The forest seemed to have calmed around Damien even more.
The kind of ambient tension that had characterized the forest during the period of demonic occupation, the specific quality of a living place that was also being used as a base of operations by something that did not belong in it, was gone. And indeed, they were gone. The demons he'd slain days ago.
What remained was the forest's own noise, the noise of a place that had been doing what it did for centuries and was simply continuing to do it.
Damien rode through it without urgency as though he now owned the place. As though this was his turf.
He did. He now owned the turf.
Fenrir set its own pace, the long, ground-covering walk it used when there was no reason for speed, the wolf moving between the trees with the practiced ease of something that had spent weeks in this terrain and had long since stopped treating the navigation as something that required effort.
Cerbe walked to the left.
