The forest remembered how to be quiet.
Not the good kind—the drowsy hush after rain, the soft-click speech of beetles. This quiet came like a held breath, caught between trees. It pressed into the group's ribs and made the light feel thin.
Arsanguir kept to the middle of the line, one hand on the shaft of his makeshift spear, eyes ticking at every sound that wasn't a sound. A leaf cracking somewhere behind them made his shoulders climb to his ears; a gnat's whine sent a small quiver through his jaw. He tried to breathe smaller. It didn't help. The air here clung.
Ahead, Rohuun broke trail—a slab-shouldered B'aakal with a stone-headed hammer slung across his back. He moved like a boulder that had learned patience. "Ground's softening," he called, voice low. "Watch your weight."
"Weight we've got," murmured Bren, the lean Lak'te scout, testing each step with the butt of his spear. "Good thing we left our luck at home."
"Speak for yourself," said Nara from somewhere to Arsanguir's right. The Ixim'kin archer was all sashes and sunburn, her bow strung but low. "I keep a thumb of it in a pouch."
"Can you lend any?" Arsanguir asked before he could stop himself. His voice sounded strange to his own ears—like he'd borrowed it.
Kaelen walked the rear as always, the Ch'olan leader's long-limbed stride measured and unhurried. He didn't glance back when he answered, but the steadiness of his tone reached the whole line. "No lending. We keep what we catch."
The path unraveled beneath them into velvet rot and matted moss. Trees widened their stance as if bracing, and the smell of damp—real damp, old damp, the sort that moved in and never left—rose to meet them. The calls of birds came in stutters, then not at all. Even the midges seemed to hum lower, closer to the skin.
Arsanguir blinked sweat from his eyelashes. His heart had a new trick now: it paused between beats to count. One-two—wait—three. The pause scared him more than the thud.
He scratched the inside of his wrist and froze. A creeper vine that had been touching his skin slid away by itself, slow as thought. He told himself it was a trick of wind. There was no wind.
"Eyes front," Kaelen said softly. "We're in it."
Bren stopped abruptly and held up a hand. He leaned on his spear and frowned at a lump of moss clinging to a low root. "Is that… new?"
"It's moss," Rohuun said.
"Then why is it—" Bren tapped the lump with his spear-tip. The green mass pulsed, burped, and split along a seam Arsanguir hadn't seen. What spilled out wasn't liquid. It was air made wrong.
A wet puff rolled over Bren's boots. It wasn't smoke and it wasn't fog. It was soft and green and too heavy for mist, and when it reached Bren's knees he coughed once, then again, then folded with his hands at his throat. Nara swore and leapt back, bow rising but eyes watering. Another lump on a nearby stump bulged.
"Down!" Kaelen snapped. "Cloth up, eyes closed!"
Arsanguir didn't think; his body cut the thought out. He grabbed Bren by the collar and dragged him sideways, boots slurping in the deepening muck. The air bit at his own eyes and tongue, a bitter green that tasted of pond skin and rot. Somewhere between one step and the next, his left forearm sliced open on something sharp—he saw the clean red line, felt the skin lip apart—and then it wasn't there. His fingers kept their hold. His mind, breaking little pieces off itself to keep moving, barely noticed.
Shapes slid between the roots. Slick. Low. Long. Not foxes—though the bone map of their bodies ran close—but flatter, wired tighter. Their fur wasn't fur so much as fine wet moss laid over muscle. Their eyes were the glassy coins of frogs. A Muxil darted across open ground, mouth opening wider than it should—wide enough to show a wet clutch of moss in its throat—then clamped shut and heaved. The clump described a clumsy arc, hit a root with a soft slap, and exhaled another choking cloud.
"Circle, circle!" Kaelen's voice carried a ripple that wasn't sound. The earth under Arsanguir's boots seemed to firm, just for a heartbeat, as if the word itself had borrowed spine. He pulled Bren into that firmness and shoved him at Rohuun's legs.
Rohuun set his hammer, the haft braced against his hip, his boots deep in muck. A Muxil swept in at his left and he turned with the speed of a door on a well-oiled hinge. The stone head kissed the creature behind its foreleg with a wet crunch and flung it into a fern. It didn't yelp. It simply stopped being in one place and started being in another.
