"Good morning, weirdo."
The voice broke across the snow with easy familiarity, casual and warm in a world that still seemed half-asleep. It did not belong to the wind, or the mountain, or the old silence hanging over Mjull like a held breath.
It belonged to someone very real.
Icariel turned his head.
A boy was walking toward him from the direction of the stone building, his steps slow and steady, boots sinking into the untouched white with soft, regular crunches. Snow gathered around his ankles and slid from the leather in powdery spills as he moved. He walked like he belonged exactly where he was—without effort, without doubt, without the careful economy Icariel had long ago learned to wear like a second skin.
Neo.
Orange hair caught the pale morning light and burned softly against the white around him. His green eyes were bright, clear to the point of irritation, almost too alive for a mountain that dulled everything it touched. They always made Icariel think of fresh leaves in spring, though he would never have admitted something so poetic aloud.
His face was as aggravating as ever.
Too symmetrical. Too clean. Too unmarked by the mountain's usual cruelty. As if winter had taken one look at him and decided to spare him for reasons of its own. Only the nose ruined the effect—a jagged, slightly crooked thing that sat at the center of that nearly perfect face like an insult left by fate itself.
Icariel's lips twitched faintly.
The gods must have slipped there.
His gaze drifted lower, to the axe resting on Neo's shoulder.
The handle was dark with age and use, polished by years of grip and sweat. The blade had been sharpened recently even in this muted light, its edge caught a pale gleam. He remembered, suddenly and without wanting to, the day Neo's nose had broken—wild boar, bad footing, too much confidence, a spray of mud and panic and a wet crack ugly enough to make even Icariel wince.
Maybe the pig had simply corrected a mistake.
"I guess it's the latter,"
Neo stopped a few paces away and tilted his head. "What?"
Icariel blinked once, expression flattening.
"Morning Neo."
Neo narrowed his eyes slightly, studying him. Then his mouth curved into the same infuriating smirk he had been using for years, one that always seemed balanced between amusement and challenge.
"You look like you haven't slept."
Icariel's gaze flicked automatically to the faint shadows beneath Neo's own eyes. Bruised half-moons. Subtle, but there.
"I might look… but you haven't at all."
Neo breathed out through his nose, not quite laughing.
"How could I?" Pride brightened his voice immediately, open and uncomplicated. "I killed that bear yesterday. Alone."
The words hung in the cold between them as if expecting admiration to gather around them. Icariel stared at him.
Then, very dryly, "What a magnificent reason to lose sleep."
Neo grinned wider.
"You're jealous."
Icariel looked at him as though considering whether the statement deserved the effort of being rejected.
"I'm alive," he said at last. "That's enough for me."
Something in Neo's grin sharpened, amused rather than offended. He shifted the axe on his shoulder with practiced ease. It was a weapon that would have forced most boys their age to compensate with posture and strain. Neo carried it like a branch.
"We're heading out," he said. "Father already gave the order."
Icariel said nothing.
Neo glanced toward the forest.
"Meron left before dawn."
Of course he did.
Icariel gave the faintest nod. The trap setter always moved first when weather allowed it, slipping into the trees while the rest of the village still clung to warmth and sleep. Quiet man. Quiet work. Quiet deaths waiting in iron jaws beneath the snow.
"He'll make things easier again," Icariel said.
"I hope so."
The answer came too fast to be entirely casual.
Icariel noticed that. He noticed most things.
For a brief moment he watched Neo's face, the easy confidence still there, the posture still loose—but something beneath it had tightened almost imperceptibly. Not fear. Not yet. Just awareness. The kind a hunter carried when stepping into woods that had moods of their own.
Without another word, Icariel turned toward his house.
The snow complained softly beneath each step. The morning air had sharpened further while he stood outside it bit exposed skin, slid under layers, pressed itself against his throat and wrists like something living. By the time he reached the door, his tea had gone completely dead in the cup.
He set it aside and stepped inside.
The dimness swallowed him at once.
The house was colder than it should have been. Still. Quiet. The kind of quiet that did not soothe so much as wait. His room smelled faintly of old wood, leather, dried herbs, and the ash of last night's fire—familiar scents, tight and contained. It should have felt safe.
Instead, for a strange passing second, it felt as though the entire house had been holding its breath while he was gone.
Icariel ignored the thought.
He reached first for his satchel hanging near the door. Worn leather, darkened by weather and years of use. His fingers moved over the straps and buckles automatically, checking weight, compartments, contents. Knife. Cord. Wrapped cloth. Hooks. Small bone-handled tools. Dried food. Everything where it should be.
Then his gaze moved to the bow.
Black.
Not painted black. Not stained. Black by nature.
Even now, every time he looked at it, something in him remembered the place where he had found the wood.
Deep forest. Too deep. Past the places Meron marked. Past where ordinary hunting trails thinned into older paths and then into nothing at all. The canopy there had grown so thick that light ceased to feel like a certainty. The trees stood in unnatural silence, tall and dark and wrong in ways he had never fully managed to define. Their bark drank brightness. Their roots twisted over stone like veins over bone.
He had gone too far that day.
He had known it while going.
He had done it anyway.
Because distance was safety. Because things were less likely to kill you if you killed them before they reached you.
Because he had no intention of dying merely to prove he could stand closer to violence than someone else.
He took the bow in hand.
It settled against his palm with terrible familiarity.
