I
The Weeping Forest earned its name, Nivlac decided within minutes of entering it, from the way moisture seemed to cling to everything — moss-draped branches drooping low enough to brush against his shoulders, thin trails of water tracing down bark in patterns that looked, if you squinted and were in the right mood, almost like tears.
“Cheerful place,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Wait till you hear the local legend about how it got its name,” Rowan offered from a few paces ahead.
“Spoiler: it’s sadder than the trees look.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” Rowan said, though he seemed faintly disappointed, the way people often are when someone declines to hear a story they’ve clearly been looking forward to retelling.
“Short version, since you’re going to hear it eventually anyway: local legend says a grieving mother planted the first of these trees after losing a child to the old wars, and the sap runs slow and wet ever since, like the forest never quite finished mourning either.”
“That’s considerably sadder than I expected from a two-sentence summary,” Nivlac admitted.
“Everything around here has a tragic backstory if you dig one layer down,” Rowan said, with the weary cheer of someone who’d clearly done a great deal of unwanted digging.
“You get used to it.”
II
The group moved with a practiced rhythm Nivlac hadn’t fully appreciated back at the guild hall — Tal on point, scanning ahead with the kind of alertness that never quite relaxed even on flat, unthreatening terrain; the broad-shouldered man a step behind her, greatsword resting easily across one shoulder; Rowan trailing slightly to the side, bow not yet drawn but clearly ready to be, at a moment’s notice.
Their footsteps fell into an unconscious rhythm against the damp forest floor, three people who had walked this exact formation dozens of times before, needing no verbal coordination to maintain it.
Nivlac fell in at the rear, partly because nobody had suggested otherwise, and partly because it gave him the clearest vantage point to actually watch how the terrain and the party interacted — which paths Tal avoided instinctively, which sounds made the broad-shouldered man’s shoulders tense fractionally before relaxing again a beat later. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
III
“Commission site’s another twenty minutes in,” Tal said, consulting a rough hand-drawn map without breaking stride.
“Rabbit warren’s supposed to be small.
In and out, clear the nest, back to town before dark.”
“Supposed to be,” Nivlac repeated.
“Guild intel isn’t always perfect,” she said, in a tone that suggested this was less a caveat and more a hard-won piece of institutional wisdom.
“You learn to treat the estimate as a starting point, not a promise.”
He filed that away too.
It was, he thought, a remarkably transferable piece of advice — he’d spent eight years watching clients treat vendor estimates as binding contracts, only to be blindsided every single time reality diverged from the paperwork.
IV
The deeper they moved into the forest, the more the ambient sound shifted — birdsong thinning out, replaced by a low, constant rustle that could have been wind moving through the canopy, or could have been something else entirely. New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
Nivlac found himself listening more carefully than strictly necessary, some old instinct telling him that the difference between those two explanations might matter quite a bit in the next twenty minutes.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Rowan said, glancing back.
“What thing?”
“The watching thing.
You’ve barely said two words since we left town.”
“Better to notice something a beat early than explain, after the fact, why I missed it,” Nivlac said.
It wasn’t a rehearsed line, but it came out sounding like one anyway — the kind of thing that had become instinct through sheer repetition, back when every unresolved complaint traced back to some small warning sign nobody had bothered to flag in time.
V
Rowan didn’t respond immediately, but something in his expression shifted — not quite trust, nothing so significant yet, but a small, genuine flicker of reassessment, the sort you might give someone who’d said something unexpectedly sensible in a conversation you’d assumed would be entirely forgettable.
Ahead, Tal held up a closed fist, and the group slowed automatically, falling into a loose, watchful formation Nivlac hadn’t been explicitly taught but understood well enough to mirror.
Through a gap in the treeline, he could just make out the mouth of a low burrow, dirt freshly disturbed around its edge.
“There,” Tal said quietly.
“Warren entrance.
Everyone stay sharp — this is where the easy part supposedly ends.”