More shapes, more clumps. Green breath rose around them. Nara coughed into the crook of her elbow, eyes narrowed to slits. She lifted her bow—stringing it in one smooth pull—and drew blind, lips barely moving as if tasting threads in the air. The arrow left her string and… bent. That was the word Arsanguir's frightened mind chose. It bent around a hanging branch and sank into a Muxil's flank as it tried to cut across their rear. The creature stumbled, scrabbled, then launched again with nightmare cheer. The arrow quivered and stayed.
Bren gagged and hauled in a ragged breath through cloth. "Better to drown," he wheezed between coughs, "than choke on what—"
"What the Muxil feeds you," Rohuun finished, swinging again. "Yes, grandmother. Fight."
The spores had a personality. They were not simply in the air; they seemed to choose where to be. They drifted toward mouths, gathered in hollows, slid around blades like they had a respecter of persons. Arsanguir pressed his sleeve against his face and moved when Kaelen said move, stopped when he said hold. Every time Kaelen spoke the world aligned by a hair. The ground didn't love them, but it granted them tiny favors.
A Muxil slipped between Nara and Bren with surgical grace. Arsanguir saw its target choice—ankle tendon—and lunged without planning. His heel slid; his knee shuddered; his weight should have dumped him into the bog. Instead his body—not him, his body—threw itself through the mistake, found a new angle, and hit the creature's ribs with his shoulder. He felt a give like rotten wood. The Muxil rolled, twisted, and its claws raked up his side. Hot. Wet. Then… nothing. Cloth clung to skin that wasn't torn anymore.
Nara's hand brushed his neck. "Don't breathe deep," she murmured through cloth. "Short sips."
"Right," he said, grateful for the order. A Muxil leapt; his spear met it; the tip glanced off wet muscle and rang on bone. If sound could be green, it would have been that ring.
Kaelen shifted the circle with a word. "Left."
They moved left. The spores moved with them, as if annoyed. Rohuun took another hit in the chest and the hammer's haft bit the meat of his palm. He grunted, then smiled without teeth. "Harder," he told the world.
Something thin and bright traced over the skin of his forearms—veins of light, like magma beneath a crust. It lasted no more than a heartbeat, but the next Muxil that came in at him met flesh that gave less than stone and teeth that found no purchase. He brought the hammer down in a tight arc to spare Nara's range, and the head met skull with a thick, wet drum.
The pack didn't break. Muxil didn't do bravery and they didn't do fear. They did arithmetic. They darted in, tested, darted back; they broke the line where it frayed and licked green breath into those breaks. When Bren faltered, a Muxil boxed him to the right and another to the left, and a third, grinning with too many teeth for that narrow jaw, slid toward his boot.
Arsanguir moved again without getting a vote. His ankle turned. He should have fallen. He—didn't. Something under him adjusted his geometry. He crossed the space like water spilling from a dish and put the spear haft between Bren's boot and the Muxil's mouth. The beast bit wood; splinters bit its tongue; it recoiled and sprayed another gob of moss.
"Back," Kaelen said. The single syllable pushed into Arsanguir's bones and turned his feet for him. They ceded ground in a small crescent, like a door shutting on bad weather.
Nara loosed two arrows quick. One sank. The other skated off a slick spine with a note that rang in her teeth and made her hiss. "I hate that sound."
"Everyone up," Kaelen said, voice low, threading steadiness. "One more push."
They made it as a single shape, and for a breath Arsanguir saw the weave of them—how Rohuun's stubborn mass set a low wall; how Nara's arrows stitched light between gaps; how Bren's spear made a clock face for their movements to hang on. Kaelen's voice drew a ring around the whole and held it just long enough. The Muxil did their counting and disagreed with the sum. One more dart in; one more claw raking leather and finding nothing softer beneath; then the pack slipped back into the green. Their passage left trails on the water like written words that read: later.
For a while the only sounds were coughing and the small wet breaths of the swamp.