By the time he stepped back outside, Neo had not moved far. He was waiting where the village path opened toward the tree line, patient in the way of people who did not spend every silence wrestling with their own thoughts.
"I'm ready," Icariel said.
Neo nodded once.
"Then let's go."
They walked.
Mjull remained silent behind them.
Thirteen wooden houses. One stone building. White roofs buried beneath snow. No smoke yet rising. No doors opening. No voices spilling into the morning. The village looked less asleep than suspended, preserved in frost and stillness like something the mountain had not quite decided to keep alive.
Their boots became the only rhythm in the world.
Crunch. Step. Crunch.
After a while, Neo broke the silence.
"What did my father want from you so early?"
"Nothing."
The answer came too flat. Too immediate. Icariel corrected it a heartbeat later, voice cooling back into its usual measured shape.
"That old man ruins enough of my mornings already. There's no need to make him sound more important than he is."
Neo snorted.
"Try being his son."
Icariel glanced at him sidelong.
"I'd rather not," he said.
Neo laughed quietly, the sound vanishing almost at once into the white air.
"Fair."
They kept walking.
The forest drew nearer, its shadow beginning to stretch over the snow before them in long pale-gray tongues. The line where open light ended and the trees began always bothered Icariel more than he liked to admit. It looked too much like a mouth.
After several more steps, he said, almost despite himself, "I don't mind him."
Neo looked over.
Icariel's mouth tightened.
"…Much."
Neo said nothing. But the corner of his lips moved.
The forest rose before them.
Tall.
Too tall.
The pines at Mjull's edge had always seemed larger than they should have been, as if the mountain's isolation had allowed everything here to grow according to stranger rules than the ones spoken aloud. Their trunks stood thick and dark beneath clinging frost, their branches bent under the week's accumulated snowfall. No birds moved between them. No small shapes stirred beneath the undergrowth.
The trees were not dead.
But their stillness resembled death enough to be uncomfortable.
Icariel slowed very slightly.
Neo noticed. "What?"
Icariel's eyes moved from trunk to trunk, from shadow to shadow. The forest had always felt different to him. Not merely silent—attentive. As if it registered intrusion. As if it kept count.
"…Do they look bigger to you?" Neo muttered.
"They are."
Neo looked at him sharply. "You're joking."
Icariel did not answer.
Because he wasn't.
The forest changed.
Not abruptly. Never in ways easy enough to point at and prove. But it changed. Branches reached where they had not before. Roots rose higher from the earth. Trunks thickened. Familiar spaces narrowed. The paths Meron marked often seemed less discovered than temporarily tolerated.
At the very edge of the trees, one trunk bore a fresh sign.
Green paint.
Three crude slashes.
XXX.
Neo stepped toward it first and brushed the mark with two fingers. When he pulled his hand back, damp green clung faintly to his skin.
"Still wet," he said.
Then he smiled—a small, assured thing, perfectly natural on his face.
"Three marks. We're going right."
Icariel looked at the symbol without moving. One mark meant straight ahead, into deeper woods. Two meant left, toward the frozen river and fox trails. Three meant right—where boar ran, deer sometimes passed, and hunting was difficult enough to require effort but not usually enough to require prayer.
A simple system. Efficient. Temporary. By tomorrow the pigment would fade. By the day after, there would be no trace at all. Meron said that was the point. Old paths killed fools.
"Village needs boar meat," Neo said, already turning. "And probably fox fur. The elder said supplies are thinning."
Icariel nodded absently.
Earn your food.
That was how Mjull worked. Hunters hunted. Butchers carved. Others cooked, repaired, hauled, watched, cleaned, endured. Every comfort bought by labor. Every meal paid for by someone's risk. Because of that rule, Icariel had his own house. Small, drafty, cold in winter—but his.
And because of that same rule, he walked willingly into a forest he did not trust.
The irony never stopped souring in him.
Neo stepped onto the rightward path.
"Come on."
Icariel followed.
One step.
Snow compressed under his boot. The cold stung his nose. The dark line of the path ahead waited between the trees, narrow and half-swallowed by shadow.
Then the voice inside him spoke.
[Go left.]
The words were immediate.
Clear. Absolute.
Icariel froze.
The halt was so sudden it felt like striking an unseen wall. His breath caught. One foot settled fully, but the rest of his body remained suspended around the stopped motion, tension flashing through muscle and spine. The trees ahead did not change. Neither did the wind. Neither did the snow.
But something had shifted.
The voice rarely interfered.
It watched. It advised. It occasionally warned. But it did not waste words, and it did not repeat itself. When it chose to speak like this—with that clean, unavoidable certainty—it had never once led him wrong.
Slowly, Icariel turned his head.
Neo was still walking rightward, leaving a line of fresh prints in the snow. Unaware. Untroubled. Trusting the marks on the tree, the system Meron used, the habits of the village, the ordinary logic of an ordinary hunt.
His axe flashed briefly where a sliver of pale sunlight caught the blade.
Icariel looked back at the three green slashes.
Right.
The correct path. The expected path. The path that made sense.
His fingers tightened around the black bow until the wood pressed hard into his palm. He could feel his pulse in that hand now, a hard rhythm beating against carved darkness.
The voice had spoken.
And he had never regretted obeying it.
A quiet curse slipped from him before he could stop it.
"…Fuck."
Not anger.
Recognition.
Because the moment the word left his mouth, he already knew.
He was not going right.