The forest had its own quality of forgetting.
Eli walked without particular intention, which was the only honest way to describe it. His feet found the path between the trees — if it could be called a path, more a suggestion of less resistance than the undergrowth on either side — and he followed it the way water follows a gradient, not because he had chosen this direction but because stopping required a kind of decision-making that was presently beyond him. The capital was north. He was moving roughly north. Everything else was details he would sort out when he had the capacity for sorting.
The canopy closed overhead by degrees as the morning light climbed toward afternoon, the leaves thickening until the sky above was more memory than presence — occasional fragments of blue glimpsed between branches, then less of that, then none. The air under the trees was heavy and cool in the way of places that rarely receive direct sun, and it smelled of damp bark and something older beneath that, the specific organic depth of forest floors that have been building themselves for decades without interruption.
Mara had wanted to come into this forest once. She'd asked him about it — what lived here, whether the trees grew differently in the middle where no light reached — and he'd told her he didn't know, which was true, and that they'd find out together sometime, which was something he'd meant and now could never make good on. The memory arrived without warning and he walked through it the same way he was walking through everything else, putting one foot in front of the other, allowing the grief to occupy whatever space it needed because there was no longer any point in managing it.
His forearms had begun to scab where the rope had bitten deepest. The burns along his left foot had settled into a dull, continuous protest that spiked with certain steps on uneven ground. He catalogued these things distantly, the way you monitor weather — present, relevant, not the point.
The rustle came from his left, low in the undergrowth, and Eli stopped.
The forest responded to his stillness by becoming more of itself — the creak of branches somewhere above, the distant percussion of a woodpecker working at something hollow, and beneath all of it the particular silence that accumulates in spaces where something large has recently stopped moving. He stood with his weight distributed carefully, his eyes moving across the shadowed green in methodical sweeps, and found nothing.
A bird, possibly. Or the wind catching the wrong way through a gap in the canopy.
He walked on. The forest gave nothing away.
He had covered perhaps another fifty meters when the undergrowth to his right detonated.
The Dreadmaw emerged the way catastrophes emerge — all at once, with no transitional phase between absence and overwhelming presence. It cleared the brush in a single motion that contained a terrible economy, every part of the animal committed to the same trajectory, and the sound it produced was less a roar than a physical event, a compression of air that Eli felt in his chest before he processed it with anything else.
He had heard of it. The name existed in the same category as flood and famine — things people mentioned to establish the outer edges of possible misfortune, rarely expecting to require the knowledge personally. The body was lion-broad across the shoulders, carrying the kind of muscle that suggested not speed but absolute authority over whatever it decided to be fast toward. The hide ran in jagged stripes, dark on darker, a pattern that had presumably served as camouflage in some ancestral environment and in this dim forest rendered it almost impossible to track between the trees. Its fangs curved past the lower jaw like something designed for a purpose beyond mere killing — something deliberate, architectural.
Its eyes, pale and incandescent with hunger, found him without hesitation.
Eli raised his arms and the claws found them before he'd completed the motion, opening the length of his forearm in a line of pain so clean and immediate that his mind registered it as information rather than sensation — this is happening, this has happened — and he went backward into the root of an oak tree and used the impact to redirect himself sideways, away from the follow-through.
He swung. It was not a skilled movement. It was the movement of a man whose body understood that stopping was not an option and had bypassed conscious deliberation entirely, a wide arc of his uninjured arm that connected with the Dreadmaw's jaw at an angle that accomplished nothing except to confirm the animal's solidity. The beast shook its head once, more dismissive than pained, and came at him again.
He ran between the trees, using them the only way available to him — as obstacles that a human body could navigate at angles the Dreadmaw's width made more complicated. It worked for perhaps thirty seconds, which was both longer than he'd expected and not nearly long enough. The animal's patience for the geometry of pursuit turned out to be considerable. It tracked him through two direction changes and then simply accelerated, and the impact when it hit him from behind carried enough mass to drive the air from his lungs completely and put him face-down into the forest floor with the creature's weight spanning his back.
The earth smelled of wet leaves and old wood. He became briefly intimate with these details in the compressed, hyper-present way the body registers sensation when it understands that sensation may be ending.
The Dreadmaw's breath was on the back of his neck, hot and deliberate. He heard the jaws open.
Not here.
The thought had no particular force behind it, no eloquence. It was simply a refusal, the same cold thing that had been sitting in him since the fire — the same thing that had nothing to do with wanting to live and everything to do with the unfinished nature of a specific promise. He was not done. The men in demon masks were somewhere north of him, moving toward a capital city with the unhurried confidence of people who had left nothing alive behind them, and he was not done.
His right hand found the broken branch by texture before his eyes located it — a length of pine, snapped to a rough point at one end, half-buried under leaves to his left. He closed his fingers around it. The Dreadmaw shifted its weight, repositioning, and in the half-second that the pressure on his back redistributed he drove himself sideways with everything his legs had and brought the branch around in the same motion, no elegance, no aim beyond the general direction of the animal's head.
The point found the eye socket.
The sound the Dreadmaw made was categorically different from its roar — lower, more interior, the sound of something encountering a sensation it had no prior context for. It recoiled with enough violence to clear him entirely, and Eli was already moving before it finished the motion, his feet finding purchase in the roots and the soft earth and carrying him forward through the trees at a pace his injuries had no right to support.
He ran until the sounds behind him — the crashing undergrowth, the intermittent vocalizations of an animal in pain and disoriented fury — faded into distance and then into the general silence of the forest. Then he ran a little further, because the difference between sounds faded and is not following anymore was not a distinction he could afford to be wrong about.
When he finally stopped, he braced himself against a tree with his uninjured arm and let his body do what it needed to do, which took a while.
The forearm was bad. Not lethally bad, but bad in the way of wounds that demand attention they are unlikely to receive — the claws had opened four parallel lines from just below the elbow to the wrist, deep enough to have bled considerably and still leaking at the edges where movement kept reopening what was trying to close. He tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt, already destroyed past the point of concern, and wrapped it tight enough to apply pressure, using his teeth to tie the knot. The pain clarified him somewhat. He had found, over the past day, that pain was one of the few things still capable of returning him to the immediate present.
He sat at the base of the tree and looked up through the canopy at the sky, which had shifted toward the pale gold of late afternoon, and breathed.
Mara had asked what lived in this forest.
He looked at his wrapped arm and almost laughed, and didn't, and sat for another moment in the complicated silence of a person who has survived something that required more luck than competence and is not yet sure how to hold that. Then he pressed himself to his feet, found north by the light through the trees, and walked on.