A fascinating soul.

His dream was to fly.

To move among birds as though the sky had always belonged to him. To cut through blue and dusk and cloud with ease.

He never knew why he felt it. He only knew that he did.

But he feared to fall.

A man who had never touched the sun, yet was certain it would burn him.

How strange, to grieve the ruin of wings you have never once unfolded, Rouge.

Perhaps he read too many stories.

Perhaps his own mind had become a prophet of disasters that had not yet happened.

Perhaps knowledge, in the wrong hands, is only dust in the eye.

For he spent his life using his wisdom on everyone but himself.

He helped the pregnant woman who thought her child would never be born.

He helped the blind man who believed he had lost his cane, only to find it had been in his hand the whole time.

He helped the man who could see the ocean but never his own boat, drifting quietly beside him.

But never once did he think to help himself realize that he feared the sun while standing gracefully beneath the moonlight.

Never once did he realize he had not lived long enough to be burnt by anything at all.

Never once did he notice the same birds he admired flew through this same sky and never fell.

His mercy never turned inwards.

Do you not see yourself, Rouge?

Do you not see the vast wings behind you? Or the intricate feathers that adorn them? The ones you never once unfolded.

Maybe that is why it was asked, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but do not notice the plank in yours.”

In your attempt to save yourself, you died never knowing the possibility of your life.

In fact, you were meant to be an angel, Rouge. But look where you brought yourself instead.

Oh, Rouge.

Was it better to die? Or was it just easier.

Easier to hand your wings to every stranger who needed lifting, so long as no one asked you to use them for yourself.

A shame.

Somewhere, a pair of wings still waits, folded and forgotten, gathering dust in the shape of a man who once dreamed but never dared.

The sun never burnt you, Rough, no.

You burnt yourself.

So I stopped talking after many years of trial and error. I just… stopped. But every once in a while, I open up to someone and I’m quickly reminded why I shut down in the first place.

Wanna know what’s funny? For years, I actively tried to be like one of my elder brothers, Jeffrey. He rarely talks. But I realized that was never really my nature. Still, nowadays I find myself more like him than I ever imagined. I guess the part of me that wanted to express myself slowly died during all those years of trying so hard to do exactly that.

I just want to be left alone.

I hate having to watch my words, because at the end of the day it always ends up the same way, at the end of the day, my feelings never actually matter to anyone but myself. If I’m all alone, I don’t have to worry about anyone’s feelings, just mine.

I don’t wanna be saved. I can’t be saved. Cause it all ends up the same.

I end up asking myself why I didn’t just shut the fuck up.

Somewhere there is a forest that has been waiting longer than the man standing at its edge has been alive.

Actually, It does not call to him. It never has. But he has always told himself it has, because a forest that calls you in is easier to resist than a forest that simply exists, indifferent, patient, unconcerned with whether you ever enter it at all.

He has built a whole life on its border.

A house with a view of the tree line. A chair angled just so. A window he opens some mornings to smell the wet bark and rot and green of it, close enough to believe he knows the place.

He does not know the place.

He knows the idea of it.

There is a difference between a man who has walked through fire and a man who has only read the temperature.

The forest does not punish those who stay outside it. That is the part no one warns you about. There is no lightning for cowardice. No wolf sent to drag the hesitant in by the collar. You are allowed to stand at that edge for the rest of your life, growing old, growing soft, telling yourself a hundred different reasons why today is not the day, and the forest will simply let you.

It has nowhere else to be.

I think the cruelest doors are the ones that never lock behind you.

Because a locked door forces a decision. An open one lets you linger in the doorway forever, one foot in shadow, one foot in light, calling that lingering wisdom.

He has told himself he is being careful.

He has told himself he is waiting for the right season.

He has told himself the path will still be there when he’s ready, not understanding that a path walked in the mind a thousand times and a path walked once with your actual feet are not the same road at all.

You cannot think your way to the other side of a forest.

You can only walk.

And somewhere beneath all his waiting is a much smaller, much older fear.

Not of wolves.

Not of the dark.

Not even of getting lost.

The fear that he will walk in, and come out the other side, and find that the version of him who was afraid to enter was never protecting anything worth protecting at all.

That the only thing standing between him and the other side of that forest was the forest he built out of himself.

Some people spend their whole lives circling the one door they were always meant to walk through, mistaking the circling for a kind of survival.

The trees have not moved.

They were never going to.

So I say to you… The only way out is through.

I write this while listening to Adaugo and Beautiful Rain by The Cavemen, on repeat.

(Please listen to the song as you read, it is essential.)

Rain… oh rain, descend upon this hollow vessel.

Ethereal, I whispered it only to graves and dying stars, a word too heavy for mortal tongues. I guarded it through barren years, unknowing that its final invocation waited in the curve of her silence. Unbeknownst, I was carving space for her alone.

Have you ever encountered a mirror forged not of glass, but of forgotten lifetimes? One that drags the exiled self from shadowed corners you swore you never lost? It reflects not light, but frequencies, low, ancient hums that unravel the bones. That is how she found me. That is how she holds me still, suspended between worlds.

Speaking with her was communion with a twin I never interred, a parallel flame raised beneath stranger skies, murmuring different names to recognize the same God we both serve. Two candles require no sermon; they simply ignite in recognition, dancing the same doomed waltz.

Every conversation unfolded like the forbidden chapter of a book bound in twilight skin and starlight thread. I knelt before each sentence as if it were scripture etched by unseen hands, trembling lest one syllable dissolve into the ether, lost forever to the void between us.

Curiosity bloomed into sacred famine. Addictive as the first breath after drowning. Some hungers arrive cloaked in quiet peace, wearing the face of homecoming, until you realize your hands have already clawed deeper, begging the abyss for more. It was water from forgotten heavens, cooling the scorched altar of my soul.

Mmiri Ozuzo…

Oh rain. Rain down on me.

I wandered seasons of cracked earth and merciless sun, christening the drought as strength, as discipline, as the lonely crown of “I need no one.” Then she arrived, the Mermaid risen from veiled depths, a storm unleashed upon a city that had sealed its eyes to the sky. I stood motionless in her torrent, letting every drop rewrite the map of my ruins.

Nwaanyi Mmiri.

Sacha pu ihe ojoo m.

Wash away the rot wearing my father’s shadowed face. Heal the flaws that learned to cloak themselves in bitter humor, dancing so wildly no soul would dare inquire what bled beneath. In her presence, the masks dissolve like mist at dawn. I stand before the deluge, unafraid.

She needs no arrow from Cupid’s quiver; I would hurl myself willingly into whatever abyss her gaze commands, diving through thorns and tempests for the promise of her name on the wind.

Ariel…

Some nights I wander the edges of language, seeking a word vast enough to contain her. Girlfriend, a brittle cage. Soulmate, a faded echo worn thin by lesser tongues. So I leave her unnamed, as the old poets too left God unnamed.

She simply is the rain that both destroys and resurrects.

I shifted the architecture of my days around her ghost before I even named the ache. My hours once belonged solely to me, charted like a solitary kingdom of stone and silence. Now the map bears a second capital, pulsing with hidden rivers and moonlight roads.

I can no longer conjure a future without her silhouette woven through every thread. Every quiet plan unfurls an extra chair at the table, an extra name whispered into the dark, a second set of footprints trailing mine through uncharted snow.

I became clay beneath unseen hands, carving, not erasing. Patient reshaping without violence, until the new contours sang truer than the old, hollow form. She changed for me in the same silent ritual; two mirrors bending toward perfect alignment.

I never summoned this. I noticed only after the old trees had already completed their slow, merciless work, roots entwining beneath the soil, branches reaching through my ribs toward her light.

Rain down on me, Nwaanyi Mmiri.

Wash away the flaws that still whisper in my blood.

Fill this empty chalice without mercy, without permission, without end.

I was a mirror adrift, seeking its lost reflection across lifetimes.

I found her in the storm.

And I remain, still standing in the rain, drenched, trembling, alive at last, while the candle flickers low and the woods remember every word.

I call her a Mami Wata lol. She definitely already knows some of the reasons why. The rest, I suppose she knows now.

The funniest (and saddest) part? Individuals rarely wield real influence unless the crowd lets them. The audience isn’t some innocent victim nah, they’re active co-conspirators. So when folks rush to defend Peller with that tired line, “He’s not dumb, he just understands the audience,” they’re not solving the problem. They’re birthing a bigger one, like a philosophical hydra. You’re basically admitting the audience is primed for stupidity, then patting the clown on the back for exploiting it.

Peller’s content is stupid. He acts stupid. And if you’re out here caping for him by saying “he’s just smart about the market,” congratulations, you just volunteered as the next exhibit in the scapegoat of stupidity. Because guess what? He wouldn’t be popping if y’all didn’t crown him king. He clocked early that a huge chunk of the Nigerian online space is easily amused, low-bar, and ready to stan anything with decent lighting and zero substance. As my guy Nietzsche might put it, this is the “herd mentality” in full effect: “The majority is always wrong… but damn if they don’t stream well.”

My personal aversion to Peller runs deeper than aesthetics. It is rooted in his disingenuous posture: the absence of substance, the casual disdain for those who sustain his platform, and a striking indifference to the national conditions weighing on his followers. One example I can recall is his take during the 30 Days Rant Challenge: “If you want to rant, don’t do it on TikTok so the government doesn’t ban it.” I remember being visibly disgusted after watching that clip. In a moment when young voices were articulating genuine hardship and systemic failure, the literal biggest influencer was more concerned about his likes and coins, which isn’t bad but if you have nothing reasonable to say then why not just maintain silence. Silence would have been much more preferable than such dismissive theater. The same critique extends to his babe Jarvis. When the times demand even minimal gravity, evasion dressed as entertainment becomes moral failure.

This phenomenon reflects a broader cultural affliction: the enthusiastic platforming of mediocrity and vice. Consider the normalized spectacle of Yahoo culture. What we euphemistically call “hustle” is, in plain terms, systematic theft, digital predation with none of the raw courage (or consequences) of traditional robbery. These acts differ from armed robbery only in method, not in ethics. Yet it has become so entrenched that within many circles of young men, participation is almost a rite of passage, while refusal invites quiet ridicule. Where is the honor in cowardice? Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, reminds us that true virtue lies in courage and justice, not in exploiting the vulnerable from behind a screen. Glorifying such behavior is quite literally societal indictment.

