Dawn came gray and thin. Mist clung to the trees and the little hollow where they had fought looked worse in daylight—blood dark in the leaves, arrows jutting, bent knives half-buried in mud. The air was sour-sweet. Crows circled high and quiet.
Rowan packed his blanket with stiff fingers. His palms still tingled from shaping ice the night before. Every time he looked at the ground, he saw the places where goblins had frozen mid-step, faces twisted hard as stone. He had done that. Part of him was proud he had survived. Part of him hated the feeling.
Brennar slung his axe and scanned the tree line. "We move," he said. "Scouts'll come back with friends."
Ari was already plucking good arrows from bad, wiping each on damp grass before sliding it into her quiver. "Leave nothing useful behind," she said. "Not for them."
Nyx crouched at the edge of the hollow, fingers pressed into the soil. "Tracks," she murmured. "Some fled east. Some south. They'll circle. We won't wait for it."
They burned what they couldn't carry. Ari sparked flint; soon greasy smoke climbed through the mist. Rowan turned his face away when the flames reached the first body. He didn't want to watch. Lyra touched his wrist.
"Don't lock it all in," she said softly. "It will only get heavier."
"I don't know what I'm supposed to feel," Rowan said.
"Then feel whatever comes," Lyra replied. "There's no right way."
Brennar's voice cut through the smoke. "Enough. Go."
They took an old deer trail that hugged the folds of the land. The ground was soft and dark; roots crossed the path like old scars. The forest smelled of wet bark and crushed fern. No one spoke for a while. Even Brennar's jokes felt wrong in the quiet.
By mid-morning they passed a stand of birch. Pale trunks gleamed through the mist like bones. Rowan kept glancing back, half-expecting yellow eyes to glow in the underbrush. Only crows followed. Once, far off, a horn sounded—thin and reedy. It came again, fainter, then not at all.
They stopped at a stream when the sun was a hand's width higher than the trees. Rowan knelt and drank. The water was so cold it hurt his teeth, but it felt clean, like it washed last night out of him. He refilled his skin and held his sore hands under the surface until they went numb. The river's steady rush soothed him.
Ari crouched near him, squinting at the mud. "They're moving in groups," she said. "Not lone hunters anymore."
"Driven," Nyx said. Her voice was quiet, but it carried. "They'll keep at it until something bigger tells them no."
Rowan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Then why don't we warn the next town? Barricades. Watchmen. Anything is better than nothing."
Ari shook her head once. "And paint targets on our backs? Verdant Hollow, Stoneford—did you not see their eyes? We walk in with news of goblins and corruption and they'll see trouble, not help."
Rowan looked down at the water. He remembered the bell in Verdant Hollow, the line at the gate, the way people had stared when the river answered him. He had no good answer for Ari.
Brennar rolled his shoulder and winced at a healed pull. "We're not heroes of song," he said. "We're strangers with knives. We keep moving."
They did. The trail bent north, then west. As the day wore on, the mist thinned but the canopy thickened. Broad leaves soaked up light and gave it back green. Once, a boar crashed through the brush far off, grumbling. Once, Nyx raised a hand and they all froze while a small troop of pale monkeys slipped past overhead like ghosts. The world felt crowded and empty at the same time.
Near dusk they found the river again, wider here, talking to itself around stones. They made camp a few strides back from the bank under a tangle of oak roots. Ari allowed a small fire, banked low. Brennar strung a line to dry socks. Nyx walked the perimeter and simply vanished, one blink and she wasn't there.
Rowan sat near the water and worked. He poured a thumb-thick stream across the harpoon and formed the frost blade. It came easier now—one breath to still it, another to set the shape. The edge shone pale blue in the firelight. He timed it in his head; by the time he reached sixty, the first hairline cracks began to show. A minute. Just like Nyx had said.
"Again," he told himself, and let the ice melt away. He shaped a dagger in his off-hand. It held. He turned it once, felt the balance, then tossed it at a stump. It hit low and shattered in a ring of frost that crawled over bark and disappeared.
Ari glanced over her shoulder. "Higher. Aim where it hurts."
"Right," Rowan said. He tried again. Better. The shard hit at chest height and burst. A rough disk was next; it tore itself apart halfway through forming and rained sleet across his boots. He grinned in spite of himself.
Brennar dropped onto his blanket with a groan. "If you freeze my toes, boy, I'll tan your hide and wear it for a scarf."
Lyra laughed softly. She wrapped Rowan's raw fingers with clean cloth and tied it off neat. "Rest between tries," she said. "Hands break easier than pride."
Nyx reappeared without a sound and settled across the fire, cross-legged, knives in her lap. She watched him without comment until he made a clean shard, held it steady, then sent it spinning true. It struck the stump and puffed a clear, even frost.
"Better," she said.
The word landed warm. Rowan felt it settle in his chest. He shaped one more shard, just to prove to himself it wasn't luck, then let the water slide back into the skin. His hands throbbed. His shoulders ached. He didn't mind.
They ate simple—dried meat softened in a little river water, a handful of berries Brennar swore were safe, a heel of hard bread Ari had somehow kept uncrushed. When the food was gone and the fire sank low, the forest leaned in. Cicadas chirred. Something hooted twice and fell silent.
The silence after that felt wrong.
Rowan lifted his head. The river's talk had changed. It wasn't louder. It was… aware. As if the current held its breath.
