Max woke to trees.

  Leaflight dappled his face, a lattice of green and gold, and damp earth pressed a cool line along his spine. He lay still for a heartbeat, listening, and a small sound answered him: a thin, determined mew from somewhere near his ribs.

  He turned his head.

  A lynx kitten, tufted ears too big for her head, paws like soft clubs, was bracing both forefeet against his tunic and patting at him like a malfunctioning healer. Not a newborn; a month old, maybe, with the gangly confidence of a creature that has just discovered leaping. Her eyes met his, slate-bright and curious.

  Something in Max’s chest clicked into place.

  He didn’t think about it. He scooped her up, and she came willingly, settling against him with a rumbling purr that felt absurdly disproportionate to her size. Warmth ran from his sternum outward, a thread catching, tightening, holding.

  A soft overlay ghosted his vision, no voice, just the polite insistence of the Journal’s interface.

  Name your bonded companion.

  He looked down at the ridiculous, perfect face and laughed once, helplessly. “Joy,” he said.

  The overlay pulsed, confirmed, and the thread in his chest tugged back like a hand squeezed his.

  He breathed, really breathed, for the first time since… everything. Then he sat up, shifted Joy to the crook of his arm, and inventoried his world.

  Pines and broadleafs shared the canopy; the ground wore last year’s leaves and this year’s cautious shoots. Not far off to his right, judging by the openness of the understory and the slant of light, there’d be a track or a road. He reached for the pouch at his belt.

  Inside: dried meat wrapped in waxed cloth; his Journal, edges already scuffed; a folded map nested in its back sleeve; flint and steel; a coil of twine; not much else. He cracked the Journal and skimmed the familiar first pages, class header, Beastmaster, then the small, neat list of Starting Abilities he’d thumbed past in the Inbetween. As his eyes tracked the ink, something… woke.

  Awareness unspooled around him, not sight, not sound, presence. Birds skittered in the branches, bright quiver-notes of attention. Chipmunks darted under the deadfall, warm sparks of busy intent. A fox den, old, faint. A beetle as significant as a drumbeat. None of it obeyed him; all of it noticed him. The connection was thin this far out, like hearing a conversation through a wall, but it was there.

  Joy wasn’t thin. She was a bell inside his ribs. Her comfort washed up his arm; his steadied heartbeat mirrored in her purr. When a jay scolded from overhead, irritation ran through her like static, and he felt himself almost want to skitter up the nearest trunk after it. He laughed again, softer. “Later,” he told her.

  Another sense shouldered in, quiet but sure, knowing. He scanned the roots and loam, and names arrived with the same undeniable rightness as the name he’d given the kitten: this fern, nothing but roughage; that gray-capped fungus, edible; the orange one, don’t. He could almost see the strands of Myriad braided through them, thin green lines in the edible, a dull skein in the dangerous.

  “Okay,” he said, more to himself than to anyone listening. “We’re not dying today.”

  He set Joy on his shoulder; she climbed him like a tree with decorum, then made biscuits against his collarbone as if she’d always lived there. Max moved slowly, working a small loop around the clearing, collecting a dozen of the high-protein shelf fungi he didn’t have a name for yet, thick, pale, slightly nutty on the tongue when he tested a sliver with the Journal open to confirm his instinct.

  The dried meat stayed in the pouch. He wasn’t sure why it felt wrong to eat it, habit, maybe, or the way the new sense of living things tugged at him, but the fungus sat easily, and Joy, after sniffing it with theatrical suspicion, accepted a flake like a queen accepting tribute.

  He tucked the rest into a cloth, placed it into his magical pouch, and sat back on his heels. The forest breathed. Joy’s tail flicked once against his cheek.

  “Right,” Max said, giving the kitten a gentle scratch between her ears. “We start small. We learn fast.”

  He rolled the map open on his knee. A compass rose etched itself in the corner, clean and sure. The parchment showed almost nothing else, just a pale wash of terrain and a single, patient marker waiting for a world he hadn’t walked yet to fill itself in.

  He closed the Journal, stood, and brushed leaf-dust from his trousers. Joy clambered to his shoulder again and settled like a promise.

  They had time to decide what to do next.

  For the moment, the trees were enough.

  Max unfolded the map again, Lucien’s last words threading through his head: Make for Pendle. Ask after Jack or Asil. The parchment felt warmer than paper should, a patient pulse in his hands.

  No Pendle.

  No tidy ink-stamped town square, no mountain chain where there ought to be, no river bend he’d memorized. The map granted only the immediate: the crown of trees, the scratch of undergrowth, a ribbon of road not far off, and two faint dots, close enough to touch: Maximus and Joy.

  His throat tightened. He blinked hard, tried to swallow hope back down where it couldn’t bruise as easily. Mom. Jack. He folded the map with care born of panic, and three yellow dots winked into being on the road.

