Time had become a meaningless concept, a slurry of exhaustion and despair. Days bled together in a monotonous cycle of green, gray, and the forest's own sickly, pulsing gold. The trees were a taunting, identical army, their roots like gnarled veins pumping faint light into the corrupted soil.
Asli hated this place with a purity that was almost comforting. He hated the chittering insects, the sinuous snakes, the perpetual, maddening drip of water where no water should be. On his first night, the ground had given way, plunging him into a swamp that reeked of primordial rot and spent magic. He'd clawed his way out, retching, and decided the gods of this forest were not just cruel, but profoundly bored.
Now, he just endured. His boots made wet, sucking sounds with every step. The air wasn't silent; it was a canvas for a thousand tiny, scuttling, breathing noises. Sometimes, the vines seemed to track his movement. Sometimes, they whispered secrets in a language just below hearing.
He tried to ignore them.
"Should've stayed," he muttered to the oppressive stillness, kicking a stone. It vanished into the undergrowth without a sound. Nothing echoed here. The forest consumed all noise, all hope. "Could've been warm. Could've been eating something that didn't try to move. Could've been listening to Cassian's insufferable philosophical debates."
He sighed, the sound swallowed by the trees.
"Could've been sane."
But he wasn't sorry. The lie was a familiar shield. He had ensured their safety—Milo, Nora, even that unnerving kid, Ezra. And Silas...
The thought was a physical constriction in his throat.
Silas.
It was a fool's errand, he knew. A suicide mission. But it was the only thread he had to cling to. In the deepest quiet of the night, he could still feel it—a faint, frayed hum beneath his skin, a resonance as familiar as his own heartbeat. Silas's song. Or the ghost of it.
He followed that dying ember, a compass leading him through landscapes that defied reality. Here, the trees contorted towards one another, branches intertwined like skeletal fingers trying to blot out the sky. The air itself shimmered, thick with magic that felt ancient and deeply unnatural.
Asli wiped sweat and grime from his brow, a broken laugh escaping him. "You're finally there," he told the empty air, his voice rough. "Congratulations. Fully, certifiably insane. Be sure to tell Silas when you find his corpse."
He pushed through a final curtain of weeping vines and halted.
The clearing opened before him like a fresh wound—unnaturally circular, impossibly smooth, and utterly silent.
At its center stood a statue. Or the corpse of one.
It was a woman, tall and robed, her form radiating a fallen grace. But her face was a catastrophe of shattered marble, a web of cracks fracturing her features into a mosaic of anguish. At her feet, flowers bloomed—gold-petaled, with metallic veins that pulsed with a slow, parasitic light.
Asli stared, a cold knot tightening in his gut.
He didn't know her, but some deep, instinctual part of him did. The recognition was a poison in his blood.
The very air changed, a resonant hum vibrating in his bones. A whisper—a breath—ghosted across the back of his neck.
He spun. Nothing.
When he looked back, the cracks in the statue's face seemed to have deepened.
Cautious, his hand found the hilt of his blade. His shadow, a pool of living darkness at his feet, rippled with agitation. He didn't see the world with light-struck eyes; he perceived it through the whispers of shade, the way darkness clung to form and fed him impressions. What others would call blindness was, for him, a deeper kind of sight.
His shadows flowed outward without conscious command, becoming his fingers, his nerves. They traced the jagged lines in the marble, coiled around the unnerving flowers, skimmed the surface of the soil where a faint, rhythmic pulse beat like a buried heart.
"Yeah," he murmured, his voice low. "You're humming, alright. A little too loudly for a piece of stone."
He crouched, pressing his palm to the earth. His shadow stretched further, probing the tree line. And then it brushed against something—faint, fleeting. The echo of a footprint.
A human one.
He froze. The forest didn't echo. His shadows did.
The sensation came again. Closer.
He held his breath, listening. And then he heard them. Voices, wispy and distorted, but unmistakable.
Rowan.
Nora.
Ezra.
His heart hammered against his ribs. They're here.
He almost called out. His mouth opened.
But the air convulsed. It grew dense, wrong. His shadows recoiled as if seared, snapping back to him. A wave of distorted energy rolled through the clearing, bending reality, folding the sound of their voices into nothing.
Silence. They were gone. Erased.
"Of course," Asli whispered, the bitterness a familiar taste. "Of course it's not that easy."
