it, Soren began to realize he wasn't the first person the tribe had thrown away.
He wasn't the first "Guest" to seek shelter in this rot.
But as he clutched the bone and the knife, a terrifying thought took root in his mind; a thought that was more dangerous than any poison.
The ones before me died because they were waiting for someone to find them.
I will live because I have nothing left to find me.
The first night of banishment was almost over, but in the hollow of a dead tree, the Nameless Guest had stopped waiting for the world to end; instead, He was now waiting for the sun to rise so he could begin to destroy it.
-------
The dawn did not break over the Forest of No Return; it simply bled into it.
Even when the first orange-red light of the morning filtered through the interlocking canopy, it didn't bring warmth, instead It brought with it a cold, clinical clarity that made the hollow log feel less like a fortress and more like a coffin for Soren.
Soren awoke not to the sound of birds, but to the sound of his own heart; a slow, sludge-heavy thumping that felt like a drum being played underwater.
His body was a map of agony. The night had been a war, and though he had survived, the casualties were still surgically etched onto his skin.
His fingers were stiff, the joints locking into place like rusted hinges, and his legs felt as though they had been replaced by pillars of frozen lead.
But worse than the cold, worse than the lingering burn of the Tranquil Poison, was the hunger.
It wasn't the polite hunger of a skipped meal. It was a predatory, internal devouring.
It felt as if the thirty poisons, having failed to stop his heart, had turned their attention to his stomach, clawing at the lining of his gut in search of fuel.
Soren dragged himself to the mouth of the log; every movement of his being a barter with pain.
He pushed his head out into the morning air, and for a moment, the world spun.
The hallucinations: the dizzying, violet-tinted flickers that he still attributed to his rotting brain, flared even stronger in the morning light.
The gray moss on the rocks seemed to vibrate with a sickly, iridescent hum, and the very air looked heavy, as if he were breathing through a veil of thin, translucent gauze.
"Just move," He hissed at himself, his voice nothing more than a dry wheeze.
'Water first. If you don't find water, the poison will thicken until your blood turns to stone.' He reminded himself.
All the knowledge he had been stealing from the tribe's ancient scrolls can finally begin paying their dividends.
Forcing his body out of the log, he fell onto the damp, thicket-strewn floor of the forest.
He gripped the rusted paring knife in his right hand, and the notched white bone in his left.
They were the only anchors he had to reality.
The forest in the morning was a cathedral of gray.
The massive trees, the ones he had seen as twisted giants in the dark, were now revealed to be ancient, dying sentinels covered in parasitic vines.
There was no undergrowth here, only a thick carpet of decaying needles and the occasional cluster of translucent, ghost-white mushrooms that looked like tiny, upturned skulls.
Soren began to crawl; walking felt like an impossibility to him at the moment; his balance was gone, and his vision was too fractured to trust his feet.
He moved like an insect, dragging his weight forward with his elbows, his eyes fixed on the slope of the land.
Water moved downwars, and if he followed the dip in the limestone ridges, he would eventually find a trickle, a pool, or a death-trap.
However, while it was a difficult task in thought, the physical effort required was monumental.
Within minutes, the cold sweat of exhaustion was already stinging his eyes, mixing with the grime of the Outer Wastelands.
He passed a cluster of the white mushrooms and paused. His stomach roared, a violent, cramping sensation that made him double over in the dirt.
'Are they poisonous?' he wondered, staring at the pale fungi.
'Or are they just food?'
He couldn't recall reading about these kinds from the ancestral scrolls, the hunger and pain weren't allowing him such benefits.
So he reached out a trembling hand; but as he moved closer, his "vision" spiked.
The mushrooms stopped look white; and now they looked like they were dripping with a viscous, black ichor, the same color as the poison in his veins.
Soren jolted back in fright, his heart racing.
Had he just stumbled into one of the ingredients of the poison he was inflicted with, or was the forest just playing a joke on him by showing him his own rot in the dirt?
Hacking a wheeze, he pushed himself past the shrooms, his thirst gradually becoming a more pressing blade than his hunger.
Then after an hour of agonizing progress, a distance that a healthy boy could have covered in minutes, he heard it.
A soft, rhythmic dripping sound.
He rounded a jagged outcrop of limestone and found a small, natural basin formed by the roots of a tree at least three times the sizes of the ones he had been seeing so far.
It wasn't a stream; it was a collection of rainwater and dew that had filtered through the mossy bark.
The water was dark, and tea-colored due to the tannins of the oak, and a thin film of dust sat on the surface.
