I tell this the way it happened, because if I soften even one edge of it, you will not understand what we lost — or what we nearly became.
We were four hunters out of the garrison city of Verath Dun, a place of iron gates and chalk-white walls that press against the Ashwood like a hand held flat against a stranger’s chest. The Ashwood has no official name on any garrison map. Soldiers call it that because the trees bleed a pale grey resin when cut, and the resin smells like a fire that burned out three days ago. Nobody cuts them anymore. Nobody goes in unless they are paid very well or have no better options. We were the latter, dressed up as the former.
Our contract was simple on paper. Something had been taking livestock from the three outermost farms. Not killing them cleanly. Taking them — whole, without blood, without track, without any sign of struggle beyond a broken fence rail or a latch pulled loose from the inside. The garrison’s Warden had written the word “Creature” on the contract in the way people write words they don’t believe but cannot replace with anything better.
I am recounting this now because three of us came back. And because what we found was not what the Warden’s contract described. I want to be precise about that.
The four of us: Isolwen Ashenvale, our tracker, a woman with close-cropped silver hair and the particular stillness of someone who has spent too many years listening to forests. Ognar of the Blackmaw Clan, half a head taller than any doorframe in Verath Dun, his broad grey-green face carrying the deep-set amber eyes and heavy jaw ridges of the Blackmaw orcs — a clan known less for their size than for their near-supernatural patience. Sven Hagen, a former garrison soldier turned freelance, reliable and irritating in equal measure. And me.
We enter the Ashwood at first light.
Isolwen finds the first sign within the hour: a path through the undergrowth, deliberate and low, like something that moves on four legs but pauses often to stand on two. She crouches over a depression in the pale moss and says nothing. That silence is its own kind of warning.
“Big,” Ognar says, from behind her.
“Not big,” she says. “Careful.”
Sven doesn’t like that distinction. I can tell by the way he adjusts his grip on the crossbow. We push deeper.
The Ashwood in full morning is a grey, suspended world — the canopy so dense that the light arrives filtered and directionless, as though the sun itself cannot decide where to land. The trees are enormous, their bark smooth and pale as old bone, their roots surfacing from the earth in long arching ridges that you must step over or around. The resin smell is constant. Not unpleasant, exactly, but it coats the back of the throat, and by midday you stop noticing it, which is somehow worse than if it had stayed sharp. Between the trees, pale ferns grow in clusters, and there is a moss here that is almost luminous, a cold silver-green, and it grows thickest where the roots press deepest. Everything in this forest looks like it is waiting.
The tracks change.
Isolwen stops walking so abruptly that Sven nearly walks into her. She points. The low, careful trail has become something else — the prints of bare feet, human-shaped but longer in the toe, pressing deep at the heel as though whatever made them was carrying great weight, or standing very still for a very long time before moving again.
“That’s not a creature,” Sven says.
“No,” Isolwen agrees.
“Then we go back. We report to the Warden.”
“And the farms?” Ognar asks. His voice is low and even, the way it always is. “Three families. Winter coming.”
Sven has no answer for that. Neither do I. We follow the prints.
The light shifts. This is the thing I cannot explain cleanly: the light in the Ashwood begins to gather. Not brighten — gather. It pools between certain trees, hangs at the edge of clearings, and when you look at it directly it retreats, just slightly, the way a reflection retreats when you lean toward a still pond. Isolwen tells us not to follow it. She says this twice. The second time, she is looking at Sven.
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