"Run faster!"
Meron's voice cut through the trees like a blade.
They were already running.
Snow burst beneath their boots in harsh white sprays as all three of them drove forward through the forest, branches clawing at sleeves and shoulders, low twigs whipping past their faces, the cold air slicing deeper into their lungs with every breath. The path had ceased to matter. They were moving in a straight line now, guided only by the scream that had ripped the silence open and the certainty that whatever had caused it was still ahead.
Icariel ran with his bow lowered but ready.
His chest burned.
Each inhale scraped raw against the inside of his throat. Each exhale vanished instantly into the frozen air. The world had narrowed to impact, breath, motion—boots striking snow, lungs seizing, heartbeat pounding hard enough to blur the edges of thought.
And beneath all of it sat one colder fact.
They were heading back toward the right. Toward the very direction the voice had warned him against. The voice said nothing now.
That unsettled him more than if it had spoken again.
Another scream tore through the forest.
Shorter this time.
Broken.
It rose jaggedly through the trunks, then cut off in the middle as though something had closed a hand around it and strangled the sound before it could finish being born. The echo twisted as it moved between the trees, distorting against bark and frost until it felt bigger than a human throat should have allowed.
Icariel's jaw tightened.
'I know that voice.'
The recognition came half-formed and unwelcome.
His thoughts accelerated beyond the rhythm of his own body, outpacing breath and muscle, cutting rapidly through possibilities with the merciless speed fear had taught him. Animal attack no. Dismissed immediately. A boar could gore, a fox could bite, a wolf could tear flesh open, but that was not this. This had duration. This had shape. Pain, yes—but not animal pain.
Not mindless pain.
Deliberate pain.
Controlled.
His pulse lurched.
An ambush?
The thought arrived cold and complete. He did not reject it. He never discarded possibilities outright, not when being wrong once could be fatal.
But from who?
That was the rot at the center of it. That was the part that made his skin feel too tight.
No one came to Mjull.
No one should have been able to.
And within the village itself, there was no room for hatred. Too few people. Too little complexity. Too much shared hardship. If someone wanted out, they left. If someone wanted less work, they did less and endured the consequences like everyone else. There were irritations, grudges, old annoyances rubbed thin by proximity but this?
No.
And yet he had studied them anyway.
All of them.
Since childhood.
Because humans were the only intelligent threat he knew. Which meant they were the only threat worth learning thoroughly.
The voice had encouraged that in its quiet way. Not directly. Never so simply. But through warnings, through lessons, through the slow shaping of instinct.
Study what can end you. Understand what can betray you. Survive what you cannot predict.
His fingers tightened on the bow.
Someone changed the mark. He knew that now with a clarity so sharp it felt like a splinter driven under bone.
This was not coincidence.
Not error.
Not chance arranging itself into something unfortunate.
This had intent.
"Damn it…"
The curse fell from him in a breath too soft for the others to hear.
Too many unknowns. Too many variables. No answers.
He hated that.
No hate was not strong enough.
The unknown was the one thing he never tolerated well, because the unknown could not be measured, and what could not be measured could not be prepared for, and what could not be prepared for could kill him.
They broke through the last dense stretch of trees around the original split.
The marked trunk came into view.
Meron slowed first.
Neo with him.
Icariel took one step more before he stopped.
Three slashes.
XXX.
Right.
He stared at them. Fresh green against bark. Wrong.
Snow crunched softly beneath his boots as the three boys stood before the tree, breaths rough and visible, the cold collecting instantly at the edges of sweat beneath their clothes.
Someone had stood here. And the timing struck him all at once with enough force to make something inside him go still.
Before Meron returned this way.
Before Neo reached the fork.
Before Icariel had even climbed down from his roof.
Night.
The thought surfaced with brutal immediacy.
They moved at night.
But how?
His eyes sharpened further.
The forest in darkness was not something villagers treated lightly. Even the best hunters avoided moving blind between these trunks after sunset unless necessity left them no choice. Too easy to lose distance. Too easy to misjudge terrain. Too easy to break a leg, take a fall, vanish into the wrong patch of trees and never find the path back until dawn came too late to matter.
And yet whoever had done this had moved cleanly enough to leave almost nothing behind.
That made his spine tighten.
No one in the village should have been able to do that unnoticed.
A stranger?
That answer fit first.
Then began to split apart.
For the mark to be changed, the intruder would have needed to know the system. Not guess at it. Know it. Meron's marks were not random cuts. They were specific. Deliberate. Functional. Anyone ignorant of their meaning might alter one out of mischief, perhaps but not like this. Not with such clean, useful sabotage. If that had been the case, the scream would never have happened after all and the voice would never have needed to intervene.
Then another thought hit him. So sudden and so precise that his eyes widened slightly.
The chief.
Not because he had done it.
Because he could have taught it.
The system was not ancient. Not really. It belonged to the village, yes—but the village had not birthed the chief. The chief had come from below the mountain long before Icariel's memories began. He had brought things with him. Habits. Knowledge. Ways of shaping work and order that the others had simply accepted because he was stronger, sharper, and better at making simple things function.
Which meant the marking system was not necessarily confined to Mjull after all it was refined by chief even if not created.
Someone else could know it.
Someone who knew him.
"Move!"
Meron's voice snapped him back into motion.
They ran again. Deeper now. Past the altered tree and into the rightward trail.
The snow changed underfoot almost immediately—softer, less compacted, more treacherous in the hollows where drift had gathered deeper than it first appeared. The ground began to shift as well, small rises and drops hidden under white, roots pushing up like frozen knuckles beneath the surface. The trees leaned closer together here. The light thinned.
The forest closed.
Icariel slowed, but only slightly. Not enough to lag.
Just enough to think.
Neo and Meron pressed ahead, Meron in front now, Neo close behind him, both of them driving straight toward the place where the screams had originated. Icariel kept them within sight, every angle of his attention sharpening despite the pull of exertion in his legs.
This all felt wrong. Not chaotic. That would have been easier.
Not random. That too would have been easier.
No it was almost structured.
Positioned.
As if someone had arranged pieces on a board and then stepped back to watch what happened when others moved exactly where they were expected to.
The altered mark.
The forced direction.
The scream.
His heartbeat pounded against his ribs with furious violence, but not from fear alone now. Calculation had taken hold beneath the fear, colder and cleaner, sorting everything into patterns even while his body strained to keep pace.
This was design.
They crossed into a shallow clearing.
Not large.
Just wide enough for the trees to draw back and leave a patch of open whiteness ringed in trunks and low brush. Snow here lay smoother, less disturbed, reflecting what little light filtered through the canopy in a dull gray glow.
Something inside Icariel shifted. His expression darkened. His steps slowed another fraction.
Not hesitation. Control.
He had learned this once already.
The first time the unknown had truly reached for him not as a story, not as a possibility, not as one of the village's distant warnings, but as something immediate and real he had survived.
Barely.
But he had survived.
And afterward, he had understood something essential.
Fear of death had shaped almost everything in him. It had strangled parts of childhood before they could flower properly. It had sharpened his caution, narrowed his pleasures, taught him to value breath over pride, distance over bravery, survival over spectacle. It had reached into his habits, his choices, his future, bending all of it inward, until even his curiosity answered to the same quiet master.
But there was one thing it had not managed to kill.
One thing that remained even when fear hollowed everything else out.
Hate.
Cold.
Precise.
Lasting
And he saved it for anything that reached for his life while refusing to be understood.
Because in the end, there was nothing—
Nothing—
he hated more than the unknown.