Chapter 2: The Watched
[The Moors — Dawn]
Something poked Nathan's boot.
Not hard. A tentative prod, like a child testing whether a sleeping dog would bite. Nathan kept his eyes closed, kept his breathing steady, and catalogued what his other senses were telling him. Cool air. Bird sounds—except not birds, exactly. Something higher, more melodic, with harmonics that didn't exist in nature as he knew it. And close, very close, the sound of breathing that wasn't his own.
Multiple breathers. A dozen, maybe more. Surrounding him.
Nathan opened his eyes.
Twelve creatures stared back from a distance of roughly two feet.
They were the size of large rabbits, brown-skinned, with round bodies and short limbs and—most distinctly—trunk-like noses that protruded from flat faces. Big dark eyes. No visible teeth. They stood in a loose semicircle around his hollow, packed shoulder to shoulder, every nose pointed at him with intense concentration.
Nobody moved.
Nathan didn't breathe. The creatures didn't breathe. The forest held still, as if even the trees were watching to see what happened next.
One of the creatures—slightly larger than the others, with a darker patch across its forehead—leaned forward and extended its trunk toward Nathan's left boot. The tip hovered an inch away. Touched leather. Recoiled.
The creature turned to its companions and made a rapid chittering sound that Nathan could only describe as reporting back.
"Hello," Nathan said.
The effect was immediate and total. All twelve creatures scattered in twelve different directions, chittering at maximum volume, trunks flailing, stubby legs churning through moss and leaves. Within two seconds, the clearing was empty. Nathan sat alone in his hollow, hand half-raised in what had been intended as a peaceful wave.
"Great first impression," he muttered.
---
He gave them ten minutes. They gave him five.
The dark-patched one reappeared first, peering around a fern with one eye and half a trunk visible. Then two more, higher up, watching from a branch. Then the rest, filtering back in ones and twos, chittering amongst themselves in a way that was unmistakably conversational. Nathan caught tones—urgent, questioning, cautious, and one that sounded an awful lot like I told you so.
He sat still and let them acclimate. Same principle as a skittish patient in the ER: don't chase, don't crowd, just be present and nonthreatening until they decide you're safe.
By the time the sun was fully up, the creatures had reformed their semicircle at a more respectful distance of about four feet. The dark-patched one—Nathan was already thinking of it as the scout—sat directly in front of him, trunk curled, watching with the patient intensity of a tenured professor waiting for a student to answer a question.
"I don't suppose any of you speak English," Nathan said.
Twelve blank stares. One creature scratched its ear with a hind foot.
"Didn't think so."
He stood slowly. The creatures tensed but didn't run. Progress.
---
[The Moors — Mid-Morning]
Nathan spent the morning doing what he did best: testing hypotheses under bad conditions.
Hypothesis one: the gravity thing wasn't a dream. He stepped off a boulder and hovered. Confirmed. Three of the trunk-creatures fell off their perch in apparent shock. The rest chittered furiously at each other.
Hypothesis two: he could control direction, not just altitude. He leaned forward and drifted across the clearing at walking speed. The headache returned immediately—a low throb behind his right eye—but the movement was smoother than yesterday. Muscle memory, except the muscle in question didn't exist in any anatomy textbook.
Hypothesis three: he could affect other objects.
Nathan found a rock the size of his fist. He set it on a flat stump. Stared at it. Willed it to rise the same way he willed himself to rise—not with force but with permission, as if asking gravity to let go.
The rock trembled. Shifted. Lifted one inch off the wood.
Pain lanced through Nathan's skull. Sharp, bright, immediate. The rock dropped. He pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye socket and breathed through his nose until the white sparks in his vision faded.
So. Moving himself was one cost. Moving other things was a higher cost. And pushing too hard produced results that felt worryingly like the precursor to a hemorrhagic stroke.
He didn't try the rock again.
Flight, though—flight he practiced. The clearing gave him twenty feet of open space between trees, and he used it like a hallway, hovering at chest height, drifting forward and back. Acceleration was the problem. He pushed for speed once, and the result was a lurch that sent him careening sideways into a mushroom patch. He hit face-first. The mushrooms burst in a cloud of blue-gray spores that tasted like cinnamon and regret.
The trunk-creatures—wallerbogs, he'd started calling them in his head, though he had no idea if that was right or something his subconscious invented—watched every attempt with rapt attention. When he crashed into the mushrooms, one of them made a sound that was unmistakably laughter.
"Yeah, laugh it up," Nathan said, wiping spore dust from his face. "Bet you can't fly either."
The wallerbog who'd laughed twitched its trunk, which might have been agreement or might have been a sneeze.
---
[The Moors — Afternoon]
By afternoon, Nathan had established three things: he could hover indefinitely if he stayed relaxed, he could move in any direction at roughly walking speed, and anything faster or more complex cost him in headaches and what was starting to feel like caloric debt. His stomach had been growling since mid-morning. The berries from yesterday weren't cutting it.
