I kept walking through the forest.

Though walking wasn’t really the right word anymore.

By that point I was dragging myself forward with one good leg, a broken branch, and pure stubbornness, because every single step hurt so badly that there were moments my vision blurred and my body nearly folded in on itself before I forced it upright again.

My ankle was by far the worst out of everything.

Every time it shifted even a little, a flash of pain shot through my leg so violently that my breath would hitch in my throat.

But it wasn’t only my ankle.

My ribs hurt whenever I breathed too deeply as every exhale and inhale made pain tear through my flesh and intercoastal muscles.

My shoulder still throbbed from the fall.

My arms were shaking from how much of my weight I was forcing onto the branch.

And my whole body felt weak, bruised and wrong, as if I had been smashed apart and then carelessly been put back together.

The pain wasn’t even neat anymore.

It didn’t stay in one place or come in one kind.

Sometimes it was sharp enough to make me gasp.

Other times it became a deep ache that sat in my bones and refused to leave.

It was everywhere.

In my leg.

In my chest.

In my back.

In my arms.

Even in the way my head felt heavy and hot from exhaustion.

Tears kept gathering in my eyes without my permission.

Not because I was crying, not really, but because my body simply couldn’t handle the pain quietly anymore.

The forest around me only made it worse.

It was so dark and still that every small sound felt louder than it should have.

The scrape of the branch being dragged wearily against the dirt.

My own breathing as I huffed and puffed desperately in a pathetic attempt to ease my nerves.

The rustle of leaves above me whenever the wind slipped through the trees.

Everything reminded me that I was alone.

But still, I kept moving.

I had to.

That promise I had made beneath the stars was still stuck in my head, repeating itself over and over every time my knees threatened to buckle.

If you really exist, I’ll find you one day.

It was ridiculous and I knew that.

It was childish and I also knew that.

But it was all I had left.

So I clung to it and limped forward, telling myself that I wasn’t allowed to die yet.

Not before I found the person who was supposed to stay with me.

After what felt like forever, the trees finally began to thin.

At first I thought I was imagining it.

But then the trunks grew further apart, the darkness opened a little, and eventually I stumbled out of the forest and onto a dirt road.

The sight of it almost made me cry from relief.

It was just a road.

Plain, empty, and unremarkable just like any other dirt road.

But after wandering through the woods in pain and darkness, it felt like the most comforting thing in the world.

I leaned harder onto the branch and kept going while dragging my twisted leg behind.

I trekked forward down the road, I had no clue on weather I was heading to or away from the NightBane capital but I kept going.

The road began to slope upward after a while, and that made everything even worse.

My left leg had already started aching from carrying almost all of my weight.

My hands were raw from gripping the stick.

My shoulder stung every time I moved it.

But I still kept dragging myself uphill because I had already made it this far, and stopping now felt impossible.

By the time I reached the top, my whole body was shaking.

For one tiny moment, I let myself hope that maybe I would see some king is roadside inn for travellers.

Or a passing merchant.

Or anything that suggested there were people nearby.

Instead, I froze.

There was a pack wolves ahead.

Eight of them.

They were gathered on the road in a rough cluster, their bodies half-lit by the moon, and the first thing I noticed was the blood around their mouths.

It was smeared across their jaws and dark against their fur.

They had been eating something.

The shape on the ground between them was small.

My heart dropped.

I didn’t move.

I didn’t even breathe for a second as I simply found myself unable to.

Instinct screamed at me to get away before they noticed me, so as carefully as I could I tried to take a step backward.

But as I tried to get away.

The tip of the branch that held against the floor snapped.

The sound cracked through the night.

The support vanished from beneath me, and I fell hard onto the dirt with a cry as my bad leg twisted even more, sending a burst of agony through my whole body.

Every wolf lifted its head at once.

Then they all turned toward me.

Slowly, they stepped away from whatever they had been feeding on.

They spread out in a loose line, growling low in their throats, and as they moved I caught sight of the thing behind them.

It was a body.

A small body.

The clothes were familiar.

My blood ran cold.

For a second I couldn’t think.

I just stared.

But then the wolves moved again and blocked my view, leaving me looking only at their bloodied mouths and their glowing eyes.

Fear rushed through me so hard it almost made me go numb.

I was alone.

I was injured.

I could barely stand.

And there were eight wolves in front of me, they where all a fair distance away but they where all also slowly approaching me.

One had broken off from the others and delved into a full sprint headed straight towards me.

But beneath the fear, something else started rising too.

Anger.

Hot, desperate anger.

I had already been betrayed, thrown off a cliff, left broken in the woods, and now this.

The thought of dying here, after all of that, suddenly made something inside me snap.

I pushed myself up onto one knee.

The pain nearly made me black out.

Still, I planted my good foot beneath me and forced myself upright.