At the heart of the Olodo Uprising lies this cultivated cowardice. When the most visible influencers embody intellectual timidity and selective blindness, what example are they setting for the rising generation? This malaise, however, did not emerge overnight. It is the product of decades, nay, generations, of subtle conditioning: post-colonial disillusionment, economic instability, authoritarian legacies, and now algorithmic amplification. We have been slowly taught to accept shadows as substance.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave remains devastatingly apt. Chained within our digital cavern, we applaud flickering images of foolishness while scorning those who step into the light. Socrates warned that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet we have built an economy around lives proudly unexamined. Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message” further illuminates our predicament: the platforms themselves reshape us in their image, fragmented, distracted, addicted to novelty over depth.

In a truly functional society, the cultural pinnacle would belong to those who illuminate, challenge, and build, not those who anesthetize. Until we collectively decide to starve the cycle of its fuel, the uprising continues, and the cave grows ever more comfortable.

He never calls it what it is.

Because if he called it what it is, he would have to fight it. And some part of him, the oldest part, the part that learned to survive before it learned to live, knows that this particular war has no ceasefire.

You cannot negotiate with a mirror.

I think of the girl who prayed for rain and cursed the drought, never once looking down at the well she built with her own hands, dry at the bottom, cracked from disuse.

I think of the boy who lit candles for love to find him, never once asking why every flame he lit seemed to catch the curtains on fire.

Neither of them were lying. They were all true. All real. All beside the point.

The girl could point to the sky and swear it hadn’t rained in years. She could show you the cracked earth, the dead crops, the neighbors who had it worse. All true. All real. All beside the point.

The boy could tell you about the ones who left, the ones who lied, the ones who made promises out of smoke. All true. All real. All beside the point.

Some griefs are honest and still miss the mark.

I have watched a man curse the ocean for being too vast to cross, never once building a boat.

I have watched a woman curse the silence for being too loud, never once asking what she was doing to fill a house built for six with only the sound of her own footsteps.

There is a kind of suffering that hides in plain sight because it wears the mask of something noble. The girl’s thirst looked like patience. The boy’s burning house looked like passion. Passion is easy to mistake for love when you’ve never seen the difference up close.

Somewhere, a well is still dry.

Somewhere, a curtain is still up in flames.

And somewhere, someone is still looking up at a cloudless sky, waiting for a rain that was never going to fall from that direction.

The mirror does not care what you call it.

It only reflects what stands in front of it.

It is up to the owner to see what it really reflects.

Peace does not come to a man who refuses to see the thing that kills him.

Peace does not come to a man who refuses to wage war on the thing that kills him.

If I said, “Don’t go,” Tell me would you go? Adaugo.

If I said, “Let’s go,” Tell me would you go? Tell me would you go?

If I lost my way in the dead of night, tell me would you know? Adaugo

If I called your name where the wind won’t rest, tell me would you show? Adaugo.

For there are places I cannot name, where love and grief are still the same.

Where every lantern, every flame.

Bends like it knows your name, Adaugo.

If you beheld the faceless ones that wander through my plain,

Tell me, Adaugo, would you still remain sane?

If you saw the shadow stitched so closely to my name,

Would you fall to your despair, or love me all the same?

There are voices in my head, but when I raise my eyes, I know they beckon toward the end.

So if you took my hand, Adaugo,

You too would be drawn into my realm.

So I ask you. If I said “jide m aka”, would you do it without fear,

I am drowning.

Nkem, biko zoputa m.

“I would paint myself black for you.”

There is a strange, almost paradoxical amusement in the way we behave when we love deeply. My friends and I have often noticed this impulse: the more fiercely we care, the more we feel compelled to break ourselves in order to protect the other.

Love, in this sense, becomes the closest thing to perfection that imperfect beings can ever touch. And precisely because of that, it becomes chaotic. Perfection placed in human hands cannot remain untouched, our flaws, fears, and vulnerabilities distort it, twist it, and sometimes shatter it.

To say “I would paint myself black for you” is to confess a very specific kind of love:

a love so intense that staying becomes unbearable, but leaving feels like betrayal.

So we find a third option, one that feels noble in the moment, even if it is tragic.

We darken ourselves.

We cast our own image into shadow.

We play the villain so the other person doesn’t have to confront the pain of our absence.

It is the self-sacrificial instinct of someone who would rather be hated than cause harm, who would rather be misunderstood than be the source of someone else’s suffering. We tear down our own reflection so they can walk away without guilt, believing the break was necessary, even inevitable.

In this strange, inverted logic of love, we wound ourselves so the other does not have to bleed.

We give them freedom by staining our own hands.

And this is the irony at the heart of love’s chaos:

in trying to preserve the other person’s heart, we quietly destroy our own.

One day. Maybe I too would be graced with wings of wax.

Maybe I will climb into the evening sky and wander among the clouds.

Maybe I will watch the dying sun spill amber across the heavens.

Maybe the heat will begin to unmake me.

Maybe my wings will weep from their edges.

Maybe I will fall.

Past the clouds.

Past the birds.

Past all the things that were never meant for me.

Below, the earth will wait with its cracked floors and open wounds. Above, the sun will continue burning as though I had never touched it at all.

Maybe I will smile when it happens.

Maybe there will be tears too.

And as the sky drifts farther away and the ground rises to meet me, I will look at the sun one last time.

The beautiful liar.

Maybe I would take one last look at myself.

Noire.

Maybe I would remember.

Maybe I would remember the beautiful fire.

The fire that taught wax its true name.

Whats that thing she always says?

Que sera, sera.?

One of the most fascinating assumptions humanity makes is the belief that we can fully understand our creator. Whether one calls that creator God, a higher intelligence, or the origin of existence itself, people often approach the question as though it is something that can eventually be solved, analyzed, and completely comprehended.

I do not believe that is possible.

The foundation of this belief comes from observing our own role as creators. Human beings create things constantly. Through art, literature, drawings, stories, and imagination, we create entire worlds populated by characters and beings. These creations exist within the boundaries we establish for them. They move according to rules we design. Their existence depends entirely on us.

Yet none of these creations can truly understand their creator.

A character in a novel cannot comprehend the author who wrote them. A figure in a drawing cannot grasp the nature of the artist who brought them into existence. They may reflect aspects of their creator, but they can never fully understand the mind that exists beyond the limits of their world.

The reason is simple: they are confined by the dimensions and realities in which they exist.

Humanity often imagines itself as occupying a higher position because we exist in three dimensions and possess self-awareness. We believe we have free will, rational thought, and the capacity to investigate the universe. Whether our free will is truly absolute or merely perceived is a separate discussion, but what matters is that we experience ourselves as free and conscious beings.

However, if our own creations are incapable of fully understanding us, why should we assume that we can fully understand what created us?

If there exists a creator beyond our reality, that creator would stand in relation to us much as we stand in relation to our own creations, except on a vastly greater scale. Such a being would not merely create a story, a painting, or a fictional world. It would create dimensions, laws of nature, galaxies, time, space, and existence itself.

A creator of that magnitude would exist beyond the framework through which we perceive reality.

Our minds are built to understand survival, relationships, patterns, and the physical world around us. We are finite beings attempting to comprehend what is infinite. We are creatures bound by time attempting to understand what may exist beyond time. We are inhabitants of creation attempting to fully grasp the source of creation itself.

This is why I believe there is a limit to human understanding.

We may learn more. We may discover deeper truths. We may gain greater insight into the nature of existence and even into the nature of God. But complete understanding is different from deeper understanding. To know more is not the same as knowing everything.

The assumption that humanity can eventually explain the entirety of its creator may be less a product of reason and more a product of human pride. We are naturally driven to seek answers. We are curious creatures. We want every mystery to have a solution and every question to have a final conclusion.

Yet some questions may exist beyond the reach of the minds asking them.

Just as a two-dimensional creation cannot fully comprehend the three-dimensional being that created it, humanity may never be capable of fully comprehending the source of its own existence. The limitation is not a failure of intelligence. It is simply the consequence of being a creation rather than the creator.

For that reason, I do not believe human beings can fully understand God. We may understand fragments. We may understand reflections. We may understand what has been revealed to us. But the totality of a being responsible for the existence of dimensions, universes, and reality itself would necessarily exceed the capacity of the minds that inhabit that creation.

The creator can understand the creation completely.

The creation cannot understand the creator.

And perhaps accepting that limitation is itself the beginning of wisdom.

Zuka thought for a moment. “Around a hundred. Maybe more.”

Noir’s brow lifted slightly. “That’s too many.”

Zuka looked at him. “For what?”

“For labor.” Noir’s eyes drifted toward the settlement around them. “That’s an army. Different races too. Somebody specifically chose variety.”

The thought settled badly between them, a deep silence stretched between them.

Noir’s gaze moved across the crowd until it stopped on a young dark elf standing near one of the huts. You could see his small frame trying very hard not to be noticed.

Noir motioned toward him. “You… Come closer.”

The boy froze, then slowly obeyed.

Fear was obvious in the way his shoulders held tight, but he still stepped forward until he stood in front of them.

Noir crouched slightly so they were eye level. “Look into my eyes.” He said, letting out a small smile.

The boy hesitated for half a second before meeting Noir’s crimson eyes.

“What is your name.”

“K… Korak, S… Sir.”

“Where were you before you came here, Korak?”

The answer came quietly.

“I. I don’t know, It… Was underground.“

“A dungeon?”

“I don’t know. I… I… I don’t remember.”

“What do you remember.”

The boy didn’t respond.

“Do you remember what happened there?”

“I… T… They took one of us every day. Different masters. Different places.”

Zuka stepped closer. “What did the place look like?”

The boy’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

Zuka frowned.

“He’s under compulsion,” Noir said without looking away from the child. “He physically can’t answer you.”

Zuka scoffed under his breath.

Noir continued.

“What did the place feel like?”

The boy struggled with the question, eyes unfocused now.

“Powerful,” he whispered eventually. “Really powerful.”

Noir’s gaze shifted downward.

At the base of the boy’s neck, partially hidden beneath his collar, sat a faded mark.

A serpent coiled tightly around the silhouette of a man.

