The night moved on, slow and heavy. The cold of the earth climbed up his legs, but Zirel remained motionless, his senses strung tight like bowstrings.
Then, a change. The beasts—until then agitated in their ordinary chaos—fell still as one. Growls, quarrels, cackles: everything died. A leaden silence descended over the clearing.
And suddenly, they all turned as one toward the two poles.
Renn and Kael began to shake. Not from fatigue, not from cold—but from violent, uncontrollable convulsions, as if an invisible current was twisting them from within. Their mouths opened in a mute scream, their muscles standing out beneath the skin, distorted by a force that was not their own.
Zirel felt his stomach clench. This was neither interrogation nor punishnt.
It was a rite.
A shape erged from the shadow between two huts. Too straight, too controlled to be an animal. Draped in black rags that seed to swallow light. Tall, thin. Its face was a pale wooden mask, smooth and expressionless, pierced only by two narrow slits—and from those slits leaked the sa sickly green light that poisoned the air.
The creature stopped before the prisoners. It raised a long, gaunt hand, fingers too nurous, too jointed.
The vibration in Zirel’s chest turned to pain. The aura contracted, channeled by that thing.
Renn and Kael’s spasms reached a peak. Their eyes flew open—and were nothing but green light, bright and rciless. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it stopped.
They drew breath, held it—and then exhaled in perfect unison. Their heads rose chanically, stiffly. Their gazes, empty of thought, swept the monstrous crowd.
Renn and Kael no longer existed.
Only receptacles remained. Sentinels.
The masked creature slowly lowered its hand. In the sa motion, the two bodies tied to the poles turned their heads—and fixed directly on the spot where Zirel was hidden.
A deadly cold ran up Zirel’s spine. He had not revealed anything. Not a flicker of energy, not a breath. Yet they knew.
They were looking at him.
The mask, impassive, pivoted toward him.
The silence thickened. All the eyes in the clearing—beastly, reptilian, and now those hollow human eyes—were trained on his hiding place.
The trap had never been ant to lure them inside.
It had always been there to show them they had been spotted. From the beginning.
Then, with a slow, almost elegant gesture, the creature pointed its dry finger at Zirel.
And hell broke loose.
———
First ca the sound.
A rumble. Not a single isolated cry, but a chorus from the abyss, bursting from every throat, every jaw. A polyphonic roar, dissonant, that made the ground vibrate.
Then ca the movent.
The crowd erupted, pouring forward like a wave of claws and teeth. Goblins leapt, howling; kobolds slipped through the shadows; lizard-n made their bone-weapons clap. Every creature advanced without hesitation, all aid at the sa point: Zirel.
He didn’t even have to raise the alarm. His n, already tuned to the razor-edge of danger, sprang from their hiding places—silhouettes cut from the night. Their looks held no more doubt: they knew they’d been discovered. They knew they would die if they stayed.
"Retreat!" Zirel spat, his voice a deathly hiss.
He sprang backward, careening down the slope, moss slicking under his boots. Around him his n fell back, quick and silent despite the panic. Stones whistled past—fragnts of slings, crude spearheads—but they bounced off trunks or sank into mud.
A shrill cry tore the night behind them: Renn. Or rather... what had once been Renn. His voice, swollen with a foreign resonance, carried that aura right into their bones. Kael answered in echo. The whole wood seed to vibrate, as if the trees themselves were screaming against them.
Zirel sped up, his lungs afla. Branches scratched his skin, roots tried to trip him. But fear burned hotter than pain. Behind them, the thunder of monstrous feet closed in.
They reached the dry ravine where they had regrouped earlier. Without hesitation, Zirel signaled to the right, diving into a narrow corridor of vegetation. His n followed, gasping, each clutching their anima gems like a lifeline.
A crash sounded behind them: a reptilian mass had hurled itself from above and smashed down a few ters away. Its gaping maw spat a spray of acidic drool that ate into the stone.
"Dodge!" Zirel shouted, rolling aside as the ground smoked.
Two of his n struck back, hurling daggers in a single motion. Steel sank into the beast’s eye; it recoiled, bellowing. Not dead. Just wounded. Just angrier.
"We don’t stop them!" Zirel roared. "We buy ti!"
He led them, breath jagged, each step torn from the earth as if the soil itself were trying to hold him. His senses, all pulled taut, hunted an exit, a hole in the net tightening around them.
Behind them, the tide thundered. Tens—maybe hundreds—poured after them. And above, riding that monstrous wave, he still felt that cold green stare fixed on him. The wooden mask.
A whistle split the air. An arrow skimd the edge of Zirel’s ear and slamd into a trunk, splintering it. He swore under his breath, pressed his back to the ground as three kobolds burst from the undergrowth, brandishing crude stakes. His n reacted fast: two bolts, fired point-blank, sank into their scrawny chests. The small creatures convulsed and dropped, but the sound of their fall rang like an alarm.
"Move!" Zirel growled, voice sandpapery. "Faster!"
They ran now in controlled chaos, like cornered wolves. The trees flew by, yet the green light never dimd. It vibrated in the sky, a sick moon that followed wherever they went. Every heartbeat clashed against the rhythm of that monstrous breathing, as if the whole forest matched the mask’s inhalations.
A dry crack—behind them, a hulking shape tore itself from the shadows: an ogre armored in bone plates, swinging a tree-trunk like a club. When it struck, the ground shook. One of Zirel’s n was caught by the blow and flung into a stump. A snap of bone. Then silence.
Zirel ground his teeth without looking back. To die while stealing a glance at death was to betray the living.
"Left!" he barked, veering sharply into a narrow pass between two rocks. Branches tore at their faces, but the monsters’ jaws had less room; the largest couldn’t follow here.
For a single breath, the tumult seed to recede. Only their ragged breathing remained.
Then an inhuman cry cut through—the most piercing sound yet. Renn. His voice, hollow, cleaved the silence like a blade. And Kael’s echo answered among the trees.
Zirel felt his legs give for a mont. It was worse than fear: it was certainty. Those voices were not calling them; they were condemning them.
Ahead, the undergrowth opened onto a steep slope. Far below, a river bed glinted faintly under the moon. A possible escape. A chance. But a natural trap: to descend would be to expose themselves.
Zirel halted, panting; his n skidded to a stop behind him. His eyes swept the slope, then the darkness pursuing them, ready to break once more.
He had a choice.
Improvise. Sacrifice. Lie to Death long enough to steal a few more minutes.
"Listen to ," he said in a cracked voice. "If we stay, we’re already dead. If we go down, we might shake them... maybe."
A brief silence. A single breath. Eyes wide with fear.
"Then we go down."
And he leapt first, plunging down the slope, gravity wrenching him from himself.
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