Ch9: They Don't Attack Without Reason

Vibe: Taro — alt-J | Naked as a Hand — Nostalghia | Serpents — Sharon Van Etten

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The forest took her in at once.

Neither indifferent like a road, nor cool and watchful like the estate, the forest felt something stir to life to meet her, then close heavily at her back. The air turned cold, dense with wet earth and undertones of resin and antiquity. The sounds of human presence did not fade gradually — they were cut off in a single stroke, as if someone had clapped both palms flat against the her ears.

Elara ran without looking back.

Ancient trees stood in an unbroken wall, trunk against trunk, packed so tight that not even a thread of wind could slip through. Tangled canopy interlaced far above, blotting out the sky entirely — only grey, diffuse light reached the ground below, casting no clear shadows and admitting no sun. A deep dusk ruled here, unnatural for a bright day. And silence was deader than anywhere else in the world.

She stopped.

Listened.

No birds. No rustle of leaves. Not even the sound of her own footsteps — she only registered that now. The ground beneath her did not crack with dry branches, did not squelch with damp. It simply swallowed every step without a trace. The air around her felt padded, muffled — even a heavy exhale did not carry outward but dissolved in place.

Her heart struck harder.

She took another step. Then another. Held her breath — and finally caught something: her own ragged breathing, deafening in this absolute silence.

Something cracked ahead and gave way toward her.

Her body froze on its own — not thought, not decision, only muscle that had learned to react faster than the mind. She stopped breathing. The shadow between the thick trunks... moved. Slowly. Brokenly.

At first it seemed a branch had swayed. But no.

The creature emerged unhurried, as if pushing through some invisible, viscous mass. Its forelegs were unnaturally long — they touched the ground where, by any law of nature, they should not have reached. The hind legs were shorter, which made the thing's gait strange, unpredictable, lurching, though in truth every step fell precise. Its neck turned farther than any human or animal anatomy allowed — the joints did not break, they simply carried too much unnatural freedom. Fur grew in uneven patches, and between them showed dark, taut skin that caught the light not from moisture but from something slick, oily. Eyes — two pairs. One fixed straight on her. The other angled slightly aside, and in that second pair pulsed a fragmented awareness of something the first pair could not reach.

It stopped.

And bored into her with a transfixed stare. Not like a predator — no hunger in it, no fear. Not like a person — no intent, no calculation. Like something that waits. Like something that already knew the outcome and now only watched to see whether things would follow the familiar course.

Elara went rigid.

/"Do not move."/

Not his voice in her head this time.

Her own.

She simply stood. Braced for the strike, but the creature did not attack. The monster took one slow step. Then another. Closer. The air between them turned heavy at once — not from damp, but from its very presence. The space dividing them had shrunk and was no longer empty.

The silence changed. As if someone had muted the last vibrations, wound another layer tight around her.

The creature stopped a few paces from her. Smoothly, without effort, it tilted its head to one side and lowered it nearly to the ground.

/"Weakness is a tool."/

She was not pretending. Not playing a part, not calculating in her mind how to outwit the thing. She simply had no strength left to move.

And still, the monster did not lunge at her.

Her heart hammered so violently that thought could not break through the deafening pound of it. Elara forced herself to take a step — sideways, slow, without losing the monster from view. She moved past it. The creature did not so much as flinch. Did not even turn its misshapen head to follow. It only tracked her with its pupils. Elara passed it and only then let out a broken breath — enough that her lips trembled, barely.

Farther in, the forest changed again.

It did not grow darker. It grew different.

She did not see them at first, but felt it — eyes on her. They watched from every side, never converging on a single point, scattering around her like fine mist. Behind her, a dense shadow shifted faintly; to her left, the same; and ahead, between the trees, the same thing showed itself. Only in fragments. Long paws. A curved horn. A great flank covered in something too coarse to call fur. They did not show themselves fully — they held a distance, an invisible boundary they were forbidden to cross.

Elara stopped and slowly turned her head.

One of them stood directly between the trunks, far taller than the rest. Its grotesque body looked stitched together from entirely different things: coarse fur, scales, and something like old tree bark that had fused into its flank and stayed there. Eyes — a scatter of dark beads. They did not look at her. They looked through her.

