You Turn Away

You don’t know who this man is or what he wants, but you can feel how dangerous he is. The air around him is taut, a thin layer of stillness stretched over something vast and volatile. There is no way—absolutely no way—you are getting any closer to him.

You step back, shaking your head.

“You deny me?” he growls, voice low and edged like a blade pressed against your throat.

You shake your head again, raising your hands—not to fight, not even to push him away, but in that instinctive, useless motion your body makes when there is nothing left between you and harm but your own flesh.

It doesn’t matter.

The snarl tears from his throat, raw and animal, and before you can move far enough away, his hand—no, his claw—lashes out.

The sound of fabric ripping is brief, almost dainty, but the wet, tearing rip of flesh drowns it. Heat blooms across your chest, sudden and searing, and your breath catches on the shock. The pain follows a heartbeat later, sharp and merciless. It’s all you can feel, all you can think. Five lines, burning deep into skin and muscle, each one an open flame etched into you.

You cry out. The sound rips up your throat, jagged and unsteady, but his voice rises with yours—his scream layered over yours like two notes struck at once. It is not victory in his sound. It is not the roar of a predator satisfied.

It is pain. Wild, echoing, and so deep it feels older than the forest.

The scream shudders through the air, and you could almost believe your wound is his, too—that he has cut himself in striking you. The agony feels shared, doubled, refracted.

Around you, the trees tremble. The sky dims, the air thickens. Then—

“Ursa,” a voice says.

Soft. Thin. Yet it slices through the tension as cleanly as a shard of ice.

The distant bells stop ringing. The forest exhales, slow and cold, and all sound dies.

You feel him still, rigid beside you, his breath steaming between you. He turns—not entirely away, but toward the far bank of the river, where the trees thin to a ragged seam of darkness. His clawed hand twitches near your shirt, so close it almost brushes your skin. You hold still. You don’t breathe. Any movement could snap him back toward you.

You follow his gaze.

From between the trees, something emerges. Not the smooth, sure prowl of a hunter. This is slower. Unsteady. Painfully human in its fragility.

A woman.

She moves in halting steps, each one seeming to cost her something she can’t afford to give. Her skin is pale—paler than any winter’s morning—and tinged faintly blue in the hollows of her cheeks, at the edges of her mouth, under her eyes. Fine ice clings to her skin, flaking away as she moves, melting before it reaches the ground. Her hair is the brittle gray of frozen ash, snapping as strands catch against her cheeks.

The closer she comes, the more wrong she is—not simply sick, but emptied, hollowed out as if something essential has been siphoned from her over years. There’s a smell to her—cold rain on stone, and beneath that, the stale rot of old wood locked under ice.

She stumbles. Her knees buckle, and she collapses just shy of the circle’s edge, her breath fogging in shallow bursts. She lifts her head, barely enough to see him.

“Let them go,” she says, her voice a frost-bitten whisper. “We cannot force the magic.”

The words hang there, trembling, as if even sound is too fragile here. You don’t know who they are, or what magic she means, but the sound of her voice stirs something uneasy deep in your chest.

His jaw tightens. The fury in his eyes fractures into something else—something you can’t read, but it pulls at you in dangerous ways. Without warning, he shoves you. The force knocks you backward into the damp earth. Pain jolts up your ribs. You gasp, clutching your wound to stem the bleeding.

He doesn’t look at you again.

He goes to her. The rage is gone now, replaced by a fierce tenderness that feels all the more dangerous for how easily it replaces his violence. He kneels and gathers her into his arms, holding her as though she might crumble to dust. She leans into him, too weak to hold herself up, her fingers curling faintly in the fabric of his shoulder.

“There is no more time,” he whispers to her.

The words aren’t for you, but they hit you all the same. You can feel it—she’s dying. The truth is sharp enough to cut through the fog of your pain.

And somehow, deep in your bones, you know this is your fault.

You could have stopped it.

You shake your head hard, as if you can knock the thought loose. No. You don’t owe them anything. He attacked you. He would have killed you.

You turn away from them, from the thick magic that weighs down the air, and start into the trees. Each step feels too loud, too exposed, but you keep moving, praying he won’t notice, praying he won’t follow.

The forest closes in again, shadows wrapping around you. Your chest burns. Your shirt clings to you with the sticky warmth of blood, the fabric already stiffening in places. You press your palm harder to the wound, but the effort drags the strength from your limbs.

You don’t know how far you’ve walked. The ground is uneven, roots catching at your boots, but there’s no comfort in measuring distance. Every tree feels the same, each turn in the path like a loop that could deposit you right back where you started.

Somewhere above, a crow calls. Then another.

You tilt your head and see them—three, then five, then more—black shapes wheeling high above the canopy, their cries harsh and ragged. They turn in slow spirals, as though watching you, following. The sound of their wings is heavy in the air, the rhythm almost like the pulse hammering in your ears.

You stumble. Your knees jar against the ground, and for a moment you just stay there, breathing hard.

That’s when you notice the moss.

It’s soft. Too soft for this part of the forest, where the earth is usually hard-packed and tangled with roots. It’s a bed, lush and springy, an island of green in the gloom. A ring of mushrooms marks its edges—small and pale, their caps bowed as though in quiet conversation.

You’ve heard the stories. Rings like this are not always safe. Sometimes they are traps. But this one feels… different. There’s a stillness to it, a quiet that seems to hold the world at bay. No rustle of leaves. No sound of crows. No ache of threat pressing at your back.

The forest outside the circle looms, but here—here it’s almost warm.

Your legs shake. The pain in your chest is a steady throb now, the edges of your vision dimming. The moss looks so soft. You could rest there. Just for a little while.

It feels safe.

At least, it promises safety.

You glance toward the dark beyond the mushrooms, where the trees stand in jagged rows, and wonder if moving on would be wiser—or if leaving this place would mean stepping back into the jaws of whatever hunts these woods.