He stood, his heart a frantic drum, his shadows flickering around him like panicked sparrows. The statue pulsed again, gold light bleeding from its cracks, brighter now, reactive.
His hands twitched. The hum in the ground grew to a deafening thrum. The flowers gaped open, their centers glowing with a white-hot intensity.
The moment his fingertips grazed the cold marble, his shadows screamed.
They were not a part of him in that instant; they were a separate entity of pure terror. They surged up, a black wave, wrapping around his arm and yanking him backward with brutal force. A shockwave of gold and concussive sound erupted from the statue, throwing him through the air.
He landed hard, the world a cacophony of ringing silence and blinding pain. He lay there, chest heaving, the taste of ozone and blood sharp on his tongue. Phantom gold light danced behind his eyelids.
For a long moment, he just stared at the canopy, each breath a stab of pain. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity, or maybe just weep from the sheer, grinding exhaustion. The two impulses felt identical.
"Perfect," he rasped. "Blind, alone, and now communing with hostile architecture."
His shadow quivered against the dirt, out of sync with his own ragged breathing. It seemed to pulse to the rhythm of the ground, not his body.
He pushed himself up, his palms slick with mud. The clearing had changed. The statue remained, but the cracks in its face were now sealed with veins of solid gold. Light pulsed through them in a slow, steady rhythm—too organic to be magic.
It looked like a circulatory system. Like the stone was breathing.
Asli's mouth went dry. "No," he stated flatly. "You stay dead. You hear me? Stay a monument."
But the hum continued, a vibration that crawled up through the soles of his boots and into his teeth. It made his jaw ache. It raised the hairs on his arms.
And he knew it. Not the specific frequency, but the feeling. It was the same insidious pull that had been drawing him north for weeks. The siren song of this damned forest.
His shadow, now a tense cord around his ankles, began to creep forward again. It stretched across the dirt like a reaching hand, trembling with a desire that was not his own.
"Stop," he hissed, clenching his fists. "That is not my will."
But the shadows did not listen. He could feel their yearning in his own veins—a hungry attraction to the warmth that now radiated from the statue.
"Alright," he whispered, taking a stumbling step back. "That's it. The forest has finally eaten your mind."
The warmth intensified, pressing against his skin. And then it came—not a sound, but a concept impressed directly upon his consciousness.
Soft. Familiar.
Not Silas.
Mine.
It was not a word. It was a brand.
His thoughts shattered. His shadows recoiled so violently he was physically jerked off balance. The pulse in the earth surged, a single, skull-rattling beat. Then, the light—a golden tsunami erupting from the statue, searing his vision.
He hit the ground, the air blasted from his lungs. His shadow wrapped around him like a protective shell.
When the light faded, the silence was absolute.
He sat up slowly, his head throbbing. The air stank of lightning and scorched earth. The golden flowers were now blackened, brittle stalks.
The statue had not moved. But its expression had shifted. The cracks now formed a pattern that could be mistaken for a smile. And in one hollow eye socket, a pinprick of gold light shimmered—a single, watching iris, fixed directly on him.
Asli went cold. Every primal instinct screamed at him to run.
He couldn't. His body was leaden, his mind reeling.
Finally, he sucked in a ragged breath. "Right," he croaked. "Touch the obviously cursed statue. Get claimed. Brilliant."
His hands shook as he cleaned himself up. He reached into a patch of shadow, and it parted for him—a rip in reality. His meager pack tumbled out. He clutched the worn bread, the flask, the broken knife. They were anchors. Proof he was still real, still him.
The echo of Mine reverberated in his skull, a new rhythm for his heart.
He turned toward the treeline. The air there wavered, distorted like a heat haze. Somewhere beyond that barrier, his friends were there. He could almost hear the ghost of their voices.
He reached out, his shadow stretching toward that impossible sound.
The forest twisted. The sound vanished, snapped out of existence.
He stood alone, his hand outstretched to nothing.
"Of course," he whispered, the ache in his throat unbearable. "Of course."
His shadow retreated, coiling around his arm, a trembling, living bandage. He didn't trust its comfort, but it was all he had left.
He didn't look back as he walked away. He couldn't.
But as he left the clearing, the hum started again—softer now, deeper, a heartbeat syncing with his own from deep within the earth.
The statue's golden eye flared once, twice, a pulse locking onto its new rhythm.
Something in the forest had stirred. Something ancient and patient had found what it was looking for.
And Asli, stumbling forward into the endless dark, had already been claimed.