The deep, guttural moan did not return. But its memory lingered in the soil beneath them, a vibration waiting to happen. Xeno finished the water pit, his torn palms stinging with every clump of earth he lifted. The work was a relief—a simple problem of weight and yield. But as the last light faded, the forest's voice swelled, a thousand-legged beast breathing down their necks. The constant, high-pitched drone of the insect veil seemed to mock the memory of his clumsy footsteps.
Othniel worked with quiet purpose, building a raised platform for their supplies and setting snares with hands that still held a faint tremor from the climb. He used no fire. The only light came from the ghost-pulse of violet fungi and the sickly green glow of phosphorus moss, painting their faces in shifting, spectral shades.
"Tonight, sleep is a debt we cannot pay," Othniel whispered, the skritch of his bone knife on stone a tiny, defiant sound. "This world does not forgive a misstep. It only records it. Your strength must become a whisper now."
Xeno stared at his own heavy hands. "I try to be quiet. But the forest feels my weight in its bones."
"Then you must be lighter than your shadow," Othniel replied. He led Xeno to a ten-pace stretch of ground littered with dry fronds. "Walk it. If you hear yourself, you have shouted your presence to every hunter in the wood."
Xeno's first attempt was a symphony of failure. The fronds crackled and splintered, each snap a small explosion in the dark. His body, built for the solid purchase of a cliff face or the stable earth of the plains, carried too much finality in every step. He was a stone, and stones did not glide.
"Your strength is a breath held, not a blow struck," Othniel murmured from the darkness. "Let it pool in your core. Let your foot learn the earth before it trusts it. Be water finding a crack in the stone."
The metaphor shifted something inside Xeno. He stopped fighting his body and began to negotiate with it. He repeated the path. Again. And again. His muscles, weary from the climb, now burned with the strange, exhausting effort of restraint. On the twelfth attempt, he crossed the fronds without a sound. The leaves lay still, as if he had never been.
Othniel gave a single nod. "The land has accepted your offering. Now, your ears must pay the price for your feet."
They settled back-to-back against the cold rock. Xeno tried to separate the layers of sound as his father had taught him—the deep rhythm of the trees, the high veil of the insects. But it was a storm of whispers, a chaotic web he could not untangle.
"It's just noise," he admitted, frustration sharp in his throat.
"The chaos is a mask," Othniel said, his voice a low, steady thread. "Listen for what unmakes it. The snap of a twig is an event. The silence where a sound should be is a warning."
Xeno closed his eyes, pouring all his focus into the night. He found the low croak, held it. He wove in the endless hiss. Slowly, painfully, the separate threads began to emerge from the tapestry.
Othniel's hand tightened on his shoulder. He pointed upward. "The leaves on that branch. Do they move with the wind, or with purpose?"
Xeno squinted. Most of the canopy swayed randomly. But the leaves on one branch quivered with a smooth, predatory grace.
"Something is there," Xeno breathed. "Heavy. Waiting."
"A Shadow Cat," Othniel confirmed, his voice dropping to the barest exhalation. "It hunts by feeling the air itself. Become the rock. Become the cold."
For a long moment, it seemed it would pass. Then, a mistake. The faint, sweet scent of dried Heart-Leaf Berries escaped a tear in Othniel's pack.
The Shadow Cat froze. Its head snapped down. Eyes like molten gold pinned them from the shadows. It dropped to a lower branch, silent and lethal as a falling star. The distance was nothing. Flight was impossible.
Xeno did not think. He became the lesson. He pressed his entire body into the rock face, shielding his father, forcing every muscle into a stillness more demanding than any climb. His lungs burned for air, his limbs screamed to move, but he held. He was not a boy, but stone. He was not a creature of scent, but of earth.
The Shadow Cat crouched above, its golden gaze dissecting the darkness. It scented the air, once, twice. Finding only rock and rot, it turned and vanished back into the canopy, a ghost chasing a more tangible promise.
The forest's rhythm returned, the veil of sound closing over the void left by the hunter.
Othniel was the first to move, lowering his knife with a slow, controlled breath. He looked at Xeno, his eyes reflecting the faint fungal glow.
"You became the silence," he said, his voice thick with a reverence Xeno had never heard before. "You did not hide within it. You were it."
Xeno finally let his own breath go in a shuddering rush. He looked at his hands—the same hands that had scaled the Spine of Adiarqa—and saw they were steady. The frustration was gone, replaced by a cool, solid understanding. For his entire life, his body had been a thing that stood apart, too much for the delicate world. But in that perfect stillness, he had not been apart. He had belonged to the forest as the rock belonged, as the shadow belonged. It had looked at him and seen nothing to hunt.
He had not just passed a test. He had learned a new way to exist.
Othniel smiled, weary but proud. "Tomorrow, we hunt the quiet way. This world has teeth, Xeno… but now you know how to hide from them. And more—now you know how to listen for silence."
The words settled between them, a new law written in the dark. The fear that had been their constant companion since the massacre didn't vanish, but it changed shape. It was no longer a blind terror of everything that moved, but a sharp, focused respect for the rules of this new world. They were no longer just prey fleeing a memory. They were hunters learning a new language, and tomorrow, they would speak it back to the forest.