Chapter 4 Aurelia
Aurelia
I woke gasping, pain finding me instead of air. My cheek pressed to frost-slick earth. The trees above swayed, their branches whispering to each other.
For a heartbeat, I lay still and listened.
The forest listened back.
My hands flew to my side. Snow seared my fingertips as I clawed through pine needles and ice, searching for my pack, for anything solid enough to tell me which way was up. “No—no, no.” Panic surged hot under my skin.
Breathe. You’ll figure it out. You always do.
The words shook inside me. My breath misted fast and uneven, my pulse refusing to obey. My thoughts splintered. What if this was a sign? What if I’d already lost, and the forest was just letting me walk a little farther before it claimed me?
I drove the heels of my palms into my eyes until sparks bloomed in the dark. The pressure anchored me.
I couldn’t lose myself here.
Breathe. In four, out four.
Slowly, the ragged edge of my breathing eased. I let my hands fall, stinging and raw from the snow, and forced myself to take in what I had. The pack sat half-buried nearby, strap torn but closed. Enough to keep moving.
I swallowed hard and adjusted the straps, tightening them until they bit into my shoulders. The weight steadied me. My legs felt heavy as I pushed myself upright. My ribs ached from the fall.
Every joint ached. My left palm was raw, skin torn where the rope had burned me. When I flexed it, blood welled sluggish and dark before the cold stopped it. That, at least, was useful—my pain preserved in ice.
Fog lay low between the trunks, heavy enough to turn sound to cloth. The air reeked faintly of wet iron and crushed fir. My bootprints vanished as soon as I made them, swallowed like the woods wanted no record of me at all. Branches rattled though no wind stirred.
A horse screamed, far off, one strangled note, and then went silent. When the quiet came back, it didn’t fit quite right.
The deeper I went, the more the forest bent. Light shifted wrong. Shadows stretched thin as wire, then snapped back. Branches arched like ribs. A low hum gathered beneath my sternum—pressure, not sound. My pulse fought to match it.
I slowed, hand hovering at my dagger. My ears strained.
I caught myself glancing west. Through the fog, the trees opened just enough for me to glimpse a sweep of shadow.
For a blink, I thought it was campfire smoke—until I saw how thick it ran, heavy and wrong.
Movement flickered there, shapes low and hunched, then vanished.
That way lay nothing—or so the maps claimed. The Forgotten Lands.
A shiver ran down my spine. Stories always warned that even looking west too long was asking for trouble. My head snapped forward. Nothing there.
I pressed on.
“Aurelia,” a woman called from the left.
“Elli, wait for me!” Aeryn laughed from the right, high and breathless.
Both voices were hollow and wrong. I didn’t answer. I didn’t look.
A shape stepped into the path ahead. At first, I thought it was the horse I’d heard—until the legs resolved: too long, the joints bending the wrong way. Bone where muscle should have been. It tilted its skull toward me. Empty eye sockets held a shine that wasn’t light.
“Aurelia,” it said, the name dragged over gravel. “Say your true name, and I’ll guide you.”
My fingers brushed the dagger at my hip. I kept my mouth shut.
The thing waited—as if the price of passage was hearing myself speak. When I didn’t pay it, it shifted, joints clicking, and advanced.
Fine.
I tore a strip from my cloak, wrapped it round one hook, and struck flint to steel. Sparks spat. The cloth caught, guttered, then burned. I swung the hook low. The creature recoiled from the flame, breath fogging fast in the cold, a wet rattle where its lungs should have been.
“Name,” it rasped, closer now. Another shape loomed to my right, bone-thin and wrong in all the same ways. The hum in my chest climbed, licking at the edges of my thoughts.
Never answer when the trees speak.
I moved.
The first lunge came high; I dropped and jammed the burning hook beneath its jaw. Bone thudded. A seam opened across its skull like cracked ice. Smoke spilled out, black and damp with copper. I wrenched down, dragging its weight with mine, and slammed the iron into the ground.
It screamed, except there was no sound—only pressure.
My teeth buzzed, my skull rattling as though palms were slamming against my ears again and again.
I drove the iron deeper until the hook bit into earth.
The creature unraveled and collapsed without weight, leaving only a scatter of moss and a taste of cold metal on my tongue.
The second came from behind. Its false voice slipped close to my ear—Hayat’s calm, steady: “Elli. Drop the blade.”
I didn’t turn. My free hand found the tinder.
Flint. Strike. Spark. Fire bloomed—small, desperate.
I hurled it into the fog. The flare tore the darkness open for a heartbeat, just long enough to see its face twist, seams splitting too wide.
I slammed my palm into what should have been an eye, and bone gave beneath the strike.
In the same motion, I tore my dagger free.
Steel kissed its skull a breath before the thing burst into a cough of frost and ash, vapor unraveling back into the trees.
For a moment, the fog pulsed, swelling around me as if deciding whether to close in.
I braced myself—hook in one hand, blade in the other. Shoulders forward. Weight low.
But nothing came.
I stood shaking, flame guttering low on the hook, air burning in my chest. My breath came in hard clouds. Every muscle trembled, but I forced my knees to lock, to hold. Weakness meant death here.
From deeper in the wood, something paced. Listening.
“Not today,” I whispered, to myself more than them.
My father used to say the Veil had its own laws, that when the goddesses divided the realms, Eryndis had bartered shadows to build the boundary.
That was before her name was stricken from every temple.
Before it became forbidden to even speak of her.
But I remembered. Children always remember what they’re told not to.
Ahead, the fog parted. Trunks thinned to a moss-cloaked rise, and beyond it, the air warped—glossed like heat over stone, but with a cold edge that bit the lungs. The Veil shimmered there, fragile as a held breath.
I pushed into it, and the world gave way around me.