Ari felt it too. She stood without sound, bow in hand, and faced the trees. Brennar eased to his feet and rolled his shoulders. Lyra's hands folded in her lap, eyes open and still. Nyx turned her head a fraction, as if listening to a word the rest of them couldn't hear.
"What is it?" Rowan whispered.
"Not goblins," Nyx said. "Too calm."
Leaves shifted twenty paces out. A shape slid between trunks—broad chest, high head, antlers wide as branches. A stag stepped into the open.
Rowan's breath caught. He had seen deer. This was not that. Vines hung from its neck like a green mane. Moss lay thick along its back as if it had been sleeping in the forest for years and the forest had claimed it. Its eyes glowed faint and gentle, and yet the hair on Rowan's arms rose.
Ari lifted her bow halfway and stopped. The stag turned its head and looked straight at her. She lowered the arrow.
Another shape laid itself along the ground to the left—silent, huge. A wolf, but wrong the way the stag was wrong. Bark seemed to plate its shoulders like armor. Ivy curled at its ribs. Its eyes were gold and calm. It did not bare its teeth.
Brennar swore under his breath. "We should go," he said, very quietly.
"We're being watched," Nyx said. "Weighed, not hunted."
"By who?" Rowan asked. The river at his feet seemed to hum through his bones.
The stag took three slow steps toward the firelight, head high, then stopped just beyond the edge. More eyes opened in the dark—low pairs like foxes, higher like cats, a scatter of small glints along the ground. Shapes moved and didn't. No circle tightened. No rush came.
Ari's mouth was a hard line. "If they were going to strike, they would have."
"Not a pack," Lyra murmured. "A… gathering."
The stag's breath steamed in the cool air. It swung its head once, antlers catching the dim. The wolf rose to its feet. For a heartbeat Rowan saw a different outline behind them, taller and human in the spaces between trunks, as if the trees shaped a person and then forgot to keep the shape. He blinked, and it was only leaves.
"Do you see that?" he whispered.
"No," Nyx said. Then, after a beat, "Yes."
Brennar tightened his grip on the axe. "I don't like being anyone's show."
"Hold," Ari said. "They're not closing. Don't start what we can't end."
Rowan crouched by the riverbank and dipped his fingers in without thinking. The water was cold and very clear. It felt as if the current had turned to look over his shoulder with him. He pulled his hand back and wiped it on his tunic.
The stag stamped once, not hard. The ground under Rowan's feet seemed to answer, a faint tremor like the root of a drumbeat. The wolf's ears flicked. The eyes around the camp blinked, one after another, like a slow wave passing through the trees.
Then, as simply as they had come, the eyes dimmed. The wolf slid away. The stag turned and melted into the trunks. Leaves fell back into place. The night sounds returned as if someone had opened a door.
No one spoke for a long breath.
Brennar exhaled like he'd been holding it for hours. "I've beaten ogres and I've run from worse," he said. "But I've never been measured like a sack of grain."
Nyx's gaze stayed on the dark. "Old," she said. "Older than the towns. Older than the road."
Rowan swallowed. "Do you think it—he—wanted something?"
Ari strung her bow again with careful hands. "If it wanted us dead, we would be dead. If it wanted us to follow, it would have left a path." She flicked a look at the river. "Maybe it wanted to know if we'd flinch."
Lyra stood and banked the fire lower. "Sleep," she said. "Whatever that was, it chose not to break us tonight."
They set the watches. Brennar took first. Ari took last. Nyx did not say when she would watch—she simply vanished and the shadows felt thicker near the trees. Rowan lay down and stared at the canopy until his eyes burned. Every time he blinked he saw the stag's eyes, calm and strange, and the wolf's silent chest rising and falling like a bellows in a forge.
When sleep took him, it was shallow and full of water. In his dream the river ran backward, up the bank, and around the camp like a ring. Something old stood on the far shore and watched him, patient as stone.
He woke before dawn to a light that was not fire. Mist glowed where it lay on the river like breath. The forest smelled green and sharp. Brennar snored softly against a root. Ari sat with her back to a trunk, eyes open and clear. Lyra slept still as a carved thing. Nyx was nowhere and everywhere.
Rowan stood and walked to the edge of the camp, heart thudding. In the wet dirt between two roots lay the mark of a hoof—broad, deep, clean. Beside it, four neat impressions of a large paw, pads clear as if pressed by a careful hand. When he looked away and looked back, water had seeped into both prints and made them shine.
"What was that?" he whispered.
Brennar had come up beside him without Rowan noticing. The big man rubbed his jaw. "Something old," he said. "Something watching."
Rowan stared at the prints until the river lapped in and blurred them. He didn't know whether to be comforted or afraid. He only knew this: somewhere in these woods, something had looked at them and chosen to let them pass.
He tightened the strap on his waterskin, shouldered the harpoon, and turned back to the others. "We keep moving?" he asked.
Ari nodded. "Away from any road a council would guess. Follow the river until it bends. Then we vanish."
Nyx's voice came from the trees. "If it wants to find us again, it will."
Rowan didn't ask who it was. He didn't think any of them truly knew. He fell into step behind Brennar as the first birds woke and the mist lifted in slow threads. The hollow road stretched ahead, green and quiet and full of eyes he could not see.
They moved out, not toward any town, but away—deeper into the wild, where the land chose who belonged and who did not. Behind them, the river took their last footprints and smoothed them flat. Ahead, the forest breathed and waited.