Bren knelt and spat green. "Better to drown," he repeated, tone lighter now that he wasn't dying, "than choke on—"
"Yes," Rohuun said, rolling his shoulder where a claw had traced his flesh and failed to be remembered by it. "We learned the lesson."
Nara wiped her mouth and looked at the moss clinging to her sleeve. It seemed to look back. She flicked it off with distaste and took a small breath through teeth. "That was… not nothing."
Kaelen crouched and looked at the body of the one Rohuun had broken. The slick fur steamed faintly in the humid air; its throat still cradled a little green. "It pressed as hard as it judged us worth. It miscounted."
Bren chuckled hoarsely, then coughed again, then winced. "I hate swamps."
"You like breathing," Nara said. "This one tried to help you decide."
Arsanguir looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He rubbed at his side where the claws had kissed him. The cloth came away wet—not with blood, but with clean swamp water that had wicked into the cut of his shirt. He blinked at it, waited for pain to compose itself, and when it didn't he put his hand down and tried to make his breath small again.
Kaelen's gaze flicked to the torn shirt, then away—a man filing a question for later. "We move," he said to the group at large. "Before the mire remembers we owe it."
They moved.
————————————————————————————————————
Not fast—just the kind of steady that tells fear it can trail behind if it wants, but it won't be invited up front. The swamp thinned by grudges and inches. Muck gave back the shape of their boots. The smell of rot loosened its fingers and let in leaf and bark and the faint iron of old stone.
Bren walked point again, spear butt testing the ground, shoulders sloped with the careful tiredness of a man who'd been wrong and would prefer not to be wrong twice. "Heads up," he murmured. "The mire's arguing less. That means it's planning something else."
"Everything plans," Nara said, voice low, bow unstrung now and carried in her left hand to rest the tendons. "Even water."
Rohuun answered with a grunt that meant he agreed with the principle but distrusted water anyway. He shook a sleeve; pale-green dust fell in a small sigh. "Spore on cloth," he said. "Not much. Enough to be rude."
"Give it here," Kaelen said.
They paused beneath a beech whose roots braided the path like old fingers. Kaelen crouched and pulled a small clay vial from his satchel—plain, stoppered with oiled twine. He breathed once, twice, then pinched at the air as if finding a thread others couldn't see. A faint shimmer tugged along Bren's collar, then Rohuun's sleeve, then the inside of Nara's scarf. Green motes lifted from fabric as if remembering they were lighter than air. They drifted—reluctant, stubborn—into the waiting mouth of the vial.
"Small flush," Kaelen murmured. "Not all of it. Not worth the cost. Enough to stop the coughs."
The last flecks settled. He stoppered the vial; the clay darkened a shade, like a jar that had decided it now held a secret.
"What for?" Bren asked, already knowing and asking anyway.
"Later," Kaelen said. "Poison's a tool if you tell it who to hurt."
"Make sure it listens," Nara said. She tugged her scarf loose, coughed once and found her lungs less offended. "My vote is for teaching it manners first."
Arsanguir watched the shimmer fade. The ordinary snapped back thin and bright. He flexed his fingers. A thin itch crawled under the cut on his forearm that wasn't there anymore. He stared until the sensation gave up on being noticed.
"Move," Kaelen said, softer now, as if speaking to the path. "Let's not be where we were."
They slid into a rhythm that could have been called peace if it hadn't been working so hard. Birds risked a note, then two. A dragonfly saw its reflection in Bren's spearhead and decided not to correct it. The light sharpened, making small bright knives of the spaces between leaves. Once, a creeper that had been draped across Arsanguir's wrist unhooked itself and laid back against its own bark, slow and apologetic. He pretended not to notice. The creeper pretended it had intended to be there all along.
"Head's wrong," Bren said after a while, pressing fingers into his temple and rolling them like trying to knead out a stubborn thought.
"Lungs, too," Nara added. "It's passing."
"Eyes," Rohuun said. "The swamp hates eyes. Forest only argues with them."
Arsanguir's heartbeat had quit the counting game, mostly. It only paused now to make sure the next beat would be worth the effort. He let the breath in his chest get small and square.
