The forest at night was a different world.
During the day, the Great Forest had a quality to it — something old and aware, the kind of quiet that came from a place that had existed long enough to stop being impressed by things moving through it. At night, that quality deepened into something less comfortable. The trees didn't change. The dark just made them honest.
Ginn moved slowly. The others matched his pace without being told.
The blood trail was faint, but it was there — dark spots on roots and fallen leaves, a smear on the side of a low branch where a small hand had steadied itself. The blood of the girl who was hurting badly and hadn't stopped to hide where they'd been. Ginn kept his eyes low and his breathing even and followed it the way you followed anything in the dark. Carefully. Without assuming you knew where it ended.
Behind him, the captured man walked between Rooster and Evanc, wrists bound, moving because the alternative had been explained to him in terms he understood. He hadn't spoken since they entered the forest. He looked at the trees the way a man looked at familiar ground.
They stopped at a wide tree, old enough that three men couldn't have wrapped their arms around it. Rooster pushed the man down against the roots. Steil crouched in front of him, dagger out, tip resting at the soft point below the jaw.
"Everything," Steil said. "Start talking."
The man looked at the dagger. Then at Steil. Then he smiled.
It wasn't bravado. It was something quieter than that—the smile of someone who had already made their peace with a particular set of outcomes.
"My death here means nothing," he said. "There are others. More than you'd want to know about." He tilted his head slightly against the dagger's tip. "I'd rather die than tell you anything."
Ginn stepped forward.
He didn't raise his voice. Didn't change his expression. He crouched, wrapped one hand around the man's leg just above the knee, and let the cold come.
Not fast. Slow. The kind of cold that moved through cloth and skin and settled into the bone like it had always belonged there and was only now remembering where it lived.
The man's smile faltered.
Steil placed the tip of the dagger against the man's lips. A suggestion. The man understood it.
"The only reason you're still breathing," Ginn said quietly, "is because we needed to avoid the magic knights on the road. You were useful for that." He let the cold deepen slightly. "You're less useful now."
He looked at Steil. Steil withdrew the dagger.
"Tell me who you are," Ginn asked.
The man looked at him for a moment. Then he gathered whatever was sitting in his mouth and spat it directly into Ginn's face.
The cold came fast after that.
The man's leg froze and shattered first — ice spreading from Ginn's hand outward, locking through the joint, and then the sound. Short and final, like something that had never been meant to bend, being asked to anyway. The man's scream started, and Steil's hand covered his mouth before it could finish.
The man shook against the tree roots. His eyes were wide now. The composure was still there underneath, but it was working much harder than it had been.
Ginn wiped his face with the back of his hand.
"Your lungs next," he said. He placed his other hand flat against the man's chest. "Then your heart." He let the cold settle at the surface. Not moving. Just waiting. "You'll feel it the whole way."
The man's breathing had gone shallow. Not from fear — from the ice already spreading inward, slow and patient, finding the space between each breath and making it smaller.
"It doesn't matter," the man whispered. His voice had lost some of its steadiness. "You'll die if you know anyway."
Ginn looked at him. Said nothing. The cold moved slightly deeper.
The man closed his eyes. Opened them. Something in him was calculating. Running the numbers on what was happening to him.
"Follow the blood trail," he said. Barely a whisper now. "You'll find a lantern."
Ginn didn't move.
"Past the lantern." The man's chest was rising in short pulls. "Underground. A dungeon."
"How long?" Ginn asked.
"Four hours." The man's eyes were losing focus at the edges. "Maybe less if you move." Something shifted in his face. The composure is coming back, but different now — not the composure of someone who hadn't broken. The composure of someone who had and didn't mind. "It doesn't matter how fast you go." His mouth curved slightly. "Once you enter that place, your fate is sealed." A breath. A sound that might have been a laugh if he'd had more air for it. "Better to end here. Better for all of you."
He stopped breathing shortly after that.
Ginn stood. The sounds of the forest came back in — wind moving high in the canopy, something small rustling in the undergrowth far off to the left. The blood trail continued ahead of them, patient and dark against the forest floor.
