The lightning passed.
The dark came back.
For a long moment, none of them moved.
Vyom was the first to speak. His sword was still up. His mouth had gone dry.
"…a kid."
His voice came out smaller than he meant it to.
"That is a kid."
Eshani was already looking at the place the lightning had shown. Her eyes were narrowed. She had not lowered her sword either, but her grip had loosened on the hilt — the unconscious loosening of someone whose brain had stopped processing threat and had started processing something else.
"Leader."
"What."
"Look at him carefully."
Vyom looked.
"What am I looking at."
"The hair."
A pause.
"There was a rumour in our kingdom, years ago. A boy in the Bluemoon Kingdom was born with hair the colour of bone. The story moved through the eastern provinces for a season. The kingdoms beyond ours heard it. Then it went quiet."
Ranjan, behind them, let out a breath he had been holding for too long.
"…Sir Viraj spoke of it. Once. In the eastern barracks."
He squinted toward the dark where the boy had been.
"…it is him."
Inside the half-circle of hunters, Alina had gone very still.
She was looking at the same dark the others were looking at, but her mind was somewhere else — somewhere nine years back, in the eastern study of the Bluemoon palace, where she had been a small girl crying very quietly into the sleeve of an older man's robe.
*Sir Viraj, I cannot. I have tried. I am eight years old. The other children my age have not — none of them have — *
Princess. Listen.
His hand on the side of her head, that careful warm pressure.
There is a boy. He is one years younger than you. He evolved at six.
…at six, Sir Viraj?
At six, princess.
…Nothing is impossible in this world.
She had let go of his sleeve. She had stopped crying. She had gone back to the courtyard.
—
Her hand, at her side, closed quietly around a fold of her travelling robe.
…oh.
—
Then the dark moved.
He came down off the stone without ceremony. One step. Then another. The leaves under his boots made the smallest possible sound — not the careful sound of someone trying to be quiet, just the sound of a body that had walked through forests for so long that the forests no longer noticed it.
He came up the path toward them.
He did not slow. He did not look at the broken cart, or the four bodies of the soldiers, or the four hunters with their swords half-raised, or the princess with her hand closed in her own robe.
He walked through the centre of them.
The walk had no name. It was not the walk of a child. It was not the walk of a soldier. It was the walk of a hunter who had been somewhere and was now on his way to somewhere else, and had not, at any point in the journey between the two places, considered the path interesting enough to look at.
He passed within two feet of Alina.
He did not look at her.
Her chin lifted, faintly — the small involuntary motion of a person who had spent her entire life being looked at by every man in every room, registering, for the first time, what it felt like to be in the same air as a man who had not noticed she was there.
The boy walked past.
The hunters turned slowly to follow him with their eyes.
He kept walking.
Toward the dark beyond the path.
Toward the place where the five creatures had gone.
Vyom found his voice first.
"Hey — boy — *hey — *"
A step.
"What are you doing — "
Hardik: "Boy, stop — there are monsters in those trees — "
Another step.
Ranjan, louder, the kind of louder a man used when he could not quite believe what he was watching: "Boy. Boy. The danger is over there. Do not go that way — "
Another step.
Eshani, almost to herself: "What — what is he doing — he is walking toward them — "
Another step.
Vyom again, fully now, the voice of a hunter who had not been the loudest voice on the road in a long time and was scrambling back into it: "*Boy. The creatures will kill you. **Stop — *"
The boy did not stop.
He walked until he reached the place the lightning had shown the first creature standing in. The grass was still bent. The earth still wet where the not-water had fallen.
He stopped there.
He did not look at the trees.
His head turned, slowly, back toward the hunters.
His eyes caught the next flash of lightning.
They were not bright. They were the opposite of bright. They were the deep, drinking blue of water that had never known sunlight — the kind of blue that did not reflect the world the way other blues did, but absorbed it. They were the eyes of a hunter who had been a long time in places where light did not reach, and had stopped expecting it to.
When he spoke, his voice was flat.
"What are you all shouting about."
A pause.
"It is already dead."
—
Then — at the same beat, as if his words had been the rope holding them up —
Five creatures fell.
They came down out of the trees and out of the brush in five separate sounds. One from the left of the path, a long heavy collapse through low branches. One from the right. Three from deeper in. They hit the leaves in five different positions and lay there, unmoving — the kind of stillness a body had after it had stopped being a body.
The four hunters did not move.
They stared.
Vyom's mouth was open.
In the lightning, in the slow uneven light that the canopy was letting through, they could see the bodies. They could see them clearly. The five creatures that had nearly killed them ten minutes ago were lying in the leaves, and every one of them had a sword in it.
Not one sword.
Many.
Dark blue-purple. Slim. Sharp. Sticking up out of the bodies like a small forest of upright steel. Some had gone in at the throat. Some at the side of the skull. Some had punched through the ribcage and emerged from the back. The blades had not dissolved. They were still there. Holding the bodies to the ground.
Vyom's sword was at his side.
He had not put it there. His arm had simply lowered without asking him.
"…when."
He took one step forward — not toward the bodies, just forward, the body of a man whose feet had decided to move because his brain had not yet caught up.
"…when did he — "
Eshani had gone completely still beside him.
"…leader."
"I see them."
"How many — how many blades per body — "
"…four. Five. I cannot — "
"On every one, leader."
"I see them, Eshani."
Ranjan, behind them, his voice the small thin voice of a man trying to think through a thing his brain was refusing to think through: "He killed them before we knew they were there."
"He killed them before they ran."
"He killed them and we did not see it happen."
Vyom's mouth had stayed open.
He looked at the boy.