They walked. The ground sloped up as if finally remembering there was a direction besides down. Roots reappeared as obstacles instead of traps. A breeze found them and did not stink. For several minutes—five, ten—the worst thing that happened was Bren missing a step and swearing at a root in a voice that implied the root had wronged his family.
Kaelen lifted a palm without looking back. "Listen."
They did.
What they heard first was the absence: the seam of silence that had frayed when the swamp let go now knitting itself tight again. Then, beneath that, something so low it was easy to mistake for thinking.
Arsanguir hoped it was his blood. He knew it wasn't when Rohuun's head tilted, Nara's shoulders edged closer to her ears, and Bren's mouth pressed flat like a man remembering an old lesson he'd hoped to forget.
"Hold," Kaelen said, and the path obliged by not moving under them.
The hum widened. It pressed under arches and up calves, found bellies and teeth, crawled behind eyes—a slow, queasy tide that made the world feel half a thumb-width tilted. Leaves stilled. Gnats forgot their lines. Somewhere very close, the ground rehearsed a song and waited for the verse where they failed to keep time.
"If you hear the ground sing…" Bren whispered, and didn't finish.
Between two trunks to the left, rust-and-coal peeled out of shadow—shoulders too heavy for a runner, claws too long for any animal that trusted speed, ribs parted by faint glowing seams like breath through a forge grate.
"K'ahal," Nara breathed. "Five. Two fast, one heavy, two setting the braid."
Kaelen's voice stayed plain, steady. "Rohuun anchors. Bren, draw thin. Nara, cut breath. Arsanguir—close and stubborn."
Arsanguir tightened his grip on the splintered haft and felt his hands choose their own work.
The first note from the K'ahal wasn't for ears. The second one was.
And the ground began to sing.
The heavy-one arrived low like a sliding boulder, claws raking for Rohuun's thigh. Rohuun stepped into it as if greeting an old enemy, let the magma-lines trace quick fire under his skin, and met shoulder with a hammer head turned flat. Stone on bone sang; the song traveled up Rohuun's arms, set his jaw to grinding. The beast reeled—not far, just enough to prove it could be moved.
"On you!" Bren called, and fast-one scythed across their front—long claws, serpent hips hidden in a dog's shape. Bren didn't lunge; he wasn't there when it reached the place he'd been. A thin Kucholel thread webbed under his toes—he'd laid it without looking—and he rode it like a taut line, sliding two steps left on a footpath only he felt. His spear flicked. The point kissed seam-light along a rib and pushed the glow back in. The K'ahal snarled and miscounted its next step.
The hum deepened. The ground under Arsanguir's heel decided it would prefer not to exist for a breath. He should have fallen. He didn't. His body snapped a new map into place, drew a line where no ground was, and let him cross anyway.
"Breath," Kaelen murmured. It wasn't a warning; it was a word the world obeyed. Air remembered to be air in a tight ring around them—no more nausea than necessary, no less fear than honest.
Nara loosed. The arrow bent around a leaf that should have stolen it, curved again when a trunk disagreed with its appointment, and sunk under the jaw of fast-one. The impact popped a seam. Light fled the wound like offended steam. The K'ahal jerked back, then in—anger made geometry.
The watchers braided a second note under the first. Stomachs clenched. Knees argued with themselves. Rohuun leaned forward as if into a gale.
"Counter," Kaelen said, two plain Lak'te syllables, and their boots remembered friction. Bren's line firmed; Nara's hands steadied—her next arrow refused anything between her and an eye, and the eye learned about refusal.
The heavy-one changed plans, bounding sideways for Kaelen. He named a circle under himself with a whisper and a pinch of thread; the beast's claws struck that circle's edge instead of his legs—three bright sparks skittered off a boundary that hadn't existed a moment before and wouldn't after.
"Now," Kaelen said.
Rohuun moved with the patience of landslides. He let the hammer fall not down but through, dragging stone's idea into flesh. It connected high at the shoulder, low at the ribs—both—and the heavy-one folded like a bad hinge. It sank teeth into Rohuun's forearm out of spite. Teeth met skin that remembered being mountain and skipped.
"Harder," Rohuun told the world, and gave it what it asked for.