To Soren however, it was a king's ransom.
He didn't even care about the parasites or the dirt. He simply plunged his face into the basin, lapping at the water with the desperation of a dying animal.
It was bitingly cold and tasted of earth and ancient wood, but as it slid down his parched throat, he felt a momentary reprieve.
The fire in his chest dimmed by a fraction of a degree.
He sat back against the root, gasping for air, his face dripping with the dark water.
For the first time since the banishment, he looked at his surroundings with something other than pure terror.
And that was when he noticed it;
The forest was quiet... too quiet.
In the House of Ignis, even the lowliest servant knew the tales of the Forest of No Return.
They said the trees didn't just grow; they moved when you weren't looking.
They said the shadows had teeth.
Soren had always thought they were just stories meant to keep children from wandering too far from the tribe's fires. But as he sat by the oak, he realized the stories were wrong...
The forest didn't need to move. It just had to wait.
He felt a prickle of unease on the back of his neck.
It wasn't the cold. It was the sensation of being watched; not by a person, but by something that measured time in months, or years even.
He gripped his rusted knife tighter. His vision flickering again and again.
The shadows between the trees seemed to deepen, becoming more solid, more intentional.
Then he saw a shape; a long, low silhouette that blended perfectly with the gray bark and the black thorns.
It was about twenty yards away, standing perfectly still.
It was a Shadow-Cat, a lean, starving predator of the Wastelands.
its fur the color of charcoal and its eyes two pits of dull, flat amber.
It wasn't pouncing. It was observing. It saw the trembling boy, the black bruises on his skin, and the way he couldn't even stand.
It saw a meal that was already half-decayed.
Soren didn't move.
He couldn't even if he wanted to.
The Tranquil Poison, sensing his fear, chose that moment to surge, locking his muscles in a foreboding paralysis.
He sat pinned against the oak root, his rusted knife held in a hand that felt like it belonged to someone else.
The cat took a single step forward. Its paws made no sound on the thickets.
It opened its mouth, revealing needle-thin teeth and a tongue as black as Soren's own poisoned blood.
'I am seven years old,' Soren thought, his mind surprisingly cold.
'And I am about to be eaten by a shadow because I was too thirsty to look up.'
The cat crouched, its haunches tensing.
Soren watched it through the violet haze of his failing eyes, and for a heartbeat, the world went translucent once again.
He didn't see the cat's fur; he saw the tension in its tendons, the rhythmic pulse of its hunger, and the path it was about to take through the air.
He didn't have power. He didn't have a technique. He only had the knife and the absolute, crushing certainty that he didn't want to die in the dirt.
The Shadow-Cat didn't growl. In the Forest of No Return, noise was a luxury for those who didn't mind being hunted themselves. It simply launched.
It became a blur of charcoal-gray fur and predatory intent, a literal shadow detaching itself from the gloom of the ancient oak.
Soren's world slowed to the crawl of freezing honey.
The "hallucination" reached a fever pitch, the violet veins in the air vibrating with a high-pitched hum that only he could hear.
He didn't see the cat's face; he saw the arc of its leap, a jagged trajectory of light displacement that his dying brain mapped out against the gray backdrop of the woods.
He couldn't stand. He couldn't dodge. But he could tilt.
As the beast reached the zenith of its leap, its claws unsheathed like ten obsidian needles aimed at Soren's throat.
Soren threw his weight to the left. It wasn't a graceful movement; it was a desperate, ugly lurch.
His shoulder slammed into the rough bark of the oak root, and the Shade-Cat's weight hit him not in the chest, but on his upper arm.
Bang!
The impact was like being struck by a bag of wet stones.
Soren throat released a thin, ragged screech as the cat's claws raked through his tunic and into the necrotic bruises of his shoulder.
But in the next moment, the Shadow-Cat recoiled; a sharp, hacking snarl escaped its throat, caused not by the physical resistance, but by something extremely toxic.
The Shadow-Cat itself had an oblivious error in its calculations. It had expected to hit a soft, yielding flesh; but instead, its claws sank deep into the areas where the Tranquil Poison had concentrated.
The are where patches of skin that were tough, leathery, and saturated with the black ichor of thirty venoms accumulated.
Its sensitive pads and claws had come into direct contact with the concentrated essence of the Matron's malice.
Sensing the momentary lapse, Soren didn't wait for the cat to recover.
He didn't have the strength to swing the knife, so he simply fell forward, using his entire body weight to drive the rusted paring knife toward the charcoal shape in front of him.