Part 1 Elia

  The mountain did not care that she was cold.

  She had understood this within the first twenty minutes — the abstract knowledge of *it will be cold* colliding with the concrete reality of her thin training clothes doing almost nothing against air that moved through the fabric like it wasn't there. Her fingers went numb somewhere around the second kilometer. Her feet shortly after. She kept moving because moving generated heat and heat was the only currency she currently had.

  Harren had pointed north, then east where the tree line broke, and he had walked away, and she had stood there watching him go until he was gone and then she had turned to face the mountain and started walking.

  *Alright,* she had thought. *Alright then.*

  The forest received her without ceremony.

  ---

  She heard the demon before she saw it.

  That low subsonic patience — she knew that sound now, had learned it in the worst possible classroom, and her body responded before her mind finished processing it. She turned and it was at the treeline behind her, maybe forty meters, not rushing. Just present, in the way demons were present, like something wrong that had decided to pay attention.

  She ran.

  North and east the way Harren had said, into the trees, committing to it entirely with every cell in her body that still had sensation.

  The demon followed.

  The forest was dense and dark and the snow made the ground treacherous and she was a month out from cracked ribs and thin clothes and no breakfast and she ran anyway because the alternative was not running and that was not an option.

  She hit the wire at full sprint.

  It caught her shin and the world rotated — forward and down, hands and forearms hitting frozen ground, skin tearing open against ice-crusted earth — and she was up again before she'd fully registered falling because the sound behind her hadn't stopped. Her palms were bleeding. She noticed and filed it and kept running.

  The ground gave way beneath her left foot without warning — snow-covered, constructed, designed to look like every other section of ground — and she dropped to her knee in the pit before her weight redistributed and she wrenched herself out with a sound she couldn't suppress, knee twisting badly on the way up, and she kept going because the sound behind her was closer now.

  She was running unevenly. The knee made every stride a negotiation.

  She ran anyway.

  The horizontal cord hit her across the ribs.

  She hadn't seen it — chest height, thin as thought, invisible against the grey air — and the impact was a full-speed collision with something that didn't move and she felt the crack before she felt the pain and then the pain arrived all at once and she was on the ground against a tree with her hand pressed to her right side and her vision whiting out.

  The sound in the trees had stopped.

  She looked back. Nothing visible.

  She pushed off the tree and ran.

  The pain was extraordinary. She breathed in shallow increments, her right arm held tight against her side, each stride sending a sharp specific message through her torso that she received and ignored and received again. The cold numbed the sharper edges of it which she accepted gratefully and kept moving.

  Something dropped from above — weighted net, heavy, fast — and she got half out of the way.

  Half was not enough.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The edge caught her left shoulder and drove her sideways and down and she hit the frozen ground hard, something in her shoulder joint protesting violently, and she rolled and got up because the net hadn't fully caught her and behind her the demon had found its pace now, properly, she could hear it.

  She ran.

  She was aware of what her body was accumulating. She made the conscious decision to stop taking inventory because inventory was not useful right now. What was useful was the next ten meters. Then the ten after that.

  ---

  The snare took her ankle so fast the sequence didn't have time to exist.

  One moment: running. Next moment: the world inverted.

  She went up fast — faster than the first snare, the pulley mechanism more complex, more powerful — and her head caught the edge of a branch on the way up, a solid impact against her left temple that was sudden and total and white, and then the cord locked and she swung there suspended and her head was —

  She couldn't quite —

  The world had a lag to it. A half-second delay between what she looked at and what she registered, between intention and understanding. She knew this feeling. She had had this feeling before, in the recovery room, in the early days after the forest.

  *Not now,* she thought, with some difficulty. *Not right now please.*

  She blinked. Blinked again. The lag didn't fully clear but it thinned enough that she could take in what she was looking at — the forest below her, very far below her, the grey sky above through the branches, and the cord that had done significantly more than catch her ankles.

  In the speed of the ascent it had looped, wrapping her legs together from ankle to knee, a secondary cord catching her arms against her sides and pulling her wrists behind her with the tension of the whole system. She tested it with fingers she couldn't entirely feel. The cord was tight across her chest, deep enough into her wrists that she could feel it breaking the skin there even through the numbness, the cold making it worse, and her ribs from the sudden inversion had —

  She stopped taking inventory again.

  She looked down.

  The pit was directly beneath her — wide and deliberate — and at the bottom of it, in the cold darkness, something was already moving. Something very large that had heard her arrive and was now looking up at her with an attention that required no translation at all.

  She looked at it.

