The three of them pushed deeper into the dark forest. Roughly thirty minutes remained before the first stage closed. Cassian’s group was already ahead of most of the others, and still, something about these woods felt wrong in a way he couldn’t quite name.
At first they could still hear the distant cheering carried back from the square. That faded the farther they walked. The trees grew taller, their branches locking together overhead until only thin scraps of sunlight reached the forest floor. The air cooled around them. The undergrowth thickened until it dragged at their ankles with every step.
Cassian walked a few paces behind Zayd, who led the way with the easy confidence of someone who’d never once doubted his own sense of direction. Aurelia stayed close at Cassian’s side. The longer they stayed under the canopy, the tighter the knot in his chest pulled.
Somewhere far off a branch groaned and settled, the kind of sound a tree makes on its own, and Cassian still flinched at it anyway. He kept his eyes moving trunk to trunk, shadow to shadow the way six months of Azhur’s training had drilled into him without either of them ever calling it training out loud. Never trust the quiet. The quiet is where things wait.
"It’s really quiet out here," he said.
Zayd glanced back over his shoulder. "Yeah. Too quiet."
Aurelia peered between the trunks, arms wrapped around herself. "Do you think there are actually as many dangerous beasts out here as everyone says?"
"Probably." Zayd’s voice had lost some of its usual ease. "That’s exactly why the real Hunters don’t come this deep unless they have no other choice."
Cassian forced his shoulders back. "We’ve still got this."
Zayd gave him a flat look without breaking stride. "You don’t have to pretend you’re not scared, you know."
"I’m not pretending anything."
"You keep looking behind us."
"I was checking the path."
Aurelia’s mouth twitched. "Sure you were."
"I’m not scared."
"I didn’t say you were."
"You didn’t have to."
Zayd sighed, cutting the argument off before it could go anywhere. "Can we just keep moving?"
They walked on without speaking. The forest kept growing stranger the deeper they went the silence too complete, the light too thin, the air carrying a stillness that had nothing natural about it. Then Cassian stopped dead.
"Wait."
Zayd and Aurelia halted beside him.
"What is it?" Aurelia asked.
Cassian pointed at the ground. A dark stain spread wide across the leaf litter, still glistening where the light caught it.
"That’s blood."
Aurelia’s face went tight. Zayd crouched and touched two fingers to the stain, then lifted them and studied the red that came away on his skin.
"Fresh."
Cassian’s stomach dropped. "Then whatever’s hurt can’t have gone far."
Zayd stood back up, already scanning the trees. "Stay sharp. All of you."
The smell of it reached Cassian a second later copper and something else underneath, something wild and unwashed that made the hair along his arms rise before his brain had finished deciding why. He’d smelled blood before, plenty of times, from scraped knees and a dozen bad falls off that same low wall behind the bakery. This wasn’t that. This sat heavier in the air, the way smoke sits heavier than fog.
Aurelia’s voice went small. "Maybe we should turn back."
"We can’t. We still have to reach the tree."
"But if something dangerous is out here"
"Then we deal with it if it finds us," Cassian said, more confidence in his voice than he actually felt.
Zayd looked once more at the stain. "I don’t know if it was an animal or a person. And honestly, I’d rather not find out either way."
They moved on together, closer now, shoulder to shoulder wherever the path allowed it. A few minutes later Cassian caught a soft rustling somewhere off to their left. He froze mid-step.
"Did you hear that?"
Zayd turned at once, already tense. "Yeah."
"What was it?" Aurelia asked, drawing in close.
"I don’t know."
They stood motionless, listening. The rustling stopped. Slowly, without a word between them, they crept toward where the sound had come from. The forest had gone completely, unnaturally still around them no birdsong, no insects, not even wind moving through the leaves overhead, as if every living thing for a mile in every direction had already made the decision to be somewhere else.
Aurelia’s hand found Cassian’s sleeve and gripped it, just once, before letting go again. Neither of them said anything about it.
Then, just as they closed the last few steps, a roar tore through the trees loud enough that the ground itself seemed to shudder beneath their feet.
Cassian froze solid. "What was that?" His voice cracked on the last word.
Zayd’s eyes went wide. "Move. Now!"
"What? Why"
"No time get on the sand, I’ll carry us!"
Sand rose from the forest floor in a swirling column beneath their feet, gathering, lifting.
Cassian stared down at it. "You can carry all three of us at once?"
"Just get-"
BOOM.
Something slammed into Zayd from the side hard enough to fling him through the air. He crashed into the ground several meters away and didn’t move.
"ZAYD!"
"He’s unconscious!" Aurelia’s scream cut through the trees.
A shape stepped out from between the trunks.
A boar but nothing like any boar Cassian had ever seen. The animal was enormous, its muscle thick under a hide dark as pitch, tusks the length of a grown man’s arm curling up from its jaw. Small, furious eyes fixed on them both, and nothing in that gaze looked remotely like an ordinary beast’s.
Cassian stumbled a step backward. "What... is that thing?"
Only a rare few animals were born carrying the same blessing that let people grow abilities of their own, and the ones that were could reach a strength no wild creature should ever have been able to hold. Neither Cassian nor Aurelia had the slightest interest in finding out what this one’s ability was.
Every instinct in his body screamed at him to run. His legs refused the order completely. It was strange, he’d think later, how the body could disagree with itself so completely in a single second half of him already halfway through a plan to bolt, the other half rooted so deep into the ground he couldn’t have lifted a foot if the whole forest had caught fire around him.
The boar lowered its head, muscles bunching along its shoulders. Cassian looked at Aurelia, then at Zayd’s still form on the ground, and something in his chest hardened past the fear.
"What kind of friend would I be if I let it get to you?"
Aurelia’s hands were shaking. She drew one unsteady breath. "You’re right." Her voice firmed, just barely. "Let’s show it what we can do."
The boar charged.
Aurelia threw up a thick wall of ice around Zayd’s body in the same instant Cassian bolted straight at the beast with no plan beyond the desperate need to do something.
"TAKE THIS!"
He drove his fist into its shoulder with everything eleven years of small body and six months of hard training had given him. The blow would have dropped a grown man where he stood. The boar didn’t so much as flinch. It only looked at him, almost curious, and that was somehow worse than if it had roared.
Cassian’s eyes went wide. "What"
It slammed its full bulk into him before he could finish the thought. He flew backward and hit the ground hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.
"CASSIAN!"
Aurelia watched both her friends go down within the space of a few heartbeats, and something in her simply locked in place. The boar turned toward her next, lowered its head, and charged. Her whole body refused to move, no matter how loudly every part of her screamed to run.
"Please..."
She closed her eyes.