Chapter 4: The Interrogator
[Root Bunker — Midnight, Day 3]
The plan lasted about four hours.
In Nathan's defense, it had been a solid plan. Stay hidden. Observe from cover. Avoid the winged thing on the cliff. Gather information through passive reconnaissance until he understood the tactical landscape well enough to make contact on his own terms.
Good plan. Professional plan. The kind of plan a rational person makes when dropped into an alien environment with hostile megafauna and no backup.
The plan did not account for the raven turning into a man.
One moment I was staring through the gap in the root structure at the dark shape perched outside. The next moment the dark shape moved—and kept moving, unfolding, expanding, limbs sprouting from feathers, a face emerging from a beak, the whole transformation lasting maybe two seconds and violating every biological principle I'd spent eight years studying.
A man stood where the bird had been.
Lean. Dark-haired. Sharp features with a quality I could only call angular—everything about him pointed somewhere, from his cheekbones to his jaw to the way his eyes caught the faint light and turned it into something accusatory. He was dressed in black, and he stood with a slight tilt to his head that was distinctly, unmistakably avian.
He looked down at me through the gap in the roots.
"Don't scream," he said. "It won't help."
I didn't scream. What I did was lurch backward, hit the root wall behind me with my shoulder blades, and feel my body lighten involuntarily—the gravity manipulation kicking in on pure instinct, trying to lift me away from the threat. I forced it down. Floating would not improve this situation.
"You—" I started.
"Were the raven, yes." He crouched to get a better look at me through the root gap. His head tilted again—a tiny, precise movement that belonged on a bird, not a person. "You've been sleeping under my watch for three nights. I decided it was time we spoke properly."
My heart was hammering. The root bunker that had seemed like shelter ten seconds ago was now a trap—one entrance, no exit, and a shapeshifter blocking the way out. I forced my breathing steady. ER training. Three seconds in, three seconds out. Assess.
"You going to let me out of here for this conversation?"
He considered it. Stepped back.
I crawled out of the root bunker and stood, brushing bark fragments from my clothes. The night forest was quiet around us—that same unnatural silence from the valley earlier, as if every creature within earshot was holding its breath. Moonlight filtered through the canopy in pale columns, turning the moss silver.
The man—the raven—circled me slowly. Not threatening, exactly. Evaluating. The way a doctor circles a patient when they suspect something the chart doesn't show.
"Where are you from?" he said.
"Another world." No point in lying. I'd already given this answer to the empty air a dozen times, practicing for exactly this kind of encounter.
"How did you enter the Moors?"
"I don't know. I woke up here three days ago. No memory of arrival."
"What are you?"
"Human. I think. I don't have a better answer."
He stopped circling. Stood directly in front of me, close enough that I could see the texture of his skin—too smooth, slightly unusual, as if the transformation hadn't quite finished in places. His eyes were the color of wet coal.
"You fly without wings."
"I manipulate gravity. It's not the same thing, but the result is similar."
"Where did you learn this?"
"Nowhere. It came with—" I gestured vaguely at myself, at the forest, at the general situation. "Whatever happened to bring me here."
Silence. He tilted his head the other direction. Processing. Then:
"No one is this honest."
"Excuse me?"
"Three days I've watched you. You talk to yourself. You talk to the wallerbogs. You say exactly what you're thinking with no apparent filter." He folded his arms. "In my experience, people who tell the truth this readily are either genuinely innocent or so confident in their lies that they've stopped bothering with deception."
"Or they're lost in a strange forest with no allies, no information, and no reason to lie."
"Hm." The sound was sharp. Birdlike. "That's also possible."
---
He asked more questions. Dozens. Some practical—what did I eat, how far had I explored, had I encountered any creatures that tried to harm me. Some probing—did I know what fae were, had I ever encountered magic before, could I demonstrate the gravity ability.
I answered everything. Hovered two feet off the ground to prove the flight. Didn't try the object manipulation—the headache from earlier had barely faded, and showing weakness to an interrogator was bad medicine.
