I watched the mist retreat through the cave entrance.

  It crawled back toward the Frostspine Mountains like some massive wounded beast, dragging itself home to lick its wounds. The wailing songs of the Mist Singers faded with it, those nightmare voices finally shutting the hell up after a night of what sounded like cats being slowly fed into a wood chipper.

  Grey light spread across the ridge outside, it was cold and stingy with its warmth, like it was rationing out daylight by the teaspoon.

  I waited until the last wisps of fog disappeared before I moved. My body ached from the wyrm fight, my left arm still tender where the beast had nearly ripped it off. The worms had done their work overnight, knitting muscle and bone back together, but healing always left a dull throb behind. Like a signature on their work.

  The worm-sword formed in my grip without conscious thought. I was just instinct now, like breathing. I stepped out of the cave, my eyes scanning the rocks and trees for any sign of the watcher.

  My heart still hammered from that moment in the night, those human eyes staring at me through the mist. Unblinking. Watching. Then vanishing like they were never there.

  "Still clear," Mabel said, her voice oddly subdued. "No one's out here."

  I turned in a slow circle, taking in the ridge, it was empty. There were no figures standing in the open… no corpses of Mist Singers to explain how someone survived the Long Dark without shelter.

  Just snow and stone and the endless forest stretching below like a dark green stain.

  "Let's check around the cave," I said.

  I circled the entrance, scanning the area. The snow lay undisturbed except for my own tracks from yesterday. Nothing to—

  I stopped.

  "Holy shit," I whispered.

  There were fresh tracks in the snow… boot prints, human-sized, pressed deep into the frost directly outside the cave mouth.

  Someone stood here during the Long Dark, close enough to reach inside and touch me while I slept.

  "Okay, and I thought you were creepy," Mabel said, a segment of her pale form emerging from my collar to inspect the tracks. "Someone actually stood here. Watching you. While nightmare monsters danced and sung all around them."

  The tracks led away from the cave, heading along the ridge before descending into the Greywood.

  The stride was long and confident, someone who knew exactly where they were going. Someone who walked this land without fear.

  "Should we follow them?" Mabel asked.

  I nodded. "But first, I need to check something."

  I settled against a boulder near the cave entrance, taking inventory of my body. The wyrm fight had cost me, not just blood and pain, but essence.

  The worms needed to feed, and fighting burned through their reserves.

  But something felt different this morning.

  I closed my eyes and focused inward, sensing the worms beneath my skin.

  There were more of them now, far more than before the fight.

  The wyrm's essence hadn't just repaired my wounds, it had multiplied the parasites, adding to their numbers in ways I hadn't expected. They were spreading through my body in more complex ways than before.

  And the connection between us had tightened.

  "We're getting stronger," Mabel observed. "The wyrm was a good meal."

  But that wasn't all.

  I focused deeper.

  The wyrm had left something else behind, it wasn’t memories like Cedric's clear images, but I felt impressions… Instincts encoded in the essence I'd consumed.

  Images surfaced through my mind without being called.

  I could see how the wyrm sensed the vibrations through earth… how to feel footsteps from below, track prey by the tremors they made.

  A fragmentary map of the Greywood's underground tunnel networks the wyrm used to travel beneath the forest, emerging to ambush its victims from below.

  I hadn't learned this. I'd absorbed it. The wyrm's predatory knowledge now belonged to me.

  "Hmm," Mabel hummed, a sound like bone dice clicking together. "Each meal makes you less human and more monstrosity."

  I couldn't argue with that. I'd stopped being fully human when I first merged with the parasites. Each meal since then had pushed me further down a path with of no return.

  "Let's go back to the clearing," I said. "There's something I need to check."

  The clearing where I'd killed the wyrm looked like a war zone. Shattered pine trees jutted from the ground like broken fingers.

  The earth had been churned into frozen mud, streaked with blood that had darkened overnight. The battlefield looked like something massive had died here.

  Something had.

  The wyrm's corpse had been reduced overnight.

  The worms I'd left inside continued feeding through the Long Dark, stripping flesh from bone, consuming organs and muscle. What remained was a skeleton draped in loose scales, twenty meters of death already crusting with frost.

  I approached the remains and began harvesting what I could.

  I began pulling off wyrm scales as it was valuable, according to Cedric's memories. Harder than steel, resistant to both blade and claw. Dragoons paid well for it.

  I pried loose the largest intact plates and stored them in the pack I'd taken from the cave.

  I worked several teeth free from the massive jaw, each one curved and wickedly sharp, easily the length of my forearm.

