You stride forward, all empty confidence and rattling breath, boots grinding wet leaves into the earth. The night closes around you, thick and listening, but you, oblivious thing, mistake its silence for surrender.
You see him—or what your dull instincts believe is him—hunched by the skeletal fire, a smudge of warmth against the swallowing mist. No more remarkable than any of the others you’ve bled dry across a hundred blackened nights.
You think you understand this scene already.
The camp sprawls like a carcass: broken branches lashed into a crooked rack, scraps of fabric fluttering like torn flags above scattered supplies. No order. No defense. Nothing but the desperate clawing of a creature clinging to a life already slipping between his fingers.
The fire sputters, half-dead, coughing out smoke thicker than flame, each wheezing breath strangled by the damp.
You think you’ve seen this story before.
Another fool who mistook tenacity for power.
Another mouthful for the dark.
Don’t smile.
Idiot.
Of course you do anyway, a twitch of the lips you cannot quite suppress. Such a small thing. Smaller than the trembling legends, smaller than the frantic prayers clawed from broken throats.
You scoff under your breath, low and careless.
you mutter, almost laughing.
Blind. Deaf. Drowning in your own certainty.
You miss the way the iron stirs beneath the soil—not blood, not rot, but something older, rawer, a marrow-deep scent the wilds themselves flinch from.
You miss the way the smoke twists backward, sliding against the breath of the night.
You forget, fool, that Gaia does not lift her hand for cattle. She does not bend the System for prey.
No. Only for wolves in sheep's skin.
And you, blundering forward, wrapped in the stink of your arrogance, cannot hear how the trees have fallen silent around you.
Cannot feel how the soil stiffens under your tread, holding itself breathless.
The figure by the fire shifts—no more than a twitch, a shrug, a settling of bones—but you are too busy cataloguing your certainty to notice how his shadow slides in another direction entirely.
Too drunk on your imagined victory to feel the mist clawing up your legs, twining around your ankles like waiting chains.
You sneer, voice sharp, brittle:
you say, spitting the word like it stains your tongue.
You sound almost disappointed.
You should not be.
You should be afraid.
But you step closer anyway.
You always do.
The firelight flares, sick and wild, clawing at the dark—and for a breath, for the space between one heartbeat and the next—you see.
Not the man.
Not the camp.
Not the ashes and smoke.
You see the thing behind his eyes.
The shape the world has already begun carving from his bones.
The mark Gaia pressed into him with both hands.
And it is not small.
It is not weak.
It is not yours to break.
You blink—reflexive, stupid—and the vision buries itself once more beneath blood and dirt and stubbornness.
You laugh again, thin and brittle, the sound scraping raw against your throat.
You tell yourself it’s nothing.
You step closer still.
You always do.
Fine, then.
Wrap yourself in that shroud of shadows you cling to like a child's blanket.
If you think it will help.
Let the trees hum your trespass into the bones of the earth, carrying your scent on the damp breath of the forest, whispering your presence like a secret they have no interest in keeping.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Ah. What’s this? That tremor—barely a quiver—slithering across your voice like a dying thing. Hesitation. Pitiful and sour. I can hear it scraping your throat raw.
Of course you don’t. Understanding was never your gift, was it?
Go on then. Wrestle your confusion into something small enough to ignore. Pretend your instincts aren’t gnawing at the frayed edges of your mind, whispering things you do not have the courage to name.
Yet.
There it is—that hairline crack in your certainty, widening.
Good. Let it fester.
Shift your stance. Edge sideways through the underbrush. Yes, just so. Peer through the knotted skeletons of the trees and look. Look properly.
Practiced?
How quaint. You expected the fumbling desperation of prey. Yet here he stands—deliberate, patient—as if the night were a stage and he alone carried the script.
And?
Go on. Speak it. Feel your throat closing, the air thickening around the unsaid.
A feast beneath blighted boughs. A parlor trick staged for vermin and restless ghosts.
Curious, isn’t it?
Go on, sweet fool. Ask the question clawing at your ribs. Where did they learn such manners? In a world where survival feasts on blood and bone, who taught them ceremony?
Ask it.
Savor the silence that answers you.
What’s this? Losing your nerve so soon?
Oh, but it does.
It matters more than you could ever comprehend.
He senses danger, yet does not flinch. Does not reach for a blade. Does not stiffen or still his hands with fear.
Instead, he hums. Soft and low. A song far older than you, than this forest, than the bones beneath your feet.
He brushes oil over the caps of mushrooms, lays them tenderly across a flat stone cradled by fire, as though honoring the ritual of it.
Closer.
Draw closer—not with your feet, but with your hunger. Your malice. Let the raw thirst peel you open. Taste him. Sift the air between you. Smell the iron threading through his sweat, the strange sweetness stitched into the battered fibers of his torn jacket.
Now—
Stop.
See.
Yes. A blade, poised an inch from tender flesh.
No.
Not you.
Not truly. His gaze cuts through you as a hound scents not the rabbit, but the bloody hand that loosed it.
Yes. At me.
Or what of me stirs inside you, like a sickness you can no longer deny.
Isn’t it just?
Step forward.
Break the fragile hush of mist curling at your ankles. Let him see you—let him name you. Earn the weight of his gaze.
Thwerp!
The projectile rips through the air, savage and bright, slamming into the tree where your skull would have been if you’d dared hesitate.
Not an arrow.
Not a spell.
A knife—small, ordinary, gleaming with aether-infused spite. A simple pocket blade, yet potent enough to shred bark and rain splinters down like shattered teeth.
You stagger.
Pain blooms electric in your chest.
Adrenaline sears through your blood, bitter and unclean.
How indeed.
How does prey strike first?
How does the hunted become the hunter before the trap has even sprung?
Do you see now?
Do you finally understand?
This is no man you stalk.
He is something older, something patient and furious. A relic shaped from soil and sorrow, from bone-deep rage. Gaia's lost child, torn from the crumbling marrow of the world and stitched together with grief.
He is a threat.
A wound we cannot allow to fester.
You hesitate. A breath. A shiver you cannot smother, rattling the cage of your ribs.
Do you?
Good.
Because knowing—truly knowing—is the first step.
And knowledge, my sweet fool, is a blade sharper than any you could carry.
Now go.
He stands between you and everything you desire. Kill him—if you can.
And if you fail...
Well.
You will find that death would have been the kinder fate.