The second strike comes without warning.
Gold floods my sight so violently I gasp. My eyes burn. Blood spills warm over my lip at once .Two more futures layer over the first three.
In one, Vaedros pushes through the thorn wall ahead of us and hidden stakes drive through his side, pinning him in place while dark sap hisses over steel.
In another, he cuts a clean opening and emerges untouched into sunlight falling across ancient stairs. The images overlap until I cannot tell wound from escape, danger from passage, blood from shadow.
I hesitate. That alone terrifies me more than pain. Vaedros turns toward me, mouth moving, but his words blur beneath the pounding in my skull. The trees bend inward. White trunks become black. Thorn branches resemble fingers reaching for my face.
Then another vision strikes. No warning. No splintering flood of possible paths, no layered outcomes colliding over one another until meaning has to be dragged from the wreckage.
This one arrives whole. The forest around me falls away so completely that I no longer feel the cold air on my skin or the ache in my skull. There is only stillness, vast and absolute, as though the world has paused to make room for what comes next.
Vaedros stands before me. Years from now or moments ahead, I cannot tell. Time has no edges here. We are inside a chamber lit by blue fire that burns without smoke. Silver runes blaze across his skin, brighter than I have ever seen them, moving like living script over muscle and bone. My wrists are bound to a stone frame behind me. Blood covers my mouth and chin, fresh enough to taste.
He is taking the visions from me. I feel each one being torn free, stripped from whatever place they root inside me, leaving only pain and emptiness in their wake. His expression remains composed, touched by something that resembles regret closely enough to wound. When nothing remains to give, my body sags against the restraints.
He steps forward. His hand lifts to my face, fingers brushing my cheek with unbearable care. Then he drives a blade into my throat. The image is so sharp, so certain, that for one breath I believe I am already dying.
I jerk backward with a sound ripped from somewhere beneath thought, lungs fighting for air that still exists, hands grasping at my own neck as the forest slams back into place around me.
Everything returns at once, the smell of wet bark, the weight of blood running from my nose, the pulse of pain behind my eyes, Vaedros standing directly in front of me with his hands on my shoulders.
But the vision lingers. Not like the others. The others fracture, blur, shift when touched. This one settles inside me like a blade left buried. This one is very different, not like anything I experienced before.
Vaedros catches my shoulders. “Aeryn.”
I tear free. My chest heaves. Blood drips onto leaves between us. Was it real? A future. A planted lie. My own fear wearing his face. I cannot know. That may be the worst part.
“We’re changing course,” I say.
His gaze narrows immediately. “You said left.”
“Now I say east.”
“There is no east visible from here.”
“Then trust the woman you dragged into a haunted forest.”
He watches me with infuriating steadiness while I wipe blood from my mouth using a sleeve already stained by previous episodes.
“What was in your vision?” he asks.
Too much. The wrong thing. Something I will not place in his hands. Him betraying me.
“A path closing,” I say, choosing a truth thin enough to pass through. “If we keep pressing here, the forest folds us deeper.”
Partial truth. Useful truth. Safe enough truth.
He looks beyond me at the thorn wall, then up through branches where no sky can be seen, then back to my face as if measuring the rhythm of my pulse rather than the words themselves.
“You’re hiding something.”
“Yes,” I say, because denial would insult us both.
His brows lift by the smallest degree. The answer buys me one breath of advantage.
“Is it danger to me,” he asks, “or to you?”