11. Aeryn
AERYN
The forest deepens by degrees so subtle that awareness notices before thought does.
At first the changes seem ordinary enough, a thicker canopy, older trunks, roots larger than a man’s waist lifting the ground into ridges and hollows where shadows collect even at midday, yet with every mile something less visible tightens around us. Sound loses distance.
Bird calls arrive close and impossibly far in the same breath.
The wind moves leaves overhead while moss at our feet remains undisturbed.
Light slips through branches in narrow silver bands that never warm the skin.
Even scent behaves strangely, wet earth and crushed fern one moment, smoke and cold iron the next, then sweetness from flowers no eye can locate.
We have crossed into a region the outer forest merely imitates.
Vaedros senses it too. He speaks less, listens more, and keeps one hand near the hilt at his side whenever the trees gather too tightly.
His presence has become a constant pressure at the center of my awareness, measured footsteps behind me, the faint shift of leather when he turns his head, the resin and steel scent that belongs to him alone after days on the road.
I tell myself I notice because vigilance requires it.
That explanation grows weaker by the hour.
The path ahead narrows between two colossal roots arching from opposite trees like the ribs of some buried giant. Pale fungi glow beneath them in soft clusters. Water drips somewhere unseen in patient intervals. I step forward and the world ruptures mid-motion.
Three roads open at once. I am still standing between the roots, yet I am also already beyond them on three different paths that branch through the same forest and refuse to resemble one another.
On the first, I lead us left through a corridor of white-barked trees where the ground remains level and clear. We reach a stone circle half-sunk in moss, and at its center lies a black door set flat into the earth with silver symbols burning across its frame.
On the second, I guide us right along a ridge lined with thorn vines. The vines wake when we pass. They coil around Vaedros’s leg and drag him sideways over the drop while I scream his name too late.
On the third, we go straight into dense cedar shade where the air tastes of winter. We walk for hours without danger until we discover we have circled back to our own footprints filling with fresh rain.
All three futures pull equally.
My foot catches on nothing visible. I stumble hard, shoulder striking bark slick with moss, and pain snaps through my arm. Vaedros is beside me instantly, hand closing around my elbow before I can fall further.
“What happened?”
Too many answers crowd my mouth.
“Left,” I say, because the stone circle felt realer than the others, because choosing any direction is safer than standing still while my head splits open.
He studies my face for one sharp second, then guides us left beneath the white trunks. The forest changes within twenty paces.
The level ground buckles upward into roots that were not there a heartbeat ago.
White bark darkens to gray. The neat corridor narrows into tangled undergrowth dense enough to claw skin through clothing.
No stone circle waits ahead, only a wall of thorn and twisted hazel where no road should continue at all.
I stop so abruptly Vaedros nearly walks into me.
“That path was clear,” I whisper.
“Was?”
I turn slowly. Behind us the entrance between the giant roots is gone. In its place stands a slope crowded with ferns and black stones I do not recognize.
Cold slides down my spine. One of the futures was false. Or true only until we entered it. Or changed because we chose it. I hate all three possibilities.
“We go back,” I say.
“To where?”
He does not ask mockingly. He asks because there is no obvious answer.
I force breath into my lungs and reach again for the flickering remnants of the vision, trying to recover the ridge path, the cedar loop, anything useful before it fades completely.
The second strike comes without warning.
Gold floods my sight so violently I gasp. My eyes burn. Blood spills warm over my lip at once .Two more futures layer over the first three.
In one, Vaedros pushes through the thorn wall ahead of us and hidden stakes drive through his side, pinning him in place while dark sap hisses over steel.
In another, he cuts a clean opening and emerges untouched into sunlight falling across ancient stairs. The images overlap until I cannot tell wound from escape, danger from passage, blood from shadow.
I hesitate. That alone terrifies me more than pain. Vaedros turns toward me, mouth moving, but his words blur beneath the pounding in my skull. The trees bend inward. White trunks become black. Thorn branches resemble fingers reaching for my face.
Then another vision strikes. No warning. No splintering flood of possible paths, no layered outcomes colliding over one another until meaning has to be dragged from the wreckage.
This one arrives whole. The forest around me falls away so completely that I no longer feel the cold air on my skin or the ache in my skull. There is only stillness, vast and absolute, as though the world has paused to make room for what comes next.
Vaedros stands before me. Years from now or moments ahead, I cannot tell.
Time has no edges here. We are inside a chamber lit by blue fire that burns without smoke.