  Boot soles on a beaten path, grit crushed under hurried feet. He moved before he could argue with himself, angling through the trees until the trunks thinned and the road opened like a sentence he could finally read.

  He almost collided with them.

  Two men, dusty, wide-eyed, clubs that were really determined sticks, and between them a woman no taller than his hip, quick as a sparrow and ready to bolt. The gnome darted behind the nearer man the instant she saw him; both men lifted their “clubs” with all the conviction fear could buy.

  Max threw his hands up, palms empty. “I’m not…I’m friendly.”

  “Earth?” the taller man blurted, voice shaky but English clean. “You from Earth?”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “Phoenix. Arizona.”

  “Arizona, States? Desert, right?” the other man said, relief loosening his grip. “I’m Mo. Toronto.”

  “Ben,” the first added, lowering his stick. “Christchurch. New Zealand.”

  The gnome peeked out, chin high. “Pip,” she said. Kyiv, Ukraine. Height changed, attitude didn’t.”

  Joy chirruped from Max’s shoulder. All three strangers clocked the lynx kitten and rearranged their fear into awe.

  “We woke up a few hours ago,” Ben said, glancing up and down the road. “Pip and Mo together. I, uh, tripped over them about an hour in.”

  “Literally,” Pip said.

  “Basically,” Ben conceded. “Picked a direction and… walked.”

  “Same,” Max said. “Except I woke up with,” he nudged Joy with his cheek. The kitten pushed back, pleased, sending a small pulse of warmth through the bond that steadied him better than breath. “Lucien told me to find a town called Pendle. I don’t see it yet.”

  “Maps?” Mo asked, hopeful.

  “Check your pouches,” Max said.

  They did. Three Journals. Three folded maps. Three blank stares turned into the same hungry relief Max had felt in the Inbetween when the world finally gave him a handle.

  “Open them,” Max prompted.

  The parchment populated: road, verge, trees, and a single yellow dot in the brush where Max stood with a cat on his shoulder. On Max’s map, three yellow dots edged the road where they clustered.

  Pip frowned. “Why are ours yellow?”

  “Yellow’s neutral,” Max said, surprised by the certainty. “Not hostile. Not trusted.”

  “Like a first impression,” Ben said.

  “Let’s try a second,” Mo offered, lowering his club the rest of the way. “Mo Omondi. Software dev. Terrible at camping. Good at following directions.”

  “Ben Harris,” Ben said. “Warehouse picker. Decent with maps if they behave.”

  “Pip O’Rourke,” Pip said crisply. “Pharmacist. New to being this height. Not new to telling tall people what to do.”

  Max huffed a laugh despite himself. “Max.” He didn’t add Oddo. He didn’t add Asil’s son. Lucien’s warning rode the edge of his tongue like a bit. He swallowed it.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  On his map, the three yellow dots softened, then pulsed and slid to green. On theirs, Max’s own mark shifted from yellow to green in reply; Joy’s tiny sigil was already green and chimed once like a heartbeat. A faint line of UI text ghosted across Max’s margin: proximity status updated: Ben, Mo, Pip , Friendly.

  Ben tucked his map away. “Direction?”

  Max glanced west. The light lay that way; the undergrowth felt a fraction less contrary. “West,” he said. “We walk until the world fills in. If we hit a river, ”

  “I’m naming it,” Pip said.

  “Deal,” Max said, and tried not to sound like he was laughing and crying at once.

  They stepped off together, four green markers on a page that knew just enough to be kind. Joy rode his shoulder like a small, satisfied crown. Somewhere ahead, the world he’d been promised waited to be drawn in.

  They took the road west because west felt like a word you could live with. The light slanted that way. The undergrowth quit arguing underfoot.

  They talked because silence had too many edges.

  “The Inbetween was… neat,” Ben said after a while, like he was trying on understatement for size. “White room that wasn’t a room. That god, Lucien, knew my mum’s full name: accent and all. I asked if I’d died in the storm. He said, ‘Not today.’” Ben’s mouth tipped. “Didn’t answer the larger question.”

  Mo ran the knuckles of one hand along the head of his stick. “I thought it was the afterlife. The whole condo tower lost power; the sky went the wrong color. I remember glass, and then… that table. Lucien was patient. Not kind, exactly. Like a teacher who won’t do the work for you.”

  “Yeah,” Pip said, dry. “And then he lets you pick a race and class like it’s character creation, and you’re not about to have to pay for the joke for the rest of your natural.” She spread her arms to indicate exactly two feet of natural. “Gnome. I chose Gnome as a bit.”

  Ben glanced down at her, deadpan. “You’re committing to it beautifully.”

  “Oh, I’m owning it,” Pip said, chin up. “Gnome Trickster. If the world insists on being ridiculous, I’ll meet it on theme. I get light-steps, a pocket-glamour, and a bonus to making tall people underestimate me.” She paused. “Which is everyone.”

