He set a pace that the others struggled to match without complaint. Not deliberately — it was
simply the pace he had walked for ten years, calibrated to cover ground before the forest's mood
shifted, before whatever was hunting in one area moved into another. They adapted. Faster than he
expected.
The forest was quieter than usual around them. Not the silence of animals hiding from
something passing through — that had a particular quality, a compression to it, a held-breath
feeling. This was different. This was the silence of animals that had already left. The kind that
preceded something Arim recognized.
Every few minutes, he would reach out along the unseen threads of his power and touch
something in the undergrowth. A twisted wolf crouched in a hollow twenty meters left. A blight
spider in the canopy sixty feet up, watching them with compound eyes. A shadow-mastiff on the
trail ahead, young, not yet at full strength. His power found their hearts the way a hand finds a
candleflame in darkness — without looking, just extending until something warm pushed back.
Then he squeezed. Not catastrophically. Just enough.
The wolf stopped moving. The spider retreated. The mastiff turned and fled.
The others did not see him do any of it. But Eddie, walking nearest to him, registered the
pattern: the occasional pause, the slight tension in Arim's jaw, the way things simply stopped
happening around them that ought to have been happening.
He didn't say anything about it until the fourth occurrence, when a vine horror that had been
tracking them for the better part of an hour simply stopped moving and fell sideways into a ditch
without visible cause.
Eddie: "You know, I've read about this. Certain kinds of entities. The stories say they don't
swing a blade — they just walk, and the things around them that are weak enough simply stop.
Like the world decides it's time."
— 7 —
Arim kept walking. Eddie kept pace.
Eddie: "Is that what you are?"
Arim didn't look at him.
Arim: "Don't pry too much, new friend. Knowledge can be a curse, and curiosity can lead to
distrust."
Eddie received this without offense. He fell back half a pace, giving Arim the space the
warning requested, and said nothing more about it.
By midday the trees had changed character. The bloodroot oaks and black-barked elms of
Nirvedu's middle reaches gave way to older growth — stone-grey trunks twice the width of a man's
armspan, root systems that buckled the ground into ridges and valleys, canopy so thick that the
light reaching the forest floor arrived in thin, cold columns like something sacred and diminishing.
Elven architecture had once stood here. Ruined pillars emerged from the undergrowth at intervals,
rune-cut and half-consumed by moss and root. The air smelled different: older, layered with the
specific mineral quality of stone that hadn't seen open sky in centuries.
Dustin: "Necrotic signatures are intensifying. We're getting close."
Lucas: "Close to what, exactly."
Dustin: "Close to whatever is generating the rifts. Something's been feeding this space for a
long time."
Arim stopped walking. The others nearly walked into him.
Through a curtain of hanging black moss, perhaps fifty meters ahead, pulsed a light the color
of arterial blood. Steady as a heartbeat. Patient as something that knew it was not going anywhere.
Arim: "There."
Nobody spoke. The light moved through the moss in slow, rhythmic waves.
Eddie: "So. How do we do this."
Arim looked at the light for a long moment. He thought about the girl in the apprentice robes,
and the ten years he had spent not letting himself wonder where she was, and what it said about
him that he had managed it so successfully.
Arim: "Carefully."