Noir tilted the boy’s head slightly forward, fingers brushing the symbol.

His expression darkened immediately, a faint anger appeared in his eyes. “человек-змея.” he murmured.

Zuka noticed the shift. “What?”

Noir straightened slowly.

“These slaves weren’t gathered randomly.”

The grin he usually wore was gone now. Completely.

“This is intentional.”

Zuka’s eyes narrowed. “Go straight to the point, I don’t expect slaves to come about by accident and not by intention.”

“Their energy is being harvested. Zuka. Those dark elves are part Necrilith...”

“Necrilith… No… It can’t be…” Kaizen muttered under his breath, two beads of sweat slowly rolled down his face.

Noir’s voice flattened. “Black magic.”

Noir paused.

“This is a large-scale operation, and you have accidentally opened Pandora’s box… These slaves are pawns in a larger game… And we just became players in that game.”

Zuka stared at him. “Necrilith… Noir I don’t think you understand what you are saying… That’s impossible. Physically and Biologically. That’s impossible. Necriliths can’t hybridi—”

Noir shook his head once. “Lycan. Gyuri. Krivudan.” Noir looked at him. “The world stopped caring about the impossible a long time ago.”

“The snake that eats itself… эти кровососы. I know exactly who is behind this… And I know where to find them. ”

His eyes darkened slightly.

Kiaren looked at Kaizen, then at Noir, but remained quiet. “So it’s active once more.” He thought to himself.

Zuka’s fists tightened. A faint golden aura flickered around him before settling again.

“Noir,” he said carefully. “How do you know?”

Silence.

Noir looked away from him toward the deeper forest.

Then finally,

“If my assumptions are right,” he said quietly, “how I know is the least important problem we have.”

At the edge of the clearing, Kaizen remained silent.

But something in him shifted.

The air around him darkened faintly, subtle enough that most people wouldn’t notice it, but Zuka did. Kaizen’s blue eyes glowed sharper for a brief moment, and his fingers twitched once at his side before going still again, the movement restrained so quickly it looked almost like someone forcing composure back into place before it slipped.

Zuka’s gaze lingered on him only briefly before moving on again, scanning the settlement, the survivors, Noir, the boy, every detail in reach.

The silence stretched for several seconds before Noir turned toward the others.

“Kaizen.”

Kaizen stepped forward immediately.

“Have Cord transport these men to the palace prison. The rest stay here and secure the settlement.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You, Mako, Aiden, Tova, Silus, and Kiaren are coming with us.” Noir replied.

“We’re taking a trip to Jordan.”

Human nations. Slavery rings. Experimental hybrids. Just another normal week in a civilization somehow trusted with architecture and agriculture.

“When is a door not a door, Noir.” Zuka asked without looking at him.

Silence filled the air.

“When it’s ajar.”

A pause.

Zuka muttered. “Shadows belong to the reflector, the owner is merely a pawn… Keep—”

“Your door sealed… If it isn’t ajar.”

Zuka’s wings snapped open and he vanished.

The force of his takeoff hit the settlement a second later.

Two fires died instantly. The others bent hard before erupting upward, embers dragged into the canopy in a spiraling column of orange and gold. Loose debris skidded across the ground. Smaller branches cracked overhead.

Noir stayed where he was for half a second, watching the trail Zuka had carved through the forest ceiling.

Then he looked at Kaizen.

Kaizen already understood.

They moved.

Six figures rose behind the two princes, cutting upward through the corridor of destruction Zuka had left behind. The forest still reacted to his passage. Branches remained bent in the same direction. Moss pulsed dimly along trunks where displaced mana rolled outward through the wood like aftershock.

He was still accelerating.

Noir pushed harder.

For a moment he closed half the distance.

Then Zuka accelerated again.

The resulting shockwave tore through the mid-layer canopy and stripped everything fragile from the surrounding trees. Leaves detonated into the air. Thin branches snapped apart. The sound became constant inside the enclosed forest, a low violent pressure that settled behind the ears and refused to leave.

After an hour, the distance stabilized.

Not because Zuka slowed.

Because Noir decided the gap no longer mattered.

Behind them, Kaizen and the others maintained formation in silence. Nobody complained. Complaining required spare breath and poor instincts.

Two hours in, the forest changed.

The crystal regions began without warning.

Towering formations rose between the trees like frozen lightning embedded into the earth, translucent structures veined with pale blue light. Zuka hit the first cluster without reducing speed.

The impact shattered the two largest crystals before the light from the initial fracture had fully expanded.

A pulse of white engulfed the forest.

For one full second the entire region glowed.

Fragments scattered across roots and bark in glittering arcs, embedding themselves into the forest floor where they would likely remain for decades. Maybe centuries. Nature loved pretending destruction was decoration.

Noir passed through the fading light without slowing.

Three hours in, something moved above them.

Fast.

Even Noir registered it late.

A silver streak dropped through the upper canopy at an angle sharp enough to intercept Zuka directly.

The kick landed clean.

Zuka disappeared sideways.

He tore through a gap between massive roots, crashed through two lower canopy layers, then slammed into a trunk wide enough to pass for a fortress wall. The impact buried him inches deep into the bark.

The tree shook from crown to roots.

He was already standing before the debris finished falling.

The high elf landed lightly in front of him.

Fifty blades of light materialized around the noble in the same instant. Silent. White. Perfectly shaped. They rotated slowly around his body in controlled orbit while his eyes locked onto Zuka with immediate calculation.

Eight escorts spread behind him automatically.

Nobody spoke.

The elf stood between two enormous roots, silver robes untouched despite the descent. Tall. Composed. Bored.

That expression was somehow more hostile than anger.

“Do you have any idea,” he asked calmly, “what time it is?”

Zuka said nothing.

The blades continued rotating.

“Do you have a death wish, Elven?”

“People are sleeping,” the elf continued. “Forest settlements. Traversal communities. You’ve spent the last three hours sounding like tectonic failure.”

His gaze shifted briefly toward the damaged trunk behind Zuka.

Then back.

“These forests are under treaty protection. There are protocols.”

“You kicked me,” Zuka said flatly.

“I got your attention.”

“You kicked me into a tree.”

“At your speed, alternatives were limited.”

Zuka’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“Do you have a death wish, Elven?” Zuka repeated.

Noir dropped through the canopy opening above them.

He landed between the two before either moved further.

“Put them away.”

Zuka didn’t move.

“Zuka.”

The blades dissolved slowly around him.

One after another.

The last few lingered longer than the rest, reluctant to disappear.

Noir turned toward the noble. “My apologies. We left under urgency and ignored the corridor restrictions.” His tone stayed level. Easy. “We’ll clear the forest within the hour. There won’t be further disturbance tonight.”

The elf studied him for a moment.

“You’re Noir of the Wicked Eye.”

Noir said nothing.

The noble adjusted his posture slightly. His eyes narrowing

“The corridor agreements have existed for three centuries between the forest territories and Ryūjin No Sumai. They are not optional.”

Silence settled briefly.

Then Noir’s expression changed.

Not visibly at first. Just enough for the air around him to tighten.

“Be careful how you address me noble…” He said quietly. “I said it would not happen again… Tonight .”

Another silence.

The escorts behind the elf subtly shifted their footing.

The noble looked once more at Zuka. At the crater in the bark behind him. Then back to Noir.

“See that it doesn’t… Your Majesties.”

He turned.

The escorts followed immediately and the group vanished upward into the canopy with barely a sound, their departure far quieter than their arrival.

Noir looked toward Zuka.

Zuka was still staring at the tree.

“He kicked me,” he said finally.

“He did.”

“Out of the air.”

“Try not to cry about it.”

Something shifted across Zuka’s face. Not embarrassment, nor anger, more like wounded pride.

Then he spread his wings and launched upward through the canopy gap without another word.

Noir followed.

Zuka’s speed remained unreasonable but stopped short of catastrophic. The canopy gradually thinned overhead. Moss became sparse. The crystal formations disappeared entirely. Pale pre-dawn light began leaking through widening breaks between branches.

Eight hours after leaving the settlement, they crossed the treeline.

The sky opened above them.

Stars faded slowly at the edges of the world while the east brightened into pale silver-blue. The air here felt lighter, drier, cleaner against the wings.

Below them stretched the Delthas Plains.

The grasses rolled beneath the morning wind in massive slow-moving waves that made the entire landscape resemble an ocean reconsidering its career choices.

Zuka flew ahead in silence for a while, then, eventually he spoke. “Noir. What do you make of this place?”

Noir’s gaze moved across the plains below.

“It hums,” he said. “Something underneath it. Old enough that it stopped measuring time.”

Zuka didn’t respond.

They continued forward. Then the gold ended, not gradually. The grasses simply stopped existing.

The land ahead turned gray and cracked and lifeless so abruptly it looked unnatural.

The Gray Barrens.

They descended, their boots touched fractured earth.

Wings folded inward.

Above them, Kaizen and the others hovered briefly before landing with visible reluctance. Nobody trusted places like this. Ancient ruins always carried the same energy. Arrogance, catastrophe, and eventually historians pretending it was educational.

The air was dry.

Jagged stone formations rose from the wasteland in broken clusters. Too deliberate to be natural. Too ruined to identify clearly. Fine ash drifted permanently through the air, dulling the early sunlight until everything looked faded and distant.

Kaizen scanned the landscape carefully.

“Dead,” he said.

“Dormant,” Noir replied.

He was staring at a massive crack in the earth nearby. Several feet wide. Deep enough that the bottom vanished into darkness.

Something about it held his attention.

Zuka studied the surrounding formations.

“The spacing,” he murmured. “The alignment.”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

“This was a city.”

Wind dragged ash across the ground between them.

“The mages here reached for something beyond them,” Zuka continued quietly. “Whatever they touched destroyed the city from within.”

He looked upward into the gray haze hanging above the barrens.

“The land remembers. That’s what you feel. Not death.”

A pause.

“Memory with nobody left alive to carry it.”

Noir crouched near the edge of the fissure and looked down into the darkness below.

Then stood again.

“The ashes wake eventually,” he said.

Kaizen’s hand had already settled against the hilt of his katana.

“How long?” He asked.

Noir considered it seriously.

“Depends who walks through them next.”

Silence again.