The watchers broke formation—bite-time. Fast-one came for Bren, but found Arsanguir instead, because Arsanguir had set himself where the beast had decided the weakest was. It wasn't bravery. It was a colder thing: hatred for certainty on a predator's face.
His spear was a farm tool with opinions. He met the leap with a short jab that wanted a throat and got lower jaw. The haft cracked; the iron tip stuck for a heartbeat, then tore free as wood apologized and died. Claws laced his chest. He saw four lines open him from clavicle to belly. He did not feel them. His back hit the ground; then he was on his feet again with no between, breath already continuing a sentence it hadn't had time to end. The shirt hung in ribbons. The skin under it was whole.
Nara saw and didn't see. She put an arrow in fast-one's hip to break a hind leg's argument. It staggered, howl collapsing into that sick metal grind, and Bren stepped through his own thread, reappearing half a stride past where he should, spear reversing and driving into the carotid seam. Blood came black-red and hot; the ground ate some of the note with relish.
"Left," Kaelen said—barely louder than a breath. Feet obeyed.
They rotated as a single creature—Rohuun the hinge, Bren and Arsanguir the quick eyes, Nara the needle stitching space, Kaelen the tongue telling the world what it was for the next heartbeat. The watchers tried to rebraid the song. Nara plucked a subtle line between two roots and the harmonics fell crooked. The next wave of nausea arrived late and missed its cue.
A fourth K'ahal—unseen till now—flowed from behind a buttress root. It went for Nara. She didn't dodge; she reframed. Two points underfoot became an arc; the lunge found itself a hand-span short of her throat. Teeth cut air; momentum placed an eye exactly where her last arrow wanted it. It didn't die—K'ahal don't for first wounds—but it flinched and bounded past her into Rohuun's reach. The hammer kissed its spine. The kiss wasn't gentle.
The heavy-one staggered back into the fight, ribs scaffolding breath that wanted to quit. It threw its full weight at Kaelen—body, not teeth. Kaelen stepped aside one thumb's width. The K'ahal met a trunk with all its arguments. Bark cracked. Its rib-light guttered.
"Finish," Kaelen said, watching the watchers.
Bren drove his spear into heavy-one's armpit with both hands and a tired man's authority; Rohuun brought the hammer down behind the skull to make the message legible. Bone conceded. Muscle lost its case. The body slumped under its own history.
The last two stopped singing.
For a breath, no one moved.
Then they committed—silent accountants collecting two debts at once. One angled for Bren's liver, the other for Kaelen's knee. Nara chose badly on purpose—shot the one on Kaelen poorly, low, to make it lift a paw. It did. Claws missed the knee and raked air.
Arsanguir did not choose. He was where the other would be. With only a length of broken haft, he jammed wood into a seam and twisted. Something tore. The K'ahal screamed—real, ragged—and slammed him with its shoulder, a cartwheel of weight that should have spun him away. He slid two paces instead, feet finding purchase where moss had no right to hold him.
"Now," Kaelen said again, as if telling time.
Rohuun arrived like a verdict and laid the hammer against the watcher's skull with mercy's opposite. Bren shoved his spear through the other's mouth from the side; cheekbone cracked like pottery; the point found the soft roof and stayed like a held breath.
Silence considered returning, then decided it would be more honest to hang nearby and watch.
Rohuun stood over the last of them, chest heaving, magma-veins fading. He planted the hammer head in soil and leaned. "Count," he said to no one. "We keep missing one."
"There were five," Nara said, strand-dry. "We made them two, then one. Now none."
Bren pressed two fingers to his temple. "Still humming," he muttered. "Like the world got the song stuck."
"It will fade," Kaelen said. He crouched beside a carcass and touched two fingers to the seam where light had lived. Dark now. "It was a measured hunt. They'll tell others we cost more than we're worth."
"They would if they could talk," Bren said.
"They do," Rohuun replied, already dragging the heaviest by the forelegs. "Just not to us."
Arsanguir looked down at the ribbons of his shirt. He should have felt raw air on raw skin. He didn't. He closed the shirt like a polite man closing a door and let the fact sit outside.