He found more along the stream—different species this time, red-orange, smaller. He ate cautiously. No adverse effects. A nearby tree had something that looked like an apple if apples were blue and slightly luminous. He bit into it. Tart, juicy, flesh that dissolved on his tongue. Best thing he'd ever tasted.
He ate two more. Wiped juice from his chin. For just a moment, sitting on a mossy bank with juice running down his wrist and alien birdsong filling the canopy, something in his chest loosened. Not happiness, exactly. Relief. The specific relief of being alive when you shouldn't be, in a place that was strange and beautiful and not on fire.
He found the waterskin hung on a low branch near the stream, like someone had left it for him. Leather, well-made, already filled. Nathan looked around. No one visible—but the chittering from the undergrowth suggested the wallerbogs were still shadowing him. Had they left this? Could they craft leather goods?
Questions for later. He hooked the waterskin to his belt and kept walking north.
---
[The Moors — Late Afternoon]
The thorn wall appeared without warning.
One moment Nathan was walking through increasingly dense forest, pushing past hanging vines and ducking low branches. The next, the forest ended. Abruptly. Completely. As if someone had drawn a line and said nothing grows past here.
Instead, thorns. A wall of them, twenty feet high at minimum, so tightly interwoven that individual branches were indistinguishable from the mass. Each thorn was the length of Nathan's forearm and black at the tip. The wall extended in both directions as far as he could see, curving gently, describing the perimeter of something enormous.
He reached out. Stopped himself. The thorns radiated a faint warmth—not the comfortable warmth of the oak tree, but something intentional. A warning. Don't touch.
Nathan stepped back and looked up. The wall continued above the treeline, blocking the horizon. Whatever was on the other side was invisible.
This wasn't natural. Thorns didn't grow in perfect walls. Thorns didn't maintain uniform height across what appeared to be miles of perimeter. This was built. Grown, probably, but built. Engineered.
Someone or something had sealed this forest off from the rest of the world.
Nathan stood at the boundary for a long time, long enough for the light to shift from gold to amber. The wallerbogs had stopped following at some point. He was alone at the edge of the cage—or the sanctuary, depending on which side you were standing on.
He turned back.
---
[The Moors — Evening]
A clearing near his oak hollow caught the last of the day's light. A gap in the canopy, maybe thirty feet across, where the trees had pulled back as if making room for the sky.
Nathan sat in the center of it.
Golden light poured through, thick and warm, catching dust motes and drifting spores and the faint shimmer of things too small to see properly. The air smelled like wild thyme and something floral he couldn't name.
He tilted his face upward and let the warmth soak into his skin.
For thirty seconds—he counted—he wasn't a dead man in a strange forest. Wasn't a doctor without a hospital, a scientist without instruments, a human without a species. He was just a body in sunlight, warm and alive, breathing air that tasted like the world had just been made.
The thirty seconds ended. He opened his eyes.
Two wallerbogs had crept into the clearing and were sitting five feet away, trunks tilted upward, mimicking his posture exactly. Sunbathing. With him.
Nathan almost laughed. Almost.
He stood, brushed moss from his trousers, and headed back to the hollow. The wallerbogs followed at their customary four-foot distance, chittering softly to each other about whatever wallerbogs chittered about.
At the tree, Nathan settled in for his second night. The bark's warmth was already familiar. The waterskin sat heavy and reassuring at his hip. Above him, through gaps in the root structure, the first stars were appearing—too many stars, too bright, constellations he'd never seen.
He was beginning to compile the evidence. Magical forest. Living trees. Fairy creatures. A wall of thorns encircling everything. Powers he couldn't explain. A body that wasn't injured despite dying in a fire.
The picture was forming. He didn't have all the pieces yet, but the frame was taking shape: this was somewhere else entirely. Not a different country. Not a coma dream. A different world.
A black shape cut across the stars. A bird—large, dark-winged, moving fast. It circled the clearing once, banked hard, and landed on a branch directly above Nathan's hollow. Ten feet up, perfectly positioned to observe.
A raven. Bigger than any raven Nathan had ever seen, with feathers so black they seemed to absorb what little starlight reached them.
It didn't fidget. Didn't preen. Didn't make a sound. It sat on that branch and watched Nathan with eyes that caught the starlight and held it, and in those eyes was something Nathan recognized from twenty years in medicine—the look of someone paying very close attention.
Nathan met the raven's gaze. The raven held it.
Not curious like the wallerbogs. Not shy like the water fairies. This was surveillance. Deliberate, intelligent, purposeful.
"You're not just a bird," Nathan said quietly. "Are you."
The raven tilted its head. One degree. Precise.
Then it settled its wings and went still, and it did not blink for a very long time.
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