She considered calling out to Jakobav, knowing it was probably time for everyone to pack up and keep moving, but the words gathered at the back of her throat. Hesitation held her in place.
The silence didn’t feel like absence, but like tension, the entire forest suspended in waiting. It felt charged and brittle, as though she were listening for a note too low for mortal ears, one that hovered just out of reach yet refused to fade.
The wind whipped against her face, cold enough to sting and bitter enough to make her slightly nauseous. She hated how Dravaryn mornings always seemed to turn the air into a punishment.
Suddenly a howl broke through the trees, faint but wrong in a way that crawled beneath her skin. It wasn’t simply sound. It was dissonance, like a note bent too far on a string, the kind that unsettled without warning.
Her body reacted before her mind did, every muscle jolting tight, the hair along her arms prickling in answer.
The noise roused the others, steel flashing as they moved with the precision of soldiers who had woken this way too many times before, bodies falling into rhythm without a word. Soren was no longer at the edge of the fire where she’d seen him moments ago; she would have sworn on Orchid’s throne that he’d been there, and yet he was gone, vanished so completely she couldn’t decide whether she’d actually blinked.
The sound came again, louder now, tearing across the forest in a pitch that was not human, a scream that cracked somewhere between howl and shriek. The tone clawed at her memory, dragging her back to the first time she’d ever heard a mountain lion in Orchid’s eastern ranges. Sleek predators, silent in their movements, yet when one screamed, it was high and raw and utterly jarring, like a woman crying out in distress.
She remembered thinking it was obscene, the way the noise betrayed the creature’s shape, how the mind refused to reconcile predator with that terrible cry.
This was worse.
The sound in Dravaryn carried that same wrongness but stretched beyond it, a warped echo that did not belong to flesh at all.
Ella turned instinctively toward the noise, as if tugged by the spine.
Shadows moved at the treeline, skittering shapes half-glimpsed and already gone. The horses reared, hooves tearing up soil, ears pinned flat against their skulls as they thrashed in terror, their panic so stark it was almost contagious.
“Move!” Jakobav’s roar cracked through the clearing and he was already sprinting toward her, sword half-drawn, closing the distance in seconds.
And then the creature came.
It lunged from the forest in a blur of motion, towering over the firelight, easily twice the height of any man. Its frame was hunched but massive, the outline still human enough to suggest it had once been mortal before being twisted into something demonic. Black flesh clung to its body like tar, stretched tight over ridges of bone and sinew that shimmered faintly with glassy threads of light. Its arms were grotesquely long, ending in claws with fingers so extended they looked made for rending, while its taloned toes gouged the earth with every step. A whip-like taillashed behind it, anchoring the weight of its hulking body with each jagged stride.
There was no face to meet, no eyes or mouth to mark it living, only a smooth, skull-like head split clean down the center, a vertical seam that glowed faintly red, pulsing like a wound that refused to close.
Its movements shifted unnervingly between a predator’s fluid grace and the marionette-jerk of something dragged on invisible strings, every twitch a reminder that this was not a beast of flesh but something far older and utterly wrong.
Jakobav met it head-on, his own roar answering, his sword flashing as it sang through the air in a single strike.
Maeren cut left without hesitation, twin blades gleaming as she dipped low to the ground, while Savina mirrored her in the opposite direction, their movements so perfectly aligned it was clear this was not chance but a pattern drilled into their bodies by years of training together, a dance rehearsed a thousand times with blood as its music.
Thane surged forward with far less grace, his curse ripping through the clearing like an oath as he tore twin axes from his belt, his broad shoulders rolling as if eager to split something in two.
Soren, by contrast, made no sound at all. In one heartbeat, he was at the edge of the firelight, cloak drawn close, and in the next, he was gone, swallowed by shadow completely.
The creature shrieked again, and the forest responded in horror. Every leaf curled inward on itself, branches bending as though recoiling from the sound. The very air trembled, brittle as glass about to splinter.
Ella flung out her hands, calling on her fire. Nothing answered.
She tried again, and her power sputtered once, a weak static jolt under her skin, then collapsed in on itself like air punchedfrom her lungs. The creature didn’t seem to notice, still entirely focused on Jakobav.
“What the hell is that?” she gasped, her voice torn raw.
“Veil Leach,” Jakobav snarled, meeting its bulk head-on, his blade already sinking into its chest with brutal force. Sparks scattered as steel hit bone. “Stay back, and don’t let it feed on you!”
Ella tried again, desperation delving deeper than fear.
This time, her palms shuddered with heat, but what came forth was stranger: a shimmer in the air, no light, no flame, just a wrongness that bent the clearing for a single heartbeat before snapping back into place.
A ripple. Small and barely visible, yet undeniable.
The Veil Leach reacted instantly. Its eyeless head jerked toward her, the vertical split along its skull peeling wider with obscene hunger. The scream it unleashed was not sound but force, low and vibrating, a pressure that rolled outward in a wave so dense it buckled Ella’s knees.