Kaelen rose. "We don't linger. Drag them fifty paces. High ground. Work quick. Nara—smoke small. Bren, watch our backs. Rohuun, you and I split and haul. Arsanguir, strip the hides; tendons, ribs, heart if it's whole."
They moved the bodies to a dry spine. Nara set a skillet across two stones and braided three thin threads into the air over it—one to keep smoke honest, one to keep scent stingy, one to remind fat to stay where it belonged. The fire listened. Bren prowled the perimeter with spear low, tapping roots now and then, laying lines the rest of them lacked the patience to feel.
Arsanguir's hands stepped into butchery before thought could audition. Knife in, hide back, follow the white tissue. K'ahal hide parted with wet reluctance, then all at once, like a stubborn conversation finding its end. The meat beneath was clean—dense and red with a shadow's sheen.
Kaelen glanced over. "K'ahal carry their own light—angry, not swamp-tainted," he said, answering the question Arsanguir hadn't spoken.
Rohuun and Kaelen treated ribs like beams, haunches like bricks, building neat stacks that would travel without complaining. Hearts went into oilcloth; tendons into twists; bones with marrow were split and roasted while honesty still lived in the coals. Blood was collected where it could be, poured into two stoppered skins with frowns—it would spoil before any alchemy could want it. Waste went where scavengers would find it faster than noses.
They ate narrow strips when enough heat had passed through them to make arguments pointless. The flesh was copper-salt and smoke and the echo of iron. Bren made the small noise of a man surprised by joy against his own better judgment.
"Don't get used to it," Nara told him, chewing. "Most days the forest feeds us roots and regret."
"I'll remember the regret tomorrow," Bren said. "Today I remember salt."
Rohuun huffed approval. Kaelen didn't smile, but his shoulders acknowledged there were worse minutes than this one.
When the loads were tied—two haunches slung in a simple net over Rohuun's travois, ribs bundled for Bren's narrow back, a heart parcel for Nara, a strip of cooked meat and three lengths of tendon for Arsanguir—they banked the coals and brushed out the fire ring until even an honest tracker would have needed to argue with himself.
"North," Kaelen said, like the word contained a road. "Ridge path before dusk."
They set off. The hum in the ground unraveled over a hundred paces, thread by thread, until it became memory—the kind that checks the door twice.
A flock of Hozal drifted high and south, bone-masked heads tilting as if reading the day. None circled. The forest kept its opinions to itself.
————————————————————————————————————
They found the ridge as the light decided to stop insisting. The spine of stone angled west, dry-backed and thoughtful. The wind, having met its obligations elsewhere, came to see what they were doing and took some heat in trade. The world spread below in layered greens and the suggestion of blue farther off where lowlands drowned themselves slowly.
"Here," Kaelen said. "Short rest. Then more."
Rohuun lowered the travois and flexed the ache out of his hands without apology. Bren cut two strips from a rib parcel and propped them over a stingy glow. Nara checked the arrow she'd bent back into honesty and told it not to sulk. Arsanguir sat on a flat stone and rewound a thin strip of linen around the broken haft of his spear—making it into something with better manners.
No one talked about the song under the ground. No one needed to. It had left something behind—an echo in knuckles, a tremor in the parts of them that chose angles without asking eyes.
"Those seams," Bren said finally, because someone had to push words into the space. "The light in the ribs. Kucholel?"
"Not like ours," Nara said. "Not woven. Born."
"Bone-light," Rohuun offered, as if naming a mineral. "Hot when it wants."
Kaelen watched the treeline. "Some creatures pull possibilities through muscle. We borrow. They carry." He glanced back at Arsanguir—first fully, then careful again. "And some people surprise both."
Arsanguir tightened the last wrap and bit the linen to tear it. "I learned to run today," he said, trying to make it a joke and failing. "Not fast. Just… where the ground allowed."
"Good lesson," Bren said. "The ground is a stubborn teacher."
"Sometimes fair," Nara said.
"Sometimes there," Rohuun added, which earned the right kind of silence.
Kaelen let them have it for a few breaths, then stood. "We move. We smell like victory and meat. Both are invitations."
They moved.
The forest did not forgive them. It tolerated. That was enough to be alive between one step and the next. And for now, that was all any of them asked.