He didn't stop running until his body forced him to.
Torian collapsed just past the shattered ledge, his arms skidding across wet rock as he tumbled into a gully. He rolled once—twice—before slamming shoulder-first into a moss-covered boulder. A gasp tore from his throat, but it was cut short as he swallowed dirt and pine needles, face pressed to the cold ground.
He lay there for minutes. Maybe more. The sky above was choked in smoke and cloud, a dull smear of gray and ash.
His hands were shaking uncontrollably. His legs twitched. His lips were cracked and tasted like blood. Still, he couldn't close his eyes—not for long. Every time he did, he saw the flame again. The roof falling. His father's hand reaching. His sister's ribbon in the cinders.
His breath hitched and he gritted his teeth hard enough to hurt.
"Get up," he rasped, voice hoarse from smoke and screaming.
He pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet. His calf stung where thorns had bitten deep. His right ankle gave under his weight, but he leaned on a low branch, steadying himself.
He was still alive.
But everything that made him Torian—his home, his people, his family—was gone.
⸻
The forest ahead was vast and wrong. He didn't know this part. These were not the familiar trails he'd used to hunt frogs with Eysa or follow his father to cut wood. The trees here grew twisted, taller than anything near the village, their roots exposed and sprawling like veins. The light barely reached the ground. The air was wet and filled with the smell of rot and iron.
He tried to move quietly, but every step was clumsy. His feet were cut and raw. His tunic had torn up the side, one sleeve hanging loose. The sword on his back thumped against his spine uselessly — too heavy, too meaningless.
He kept to low paths and shadows, weaving through ferns and thornbrush. Somewhere, far behind him, a crow screamed. Then another. Then silence.
He stumbled down a rocky slope and nearly twisted his ankle again. There were ruins here — old, half-swallowed by the earth. Spiral-carved stones leaning at odd angles. Vines thicker than rope covered everything.
Torian paused to catch his breath, placing one hand on the cool surface of a fallen obelisk.
That's when he heard it again.
The hoofbeats.
He went still. Completely still.
Then came a low whistle—almost like a breath—and the quiet creak of leather. Not far. Not far at all.
He dropped to his knees and crawled under a tangle of roots, barely fitting. He lay on his belly, listening.
Voices. Two men. Close. Speaking in low tones he didn't recognize. Not the language of his village. Cracked and harsh, like metal snapping.
He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to the ground, trying to still the shaking in his chest.
They passed without seeing him.
But they were hunting.
Not pillaging. Not searching bodies.
They were tracking.
And Torian knew—without doubt—they were looking for him.
When they were gone, he didn't move for a long time. Only when his arms went numb did he push himself out from beneath the roots. He kept crawling for a while, too scared to stand.
It was only when the sun began to dip behind the twisted canopy that he rose again and stumbled deeper into the wild.
⸻
Hunger gnawed at him now, deeper than the bruises and the blood. It was like fire curling in his stomach. He found a few crushed berries near a creek and shoved them into his mouth before even checking if they were safe. The bitter taste made him gag, but he didn't stop.
His lips and chin were stained violet as he walked on.
The cold began to settle in as night fell. Not sharp—just seeping, like fingers of ice working slowly into his bones. The wind here was dead. The trees creaked. The silence was too perfect, and every sound he made seemed to echo twice as loud.
He reached a grove of skeletal trees and dropped beside a hollow trunk. He could barely move now.
He curled into a ball, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. His heartbeat filled his ears. His breath came fast. He couldn't stop shaking.
And the dark kept pressing in.
He remembered his mother humming. The feel of her hand on his head when he'd had nightmares. Her voice had always made him feel smaller, but safer.
Now he was small again. And no one was coming.
No one.
⸻
He drifted into something like sleep, but not really. A gray haze between waking and unconsciousness. Every sound startled him—snapping twigs, distant rustles, the shriek of some bird high in the trees.
Then he heard something move.
Close.
It didn't step. It slid.
Branches brushed aside softly.
He held his breath and stared into the dark.
There—at the edge of the grove—eyes.
Low. Reflecting faint moonlight. Four of them.
The shape didn't move like a person. Or a wolf. Or anything he knew.
It waited.
So did he.
And then, finally, it crept away.
But it didn't flee.
It just retreated. Like a predator choosing not to feed.
This time.
Torian didn't sleep again.
He just lay in the cold and the dark, listening to his own heartbeat.
