The scout who returned was younger than Helios expected, a Forest Spirit barely holding a humanoid shape, her edges still faintly translucent where the light caught her wrong.
She didn’t wait for permission to speak once she reached them, words spilling out fast enough that Seraphina had to raise a hand to slow her down.
Her hands, Helios noticed, hadn’t stopped shaking since she’d arrived.
“I saw them,” the scout said.
“Both of them. Alive, I think, but not moving on their own.”
“Not moving on their own,” Seraphina repeated carefully.
“Explain that.”
“Something was carrying them. Deeper into the woods, past where the pack had been watching the wall. I didn’t get close enough to see clearly, but it wasn’t another Ravager. It walked upright. It was patient about it, like it wasn’t worried about being followed.”
Kaelen’s jaw tightened.
“Patient isn’t a word I want to hear attached to anything out there.”
Around them, the small crowd of soldiers who’d gathered to hear the report shifted uneasily, a few exchanging glances that said more than words would have.
“Neither did I,” the scout admitted.
“That’s why I came back instead of following. I told myself it was the smart choice. It still felt like leaving them behind.”
Helios felt the shift in the air around him, the same tightening that had settled over the field right before the Ravager first broke the tree line.
Alive.
Carried, not killed outright.
Whatever was coordinating that pack wanted the scouts for something, and none of the possibilities Helios could think of were good.
“We’re not leaving them out there,” he said.
Seraphina’s eyes flicked to him, weighing the statement before responding.
“Your Majesty, with respect, you are Level 3. Whatever took two trained scouts without difficulty is not something you should be within a mile of.”
“But I’m not sitting behind a wall while my own scouts are carried off into the dark. That’s not the kind of king I’m trying to be.”
“I’m not planning to fight it alone.”
“Good,” Kaelen said.
“Because I wasn’t going to let you.”
Seraphina exhaled slowly, the sound of someone recalculating a plan she’d already half-built in her head.
“Then we do this properly, or not at all.”
The Council assembled quickly once word spread, and the argument that followed was shorter than Helios expected, mostly because nobody seriously suggested doing nothing.
A few voices raised the obvious concern, that a king only Level 3 had no business anywhere near whatever had taken the scouts, but even those voices quieted once Kaelen made it clear he wasn’t going without Helios’s explicit blessing, and Helios wasn’t planning to give it from behind a wall.
A rescue party formed within the hour: Kaelen leading, six Dark Elf soldiers with him, two High Elf trackers to read the trail the scout had described, and Helios, against Seraphina’s very clearly stated objections, insisting on coming along himself.
He caught a few of the soldiers eyeing him with the same wary curiosity he’d seen at the wall earlier that same day, clearly still deciding whether a Level 3 king belonged in the field at all.
“If Radiant Bulwark is going to matter at all,” he told her, “it needs to matter somewhere other than a training yard. I can’t protect people I’m not standing next to.”
Seraphina didn’t look happy about the logic.
She also didn’t have a counter for it.
“Fine,” she said.
“But you stay behind Kaelen’s line unless a shield is specifically needed. That is not a request, Your Majesty.”
“Understood.”
They moved out through the northern gate an hour before dusk, the light already turning that same orange-violet Helios remembered from his first minutes in this world, softer now, almost deceptively calm.
The forest swallowed the noise of the kingdom behind them almost immediately, birdsong and wind replacing the low hum of a capital going about its evening business, and Helios found the quiet more unsettling than any amount of noise could have been.
Every few minutes he caught himself glancing back over his shoulder at the shrinking silhouette of Aldrenhal’s great tree, half expecting it to vanish the moment he stopped watching.
The trail the trackers found was easy enough at first, broken undergrowth and the occasional dark stain on pale bark, and then it wasn’t easy at all, the signs thinning out the deeper they went, as if whatever had made them had gotten more careful the further it traveled from the wall.
More than once the party had to stop entirely while the trackers cast wide circles around a lost trail, searching for the next broken branch or displaced stone that would let them keep moving. You are reading on novelping(.)com, the official source.
“It’s not running,” one of the trackers murmured, crouched over a half-erased footprint.
“It’s covering ground like it knows exactly where it’s going.”
“That’s not a monster,” Kaelen said quietly.
“That’s a plan.”
Helios’s stomach tightened at that, the same instinct from Seraphina’s earlier warning finally landing with its full weight.
Nests didn’t send scouts for no reason.
They sent them ahead of something.
[Detected: unidentified structure.]
[Distance: 400 meters.]
Everyone froze at once.
Ahead of them, past a break in the trees, the forest floor sloped downward into a shallow basin, and at the bottom of it, half-buried in packed earth and old bone, something enormous curved up out of the ground like the rib of a creature too large to imagine whole.
More curves followed it, rising out of the churned soil in an uneven ring, and scattered among them, dozens of pairs of that same sourceless red glow blinked awake, one after another, turning slowly toward the tree line.
“That,” Kaelen said, very quietly, “was not on any map the Council drew up.”
Helios stared at the shape, some deep, old part of his brain recognizing it as a threat before his conscious mind finished processing what it was actually looking at.
Nobody in the party moved.
Even the trackers, who’d been quietly confident the entire trek, had gone very still, weapons half-raised without any order given to raise them.
“Kaelen,” he said, just as quietly.
“I think we found the nest.”