"He was here just now, wasn't he?"
Ozair said it while staring into the dark forest, his voice carrying the particular uncertainty of someone who already suspects the answer.
"No," Aryan said. His eyes stayed on the same darkness as he tried to recall. "I don't think he was. Not even when we were running."
Toviro got to his feet immediately.
Across the garden, Elina was standing in the doorway of the house, smiling, waving them in. "Hey, come on. Hurry up."
The warmth of the fire inside came through the open door behind her. When nobody moved, her smile slowed. She stepped forward onto the grass. "What happened?"
"Mayo isn't here," Toviro said.
Elina went completely still.
Mina came through the door behind her and stopped when she saw their faces. She looked at the group.
She counted.
Her eyes moved to the treeline and back and something shifted behind them, a mother's specific awareness of an absence, the kind that arrives before the mind has fully processed it.
"How didn't I notice," she said quietly, more to herself than anyone. "How didn't I notice my own son."
The house owner appeared in the doorway behind her. "What happened, ladies? Is everything alright?"
"One of our friends is missing," Elina said.
Ozair was already turning toward the forest. "We go back. Right now. We find him."
"Agreed," Aryan said.
They ran.
The man shouted after them from his doorway. "Wait. Wait, it's dangerous out there at night." When nobody slowed he looked at his son Yami standing beside him.
Yami looked up at his father. "I think we should go with them, father. They seem like good people."
The man looked at his son. He looked at the dark forest. He exhaled through his nose.
Then he lowered himself to Yami's level and said, "You stay here and protect the house. You're the man of it when I'm gone, you hear me?"
Yami straightened. "Roger, Father."
The man went back inside for a moment and came out with something that wasn't a torch, not the burning kind.
It was a wooden rod with a medium-sized crystal ball fixed to its top.
He touched the ball with two fingers and it came alive, emitting a clean white light that reached ten feet in every direction.
He ran with it raised and caught up to the group at the edge of the treeline.
"At least let me light your way," he said between breaths. "Going into this forest at night without a light is how people disappear."
Ozair looked at him for a moment. "Thanks," he said, and meant it.
They went in.
"Mayo." Ozair's voice carried between the trees. "Mayo."
Nothing came back except the sounds of the forest, the insects and the shifting leaves.
They spread out slightly, not so far that they lost sight of each other, the man's crystal light moving with them through the undergrowth.
They moved forward, searching for Mayo through every corner of the forest along their way.
After some time, they reached the waterfall, and it was exactly as it had been before, the pond's surface undisturbed, the dragon long gone.
Ozair stood at the bank and stared at the ground with his hands balled at his sides.
"Where are you," he said, not loud enough for it to be a real call. Just frustration finding somewhere to go.
Elina wrapped her arms around herself. "He was with us the whole time. He was right here with us. We saw the dragon and we ran and he was running too."
"He was," Aryan said. "I remember him specifically. He said something to me after we stopped, the she comment, the female dragon thing. He was there."
Mina said, "Then something must have happened on the way from there to the house."
Toviro turned back toward the house without answering and started walking fast, retracing the path they had run. The others followed.
Now he walked slowly along the path, looking at both sides of it, at the ground, at the spaces between the trees.
He pressed a hand to the side of his head and forced himself to stop moving. Forced himself to think.
He replayed it.
They had run from the pond, and he had been the first to speak. He had said he thought they were safe. Then Ozair started talking about the dragon. Aryan said it hadn't followed them.
Then Mayo had said, "She?" with that specific tone of his. Aryan had said it was clearly female. Mayo asked how Aryan could tell that, or why he sounded so calm about it. Aryan just said beauty doesn't ask for permission.
And Mayo had started saying something back.
But he never finished.
Toviro hadn't noticed it at the time because Ozair had immediately started talking again about seeing a real dragon, and the conversation had moved on. But Mayo had never finished what he was about to say.
Toviro opened his eyes and said quietly, "And after that, we moved on until we reached the apple tree."
Now he brought both hands to his head, pressing against it as he shook it in frustration. "What am I missing here?" he said loudly.
As he did, he slowed a little, his eyes fixed on the ground while his mind chased something else.
"Yeah... now I remember."
They had heard the sound, something moving in the bushes to the left. All of them had accelerated then, moving faster than before. None of them had looked back, because when you are already running, nothing behind you feels like a reason to turn around.
Toviro's gaze stayed fixed on the path ahead. Then to the left.
He stepped toward the bushes and stopped beside them, staring into the darkness between the branches.
"What is it?" Aryan said.
Toviro crouched slowly.
The branches here were bent inward and crushed down, not the random disturbance left by an animal forcing its way through. This had weight behind it. A body. Something hitting hard and sliding through.
His eyes narrowed.
He reached out carefully and pressed two fingers against one of the snapped branches. Fresh. Still damp where it had broken.
Behind him, nobody spoke.
The crystal light shifted slightly as the man holding it stepped closer, pale white light spilling deeper into the bushes.
Toviro pushed one section of branches aside. At first he saw nothing except darkness and tangled leaves.
Then something caught the light.
A small strip of dark fabric hung from a twig near the center, swaying faintly in the night breeze.
Toviro froze for half a second.
Then he reached in and pulled it free. The material was torn sharply along one edge.
His grip tightened.
He already recognized it before he fully unfolded it in the crystal light.
Mayo's jacket.
"This is Mayo's," he said quietly.