And wondering what would find him first—the soldiers, the monsters, or the cold.
The sun never truly rose again that day.
A dull gray twilight bled through the trees, never warming, never clearing. It left the forest in a kind of haunted half-light where shapes shifted just out of sight and time stopped mattering.
Torian wandered deeper.
He no longer knew where he was—only that he had to keep moving.
Every time he stopped, the stillness grew thicker. His thoughts slowed, dulled by hunger and cold. He could barely tell how long he'd been walking now. Hours? Days? His stomach had folded in on itself. His feet bled freely. His tongue was cracked, lips dry and split. His legs felt like they didn't belong to him anymore.
And still, something followed.
Sometimes he heard the hoofbeats again, far off—other times it was just breathing. Once, he caught the sound of heavy movement pacing him beyond the ridge, always behind trees, never in view. A shape that waited, watched, measured.
He didn't know if it was a man or a beast anymore.
He didn't know which would be worse.
⸻
He found a cave just before dusk—low and wide, almost hidden behind a wall of fallen branches. He crawled inside without thinking, his entire body sagging into the cold stone floor. For a few minutes, he lay flat on his back, arms spread, eyes staring at the jagged ceiling above.
He could hear his heartbeat echoing through his skull.
Outside, the forest breathed.
The trees groaned. Somewhere distant, water dripped in an endless rhythm.
Then a howl.
Long. Broken.
Not wolf.
Not anything that should be alive in the world he knew.
Torian pressed himself deeper into the back of the cave, curling into the narrowest part of the stone that he could fit into. He drew the sword from his back—his father's sword—but he didn't even lift it. He just laid it across his chest like a shield and held the hilt with both hands.
He didn't cry.
There was nothing left in him.
He didn't even feel the cold anymore—just the trembling of muscles that wouldn't stop and the shiver that had become part of his breath.
Outside the cave, something padded by.
Not quickly. Slowly.
Deliberate.
Torian clenched the hilt of the sword until his knuckles turned white.
He heard the breath again. Closer.
Then silence.
Then, scratching.
A soft, wet drag of claws across stone.
Something was sniffing the entrance of the cave.
Torian didn't move.
His arms went numb. His neck locked in place. His eyes didn't blink.
For nearly ten minutes, the sound continued—slow steps, light scraping, breath.
Then… gone.
Just like that.
As if it had been called elsewhere. Or changed its mind.
But Torian knew—it would return.
⸻
He waited until it was truly night. The sky above the trees was pitch black now, not even stars. Ash still drifted down in faint, dry flakes, stirred by distant winds that never reached the forest floor.
Torian crawled from the cave in silence.
Every inch of him ached. His knees buckled twice, and he barely caught himself on the slick moss walls of the ravine. He could no longer tell which cuts were fresh and which were old. His whole body felt broken.
But he moved forward anyway.
Because he had nothing else.
No home.
No name, not really.
Only the sword. The memory of his father's hand, reaching.
The fire.
The smoke.
The silence after.
He moved through a gulley and followed a stream he hoped would lead him somewhere safe—or at least somewhere away. The water was too shallow to drink. Too dirty to trust. But he dipped his hands in it anyway and rubbed the filth from his face.
It did nothing.
⸻
When dawn finally came, it wasn't with light.
It was with rain.
A heavy, cold rain that fell in thick sheets across the wild, soaking everything. The ground turned to mud. The leaves hung heavy. Torian welcomed it. He let it fall over his body, over his head, over the bruises and dried blood. He opened his mouth and drank.
And for the first time since the fall of the village, he breathed.
Not with peace.
But with defiance.
He didn't die in the dark.
He didn't let the cold take him.
He was still moving.
Still running.
Even if he didn't know where to go.
⸻
By the time he reached the ridge just past the broken ridge trees, the ground was slick and the wind screamed through the forest like something angry. The trees thinned. The roots twisted in impossible shapes.
And there—waiting at the edge of it all—was a chasm.
Wide. Deep. Hidden by fog.
He stepped toward it cautiously, but too late.
The ground beneath him gave.
With a sudden roar of shifting stone and snapping root, Torian fell.
He dropped fast—bounced off jagged ledges, tumbled through vines, slammed into wet walls of ancient stone. The last thing he saw was the curve of a massive root twisting through rock.
Then—blackness.
⸻
No peace in the dark.
Only a deeper one.
And something waiting… below.