The Gray Barrens stretched endlessly ahead of them, patient in the way only ancient damage could be.

Zuka turned forward.

“We keep moving. Don’t lose sight of your shadow.”

Crossing the mountain range at speed, they flew high enough that the draconic runes carved into the rock faces blurred as they passed, centuries of scripture reduced to streaks of amber light. Cold air this high tasted of stone. Peaks on either side rose and narrowed into channels of wind that pushed against them hard enough to require adjustment. Without sound or signal, the Kurohane made those adjustments, thirty bodies reading the air the way soldiers read terrain.

Noir pulled ahead slightly. Zuka kept pace to his left.

Then Noir pushed harder.

A visible ring rolled outward and hit the nearest rock face with enough force to send loose stone cascading down the eastern shelf in a long rattling slide. Zuka felt the pressure against his chest like a fist opening flat and pushed through it. Behind them the Kurohane absorbed it without flinching and matched his speed.

Gradually the mountains gave way, the eastern range descending in long shelves of rock, each drop revealing more sky. Flatland opened below, the broad corridor between Ryūjin No Sumai and Nate, and for a while there was nothing beneath them but wind-scarred earth and dark formations jutting upward from the ground in clusters too deliberate to be accidental and too numerous to be named.

Forty minutes out, not a single word was uttered.

The floating mountains appeared.

Rising from a cloudbank to the south, eight of them. Drifting with the kind of slowness that implied intention, rotating on invisible axes, trailing long tails of earth and root and waterfall from their undersides. What fell never reached the ground. It evaporated somewhere in the distance between, leaving columns of mist that the wind tore apart and rebuilt endlessly. Passing beneath the largest one took nearly a minute at their speed, and still its shadow hadn’t fully cleared by the time the next appeared.

Threading the gap between two of the lower formations, rock faces rushed past on either side close enough to see the cracks and the things living in the cracks. Things with too many eyes arranged in configurations that suggested something had decided symmetry was optional. They didn’t move as the formation passed.

Zuka glanced at one of them.

It glanced back.

Beyond the floating mountains the air changed. Warmer. Heavier. A faint pressure at the back of the throat, like breathing something that had been breathed before by something large. Green bled into the edges of everything, and then the canopy of Nate appeared on the horizon and it was not what the word forest suggested.

A wall.

Stretching left and right until it swallowed the periphery entirely. They flew toward it for ten minutes before it meaningfully grew larger. Another ten before individual crowns became distinguishable. Trees whose upper branches were lost in cloud that had settled over the forest and decided to stay, their trunks somewhere far below still invisible, the sheer height of them making distance difficult to read correctly.

They held their speed here, the wall growing taller with every second until the scale of it stopped being a visual fact and became something felt.

Descent came gradually.

Up close the trunks redefined the surrounding space rather than occupying it. Root systems rose above the forest floor and arched back down in formations that looked deliberate enough to have been designed, though the gaps between them told a different story, collapsed arches, half-formed chambers, roots that had started growing in one direction and abandoned it for another, the whole structure less architecture than argument. Bark pale as old bone, carved by centuries into expressions that may or may not have been faces. Some of them had clearly been faces once. Weather had made that ambiguous.

Crossing the canopy threshold, the sky closed above them.

Noir accelerated the moment they entered.

Outward in every direction at once, and the forest answered immediately. Smaller trees in the mid-layer snapped at their bases and spun away into the dark below. Branches the width of a man’s torso tore free and tumbled. The bioluminescent moss on the surrounding surfaces flared on impact, a brief cold blue-green, then dimmed back to its usual slow pulse. Birds scattered from their roosts, feathers cycling through reds and blacks in distress before the dark swallowed them. Inside the enclosed space the sound hit chest and ears simultaneously and left a ringing that took a while to settle.

Moving through the mid-layer now, well above the forest floor. A river ran suspended in the root channels below, its water glowing the specific blue-white of something cold enough to hurt, casting shifting light upward through the branches. Where the channel ended the water fell in thin luminescent streams that caught the dark and made it briefly beautiful before the forest floor absorbed them without acknowledgment.

Zuka watched it pass below.

Then it was behind them.

Not everything down here was intact. Dead trees stood between living ones, enormous and rotting, their bark collapsed inward and their upper branches gone, reduced to pale columns that the moss had claimed entirely, glowing brighter than the living wood around them as if decay had improved their usefulness. Sections of root channel had failed, dumping their suspended rivers into freefall somewhere below. Old nest structures clung to branch undersides, abandoned, some of them half-dismantled by whatever had built them for reasons that remained unclear.

Life and collapse running alongside each other, neither winning.

Deeper in, the trees grew wider and stranger. Silver bark gave way to wood so old it had turned black not from burning but from time, absorbing the bioluminescent light around it rather than reflecting it, so that the oldest trees existed as dark absences in the glowing forest, shapes defined by what surrounded them rather than by themselves. Root structures here formed enclosed chambers where the moss refused to grow. In the furthest dark of one of them something moved with a weight that communicated size without revealing shape.

What appeared to be giant poison mushrooms appeared in clusters on the larger roots, caps of deep violet and pale yellow the size of houses, releasing mist when undisturbed that glowed faintly yellow-green and drifted downward in slow curtains. The kind of smell the body recognizes as dangerous before the mind catches up. Alongside them grew something else, smaller, colorless, that released nothing and appeared to serve no visible function and covered more surface area than anything else in the surrounding forest. Whatever it was, it was everywhere.

Then the ants.

Built into the base of one of the great trees, the colony rose forty feet up the trunk before spreading into a network of tunnels and chambers, packed earth and resin worn smooth by centuries of use. Along the roots below they moved in lines, black-shelled, the size of horses, efficient in the specific way of creatures that had never needed to develop caution. Three broke from the line as the formation closed in overhead, mandibles wide, launch trajectories calculated for intercept.

Noir didn’t look at them.

He accelerated.

Before they completed their launch the shockwave reached them. Their shells held for a fraction of a second. Then splashed out. Their blood and intestines spread wide and dark against the surrounding bark. The remaining lines scattered into cracks and undergrowth and didn’t reassemble.

Already looking ahead, Noir flew on.

An hour in, the landscape opened slightly. Through gaps between trunks the forest floor became briefly visible far below, a world of its own down there. Pale roots and water that glowed amber in long slow pulses. A mountain range running along the forest floor, genuine peaks, their slopes covered in black moss and luminescent fungi, smaller here, denser, the ground between them lit from below as if the earth itself was warm. At the base of one peak a structure had half-collapsed into the root system beside it, something that had been built and abandoned long enough ago that the forest had begun absorbing it, roots threading through the walls, moss covering what remained of the roof. Whatever had built it was either gone or had moved somewhere the light didn’t reach.

Rivers multiplying below. One white-blue. One deep amber pulsing at irregular intervals. One running red near the surface in a way the distance made easy to leave unexamined.

Speed stayed constant here. No escalation. The forest enormous enough that even at this pace it continued to reveal new versions of itself.

A full minute behind them, it registered their presence like an afterthought.

Twenty minutes later they began to drop.

Canopy lowered. Trunks grew closer. Into the lower forest now, branches at eye level, the forest floor close and real, damp and warm. Old growth and standing water and beneath both of those something older with no name that sat in the lungs like a held breath. Formation spread out to navigate, trunks rushing past, root arches overhead, shafts of bioluminescent light cutting through the dark in long pale columns that shifted as the leaves above shifted.

Zuka pulled back his speed.

Noir pulled back further. Stopped.

Then both of them felt it at the same time.

Movement. Coming from the opposite direction through the trees. A group, moving with the kind of purpose that didn’t belong to anything native to this forest.

Noir’s hand went to his katana. His eyes lit up.

Zuka’s hand closed over his mouth before he could signal anyone.

Noir’s eyes moved to him slowly.

“Don’t. That might be our only clue,” Zuka said quietly.

A pause. Noir lowered his hand.

Zuka turned to the Kurohane, already descending behind them. “Split into groups of five. Circle the settlement from the ground. Pentagon formation. Nobody sees you. Nobody moves until I give the word.”

The Kurohane dispersed without sound.

Zuka and Noir came down last, boots meeting the forest floor without a sound. The air was damp and close, thick with moss and soil and the residue of something older underneath both of those.

They waited.

The attackers came in fast and without warning, blades already drawn as they hit the outer edge of the settlement. The camp erupted. Screams tore through the trees, mixing with splintering wood and clashing steel and the sound of people running with nowhere clear to run to.

Not all of them ran.

A beastman stepped forward into the path of the first attacker, eyes wild, fangs bared. “Everyone else, get back!” A blade came singing toward him and he twisted, taking the graze across his cheek, skin knitting closed almost before the blood had time to well. He caught the sword with both hands, the enchanted edge biting into his palms, and drove a kick into the attacker’s gut that sent him stumbling. He locked in behind him, arm around the throat.

A second attacker rushed for his exposed ribs.

Another beastman hit him from the side first, a single punch to the face that sent him into a root column hard enough to crack the bark.

The forest had gone loud and violent and alive with it.

“Now,” Zuka said.

The Kurohane rose from the undergrowth in their groups of five, each raising a hand in unison, the air between them pulling taut. The barrier that formed was five-pointed and silent, sealing the camp’s perimeter with the kind of finality that left no ambiguity about what it was.

Nobody inside it was leaving.

Noir stepped forward.

He unsheathed the katana in a single motion, darkness bleeding along the blade’s edge the way it had in the war hall, deliberate and unhurried. Then he moved.

What followed was not a fight. It was an ending administered quickly. The attackers barely had time to register his position before he had already moved to the next.

By the time the last one dropped, Noir was standing near the center of the cleared space, blade at his side, barely breathing harder than before.

He looked down at the men on the ground. Several were conscious. All of them were looking at him.

“What are you doing here,” he said.

Silence, they held a look of disdain in their eyes.

Noir crouched beside the nearest man. Studied him for a moment. Then, with a short precise motion, cut one of his fingers with his wing

The scream that followed emptied the surrounding trees of whatever had been watching from them.

“I’ll ask nine more times,” Noir said, straightening.

Zuka lost patience with Noir’s methods.

He grabbed another man by the collar and lifted him effortlessly off the ground until they were eye level. His voice stayed low.

“Who sent you.”

