One hour.

  Jacob did not know that by the sun. The sun had vanished the moment they crossed the treeline. He measured time by the burn in his shoulders and the slow grind of steps.

  The pack dug into him differently now. At first it had been weight—solid, manageable, something to lean into. Now it felt hooked beneath his collarbones. The straps pressed into skin damp with sweat, rubbing the same narrow lines raw. Each time he adjusted them, the relief lasted only seconds before the pressure returned.

  He kept his eyes forward.

  Lina walked several paces ahead, lantern in her left hand. The light carved a small, trembling circle through the dark. Her stride remained even. Not hurried. Not hesitant. The steady swing of her arm became something to measure against. If she did not falter, neither would he.

  To her right, Laurence’s shield caught the lantern glow along its rim. The crowned hart crest flashed dull gold before sinking back into shadow with each step. The breadth of his back blocked the worst of the dark ahead.

  Jacob fixed on that shield.

  Count the steps between its sway.

  One. Two. Three.

  The forest pressed close around them.

  The trunks rose like pillars, thick and black, bark swallowing light rather than reflecting it. The ground dipped and rose without warning, roots snaking across their path. Dead leaves covered everything, their crunch sharp and brittle underfoot.

  The silence had changed.

  At first it had been simple absence—no birds, no wind, no insects.

  Now something else filled the space.

  A low pressure gathered inside Jacob’s ears. Not a sound exactly. More like the sensation of diving beneath water and feeling the world compress around the skull. He swallowed, but the pressure did not ease. It sat there, constant, dull.

  He adjusted the strap again. His fingers slipped against damp leather.

  “Keep pace,” Lina called softly without turning.

  “I am,” he answered, though his voice came out thinner than he intended.

  The lantern light seemed weaker than before.

  He blinked sweat from his lashes and looked down.

  The shadows beneath the trees stretched long and thin across the forest floor. That was normal. Lantern light created distortion. He knew that.

  Still—

  He slowed half a step and watched one particular shadow cast by a bent trunk near the edge of the light.

  It moved.

  Not with their stride. Not with the lantern’s swing.

  It thinned, lengthened, and angled inward, pointing toward the group rather than away.

  Jacob stopped breathing for a heartbeat.

  The lantern shifted again, and the shadow snapped back into place, flat and ordinary.

  His pulse thudded in his throat.

  Just light, he told himself. Just light bending wrong.

  He forced his gaze forward again.

  Urian walked beside him, quieter than usual. He had spoken little since entering the forest, but now he said nothing at all. His jaw was set tight. His eyes tracked upward more often than the path beneath his feet.

  Jacob wiped his palm against his trousers and reached back to adjust the strap once more. The leather had begun to slide along his shoulder, slick with sweat. He hooked it with two fingers and tugged.

  The pressure in his ears deepened.

  His breathing shortened without his permission. Air entered shallow, quick.

  Ahead, Eyda’s silhouette flickered along the left flank, daggers low at her sides. Lucas moved opposite her, spear tip steady.

  Jacob swallowed again.

  The shadows shifted.

  He could see it now, clearly.

  Every time the lantern swayed, the darkness between the trunks recoiled—but not away from them. It leaned inward. The gaps seemed to narrow. The spaces between trees compressed as if closing ranks.

  He blinked hard.

  The pressure in his ears sharpened to a dull ache.

  Beside him, Urian stopped walking.

  The line ahead continued three steps before Lina sensed the break and slowed.

  Jacob turned.

  “Urian?”

  Urian stood frozen, staring upward into the canopy.

  The lantern light barely reached that high. Branches intertwined above, blotting out what little gray filtered down. The darkness there felt thicker than the air below.

  “Urian,” Jacob repeated, reaching out.

  He touched his shoulder.

  The tremor ran through him immediately.

  Not a shiver. Not a passing chill.

  Urian’s entire body shook in tight, violent pulses, as though every muscle had locked and was trying to tear free at once.

  Jacob grabbed him more firmly.

  “Hey—”

  Urian’s eyes remained fixed upward. Wide. Unblinking.

  His lips parted slightly.

  Jacob followed his gaze.

  There was nothing there.

  Only black branches twisting against deeper black.

