The forest held its breath.
No wind stirred. No creature dared cry. Even the moon above had slipped behind clouds, as if unwilling to witness what was to come.
Then
A scream tore through the stillness.
"Aaaaaaahhh!"
It echoed like a dying soul, rattling through the trees, awakening the dark. Torchlight bloomed below the canopy flickering like restless spirits as figures emerged from the black, howling, snarling, hunting.
"There! I see them!"
A voice, raw and broken, rang out. A man surged forward, eyes red with madness, clutching a spear so tightly it seemed fused to his hand. Around him, others followed faces twisted, mouths foaming with hatred they no longer questioned.
And then came the rider.
The ground trembled beneath hooves as a figure cloaked in black iron thundered into the clearing. From helm to boot, he was shadow made flesh, faceless, wordless his mount exhaling smoke, as if it had galloped from the mouth of some forgotten hell.
He needed no command.
He was the command.
Ahead, two figures fled into the dark.
The first limped, blood trailing behind him like ink across snow. The second held him upright, urgency etched in every step, every breath, every glance over his shoulder.
The trees closed in like watching eyes. The silence behind them cracked, then roared to life as their pursuers followed.
The forest was no longer just forest.
It had become a graveyard.
And the hunt had begun.
The first limped, blood trailing behind him like ink across snow. The second held him upright, urgency etched in every step, every breath, every glance over his shoulder.
They moved as one. Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But with the desperation of men who had nothing left to lose except each other.
Auren bled from a gash across his ribs, the crimson soaking through his tunic and dripping down his leg. His steps were uneven, but not weak he pushed forward, jaw clenched, eyes unyielding, determined not to fall. He would not slow Kaelen down. He would not be a weight.
His dark hair clung to his face in wet strands, soaked with sweat and blood. Yet even here, even like this, he seemed... untouched. A phantom of light in a world gone dark. His golden eyes flickered beneath heavy lashes not with fear, but with fire, dimmed but unextinguished.
He looked like a man who had once been revered.
Like someone who still believed in something more than survival.
Beside him, Kaelen moved with feral grace the shadow to Auren's fading glow. His face was all sharp angles, his crimson eyes burning against the night like coals in a dying hearth. He had the kind of beauty that unsettled: too fierce, too focused. Like something not meant to be worshipped, but feared.
Where Auren was the ghost of something holy, Kaelen was a flame that refused to die.
He kept one arm wrapped around Auren's waist, half-carrying him as they stumbled through the underbrush. The other hand gripped the hilt of a curved dagger, already slick with blood not his own.
Around them, the forest shifted.
Once, it had been called Velith'Seren "The Veiled Sanctuary" in the forgotten tongue of the Eldenkin. A sacred place where wild magic thrived, where druids once wove sunlight into vines and coaxed song from stone.
But that was before.
Now, Velith'Seren was no sanctuary. It was a husk of its former self its old magic twisted, fraying at the edges, like flesh rotting beneath golden skin.
The trees no longer sang. They groaned. Towering things, their bark gnarled like clenched fists, their branches clawing the sky in agony. Roots broke through the earth like ruptured veins. Fungus bloomed where flowers once danced. A thin mist curled along the ground, not natural mist but the leftover breath of things that should never have walked here.
Kaelen's lip curled as he scanned the terrain.
"Velith'Seren," he spat the name with bitter scorn. "Veiled Sanctuary, my ass."
He looked around at the twisted forms of once-great trees and the slithering tendrils of rot, and his voice dropped into a growl.
"This place is a corpse. A hollow shell choked to death by the Sanctum of Ascension and their damned god. They bled the magic dry and called it salvation."
His words echoed between the trunks.
The Sanctum of Ascension a zealot-born religion that rose after the fall of the Old Orders. Their priests wielded sermons like blades. Their laws branded all magic as heresy. They preached purity through submission, and power through blind obedience. Under their banners, the world had changed. Magic had been burned from cities, sacred texts drowned, temples razed.
And Velith'Seren…
Velith'Seren had been bled dry.
Sanctified by fire. Purged by prayer.
Now it breathed only fear.
Auren stumbled. Kaelen caught him.
"I'm fine," Auren rasped.
"You're bleeding out."
"And yet, I'm still walking."
Kaelen let out a grim laugh, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Stubborn idiot."
Auren smiled faintly. "You love that about me."
The ground shuddered faintly beneath their feet. Not from the riders behind them.
From something else, deeper in the forest.
Something old. Something hungry.
Kaelen froze. His grip on his brother tightened.
Auren felt it too.
The forest… was not alone.