The man said nothing. Fear sat behind his eyes, visible despite the effort it took to hide it.

Zuka didn’t repeat himself.

His golden eyes brightened. The aura around him thickened and spread outward through the clearing. The ground beneath their feet began to vibrate softly, roots trembling, loose dirt shifting across the forest floor.

“We’ll talk,” the man said immediately. “We’ll talk.”

“Who are you.”

“We’re mercenaries—”

“Who hired you.” Noir stepped closer.

Silence again.

Noir took another step.

His wings unfolded slowly behind him, black feathers spreading wide while the obsidian lower sections dragged across the ground with a sharp metallic scrape that cut through the clearing.

“Who,” Noir said quietly. “Hired you.”

“W-We don’t know who they were.” The man’s voice started breaking apart under the pressure. “Two men approached us in Jordan. One human. One vampire. Said their property escaped and they wanted it returned. Five thousand gold for the capture.”

“Describe them.”

“The vampire wore a hood. Black hair. That’s all I saw. The human had light yellow hair and purple robes. N. Nobility… I think.”

Noir stared at him for a long moment.

Then he straightened slightly and looked toward the edge of the clearing.

Kaizen stood there already. “Could it be…” he muttered under his breath.

Zuka released the mercenary. The man collapsed hard into the dirt.

“Kaizen. See to it that they’re dealt with.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Kaizen moved immediately.

Noir slid his katana back into its sheath and turned away from the bodies.

For a moment, Zuka stayed where he was.

The settlement had quieted, though not completely. Fires still burned between the huts. The beastman who stepped forward first sat against a root while another wrapped cloth around his hands even though the cuts across his palms had already healed shut.

At the edge of one doorway, the child from earlier still stood watching.

Watching him specifically.

Zuka held his gaze for a second longer before finally turning away.

“A vampire and a human noble operating together from a human nation.”

Noir stayed quiet.

Then finally,

“Together,” he said.

Like that was the part that bothered him most.

His eye twitched once. Barely noticeable. But Zuka saw it anyway.

Zuka’s gaze caught the rivers threading through Draekoria, catching the last of the dying sun, blue folding into amber, breaking apart around rock and root and reforming endlessly, water that had never once agreed with itself. From this height they looked like veins. Like the city was alive and the water was what kept it that way.

They crossed over the outer districts fast enough that the sound of them arrived after they did. On the ground, heads turned. A market vendor shielded his eyes. A child grabbed her mother’s sleeve. A cluster of soldiers near the eastern gate stopped mid-conversation and looked up.

Then Noir folded his wings and dropped.

He came in fast and hit Zuka across the back with a burst of black flame, the kind that pulled at the light around it and compressed on contact. Zuka spun, caught himself, and before Noir could reset had already forged the whip.

“Byakurai.”

It cracked across the air in a single fast arc and caught Noir clean across the shoulder. White light on contact, the kind that didn’t burn so much as announce itself.

Noir looked at his shoulder. Then at Zuka.

Below, someone at the eastern gate said it first.

“The twin princes are sparring again.”

A crowd was already forming.

Noir pulled his arm back and threw. Three condensed orbs of black flame, staggered, different angles, each one pulling the surrounding air slightly inward as they moved. Zuka read the first two and cut through them with a beam from his free hand. The third caught him in the ribs. He let the whip dissolve and forged a shield in the same motion, flat and wide, just in time for the follow-up Noir had already released behind it.

The shield cracked. Zuka dropped it and came forward with a spear.

It was narrow and fast and Noir barely deflected it before it grazed past. He retaliated with both hands open, black flames spreading wide, not to strike but to force Zuka’s range back. It worked. Zuka pulled back and switched again. The spear dissolved. The whip came out longer this time, wrapping around Noir’s wrist mid-throw and pulling hard.

Noir went with it instead of against it, closed the distance fast, and pressed a hand flat to Zuka’s chest. The black flame that came off it at point blank was tight and concentrated. Zuka went back hard.

He came out of it with a beam already charged and fired it straight.

Noir dropped beneath it. The beam carved a line through the sky above him, white and clean and gone.

They reset. Circled each other slowly, high above the city.

“Don’t they get tired of this?” Someone below asked.

Noir dropped into his wide stance. One arm extended forward, the other drawn back and low. The black flame at his rear hand gathered differently this time, slower, pulling the light out of the surrounding air as it compressed.

“Kurogeki.”

It came out low and wide, a pressurized arc that didn’t cut so much as consume whatever light it touched. Zuka forged a zweihander and drove it into the wave. The blade held for a moment, fracturing it down the center before the pressure buckled it apart. He let it dissolve and took the hit, rolled through it, and came out the other side already building the whip again.

It caught Noir across the back before he’d fully reset.

They drifted apart. Both breathing. Both unhurt. Both fully aware the other wasn’t going to break.

“Even,” Zuka said.

Noir looked at him for a long moment. Then exhaled slowly.

“Even.”

They descended onto a ridge, folding their wings.

The ridge caught wind from three directions at once. The cold had no particular source.

Zuka stood at the edge. Noir sat further back, watching the city shift colors in the late light. Gold into violet.

Neither spoke for a long time.

“I know there’s something on your mind.” Noir’s eyes stayed on the horizon. A smirk at the corner of his mouth. “Talk to me.”

A pause. “Fancy yourself an oracle?”

Noir didn’t respond. His smirk just widened.

Zuka exhaled slowly. “I’ve been taking in refugees. Beastmen, elves, giants. Survivors from Felborn attacks. I gave them land in Nate.” A pause. “I couldn’t figure out why they’d be here. Giants belong south. Dark elves belong west. Some of the beastmen were species I’ve never even seen. Werepanthers. Though mostly werewolves among them.” He stopped. “Four attacks on them this week alone. They have the demeanor of slaves. Most likely are.”

Silence stretched between them.

“Where did you find them?”

“Beyond our borders. Scattered. Mostly dark elves.” A pause. “They were strange though. Oddly pale skin. And markings on the backs of their necks.”

Noir sounded almost bored with how obvious it was “They’re definitely slaves.”

“I want to know who is behi—”

“Finding out isn’t the problem.” He shifted his weight, still not looking at Zuka. “What I’m more interested in is why they’re here. Pale skin means hybridization.”

“But there were nearly twenty of them. They can’t all be hybrids.”

“They can.” A beat. “It just means far more had to die to produce that many.” The wind moved between them. “What I want to know is how. Dark elves from the west don’t simply appear in the east. They were transported. Then hybridized. So these are probably second or third generation successes. That’s a process that takes dec—”

He stopped.

A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face.

Zuka turned to look at him. “What.”

“Nothing.”

Zuka’s eyes narrowed. The wind filled the silence between them.

“I’d get to the bottom of this,” Zuka said.

“Of course you would.” Noir stood. “But I want to see them first.”

Zuka glanced at him. “I don’t need—”

“But you’d just get yourself killed. And I’d rather not explain that to our father.” He stepped toward the edge. Below, Draekoria breathed in the dusk. “Try not to slow me down. Wannabe king.”

Zuka held his gaze for a moment. Then turned toward the drop.

“Keep up.” A pause. “And oh. Fetch Kaizen.”

Noir grinned.

The air pressure suddenly changed, a cold chill ran through Zuka’s body, his eyes narrowed, and Noir’s grin widened.

Zuka turned to his side and Kaizen was already there, claws raised, the strike coming fast and without warning. A katana of pure light materialized behind Zuka in the same instant. It caught the blow without him moving. His head stayed turned, eyes settling on Kaizen’s form.

“Get those pesky talons off me.”

“Yes, my Lord.” Kaizen withdrew his hand.

Noir started laughing dramatically.

Zuka shot him a look.

Kaizen stepped back, light blue hair catching the wind, the edges of his vast wings holding that faint luminescence that didn’t quite behave like light should. Dark steel armor threaded with silver and cobalt. His claws extended seven inches from each finger, wide and curved like talons.

Behind him the Kurohane stood in a silence that pressed against the air. Jet-black armor with crimson patterns pulsing faintly at the joints. Wings folded tight and vast. Masks on every face, carved into snarling demonic expressions, horned, fanged, grinning, the kind of faces that made it difficult to tell where the mask ended and the intent began.

“Kaizen,” Noir called.

“My Lord.”

Zuka looked at them. Then at Noir. “It’s time. Let’s go.”

“I would say stop ordering my men around,” Noir replied. “But I’m doing you a favor. So just this once.”

Zuka didn’t respond.

His wings unfurled, golden-white membranes catching the last of the light as he pushed off into the sky. Noir followed, his own wings cutting the air clean.

Behind them the Kurohane moved as one. They crouched low, a low hum rolling through the air around them, then their wings snapped open and they launched upward in a single beat. Thirty dark forms rising together.

Below, the ground gave way to canopy. The Forest of Nate spread out beneath them, wide and dense, its twisted upper branches clawing upward against a reddening sky.

Noir glanced back at Kaizen. Their eyes met through the mask.

“Make no mistake,” Noir said. Low enough that only the wind carried it. “This is not a rescue mission. It’s a reckoning.”

Kaizen nodded once.

Zuka’s voice came quieter, eyes forward. “Stay sharp. The forest will welcome us with teeth.”

Noir looked at him. “What the fuck does that even mean.”

“I don’t know.” Zuka laughed. “I’m trying to sound mysterious. Like you.”

Their wings beat harder as the canopy rushed up to meet them. The last of the light slipped behind the treeline. They crossed into the dark with nothing behind them but the sound of thirty wings and, fading quickly, the echo of laughter.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Raen Kogetsu sat at its head. To his right, Zuka stood. To his left, Noir had pulled his chair back from the table at an angle, one arm draped over the back of it and a leg crossed over the armrest. He looked like he had arrived at the wrong meeting and decided to stay out of curiosity. A faint dark aura hung in the air around him, slightly visible and suffocating.

The seven generals lined the dragonoid side. Most were still. Orn leaned forward slightly. Mira hadn’t moved her jaw since the body was brought in. Varak, at the far end, had the quality of a stone that had survived several wars by refusing to hurry.

Across the table sat the high elf king, composed, silver-robed, flanked by officials who looked like they had already agreed on something before they arrived. Beside him, the wood elf prince said nothing. But he watched every speaker the way you watch someone you disagree with and have decided not to interrupt. Yet.

