I breathe, shaky and shallow. Nod once. And we move on.
Neither of us speaks for a while. The path bends near the ravine’s edge, where the cliffs open into a yawning drop, jagged and moss-slicked. I glance over the side. Water churns far below, frothing and loud even through the fog. I remember the jump. The impossible leap. How the air screamed in my ears as gravity yanked me down, how the world shrank to nothing but fear and freefall.
“I almost died here,” I say, mostly to myself.
“But you didn’t.”
His voice is low, steady. He doesn’t sound surprised.
I look at him. “You’re not gonna ask what happened?”
“You’ll tell me if you want to.”
We stand there a moment longer, watching the river roar below like it’s hungry for more.
“Do you trust me?” he asks.
I blink. “Do I what?”
“I said do you trust me?”
I stare at him. At his too-big frame and strange, intense eyes and voice like cracked stone warmed in the sun. I should say no. I should laugh. I should walk away and never look back.
Instead, I say, “I don’t know yet.”
He nods. “That’s fair.”
We keep walking. The forest closes around us again, and I wonder if I’ll ever really get out of it—or if some part of me will always be lost here, among the fog and blood and ghosts.
Kragna hums something under his breath. A tune I don’t know. It’s low and rhythmic, like river stones tumbling.
I don’t ask what it means.
I just let it carry us forward.
The birds stop singing again.
It’s like a breath sucked out of the forest. I know that silence now—know it in my bones, the way an old wound knows a storm’s coming. But before I can speak, Kragna moves.
"Down!" he roars, and the ground vanishes beneath me.
My shoulder smashes into dirt and rock as he yanks me flat against the mossy forest path. A heartbeat later, the worldscreams—a boulder sails overhead, close enough that I feel its hunger in the air, like it's tasting for blood. It slams into a tree with a thunderouscrack, obliterating bark and branch alike in a shower of splinters.
Another one follows.
And then they appear—two ogres, hulking and stinking of rot and wet stone, smashing through the underbrush like they were born from the mountain’s bile itself. One has a skull helmet, too small for its head, teeth sticking out like a crown. The otherdrags a slab of uprooted tree in both hands, its feet pounding earth that quivers beneath us.
“No,” I whisper. My knees turn to water.
Same band. Same bastards. I remember that grin—wide, dull, innocent in a way that’s somehow worse. The one with the crown licked blood off a friend’s crushed ribcage.
I lift my gun with a shaking hand, but before I can aim, Kragna’s already moving—toward them.
Running toward them.
And then hechanges.
His laugh rumbles out first, low and sharp like thunder cracking sideways. His skin ripples, hardens, darkens—like stone sweating blood. His shoulders stretch impossibly wide. Bones crack and reform with wet, sickening sounds. A second pair of arms burst from his sides with a spray of steaming flesh, ending in hooked claws that shine like obsidian.
