Midnight winds rustled the enik fronds overhead as the sunlight seemed to rest on the horizon. The sun had just set out of view darkening the sky to a pale glow, never fully setting without the high mountains of Risen Valley to block them. Tolly moved quickly, keeping ahead of Soren, and by extension, an unconscious Connor. She would move through the muddy swathes of ground, stepping nimbly over fallen half scorched trunks and ducking under low hung fronds in order to survey ahead.

  “Don't stray too far!” Soren called to her.

  “Need a second to rest?”

  “No. Connor's fine. Just deadweight. Besides, my shoulders went numb a kilometre ago.”

  “Lucky you're here then. It's nice to have someone to carry your baggage,” she said, sardonically smiling before trotting off ahead again.

  They continued on through the warren of tangled fronds and fallen trunks, the same that they'd come through before. They knew their footsteps this time, more easily finding placement on the crisscrossed trunks as they moved, despite the added load of Connor.

  It wasn't until thirty minutes in that Tolly noticed something felt off. She had a strange feeling in the backs of her knees, some itch she just couldn't scratch. She stopped, rummaged through her bag and came up empty.

  “Odd,” she said.

  “Odd is it?” Soren said, lightly panting as he came up behind her. He flexed his shoulders, shifting Connor's weight around to a more comfortable bearing.

  “Yes, odd. Something isn't sitting well with me. Maybe it's the lack of water, but I just know something is off. It’s as if there is this nagging voice standing right behind, right beneath me.

  “I know what you mean. I’ve felt it too,” Soren admitted. “Though, I just as quickly assumed it was exhaustion getting the better of me.”

  She cocked her head, staring off into the distance from behind where they had just come. She could feel it, almost as if something was there, standing in stark daylight, but there nonetheless. She strained her eyes, trying to see if she could see something, anything. There was nothing.

  “Well,” she said, rolling the pack back over her shoulder, “we might as well continue—”

  The crack of a branch echoed throughout the silent wood. The two of them gawked at the direction of the noise, unsure what to do.

  “I, well–” Soren started to say. Tolly shushed him.

  A frond not ten metres away shifted and bent as if displaced momentarily.

  “No,” Tolly muttered just as a shape materialised. What was once empty space fractured and shimmered, filling in a roughly humanoid form.

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  “Get out of here,” she whispered to Soren. “Take Connor. Go now.” Soren took a few steps backwards before turning to sprint southward without another word.

  The figure continued materialising, taking on the uncomfortably familiar visage of black armour Tolly had seen two nights before, although this one appeared to be solitary and unarmed. Its arms hung to its sides, and it made no attempt to raise them in response to her presence. It seemingly did not attempt to react to her at all. The figure just stared at her from behind its featureless helmet that glinted in the sunlight. A cold sweat began to form on the back of Tolly's neck.

  The figure stayed motionless as if watching her. She stood statue-still and thought about turning, about running as quickly as she could toward Soren and Connor. She knew right away that that was a mistake. The figure was large, and she guessed it could easily catch her. No matter how long she ran, and no matter how far, she would eventually tire, and she couldn't risk Soren, who, with Connor in tow, moved much slower. Their only hope was if she could lead the figure away from them.

  Just as she turned to run, she noticed movement in the trees to her right. Far off, something was sprinting, heading straight for her. She turned and saw another equally blurry shape bounding at her from the opposite side, perpendicular to where the black figure still stood.

  Her heart pounding in her chest, she stumbled off towards Soren before altering her course a few degrees westward. She would run; she was sure of it. But she was damned if she was going to lead them to her friends.

  Bounding over fallen trunks and narrowly avoiding the swamped forest floor, she ran. She ran faster than she had ever before. With expert footing, she launched herself from bough to bough, not missing a step. A deep fear was eating at the skin on the back of her skull. She knew if she stopped, she would die, knowing that it would be the last mistake she would ever make if one foot went out of place.

  Adrenaline surged through her, dominating her. Far behind her, fronds lashed and bark crumpled in the wake of her pursuers, though she didn't dare stop to look. Run. Running is all she could think of. Run or die.

  She didn't know how far she had run or for how long, but when Tolly began to tire, her mind managed to catch up with her. The adrenaline that had been rocketing through her had faded, and the fear started to roll back in. Slowing to just faster than a jog, she turned to look back. The sounds of her pursuers had faded away. For a moment, she thought her luck hadn't left her, that she had outrun the out-runnable. She was wrong.

  As if on cue, two sleek grey humanoid figures exploded out of the underbrush from where she had come. The world shrank away, and death called out to her on the horizon, an old friend.

  She smiled grimly, not bothering to increase the pace of her walk. Instead, she looked ahead, to a forest at rest. It was a place so alien to her as the things chasing her were. Sure, she had grown up here on the other side of the mountains. But she was closed off from the true alienation of the place. The forest existed to die. To grow, to thrive, but ultimately to wither in fiery agony.

  She could see it now for what it was, a reflection of her life. It was reckless while being nurtured and closed off from what happened elsewhere in the universe.

  Sunlight began to break through the thick fronds overhead. Insects billowed a chorus of chirps, clicks and whines as they lived out their short ignorant existence. A sense of calm washed over her, and it seemed like the light had increased to a crescendo of radiance.

  Finally, committing to her fate, she let her feet misstep, nearly tripping herself as she did so. She shuffled almost lazily through a section of low hanging fronds, falling out into an unexpectedly wide clearing.

  The space before her stretched a city block across. Half-sunk in an ebony pool at its centre sat an overturned firecrawler; the Perun covered in craggy roots and sunbaked mud. Behind her, the nightmare things eked closer. The sounds of snapping branches scraped at her ear tips. It was then that she decided to live.