The boy was looking at the trees beyond the bodies, the way a man looked at something he had not yet finished thinking about.
When Vyom finally spoke, his voice was very quiet.
"…it is the Sevenfold."
A pause.
"It is the Sevenfold Blade."
A longer pause. He had not blinked.
"…how. How are his blades killing Third Layer beasts in one cut."
He was not asking the hunters.
He was not asking anyone.
He was asking the air the same way he had asked it a minute ago, when he had first looked at the bodies.
Inside the half-circle, the seventeen-year-old princess of the Bluemoon Kingdom — who had been told, three hours ago, by a hunter laughing on a road, that a Sevenfold disciple could not even clear the First Layer alone — let out a small, very careful breath.
She did not look at Vyom.
She did not need to.
—
Behind them, on the path back the way they had come, a sound moved through the leaves.
Not heavy. Not threatening. The sound of feet — several feet, walking in no particular formation, accompanied by the bright, unmistakable sound of someone laughing very loudly at a joke that had not yet been spoken aloud.
"*HA HA HA — *"
The four hunters turned together, swords coming up at the same beat.
"*OH-HO — look at their FACES — *"
"*Pappu, you cannot just — *"
"*Did you SEE them, boss? Did you see their faces when they saw the bodies — *"
Six figures came out of the dark in a loose, undisciplined cluster. The man in the front was broad and middle-aged, wearing a hat that had seen the inside of every weather in the World of Living. The smallest of the six — Jhappu — was barely up to the broad man's shoulder. The other four came in various heights and various degrees of dishevelment.
They stopped a few paces from the hunters.
The broad man — Pappu — pushed his hat back. Spread his arms wide.
"Friends. Friends. Do not worry. I am here. There is nothing more for you to fear in this forest."
He smiled.
It was a wide, warm, completely sincere smile.
Behind him, Jhappu's eyes closed for one long, weary second.
"…Pappu."
"What."
"The boss is the one who takes care of the monsters."
"…what."
"We are the ones who take care of what the boss leaves."
"…what."
"That is what we do, Pappu. That is what we have been doing for three years."
Pappu turned around. Hissed at him, in the carrying whisper of a man who could not whisper.
"I am trying to look impressive, Jhappu."
"You are not."
"I *was — *"
A taller man — Lappu — leaned over Pappu's shoulder.
"Pappu. Nobody is cooler than the boss in this forest. Stop."
"*Lappu — *"
"Stop, Pappu."
In the half-circle of hunters, four pairs of eyes were doing exactly the same thing.
Vyom's mouth had opened.
Hardik's brow had pulled together in the specific shape of a man who was no longer entirely sure he was awake.
Eshani's head had tilted, slightly, the way a person's head tilted when they were watching a thing they did not yet have a category for.
Ranjan was just blinking. He had not stopped since the six men had walked out of the trees.
Alina, in the centre — had also stopped processing entirely. Her hand had risen, halfway, to her mouth. The look on her face was the look of a small girl watching a parade go past with something extremely strange at the centre of it.
The hunters and the princess shared, without looking at each other, a single thought —
…who in the gods' names are these people.
A flat voice came across the path.
"What are you idiots doing back there."
All six of them — and the four hunters — turned.
The boy had not moved. He was still standing in the dark beyond the bodies, his back mostly to them, his head turned the smallest possible amount over his shoulder.
His voice carried in the way some voices carried — not by being loud, but by being the only thing in the air.
"Stop the nonsense. The boss of this layer has not yet come."
The six men in the path stopped joking.
Pappu's hat lowered slowly to his side.
The four hunters' swords came back up.
"…right." Pappu cleared his throat. "Right. Friends. Let us — let us move. The path is no place to stand."
He did not wait.
The six of them gathered themselves. The four hunters closed around Alina. The whole loose collection began to walk — Ahaan ahead, alone, eight paces in front. Alina and the hunters behind him in a tight half-circle. The six men two paces behind them, in their easy, undisciplined cluster.
They walked.
They had not gone far when the forest changed.
—
A sound comes.
It was not a sound. It was the absence of one.
The patient sound of leaves moving in the canopy, which had been there since they began walking, stopped.
The hunters' swords came up at the same beat. Pappu's hand lifted, palm out. Ahaan did not break stride.
Then — all at once — the trees on every side moved.
Not branches. Bodies.
The shapes came out of the brush slowly. Low. Heavy. Wide, flat skulls. Not-water dripping from their jaws. The eyes were not glassy this time. They were intent.
Twenty of them.
Thirty.
The two-eyed dark that had been the forest a moment ago was now the eyes of the things that lived inside it — every one of them, every direction, the path closed at every angle.
They did not charge.
They formed a circle.
A wide, patient circle, the way a thing closed a door before it stepped into a room.
Eshani, very softly: "…oh."
Hardik: "We are surrounded."
Ranjan: "Again."
Vyom looked at the boy.
The boy was no longer looking at the trees beyond the path.
He had turned, fully, to face the part of the circle that the rest of the circle had left open.
The dark there was wider than the dark anywhere else.
And from inside it — slow, unhurried, the patient sound of something that did not need to announce itself —
A footstep landed.
Heavy enough that the leaves on the ground shifted in the air at the impact.
Heavy enough that the four hunters' boots felt it through the earth.
Heavy enough that — somewhere very deep in the bones of every living thing on the path — a small still voice that the body had not consulted in its entire life arrived at the same conclusion at the same time.
The thing that is about to come out of those trees is not a thing this forest has shown anyone in a long time.
And it is not coming out for anyone here.
It is coming out for the boy.
To be continued…