They ran.
Not from panic. Panic had a shape, and this wasn't it. This was quieter, colder, the kind of moving-forward that came from not knowing what waited behind them or ahead of them, only that standing still felt like the worst option on the table.
Boots hit red dirt in uneven rhythm. Branches clawed at sleeves. Nobody spoke.
Korath ran a half step behind Phthisis, close enough to catch the faint curl of white lifting off his shoulders. Steam. Thin, constant, rising straight up despite the wind trying to bend it sideways.
He almost asked.
The question sat right there, easy, three words, and he swallowed it instead. Later. There'd be a later, hopefully, and later felt like a better time to find out why a person breathed heat into cold air like a kettle left too long on the fire.
Phthisis noticed him notice. Said nothing either.
Fair trade.
—
The road had stopped repeating.
Phthisis didn't announce it. He simply felt the absence of something he'd spent three days memorizing without meaning to, the split tree gone, the folded-hand boulder gone, every landmark he'd catalogued replaced by ground that owed him nothing familiar.
New road.
Or maybe not a road at all anymore. Maybe just forest, doing what forest did when nobody was forcing it into a shape.
He filed that away and kept moving.
—
The lead knight stopped first.
Not slowed. Stopped, dead, mid-stride, like a puppet whose string got yanked from directly above.
The rest piled up behind him in a ragged clump, breath ragged, eyes wide, and for one long second nobody moved at all.
Then the knights' ears twitched.
All four at once. Small, sharp, involuntary, the motion of something listening for a frequency the rest of the convoy couldn't reach.
Phthisis watched, and something in his stomach went very still.
—
Their legs bent wrong.
Not broken. Not injured. Reshaped, knees folding backward at the joint the way a wolf's did, or a deer's, haunches dropping low to the ground in a crouch no human spine should've allowed.
Korath made a sound behind him. Phthisis didn't turn to check what kind.
Then the knights were gone.
Not ran. Launched, four bodies rocketing forward through red trunks at a speed that turned them into smears of grey and steel, gone so fast the wind they left behind arrived a full second after they did.
Phthisis stood there a moment, chest heaving, watching the space where four armored men had just stopped being ordinary.
They found something, he thought.
Something worth that kind of speed.
Safety, maybe. Or the end of the road. Either way, he wasn't waiting to find out secondhand.
"Move," he said, already moving. "Follow the tracks."
Korath didn't argue. That, more than anything, told Phthisis how badly the prince wanted this particular nightmare to be over.
—
The tracks were easy at first.
Deep gouges in soft dirt, four sets, wide-clawed and evenly spaced, the kind of print that told a story about speed and weight and very little else.
Phthisis followed them at a dead sprint, counting without meaning to, the way he'd counted landmarks two days ago. Ten prints. Twenty. A rhythm.
Then the rhythm broke.
One print, off to the side, half-buried under a root. He almost missed it. Would have missed it, if the shape hadn't snagged something behind his eyes and refused to let go.
He stopped.
Crouched.
Looked.
It wasn't a claw print.
Five toes. An arch. A heel. But the mud around it didn't sit right, didn't pool the way mud pooled when something heavy came down on top of it. It rose. Folded upward and outward from beneath the shape of the foot, like the ground itself had pushed the print up from underneath rather than taken it from above, the base mud line bulging where it should have flattened.
As if the foot hadn't landed there at all.
As if it had grown up through the earth from somewhere far below it, breaking the surface only long enough to leave the shape behind before whatever wore it kept going.
Human.
Or close enough to human that the difference didn't matter, not with the ground torn up around it in a burst pattern, not with the mud still settling at the edges like it hadn't quite decided which direction it was supposed to fall.
Something had come up here.
Then gone straight up again.
Phthisis stared at it for exactly as long as it took his stomach to finish turning over, and not one second longer.
"...Right."
He stood.
Something about the print sat wrong in a way none of the last four days had managed, not the birds, not the doubled road, not the thing wearing his own face back at the treeline. This was smaller. Quieter. Worse.
Unholy. That was the word that arrived, uninvited, and he didn't argue with it.
He ran.
Not toward the print. Away from it, following the claw tracks at a pace that left his lungs burning and Korath struggling to keep the gap from widening, and somewhere in the back of his mind a very calm, very certain part of him understood one thing clearly.
Whatever that print belonged to, he did not want to be standing anywhere near it when it came back down.