The forest was quiet—too quiet. Silence never meant safety.
I crouched low beside the little fire I’d banked with river stones, a strip of rabbit beneath my knife.
The blade flashed orange as the flames licked higher, then sank back into shadow as if the night had swallowed it. Around the clearing, bones hung from the black pines— bird skulls, hare legs, ribs wired with twine. They clicked and rattled in the wind like morbid bells. The villagers called them witch-chimes. Let them. Fear was a better ward than any prayer ever was.
I worked without thinking. Slice, tug, scrape. No hesitation. The motions were older than memory. Older than childhood. Grease slicked my fingers, silver in the moonlight. Ash streaked my cheek where I’d wiped sweat away with the back of my hand. The meat hissed when it met the hot stone. Fat seared, smoke rose with the scent of pine resin, wood char and a thread of sage I’d thrown in to drown the iron tang of blood. The scent of my life: forest floor after the rain, smoke and leather, the cold bite of steel. The wind shifted. I froze. Faint and far, the village bells rang once, twice… three measured notes. Not celebration. Not mourning. It was either time for night prayers, or a warning. The bells had never rung for me.
My mouth thinned. I set my knife aside, listening for the follow-up; boots, voices, the careless crackle of men who believed the woods belonged to them. Nothing, only the fire, the bones and my pulse.
“Not my problem,” I told the dark. It never had been, and tore a strip of meat free with my teeth. That was the rule. Survive first. Wonder later.
The heat burned my tongue, I chewed until the sting faded, until my breath settled.
When I’d eaten my fill, I wiped the blade clean and strung the rabbit’s remains on twine, tying the new bones with the old. The charm’s knot-work was muscle memory at this point, fingers working faster than thought: loop, pull, bind, whisper something my mouth remembered though my mind did not—the bones turned slowly, catching silver on their edges.
“Stay awake,” I told them. “Warn me if danger comes.”
I banked the fire to coals and slid back beneath the jut of rock that made my shelter more than a campsite. The cave’s mouth framed the clearing like a jaw. My bed was a nest of furs and old canvas. My weapons lay always within reach should I need them; my yew bow and a fist of arrows tipped with iron-fae alloy and seven flat knives balanced for throwing.
The first stars were hard and cold. I watched them until my eyes blurred. The bones clicked once or twice; only from the breeze and then I slept.
Fire bloomed behind my eyes. I knew the sound of a door splintering better than I knew my own name. It tore the dream open: wood shrieking, torchlight flooding across packed earth, shadows leaping up the walls like trapped animals. My mother’s bare feet, pale and steady, standing between me and the men who had broken into our little cottage. Her hands smelled of lavender and sage when she shoved me under the floorboards. Her heartbeat thundered through her fingers against my skin.
“Do not make a sound, Ceren.” Her gray-blue eyes met mine… “Find Kaelith. Find our place.” She whispered urgently as she stood up and walked away from where she had hidden me. I didn’t know who Kaelith was. I didn’t know what place she meant. I only knew the way her voice broke around the words.
Boots thundered through the cottage. A laugh cut the air. The room filled with men and flame—steel flashing, breath thick with smoke—the crush of too many bodies and not enough air. My mother’s voice rose; words I couldn’t catch, a prayer, a spell, or my mother’s last command then… silence before a sound like the sky tearing apart.
Silver fire burst at the edge of the dream—blinding, wrong, beautiful, and for an instant I was certain the world was being engulfed in that light and all I could hear was a high ringing inside my head. Then the fire became a scream, then the scream turned to silence.
I woke with my heart clawing at the cage of my ribs like it was trying to escape me, coals glowed in a dying crescent, red as an open wound. Cold crept into the clearing in my sleep, settling on my tongue and teeth, on the sweat that slicked my neck. For a long breath, I didn’t move. Dreams liked movement. They followed it, poured through it, shaped it into something more.
My hands hurt. When I could make myself look, I found crescent shapes where my nails had bit into my palms, four beads of blood proof that I hadn’t escaped it in each palm, steady as a measure of time. I curled my fingers closed and opened them again. Blood welled up and ran down my palm.
“Enough,” I rasped as I slid from the furs and moved through the clearing, silent, deliberate, each step placed where I’d learned the ground would not betray me. The bone charms dozed in their ropes. The bells in the distance had stopped. The stream called louder than all of it.
Water was a blade of cold across my skin. I plunged my hands into it to the wrist, to the forearm, until the ache of thaw turned to numbness. Red slipped free in thin ribbons that swirled away into the dark water. I held there until my breath slowed, and the pulse at my throat stopped tripping over itself.
