He woke to red.
Not light. Not heat. Just red — pressed against the inside of his eyelids, humming behind his teeth. It tasted like rust. Like blood left too long in the mouth.
Ezra didn't remember falling.
But his body told him he had.
Every part of him ached with something old. The mark on his chest burned, and when he touched it, he felt not skin — but chain. Cold. Threaded through bone.
He opened his eyes.
The sky was wrong.
It wasn't sky. It was veins — rivers of crimson coiling over black clouds, pulsing like something alive. No stars. No sun. Just that moon — so massive, so near — staring down like a god without mercy.
He sat up slowly.
He was lying on a platform — ancient stone, cracked and weeping light. Around him, a circle of rusted swords jutted from the earth like grave markers. In the distance, pillars floated in midair, chained to nothing. And far, far away, the sound of bells — muffled, broken.
The wind did not blow.
But the trees moved anyway.
One moment Ezra was on the platform, its cracked surface weeping light beneath his palms.
The next — the stone broke.
Not with sound, but with absence. A pulse from the moon above, like the toll of a bell heard underwater, and the ground vanished beneath him.
He fell without falling.
And when the world stitched itself back together — it was wrong again.
Ezra landed hard on all fours, knees digging into moss that pulsed faintly beneath him, like it was breathing. His stomach twisted. Heat rose up his throat before he turned and retched violently, the acid burning his tongue. Whatever was inside him had not wanted to follow.
The air tasted sweet. Too sweet — like rotting fruit left under the sun.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up.
He was at the edge of a forest that breathed.
It looked… normal, at first. Lush. Green. Light filtered through the canopy in warm, dappled gold. Leaves rustled. Birds chirped. Flowers bloomed in technicolor brilliance along the forest floor. It should have been beautiful.
But it wasn't.
Because the trees were too tall. Their trunks bent like ribs in a beast too large to name. The vines that climbed their bark glistened wet, slithering upward even though there was no breeze
.
Petals on the flowers twitched like they were listening.
And behind it all — deeper in the woods — towered abandoned buildings.
Ruined archways smothered in moss.
Stone spires half-sunken into the ground.
A temple swallowed whole by roots that bled amber sap like wounds that never healed.
Ezra's skin prickled.
The forest was too still.
It looked alive — vibrant, almost lush — with thick vines draping over stone like hair and flowers blooming in impossible colors. But it felt wrong. The kind of wrong that made animals go quiet and children start crying without knowing why.
The air was heavy with moisture, but the trees didn't sway. No wind. No insects. No birdsong.
Ezra pressed a hand to the mark over his chest. It still burned, still pulsed with its own rhythm — slower than his heartbeat, but deeper, older. Like it wasn't keeping time with him, but with the forest.
Focus.
Shelter. Water. Food. Fire.
That was how Theodore always said it — in that clipped, military tone like he was reciting gospel. Ezra could hear his voice even now.
"You don't panic when you're dropped somewhere unfamiliar. You break the world down into pieces. Shelter, water, food, fire. In that order. No exceptions."
Ezra exhaled, slow. Steady.
He glanced up, squinting through the canopy — looking for the sun, for cardinal directions.
He muttered a curse under his breath and turned slowly, scanning the tree line. He wasn't sure what he was looking for — an incline, a clearing, a break in the trees — but standing still wasn't an option. Not in a place like this.
He took a few cautious steps, boots sinking slightly into moss-covered stone. The temple loomed behind him, half-devoured by vines. The air near it smelled sweet — too sweet. Rot beneath perfume.
He'd come back to it. Maybe. If he survived the night.
Theodore had said something else, too, once.
Right before sending Ezra into the mountains with nothing but a knife and a bottle of rainwater:
"The forest always tells you something. It's your job to listen before it stops talking."
Ezra moved.
Slowly. Quietly. Like a man in a cathedral made of teeth.
The forest pressed close — not with noise, but with presence. Every vine was watching. Every leaf listening.
Ruined archways smothered in moss twisted above him like vertebrae from giants long-dead. Stone spires jutted from the earth at broken angles, half-swallowed by time. A temple — if it could still be called that — slumped in the distance, its once-sacred roof collapsed, roots knotted through its heart. The trees weren't still. They breathed, subtly, their bark rising and falling as if inhaling something that wasn't air.
Amber sap bled from the roots. It smelled sweet. Too sweet.
Ezra didn't touch it.
He remembered what Theodore had drilled into him during their wilderness exercises. "Three rules," his old instructor had said, "if you're stranded in a living zone: Find water. Find cover. Do not eat what sings."
He hadn't understood the last one at the time. Now… he wasn't so sure it was a metaphor.
His stomach still twisted from earlier — the vomiting had passed, but the taste hadn't. Copper and ash. Like he'd swallowed the sun and it had curdled inside him.
He scanned the sky — or what passed for it. The sun here was a haze. It flickered, dimmed, reappeared. North was uncertain. But the moss on the trees did grow heavier on one side. He chose that as north. A guess. A gamble. But better than drifting.
He kept moving.
The forest was quiet — not with peace, but with hunger. There were no birds, no insects, no wind. But things moved when he wasn't looking.
Once, he stepped between two trees and emerged into a different clearing than the one he saw. Not behind it — through it. Space curved. The path behind him vanished.
He started marking bark with a stone.
Then he saw the bark grow back.
Another tree had a mouth. It didn't open — it just was. A slit in the trunk, lined with soft flesh and thin teeth. It didn't move. It didn't breathe. But it bled when he passed too close.
Ezra didn't run.
He stayed calm. Inhaled through the nose, exhaled through the teeth. Counted steps. Assessed. Survive. Scout. Learn.
A shallow creek cut through the underbrush — water. Stagnant, metallic. But he'd learned the test. He took a thin stick, split the bark, and dropped the inside into the water. It turned black in under ten seconds.
Poisoned.
He moved on.
Deeper into the forest, the ruins grew stranger — statues sunken into the mud, faces half-swallowed by vines. They all bore the same feature:
Eyes veiled.
Some had serpents coiled around their necks. One wept golden ichor. Another bore the inscription in an old tongue he barely recognized.
He touched it.
The mark on his chest throbbed.
The sun blinked out. Just once. Then returned.
And in the distance — something shifted. A groan. Wet. Low. Wrong.
Ezra crouched, eyes sweeping the treeline.
He didn't see it yet. But he felt it. Like the pressure before a nosebleed. Like something that didn't belong trying to push its way into shape.
He slipped into the shadows of a collapsed column. Held his breath. Waited.
And then he saw it:
Six legs. No head. A body like stitched skin wrapped over broken armor. Its back pulsed with fluid-filled sacs, and where its face should've been was only a knot of hair, teeth, and hollow sockets.
It paused.
Sniffed the air — though it had no nose.
It stopped.
Turned slightly.