  Wyrm teeth made excellent weapons when properly mounted. More importantly, they were trade goods.

  Deep in the creature's chest cavity, lodged where its heart used to be, I found what I was really looking for. A crystalline formation the size of my fist, pulsing with faint light. It was warm to the touch despite the frozen air.

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  A core… the condensed power of a creature that lived and killed for decades.

  I tried to absorb the core the way I'd absorbed the wyrm's essence during the kill. Nothing happened. The core remained inert in my palm, its energy locked behind some barrier I couldn't breach.

  "Don't bother," Mabel said, extending from my collar to inspect the core. "You can't eat that one directly. The Covenant of Horns accepts them as payment. Merchants in Valdris deal in them."

  I nodded, tucking the core safely into an inner pocket of the pack. I couldn't use it to grow stronger, but I could use it to buy things I needed.

  I climbed back to the ridge and found the tracks where they descended into the Greywood. Boot prints disappearing into the dark line of pines. I checked my supplies—food and water from the cave, wyrm materials in the pack, the core tucked safely away—and began the pursuit.

  The forest had swallowed me within minutes.

  The pines grew thick here, branches interlocking overhead to block the grey sky. My visibility had dropped to twenty meters at best. Shadows pooled between trunks, and every fallen log could hide a predator waiting to attack me.

  I sent worms ahead as scouts.

  They flowed from my palm and spread through the undergrowth, searching for the tracks, reporting back through their connection to me. The boot prints continued north, weaving between trees with the confidence of someone who had walked this path many times.

  "They're not trying to hide their trail," Mabel noted. "Either they don't know we're following, or they don't care."

  "Or they want us to follow," I added.

  The trail became harder to follow as the morning progressed. In some places, snow had drifted over the prints. In others, the ground was frozen too hard to hold any impressions. Rocky outcroppings forced long detours where no tracks remained at all.

  I lost the trail twice. Each time I had to stop, send worms in wider circles, and wait for them to find the next clear print. The delays cost me precious time. The sun climbed toward noon behind grey clouds, and I'd covered less ground than I'd hoped.

  My left arm ached with every movement. The worms had rebuilt the structure, but the muscles tired quickly. I favored my right side, moving slower than my body wanted to go. The chase demanded speed. My injuries demanded patience. The conflict wore at me with every step.

  "We're burning daylight," Mabel warned. "If we're still in this forest when the mist rises, we'll be dead for sure."

  The cave on the ridge was hours behind us now. We couldn't go back.

  "We'll find something," I said, with more confidence than I felt.

  The Greywood changed as we moved deeper.

  The trees grew older here, their trunks wider than I could wrap my arms around. The undergrowth thickened into walls of frozen brush that forced me onto narrow paths between.

  I followed a trail for twenty minutes and emerged where I started. I took a different route and found myself at the same cluster of boulders I'd passed an hour ago.

  The landmarks repeated—the same fallen pine, the same frozen stream crossing, the same distinctive rock formation—as if the forest was folding back on itself.

  "This is not natural," Mabel said, her body extending from my collar to look around. "The Greywood has been altered somehow, shaped into a maze designed to trap intruders. The paths loop and twist, leading travelers in circles until they exhaust themselves or the Long Dark takes them."

  "But the tracks don't loop," I pointed out. The boot prints I followed cut through the maze without hesitation, taking turns that seemed random but led steadily forward.

  I forced myself to trust the tracks.

  When my instincts said turn left, I followed the boot prints right. When the path ahead looked clear, I took the narrow gap between rocks that the tracks indicated.

  The worm scouts helped a lot. They ranged ahead, confirming which paths looped and which continued forward. I built a mental map of the maze, marking dead ends, noting the patterns.

  The afternoon light had begun to fade. The sun descended toward the Frostspine Mountains. The Long Dark was coming, and I was deep in a labyrinth with no shelter in sight.

  "Wait," Mabel said suddenly. "The scouts found something."

  "What?" I asked, changing direction to follow where she indicated.

  "A clearing, maybe a hundred meters through the trees."

  I pushed through dense undergrowth, branches scraping my face and catching on my clothes. The path twisted through thickets before opening into a small clearing ringed by towering pines. The space was maybe thirty meters across, sheltered from wind by the surrounding trees.

  My eyes caught on marks carved into a tree at the clearing's edge.

  I moved closer, brushing away the frost to see them clearly.

  Scratched crudely into the bark with a knife or sharp stone.

  Two letters: Z.S.

  My heart stopped. I knew those initials. I knew exactly who would carve them.