One of the high elf officials opened. “We must be precise about what we are discussing. Kion carried dragonoid blood, yes. He also carried a confirmed designation as a spy operating in vampire territory. That confirmation did not originate with us, but it has not been disputed. We are not here to excuse the manner of his death. What was done to him was excessive, deliberately so. But the question of whether his presence in that territory was itself a provocation is one this council cannot simply dismiss.”

“You’re citing the people who killed him,” Zuka said. “As your source.”

“We are citing the available record—”

“They dragged him here. Put an arrow through his throat. Hung him. Cut him in half. Then used his blood to paint the walls of your land, and you’re in here asking whether he provoked them?” Zuka’s voice cut sharper. “He carries dragonoid blood. He carries your blood. There is no version of what they did that deserves a rebuttal.”

A second official spoke. A druid, by the marks on his collar. His voice carried something the first one’s hadn’t.

“I want it recorded that I find what was done abhorrent.” He paused. “I also want it recorded that Kion was a philosopher. A thinker. Someone whose role was to observe and to advise, not to be sent into hostile territory carrying someone else’s questions.” His eyes moved to Zuka briefly, then away. “That he was used this way, and that he accepted it, is its own wound for us. We are not indifferent. We are grieving something more than his death.”

The first official continued the thought. “The druids do not exist to be instruments of state intelligence. That Kion was placed in that position reflects a decision that should have been made differently. That is not an excuse for what was done to him. It is context that this council deserves.”

“Context,” Zuka said.

“Yes.”

“He’s dead.”

“We are aware.”

“Then agree on what the statement means,” Noir said.

Once more the room shifted slightly. The pressure around him had grown. One of the high elf officials shifted, pressing a hand against his ribs as the pressure in the room deepened.

“They used his blood to paint arrowhead sigils and a diamond seal,” Noir said, still not looking up from the report. “Ritual markings. That isn’t an execution.” He tilted his head slightly. “That’s correspondence.”

He let that land for a moment.

“The vampires have codes. Structures. Finding a spy in your territory is going to bring a reaction, yes. But this wasn’t revenge. Nobody in this room actually believes that.” His eyes finally moved up, slow, settling on no one in particular. “The question of whether it’s a show of strength or a deliberate insult to us is honestly not that interesting. Both answers lead to the same place.” A pause. “They’re telling us they’re ready. That’s all this is. They wanted us to read it and here we are, reading it.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The first official objected. “We don’t know that yet. Vampires have always been hostile. Your people made a shortsighted decision sending a spy to their land without proper planning. Which is precisely why restraint is necessary. If we treat this as a declaration of war, we may create the war we are trying to prevent. The vampire nation is not unified in its leadership. There are internal—”

“Seventeen vampires spotted in Nate,” Orn said flatly. “Two months. Three human settlements gone along the Solis border. They’re measuring.”

“Measuring is not mobilizing—”

“It comes before it.”

The high elf king raised one hand. The room settled.

“Enough.” He looked across the table at Raen Kogetsu, who had still not spoken. “We are not here to argue about what has already been done. We are here because what comes next will determine the shape of this region for a generation.” A pause. “The vampire nation is old. Its armies do not move without calculation. What we are seeing is not aggression. It is assessment. They are learning whether we are unified, and how quickly we respond, and what we are willing to sacrifice to avoid conflict.” He set both hands flat on the stone. “That is the more dangerous version. A nation that wants war will come. A nation that is deciding whether it needs to is one that can still be influenced.”

“And Kion?” Zuka said.

“Was a tragedy,” the high elf king replied. “And a message. Both things.”

Zuka looked at him for a moment, then looked away.

Doran spoke for the first time. His voice had no ceremony in it. “Even if we agree on intent, the tactical reality doesn’t improve. A vampire dies when you remove its heart. Getting close enough to do that against a coordinated unit, at their speed, in their numbers—” He stopped. “We’d win. I believe that. I don’t believe it would be clean, and I don’t believe we’ve done the math on what it costs us to get there.”

“Then we find a way to make it cost less,” Zuka said.

“I’m telling you the math.”

“I heard you.”

The wood elf prince spoke for the first time. Quietly, toward the high elf king rather than the room. “We have settlements along the southern edge of Nate. My father’s concern is not hypothetical.”

The high elf king nodded once.

The aura around Noir increased once more. The torch nearest him bent inward, and the flame died.

Zuka glanced at him sideways. Noir glanced back. A beat passed between them.

The aura pulled back. The flame reignited.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The room settled back into itself, like it had been holding its breath. Then the doors slammed open.

A soldier entered, breathless, and dropped into a low bow. “Your Majesty. The messengers sent to Solis have been found dead. King Garfield has confirmed it. The bodies carried the same markings. Arrowhead sigil. Diamond seal. Vampires have been seen moving near the borders of Solis Imperium.”

No one spoke.

Raen Kogetsu looked at the soldier for a moment, then dismissed him. The doors closed.

The silence rearranged the room.

Raen finally spoke, it was without hurry. “They are not declaring war. Not yet. They are setting the stage.” He looked across the table. “How we respond decides how the tides turn.”

His eyes moved to General Kael, who had said nothing since the meeting began.

“I want to know who gave Kion his orders. I want to know what he found before he was caught. And I want to know what is moving in those ruins.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

We thought it might just be a myth, but this world is… Changing.

The ancient forests have grown cold, the once-green canopies twisting into jagged, skeletal shapes that whisper of ash and ruin.

Tension fractures the races. Hardened warriors flinch at shadows. The elves, the druids, the dryads wander the dying groves with hollow eyes, looking less like saviors and more like mourners.

There is a suffocating weight bleeding through the soil. We kneel and pray, but the heavens remain completely silent.

The dragons are long gone, and whatever they buried down there is waking up, quietly choking the life from our world.

Have you ever spoken to your shadow? The real terror isn't the silence; it is the creeping dread that one day, it might answer back.

People are vanishing. They leave their homes and never return, leaving behind no bodies, no belongings, just empty space. Sometimes you can still feel their shadow.

Even hunting feels like being hunted. You walk through the trees and feel eyes on your back, accompanied by the sickening realization that the silhouette trailing beside you is only pretending to be yours.

I want to believe it is just my mind playing tricks. I try to sleep it off and live a normal life.

There was once peace.

A friend once told me, “Be careful what you wish for, cause the devil can hear your prayers. And he has power too.”

At first, I dismissed it as nothing more than a clever warning. Yet the more I lived, the more I began to see the weight behind those words.

Man believes that his desires are pure. He looks upon what he wants and calls it good. He says, “If I gain this, I will be whole.” Yet he rarely questions the origin of that desire. He does not ask whether it was born from truth, or from the wounds he has yet to heal.

For desire is not always a guide. Often, it is an echo of lack.

The mind, when wounded, does not seek what is right. It seeks what will quiet its pain. A man who feels unworthy does not wish for truth. He wishes for validation. A man who fears loneliness does not wish for growth. He wishes for company, even if that company destroys him.

And so he prays.

But what is a prayer? It is not merely words spoken into the void. It is the direction of the soul. It is the declaration of what a man believes will save him.

Here lies the danger.

If your desires are shaped by fear, then what you call salvation may be the very thing that deepens your suffering. You ask for something, and life grants it. Yet when it arrives, it does not heal you. It exposes you. It magnifies what already lives within.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Few understand that this applies not only to struggle, but also to desire. For in chasing what you believe will complete you, you may become bound to the very darkness you seek to escape.

The devil, then, is not always a being of horns and flame. Sometimes, it is the silent force that answers the wrong desires. Sometimes, it is the path that gives you exactly what you asked for, but at the cost of who you are.

Consider this. A man prays for wealth, believing it will grant him respect. He gains it, yet finds himself surrounded by those who see only his riches, not his soul. Another prays for love, yet what he truly seeks is escape from himself. When love comes, it turns into dependency, then fear, then ruin.

Was it the answer that destroyed them, or the desire itself?

The Stoics taught that it is not events that disturb us, but our judgments about them. In the same way, it is not desire that corrupts a man, but the blindness with which he holds it.

To desire without understanding is to walk into a storm with open arms.

This is why one must be careful, not only with what he asks for, but with the part of himself that is asking. Before you seek anything from the world, you must first examine the state of your own mind.

Ask yourself: does this desire come from strength, or from emptiness?

For the world does not always deny you. Sometimes, it listens.

And when it listens, it does not correct you. It reveals you.

I’ve grown to distrust advice that comes from social media. Not because advice itself is useless, but because of the way it is framed, simplified, sharpened, and then thrown at people as if life were a checklist. I touched on this before, lightly, but I want to slow down now and actually think out loud.

To do that, I’ll focus on one corner of social media that I am personally obsessed with. Love. Men and women. Not relationships in the shallow sense, but the stories we tell about each other.

From one side, you hear women who speak with absolute certainty that men are wicked, men are manipulative, men are narcissistical, men never mean well. And I understand where that certainty comes from. Pain has a way of hardening into doctrine. Trauma wants explanation, and explanation often becomes generalization. When you’ve been hurt, you start building theories so it never happens again.

But when you step outside the screen and look at life as it actually is, the theory starts to crack. We have fathers. Brothers. Uncles. Friends. Men who love quietly, who sacrifice without posting about it, who stay. Not everyone is good, of course. That would be naïve. But it is just as naïve to believe that the worst examples represent the whole.

The problem is that suffering is loud. Kindness is quiet. People post about betrayal, not loyalty. About being robbed, not about the policeman who helped them recover what was stolen. Pain travels faster than peace. Algorithms know this. Humans have always known this.

Then you flip the coin.

Men online swear just as confidently that women are evil. That love is a transaction. That loyalty expires the moment money enters the room. That if you are rich enough or charming enough, any woman can be taken. Love, according to them, is an illusion dressed up as strategy.

But again, reality interrupts the story.

I have a mother. She stayed when things were hard. I have a sister. She would not abandon her husband because a billionaire snapped his fingers. I know women who are young, Gen Z, living in this same modern world, who are unwavering in their commitment. Not because they are foolish, but because love is not always fragile. Sometimes it is stubborn. Sometimes it is boring. Sometimes it is deeply rooted.