"The wall of thorns," he said, leaning against a tree trunk with the casual ease of someone who'd spent decades learning human body language. "You found it."
"Hard to miss. It's two stories tall."
"You didn't try to pass through it."
"The thorns are the length of my forearm and the barrier radiates don't-touch-me energy. I'm new here, not stupid."
The ghost of something crossed his face. Not a smile. An adjustment. A recalculation.
"The Mistress of the Moors will see you herself," he said. "Tomorrow. At dawn."
My stomach clenched. "And if she doesn't like what she sees?"
"Then you'll wish you'd tested the thorns."
"That's not exactly reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be reassuring." He pushed off the tree. Stood straight, and for a moment the moonlight caught him in a way that emphasized the not-quite-human quality of his features—the too-sharp angles, the slightly wrong proportions, the eyes that reflected light a fraction of a second too long. "You have two options. You can attempt to flee tonight and reach the thorn wall, which will kill you. Or you can present yourself tomorrow and perhaps survive."
"Perhaps."
"Perhaps." He held my gaze. "I've seen her in merciful moods. Once."
The laugh came out before I could stop it. Not real humor—the pressurized kind, the stress-release valve that opens when the situation becomes so far beyond absurd that the body needs to vent something or rupture. It sounded wrong in the silent forest, too loud, too human, and it went on a beat too long.
"I survived a hospital fire," I said, "just to get murdered by a magic bird-person. That's—" Another laugh, shorter. "That's really something."
The raven-man's expression shifted. The calculation remained, but something else entered it—something I couldn't name with confidence. Curiosity, maybe. The faint surprise of encountering something unexpected.
"A hospital," he said slowly. "What is a hospital?"
"A building where you take sick and injured people to make them better. Or try to." The laughter was gone now, replaced by the familiar weight of memory. Smoke and screaming and a ceiling that groaned like a dying animal. "I was a surgeon. A healer. Before."
"Before you arrived here."
"Before I died."
Silence. The forest breathed around us. Something in the undergrowth moved—one of the wallerbogs, probably, lurking at the edges of the conversation like a furry eavesdropper.
"You claim you died." His voice was flat. Neutral. But his head tilted again.
"The building collapsed. I was inside. Next thing I know, I'm lying on moss in a magical forest with the ability to ignore gravity." I spread my hands. "If you have a better explanation, I'd genuinely love to hear it."
He studied me for a long moment. The kind of look that weighed and measured and sorted, that compared what was being said against years of experience with deception and determined—with the ruthless efficiency of someone whose survival depended on accurate assessment—whether the raw material in front of him was truth or performance.
"You'll sleep tonight," he said finally. "I'll wake you before dawn."
"Will you be the bird or the man?"
"The bird is quieter." He turned toward a low branch. "And easier on the eyes."
He shifted. The transformation went the other direction this time—man folding into bird, dark feathers erupting from dark clothing, the whole process so smooth and quick that it looked less like magic and more like the man had been wearing the raven as a costume all along. The bird hopped once, twice, settled on the branch, and fixed me with those coal-dark eyes.
I stood in the clearing, heart rate still elevated, and processed.
Tomorrow I'd meet the winged figure from the cliff. The Mistress of the Moors. The one who'd made a man turn into a raven, who'd walled an entire forest in thorns, who ruled a domain where trees breathed and flowers watched and gravity was apparently optional.
I looked at the raven. "Is she cruel?"
The bird didn't move for a long time. Then it tilted its head—left side, the same precise motion the man used—and held the pose. Considering. The question apparently required more thought than anything else I'd asked tonight.
The raven settled its wings. Made a single, low sound that could have been a sigh if birds could sigh.
She's been given every reason to be.
I didn't hear the words. But I understood them anyway—in the angle of the head, the set of the feathers, the weight of that silence.
Nathan crawled back into the root bunker, lay on his back, and stared at nothing. Sleep was unlikely. He tried anyway.
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