  It looked at her.

  Her head throbbed with a slow deep pulse that had its own rhythm separate from her heartbeat.

  "Hello," she said. Her voice came out slightly wrong — a little distant, a little unmoored, the way voices sounded when the head injury was doing what head injuries did.

  The thing in the pit made a sound.

  "Right," she said. "Okay. I want to be upfront with you." She looked at the treeline to the east where shapes were moving, more than one, unhurried, coming toward the snare. She looked back down. "I genuinely do not taste good. I need you to know that. Months of terrible food — very inconsistent portions, a whole ongoing situation — very disappointing outcome for you. You'd be wasting your time entirely."

  The thing shifted its weight.

  "I'm being serious," she said. "You should find something that ate better. That's just practical advice. I'm giving it to you for free." She paused. The throbbing in her head was getting louder. "No charge. Genuinely."

  The shapes at the treeline stepped out into the open below her and they were not small and they were not in a hurry and they were looking up at her with the patient attention of things that had nowhere else to be.

  She looked at the cord above her. At the mechanism in the branches. At her wrists behind her back.

  She pulled against it.

  Very well made.

  "Just —" she said, and stopped, and the world tilted slightly in a way that had nothing to do with being suspended, that was entirely the head, and she waited for it to correct and it mostly did. "Just give me a minute. I just need —"

  The thing in the pit stood to its full height.

  She looked at it properly for the first time and the joke she'd been about to make didn't arrive.

  Her wrists were bleeding. She could feel it now even through the cold — the cord was deep enough and the suspension was putting enough tension on her arms that something warm was tracking slowly down her hands, dripping off her fingers and falling a very long way down into the pit below.

  The demon looked at her bleeding hands.

  It made a sound that was different from the sounds it had been making.

  She looked at the shapes approaching from the treeline. At the thing below her. At the grey sky. At her bound wrists behind her back that she could not see and could not reach.

  *Kaelan,* she thought. Quiet and clear and with no strategy in it. Just the name, the way you reached for something solid when the ground wasn't there.

  The cord swayed slightly in the wind.

  It held.

  For now, it held.

  ---

  ## PART TWO — KAELAN

  He noticed she wasn't at breakfast.

  This should not have been remarkable. She had missed breakfast before — in the early recovery weeks when sleep claimed her past the morning bell, and he had let it go because sleep was what she needed and he had checked on her afterward regardless. He had a system for that. He knew, without examining why he knew, roughly where she was at most hours of the day.

  This morning she was not where she should have been.

  He checked the training ground first. Empty — the session hadn't begun yet, the compound quiet in the early morning hour. He checked the corridor. Her room. He knocked twice and heard nothing and opened the door and the room was made and the bed was cold and his cloak was folded at the foot of it the way she always folded it, neatly, carefully, as if she were returning something borrowed.

  He stood in the doorway of her empty room for a moment.

  Then he went to find Harren.

  ---

  He found him in the equipment room, working through inventory with the focused efficiency of a man with no particular awareness that anything was wrong. Harren looked up when Kaelan appeared in the doorway and something in his expression — not guilt, Harren did not do guilt, but something adjacent to recalibration — told Kaelan the answer before he asked the question.

  "Where is she," Kaelan said.

  Harren set down the equipment he was holding. "North face assessment terrain. I took her last night." A pause. "Left her before dawn."

  The room was very quiet.

  "Before dawn," Kaelan said.

  "Her compound progress wasn't sufficient. She needed field —"

  "What is she wearing."

  The pause this time was shorter and more informative.

  "Training clothes," Harren said. "Standard."

  Kaelan looked at him for a moment. One moment, controlled and level, and then he turned and walked out of the equipment room and down the corridor and Riven was there, coming from the opposite direction, and took one look at Kaelan's face and stopped walking.

  "North face," Kaelan said. "Now. Both of you." He didn't slow down. "Get Davan."

  Riven didn't ask questions.

  Kaelan was through the outer door and into the cold morning, the grey sky overhead pressing down flat and heavy with the cold front that was coming in from the north — from exactly the direction she was in — and he was moving fast, faster than he normally moved in open terrain, with the specific controlled urgency of a man doing the calculation in his head and not liking the result.

  *Before dawn,* he thought. *Training clothes. North face. Six hours.*

  He thought about thin fabric and mountain cold and six hours and cracked ribs that had only just healed.

  He thought about the traps on the north face, which he knew by location, which he had helped set years ago, which were designed for demons and large prey and were not —

  He moved faster.

  He did not run.

  But he moved faster.