The village gate loomed before him like a promise cut out of smoke. Beyond it, pale shapes of roofs and the warm glow of hearths shrank the world down to something manageable — a few straw-thatched houses, a low stone wall, a curl of smoke that suggested bread and heat and people who kept the dark at bay.
Elias stopped, every nerve in his body a taut wire. The storm had not lessened; if anything, the wind seemed to take satisfaction in how small it could make a man feel. Snow lashed at his face, the flakes stinging like a thousand tiny needles. Each breath he drew burned him and left a bitter tang of iron in his mouth. His legs trembled as though wood-splinters sat under his skin. He had nothing left to give, nothing left to shout, nothing left to fight the small betrayals of his own body.
He leaned against the ragged gate and tried to listen through the roar that filled his head. The storm filled his ears with its own private argument: wind versus branch, sky against leaf, world insisting on absence. He could barely make out the muffled banging of the gate behind him, or perhaps that was only the sound of his heart, thudding at the base of his throat.
Something bright, impossible, pulsed on the edge of his vision — a dark patch, a movement, a presence that should not belong to a place like this. Between the trees, half-hidden among the bamboo and snow-lashed pines, a figure sat. Black hair hung long across the person's shoulders, droplets of snow beading along the dark ribbon of it and sparkling like a necklace. A faint, steady glow shimmered around them, a ring of warmth that made Elias's eyes ache with confusion. The figure sat with the kind of calm that belonged to rock or to gods, not to the living, shivering things he inhabited.
Elias squinted, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand as if that might clear what seemed like a trick of light. The person hadn't moved. They sat cross-legged on a patch of ground that was somehow drier than miles of sodden earth all around — as though the ground itself respected this one point of stillness. The glow was not bright enough to burn the night away, but it carved the figure into clarity the way a lantern reveals something the forest would rather keep hidden.
He stumbled a step forward, then another, like a child testing a creek. The cold bit into him with every breath; a numbness spread up from his calf into the rest of his body, dulling his senses into a slow, heavy syrup. The figure did not open their eyes. The stillness they wore seemed absolute, as if they had paused the rustle of the woods to sit inside the center of a clock.
Elias thought, absurdly, of the book — of ink burned into ash and of a ritual that had wanted to pull him into its teeth. He wondered whether this was another trick: the forest's cruelty, his mind playing recollections like a broken music box. He tried to call out and found his throat raw, his whisper barely able to cut through the wind. "Who—" he began, and the word fell apart.
The cold took him like a curtain. The world shuddered and shrank. He tried to take another step and his legs crumpled from under him. For a moment the snow rushed up to meet his face; he tasted it, sharp and clean and unreal. The last sound he heard before everything folded in on itself was the soft, even hum of someone — the figure — breathing like a bell.
He plummeted into darkness.
He dreamed in fragments. A blade of light across the dark water. Hands, warm and cupped, carrying him like a bundle to somewhere that smelled of herbs and boiled roots. A fire crackling, steady and bright, that smelled of resin and clean smoke. Faces rearranging themselves like puzzle pieces: a woman with an apron, a child with a curl of hair, Daren's mouth moving in a string of words he could not hear. Warmth seamed his ribs. Someone wrapped a cloth across his leg; cool hands pressed and hissed like rain. And, underneath everything, the figure in the forest again — black hair like a river — who seemed to sit farther and farther away the instant he tried to focus on them.
Time thinned and thickened. A chorus of muffled voices turned into a single steady tone that led him like a current until the dream dissolved into waking.
He opened his eyes to wood.
Not the splintered, rain-eroded planks of the old tower, but clean, dry timber. A narrow bed with a rough mattress. A handwoven blanket over his legs. Light slanted in through a small window and painted pale bars across the floor. His breath came easier, the air warmer and fragrant with the faint, medicinal tang of dried herbs. For a dizzy second he could not place the sound — the thud of someone moving across a floor, the quiet murmur of voices — then memory snapped into a sensible order and he sat bolt upright.