  “Lina,” Jacob called, voice cracking despite himself.

  The group halted fully now.

  Boots stopped crunching.

  The silence surged forward to fill the gap.

  Lina moved back toward them, lantern lifting higher. Light climbed Urian’s face, catching the tremor along his jaw, the strain in his neck.

  “Urian,” she said calmly.

  No response.

  Jacob felt his own breathing turn ragged. Sweat trickled from his hairline into his eyes, stinging. He did not release his grip on Urian’s shoulder.

  The pressure in his ears intensified, like hands pressing inward from both sides.

  “Look at me,” Lina said, stepping closer.

  Urian’s trembling worsened. His hands curled into fists at his sides.

  Jacob leaned in.

  “What do you see?” he whispered.

  Urian’s lips moved.

  For a moment, no sound came out.

  Then, barely audible—

  “It’s… closer.”

  Jacob’s stomach tightened.

  “What is?”

  Urian’s eyes finally flicked downward, but they did not focus on Jacob. They passed through him, then snapped back upward again.

  The shadows above shifted once more, stretching thin fingers toward the lantern glow.

  Jacob’s grip slipped against Urian’s sweat-slick cloak. He tightened it again, nails biting through fabric.

  The forest remained otherwise still.

  No leaves stirred.

  No branches creaked.

  Only the low pressure in his skull and the violent tremor beneath his hand.

  And the sense—impossible, unmeasured—that something in the dark had begun to lean down toward them.

  Urian’s whisper still hung between them.

  It’s… closer.

  Jacob opened his mouth to ask what that meant—

  The lantern light snapped sideways.

  Not blown. Not dropped.

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  Bent.

  The circle of gold warped into a jagged oval, then split into shards that hovered midair like broken glass. The trees lurched inward.

  The trunks did not fall.

  They folded.

  Angles sharpened where curves should have been. Bark peeled back in long strips that hung suspended, writhing without wind. The ground rippled underfoot, leaves liquefying into a dark sheen that reflected nothing.

  Jacob staggered.

  The pressure in his ears ruptured into a high, thin whine.

  Ahead, Lancelot turned—

  His armor screamed.

  Metal shrieked as if dragged across stone. The breastplate caved inward without impact, folding in on itself like wet tin. The engraved lines twisted, spiraled, burrowed. Steel sank into flesh without resistance.

  Lancelot did not fall.

  He compressed.

  His body narrowed, joints bending the wrong direction, limbs drawn tight to his center as if pulled by hooks beneath the earth. The axe slipped from his grip and hung suspended, rotating slowly in air that no longer obeyed gravity.

  Laurence raised his shield.

  The crowned hart split down the center.

  The wood beneath it softened, sagged, and then the entire shield collapsed inward, swallowing his arm to the elbow. His sword flashed once—then the blade unraveled, thinning into threads that lashed back across his face. His mouth opened in a shout that stretched too wide, jaw unhinging as though hinged wrong.

  Lina turned toward the boys.

  Her lantern burst.

  Light exploded outward in a rain of golden fragments. They did not fall.

  They pierced.

  Her body fractured along invisible seams, skin separating into hundreds of uneven shards that hovered in the air around a hollow center. For a breathless instant, Jacob could see through her—rib bones suspended like white branches, organs trembling in open space—then those too split and scattered, dissolving into pulsing red motes that drifted upward into the canopy.

  Eyda leapt.

  The ground opened beneath her midair.

  Not a pit.

  A mouth.

  The soil split into layered plates that peeled back like petals, revealing a depthless dark that pulsed with slow, rhythmic contractions. Her daggers struck nothing. Her body dropped, elongated as it fell, limbs stretching thin as wire before snapping out of sight.

  The earth closed with a soft, satisfied click.

  Lucas’s spear thrust forward.

  It pierced the air—and the air folded around it.

  His arm bent at the elbow backward, joint reversing without breaking skin. His torso twisted in opposing directions. Ribs surfaced beneath his cloak, pressing outward until fabric tore. His head tilted sharply to one side, then rotated fully around, eyes still open, fixed on Jacob as his spine tightened like a drawn cord.

  Aeltgen’s maps burst from their case.