"I’m not dying here," I said, but it came out as a weak rasp.

So I gritted my teeth and shouted it instead.

"I’m not dying here!"

My voice cracked, but I didn’t care.

"I haven’t found them yet!"

"I haven’t found the person who’s supposed to stay with me, and I’m not letting any of you kill me before I do!"

I grabbed the broken branch from the ground.

Since only the bottom had snapped, which meant the rest was still long enough to use as a weapon.

That tiny bit of luck felt almost absurd.

The pain in my body was unbearable now.

My ankle felt like it was on fire.

My ribs hurt every time I breathed.

My shoulder throbbed wetly with blood.

My arms were shaking so badly I could barely keep the branch steady.

But I still stood.

Because I had already decided I wasn’t going to die here.

The wolf that had broken off from the rest had finally arrived and lunged first.

It slammed into me before I could properly react.

Its weight drove me flat onto my back, and then its jaws clamped down onto my shoulder.

The pain was instant and blinding.

I felt its teeth sink into flesh.

I felt blood spill down my arm.

I could smell its breath and its fur and the iron scent of my own blood, and for one horrible moment I truly thought that was it.

That was how I died.

Then something inside me changed.

I don’t know what it was.

Fear. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Rage.

Desperation.

Maybe all of it at once.

But suddenly my right arm moved with a strength I didn’t know I still had, and I drove the broken branch straight into the wolf’s eye.

The wood punched through.

It split flesh and bone.

Blood sprayed across my face.

The wolf convulsed violently on top of me, and then the strength left its body all at once.

It collapsed into dead weight.

I shoved it off and stared at it.

The branch was sticking clean through its skull exiting right outside the wolf’s other eye.

Blood ran down the wood in dark streams.

Its ruined eye socket was still leaking onto the dirt.

It was the first time I had killed anything and it should have been horrified.

I should have been shaking in disgust at what I had just done.

But I wasn’t.

What I felt instead was something much worse.

Satisfaction.

A dark, fierce thrill spread through my chest as I stared at the corpse.

It had attacked me.

And now it was dead because I, myself had killed it.

That realization sent a rush through me so sharp it nearly made me laugh.

For the first time in my life, something had tried to hurt me and I had forced it into the dirt with my own hands.

And a part of me loved that feeling.

Then I felt something else.

Something strange moved through the air around me.

I couldn’t see it.

Not with my eyes.

But I felt it with absolute certainty.

Something had left the wolf’s corpse and seemingly entered me.

It was like a dark warmth sliding into my chest, heavy and unnatural and far too real to be imagination.

And the worst part was that it felt good.

Not comforting.

Not gentle.

Good in a way that almost frightened me.

It didn’t heal me as my body still hurt just as badly as before.

But it wrapped around my exhaustion and sharpened something inside me, making the world feel brighter and crueler all at once.

I stood back up and looked at the remaining wolves.

They had slowed.

They were still approaching, but no longer with the same confidence as before.

Now they were cautious.

Their eyes flicked between me and the dead wolf at my feet, and seeing that slight fear in them made something ugly flare inside me.

I looked at the pack and all the anger from tonight came rushing back at once.

I tightened my grip on the branch and screamed at them.

"Just fucking die and leave me alone!"

The ground beneath my feet turned black.

Not dark.

Not shadowed.

Black in a way that looked wrong, as if the space was simply deleted from the world.

It spread outward from me in a wave, swallowing the dirt and grass and road in its path until it looked less like darkness and more like reality itself had been carved away leaving behind what seemed like a void.

The wolves recoiled instantly.

One of them wasn’t quick enough.

The darkness touched its paws first.

The wolf shrieked.

It threw itself backward and rolled violently across the ground as the darkness climbed over its fur like an infection.

It spread up its legs.

Across its body.

Over its neck and face.

Until the whole thing had been consumed by that same impossible void.

Its cries were awful.

High and panicked and full of pain.

I stood there shaking and bleeding while it writhed on the road until it dropped to the floor, slowly it was partially engulfed by the void below.

Everything went still.

For a couple of seconds, there was nothing.

Then a pulse of purple light spread from the top of the buried wolf’s head.

The glow moved across its now completely black body in intricate lines, carving strange ancient-looking markings into it as if someone were engraving runes directly into its flesh.

The patterns burned with a deep violet light.

Slowly, the wolf stood back up.

Its fur was still pure black.

The purple markings glowed across it like scars filled with light.

When it turned its head toward me, a shiver ran through my whole body.

But it didn’t attack me.

It looked at me for only a moment.

Then it turned away and faced the rest of the pack, the same wolves that it had stood beside less than a minute earlier.

And in that moment I realized, with a cold certainty settling into my chest, that whatever had just risen from the void was no longer one of them at all.