Daren and Lyra looked back at him from where they stood near the door. Daren's face was gray with worry but softened around the edges in the way that happened when a man believed the worst had passed and then found himself pleasantly wrong. Lyra's cheeks were flushed, a little raw from the cold, and there was a softness in her eyes that did not belong to the Lyra who'd laughed at danger. For the first time since Elias met them, warmth bled from them into the room like sunlight.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, the motion clumsy with grogginess. "You two… you're still—" He stopped, the question dissolving on his tongue.
Daren closed his mouth and blinked. "Alive," he finished, a grin trying to edge through. "Yes. Barely. And you're awake." He moved as if to reach for Elias's shoulder, but his hand hovered, uncertain. "We found you at the gate."
Elias's head turned slowly toward the window, then back to the faces of his companions. Snow still dragged itself along the edges of the glass, but the storm beyond had a different sound now: less like a predator, more like a thing sighing in its sleep. "I saw someone in the forest," he said, voice raw. "A person. Sitting like they were meditating. Black hair. They glowed. Did you—"
Daren's brows rose. "We didn't see anyone. We ran ahead — tried to keep moving. We made for the village first, thinking if we could get you shelter, the storm would serve as cover. We were here—" He glanced toward the doorway as though measuring how long ago — "—for a while. We were trying to find someone to help. The villagers helped when they heard your noise at the gate. They dragged you inside."
Lyra punctuated his meaning with a small, incredulous snort. "I swear to you, I saw only flurries and trees. The wind took you and the next thing I know there was a banging at the gate and people shouting. We thought the worst. Then someone — a farmer and his wife — came out and they pulled you in and laid you on the bench near the hearth. They called a healer, and then we all—"
She stopped when Elias's eyes narrowed and he touched his calf.
There was no bandage.
Elias's fingers pressed at the skin of his leg with a gentle, alarmed curiosity. The jagged ache that had lived as a constant drum in his calf was gone. The skin was smooth under his hand, only a faint pinkness that might have been a bruise if he had looked for it. He prodded harder, then flexed his foot. The motion was clumsy and sent a small number of protest-sharp jolts up his leg, but nothing like the hot, gnawing pain that had defined him for days. Warmth spread through him — not the easy warmth of comfort but a radiant, suspicious warmth like the memory of a lamp you'd seen blown out.
"How—" he began, but the word snapped when Daren interrupted.
"We carried you in," Daren said. "The farmer said he found you half-buried near the gate. He swore a meditating figure had been crouched in the woods, but when they went to find it, there was nothing. No tracks. No prints. Just a thin circle of trampled moss where the snow had been kept off. The healer — old Mara — she worked on you for hours. She wrapped your wounds, fed you broth, and sang as if trying to call the color back into your face."
Lyra's voice softened. "Mara said the cold had pulled most of your heat out of you; you were near hypothermia when she found you. She put you on the pallet and used a poultice made of willow and thyme. She said she'd never seen a wound heal so quickly once tended, but she also said not to be flippant with what happens in the forest. Some things are old and quiet; others… are awake for reasons we cannot guess."
Elias strained to recall fragments of being carried: the warmth of hands, the smell of boiled roots, the barked instructions of villagers who smelled of smoke and milk. Yet the image that had tormented him — the meditating person in the forest — cleaved itself to the inside of his skull like a shard. "Did anyone see them?" he asked again, quieter.
Daren rubbed at the stubble at his jaw. "Some said so. The farmer swore he'd glimpsed a hunched shape and the cadence of breath, but when they went looking there was no one. I dug around the spot where you fell and only found compressed snow and the odd print that disappeared into the trees. Whatever it was, it left no name."
Lyra's eyes flicked to Elias, and for a heartbeat he saw something else there: wonder and a thread of fear. "You saw them," she said simply. "You weren't hallucinating."
Elias's laugh was small and flat. "Maybe I was," he admitted. "Everything was pale and blown apart. The air was full of white. I thought—" He swallowed. "I thought I saw someone who'd stopped time."
Daren's jaw hardened in that way it did when he was thinking too quickly and not quite confident about the conclusions. "If they were real, then they may be why you're not lit aflame with pain right now. Mara said the poultice and the fever left some of the swelling down, but you should still be limping. She said you ought to see the bone there's no sign of infection. Your wound was cleaned and stitched. The rest — your strength? You nearly died, Elias. That you're standing is down to three things: the healer, chance, and maybe the kindness of someone we don't get to understand."