  "Zo," I whispered. "Sadie."

  "Your prison buddies?" Mabel asked, extending from my shoulder to examine the carving. "They were here?"

  "They came through the tear ahead of us," I said. "When Klaus attacked. We all went through together, but at different times..."

  "Well, they were here," Mabel confirmed. "And they left—or were taken—recently enough."

  I examined the tracks leading away from the camp. They headed toward the edge of the Greywood. Toward the wild tundra.

  I didn't hesitate. The mysterious watcher could wait. The mystery of who walks through the mist could wait. My friends were alive.

  I followed the new tracks at a run.

  These prints were easier to read than the watcher's careful trail. Multiple people moving together, two sets of boots. They were not trying to hide. They were moving fast, heading toward the edge of the Greywood.

  I pushed my body harder than I should.

  My left arm screamed with every jarring step. My lungs burned from the cold air.

  The tracks led through the labyrinth's passages.

  I followed without thinking, trusting the prints, letting my friends' path guide me through the maze that nearly trapped me earlier.

  They found a way through.

  Hours blurred together. The sun dropped toward the Frostspine Mountains, painting the sky in shades of orange and red. The shadows between trees grew longer. The temperature had begun its evening plunge.

  "You have maybe an hour before the mist rises," Mabel warned. "Maybe less."

  I ran faster.

  The tracks were fresher now, snow disturbed more recently, prints sharper. I was catching up. They couldn't be far.

  The trees began to thin ahead.

  The edge of the Greywood, opening onto the tundra beyond. I could see the grey sky through the branches… the open tundra, and figures moving across the snow.

  My heart pounded as I crashed through the last of the undergrowth onto open tundra.

  The Hearthlands spread before me, rolling white and grey, broken by rocky outcroppings and scattered pine groves. The sun bled orange across the horizon, minutes from vanishing behind the mountains.

  Two figures moved across the snow maybe two hundred meters ahead.

  They were heading toward a rocky formation, shelter, I realized.

  My eyes locked onto their figures.

  Even at this distance, even with failing light, I knew them.

  The first was tall and curvy, moving with the deliberate pace of someone carrying injuries. She had an axe strapped across her back, she must have found that or made it in this frozen world.

  Zo.

  The second was smaller, quicker, constantly looking over the terrain around them. Her hair was whipping in the cold wind.

  Sadie.

  I tried to call out, but my voice caught.

  I had been running for hours. My throat was raw from the cold air. The sound that emerged was barely a croak.

  I tried again. Forced the word out with everything I had.

  "ZO! SADIE!"

  The figures stopped.

  Turned. For a long moment, no one moved. They stared at me across the snow, and I stared back, heart pounding, hardly daring to believe.

  Then Zo started running toward me.

  Sadie followed a heartbeat later, her cautious nature overwhelmed by the same desperate hope I felt.

  They closed the distance while I stumbled forward to meet them, three survivors converging on the frozen plain as the sun sank and the Long Dark prepared to rise.

  I reached them as the first wisps of mist began forming in the valleys.

  Zo's arms wrapped around me in a crushing hug that made my healing ribs scream. Sadie grabbed my shoulder, her grip tight enough to bruise, as if afraid I would vanish if she let go.

  "Fish," Zo said, her voice thick with emotion. "You crazy son of a bitch. You made it!"

  "We thought you were dead," Sadie said, her normally guarded expression cracked wide open. "When the tear separated us—"

  "Later," Zo cut in, already moving, already taking charge. She pointed toward the rocky outcropping, where there was a shallow cave, barely visible from where we stood.

  We ran together as the Long Dark descended behind us, a white wall crawling across the tundra, swallowing everything in its path. We reached the rocky outcropping with minutes to spare, diving into the shallow cave as the first tendrils of mist curled around the entrance.

  Zo pulled a hide covering across the opening, securing it with stones. The cave was small but dry, with bedrolls and supplies stacked neatly against one wall.

  "Home sweet home," Zo said, dropping onto a bedroll. "For now, anyway."

  Sadie knelt beside a small fire pit, striking a spark to kindle a tiny flame. "You look like hell, Fish," she said, her eyes taking in my changed appearance. "What happened to you?"

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Mabel emerged from my collar first, extending to her full length as she stretched dramatically.

  "Oh my STARS, it is GOOD to meet actual people who aren't trying to kill us," she announced. "Do you have ANY idea what I've been through? Trapped with this natural disaster, fighting monsters, freezing half to death—"

  Zo's eyes widened. Sadie's hand went to her spear.