The moment she crossed the woods, darkness engulfed her whole.
Kyva wasn't sure what she had truly expected. It had been a long time since she escaped enough to be outside like this, but this did not look like the soft dark of a moonlit road she had imagined.
The forest loomed dense and untamed, its canopy knitting together overhead so tightly that even the stars were strangled from sight. The air shifted the deeper she ran, colder beneath the trees, the damp scent of moss and rot hitting her nostrils.
She wasn't afraid to admit that she had no sense of direction. Nothing here looked or felt familiar.
But she ran.
Faster.
Twigs snapped underfoot no matter how carefully she tried to move, each crack a betrayal from nature. It pierced the tender skin of her sole, and she nearly cried out.
Her undergarments offered her no protection from the night. The thin linen clung to her sweat-damp skin, transparent in places where it pressed against her, already snagging and tearing on brambles that seemed to reach deliberately for her.
Leaves brushed her half-bare legs like searching fingers, and low branches whipped across her face without warning, striking her cheeks and collarbone hard enough to sting long after she had passed.
It felt as if the woods themselves were resisting her escape, resentful of her intrusion and were eager to deliver her back to the establishment.
And why wouldn't they be?
The establishment had been built in the middle of nowhere for a reason. There were no nearby roads. No neighboring villages. Just miles of tangled forests and uneven grounds to discourage exactly this. It had to be structured to swallow any hope before it traveled too far.
As the realization settled, Kyva's fear shifted shape inside her. She was truly lost, and there were no landmarks in the dark to properly guide her to safety.
Her thoughts raced.
Had she made a mistake by running away?
But there was no use in turning back now.
Behind her, voices spilled outward like hounds loosed from a leash. Men barked at the top of their lungs, their boots trampling bushes.
"Spread out!" A voice yelled impatiently.
The warden's voice.
"Check the east side!"
"She's barefoot, she won't get far!"
"I swear when I get my hands on her-!"
The anger in each voice made Kyva's breath hitch in fear.
'Don't look back.'
Her own voice echoed in her mind, her will stronger.
Kyva knew better than to surrender herself. She knew what awaited her if they caught her. Mistake or not, she would rather choose to die out here than crawl back to that hellish establishment.
So she kept her gaze forward, even when tears blurred the dark into shifting shadows.
One step at a time.
Then another.
Her feet pounding against the earth.
Her chest ached from the pace she forced herself to keep.
But she didn't slow.
She couldn't afford to.
Unfortunately, a gnarled root hidden beneath fallen leaves and invisible in the dark, hooked around her barefoot. Her toes bent painfully, and she pitched forward with a strangled gasp.
Before she could catch herself, her knee slammed into a stone with a sickening crack.
"...!"
Pain exploded upward, white and blinding.
The impact knocked air from her lungs in a voiceless gasp. For a heartbeat, Kyva lay there stunned, the world reduced to the violent pulse radiating from her knee. It felt wrong, as though the bone there had shattered, as though something inside had cracked beyond repair.
Her mouth opened—
—and she didn't know what to clutch.
Her knee, where agony throbbed in vicious waves. Or her mouth, to cage the cry clawing its way up her throat.
Instinctively, her hands flew to her mouth, her palms crushing against her lips as a broken sound escaped anyway, thin and strangled.
But it was unfavourably loud.
A voice suddenly cut through the trees, alerting the others. "Hey! I heard a voice! Over there!"
The words sliced through Kyva's paralysis, and when another shout answered, she realized she had been caught.
The pain anchored her to the ground for a terrible second longer. The cold earth pressed against her bare stomach and her thighs, leeching heat from her trembling body. Her knee throbbed so violently she felt nauseous and sick.
For one fragile second, she almost let herself stay there. Almost let the men find her and end the running.
'Run'
But she couldn't.
'Get up!'
The command didn't come from the hunters, but from her own furious and desperate thoughts.
'Get up.'
Kyva swallowed hard, forcing air into her lungs. She pressed her palm into the dirt and pushed. Pain flared sharply as she bent her injured leg, nearly buckling again. A choked whimper slipped free despite her efforts, but she clenched her jaw and forced herself upright.
A warm trickle of blood, thick and steady, slid down her shin and into the mud at her feet. But she didn't look at it. Measuring the damage would only make it real.
Instead, she staggered forward, and the first step nearly dropped her.
The second was worse.
But by the third she found a broken rhythm as she dragged her injured leg through the undergrowth, while the other did most of the work. Every movement sent sharp tremors through her knees, but stopping wasn't an option.
Behind her, the voices were drawing closer. But she moved anyway.
"Little slave…" the warden's voice pierced into the night as he warned, "you'll make this a lot easier for yourself and everyone else if you surrender now."
Branches snapped in rapid succession. The beam of lantern flickered briefly through the trees to her left before vanishing again behind trunks and bushes.
"You can't escape from here," he continued, "stop running, and I'll spare you the leather this time. Not to forget but you have the slave title branded behind your back! What makes you think you can outrun that?! It's no use!"
The more he spoke to heighten her terror, the faster her pulse spiked, until it wasn't just fear anymore.
It was vertigo.
The branches ahead began to thin.
The forest floor sloped upwards without warning, the soil giving way to rock beneath her battered feet. Then the trees broke.
Kyva stumbled out onto a narrow ledge of stone.
Wind struck her immediately, and far below, water roared.
A river carved through the dark earth beneath the cliff, where the faintest hint of moonlight caught its surface. It churned around jagged rocks, white foam flashing like teeth in the shadows. The drop was too high to measure clearly in the dark, but not so high that the water looked shallow.
It looked violent.
Behind her, the forest erupted.
Men burst through the tree line, their lanterns lights flaring gold against the night. Boots skidded to a halt as they saw where she stood.
"She's trapped!"
"Don't move!"
They fanned out instinctively, forming a crescent behind her.
The warden shoved through his men, stepping forward with a dark scowl. "It's over. There's nowhere left to go. I've had it with you and your games."
But Kyva wasn't listening.
She swayed slightly at the edge, toes curling over the cold stone. Pebbles shifted and clattered downward, disappearing into the roar below.
Her vision blurred as exhaustion dragged at her limbs, as starvation hollowed her from the inside out.
She could feel herself fading.
The warden stepped closer.
"Don't be stupid. You won't survive that."
Maybe not.
Maybe that was the point.
Kyva turned her head slightly, just enough to glance over her shoulder at the river below. The wind lifted her hair from her face, and the brand on her back throbbed once and stopped.
They thought they had her cornered.
They thought scaring her would make her crawl back to them.
But to their visible unease, she smiled.
It wasn't a wide or wild smile. It was small, quiet and certain.
And then she let herself fall.
She allowed her weight to tip backwards, trusting gravity to finish what she had started the moment she ran.
For one suspended instant, the world felt weightless.
Lantern lights stretched into molten streaks above her. Then, impact.
The river swallowed her whole.