We followed deer trails north, keeping to the ridges where the wind erased our tracks.
By midday, the forest thinned into the Hollow Road. An old trade route, bones picked clean by the war. Shattered carts. Ravens on frozen shapes that were once men. The silence was a weight.
Rhen walked point, and I only noticed the limp then—a stiffness in his right leg. He was favoring it. I kept watch behind, the back of my neck prickling. We were too exposed.
At dusk, we broke into a way-station, its roof a sieve of broken beams. Snow sifted down like ash. I built a fire small and desperate, its light clinging low to the floor. Rhen sat across from me, the grind of his whetstone on notched steel the only sound for a long time.
"That leg," I said, finally. "Let me see it."
He glanced up, shadows hollowing his eyes. "You any good?"
"Good enough to keep you walking."
He peeled back the torn fabric of his trousers. The gash was deep, edges inflamed. Not fresh. I threaded a needle, heated my knife blade in the coals. He didn't make a sound when I sealed it, just a sharp intake of breath, his jaw clenched tight against the smell.
As I worked the stitches, he spoke to the flames, not me. "When I was twelve, a priest held my head under in a font. Said my scar was a sign. A brand. I left him with two fewer fingers."
I pulled the gut tight. "When I was nine, they locked me in a tomb beneath the church. Said starvation would purify the tainted half."
His gaze lifted, meeting mine in the flicker. "We should have talked sooner."
A sound, rusty and unfamiliar, left my throat. A laugh.
Later, when the embers pulsed, he asked the question we'd been avoiding. "What if we just… don't play their game? Let the sacrifice happen?"
"Then the sky tears open," I said, poking the fire. "And the stories they used to scare us become real."
"Except they are real," he said.
I nodded.
He leaned forward, the firelight carving the planes of his face. "And if one of us… wins?"
"The other is gone. Erased. The winner becomes complete. And then they choose. To seal the rift, or to let it all burn."
He held my stare. "Which would you choose?"
The silence stretched, thin and dangerous. I opened my mouth, found no words, and closed it.
A branch snapped outside.
Not wind. Not an animal. Something with weight. And purpose.
Rhen was on his feet in a fluid motion, his broken sword a solid line in the dark. I had my knife in hand, backing toward the wall.
A shape filled the ruined doorway. Tall. Cloaked in layers of ragged fur and tanned hide. A crown of antler points woven into the hood shadowed the face.
"Put your toys down." The voice was a woman's, worn rough by weather and worse. "I've walked an age to find the two of you still breathing."
She took one step inside, then another, moving with a predatory grace. With one hand, she pushed back the hood.
My breath caught.
Half her face was human, starkly beautiful. The other half was a nightmare of twisted, glossy scar tissue, as if the skin had melted and reformed wrong. One clear, sharp grey eye watched us from the ruin. An eye I knew. I'd seen its twin across the fire all night.
Rhen went very still.
The woman smiled with the good side of her mouth. The other side didn't move. "You're wondering about the rules," she said, her voice filling the hollow space. "About winning and losing. About choice."
She took another step, and the firelight danced in her single, familiar eye.
"Let me show you what happens when the merge fails."