The Gathering Threads

The morning air kept its bite as the caravan rolled through the open gates. Iron-banded wheels groaned over cobbles slick with dew, and leather harnesses creaked in a steady rhythm. A pair of horses tossed their heads, steam drifting from their muzzles. Lanterns hung unlit from the wagons, swaying softly as they crossed from the city’s warm glow into the cool throat of the road.

Kaori adjusted the strap of her longsword, the silver-chased hilt catching a shy sliver of sun. “So this is it?” she said around a yawn. “Royal seal, hush-hush route, fat purse. Feels… tidy.”

Daelric walked on the wagon’s left flank, his broadsword slung across his back, runes along the fuller banded in dull iron. “Tidy is how I like my coin,” he said, smirking. “Not my fights.”

Between them, Luneth kept an easy pace beside the lead cart. No blade on her hip, no dagger hidden in a boot—only the quiet fall of her steps and the soft, deliberate way she held her hands, as if her fingers remembered patterns even when she wasn’t casting. A slim satchel hung at her side, its clasp etched with faint sigils. She scanned the hedgerows, the rise of the fields, the sky’s thin veils of cloud—not hunting for trouble, just… listening.

The employer—sharp-jawed, slick-haired, already sweating—sat perched on the wagon bench. He kept glancing back at Luneth like he wanted to ask a dozen questions and feared all the answers. He chose one. “The Western Vale road. I was told it’s… clear?”

“Clearer than most,” Luneth said without looking at him. Not cold, not comforting. Simply true. “We’ll keep it that way.”

He swallowed and nodded too many times. The reins twitched in his hands. They crossed the last low walls of kitchen gardens and smoke-scented cottages. Behind them, the city faded—its clatter and barter and tin-pan laughter muffled by distance. Before them, the land unrolled in alternating bands of field and thicket, the road a pale seam stitched across it.

Kaori breathed in the air. “Smells like wet hay and old cider.”

“Smells like work,” Daelric said, but there was no edge to it.

They didn’t speak much after that. The road didn’t ask them to. By late morning, the fields thinned and the trees rose up—old oaks shouldering each other, pines knotting their branches into a high, dim cathedral. Shade pooled across the path. The air cooled, touched by resin and wet bark.

“Hold,” Kaori murmured. She crouched, gloved fingers hovering over a torn rut in the road’s edge. “Claw marks. Deep.”

Daelric knelt beside her, measuring depth with two knuckles. “Weighty. Could be ogre. Yesterday, maybe less.”

The merchant flinched. “O-og—”

“Could be,” Daelric added, standing. “Could also be a scared boar and a bad angle.”

Luneth let her gaze drift beyond the obvious: a snapped twig higher than a boar’s shoulder; a fray of moss scored sideways, not up; a scatter of grey-black dust clinging to a fern like ash that wasn’t ash. She didn’t name these things, only folded them quietly into her attention. “We keep moving,” she said. “No loitering in choke points.” Kaori stood, dusting her palms. “You heard the lady. No loitering.”

The forest received them with the hush of deep water. Birds called, but fewer than they should have. Once, a small shape darted across the road—brown, quick—then vanished into the bracken so fast the leaves didn’t seem to move at all. They stopped in a shallow glade where the road widened just enough to circle the wagons. Horses took water from a canvas bucket. A guard chewed on a strip of dried meat and tried not to look at the cargo. Kaori flopped onto a mossed stone and leaned her sword against her shoulder. “Bets on what’s inside?” she asked, voice light. “I’m still rooting for illegally smuggled velvet.”

“Reinforced corners,” Daelric said, tapping a crate with two knuckles. The wood gave back a muted, heavy sound—the sound of a thing wrapped in baffles. “Iron straps. Waxed seals. Wards. Velvet doesn’t sigh like that when you drop it.”

The merchant froze mid-fuss. “W-we… don’t drop it.”

