It happened between one step and the next, the way most bad things in Red Rain seemed to happen. No warning. No build. The convoy simply stopped being a convoy and became a scattering of people standing very still, staring at things that weren't there.
Phthisis felt it before he saw it. A pressure behind his eyes, faint and probing, like something running a thumb along the inside of his skull looking for a seam to pull.
Then he was looking at himself.
Standing between two red trunks, maybe ten feet off, wearing his own face and his own clothes and holding itself with his own loose, unbothered posture. Even the knife was right, tucked the way he tucked it, edge in.
His smile fell.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. It simply wasn't there anymore, gone the way breath goes when something lands wrong in the chest, and for a moment his hands forgot what they were supposed to be doing.
He didn't ask why.
He didn't wonder how.
Some part of him already understood questions like that would go nowhere useful, and some smaller, quieter part of him understood something else entirely: that this was the shape the forest had chosen for a reason, and the reason wasn't random.
He looked at himself and felt something curdle low in his chest that he didn't examine too closely. It wasn't fear. He was fairly certain of that. It sat closer to disgust, and disgust needed a target, and the only target standing in front of him happened to be wearing his own skin.
"...Rude," he muttered, mostly to have said something.
The other him didn't answer. It only watched, patient, the way the forest itself had been watching for days.
Somewhere to his left, Korath made a sound Phthisis had never heard him make. Not a shout. Something smaller and worse, cut off halfway, like a word caught behind teeth. Phthisis glanced over on reflex and caught the moment it happened, the exact instant Korath's easy, constant expression simply stopped existing, replaced by something raw and unrehearsed. The prince's face went bloodless first, then flooded red just as fast, his jaw locked hard enough to ache, both hands curled into fists that trembled without shaking.
He was looking at something Phthisis couldn't see, and whatever it was, Korath wasn't backing away from it. His feet stayed planted. His eyes stayed open. There was fury in his face where fear should have made him small, the kind of fury that only lived in people who'd learned a long time ago that being afraid wasn't allowed to look like being afraid.
A woman's voice, or something wearing one, drifted faintly on the wind, too soft for Phthisis to catch the words.
He looked away. That felt like the only decent thing he could offer.
Further along, one of the knights flinched like he'd been struck, sword half drawn before his body seemed to remember it belonged to him, and went rigid staring at a stretch of empty road like it had said something unforgivable. Another simply stumbled backward, one step, then two, until his shoulders hit a tree and stayed there, breathing hard, eyes fixed on nothing Phthisis recognized as a person at all, just a shape standing where a shape shouldn't be. Neither knight looked at the other. Neither knight looked anywhere but forward, transfixed by whatever the forest had reached in and pulled out of them.
Nobody spoke to explain what they saw.
Nobody asked what anyone else saw.
That, Phthisis thought distantly, was its own kind of answer.
The other him took a single step closer, and something about the movement made the hair rise on Phthisis's arms, not because it was threatening, but because it was correct. Every motion, every shift of weight, matched so precisely that for a moment he wondered if the forest had been watching him specifically, longer than the others, learning him the way it seemed to have learned every fork in its own road.
"You're not me," Phthisis said quietly.
The thing tilted its head, exactly the way he did.
"Aye," he added, mostly to himself now, "figured that much."
The knights moved first. All at once, like the decision had been made somewhere above their heads and simply arrived in their bodies at the same instant, they closed ranks around Korath, blades out, shoulders forming a wall between the prince and whatever the rest of them were seeing. It was fast. Practiced. The kind of formation soldiers drilled a thousand times before they ever needed it for real.
Nobody moved toward Phthisis.
He noted that the way he noted most things, without much surprise. He'd noticed the ease of his own recruitment back in the capital, the empty line that should have been full of better fighters, the official's bored disinterest the moment he said human. He understood now, standing alone at the edge of the treeline with something wearing his face ten feet away, exactly what that ease had been. Not luck. Not charity.
They needed bodies between the prince and whatever this road eventually cost. Bodies were easier to find than loyalty, and far easier than replacing a prince.
He almost laughed again. It seemed to be becoming a habit out here.
The forest held its breath around all of them, red branches motionless, the smell of old blood thick enough to taste. Whatever waited behind the shapes it had made didn't lunge. It didn't need to. It simply watched them watching themselves, patient as it had been patient for days, gathering something Phthisis didn't have a name for yet.
Then, slowly, the pressure behind his eyes began to ease.
The other him didn't vanish so much as stop being finished, edges softening like wet paint, until there was only a red trunk standing where a person had been. Along the road the knights lowered their swords one at a time, uncertain, glancing at each other with the specific relief of men convinced their formation had done something.
Korath exhaled like he'd been holding his breath for an hour. His hands were still shaking. He didn't apologize for it, and nobody asked him to.
"We held," one of the knights said, low, mostly to himself. "Whatever that was. We held."
Nobody corrected him.
Phthisis stood at the edge of the trees a moment longer, looking at the spot where himself had been standing, and thought about the way the pressure had eased not when the knights closed around Korath, but a breath before, right as he'd said you're not me out loud into the quiet.
He said nothing about that either.
Some things, he was beginning to understand, were better left for the forest to keep.