The forest had no color anymore—only shades of breath.Gray air. Gray bark. Gray fear.
Kael moved through it bent at the waist, each step a slow translation of the girl's hand signals. She didn't speak again after that first whisper.Her movements were quick, exact, the way wild animals move when they already know the world is trying to erase them.
The snow thickened around their ankles. Wind combed the branches overhead until they clattered like metal bones. Kael followed, matching her pace, keeping his breath to the four-count rhythm she'd taught him.
In—two—three—four.Hold.Out—two—three—four—five—six.Hold.
The Lines beneath his skin pulsed with each measure. For the first time they didn't ache. They listened.
The trackers' calls faded behind them until there was only the sound of snow folding under their feet. The girl crouched behind a fallen cedar and motioned him down.Kael obeyed. His knees trembled with cold.
She pointed to his arm.The faint red light there had begun to seep through the cloth again. Her eyes narrowed, and she reached for his wrist. When her fingers brushed his skin, she hissed softly and drew back—heat had bitten her.
Kael pulled his sleeve down tighter. "It won't stop," he whispered. "It burns when I'm scared."
She studied him a moment, then mimed a slow inhale, pressing her palm flat to her own ribs. "Quiet lung," she mouthed again.
Kael tried.The breath felt thick at first, like swallowing frost. He held it until his chest trembled, then released it exactly as she'd shown him—long, smooth, silent.
The burning eased.
Her expression didn't change, but something in her shoulders softened. She motioned forward, and they began again.
By dusk, the forest thinned into a slope of blue ice and wind-carved stone. The girl led him to a hollow beneath a cliff where old branches and bones had collected. She began stacking them into a wall to break the wind. Kael watched, shivering, until she gestured for him to help.
They worked without speaking, the silence broken only by the creak of wood and the hollow rush of wind through the pass.When they finished, the girl sat cross-legged and took a small knife from her belt—a blade so thin it was almost invisible until it caught light. She pulled a strip of bark from her sleeve, cut it in half, and handed one piece to him.
He stared at it. "What's it for?"
"Chew," she said quietly.
The bark was bitter and sharp, but warmth followed the bitterness. His stomach stopped clawing itself for a few breaths.
They ate snow for water.When night came, the girl drew lines in the dirt with her finger—a crude map, but Kael could tell she knew where she was.She tapped the top edge. "Ridge. Empire road."She tapped the bottom. "Hollows. Wraith lands."Then she pointed between them and shook her head. "No path."
Kael frowned. "So where are we going?"
She looked at him for a long time, as if deciding how much of an answer he deserved, then traced a small circle near the ridge and tapped her chest. "Home."
He wanted to ask what kind of home waited for someone who spoke with her hands more than her mouth, who moved like smoke and breathed like stone—but he was too tired. He just nodded.
They slept with the wall to their backs, the cliff above them, and the cold doing its patient work on their bones.
He woke before dawn.The wind had died. The silence felt too full, as if the world were holding its breath.
The girl was gone.
Panic hit before thought. He sat up, scanning the gray, until he saw movement a little downhill—a small shape crouched beside the stream. She was rinsing blood from her fingers.
Kael slipped down the slope. "What—"
She turned quickly, pressing a finger to her lips. Then she pointed to the water. A snare cord disappeared beneath the ice. She tugged once and lifted a limp gray rabbit from the hole.
He stared, half in awe, half in hunger.
She smiled—small and brief. "Eat."
They cleaned it with her knife. She showed him how to strip the skin in one long motion, how to twist the neck without splashing blood.He'd never eaten something he'd watched die so calmly. It felt wrong and necessary at the same time.
When she kindled a small fire from resin bark, Kael almost protested—the smoke—but she covered it with wet moss so it barely glowed.The smell was strange: meat, pine, and the faint copper of Vire still clinging to his own hands.
They ate in silence.
After a while he asked, "What's your name?"
She paused mid-bite, chewing slow. Then she shrugged.He wasn't sure if she didn't remember, or just didn't trust him enough to say.When she looked up again, her eyes caught the firelight and turned almost silver.
"What's yours?" she asked.
"Kael."
She nodded once, as if committing it to a ledger only she could read.
That afternoon the sky thickened with pale clouds. The wind shifted east, carrying the distant toll of metal—imperial armor, faint but real.The girl motioned for him to follow, and they began climbing the ridge toward a stand of dark pines that might hide them.
Halfway up, the sound came again—clearer now.Voices.Kael froze, heart thundering.
The girl dropped flat and pulled him down beside her.Through the branches below, two figures appeared on the lower path. Their cloaks bore the white-and-red sigil of the Empire's search detachments. The men spoke in quiet bursts, stopping now and then to study the snow. One carried a hound, its nose pressed low.
Kael's stomach turned to ice.
The girl glanced at him, eyes sharp. Quiet lung.
He nodded, though his chest screamed to breathe faster.They flattened themselves against the snow as the soldiers moved beneath them. The hound sniffed once, twice—then paused, nose lifting toward their ledge. A low growl rumbled in its throat.
Kael's fingers clenched around a rock. He didn't even realize the Lines in his arm had begun to brighten under the cloth until the girl grabbed his wrist. Her grip was fierce, her eyes furious.
She pressed her free hand to his chest, palm over his heart, and forced him to match her breathing.In—hold—out—hold.Their breath synced. His pulse slowed.
The hound's growl faded.
The soldiers moved on, the crunch of their boots growing smaller until only the wind remained.
Only then did she let go.
Kael collapsed back into the snow, shaking. "How did—"
She cut him off with a small gesture: a circle drawn in the air, a finger pressed to her lips, then a motion like pulling thread from her throat to her stomach.He didn't understand all of it, but he caught the meaning—Breath controls pulse. Pulse controls light.
He lay still, staring up at the sky until the clouds broke and a patch of pale blue showed through. For the first time since the fire, he felt something almost like peace.
They didn't speak again until nightfall.The girl found a narrow ravine choked with frost-bitten vines and led him inside. The walls muffled the wind.When they stopped to rest, Kael looked at her and said quietly, "Thank you."
She tilted her head, curious.
"For the breathing," he added. "For not… leaving me."
Her gaze softened just enough to show she'd understood.
He hesitated, then asked, "Are we safe now?"
She looked out into the dark, where the snow still fell in perfect silence."Safe?" she echoed, as if testing the word.Then she shook her head.
That night, Kael dreamed of the forge again—but this time the sound of hammer and flame was replaced by a heartbeat that wasn't his.He woke to find the red Lines along his arm pulsing faintly in time with something deep under the earth.
He pressed his hand to the ground.
The mountain was breathing.