Kaori’s smile tugged sideways. “Demon specimens, then. Or cores.”

No one confirmed it. The wind moved through the glade and made a soft hush of the grass.

Luneth checked the rear wheel’s pin, patted the horse’s neck, and walked the perimeter slowly. To most eyes, she was being thorough. To a sharper eye, she was counting small things: the way moss grew a fraction lighter on the north-facing stone, the tiny flare of a broken ward thread in a knot of the wagon’s strap, the iron tang braided into the breeze from the north. She paused at the glade’s edge, looking into the darker shade between two firs where the undergrowth seemed pressed down not by hooves but by something that didn’t fully touch the ground.

She returned, and sat on the wagon’s step, resting her palms on her knees. To Kaori and Daelric, she looked like she’d found stillness. She had—just not the simple kind.

“Eat,” Daelric said. “Then we move.”

They ate. The world held. For now.

Meanwhile, at that same hour, the guild hall buzzed like a hive. Shin stood with his shoulder to the quest board, eyes traveling the uneven grid of parchment notices. Cooks’ errands. Herb runs. Slime nests—not those. His gaze slid past the familiar E-rank postings, halting on a D-rank whose ink had bled as if the writer’s hand had sweat:

SUBJUGATION: Forest Aberrations

Location: Western Vale route — outer ridgeline

Details: Travelers report distorted fauna, corrupted spoor, missing game. Specimens unknown. Reward: 8s + cores.

He read it twice. The letters didn’t change.

The guild pressed around him—boots scuffing, mugs clacking, a laugh cut short, the soft scrape of someone drawing steel for a demonstration and getting hissed at by a clerk. Somewhere, someone argued that a wyvern was just a dragon with an inferiority complex. He heard none of it. Behind his breastbone, the Abyss’s second heartbeat gave a small, deliberate pulse. Shin took the sheet to the counter. The clerk peered at him over a ledger, tired and unsentimental. “You’re pushing yourself,” she said, stamping the notice. “If you come back with nothing but ash again, I’m docking it without argument.”

“Understood,” he said.

She paused. “Watch your head out there.”

He nodded, slid the notice into his cloak, and stepped back into the day. The market was waking up into its noon-thick noise—spices thrown like confetti across the air, iron on iron, hawkers calling prices like wagers. Shin moved through it like a blade through cloth, quick and without snag. He bought a strip of dried venison, a spool of twine, a stoppered vial of pungent resin he didn’t need but might. He wrapped them with habits he hadn’t known he had, tucked them away, and left through the east gate without looking back.

Back on the road, the trees leaned closer, the trunks crowding like the ribs of a cage. The path narrowed to a single rutted groove. Webs spanned between low branches in long, pale veils, the threads thicker than normal, like spun glass.

“On me,” Daelric said softly. His hand slid to his sword hilt. His fingers flexed once. The rune-band along the blade’s fuller woke—just a prickle of red along the iron. He didn’t ignite it. Not yet. Kaori stepped a half pace to his right, her longsword angled low, point behind, the way wind-magic traveled cleanest down the edge. She drew a breath through her teeth and let it out in a steady line. The air around her blade stirred, almost too subtle to see. “Brisa—” she whispered, not completing the word, just teasing it into readiness.

A crow cried once. Then again, farther away. Then silence.

Luneth raised her hands slightly, palms open. To anyone watching, it was a defensive posture—ready to ward, ready to weave. To her, it was the remembering of a sequence: a series of shapes your hands could make to catch light and shadow by the heart and pull.

“Left ridge,” she murmured. “Something pacing us at range.”

Daelric’s jaw tightened. “I see it.”

He didn’t. Not yet. But he trusted the way she said it.

They pressed forward. The wagon wheels found every stone. A patrol of lesser mercenaries met them from the opposite bend, breathless and relieved. “All clear ahead,” their leader said too loudly. Kaori eyed his hands—tremble. His sleeves—sap streaked higher than a branch could smear. His boots—web filament clinging at the ankle like pale hair. She smiled a thin smile. “Is it.”