  Parchment unfurled midair and hardened, edges sharpening into blades. They sliced across Aeltgen’s arms, carving lines that bled ink instead of blood. Symbols crawled from the pages and burrowed into his skin, swelling beneath the surface in writhing patterns that reconfigured his shape into angles that did not belong to bone.

  The forest tilted.

  Up became sideways.

  The trunks leaned inward at impossible degrees, converging above the clearing into a narrowing funnel.

  The low whine in Jacob’s ears spiked into a roar.

  He could not breathe.

  His throat worked, but air scraped down wrong. His hands slipped from Urian’s shoulders.

  No. No no no—

  The six ahead of him collapsed in fragments, folding, tearing, consumed by shapes that did not cast shadows.

  Blood did not fall to the ground.

  It streamed upward.

  It curved.

  It wrote lines across the air before vanishing.

  Jacob’s vision stuttered.

  Frames missing.

  Lancelot’s gauntlet lay on the forest floor.

  Inside it, something twitched.

  Laurence’s shield reformed briefly around empty space before imploding again with a wet crunch.

  Lina’s voice—half a word—then nothing but the snapping of splintered bone that bent and bent and bent until it resembled woven wicker.

  Jacob’s mind could not hold the image.

  It slipped.

  Tore.

  His stomach convulsed. Acid surged into his mouth. He gagged, choking on bile that burned his throat.

  Beside him, Urian made a sound that did not resemble language.

  A raw, tearing noise.

  The pack slid from Jacob’s shoulders. He did not feel himself shrug it off. It simply dropped, hitting the ground with a dull thud that echoed too long.

  “Run,” Urian croaked.

  The word cracked apart halfway through.

  Jacob’s legs moved before thought returned.

  He turned.

  The forest behind them no longer resembled the path they had walked. It pulsed in uneven segments, trees bending in synchronized spasms. The shadows peeled off the trunks and lunged low across the ground like spilled ink racing downhill.

  He ran.

  Branches lashed at his face. Or perhaps they did not move at all.

  His boots slipped on leaves that had become slick and wet. He did not look down to see what coated them.

  Urian sprinted beside him, breath coming in broken gasps. His earlier tremor had transformed into violent, uncoordinated movement. He crashed through undergrowth without care, snapping twigs that screamed like thin metal rods under strain.

  Behind them—

  The sound.

  Not pursuit.

  Not footsteps.

  A deep, grinding collapse, as though the forest itself were rearranging.

  Jacob’s lungs burned. His chest tightened so fiercely that black spots crowded his vision.

  Don’t look back.

  He looked back.

  For a fraction of a second, the clearing still existed.

  The six shapes of the Vanquishers hung suspended mid-destruction, bodies half-folded, half-consumed.

  Then the image shattered like dropped glass.

  Darkness slammed into place.

  Jacob screamed.

  The sound tore from him without control, high and ragged, shredding his throat raw. Urian’s scream joined it, lower but just as fractured.

  They ran blindly.

  Left.

  Right.

  Branches struck his cheek. Something warm streaked down his jaw. He did not slow.

  The path they had taken no longer aligned with memory. Trees appeared where none had stood. Roots rose beneath his boots. He stumbled, caught himself, kept running.

  Castleside. Highgarde. Light. Walls.

  The words clanged uselessly inside his skull.

  His hands were empty.

  His pack gone.

  His mind splintering with every stride.

  Jacob screamed.

  The sound tore through the forest without warning—high, ragged, unrestrained.

  Lancelot turned sharply.

  The trees stood exactly as they had moments before. Trunks rooted firm. Branches interlocked overhead. The lantern in Lina’s hand burned with a steady, unbroken flame.

  No fractured light. No bending earth.

  Jacob staggered backward, eyes wide and unfocused, staring into the air ahead as though something towered there.

  Urian stood beside him, trembling violently.

  “What—” Lina began.

  Jacob’s pack hit the ground.

  The thud sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness.

  Without another word, he spun and ran.

  Not a tactical retreat. Not controlled movement.

  He ran as if the ground itself had ignited beneath him.

  Urian followed a heartbeat later, boots slipping against the leaves as he turned and sprinted after Jacob. His breath came in broken, animal bursts.

  “Jacob!” Lina shouted.

