Morning came dull and gray, as if the sun had risen reluctantly and already regretted it. Fog clung tight to the forest, low and heavy, muffling every branch and stone. Dew slicked my boots, beading on my cloak and soaking into the leather straps across my chest. I moved in silence, but the Edgewilds were not silent with me.
The forest watched.
I crouched near the remnants of a snare I’d set the night before, fingers gliding over the faint impression of a boot print in the mud. Larger than mine. Deeper. Careful, not desperate. Heel to toe. Trained.
Not villagers.
Not hunters.
Fae.
My pulse didn’t quicken. It sharpened.
I scanned the earth again, two more sets of prints behind the first, one heavier, one lighter and narrow. They fanned outward in a pattern that suggested practiced rather than wandering.
A unit. Not wandering. Not guessing. Hunting.
And I wasn’t imagining it. They were moving through the Edgewilds the way a blade slices through a map.
Something metallic and warm glinted near the snare line. I brushed aside the moss to reveal a carved wooden totem, half-buried in the mud. A spiral of thorns wrapped around a single sunburst, each groove burned rather than carved, scorch marks without ash.
Solar-magic.
I turned it between my fingers. The wood was fragrant on the air. Pine, amber, smoke and beneath that some brighter note I couldn’t name. Something like sun on steel.
Not mine.
Not from this forest.
Not from my world.
I reburied it under the dirt and leaves the way you would bury a body and hoped it stayed buried, then rose back to my feet. The air thrummed, low and electric, like the forest itself was humming through the roots.
“So,” I whispered to the trees, “The hunters have come again.”
I slipped between shadows, moving soundlessly as a wild cat. My knives pressed warm against my hips and boots, seven points of promise. The yew bow rose easy across my back, ready for motion.
I never ran.
I hunted, even when I was being hunted.
And they were close. Very close.
I followed their trail long before I saw their faces.
They cut through the Edgewilds like they knew exactly what they were doing; no hesitation, no backtracking, no fear. Even their weight on the earth was measured. Whoever led them wasn’t learning the forest as he went. He was reading it, like it spoke to him. That made him dangerous. That made him like me.
I stayed high in the branches, my cloak blending with the bark. I moved from limb to limb, shadows swallowing me whole.
I heard them before I saw them. Soft voices beneath the trees. Professional. Controlled. These weren’t wandering bandits or mortal soldiers, they were a pack.
But one voice scraped something raw inside me.
Something I hadn’t buried deep enough
Deep. Steady. Carried the weight of command.
Then I saw him.
Copper hair caught the weak sunlight like a secret the morning wanted to keep and I wanted to steal. Broad shoulders encased in armor blackened for stealth but trimmed with faint gold thread that hinted at rank. His movements were not just strong, they were anchored. The others watched him without looking like they were watching him.
He knelt beside my snare and touched the cord with two fingers, like someone reading a letter written in a private language. Written for him.
“She’s clever,” he murmured.
My breath hitched—once.
Not fear, something worse, and that was enough.
He remembers my work.
He studies my traps.
He was learning me—and I was letting him.
I should have run, I but didn’t.
One of his men; tall, storm-blue eyes and enough tension to choke a room let out an amused grunt. “Mortal trickery.”
“She’s not ordinary.” Sunfire corrected.
I pressed a hand to my chest to quiet the roar of my pulse. What did he mean by that? Of course I was mortal.
Another voice, smooth, shadowed, responded from the fog behind them like a phantom. “You’ve scented her, then.”
My heart stopped.
Scented.
Claimed.
Like prey. Like something worth tracking.
Sunfire didn’t look predatory. He looked… focused. No. That was too dangerous a word. Too impossible.
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t deny it.
They moved again, and I moved with them, unseen. Their formation tightened, five soldiers sweeping the glen like one moving mechanism. And when the leader tilted his head toward the wind, the entire pack shifted with him.
They hunted with purpose.
Not for land.
Not for food.
For me.
By midday the air had shifted.
The forest is old and wise and hateful of intruders. She sings her warnings in sighs of bark and snaps of twigs, and I’d spent years learning her voice. But today, her warnings were not just sound. They were pressure, like a hand on my spine pushing me back.
Every instinct said turn back. Not this way. Not now.
But I have never been one to listen well.
Curiosity is a wound that never healed right and I kept picking at it.
I tracked them toward the old glen, the one full of burned stone and wild magic where the last battle of the war had melted trees into black glass like something had tried to erase the world. Fae soldiers hadn’t crossed that ground in two decades.
Until now.
My bow hung loose in my hand, though the tension in my body had coiled tight as drawn wire. Memories rattled in my skull; images of ruins, dreams of silver fire cutting through the world.