  Mo smiled despite himself. “Human, Artificer,” he said. “Lucien said my hands and my brain like the same kinds of problems. I have… a cantrip that sketches a lattice, and another that makes tools feel like they’re listening. No idea what I’m doing yet.”

  “Human, Warden,” Ben added. “Sounded practical. Stand there. Don’t fall down. Make sure the people behind you don’t get eaten.”

  Pip eyed the stick in his hands. “Strong start.”

  “It’s an early stick,” Ben said.

  They walked a dozen paces to the rhythm of birds and boots.

  Max cleared his throat. “Wanderkin,” he said, and the word fit his mouth like a thing he’d practiced alone. “Elf-blood somewhere in the line. I picked it because… I don’t know. It felt like movement.” He nudged Joy with his cheek. “Class is Beastmaster. Joy’s my starter companion.”

  Joy made a pleased mmfp noise and butted his jaw, smug as a sunrise.

  “I was a light gamer back home,” Max went on. “Minecraft mostly. Built reefs and weird roller coasters. My parents were the heavy gamers.” He stopped before their names came out and sidestepped it clean. “I was studying marine biology. Second-year. Sharks, kelp forests, plankton cycles. Now I can… tell which mushrooms want to be dinner and which want you dead.” He half-laughed. “Transferable skills, I guess.”

  “Ecosystems are ecosystems,” Mo said. “Inputs, outputs, opportunists.”

  “Predators that don’t look like predators,” Ben added, eyeing the trees. “Good to know.”

  Pip tilted her head at Joy. “And you can feel other animals?”

  “Kind of,” Max said. “Like footsteps through a wall. Near is clearer. Joy is… loud.” He scratched the kitten’s chin. “In a good way.”

  “Useful,” Pip declared. “Also adorable. She can be our morale officer.”

  Joy accepted the promotion without comment.

  They traded Inbetween details the way people trade weather: a few precise, personal notes to prove they’d stood under the same sky. Pip described the moment the UI text in her Journal stopped feeling like a prank and started feeling like a promise. Ben admitted he’d asked Lucien if he could pick “Dad” as a class and got a look that suggested future upgrades. Mo confessed he’d tried to negotiate for a third hand and was told to learn to use the two he had.

  By the time the sun started laying long copper across the road, the trees on the north side opened into a shallow clearing tufted with grass and ringed by low stone. Max drifted toward it without quite deciding to. The air felt cleaner there; the ground didn’t hum with old trouble. Joy’s tail flicked in approval.

  “Camp?” Ben said.

  “Camp,” Pip agreed. “Before the dark gets clever.”

  They stepped off the road. Max walked the circle once, listening with all the new parts of himself; nothing nasty nested in the edges, nothing sour underfoot. He set his pack down and started collecting fallen branches. Mo knelt and scratched a neat fire ring into the soil. Ben stacked stones for a windbreak and tested the weight of his early stick like it might become something soon. Pip hopped up onto a rock that gave her enough height to boss from and declared herself quartermaster of snacks.

  “Democracy resumes in the morning,” she told them, and the four of them grinned like it might.

  They ate bad jokes like trail food. Pip weaponized sarcasm; Ben tried a dad joke and apologized; Mo confessed to once soldering a USB port upside down on purpose just to prove a point. Max smiled more than he spoke. Joy dozed across his shoulders like a scarf that purred.

  Then Max went still.

  He didn’t know how he knew, only that the forest’s small conversations thinned, and something ugly pressed at the edges like a cold thumb. He lifted his hand and held up three fingers.

  The others shut up. Ben rose, planted his feet between the fire ring and the dark. Mo’s stick turned from prop to tool. Pip slid off her rock without a sound and vanished sideways like a dropped shadow.

  The brush exploded.

  They were canids, but wrong, shoulders too broad, jaws too long, ears torn and studded with bone spurs. Their eyes held a hateful kind of light. The Journals didn’t ask; they told:

  Gnoll (x3) Level 2 Pack Hunter ? Bleed ? Hyena Howl (Frighten)

  “Behind me,” Ben said, and his voice wasn’t loud so much as sure. The ground under his boots firmed like someone had wedged a wedge under him, Warden: Guard’s Stance, and when the first gnoll lunged, his early stick met it with an impact that rang up his arms and made the creature yelp.

  The second went right; Pip was already there. The air hiccupped; for a blink, there were two Pips, one darting left, one right, Trickster: Mirror Step, and a flash of metal answered from her sleeve. The knife didn’t kill; it changed the angle. The gnoll flinched, head turning to track the wrong Pip, and the real one slid under its reach and slashed at the tendon above its heel. It went down cursing in whatever language gnolls curse in.

  The third came for Max.

