Ezra didn't follow them right away.
That was how you got killed — chasing a lead like it was a rescue party.
Instead, he tracked from the tree line.
Watched the trail when it was empty. Counted the hours between their passes.
They moved in small groups. Never more than six. Always armed — not with scavenged junk like him, but with crafted weapons. Stone hafts wrapped in dyed cord. Bone blades carved smooth. They wore layered hides and strips of cloth the same color as the forest canopy, faces marked in curling patterns that caught the light.
At night, he watched from a ridge. Their fires were strange — pale blue instead of orange, flames that gave more shadow than light. People sat in circles around them, swaying in unison. No laughter. No idle talk.
Just a rhythm.
A chant too low to make out the words.
Ezra didn't move closer. He'd learned not to lean in when the air around something already felt wrong.
On the third day, he saw them stop at a massive tree split down the middle. The inside glowed faintly — like it was lit from within by veins of gold. They placed their hands on the trunk. One by one. Stayed there for a count of ten heartbeats before moving on.
Some ritual.
Or a checkpoint.
By the fourth day, he'd started to recognize their route — a wide loop, skirting the densest parts of the forest. He marked their positions on bark strips, built a crude map in his head.
They never looked up at the sun.
Not once.
Ezra did, once — and regretted it. The sky had been clear when he blinked, but in the space of that blink, the sun had shifted. Lower. Redder. A ring of cloudless dark circling it like an infection.
The forest pressed harder against his mind when he looked at it.
So he stopped.
On the fifth day, he caught something else. Not from the people — from the trees.
Carvings. Half-hidden under moss. Curves and loops that almost looked like words. The kind of script you thought you could read if you stared just a little longer.
He didn't.
Ezra kept his distance. The group was a puzzle, but he wasn't in a hurry to solve it. Not until he knew which way the blade turned when you picked it up.
For now, shadowing them was enough.
Learning. Watching. Counting.
The forest could keep its secrets a little longer.
On the sixth day, it happened.
Ezra had settled into his shadowing routine. Keep two turns of the trail behind them, never close enough to catch a stray glance. Watch for breaks in formation, listen for shifts in pace.
They were passing through a stretch where the trees leaned so close together the canopy turned black. Only the pale glow from their strange firestones lit the path ahead.
Ezra was crouched behind a fallen trunk, eyes just above the moss line, when one of them stopped.
No signal. No reason.
The rest kept walking.
Ezra stayed still. Even his breath felt too loud.
The figure didn't turn fully toward him — just tilted their head, slowly, as if catching a scent. Their mask was bone-white, painted with curling green lines. The mouth was closed, but the eyes — dark, too dark — seemed fixed on the exact place he hid.
Ezra's grip tightened on his spear. His pulse didn't just spike — it flattened, like his body was caught between fight and freeze.
The figure stayed like that for three long seconds. Four. Then, without a word, they reached into a pouch at their side.
They pulled out something small.
And dropped it on the path.
Then they walked on, rejoining the others as if nothing had happened.
Ezra waited until they were gone before moving.
It was a strip of cloth. Faded red. Soft, frayed. The kind used to bind wrists in certain rites — he'd seen the practice in academy lectures on old Trial cults.
One side had a mark on it.
A coil. Not ink — thread. Gold, catching the light in a way that felt too deliberate.
Ezra didn't pick it up. Not right away. He crouched over it, scanning the tree line, the path, the canopy.
Nothing moved.
Finally, he wrapped it around his palm and tucked it under his armor.
Message? Warning? Invitation?
Didn't matter.
They knew he was there.
Ezra stayed with them.
Not close. Not far. Just enough to see the shape of their world without being pulled into it.
Seven days of shadowing should've been enough for patterns to calcify. But theirs kept breaking — small ways, almost imperceptible. They didn't take the same path twice. They never camped where they had the night before. It was like they didn't want the forest to remember them.
He didn't blame them.
Ezra kept his own markers hidden — a stone stack here, a slash in the bark there, always just outside the routes they favored. If they saw them, they gave no sign.
That morning, he caught something he hadn't before. The lead walker — tall, lean, wearing a mask of carved wood lacquered in deep green — stopped at a half-rotted stump. Nothing special about it. No glow, no runes, no sound.
But they knelt.
Pressed their hand into the hollow, and when it came back, there was something dark and wet on their palm. They smeared it across their mask in a single stroke.
The others did the same.
Ezra watched from the ridge, thumb resting against the mark on his chest. Ritual, again.
The kind that wasn't for show.
Day 8
By now, Ezra had stopped pretending he'd break away in the morning. He told himself it was tactical — that they were the best lead to anything resembling a settlement, food, or intel. But in truth, he was invested.
He wanted to know who they were.
The forest fed that hunger. It kept staging little shows for him.
That day, he saw them approach a clearing where the ground was wrong. It wasn't dirt but a hard, pale crust, like the top layer of bone. A fissure split it in the middle, wide enough to fall through. The group formed a semicircle around it. No talking. No movement.
And then he heard it.
From the crack — a voice.
Not words, exactly. More like the idea of words. Too muffled to catch, too heavy to ignore. The sound made the back of Ezra's teeth ache.
The group bowed their heads. Stayed that way for a long time before moving on.
Ezra didn't follow right away.
He waited until they were well gone before creeping to the edge of the fissure. Cold air breathed out of it, carrying the smell of salt and rot. Far below, in the dark, something shifted.
He pulled back. Quickly.
Whatever they were listening to, it was still down there.
That night, he didn't sleep.
He kept turning the strip of red cloth over in his hands, running his thumb across the gold-thread coil. Not a warning, he decided. Not a threat.
An invitation.
And one way or another, he was going to answer it.
Day 8
By now, Ezra had stopped pretending he'd break away in the morning. He told himself it was tactical — that they were the best lead to anything resembling a settlement, food, or intel. But in truth, he was invested.
He wanted to know who they were.
The forest fed that hunger. It kept staging little shows for him.
That day, he saw them approach a clearing where the ground was wrong. It wasn't dirt but a hard, pale crust, like the top layer of bone. A fissure split it in the middle, wide enough to fall through. The group formed a semicircle around it. No talking. No movement.
And then he heard it.
From the crack — a voice.
Not words, exactly. More like the idea of words. Too muffled to catch, too heavy to ignore. The sound made the back of Ezra's teeth ache.
The group bowed their heads. Stayed that way for a long time before moving on.
Ezra didn't follow right away.
He waited until they were well gone before creeping to the edge of the fissure. Cold air breathed out of it, carrying the smell of salt and rot. Far below, in the dark, something shifted.
He pulled back. Quickly.
Whatever they were listening to, it was still down there.
That night, he didn't sleep.
He kept turning the strip of red cloth over in his hands, running his thumb across the gold-thread coil. Not a warning, he decided. Not a threat.
An invitation.
And one way or another, he was going to answer it.