For hours they walked in a kind of companionable silence that felt less empty than full. The forest around them breathed slow and deep: trunks rose like columns, branches interlocked overhead to make a living ceiling that filtered sunlight into a soft, green dusk. Moss clung to stone and root; ferns bowed in the little pockets of shade; distant birds argued with the wind and then fell quiet. Small things—beetles that flashed like coins, a fox's distant scuff, the faint rip of an unseen brook—made the world feel inhabited, benign in its ordinary way.
Elias fell into the rhythm of their footsteps. The bandage around his calf itched and ached with each step, but the pain was another steady thing, an anchor to the present. His thoughts wandered and folded back on themselves: yesterday's terror, the book's ash now smeared on his fingers in memory, and the absurd comfort of a warm coffee he hadn't had since a life ago. He breathed the forest air like medicine—thin, clean, and alive.
After a long stretch of walking that tasted of sun-warmed pine resin and damp loam, Elias stopped and announced it, the words falling out before he could soften them.
"I'm hungry," he said, and the small eruption startled both Lyra and Daren into laughter.
Lyra glanced back, her expression a playful scowl. "We're all hungry, genius. You're not special."
Daren's brows knit into a faint grin. "Speak for yourself. I can forage and fight equally well." He looked genuinely amused, the kind of easy humor that comes from being roughened by life but still having a soft center.
"But we're still in the middle of the forest," Elias pointed out. "What are we supposed to do? We can't exactly stop and open a tavern."
Lyra waved a hand like she'd just swatted the shadow of boredom aside. "We're in the forest—of course we can find something. Keep walking."
They fell back into silence for a while, but it was not heavy or forced. It was the kind of silence that forms when three people are content to share a moment without words. The path curved and dipped; small clearings opened up like breathing spaces in a crowded room. Sometimes the trail ran atop a shallow ridge and they could peer down into bowl-shaped valleys thick with ferns. Later, sunlight widened until the canopy broke into high, towering pines.
Those pines changed the feel of the forest entirely. The trunks in that stretch climbed straight and proud, ten to fifteen meters without a branch, then exploded outward into a crown of green. Some of the elders were strangers in a stranger land—so tall they seemed to try and poke the sky, and a few colossal ones reached some impossible fifty meters where the topmost branches disappeared into a haze. Sunlight that would have been a shower in other places became a single, wide beam when it found a gap among those high crowns. The air under those giants tasted of resin and old storm-songs.
Elias blinked up, the size of the trees making his chest swell with a small, reverent unease. "This place… it's enormous. Look at them—forty, fifty meters tall in places. How can a forest grow like this and not have monsters crawling through every root?"
Lyra walked beside him, a crooked smile on her face. "You've been in the dark part. You heard the tales. But this forest is not one thing. It has three parts."
Daren, who had been watching a bird wheel above a distant clearing, turned his head. "Three parts?"
Lyra nodded, as if she were reciting a map she'd always known. "The first—where we were born, where we came from—is a sort of coastal plain. Think village, docks, the kind of place where people trade for fish and bolts of cloth. That's the place I and Daren grew up in. We never left it because it was comfortable and small and boring in all the right ways."
Daren made a face as if that description were an insult to something noble. "Comfortable and small is underrated."
Lyra grinned at him and continued. "Then there's the center—the heart of the forest, where the light hardly reaches. That's the place we came through last night. It's thick, close, and full of shadow. People don't go there. It's where the old things sleep. Even we avoid it most of the year. Only fools or greedy explorers go into the center."
Elias remembered the suffocating dark and the sense of being watched. He shivered slightly. "That's the center you meant, the place with no light and no people at all."
"Exactly," Lyra said, tapping the tip of a pine needle between her fingers. "That place is like a closed fist. You don't go there unless you want your food eaten by the dark."
Daren's eyes went pale, thoughtful with the memory. "It's the place of stories," he added in a hushed voice. "The older folk warn their kids to stay away because the roots there… they don't like to be disturbed."
Lyra glanced at Elias as if to add a small point of curiosity, then dropped her voice like it was something delicious to whisper. "And the third part—the region we're in now—is near the edges. It's almost unnatural. The plants grow fast here. Trees tower like they were watered by storms of magic. Animals are fewer, and the ones that live here seem to prefer away from the center. People farm near the edge and call it the Bright Fringe. It's a good place to find food, if you're smart."
Elias looked along the path, taking in the pine giants and the soft light. "So that's why the place is quiet. The middle keeps most things away, and the edge supports normal life. But what about Veran and the tower—how could they exist in the center? How could the demons and their rituals be there without being immediately devoured by whatever lives in that darkness?"
Lyra's face tightened with honest wonder. "I don't know. That's why most of us don't go there. If something can live in the center, it's either very small and cunning or very powerful and very old. Veran's tower… maybe it sits on a seam, a pocket in the land. Maybe the stone there is different. Or maybe the tower itself acts like a little island where other things don't want to tread."
Daren mulled that over. "Or perhaps the rituals change the environment. Magic can be territorial. Maybe the sigil and the tower make the center tolerate the ritual's presence. Not everything is natural—some things are carved or called into being."