And even if you dismiss family as bias, look closer. Look around. Look honestly. You will find women who stay. Men who stay. People who choose each other every day without turning it into content.

So why does social media insist that everything must end?

Why are we taught to expect collapse instead of continuity? Why does goodness feel temporary, like a mistake the universe will soon correct?

I saw a video recently that said something like, if a famous athlete’s girlfriend could leave him, who are you that yours won’t? And that sentence lingered with me. Not because it was clever, but because it was empty. It assumes that all lives are parallel lines. That wealth, fame, and circumstance flatten human behavior into inevitability.

If someone else has millions you don’t have, you don’t assume you will suddenly inherit their fortune. So why assume you will inherit their tragedy?

This is the illogic social media thrives on. It takes isolated events and turns them into universal warnings. It mistakes probability for destiny. It teaches people to live defensively, suspicious of joy, braced for loss.

That is why I stopped taking advice from social media.

It is not wisdom. It is noise. Two extremes screaming over each other, each claiming moral superiority, each convinced they have decoded life. And if you follow either path blindly, you end up hollowed out. Distrustful. Afraid of something as simple as being loved.

I know this because I walked that road. For a long time, I genuinely believed women were evil. It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time it felt logical. The internet gave me evidence. Clips. Stories. Testimonies. Enough fragments to build a worldview that felt airtight.

Until reality broke it.

Not everything is a symbol. Not every action hides a scheme. Not every smile is manipulation. Life is not always a puzzle demanding suspicion. Sometimes it is exactly what it looks like.

Live. Pay attention. Choose carefully. But do not surrender your understanding of humanity to strangers chasing engagement.

You are one person among billions. Most of what you are warned about will never touch you. And if you let fear educate you instead of experience, you will lose something far more valuable than love.

You will lose clarity.

And people don’t realize how far that loss goes.

Behind him, the ambulance rolled up slower, pulling into the secondary bay.

Deputy Hall was already outside, speaking into her radio. She glanced over as Alex approached.

"The missing kid’s in there?" she said, nodding toward the ambulance.

Alex jerked his chin toward her. "Walk him in. Bring him through the back entrance, less eyes. He's spooked."

She gave a skeptical look but didn't question him "Sure. Because dragging feral children through the back entrance is totally normal now." She said.

As the back doors of the ambulance opened, Jade sat upright on the gurney, gripping the card Alex had given him like it was a lifeline. Hall stepped up, her tone firm but kind.

"C'mon, kid. This way. We'll get you inside, warm, and away from the noise."

Jade slid down carefully, barefoot, clothes still torn and crusted with dirt. He didn't look around. Just kept his head down and followed.

Alex didn't wait.

He was already inside the building, moving fast, steps echoing off the station's linoleum floors. The air smelled like old coffee and photocopier toner. One deputy nodded as he passed; Alex didn't return it.

He reached the surveillance room and pushed the door open.

Inside, dimly lit by blue-tinted monitors, sat the station's drone operator and unofficial tech goblin. Mid-twenties, hoodie layered under his uniform vest, energy drink can open beside him. The guy looked like he hadn't slept in a week.

Alex stepped in, arms crossed, jaw tight. "Tell me you've got something Wells."

Wells didn't look up. "We launched the drone about twenty minutes after your call-in. Eastern perimeter. Low altitude, slow sweep. I figured you'd want it raw, no clean-up or overlays."

"Show me."

Wells tapped a few keys. One of the monitors flared to life, showing thermal imaging in grainy black and white. The forest canopy glowed white-hot, while the floor below remained a pit of shifting greys and black.

"You're sure this is the same area where we found him?" Alex asked, stepping closer.

"GPS tagged. Coordinates match your hit site. That little stretch between Highway 9 and the Ridge Trail."

Alex's eyes flicked over the image. Trees. Nothing else. Not even birds. Just stillness.

Wells scrubbed forward. "Here," he said. "This is where it gets weird."

The drone dipped lower. Closer to the treeline. It followed a barely-there path, nearly invisible under the heat map. And then, just for a second, the feed glitched. A flicker. Pixel distortion.

Then the trees moved.

Not a breeze. Not swaying.

They shifted.

Trunks leaned closer together. Limbs stretched, repositioned. Not alive, but not acting dead, either.

The air in the room went still.

Alex narrowed his eyes. "Back it up."

Wells rewound. Slowed playback to half speed.

The glitch hit again, sharper this time.

Then it was there.

The movement.

Not chaotic. Deliberate. Like the forest was reacting. Closing in on something. Or… protecting something.

Wells leaned back, eyes a little too wide. "Okay, that's… probably just a glitch, right? Heat distortion? Compression artifact?"

Alex didn't speak.

His eyes were locked on the screen.

Because right before the feed cut out, just in the corner of the frame, one of the tree trunks turned.

Not all the way. Just a slight angle.

Enough to suggest a shape beneath bark. Something tall. Watching.

Looking directly at the drone.

Then—

Black screen.

Signal gone.

Static filled the monitor.

Wells swallowed. "That's not standard terrain interference."

Alex slowly leaned in, staring at the screen's faint glow.

"No," he muttered. "It's not. I feel like I'm the only one who sees these things. Or at least. The only one who chooses to believe."

"Trust me, Detective. I see it too. Most of us do. But… what the fuck can we do? Call a tree surgeon?"

Alex stood there in silence, just watching the static flicker across the monitor. The hum of the machines, the soft rattle of the air vent, even Wells' breathing, it all faded behind the weight of what he'd just seen.

Eventually, he turned.

He opened the door and stepped out, letting it swing shut behind him with a sharp clack that echoed down the corridor.

The station was quiet now, hollow and sterile in the late hours, just distant voices, a printer spitting out a report somewhere, the hum of old fluorescent lights.

He made his way past the front desk and turned down toward the temporary holding rooms. The kind of small, secure room where they kept witnesses or anyone who needed space. Where they put people who didn't quite fit in the normal system.

Alex stopped at the door. A uniformed deputy stood nearby, Deputy Palmer, young. He looked up as Alex approached.

"He's in there," Palmer said. "Been quiet. Hasn't said a word since Officer Hall brought him in."

Alex nodded once. "You can go."

Palmer hesitated, then stepped away.

Alex took a breath, opened the door, and stepped in.

Jade sat on a padded bench along the wall. His clothes were still crusted in dried soil and blood. The business card Alex had given him earlier was resting on his lap, his fingers brushing over the edges in slow, repetitive motion.

"Hey, kid," Alex said as he closed the door behind him. His tone was calm. Low. "How you feeling? You good?"

Jade didn't look up right away. When he did, it was with the same expression he had in the woods, half-aware, half-somewhere-else.

"Yeah," he muttered. "I'm fine."

Alex leaned against the wall instead, arms crossed. "I know I said I wouldn't pressure you. And I won't. But… I need something. Even if it doesn't make sense. Something to start untangling this mess."

Jade stared at the floor, jaw tight. "If I told you, you wouldn't believe me."

Alex studied him in silence. That haunted look again, deep and distant. But it wasn't fear anymore. Not entirely. It was something colder. Settled. Like the boy had stared into something monstrous.

"I've lived in Elmwood my whole life," Alex said finally. "Thirty-one years. I've seen things most people couldn't even describe, let alone explain. Trust me, your story wouldn't be the most ridiculous one I've heard."

The room was quiet for a few moment. Jade didn’t respond at first, then he shifted slightly. His voice came quiet. "I… I go out at night sometimes. Just to be alone. I like looking at the moon. Makes everything feel still."

"Why?" Alex asked, brow slightly raised.

"My house is… loud. Not in a fun way. Frustrating. I guess I was trying to breathe."

Alex nodded slowly. "Then what happened out there?"

Jade's throat tightened. "I was snatched."

Alex's eyes sharpened. "Snatched?"

"I don't know how. I didn't see it coming. One second I was standing under the streetlight… then I was, bitten, lifted in the air and dragged." He paused. "It ran fast. Insanely fast. I saw trees flashing by like headlights. Then… I was just dropped in the woods."

Alex pushed off the wall, stepping closer now. His voice dropped a register. "This might sound strange, but… have you ever had encounters before? Dreams? Nightmares? Anything you couldn't explain?"

Jade hesitated, eyes flicking to the corner of the room, away from Alex. Then he nodded.

"I've had dreams. The same one, over and over. A wolf. Drowning in blood. Always the same howl. Same color."

Alex took that in, then asked, "When you were in the woods… were you afraid?"

Jade looked up now, faint surprise in his eyes. "Why do you ask?"

Alex studied him carefully. "Because your eyes… they don't show fear now. They did when you woke up. But now it's different. It's like the fear burned out. And that makes me think… you're not telling me everything."

Jade was quiet for a long moment. Then:

"I saw the sun. That was the only time I felt safe. I saw deer. Birds. For a moment, I thought I'd find a road. Rescue."

He shifted.

"But by the third day… I gave up. I stopped believing someone would come. And when the fear left… it didn't take anything good with it. I was just empty. Starving, physically and mentally."

Alex remained quiet for a few seconds, trying to register what he was hearing, a drop of sweat rolled down his cheeks, but he nodded once. "Then what happened?"

"I ran," Jade said. "I don't even know how. But I ran. Found a shed. Thought I was safe."

He paused.

"But it found me."

Alex's voice stayed calm, low. "What found you?"

Jade's mouth went dry. "The beast. The same one."

Alex didn't flinch. "What did it want?"

"It kept saying different things. Words I couldn't always understand. It didn't just speak… its voice echoed."

"Did it say anything you understand?" Alex asked, eyes narrowing.

Jade nodded.

"What did it say?"

There was a beat. A shift behind Jade's eyes.

Jade paused for a second. He looked straight at Alex. "It asked… 'Where is… D. Dan… Where is the way to the other humans?'"

Alex exhaled slowly through his nose. Thoughtful. Quiet. Processing.

He stepped back from the table, walked toward the door, but paused at the frame.

"That's all for now," he said. "I'll have your parents come pick you up. We'll figure out the rest later."

His hand touched the door, but he lingered.

There's more he's not saying, I can feel it. He's not confused, he's holding back. He knows something. Maybe he doesn't understand it all yet… or maybe he understands too much.

