The eastern stables smelled heavily of sweet hay, oiled leather, and the reassuring, musk-laden warmth of horses resting in the shadows.
Caelan had changed in a blur of motion back at the palace, tearing off his sweat-stained training gear for a plain dark shirt, heavy riding trousers, and a canvas hunting jacket thick with useful pockets. The familiar, grounding weight of his broadsword settled against his hip as he stepped out into the bright light of the courtyard.
At this hour in the morning, the compound hummed with life. Guards rotated their shifts in pairs, their armor clinking rhythmically. A massive supply cart groaned under its load near the far wall, flanked by two stable hands shouting over the noise as they unloaded crates.
Leaning his shoulder against the weathered stone wall, Caelan watched the stable hands prepare his mount. His mind drifted back to the training hall, Alfor's parting words echoing in his skull: Have an answer ready. He had been turning that phrase over and over like a smooth river stone, yet nothing satisfying had taken shape.
Then, a faint sound drifted from the direction of the main archway.
It wasn't words, not exactly. It was more like the structural silhouette of a voice, the phantom impression of speech muttered from a distance so vast that the air swallowed the meaning before it could land. Caelan's head snapped toward the iron gates. The two guards on duty remained leaning against their pikes, chuckling over some shared joke. The stone archway was entirely empty. No one was passing through.
He rubbed his eyes, letting out a slow, steadying breath.
"You left early."
Caelan turned. Merida was marching across the bustling courtyard, her stride carrying the aggressive speed she reserved for when she was thoroughly annoyed. She was still in her dark practice leathers. A thin sheen of sweat glistened along her hairline, her cheeks flushed crimson from the morning's brutal exertion in the sand. She had clearly run straight from the pits, which meant either Alfor had dismissed them early, or Faris had a big mouth.
"I finished my sets," Caelan shifted his weight, trying for casual.
"You didn't finish a damn thing," Merida countered, halting right in front of him. Her chest heaved slightly as she took him in, the hunting jacket, the strapped broadsword, the sturdy roan mare being led out of the stalls. Her hazel eyes narrowed. "Where are you going?"
"Out."
"Out," she echoed, her voice dropping into a flat, dangerous tone. "You're dressed for a deep trek. You have your damn sword." She tilted her head, her sharp gaze raking over his face. "You pull Alfor away for a hushed whisper, and suddenly you're fleeing the compound? Talk to me, Caelan. What is going on?"
"I just have something I need to check on in the valley."
"What 'something'?"
Caelan looked at her. Really looked at her. Her hazel eyes were trying to read him, darting across his features, actively searching for the exact seam where his words decoupled from the truth.
"Caelan," she murmured, the irritation draining into something softer, heavier, that he didn't quite understand. "You've been acting strange ever since we found you in the woods. Both Faris and I notice it. You're distant, like you're not actually here with us, when you physically are."
Behind him, near the gates, the faint, sourceless whisper brushed the back of his neck again. He forced his body not to stiffen.
"I know," Caelan admitted quietly.
"Then let me come with you."
He shook his head, "I can't. Not this time."
"Why?" Merida asked and crossed her arms, holding his gaze.
He opened his mouth to formulate an excuse, then closed it. The truth required an explanation, and the explanation required a level of certainty he simply didn't possess. He wasn't about to drag her into the woods based on a terrifying hunch. Telling her 'I keep hearing a phantom voice in my head and I think a tree is stalking me' wouldn't sound like a mystery; it would sound like a concussion brought on by his plunge into the river. He needed proof first.
The stable hand broke the tension, emerging from the dim barn leading the roan mare, Marron, that Caelan usually rode.
"Thank you," Caelan muttered, taking the leather reins.
"My lord," the stable hand offered a crisp nod and vanished back into the shadows.
"Caelan." Merida stepped into his path, not entirely blocking him, but positioning herself close enough to make her presence unavoidable. "You're doing it again. You're making a dynamic decision entirely by yourself and cutting us out."
"I do tell you things."
"You tell us things after," she clarified, her voice completely devoid of heat, which somehow made the words cut infinitely deeper. "When the blood is dry, the danger is over, and you've barely survived it. It's a miserable habit, Caelan. And it's exhausting."
The critique hit him squarely in the chest. She was entirely right, and they both knew it, but the reality of what he was facing didn't change.
"I'll be back before dark" he promised, his voice softening as he held her gaze. "And I will explain everything when I am."
Merida searched his eyes for a long, silent moment. "Everything?"
"Everything."
Sighing, she stepped back, unlinking her arms but keeping her shoulders tense. "Fine. Just try not to get carried off by any local wildlife today."
"That eagle was a singular event," he laughed.
A phantom of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips, though she fought to keep it down. "Just go."
Caelan shoved his boot into the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. Gathering the reins, he turned the roan toward the heavy iron archway. When he glanced back over his shoulder, Merida was still standing in the center of the dusty courtyard, her arms crossed tight over her chest, watching him go. A heavy knot of guilt settled in his stomach as he guided the horse through the gates.
The city of Athosea was drowning in noise.
The upcoming Prypetha Festival was drawing the surrounding world into its belly by degrees. The population had swelled overnight, flooded by merchants, farmers, and traveling troupes arriving from the outer territories and border towns. The streets were a vibrant, chaotic labyrinth of sound and color. Oversized supply wagons choked the thoroughfares, market stalls had aggressively expanded past the curbs into the cobblestone roads, and strings of unlit festival lanterns draped over the crowds like spiderwebs.
