They entered the Ashenveil at twilight, when the border between worlds feels thinnest,
The change was immediate.
One moment they walked beneath ordinary pines the next, the trees turned silver-barked and black-leaved, their trunks rising like pillars in a ruined cathedral. The ground crunched underfoot with shards of broken moonstone that chimed softly when stepped on. Even the air tasted different: metallic, cold iron and old grief.
Kazeal shoulders stiffened the instant they crossed the invisible line.
Lira noticed. "You've been here before."
"Many times," he said. "Never willingly."
He offered no more, and she didn't press. Not yet.
They followed a path that wasn't a path at all, just a memory of one.Kazeal moved with the wary grace of someone walking over graves. Every few minutes he paused, touched a tree trunk, listened. Once he knelt and brushed aside leaf-litter to reveal a small carved rune glowing faint blue, then hissed a curse and rubbed it out with the heel of his hand.
"Old wards," he muttered. "Failing."
Night came quickly under the black canopy. The moon, when it rose, was wrong: too large, too white, ringed by a halo the colour of dried blood. It turned the forest into a negative of itself: silver trunks, black sky, white ground.
Lira skin prickled. "It's watching us."
"It always watches,"Kazeal said. "The Ashenveil keeps every sorrow that ever happened here. It likes to give them back."
They had gone perhaps two miles when the first ghost appeared.
A little girl in a soot-stained dress stood in the middle of the trail, barefoot, holding a broken doll. She looked exactly like the baker's daughter from Emberhollow, the one lira used to braid flowers into her hair for festivals.
The child lifted her head. Her eyes were empty sockets full of slow-moving flame.
"Lira," she whispered, voice layered with a dozen dying screams. "Why didn't you save us?"
Lira's heart lurched. She took one involuntary step forward.
Kazeal hand clamped around her wrist like iron. "Don't."
The child's mouth stretched impossibly wide. Fire licked out between needle teeth.
Kazeal yanked lira sideways just as the thing lunged. His dagger flashed; the illusion burst into black moths that scattered, laughing.
They ran then, until lira lungs burned and the moonstone shards cut through her boot soles. When they finally stopped, Kazeal pressed her back against a tree and cupped her face with both hands.
"Look at me," he ordered, voice low and urgent. "Only at me. The forest lies. Remember that."
His thumbs brushed her cheekbones she hadn't realised she was crying. The warmth of his palms grounded her. For a moment the world narrowed to the green of his eyes and the quick, frightened beat of his pulse beneath her fingers where they rested on his throat.
The moment stretched, fragile as frost,
Then a second voice drifted through the trees, soft, amused, female,
"Well, well. The prodigal prince returns, and he brought a pet."
Kazeal spun, arrow already nocked.
Ten paces away, lounging against a silver trunk as if she'd grown there, stood an elf woman in midnight leathers. Violet eyes, black hair braided with tiny bones, a smile sharp enough to cut glass.
"Seraphin," kazeal said. The name sounded like a curse.
The woman's gaze slid to lira and lingered, slow and deliberate, like a hand sliding under clothing.
"Hello, little ember," she purred. "I've been waiting for you."
The moonstone at their feet flared white.
Somewhere deeper in the forest, something very large screamed in delight.