The compass rose in the book never stopped spinning.
Even when the needle stilled, just slightly, its thin, black point edging toward the east, it never truly rested. It quivered in place, vibrating with a defiance that felt too deliberate for mere magnetism. It was as though the needle resented being certain, as though certainty itself had become a fragile illusion the book could no longer afford to offer. There were no more words inked across the brittle parchment, just the silent, swirling symbol that turned with unnatural grace, its lines impossibly fine, the kind of intricate work that made the eye ache if stared at too long. The direction it chose, if it could be called a choice, did not feel like guidance. It felt like warning. Like doom dressed up as instruction.
Elowen watched until the pages blurred and swam together, until her vision shimmered with fatigue and the needle's spin etched itself into the back of her eyes. With a slow, steadying breath, she closed the book with a reverent firmness, bound it tight with a strip of worn leather cord handed to her earlier by Azazel along with two swords. He hadn't said a word when he gave it to her, just pressed the weathered strip into her palm with a grim nod and a look that said everything he didn't. She hadn't asked where he'd gotten it. She was learning that, with Azazel, silence was often the safest form of understanding.
The eastern path was not a path at all. No trail marked her way, no clearing through the trees, no signs of travel left by beasts or other travelers. It was simply the forest, unbroken and unwilling, a place that refused her presence with every inch. The underbrush clawed at her legs like regrets trying to hold her back. Thorny vines curled across the forest floor like veins, too red to be natural, and the trees themselves leaned in with gnarled branches and splitting bark, their blackened trunks resembling torsos torn open by ancient wounds.
The air had changed too, no longer thick with mist, but instead filled with a strange, golden haze that hovered without motion. It looked like sunlight caught in still water, warm in color but wrong in its refusal to move. When she reached out to touch it, the haze clung to her skin like powder, dry and strange. Not light. Not fog. Pollen—so dense it hung suspended, untouched by wind, unmoved by breath. It coated everything. It coated her.
Elowen pressed onward. Each step was a negotiation between balance and instinct, her boots slipping on the uneven patchwork of moss-slick roots, half-buried stones, and soft depressions that felt like the forest had swallowed things whole and never properly buried the bones. Once, she stepped over what looked like a fox's jaw. Later, she passed a deer skull impaled on a branch barely knee-high, its sockets filled with spiderwebs and its antlers green with mold.
Another hour deeper, she found a child's shoe, small, leather, laced perfectly, resting beside a hollow log like it had simply been taken off and never put back on. Nothing around it suggested violence. But the silence that surrounded it? That was louder than any scream could have been. None of it felt accidental. Everything had been left for a reason. A trail made of implications.
The book didn't speak. Azazel didn't follow. She thought of him as she walked, his cold silver eyes, the sharp edges of his voice, the way he moved like someone who had long since stopped fearing consequences. There was something ancient in him, but not in the way her grandmother's stories spoke of ancient, Azazel was not a relic. He was a survivor. He moved like stone worn smooth by centuries of storms, like something shaped by time instead of consumed by it. And yet, for all his bitter disdain, he hadn't let her die. Not when he could have.
By the time she reached the clearing, if it could be called that, the sun was dissolving behind the tangled treeline, staining the sky in bruised purples and bruised intentions. The basin before her was nothing like the forest she'd come through. Here, the ground was scorched, bare and black, a great wound in the world where even the weeds feared to grow. Trees that had once stood tall now existed only as stumps, charred and hollow, their roots exposed like severed nerves. The air smelled of burnt iron and brittle herbs, like someone had once tried to cleanse this place with fire but failed to finish the job. In the center of it all, rising from cracked earth like a tooth too stubborn to rot, stood a single stone pillar, broken at the top, weather-worn, and carved in a script that made her eyes ache the longer she looked at it. The markings writhed, not literally, but somehow visually, slipping just out of focus whenever she tried to grasp their shape.
And beyond the stone, just at the edge of sight, something moved.
It wasn't a creature in the usual sense. It was suggestion, form implied, not shown. A vast silhouette coiled in the spaces between trees, flowing like smoke with weight, like muscle without bones. It slithered with a soundless grace, never touching the leaves, never bending a single branch. It had no feet. No limbs. But eyes, yes, there were eyes, dozens, maybe thousands, though none seemed to see. She dropped to her knees beside the stone, trembling but not running, and opened the book again.
The compass is still pointing east.
Her throat tightened, and panic bloomed sharp behind her ribs. But she bit it back, pressed her palm flat to the moss-covered pillar, and whispered the only question that still made sense: "What do I do?"
But the moment she spoke, her hand tingled. She looked down and gasped. Tiny vines, newborn, tender, impossibly green, had begun to creep from the cracks in the stone, winding around her fingers with deliberate grace. The wind died. The pollen hung still. The world seemed to hold its breath. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and let her thoughts fall, not away, but down. Down past the fear. Past the need for answers. Past even her own name. Into that dark well within her that she had touched only once before. There were no running versions of herself here. No shadows of her own death. Just cold, wet soil and something enormous buried beneath it.
When she opened her eyes again, the compass had changed.
The needle still pointed east, but now, faint script shimmered across the page, like words surfacing through water:
Your path begins where memory ends.
Speak to the Watcher beneath the roots.
But do not wake it.
Elowen shivered, whispering, "That's not ominous at all."
She shut the book carefully, hands shaking slightly, and looked up. The creature was gone. She didn't know if that was better.
She made her way back through the forest as the sky paled toward dawn, scratched, bruised, wide-eyed. Her thoughts churned like silt in floodwater. The silence behind her felt heavier than the journey forward. As if the woods had paused in her absence.
But there was no hut. No sign of Azazel. It was as if he had never been there at all, no footprints, no broken branches, not even a shadow left behind. In his place stood a dungeon, low and wide, carved into the earth like an open grave. Its heavy stone archway was framed by thick roots and moss-covered rocks, as if the forest itself was trying to swallow it back. Faint orange light flickered from within, casting an unnatural glow onto the clearing. The flames of unseen candles danced just beyond the threshold, but no heat reached the air, only a chill that sank into the bones. The silence was deep, watchful. Everything felt wrong.