Isolde
The smoke stung her eyes.
She knelt beside the firepit outside the main den, rolling the red thread between her fingers while the salt hissed and snapped in the embers. A strip of wolf hide from a fallen bedroll blackened in the flames, curling in on itself like it wanted to hide its shame.
She felt it in the bones of the den now—wrongness braided into stone and soot. The child had been the first sign, but not the last. There were others in the den coughing in corners. Shivering. Their shifts no longer clean.
The sickness was blooming.
She ground a bundle of bitterroot into ash and whispered the old words her mother had taught her—not the Moon's words, but deeper ones, older ones. The kind only passed in blood and breath, never written.
She didn't look up as the elder woman from earlier approached with a fresh bundle of red-dyed thread.
"You're doing it as if you've done this before," the woman said.
"I have," Isolde replied. "But not in time."
The woman didn't ask what that meant. She didn't need to.
Alaric
He moved through the trees like a ghost, silent and unhurried, but alert.
The deeper shadows to the east were thicker than they should've been. Not unnatural yet. But close. Like the light didn't want to stay.
His hand rested near the hilt of his blade. Not drawing it. Not yet. But his body already remembered what his mind still struggled to hold.
He paused near a ridge overlooking the den.
The land was old here—he could feel it. Cracked deep with memory. Magic ran in the roots like blood. He knelt and touched the ground. Closed his eyes.
And there it was again.
That hum beneath the surface.That silence not born of stillness—but of waiting.
Isolde
She laid the thread in a circle around the sick, anchoring each corner with black salt and burning twine. The magic didn't resist her—it bent around her fingers like wind seeking a window.
One child stirred in their sleep, lips parted, breath ragged. She brushed his brow and whispered his name, though she hadn't been told it.
When she stood, she swayed.
Too much magic, too fast. The land here was hungry.
She caught herself against the wall, hand pressed flat to the stone. Her palm prickled.
The wall was warm.
Too warm.
Alaric
A branch cracked to his left.
Too heavy for squirrel or bird. Too fluid for a wolf.
He rose slowly.
Nothing moved. But the trees to the south were darker now—thick with shadow. And in the hollows between trunks, he saw them.
Eyes.
Not glowing.Not shining.Just open. Watching.
He didn't bare his teeth. Didn't run.
He simply whispered, "I remember you. I know you."
The eyes blinked.
Then vanished.
Isolde
She returned to the firepit to find the ash she'd prepared had gone dark.
Not grey. Not white.
Black.
And the thread—meant to protect—was smoking.
She bent to touch it.
It crumbled between her fingers like dust.