A wind rose suddenly from the east; hard, cold, carrying the scent of snow. It ripped through my cloak and sent my hair whipping across my face, the silver ends catching the light like sparks.
It sounded like a warning.
Like grief.
Like the edge of a storm.
A raven cawed overhead; sharp, cutting. Three times. That meant danger in the old language. That meant blood and blood meant consequences.
I didn’t stop, because the truth was simple; I didn’t know how to stop. Not when something felt like the beginning.
I slipped deeper into the glen, until the trees grew thick and ancient, until the moss muffled sound, until I couldn’t hear anything except my own breathing.
Then… voices.
His voice.
A ripple went through me, hot and unwelcome.
I drew back into shadow, invisible from the ground but one gust of wind from being impossible to ignore.
I knew, without knowing how I knew, that he was getting closer.
Not prey.
Not a threat.
Something worse.
Something I couldn’t name.
Dusk bled into the woods like ink poured into water; slow at first, then absolute. The Edgewilds thrive in darkness, and so do I. But tonight the dark felt crowded.
From the treetops, I watched them arrive.
Six shadows sliding between the trunks, silent, fluid, deadly. Even without their armor glinting faintly under the moonlight, their discipline would have betrayed them. They didn’t look around when they moved; they knew.
The one with copper-fire hair, Sunfire, raised a hand and the entire line stopped on instinct. My heartbeat matched the tiny sway of his cloak as he surveyed the clearing I’d marked with misdirection; faint prints, broken branches, signs of travel that would lead nowhere.
He didn’t fall for it.
His gaze skimmed upward not quite to where I hid, but close enough that my body went still as cooling steel.
I pulled my arrow to my cheek, bowstring taut and trembling with the weight of the moment. If he took another step, if the others positioned for flanking, I’d set it loose.
Instead, something primal took the shot for me.
The arrow flew before thought could catch it like instinct had chosen for me.
It sliced the edge of his cloak, clean as a signature.
He didn’t flinch.
Didn’t reach for his weapon.
Didn’t bark orders.
That unsettled me more than if he had.
He looked up.
Right through the shifting leaves, meeting my eyes as if the forest hadn’t bothered to hide me at all like he’d been waiting to.
His mouth curved, not in arrogance, not in threat.
In interest.
Not fear.
Not anger.
Something worse.
“She’s testing us.” he murmured, low enough that maybe only I heard it.
Heat cut through me; anger, adrenaline, and something sharper that I refused to name. I vanished before their counter attack could begin, slipping through shadows faster than any snare.
Let them track the wind.
Let them chase ghosts.
I had been surviving these woods since before any of them knew of my existence.
Sleep didn’t come. It took me.
One moment I was staring at the cave ceiling. The next, I was standing in the center of a burning forest.
Silver fire streamed from my hands, arcing like ribbons of light. Trees fell in perfect slices, collapsing without sound. The ground cracked open beneath me, glowing molten white.
Through the flame, my mother’s storm-gray eyes pierced mine.
“Find Kaelith. Find our place.”
I reached for her-
-but the dream twisted.
The fire didn’t hurt. Light became hands, shoulders, a breath against my neck.
And eyes, amber-gold flaring through the blaze.
Not threatening.
Watching like he recognized me.
As if I were the miracle and the danger at the same time.
Heat surged through me. The fire leaned toward me, bright and knowing, and whispered…
Like it already belonged to me.
A voice tried to rise through the roar.
I woke with a sound torn from my throat that didn’t belong to any creature that wanted to live.
The cave was dark.
My palms burned.
I slammed my hands into the stream until the glow drowned under freezing water.
“You don’t get to name me.”
The echo that returned wasn’t mine.
Or the river’s and it wasn’t empty.
Something in the woods listened.
Something answered.
I didn’t sleep again.
I moved through the trees instead, feet silent on moss and bark. The world was silver and black; moonlight stitched through branches like threads holding the forest together.
A prickle crawled across my skin, down my arms, into the bones of my fingers.
Someone else was moving.
Not villagers.
Not beasts.
Not wanderers.
Them.
I felt it the way prey feels the shadow of wings overhead. But I wasn’t prey or untouched either, and I refused to run just because instinct told me to.
My magic strained under the surface of my skin like an animal pacing a cage waiting to break it.
Stay down. Stay small.
The air tasted like storm and sun; like him.
I kept to the branches, following a current of pressure more than sound, letting the wind funnel information through the leaves. The space between footfalls, the faint shift in the air, the metallic tang of steel.
They were closing in.
Not fast.
Not carelessly.
With patience.
That was worse.
Predators chase.
Hunters wait.
When I paused to listen longer, the forest hummed beneath my bare palm, soft and warning.
The pattern was tightening.
“I know.” I whispered back.