Elara clenched her fingers into fists.

/"They do not attack..."/

Something in this silence did more than terrify. Something recognized her.

Yet the fear did not vanish. It only changed. It lost its edge, grew deeper, heavier. It settled, filled her lungs.

She walked on and understood: they were not hunting her. They were moving with her. At an even distance like a shadow that would not release her, a muted echo. Absolute silence held around her in a circle, and nothing outside its border could break through.

She stopped. Breathed in slowly.

Not a sound from them. None at all. No footsteps, no labored breath, no growl. As if these creatures existed in a total vacuum. Like paintings on a wall that had, for no reason, begun to move.

But when she took one more step sideways, one of the monsters flinched violently and recoiled, as if it had struck something invisible. A wall. A boundary. Elara could not see it, but she felt it in the air itself, in a sudden shift of pressure, in how the silence around her thickened, barely.

/"This is wrong."/

She had already lost count of time. Here, it simply did not move. The grey light did not change, cast no shifting glow on the ground. There was only silence, and them.

And then the forest shuddered.

Somewhere far behind her, sharp. Not a sound — a pure vibration. As if someone had shoved, clumsily, at something that should never be touched. Elara went still. Every head around her turned at once toward the same direction — back, where she had come from. The creatures retreated. One step, then another. Not from her, but closer to whatever was happening at the forest's edge.

Elara turned slowly.

The darkness between the trunks had deepened, gone almost black. It thickened, as if the whole forest were being drawn into that single point behind her.

/"He..."/

She did not know why his image rose in her mind first. But her body reacted at once — Elara took a quick step forward, deeper into the thicket, as far as she could get from the boundary the monsters held.

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At the forest's edge, no one dared take the first step.

The trees stood as they always had — silent, straight, close-packed. Yet something in them had shifted, irreversibly, and even from here it showed. The air near the boundary smelled different. Heavier. The soldiers felt it, though not one of them could have put it into words.

The Prince stared into the depths for a long while.

Luther stood to his left, half a step behind — his usual place. He did not speak. He rarely did when Erebus fell silent, knowing well that the Prince needed absolute stillness around him to think.

Christopher held himself apart. He had chosen a distance from which he could keep everyone in view at once while remaining the least visible. Duke Esterg knew this position well. Too well.

He looked at the dark trunks.

Christopher did not say that he had watched the forest change over the past two weeks. Did not say that the boundary, once only a feeling, had begun to show itself at night — a thin, barely visible line where the air bent moonlight differently. He did not say it, because to speak it aloud would mean explaining how he knew. And that would drag along new, unwelcome questions.

The past two weeks had delivered enough signs that this could no longer be called coincidence. And every one of them led back to her. But these facts remained, for now, entirely unfit for an official report to the Emperor.

The Prince finally exhaled — quiet, barely audible.

"Damn it."

And crossed the tree line.

Shadow swallowed him at once. The sounds of the outside world cut off — no footfalls, no wind, no voices behind him. Only his own breathing, which had suddenly turned... different. Heavier, as if the air itself filled the lungs with water.

One of the guards swallowed hard.

"Your Highness!"

"Quiet," the Prince cut him off.

Luther did not move. Only his gaze sharpened, held longer.

He pressed on. Branches did not crack beneath his boots. Leaves did not rustle. Even the wet ground gave no sound. Erebus stopped, turned his head — the soldiers walked behind him, yet seemed too far. The distance between them appeared to stretch on its own, though no one had slowed their pace.

"Come closer."

No one answered. The Prince did not even hear his own voice — the word he had thrown out simply dissolved into the air where it should have echoed off the trunks.

His eyes narrowed.

Something moved between the trees. To the right. He turned his whole body. No one there.

To the left. A shadow. And not just one.

Erebus did not reach for his sword at once. He watched. Assessed. The Prince never acted rashly — he needed to understand a situation first.

They emerged slowly, as if growing out of mist. First a blurred outline. Then a broken shape. Limbs of uneven length, sharp bones moving beneath taut skin in places anatomy never intended. Too many eyes. And every one of them fixed on him.