  Joy left his shoulder in a blur, a streak of dim silver that seemed to skip a frame, Shadow Lynx: Blink-Pounce (Lesser), and hit the gnoll’s face with claws meant for climbing trees and a growl that sounded much too big for a kitten. The creature reared back, swatting; Max moved without thinking, dragging steel from his belt like he’d been born holding it. The short sword felt right and wrong all at once, right in his hand, wrong because it was real.

  “Here!” Mo snapped, chalk ripping across the air. A hex of light snapped into place between Max and the gnoll’s snapping jaws, Artificer: Lattice Screen, thin as glass, strong as a promise, buying Max one heartbeat.

  He used it. He stepped in and stabbed for the ribs the way a tutorial had once told him to. The blade bit, slid, stuck. Hot blood hit his hand; shock hit his gut. The gnoll screamed and hammered down; the screen shattered with a pewter scream.

  Ben took the hit for him, Interpose, shoulder first, grunt shoved out of him like a brick. His stick cracked against jawbone and teeth; the gnoll’s head snapped sideways. “Eyes!” he barked.

  “On it,” Pip said, and Taunt/Mockery rode her voice like a splinter of magic: “Oh, that’s adorable, did you borrow that snarl from a lapdog?” The gnoll’s gaze jerked toward her, furious, which is when her second knife went in under the orbit. It spasmed and went over backward, clawing at its own face.

  The one she’d hamstrung lunged at her anyway, jaws scissoring. It got a mouthful of air, Pip flickered a half-step to the side, Mirror Step, and came back with a palmful of sand she threw into its eyes, because sometimes the best magic was dirt.

  The first gnoll recovered enough to rake Ben across the forearm with a feral swipe. His Journal flashed Bleed; he set his jaw, planted again. The ground under him bulged a thumb’s width, Warden: Rooted, and refused to let him fall.

  Max didn’t see the fourth shape until it wasn’t a shape at all but a sound, hyena laughter twisting wrong in his head. The nearest gnoll threw its head back and howled, the air shivered; fear crawled over his skin with dirty fingernails. Frighten Joy hissed, ears flat, and sent a burst of courage down the bond that didn’t erase the fear so much as give it something to lean on.

  “Stay with me,” Max told her, and he didn’t know if he meant the cat or himself. He feinted left, cut right, and dragged his blade across the gnoll’s wrist. It dropped the crude iron it had been swinging and swiped for him with the other hand, catching his bicep. Fire bloomed; wet warmth ran. He staggered, teeth bared.

  Mo’s lattice didn’t go up this time. Instead, he slapped his palm to the stick, murmured a shape under his breath, and the wood hummed, Artificer: Toolcall - Improv Shock. He jabbed the charged end into the wounded gnoll’s ribs. It convulsed like someone had yanked its plug and toppled.

  Ben finished his one planted step, a two-handed swing, a crack like a bat meeting a fastball. The gnoll folded.

  Pip rode hers down like a particularly rude dance partner, one knee in its chest, knife in and out quick, throat, clean, eyes hard and wet at the edges.

  The last gnoll decided it preferred not being a last gnoll and tried to bolt. Joy streaked after it, a half-step of wrongness in the air, and latched onto the back of its neck. Max closed the distance and did the work he didn’t want to do but had to, one short stab that made it stop moving.

  Silence came down so fast the fire sounded loud. Max realized he was shaking only when he tried to pull his blade free, and his fingers wouldn’t listen. Blood slicked his forearm in a bright sheet.

  “Max, sit.” Mo was already moving, the Journal open to a page it hadn’t had five minutes ago. “I’ve got something, hang on.” He chalked a four-point glyph into the dirt, laid his palm over the worst of the gash, and breathed through his teeth. Light seeped out from under his hand, thin, steady, Artificer: Field Mend. The pain dialed down from screaming to shouting. The bleeding slowed, then grudgingly stopped.

  “It’ll pull,” Mo said, voice low. “Don’t test it.”

  Ben bound his own forearm with a strip of tunic and a look that promised future shields. Pip wiped her knives on a gnoll’s filthy tunic with fast, precise motions; then, because she was human no matter her height, she leaned away and shook.

  Joy crawled back into Max’s lap and made biscuits into his trousers like she could knead fear into something else. He let her. He let himself breathe.

  The fire popped.

  Their Journals chimed in staggered bursts:

  Gnoll (x3) defeated XP gained

  A fourth line slid in on Max’s UI alone:

  Pack Tactics (Lesser): +5% bonus when adjacent to bonded companion applied

  He closed his eyes. Opened them. Met three faces that had the same look his probably wore: we are still here.

  “Good job,” Ben said, which was maybe the bravest thing anyone had said all day.

  Pip swallowed, nodded once, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “Next time,” she said, voice steadying, “I vote we camp with two fires. And a moat. And twelve very large friends.”