I took one last look at the black sycamore before the ruined church’s shadows swallowed it completely.
Moonlight filtered weakly through ragged clouds above, not the pale silver of home but a sickly orb hanging feebly over the horizon. Beside me, Eliza brushed soot from her cloak. Arthur squinted up at the strange moon like it owed him an explanation. Mary called a low amber glow from her fingertips to light our path, and Theo checked the sky once more, tracking the faint flicker of brightness to the west.
"That way," Mary said, pointing. "We follow the moon’s shine until we hit the gate line."
I nodded and stepped into the warped forest of gnarled trees. Behind us, the sycamore vanished into the gloom, its branches like twisted fingers closing a fist.
The air was heavy and still. Beneath my boots, the ground was cracked and dry, studded with odd stones and curling thorns of black iron. A sickly-sweet rot lingered under the surface, like the petrichor of some swamp that had died a long time ago and never bothered to notice.
Thorny vines crawled along the twisted trunks, but they kept a respectful distance, as though something had already taught them to.
"This place is unnaturally quiet," Arthur murmured, tightening his grip on his greatsword. "No shrieks. No moans. Did the Moynukz clear everything out?"
I shook my head. None of us had seen a single Unorthodox creature since the fight in the clearing, and that bothered me more than if we had. A place this dead was either empty, or it belonged to something that had already finished eating.
We came across the first body an hour later.
It was small, the size of a large dog, half-sunk into a bed of black moss. Mary’s light slid over it, and Arthur made a sound low in his throat.
"That is not Moynukz work," he said.
He was right. The Moynukz I killed tore and crushed. This thing had been opened in one motion, a single clean line from throat to haunch, like something had drawn a blade through it without slowing down to finish the job properly.
Theo crouched beside it, careful not to touch the wound. "Fresh."
"How fresh," Eliza said. Not really a question.
"Fresh enough that the blood has not finished drying." He stood, wiping his hand on his coat even though he had not touched anything. "Whatever did this was here today."
I felt the star at the back of my neck prickle, faint and cold, the way it did whenever something related to the vision stirred in the back of my mind. I forced my attention back to the group.
"We keep moving," I said. "Slower. Eyes up."
Nobody argued.
We found two more along the way, each killed the same clean way, each left where it fell. Whatever was doing this was not hunting for food. It was clearing a path, or marking one, and either option meant we were walking into someone else’s hunting ground.
That was when Arthur stopped walking and grabbed my arm.
"Tell me that is a rock formation," he said, pointing west.
It was not a rock formation.
A spire rose above the treeline, dark and impossibly tall, built from what looked like shadow poured into the shape of twisted metal. For a moment it seemed to shift, a silhouette flexing against the wind, and then it went still again, watching, or pretending it never moved at all.
My blood ran cold.
"It has not come this way," Theo said, voice tight but level. "If it wanted us, we would already know. Keep moving. Do not look at it."
’Easy for him to say. His affinity is not the one that goes numb around dead things.’
We picked up the pace, and none of us spoke again until the spire slipped behind the tree line and the sky started bleeding into full dark.
We found a hollow between two boulders and made camp there, low and sheltered. Mary lit a small blaze in cupped hands, no bigger than it had to be — Merrow’s warning about scent still fresh enough in my head that I said something before Arthur could throw a whole branch on it.
"Small fire," I said. "We are not advertising."
Arthur grumbled but obeyed. Eliza and Mary laid a ring of protective runes into the dirt while Theo kept watch on the gap between the boulders, where, if I turned my head just right, I could still see the faint black outline of the spire holding its place against the horizon.
I sat facing it, because someone had to, and because I did not trust anyone else to notice if it moved again.
"What are your affinities?" I asked, mostly to fill the silence with something that was not the sound of my own pulse. "Other than Mr. Houseplant, obviously."
"Shut up," Arthur said, without heat.
Mary answered first, turning a small spark over in her fingers. "Light. At Seed Core it is not much more than this."
"Body," Theo said. "Blood, flesh, bone."
"Spatial," Eliza said, and did not elaborate, which told me it was worth asking about later and not tonight.
’Our team is stronger than it looks on paper. Nobody here rolled a common Affinity — swordsman, water, fire, the usual first-year lineup. Even at Seed rank, what we have is unusual enough that I have never once seen Eliza’s kind mentioned in two hundred Chapters of a novel I basically memorized. Spatial. Teleportation, maybe. Time. Illusion. I am guessing, but I do not think I am guessing badly.’
The fire cracked low and orange, throwing our shadows long across the boulders. Nobody mentioned the spire again, but nobody stopped watching the direction it sat in either, and Eliza kept one hand resting on the head of her axe the entire time she pretended to relax.
I looked west, past the firelight, to where the darkness held its shape a little too well.
Whatever cleared that path was not finished with it yet. I could feel that much even without a reason to prove it.
I did not sleep first watch. I did not plan to sleep at all.