  She lunged forward, lantern swinging wildly and casting sharp, jagged shadows across the trunks.

  “Urian!”

  Their figures vanished between the trees within seconds, swallowed by the dark corridor they had carved through the undergrowth.

  Lina moved to follow.

  Laurence caught her arm.

  His grip was iron.

  “No,” he said.

  She twisted against him. “They’re not thinking—”

  “Neither are you.”

  His voice cut cleanly through the space between them. Low. Controlled.

  “Chasing them blind will lose more than two.”

  Lina’s chest rose and fell sharply. She strained to listen for the boys’ retreating footsteps.

  There were none.

  Not even the brittle crunch of leaves.

  Only the same thick, enclosing silence.

  Lancelot stepped forward, axe raised slightly, scanning the direction the boys had fled. His pulse hammered against his ribs. He saw no distortion. No movement beyond the faint tremor of Lina’s lantern light.

  “They were looking at nothing,” Eyda said quietly.

  Her usual edge had dulled. She stood still now, daggers lowered but ready, eyes narrowed at the empty stretch of forest where Jacob had screamed.

  Aeltgen moved to the spot where the boys had stood. He crouched briefly, fingers brushing the disturbed leaves.

  “No sign of struggle,” he murmured.

  Lucas shifted to guard the rear without instruction, spear angled outward into the dark.

  Lina’s breathing steadied by degrees, though her eyes remained fixed on the void between trees.

  “They saw something,” she said.

  “Yes,” Laurence replied.

  He released her arm.

  “They saw something.”

  The way he said it carried no agreement. No dismissal.

  Just fact.

  Lancelot stepped toward the dropped packs.

  Two bundles lay where they had fallen. One strap twisted over itself, the leather darkened by sweat. A waterskin had rolled free and rested on its side, untouched.

  He bent and lifted the first pack.

  The weight settled into his palm—real, solid, ordinary.

  Nothing in the forest had changed.

  Nothing visible.

  “Form tight,” he ordered quietly.

  They closed ranks.

  The air remained cold and unmoving. The pressure that had pressed faintly against his skull earlier had eased, though a residue of tension lingered behind his eyes.

  Lancelot straightened and swung the pack onto his shoulder. The added weight dragged slightly against the muscles of his back.

  “Divide the rest,” he said.

  No one protested.

  Laurence secured one of the supply crates to his belt and adjusted the strap across his chest. Lina lifted Jacob’s pack without hesitation, tightening it across her frame despite the additional strain. Eyda took Urian’s spare rations, looping them across her torso. Lucas and Aeltgen redistributed the remaining load with efficient silence.

  When the redistribution finished, the formation shifted naturally—heavier, denser.

  The forest remained unchanged.

  Lancelot wiped a sleeve across his brow.

  His skin came away damp.

  He lifted his gaze forward.

  Between two trunks, deep within the layered dark, a faint glimmer blinked.

  He froze.

  It hovered at eye level.

  Small.

  Gold.

  A single point of light pulsing softly in the black.

  Behind him, Lina drew a sharp breath.

  Another flicker sparked to life three paces to the right.

  Then a third, higher, weaving gently between two branches.

  They did not illuminate the forest.

  They did not chase away shadow.

  They simply existed.

  Laurence stepped up beside him, sword still drawn.

  “So,” he said quietly.

  The word hung unfinished.

  More lights appeared.

  One by one.

  Not chaotic. Not scattered.

  They formed a loose line, curving deeper into the trees.

  The glow did not waver like common insects. It burned steady, rich, almost liquid in color.

  Golden.

  Lancelot felt the weight of both packs pressing into his shoulders.

  The King’s voice echoed faintly in his memory. A corridor of fireflies. A path.

  He did not lower his axe.

  The lights drifted forward a few inches, then paused, as though waiting.

  Beautiful.

  Still.

  Silent.

  No wings hummed. No air stirred.

  Eyda exhaled softly. “There’s your omen.”

  No one answered.

  The fireflies pulsed once in unison.

  The forest did not react.

  It simply watched.

  Lancelot shifted his stance, adjusting to the added weight, and stared into the quiet procession of gold leading into the deeper black.

  Awe brushed the edge of his thoughts.

  Dread followed close behind.