When I looked down, a face looked back.
The surface shivered with silver. My eyes were midnight blue, flecked with shimmering silver, bright—like stars trapped in ice. My birthmarks, strange filigree patterns along my wrists and arms, back, chest, and up my neck, thin constellation lines glowed faintly where the water touched them. I swallowed, the glow dimming and brightening with each breath, as if it were listening to the beat of my heart.
“No. Not now.” I told my marks. It had simply begun one winter and never stopped. They faded obediently, vanishing back into my pale skin. I dried my hands on my cloak, though the cold bit even through the leather and wool. The stream’s mist smelled clean, straight through to the bone. Beneath the stream’s scent lingered wood smoke, pine resin, leather, and steel. Under all of that, the memory of lavender and sage , and a voice I’d never forget.
“Find Kaelith,” I breathed, as if the trees could answer. “Find our place.”
The pines rustled. Somewhere far to the West, a fox barked twice. The woods offered no other reply.
I went back to the clearing, fed the coals until the little fire woke and stretched, then knelt and set my throwing knives down in a neat even row. Habit steadied me: cloth, oil, a whetstone smooth as river glass. The small blades blinked the flames back at me. Sharpening calmed the hands that dreams unsettled. Edge, drag, lift. The familiar sounds filled the hollow that the nightmare had opened. When my throwing knives were perfect, I began testing their weight and balance, listening for the honest sound of metal that knew its purpose.
The bones gave a soft, lazy knock. Only the wind. I told myself twice for the stubborn part of me that liked to catalog threats and never forget where they’d come from. You are not a witch child. Witches had teachers. Witches had covens. I had bones and guesses— the sensible part of me said. You are a girl in the woods with far too many knives.
My mother’s last words were older than sense, and older than the ache that lived under my breast bone as if they had been caged there.
I tucked the blades away and pulled the fur over my shoulders, but I did not lie down. Sleep would not have me again tonight. Instead I sat with my back to the rock’s cold flank and watched the edges of the trees for the wrong kind of dark; the thick kind, like a bruise, that meant something more than night was moving.
Hours turned thin as wire. The fire breathed. The forest held its breath with me. By the time the East began to pale, my heartbeat had finally remembered how to work. I rose, rolled my shoulders, and blew the fire down to ash. No trace, no trail, nothing left to tell a patient hunter I’d been here. Before I slipped into the trees, I looked once toward the village through the pines. A thin plume of smoke rose from that direction; bake ovens, first fires, or some other business I didn’t want to name because naming made things real. The bells did not ring. Children would dare one another to throw stones at the tree line by mid day or to step one foot past the line and shriek that the witch would take them.
Sometimes I watched the market from the ridge, though I never stayed long. Sometimes I let their voices thread the quiet I lived in, just long enough to remember there were words meant for more than warnings.
“Not today,” I said. I would not look toward smoke and pretend it was only bread baking. The woods took me in, as they had always done. I moved the way I’d taught myself: soft-footed, weight spread, breathing with the branches, not against them. The forest had rules; I followed them and it let me be.
A scrap of old ribbon fluttered from a low branch where I’d hung it seasons ago to mark a bind. I slid into it, belly to earth, and watched the game trail a long time with my cheek in the cold leaf litter, until two does and a yearling stepped through the break in the hazel. I did not reach for my bow or knife. I reached for stillness. The smaller doe lifted her head and looked straight at me, ears flickering. For a heartbeat, recognition passed between us, wild to wild. her pulse, my pulse, the quiet moving through us both. She snorted, soft and led her family away. When I pushed to my feet again, my knees were stiff and my fingers numb. The sun had not yet broken through the canopy but its promised slivered through the mist. In that light, the faint filigree on my wrists shimmered again, startled awake by the touch of dawn then slept.
I took the long path to the river and checked my traps as I went; snares empty, spring-lines untripped, the dead-fall still set but the bait had been taken. I reset them, and traced the old ward-marks I’d carved into them with the point of my knife, pricking the pad of my thumb for a bead of blood to feed the lines. Not magic. Not really. Just… something the woods answered. The cut stung, I welcomed it.
By the time I reached the stream bend again, day had come clear and thin and cold. I knelt, cupped water in my hands, and drank until my teeth ached. The forest did not argue. It only listened, the way it always had, the way it always would, until listening was no longer enough.
A branch snapped.
Not wind.
Not deer.
Too heavy. Too deliberate.
The bones in the clearing began to rattle.
I was no longer alone.