Somewhere through the trees, a voice, deep and controlled, cut through the stillness.
“Hold formation. No sudden flares. She’ll feel it if we push.”
My breath caught.
He wasn’t just tracking me.
He was learning me.
I found their camp by accident, or maybe the forest allowed me to find it.
I was trailing their scent, the faint warmth of solar magic, the thread of scorched cedar, a touch of something sweet beneath it. When I crested a ridge and saw their fire glow through the branches below.
Five of them sat loose in a half-circle, armor shed but weapons within reach. It wasn’t the formation of soldiers frying after a long day, or men drinking to hide fear. It was a pack and they knew exactly what that meant. Comfortable. Bonded. Dangerous because they trusted one another.
I watched each of them.
The big one, forge-light grin, sharpening weapons like extensions of himself.
The restless one rested by his tent, a pendant twisting between his fingers.
The only female in the group, with sharp molten gold eyes full of wicked amusement—had been in a heated discussion with the big one, who let out an exasperated sigh—shaking his head.
Out in the shadows, a man who seemed to be apart of the shadows, nothing wasted.
By the fire was a wolfish man, sitting beside a wolfhound, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
And of course the one farthest out in the clearing;
Him, the Sunfire.
I remembered his name from the other night when I encountered him in the clearing.
Eiran.
He sat alone, blade across his knees, sharpening in long, patient strokes. Focused. Controlled. But not cold. Something about the angle of his shoulders told me he carried weight, not the arrogance of a noble.
The fire warmed his skin and caught in his hair, gilding it brighter than the flames themselves.
He laughed at something the big one muttered, just barely, a breath of amusement. The sound struck somewhere deep in me that I didn’t know existed and it answered.
Longing to belong.
Somewhere I wasn’t hunted.
They were a pack.
Not blood, but bond.
Not names, but devotion.
I’d never wanted to step into a circle so badly in my life.
I hated myself for it.
He turned then; not toward the fire, not toward his team but toward me.
Not directly. Not pinpoint, but as if something tugged at him from the edge of instinct and he listened.
I backed away so slowly that even the moss didn’t stir.
And still;
I could feel his attention like fingertips brushing the air where I had been standing.
I moved through the trees, but everything shimmered a faint silver undertone, like moonlight had seeped beneath the bark, the stone, the soil. Even the wind seemed to hum in a different key. The Edgewilds were awake in a way I had never felt before.
And something inside of me was waking with them.
As soon as I returned to my cave and laid on my furs, the dreams hit again; not fire this time, but voices.
Marble floors.
Light reflecting off gold seals.
Robes rustling like wings.
A great hall of marble and gold.
I could hear Eiran speaking into a room filled with power.
“A rogue banshee or spirit. Harmless.”
I sat up so fast that I could feel my furs slip off my shoulders, the fact that this was more of a vision than a dream escaping my thoughts, my eyes still shut as if asleep though I felt wide awake.
Harmless?
The word burned.
Was he lying for me?
Not to protect his court.
For some reason, he was lying to protect me.
Another ripple of sound broke through my thoughts. The stormy one’s voice was sharp and furious.
“You lied for her. And they heard it”
The fiery chaotic woman’s voice broke in. “Dangerous or not, she’s interesting.”
The big one’s voice was a rumble. “She’s alone.”
The silent shadow spoke, his voice smooth and quiet and almost teasing.
“The commander is thinking of her again.”
Silence followed until the steady, restrained thunder of Eiran’s voice rang through.
“She’s more than she seems and I intend to find out how much. The forest moves for her. Magic listens, and when she looked at me… it wasn’t fear I saw in her eyes.”
Recognition.
My throat tightened around the world.
I didn’t share that kind of recognition with anyone. Not since before the torches. Before the door broke. Before my mother was murdered right in front of me.
The dream or vision dissolved and I was back in the cave again, breath shaking.
They lied to their court for me.
Why?
Certainly not because they trusted me.
Maybe because they wanted to keep me for themselves for some reason.
If their court ever learned the truth…
I knew what people, mortal and fae alike would do to something or someone they feared.
I paced the cave like a trapped thing. My magic pressed against my ribs, begging for escape, lids of fire slamming beneath my skin.
Run.
Stay.
Hide.
Fight.
None of it fit anymore.
Nothing eased the pressure.
So I did the only thing I could.
I packed.
New route. New wards. New knots. Different hunting path. Different water source. Different fire site.
The Edgewilds watched me as I worked, patient and old, as if waiting to see what shape I would take next.
When the last charm was anchored to the tree and my bow was slung across my back, I finally stopped.
I could feel him.
Not close. Not far.
Just… present.
Like the moment before a storm decides where to break.
And this time, I had the terrible feeling I was the lightning.
And lightning never asks where it lands.