The mercenary swallowed. “We, uh—didn’t check the ridge.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Daelric said lightly. “Thanks.”

They passed.

A shadow flittered through the canopy—too fast for a beast of flesh. It rippled, like heat shimmer with edges. Leaves stirred where branches didn’t. Something breathed out that wasn’t air. Kaori angled her blade. The air tightened along the steel. “Aero—” she began, then held it back. Premature incantation spooked game. Spooked worse, too.

“Do not break formation,” Luneth said. The words carried no command, and everyone obeyed them anyway.

They reached a narrow stretch where the road pressed close to a low rock shelf, ferns clotted thick to the right. The perfect place to bog a wheel. The perfect place for a rush.

“Stop,” Luneth said suddenly.

Every footstep, hoofstep, wheel—stopped. She knelt beside the rut, fingertips hovering over a glittering dust scattered too neatly to be mere sand. “Pollen,” she said, voice thin with thought. “Wrong season. Wrong tree.”

Kaori looked up. “Trap?”

“Marker,” Luneth said. “For something that doesn’t read ink.”

On the ferns just off the road, she spotted small knots tied in pairs with animal gut—trip-signal charms primitive enough to be hard to sense. She didn’t touch them. She memorized where they were. She stood. “We take the outer line. Slow.” The merchant opened his mouth to argue about time. He closed it again when Daelric looked at him.

They edged wide, hugging the rock shelf, wheels creaking, horses flicking ears nervously as if listening to a language none of the people understood. The first sound was a scrape under the wagon, wrong and skittering. Kaori pivoted, blade down, voice low: “Ventus Signum.” The air stroked forward along the ground, lifting leaves and dust into a thin veil, revealing a shape crawling low and flat beneath the wagon’s bed—limbs too long, joints flexing backwards, skin like stretched parchment. It hissed when the stirred grit hit its eyes.

Daelric stepped in. “Ignis Linea.” His palm drew a short red line across the earth. Flame rose not as a roar but a clean, searing bar. The creature recoiled, skittering back into the bracken with a wet rattle.

“More,” Luneth said, eyes drifting not to the ground but higher, into the weave of branches where shadows pooled deeper than shadows should. “Three. No, five.”

Something up there smiled, though it had no mouth.

“On your guard,” Daelric said, voice steady. “We make the next bend. Then we—”

The forest exhaled in a single, low growl—left, right, above. The horses shied, ears back, eyes rolling white. “Easy,” Kaori said, one hand on a bridle, the other not leaving her sword. She angled her chin toward Luneth, a half-grin sketching across her mouth. “Guess hazard pay starts—now?”

Luneth’s answer was simply: “Left flank.”

Leaves tore. Red eyes opened like coals along the dark.

Kaori drew in a full breath and let the wind gather. “Aero Edge,” she whispered, and the word carried along her steel like a promise. The blade hummed. Air thinned to a glittering thread, ready to cut where metal could not. Daelric’s rune-band brightened by a shade. He set his feet, sword angled toward the dark. “Flamma Sigil.”

Luneth lifted one hand, fingers splayed, palm forward. No flash. No thunder. Only a small pressure wave that made the hairs on everyone’s arms rise. In the wagon, the merchant pressed himself small, clutching at wood that would not save him.

Shadows peeled away from the branch-line—first one, then two, then the rest. Sinewed shapes bound together by wrong geometry, thin as starvation and fast as hunger. No one moved yet. They waited for the rush.

It came.

Meanwhile, at that exact hour—though on a different stretch of road under a sky the same shade of pale—Shin stepped off the last farm track and onto the Vale’s forest path. The trees closed around him like a book. He adjusted the strap of his pack, let his hand rest on his sword’s hilt out of habit rather than intent, and felt the second heartbeat answer him once, slow and cold.

He didn’t look back.