Aryan stepped forward and stared at the torn fabric in Toviro's hand. His expression tightened slightly as his eyes moved from the cloth to the broken bushes.
He said nothing for a moment. Then: "That can only mean one thing."
"He fell here," Toviro said.
Ozair looked at the bushes. "As simple as that? He just fell?" He looked past the broken branches into the darkness below. "Then why didn't he get his butt back up and come after us?"
Toviro stood and pushed through the bushes and found what was on the other side.
The ground dropped away from the path, a short but definite slope of grass going down and away, invisible from the path unless you were already on it or had already gone over it.
"There," Toviro said.
—
Half an hour earlier.
They were moving forward, all of them, and at the back of the group Mayo was still thinking about Aryan saying that beauty doesn't ask permission.
Mayo was about to say something back about how that phrase made absolutely no sense in this context when his foot caught a rock half-buried in the path.
He didn't catch himself.
The momentum was already committed, and the slope on the left side of the path was right there.
He stumbled sideways into the bushes, crashed through the branches, and then down the slope in a tumbling roll that ended with him face down in the grass at the bottom.
The sound of the bushes shaking reached the others.
But everyone was already tense from the dragon encounter, already expecting something in the forest to move behind them.
The instant they heard the noise, panic kicked in and they immediately sped up, going from fast to even faster without looking back once.
Mayo lay at the bottom of the slope for a moment, trying to process what had just happened.
Then he slowly pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
"Ow," he said to nobody.
He sat back, looked at his scraped palms, then up at the slope he had just rolled down.
"Why," he said with the tired resignation of someone once again witnessing a recurring problem in his life. "Why does this always happen to me."
He stood slowly and tested his legs. Everything still worked. He was scraped up, bruised, and covered in dirt, but intact.
Mayo looked up at the slope and started climbing, one foot after another, slowly making progress through the grass and loose dirt.
Then he saw the snake.
It was coiled on a rock directly above him, its head raised slightly as it watched him with the cold, unreadable attention of something that had not yet decided how dangerous this situation actually was.
Cold sweat broke out across Mayo's face instantly.
He moved.
Not up the slope.
Sideways first, then away from the slope entirely, in the opposite direction from the snake, at a speed he didn't know was available to him.
His mouth was open the entire time, and the sound coming out of it was not quite a scream and not quite words but somewhere in between.
He ran for what felt like long enough and stopped behind a tree, back pressed against the bark, breathing so hard it hurt.
"Okay," he said to the forest. "Okay. A dragon, a snake, and now I'm alone in the middle of a jungle in a dimension that didn't even exist last week."
He looked up through the canopy at the three moons. "This is fine."
He peeled himself off the tree and looked around.
The forest in every direction looked exactly the same. The path was nowhere visible, and from here even the sound of the waterfall was gone.
Mayo forced a weak smile onto his face.
"Wow. Amazing. Truly the greatest night of my life. Couldn't it possibly get any better than this?"
Then he grabbed both sides of his head and looked up through the trees toward the sky.
"I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHICH DIRECTION I CAME FROM!"
He stood still for a moment, thought about it, picked a direction that felt right, and started walking, one hand coming up to press against the side of his head.
He had been walking for about a minute when he heard the horses.
He stopped.
He turned toward the sound and before his eyes had time to find anything in the dark a light hit him full in the face, a bright warm circle from a torch, and he put his hand up against it automatically and squeezed his eyes shut.
A voice came from behind the light. "We found one."
Another voice, closer: "Arrest him."
"Wait," Mayo said, hand still up against the light, blinking. "What? Who are you people—"
Hands grabbed his arms from both sides. He struggled and pulled, but there were two of them, and they handled him with the practiced ease of people who had done this many times before.
One of them dropped to a knee and grabbed his ankles. Chains came out, cold metal clicking around his wrists and then his feet with practiced efficiency.
"Wait, wait, what's happening?" Mayo said, panic rising in his voice as they forced his arms down. "Who even are you people? Why are you doing this? I don't know what you think I did."
"Save it," one of them said. He had the voice of a man who heard explanations professionally and had stopped being interested in them. "You all say something. None of it's ever true."
They lifted him onto the horse like cargo, laying him face down across its back with his chained hands pinned in front of him and his chained feet behind.
The moment the horse started moving, every step sent an uncomfortable jolt through his body that already felt like it was going to become much worse over time.
"I have to get back to my family," Mayo said, his voice now directed at the ground moving beneath the horse's hooves. "I have people who are looking for me right now. Can you please just—"
"Capital," the soldier said without looking at him. "That's where you're going. And right now, the Capital is searching for you a lot harder than your family is. And trust me, once you get there, you'll wish you were still dealing with us."
"No," Mayo said immediately, panic crashing into his voice as he started struggling against the chains again. "No, no, I don't want to go there. Please, just let me go."
The soldier laughed.
Then the others laughed with him, the sound spreading through the dark forest as their horses started moving again.
The trees passed through Mayo's upside-down view in dark blurs while the sounds of the night surrounded him on all sides.
Mayo stopped calling out after a while.
He lay silently across the horse, breathing unevenly as the forest passed beneath him, thinking about how this day had started with the ocean and a ramp and a dragon, and had somehow ended with chains.
Then, quietly, in the dark, he started to cry.
Not loud. Not the dramatic kind. Just the tears that come when fear has been running for too long and the body has nothing left to do with it.
"Someone," he whispered. "Anyone."
The horse moved through the dark forest and nobody came.