One. Another. And another.

They did not attack. Did not come closer. They simply held their ground — and in that predatory stillness lay far more threat than in any chaotic motion.

Erebus took a step forward. Slow. No reaction. Another step — and at that moment, one of the creatures flinched and drew back.

The Prince went still.

He took one more step and finally understood: they were not afraid. And they had no intention of striking first. They were not letting him through.

The silence pressed on his ears, as if the very space around them were contracting. Behind him, someone drew a frightened breath. One of the soldiers.

But it was already too late.

One of the monsters shifted from its place — fast, a grey blur in the dusk. The shadow lunged forward, and a man's scream broke off on its very first note. It was not a long, dying cry. A short, wet crunch, one that sounded worse than any scream could.

And silence fell again.

The Prince did not look back. Did not even shift his shoulder — only his jaw locked tight, and a muscle jumped at his temple.

/"They do not attack without reason."/

He stood motionless. He looked straight ahead into the impenetrable dark — into the place where nothing was visible, yet something there, he could feel, was looking back at him.

/"The forest is not just guarding territory. The forest is guarding something specific."/

A thin, barely visible smile rose slowly to his lips. It held no warm. He had only received confirmation of what he already suspected.

"I see," he said quietly, almost calm. "Everyone, fall back!"

He turned and led the way out first.

The monsters did not give chase, but their watchful stare followed the guards all the way to the edge — to the invisible line where the forest ended and the open field behind the estate began. As if, step by step, they were confirming the men would leave.

The world returned sharply, deafeningly. Sound, moving air, human voices — all of it crashed back onto their senses at once. The guards spilled out of the thicket in haste, not stopping, not looking back. No one even counted whether all had made it out — in that moment, each man thought only of himself.

Erebus came out last.

He stopped at the very edge, drew the back of his hand slowly across his mouth. His eyes had darkened so deeply they looked entirely black even in the light of day.

"She is here."

He had no doubt left now.

"Your Highness," Luther fell silent. The rest of the soldiers went rigid as well.

The Prince turned sharply to face them:

"Gather everyone."

In a tone that allowed neither objection nor delay.

"Comb the forest."

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The Duke stood where he had before. He had not moved. Christopher had seen it all: their entry, the hurried retreat, and that brief moment when the heir to the throne had stood in the dusk of the thicket, staring out of it with a smile.

Erebus came closer and stopped directly across from him. Too close — breaching any distance permitted for polite conversation. The space between them turned dense and hot at once.

"You knew."

It was spoken as a statement. Without a trace of question or doubt. A fact the Prince simply set down between them.

The Duke did not hurry to answer:

"I knew the Andros forest had changed."

"You knew more."

Gaze locked on gaze — direct, unbroken. The Prince looked this way only when he had already passed sentence and was merely watching to see whether his victim understood it.

But Christopher did not look away. He never looked away before anyone.

"I said enough to justify refusing to send my men east."

Erebus's jaw tightened.

"You decided for yourself what counted as 'enough.'" He took another step forward. "And concealed the reasons."

Now less than an arm's length separated them. The Duke did not step back. He had half a head taller than the Prince, but the advantage meant nothing now.

A thin smile barely surfaced on Erebus's lips. The faintest movement at the corner of his mouth, while his eyes stayed cold.

"Fine."

This time he stepped back first. But he did it so that everyone would understand: his own choice, not a forced defeat.

"Then you will come with me." His gaze slid sideways, toward the mute wall of trees rising in the distance. "And see with your own eyes what it is you decided to hide."

He turned sharply:

"Assemble the men."

And, already walking, without looking back, he threw over his shoulder:

"We are not leaving until we find her."

Luther fell into step at once — no further order required, a silent, obedient extension of his master's will.

The Duke watched the Prince's back in silence.

/"He does not suspect she is in there. He knows."/

And it was not the certainty of a hunter who had stumbled on a fresh trail. The forest did not touch the girl. Christopher had seen it himself. And the Prince, by all appearances, had guessed it too.

The Duke calmly clasped his hands behind his back. Laced his fingers so no one could see the tension in them.

/"Today he stepped back. But he will not forget."/