I pressed on.
“Aurelia,” a woman called from the left.
“Elli, wait for me!” Aeryn laughed from the right, high and breathless.
Both voices were hollow and wrong. I didn’t answer. I didn’t look.
A shape stepped into the path ahead. At first, I thought it was the horse I’d heard—until the legs resolved: too long, the joints bending the wrong way. Bone where muscle should have been. It tilted its skull toward me. Empty eye sockets held a shine that wasn’t light.
“Aurelia,” it said, the name dragged over gravel. “Say your true name, and I’ll guide you.”
My fingers brushed the dagger at my hip. I kept my mouth shut.
The thing waited—as if the price of passage was hearing myself speak. When I didn’t pay it, it shifted, joints clicking, and advanced.
Fine.
I tore a strip from my cloak, wrapped it round one hook, and struck flint to steel. Sparks spat. The cloth caught, guttered, then burned. I swung the hook low. The creature recoiled from the flame, breath fogging fast in the cold, a wet rattle where its lungs should have been.
“Name,” it rasped, closer now. Another shape loomed to my right, bone-thin and wrong in all the same ways. The hum in my chest climbed, licking at the edges of my thoughts.
Never answer when the trees speak.
I moved.
The first lunge came high; I dropped and jammed theburning hook beneath its jaw. Bone thudded. A seam opened across its skull like cracked ice. Smoke spilled out, black and damp with copper. I wrenched down, dragging its weight with mine, and slammed the iron into the ground.
It screamed, except there was no sound—only pressure. My teeth buzzed, my skull rattling as though palms were slamming against my ears again and again. I drove the iron deeper until the hook bit into earth. The creature unraveled and collapsed without weight, leaving only a scatter of moss and a taste of cold metal on my tongue.
The second came from behind. Its false voice slipped close to my ear—Hayat’s calm, steady: “Elli. Drop the blade.”
I didn’t turn. My free hand found the tinder. Flint. Strike. Spark. Fire bloomed—small, desperate. I hurled it into the fog. The flare tore the darkness open for a heartbeat, just long enough to see its face twist, seams splitting too wide. I slammed my palm into what should have been an eye, and bone gave beneath the strike. In the same motion, I tore my dagger free. Steel kissed its skull a breath before the thing burst into a cough of frost and ash, vapor unraveling back into the trees.
For a moment, the fog pulsed, swelling around me as if deciding whether to close in.
I braced myself—hook in one hand, blade in the other. Shoulders forward. Weight low.
But nothing came.
I stood shaking, flame guttering low on the hook, air burning in my chest. My breath came in hard clouds. Every muscle trembled, but I forced my knees to lock, to hold. Weakness meant death here.
From deeper in the wood, something paced. Listening.
“Not today,” I whispered, to myself more than them.
My father used to say the Veil had its own laws, that when thegoddesses divided the realms, Eryndis had bartered shadows to build the boundary. That was before her name was stricken from every temple. Before it became forbidden to even speak of her. But I remembered. Children always remember what they’re told not to.
Ahead, the fog parted. Trunks thinned to a moss-cloaked rise, and beyond it, the air warped—glossed like heat over stone, but with a cold edge that bit the lungs. The Veil shimmered there, fragile as a held breath.
I pushed into it, and the world gave way around me.
5
Aurelia
The shimmer sealedaround me like the sea closing over my ears after a cliff-dive back home—salt roar rushing in, the world above vanishing in a single breath.
Crossing drowned me. The air thickened until each breath scraped my lungs raw. Cold wrapped every seam of my coat. The weight pressed against my eardrums until sound itself fractured. The hush of the forest behind me cut away in an instant—no wind in the branches, not even the rasp of my own breath.