Silver runes blaze across his skin, brighter than I have ever seen them, moving like living script over muscle and bone.
My wrists are bound to a stone frame behind me.
Blood covers my mouth and chin, fresh enough to taste.
He is taking the visions from me. I feel each one being torn free, stripped from whatever place they root inside me, leaving only pain and emptiness in their wake.
His expression remains composed, touched by something that resembles regret closely enough to wound.
When nothing remains to give, my body sags against the restraints.
He steps forward. His hand lifts to my face, fingers brushing my cheek with unbearable care. Then he drives a blade into my throat. The image is so sharp, so certain, that for one breath I believe I am already dying.
I jerk backward with a sound ripped from somewhere beneath thought, lungs fighting for air that still exists, hands grasping at my own neck as the forest slams back into place around me.
Everything returns at once, the smell of wet bark, the weight of blood running from my nose, the pulse of pain behind my eyes, Vaedros standing directly in front of me with his hands on my shoulders.
But the vision lingers. Not like the others. The others fracture, blur, shift when touched. This one settles inside me like a blade left buried. This one is very different, not like anything I experienced before.
Vaedros catches my shoulders. “Aeryn.”
I tear free. My chest heaves. Blood drips onto leaves between us. Was it real? A future. A planted lie. My own fear wearing his face. I cannot know. That may be the worst part.
“We’re changing course,” I say.
His gaze narrows immediately. “You said left.”
“Now I say east.”
“There is no east visible from here.”
“Then trust the woman you dragged into a haunted forest.”
He watches me with infuriating steadiness while I wipe blood from my mouth using a sleeve already stained by previous episodes.
“What was in your vision?” he asks.
Too much. The wrong thing. Something I will not place in his hands. Him betraying me.
“A path closing,” I say, choosing a truth thin enough to pass through. “If we keep pressing here, the forest folds us deeper.”
Partial truth. Useful truth. Safe enough truth.
He looks beyond me at the thorn wall, then up through branches where no sky can be seen, then back to my face as if measuring the rhythm of my pulse rather than the words themselves.
“You’re hiding something.”
“Yes,” I say, because denial would insult us both.
His brows lift by the smallest degree. The answer buys me one breath of advantage.
“Is it danger to me,” he asks, “or to you?”
I almost laugh from sheer exhaustion.
“You do enjoy flattering yourself.”
“That was not an answer.”
“I rarely give any you demand.”
The forest shifts again while we stand there. A fallen branch rolls uphill. Mushrooms extinguish their glow one by one.
I move first, angling through a narrow seam between gray trunks toward a route I did not see in any vision and do not fully trust. Perhaps especially because I did not see it.
After several steps I hear him following. Of course he follows. Of course I am aware of the exact cadence of his boots behind me.
The new path descends through fern-heavy ground into a hollow where mist pools ankle-high. Every sound arrives softened. Water beads on my lashes. My headache throbs with each heartbeat, though the worst of the vision has receded into a residue of dread I cannot shake.
Vaedros comes abreast of me where the trail widens.
“You answered quickly this time,” he says after a while. “Too quickly for someone uncertain.”
“I’m always uncertain.”
“False.”
I keep my eyes ahead. “Confident people say that when they want company.”
He reaches out and catches my wrist, not hard enough to hurt, firm enough to halt me. The contact sends a treacherous awareness through my already frayed nerves.
“Look at me.”
I do, because refusing now would concede too much. Mist curls around us. His dark hair is damp from the hollow air, a few strands fallen from perfect order at last. There is mud at the hem of his coat, blood dried near one cuff from an earlier cut, indigo eyes intent enough to feel like touch.
“Whatever you saw,” he says quietly, “you changed the route to keep control of it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because I saw you become exactly what I fear. Because I do not know whether the vision came from the forest, my past, or something else. Because if I tell you, I hand you the power to confirm or deny it.
Instead I say, “Because control shared too freely becomes surrender.”
His thumb shifts once over the pulse point inside my wrist. A tiny movement. Far too noticeable.
“And if I asked for trust instead?”
I look into his eyes, hating how handsome he is in the dim hollow, how intelligence sharpens every line of him into something almost beautiful enough to be believed.
“I would assume you were injured more badly than you admit.”
For one heartbeat his mouth nearly curves. Then he releases me.
We keep walking through the mist with new distance between our shoulders and none at all beneath the surface. I no longer know whether the greater danger lies ahead in the forest or beside me on the path.
Either way, Vaedros does not have full control of the outcome. Neither do I. And for now, that will have to be enough.