Rina spoke first.
"What now?"
Ginn looked at the trail. He was quiet for a moment — not hesitating exactly, just letting the decision finish forming before he gave it a voice.
He turned to his team.
"Any regrets?" he said. "Before we go forward. Say them now."
Rina didn't pause. "Going back north empty-handed is worse than this. I'd rather know."
Rooster nodded once. No words needed.
Steil put his dagger away. "I'd regret not moving forward more than moving forward." He glanced at the trail. "So."
Evanc took a long breath through his nose and let it out slowly. "I'd like to go home and get married," he said. "But what's four hours?" He looked at Ginn. "Let's make it quick."
Ginn almost smiled. "Good. The trail is still fresh — we move fast before anything else smells it. Stay tight. Don't separate."
Rooster looked at the trees around them. "Strange that we haven't crossed a single beast out here. You'd think—"
"Don't," Steil said.
"I'm just saying. We might be lucky."
"The goddess is watching over us," Steil said, with the specific conviction of someone who needed to believe that right now.
Rina laughed quietly. "What goddess. Whatever's up there doesn't care about this world."
"Agreed," Evanc said.
"Comfort's free," Steil said. "Let me have it."
Rooster glanced at the trail again. "You think August is actually down there?"
Nobody answered immediately.
"Maybe," Rooster said. "Maybe not. But if we don't follow this lead—"
"We won't get another one," Ginn said. He looked at each of them once. "Straighten up. We move fast, and we move quietly. Stay on the trail. Don't stop unless I stop."
They coated themselves in mana — a low, even hum, each of them drawing it close and tight rather than projecting outward, moving like shadows rather than warriors. Then they went into the trees, following the blood trail north and deeper and down toward whatever a dying man had decided was worth warning them about.
The night followed them in.
In his quarters in the elven kingdom, Drune's eyes were open.
His mana zone stretched across the entirety of the Great Forest, the way it always did — a second awareness, vast and fine-grained, reading the forest the way a hand read familiar cloth. He knew every animal path, every old mana pool, every place where the trees grew close enough to create their own small weather. He knew the difference between a hunter moving through the eastern reaches and a predator moving through the southern ones.
He knew these figures were neither.
One seventh Zenith. Four fifth Zeniths. Moving in formation, tight and disciplined, tracking something rather than wandering. He'd picked them up at the forest's edge and followed them from his room without moving from his chair — five points of mana-warmth moving through his awareness like stones dropped in still water.
Foreign, he thought. Frost Kingdom, from the signatures.
He watched them move deeper.
What are you following? Where are you heading?
He kept his senses on them. Patient. The forest could wait. It always waited.
In the south, where the dwarf kingdom had been, the crater still breathed.
Not literally. But the residual energy from what had happened there days ago hadn't fully dissipated — mana and divinity stirred together in the disturbed earth, scattered by the collision of forces that had no business existing in the same space. It rose from the ground in invisible currents that most people couldn't have felt and that Goulag felt clearly enough to taste.
He stood at the crater's center and breathed it in.
"Divinity and mana," he murmured. "Fused in the ground itself." He turned slowly, reading the currents. "Inefficient. But valuable."
He levitated. Not high — just enough to find the center of where the energy was densest, the point where the two forces had mixed most thoroughly before settling. He spread his hands slightly and let his core begin the work of pulling it inward. Dark energy rose around him as the absorption began, slow and methodical, a process that required patience more than effort.
His chest scar caught the faint light from the sky above. The one that went deep.
He thought about the man in the forest. The one with no mana signature and a sword that had no business being in his hand. The one who had rattled him — not frightened, not threatened, but rattled, which was different, which was worse in its way because it meant something he hadn't accounted for existed in his calculations.
He filed it again. Dangerous unknown. Address when the time is allowed.
The eclipse was three months away. August was nearly ready. Everything was proceeding.
He pulled another current of scattered divinity into his core and let the dark absorb it and said nothing else to the empty crater around him.
Deep in the Great Forest, five people were following a blood trail toward a lantern, toward his Den.
He didn't know that yet.