Desperate to avoid the crowd, Caelan cut sharply left before the main market square. He navigated the horse through the steep, narrow alleys of the middle city, a labyrinth of shadowed stone corridors that only the locals knew how to exploit.
He cleared the southern gates with far less bureaucratic friction than he'd anticipated. Once out on the open valley road, he gave the mare her head, and she settled into a rhythmic, ground-eating canter.
The suffocating white stone of Athosea rapidly shrank into the background. Vast, golden farmlands opened up on either side of the dirt highway, the fields already harvested, quiet, and baking under the midday sun. He pressed southeast, watching the rolling hills gradually give way to ragged scrub, until the horizon was entirely consumed by the looming tree line of the Kelmoran. Dark, dense, and primordial, the forest looked like an inkblot against the bright sky.
Reaching the perimeter, Caelan checked the mare to a cautious walk, allowing her to pick her way into the thick brush.
The scout trails here were skeletal, not constructed paths, but lines of least resistance forged by decades of boots treading the same mossy earth. He knew the structural geometry of the area: head southeast from the primary mouth, trace the jagged ridgeline down, then cut directly toward the river canyon. But the Kelmoran possessed a unique, unsettling talent for making human certainty feel incredibly foolish.
The canopy closed over his head like a heavy velvet curtain. The bright sunlight fractured into shifting, emerald-filtered beams, and the ambient temperature plummeted several degrees the moment the ancient trees hemmed him in.
He kept his hand near his scabbard, his senses wired tight.
The woods felt fundamentally different in the stark clarity of day compared to the blind terror of his previous escape. It was quieter, yet hyper-alive. The chatter of canopy birds, the sudden groan of twisting boughs, the soft thud-thud of the mare's hooves breaking through dry pine needles and damp loamy soil.
He cleared the steep ridge where the earth sloped violently toward the valley floor. His instincts recognised the grade of the hill, his body remembered the exact pitch of this earth from when he was running blind, his lungs tearing open, with a apex predator snapping at his heels.
Following the slope downward, the rushing roar of the river found his ears long before the water broke through the thick foliage. He guided Marron across a shallow ford where the riverbeds were wide, flat, and white. The currents were significantly tamer today, or perhaps he was just less terrified. The crossing was effortless.
An hour later, he found the clearing. He almost missed it entirely, the dense wall of black pines abruptly yielding without warning to an explosion of open sky and long, pale wild grass.
The ancient willow anchored the center of the meadow, precisely as it had in his memories. Its trunk was a massive, gnarled tower of corkscrewed bark, its weeping branches cascading downward in a dense curtain of green that swept the tops of the grass. Small, pale wildflowers dotted the meadow, basking in the direct sunlight. In the ordinary glare of midday, the clearing looked almost peaceful. Beautiful, even.
Caelan dismounted, his boots sinking into the soft earth. He hitched Marron loosely to a stout pine at the meadow's edge, ensuring she had plenty of shade, sweet grass, and a clear, unobstructed line of retreat back to the scout path if things dissolved into chaos.
Stepping away from the horse, he marched out into the open sun, stopping ten paces from the willow's hanging perimeter.
He cleared his throat, feeling profoundly ridiculous. "Hello?"
Nothing. Only the gentle sigh of the wind through the grass.
Drawing his sword just to have steel in his hand, Caelan executed a slow, meticulous circle around the tree's exterior, studying the perimeter from every tactical angle. The long grass was undisturbed, bearing no tracks other than his own fresh boots. The long, hanging tendrils of the willow swayed lazily in the breeze. Ordinary wood. Ordinary leaves. He squinted up into the high canopy, but found only shifting green patterns and filtered sunlight.
Completing the circuit, he ended up right back where he started.
"I heard you," he called out to the silent bark, his voice tight with growing frustration. "Three separate times. I heard you in this clearing, I heard you in the palace, and I heard you in the training pits this morning." He paused, steadying his breathing. "I am here now."
Silence answered. A lone crow called out from somewhere deep in the pine forest. Behind him, Marron shifted her weight, her bit clinking softly.
Caelan clamped his jaw. Pushing his hands forward, he parted the dense curtain of hanging willow branches and stepped into the interior sanctuary.
Inside the canopy, the world changed instantly. The air felt completely static, heavy and cool. The ambient rustle of the surrounding forest died, utterly muffled by the thick green wall. Sunlight penetrated the lattice of upper branches in thin, smoky shafts, illuminating dancing motes of dust. The massive trunk loomed before him, deeply grooved and ancient as the mountains.
He stood in the center of the shaded ring, looking directly up into the wooden vault.
"Last time," he said, his voice dropping into a low, echoing murmur. "If there is something hiding in these branches, I've ridden a long way on a very dangerous assumption. I'd like to know if I'm losing my mind."
More silence.
Caelan let out a long, defeated exhale, shaking his head. He allowed his eyes to drift up to the massive bough directly above and to his left, the thick, twisted limb his gaze had kept mysteriously sliding off of during the grey dawn two days ago. It looked entirely mundane now. Just ancient wood, rough bark, and clusters of dark leaves.
He forced himself to stare at it, refusing to blink.
And then, exactly like before, his vision began to warp. His eyes fought to tracking the branch, his focus slipping and sliding as if trying to grasp oiled glass. Slowly, a silhouette began to resolve in the negative space where the limb fused with the trunk. It was an impossible, simultaneously present and absent, bleeding into the shadows yet holding a distinct, physical mass.
The fine hairs on the back of his neck rose violently, a jolt of pure adrenaline spiking his pulse.
"So," a voice rippled through the quiet air. It was impossibly soft, sourceless, vibrating directly inside his skull while sounding miles away. "You've decided to come."