Blood in the snow looked like rust against white metal.
Gerun crouched beside the dark droplets, breath steaming in the cold air. Each spot was perfect—round, fresh, still gleaming despite the frost that should have claimed them hours ago.
"Took a bolt to the hindleg." He touched one drop with his fingertip, then jerked his hand back. "Melted right through the snow."
Kaelen knelt beside him. The blood trail stretched toward the tree line, each drop a stepping stone leading into shadow. When he pressed his palm near the closest stain, heat pulsed upward like a heartbeat.
"Should've dropped fast," Gerun said.
"It didn't."
"Which means it ran scared." Gerun spat into the snow—for luck, or because the taste in his mouth had turned bitter. "Or it ran smart. Either way, we track."
He shouldered his bow and started walking. Kaelen followed, but something in his chest pulled tight. The blood wasn't just warm—it was *hungry*. Each drop seemed to reach toward his boots as he passed, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
*Snow should melt slow. This is melting like meat thrown on coals.*
---
The Blighted Woods breathed around them.
Not wind—there was no wind here, hadn't been for years. But the trees swayed anyway, their branches scraping against each other with sounds like fingernails on bark. Gerun's hand found his knife hilt without conscious thought.
"Why don't we hunt here anymore?" Kaelen asked.
"Because things started hunting back."
The blood trail veered between dead trunks, leading deeper into the forest's heart. Moss hung from the branches like funeral shrouds, and the air tasted of endings. No birds called. No insects buzzed. Even the usual forest sounds—the crack of settling wood, the rustle of small creatures—had died to nothing.
Kaelen's feet found the path without his guidance, stepping where the blood drops glowed brightest. He could feel warmth beneath the snow, spreading outward from the trail like roots seeking water.
*Something under the roots. Breathing slow. Waiting.*
"Gerun." His voice came out smaller than intended. "I think we should—"
His brother held up a hand for silence. Ahead, the trees opened into a small clearing where pale light filtered through bare branches. The blood trail ended there, in a space that felt wrong in ways Kaelen couldn't name.
---
They found it in the center of the clearing.
The deer lay split down the middle like a broken wishbone. Not torn—that would have been natural, comprehensible. This was something else. The flesh had been peeled apart with surgical precision, as if someone had reached inside and pulled until the seams gave way.
Its eyes had been boiled in their sockets—white, clouded, staring at nothing.
Gerun's face went pale. "No wolf did this."
Kaelen approached slowly, drawn by a heat that made his teeth ache. When he knelt beside the carcass, warmth flooded up his arm like molten metal in his veins.
"Its heart's still warm." The words slipped out before he could stop them.
But it was more than warmth. Something pulsed in the deer's chest—not life, but memory. The echo of hoofbeats on frozen ground. The sharp crack of breaking bone. The moment when running stopped and pain began.
And underneath it all, a voice that wasn't a voice:
*It wants something. It remembers me.*
"Don't talk like that," Gerun said sharply.
"I didn't say it." Kaelen's hand hovered over the deer's split ribs. "I—heard it."
The warmth intensified, spreading from his palm to his shoulder. His vision blurred, and for a moment he saw the clearing as it had been—green, alive, full of summer light. Then the image twisted, and he saw it as it would be: scorched earth, ash falling like snow, everything burning.
*"Kaelen."*
The name bloomed in the space behind his thoughts, spoken in a voice like breaking glass. Not heard—felt, tasted, breathed in like smoke.
*"Ember-born. Return."*
He clutched his head, the heat in his chest rising like bile. The deer's eyes seemed to track him, though they were long past seeing.
"We have to go." The words came out as a gasp.
Gerun was already moving, bow drawn, an arrow nocked. "Done. We're done."
They backed away from the clearing, but Kaelen couldn't stop himself from looking over his shoulder. The deer was gone. Only a blackened smear remained, already fading into the snow. No footprints. No drag marks. As if it had simply dissolved into the earth.
---
The forest released them at the edge of the fields, but its attention followed.
Gerun's movements were sharp now, predatory. He watched every tree, every shadow, every flicker of motion that might herald an attack. His knuckles were white where they gripped his bow.
"You didn't hear anything," he said without looking at Kaelen. "Say you didn't."
"I didn't." The lie sat heavy on his tongue.
"Good." Gerun's fingers touched the leather wristband on his arm—the one with boar teeth sewn into it, his first kill. "Because nothing should speak in your head. Nothing natural."
Behind them, something creaked—wood settling, or maybe something else. Kaelen didn't turn around. He could feel the forest watching them retreat, patient as stone, hungry as winter.
*It knew my name. It said it better than the people who raised me.*
---
Sleep wouldn't come.
Kaelen lay in his narrow bed, listening to the house settle around him. No wind stirred the shutters. No snow fell against the glass. The silence pressed against his ears like water, thick and expectant.
He climbed down from his bed and knelt beside the wall where soot from the chimney had stained the wood. With one finger, he began to draw.
The deer took shape under his touch—split wide, eyeless, wrong in every way that mattered. But as he worked, other details crept in. Wings where no wings should be. Claws that belonged on no earthly creature. A mouth full of teeth that had never tasted honest prey.
A shadow flitted across the window.
Kaelen froze, finger still pressed to the soot-stained wall. The shadow passed again—too large for a bird, too regular for a bat. Something with wings that moved like torn cloth in a windstorm.
He pressed his face to the glass. The village square lay empty, but the well's dark mouth seemed to gape wider than before. Above it, circling in lazy spirals, something moved against the stars.
*Birds don't come back. But something else always does.*
The shadow passed once more, and this time Kaelen caught a glimpse of what cast it. Not feathers—membrane. Not beak—teeth. Eyes that burned like coals in the darkness, fixed on his window with the intensity of a hunter sighting prey.
Then it was gone, leaving only the memory of wings and the certainty that tomorrow would bring worse things than whispers in the dark.