Elias tested the leg again, stepping out of the bed with a careful, deliberate motion. The motion was honest and awkward and alarmingly easy. He took a step, then another, and found himself walking across the small wooden floor like a man who had not been broken that morning. He turned in a tight circle, heart hammering faster than necessary. A flush of relief washed over him so strong it made him dizzy.
A part of him thrilled with gratitude — not just for the hands that had wrapped him and the fire that had warmed him, but for the invisible cusp that had perhaps intervened between his death and a crueler ending. Another part, colder and more watchful, cataloged the impossibility like a dossier in a mind that refused to accept miracles without evidence.
"Do you remember anything after you fell?" Daren asked. "Anything at all that could tell us where you went?"
Elias sat on the edge of the bed and tried to hollow his memory into a straight line. He could see the person in the forest again — the black hair, the outward calm, the little halo of warmth — and between those images the memory smeared. He remembered the figure's breathing as though it were its own drum; he could still feel the reverberation of that breath. He also remembered reaching out, then losing consciousness.
"Just that," he said finally. "It felt like they were both near and far at once. Like they were sitting on the edge of something and not moving. I don't know if they came to me or simply watched me fall. When I came back, Mara said someone had brought me in, that there was hardly any time. But the village—where did you go? Why weren't you both with me?"
Daren kicked at a splinter and flexed his fingers. "We got here before you, like I said. We tried to get help and wound up doing ten thousand little favors until the farmer heard the banging at the gate. When the villagers came out they found you in the snow. We—" He stopped and looked at Elias fully. "We thought we were losing you. We thought the wind had taken you and left. We argued about how best to get you to shelter without being blown away ourselves. We did not see the meditating person. If they were there, they were stealthy or as still as stones."
Lyra let out a breath that might have been a laugh if she weren't so tired. "And here I thought I'd earned the title of 'worst scout' for missing someone with neon hair."
"You would," Daren said dryly.
Despite the absurdity of their exchange, a small, human warmth threaded through Elias. They had been worried. They had—somehow—planned without him and came back to him. He clenched his fists not in anger but because the muscles felt like anchors in a fragile body.
He tested the calf one more time, flexing as though proving a point to himself. No lightning of pain struck him down. A softness, like healing, cradled the place where the wound had been. He could have laughed until he cried. Instead he only breathed.
"You should rest," Lyra said, practical and maternal in a way that unsettled him because it came from her. "Mara will want to check you again. And we need to plan. If something in the forest moved for us, we need to know what. Who watches the edges of villages? Why was it there?"
Elias let the questions roll over him like a wave. He wanted answers, certainly. He wanted to know whether the meditating person was friend or trickster, savior or sentinel. He wanted to know if He was being shepherded by forces other than his own caprice of death and rewind. But for now, each demand had to be shelved.
He lay back on the bed, feeling the timbers creak low and human beneath him. The room smelled of steaming broth and lemon-scrubbed wood and a faint trace of incense that might have come from the healer's sachets. Outside the window the storm still argued with the trees, but inside — in the small, held place of the village — a lull had settled. Daren and Lyra sat on the edge of the mattress, their boots covered with snow and their faces weary, but their presence was steady like a rudder.
Elias closed his eyes. He felt safe, for the first time since the tower. He also felt watched by a thousand small impossibilities — the healed calf, the meditating figure, the sense that the world had more strings than he had noticed. As sleep slid toward him on the soft, drugged hush of broth and bandages, one thought returned and kept at him like a bright, stubborn ember.
I believe I can make it.
He named himself aloud, a vow to himself and to the two people who had brought him this far. "My name is Elias Everen," he whispered into the dim. "And I will not be finished today."
Lyra's breath answered him with an exhausted chuckle. Daren's hand found his shoulder and squeezed — a private promise that whatever came next, they would face it together.
Outside, the storm thinned a degree as if listening. Inside the small room, under the watch of a healer who hummed quietly beyond the curtained doorway, Elias slept. The world held its breath and, for once, waited.