They fell to listening to the forest again. For a while, none of them spoke. The path widened into a sunlit strip where ferns bowed and small flowers nodded in the breeze. A stag's track crossed the trail and they followed it for a portion, watching the impressions in the dirt, the sign of hoof, claw, and a tiny web of predator and prey that made the forest feel like a living ledger.
Elias's voice came then as they passed a cluster of saplings. "These trees grow so straight and tall. It's like someone planted columns." He reached out and ran his fingers across the rough bark of a young pine—the texture was coarse, but it held stories: rings inside, years layered and quiet. "No wonder things like Dianol—or whatever people bargain for—end up in chests. This place is ancient."
Lyra grinned and poked at a low branch. "Old as the tales. But it's also good for food in the edge. See that tree there?" She pointed to a broad, twisting trunk with a crown of glossy leaves, different from the pines—an apple tree that must have been planted or somehow favored by the sunlight. "Apple trees do well here. Come on, Daren. Use your wind thing and shake us down breakfast."
Daren smiled, a quick, delighted thing. "You want fruit? Fine. Watch a professional work."
He stepped forward, planted his boots, and lifted his hands. There was a practiced calm to the way he gathered the air—fingers flexing as though plucking something invisible. He drew breath, lips moved in a silent count, and then he sent it outward.
The sound was small—a hush like the drawing of a cloud—but the effect was enormous. The crown of the apple tree shivered and then began to sigh. Leaves rustled with a noise like distant applause. Branches bowed like the sea taking a breath, and then apples—large, glossy, half the size of a normal man's head—let go of their stems and fell in a lazy cascade. A few thudded into the soft grass; a couple spun and hit the trunk with a satisfying ping.
Elias's laugh exploded out of him, bright and unguarded. "Daren! That was amazing. Your power isn't just for fighting—it's a survival skill as well."
Lyra's eyes shone as she scrambled forward. "Hurry, hurry! I'm going to make a pie and a dozen other things."
They scrambled to collect the fruit. Sunlight pooled across their shoulders, warming the sweat on their skins. Apples tumbled into Lyra's bag and Elias's hands; Daren caught one in a practiced motion and handed it to Elias.
Elias bit into the apple. Juices burst sweet and tart, shockingly clean. The taste was immediate starlight—sharp, nutritious, and somehow restorative. They sat on a patch of grass in a sunlit hollow, the three of them elbow-to-elbow like a small, makeshift family. For a time they ate in companionable silence, the only soundtrack the whisper of the wind and the soft chew of fruit.
Lyra, with a mouth half full, smacked her lips. "Twenty," she said suddenly, as if reporting inventory. Her hand went into her pouch; she revealed a cluster of small green stones—Dianol—glinting in the sun. "I kept about twenty."
Daren paused mid-chew, the expression on his face shifting from amused to calculating. "Twenty stones. That's more than enough to put us up in a decent inn for a night near a trade road, perhaps buy a healer's bandage, and still have something to barter."
Elias considered the weight of that news—not the stones themselves so much as the options they offered. A proper roof, a clean bed, a healer who could stitch his wound properly: practical things that smelled like safety. "Then… do we stay the night? Or keep moving until we find a town?"
They looked at one another in the washed-gold quiet of the glade. The question felt less tactical and more human—do they press on, running from the threat, or do they buy a single night's comfort and perhaps, for once, lower their guard?
Lyra lifted an apple to drain the juice from it theatrically, then wiped her hands on her trousers. "We could use a proper rest," she said. "I don't like sleeping without cover. The trees are lovely, but…I'd rather not wake up with a wolf licking my face."
Daren wiped his mouth thoughtfully. "If we find an inn within a day's walk, I say take it. We need supplies. A healer for Elias, new bandages, proper rations. If the stone's worth two nights, that's two nights' worth of opportunity to plan."
Elias chewed slowly, feeling the apple's tartness anchor him. "I'd like to get my leg stitched. Properly. Makes sense to stop if it means healing. But I also don't want to get too comfortable."
Lyra's smile turned sly. "Then compromise. We find a village or a traveler's post this afternoon, barter some stones for a bed, and then move on at dawn. That way we have warmth tonight and distance tomorrow."
Daren nodded slowly. "Agreed. We keep moving until mid-afternoon. If we haven't seen any sign of a settlement by then, we set a guarded camp and use some of those stones for a healer's bandage. But I suspect a road lies not far from here—people plant orchards near roads. The path we followed likely leads to a lane."
They packed up their blanket of leaves, returned the last of the apples to Lyra's bag, and shouldered their gear. The plan felt like a small fortress: practical, modest, and very much their own.
When they rose, the forest seemed to approve in a hush of wind. The path ahead wound through the pines and sloped down toward a low ridge—beyond that edge, the land would tilt toward the river basin where villages liked to cluster. They started again, their steps lighter, the weight of worry distributed among the three of them like a shared meal. Talk resumed, softer but sure: jokes, small arguments about the best way to roast an apple, and playful bets on who would get the last piece of fruit.
As they walked, the bright morning around them felt less like a reprieve from danger and more like a temporary home; the forest cradled them, the path led them, and their small alliance marched onward—hungry, hopeful, and surprisingly alive.