Without turning back, he murmured to himself, just above a whisper:

"I want to believe he’s telling the truth. But… this is all too bizarre. 'Where is the way to the humans'… What does that mean…"

He stepped out, closing the door softly behind him.

Let’s say the forest is cursed. We’ve got disappearances in those woods, moving trees, strange… things.

But. ‘Where is the way to the humans'. Does that mean the trees aren't the threat? What if… They're the fence… Ugh. Why am I even humoring this.

After Alex stepped out,

Slowly, Jade looked down, at the faint reflection on the metallic tabletop. And for a second, his eyes glowed. Blue.

Bright. Unmistakable.

Then gone.

Are humans inherently good or inherently evil?

The question isn’t new. I stole the spark from my glorious king Godesulloh, then decided to throw in my own two cents because restraint has never been my strength.

So think out loud with me for a second. Walk straight into the wall with me.

People love saying humans are inherently good. It sounds noble. Clean. Safe. But then you step outside. You scroll. You watch. You remember. And suddenly that claim starts to wobble. Cruelty feels effortless. Greed doesn’t need training. Violence spreads faster than mercy. A human rarely has to be taught how to harm, only when not to.

So maybe humans are inherently evil.

But no. That doesn’t hold either. You can’t look at a newborn and call it evil with a straight face. A child hasn’t learned malice. It hasn’t learned intent. It doesn’t scheme. It doesn’t hate. It only exists.

And existence, as it turns out, is where the problem begins.

A newborn is pure in the most literal sense. No memory of good. No understanding of evil. No moral compass, just breath and instinct and need. You could call that good. Most people do. Soft skin. Small fingers. A heartbeat that hasn’t yet learned fear.

Yet that same child cries at 3 a.m. and drives exhaustion into its mother’s bones. That same child becomes an inconvenience to the tired man on a bus, a burden to the poor family, a disruption to the quiet someone else thought they were entitled to. The child has done nothing wrong, yet it causes irritation, stress, even resentment.

So what is it then?

Good? Evil?

Or neither.

The child does not change. The observer does.

Good and evil are not stitched into flesh. They are projected onto it. A hand reaching for help is mercy to one person and weakness to another. A raised voice is honesty in one room and violence in the next. The same act can be kindness or cruelty depending on who is standing across from it.

Even our bodies betray this truth. Adrenaline keeps you alive when danger comes. It also fuels rage. Teeth are for eating. They are also for tearing. Hands build homes and pull triggers. The human body is not moral. It is capable.

That capability is where people get uncomfortable.

We are not born good or evil. We are born loaded. Loaded with instincts, impulses, hunger, fear. What we become depends on who is watching, who is teaching, and what the world rewards us for being.

Evil feels easier because it often asks less of us. Less patience. Less restraint. Less imagination. Good is work. Good requires seeing beyond yourself, and that is a muscle most people never train.

So if you ask me whether humans are inherently good or evil, my answer stays the same.

Neither.

We are mirrors. And whatever stands in front of us decides what we reflect.

I’m still not done with this either. But laziness is a philosophy of its own.

I would probably make a second part to this.

The scent of oil, pine, and blood still hung faintly in the air. An ambulance idled near the tree line, its doors open. Inside, a paramedic leaned over the unconscious boy, his body half-wrapped in a thermal blanket, his chest rising slow but steady.

Detective Alex Conor stood just beyond the chaos, coat draped over his shoulders, sleeves rolled up, shirt slightly wrinkled. A notepad in his left hand, the other shoved in his pocket as he surveyed the scene.

A young deputy jogged over, clipboard in hand. "Detective, we've confirmed the ID. The victim is Jade Colter. Reported missing four days ago. Age sixteen. No phone, no ID on him, someone recognized his photo from the BOLO we posted."

Alex gave a nod. "Put that in the report. Get me witness statements, anyone who saw the car, anything unusual. And I want the dash cam footage from every patrol unit within a ten-mile radius."

"Yes, sir."

Just then, a sheriff cruiser pulled up, tires crunching gravel. The engine cut off and the door opened with a groan. A man stepped out, not in uniform, but clearly not a civilian. Mid-40s, casual slacks, a khaki jacket, and a confident swagger. Brown hair slicked back, not a strand out of place.

"Detective Alex," the man said, walking up with that familiar, irritating smirk.

Alex didn't even try to hide his sigh. "What are you doing here, Nico? This is my case."

Nico glanced around, taking in the scene. "First off, it’s Detective Nico… Heard something went down. Thought I'd drop by. See what's what."

"Well," Alex said dryly, "as you can see, I've got it under control."

Nico didn't move. "So what's the story? Another local creeper behind the wheel? Drunk driver?"

Alex looked toward the ambulance, his eyes narrowing. "The victim's Jade Colter. Sixteen. Reported missing earlier this week. He was found collapsed in the middle of the road, looks like a hit-and-run at first glance. But there's a problem."

"Let me guess," Nico said, folding his arms, "you think it's another supernatural case."

Alex ignored the jab. "No visible injuries. Not a single broken bone. No internal bleeding, according to the EMT. He's unconscious but stable. His shirt's torn, slashed open like something clawed at him. Dried blood all over the fabric, but no fresh wounds underneath. Just dirt. Mud. Forest grime. The kid looks like he came out of a freaking battlefield. That isn't normal."

Nico chuckled. "Jesus. You're back on your bullshit again. You ever consider the kid was high off his ass? Maybe wandered out of a rave in the Pines, got lucky not to get eaten by a bear, and landed in traffic."

"Right," Alex muttered, "because drugged-up kids always fake claw marks and bleed on themselves for fun."

"Occam's razor, Alex. Hell, maybe it was just a botched kidnapping."

Alex stepped closer, lowering his voice. "You think kidnappers just let kids go without ransom or reason? You think drugged-up teens tear through the woods for days and come back without a scratch? You've seen what this town is, Nico. Elmwood eats people."

There was a long pause. Nico glanced toward the trees, then back at the boy.

"I'll give you this," Nico conceded, glancing toward the trees. "Elmwood's not… ordinary. But I don't jump to beasts and bogeymen every time something strange happens."

Alex stared at him. "Maybe that's why people keep vanishing on your watch, Nico."

Nico's smugness faltered. He turned and headed back to his car. "Just doing my job, Alex," he said, yanking the door open. "Try it sometime. Not chasing fiction you can't see."

He paused before sliding into the driver's seat. "Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one."

The door slammed. Tires kicked gravel, and the cruiser vanished into the night.

Alex stood alone for a moment, silence settling like a fog.

He turned back toward the ambulance. Jade's body was still there, still breathing, but untouched by injury. Unnatural.

"I hate that guy," Alex muttered to himself.

Then, more quietly, eyes fixed on the boy's motionless frame:

"But this… this isn't normal."

Alex stood alone for a moment, silence settling like a fog. He turned back toward the ambulance, eyes fixed on the boy's motionless frame. Still breathing. Untouched by injury. Unnatural. He was wrestling with the implications, the sheer impossibility of the situation, when, without warning...

And right then, Jade jolted awake.

A sharp gasp tore from his lungs as if he'd just broken the surface of deep water. He sat up too fast, eyes wide and wild, scanning the inside of the ambulance like he didn't recognize it. As if he'd expected to wake up somewhere far worse.

Alex froze in place, watching.

The kid looked around in frantic bursts, then down at his legs, his hands, the bloodstained rips in his shirt. Confused… but not shocked. Like part of him had expected to be worse off than he was.

One of the paramedics, a middle-aged guy named Troy, leaned in from the front. "Whoa, kid's up!"

Alex moved toward the ambulance doors, hands raised slightly to keep the moment calm.

"He's awake, yeah," Alex said, "But look at him, he's not just waking up. He's coming back from somewhere."

Troy gave a concerned nod but stepped aside as Alex climbed into the back of the vehicle.

Alex crouched slightly, meeting Jade's gaze. "Jade Colter, right?"

Jade blinked. Then gave a small nod.

"I'm Detective Alex Conor, Elmwood Sheriff Department." His voice softened just a bit. "You alright?"

Jade hesitated. "…Yeah. I think so."

"You've been missing for four days," Alex continued, studying the kid's face, "and you show up tonight in the middle of the road like you were dropped there. No broken bones. No bruising. No signs of trauma. But your shirt's torn to hell, I honestly don't know how you are conscious."

Jade didn't answer. Just stared at him. Eyes wide. Guarded.

"…Look kid, I'm not gonna force you to say anything, but you are gonna have to help me out here, I'm only doing my job to make sure things like this don't happen to another innocent child," Alex said. "But for now. We'll take you to the station and have your parents meet you there. Get you somewhere safe."

At that, Jade's expression shifted for a split second.

Not relief, fear.

Alex paused for a moment, he saw the shift instantly.

He reached into his coat, pulling a plain white card from a leather wallet. "Do me a favor… Keep this on you," he said, handing it to him. "That's my direct line. Anything happens, anything weird, anything you remember, call me. Day or night."

Jade stared at the card. Took it slowly.

From outside, a female voice called out. "Detective Conor!"

Alex turned his head. Deputy Hall jogged over, her boots crunching gravel.

"We've got movement near the eastern woods. One of the units picked something up, could be nothing, but patrol's sweeping it now."

"Log it," Alex said. "Double the perimeter and get K9 out there. No one goes in alone."

"Yes, sir." She turned and moved off.

Alex looked back at Jade. "You sure you're alright?"

Jade opened his mouth. Closed it. Then, quietly: "…There were eyes. In the trees."

Alex held his gaze. "Yeah," he said. "I figured."

He stood up straight, giving Jade space. "Get him to the station," he told the paramedic. "Call his parents. And don't take your eyes off him. I'll be there soon."

He stepped down from the ambulance, hands in his coat pockets, watching as the vehicle slowly pulled away.

"NO, NO, NO—"

"The trees had eyes…"

"The trees… had eyes."

"Thhe tttrees haad eyes."

"The treessss had eyyyes."

"The treeees hadd eeyees!"

"I ran. I ran and they followed. I heard them behind me. I felt—"

He gasped. "No. No, no no—"

"The trees had eyes. The trees had eyes."

The paramedic moved toward him, cautious. "Hey, kid, it's okay—"

Jade jerked back. Eyes wide. Voice cracking now.

"THE TREES HAD EYES!"