The mules were packed. The University bells rang with the sorrowful tunes of goodbyes, each toll echoing the solemnity of our uncertain future. Onlookers gathered at a respectful distance, their faces shadowed by apprehension, perhaps curiosity, but certainly awe. From us. From John. From our Saints…

  Ahlia moved with a deliberate grace, her steps measured, her presence both commanding and unsettling. A path formed around her like water parting for a stone, quiet reverence emanating from all who watched. She paused momentarily at each figure kneeling before her, murmuring words too low for my ears but heavy enough to make shoulders shudder and eyes brim.

  One by one, my chosen companions knelt for final rites and blessing, their hearts and minds desperate for whatever strength or comfort the Saints might offer. In the face of powers that defy rationality, skepticism becomes a frail shield, easily cracked by the undeniable and inexplicable reality before us.

  Among the kneeling was Grieg, whose scholarly pride and rigorous intellect once led him to argue fervently against the possibility of divine proofs. God, to him, was always an abstract notion, safely kept at bay by logic and alternative explanations. In his thesis, he had posited that all phenomena—be it anomaly, beast, or supposed miracle—could be understood through reason, as natural forces, akin to lightning, fire, or the fierce creatures roaming distant mountains and steppes of the Old World. A compelling argument, clear and confident.

  Yet that thesis was penned before he witnessed the Saints, before their dreadful glory had marked his heart and mind with irrefutable truth. Now Grieg knelt as fervently as any devout believer, drinking deep from the fountain of divine aura, desperate perhaps to reconcile his scholarly skepticism with the wrenching, visceral reality that defied every logical premise he'd once held dear.

  Even so, I observed him closely and saw subtle resistance lingering in his eyes. The seed of doubt, once planted so deeply in the bedrock of his reason, could not be entirely uprooted by mere miracle or spectacle. Grieg, I believe, still doubted God. But when confronted by the astonishing immediacy of divine manifestation, it was hard, even for him, to deny the evidence of his own senses.

  John and Halvdan did not join the line to receive blessings. Instead, they stood apart, engaged in intense discourse, heads bent close over maps and charters unfurled hastily atop a makeshift table. Their quiet urgency was starkly practical amid the surrounding rituals and whispered prayers.

  Halvdan, a man of rigorous method and dry ink-stained fingers, had visibly transformed since that fateful day the bell tolled and the void bled reality raw. Whatever truths or secrets had been revealed to him in that instant, they had bound him irrevocably to John. His posture spoke plainly now—no longer cautious or skeptical, but utterly committed.

  John, too, had grown beyond mere companion or curiosity. To Halvdan, he had become an anchor, a touchstone of clarity in a world unraveling at every seam. Whatever had passed between them in their shared moments of crisis and revelation, it had formed a bond stronger than any formal oath or ritual blessing.

  Watching them both, I understood with quiet conviction that Halvdan trusted John more implicitly than any Saint or divine manifestation. Frankly, in the uncertain twilight of our departure, amidst the lingering echoes of bells and whispered prayers, I found myself realizing that I trusted John too.

  I watched. I collected myself. I counted and made ready. I settled the odds:

  Three Saints joined us.

  Ahlia, the Bleeding Martyr, the holy saint of Hasholm University. Our finest asset, no doubt. Yet, her exact influence remained enigmatic. Some Saints are predictable as weather, easily read as heralds of sun or thunder. Ahlia, though, was a storm without clouds, silent until suddenly devastating.

  The others inspired far less confidence. Malin, the Walking Flame, whose origins were clouded in mystery, emerged one day from the deep shadows of the forest ablaze with a brightness comparable only to the sun. She passed through Thulden, leaving it scorched and lifeless, her mere proximity a destructive force. She has been contained ever since, encased in marble, carried by cart, a silent and volatile furnace of faith and danger.

  Guitred, The Martyred Messenger. Sent centuries past to parley with the natives at the cusp of exploration, his screams had echoed through the night as torture reshaped him. When rescuers arrived, he stood alone, native bodies fallen around him, gripping his own severed head. His sightless eyes now burned with an otherworldly light, seeing what none else could, a vision born of horror and martyrdom.

  Armed escort. A hired company, the Bull Hounds. Known most recently for killing a briganding band terrorizing the apple orchards and wheat fields of Knielhooden. Their captain, Renhard, was notorious for his ruthlessness and cold pragmatism; the men under him were disciplined yet brutal. Left none alive, disregarding orders from local magistrates to spare any who surrendered. Frankly, a very possible liability, with tensions already stretched thin among settlements we might pass. Yet state troops are for the state, and dependable mercenary companies grow scarce as the world's wheels grind slowly to a halt. Forty armed men, their armor scuffed from frequent use, bearing banners stained by years of hard campaigning, will no doubt be welcomed by any means necessary in days ahead.

  I had stood on the edge long enough. Data could illuminate our path only so far; courage would need to carry us beyond certainty, into realms untouched by maps and charters.

  Drawing in a steadying breath, I stepped down from the University stairs, each footfall heavy with resolve. My companions, the sworn wanderers whose fates intertwined with mine, awaited. Halvdan met my gaze directly, a brief nod signaling readiness and trust in equal measure.

  “Me and John have studied the charters,” Halvdan stated, always preferring directness.

  “Please do not alter the plan too greatly at the onset of our departure,” I cautioned quietly, leaning closer to decipher the intricate, hurried scribbles spread chaotically across our treasured map.

  Halvdan shrugged slightly, his voice firm yet carrying an undertone of disregard for my concern. “Simply planning ahead, Otto. John isn't entirely clear about the end goal. Frankly, neither am I.”

  “We are searching for something deep,” John interjected with his characteristic, resonant voice that always commanded attention.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “It will be well hidden, or well defended. Possibly both,” I conceded, already feeling the heavy weight of uncertainty.

  “The Eternal Forest, yes,” Halvdan acknowledged. “We knew the difficulty when we began.”

  “Otto, we both understand the Eternal Forest isn't endless,” Halvdan clarified with a sweeping gesture across the map. “It earned its name from sheer enormity, not infinity. Its boundaries are simply unknown.”

  “A massive territory to comb through,” Halvdan declared. John's expression softened briefly, echoing agreement in a manner almost intimate.

  “We seek methods to narrow the search,” John concluded, his voice dropping slightly as if wary of the enormity of the task ahead.

  “The sun hung twice in the east,” I said. The phrase had become something akin to a prophecy of doom, oft repeated in hushed tones. Among old scholars, it was whispered as the harbinger of great unmaking. To the common folk, it had become folklore—ominous, potent, inexplicable.

  “The Gustavians recorded it. Several reports from farmfolk and travelers speak to unsavory light from the east when disaster strikes.” Halvdan pointed to a particularly indecipherable piece of writing along the Common Road going east. “Observations of this kind are, if you look closely enough, clustered.” His finger moved from one smudge of ink to another, drawing invisible lines between what he claimed were intersections of omen.

  “Then your eyes are kinder than mine,” I replied, studying his lines. Yes, one could possibly see patterns. A cluster here, a grouping there. A suggestion of order where I saw only randomness. But they were still broad, imprecise—highly debatable, in my view. The sort of correlation that comforted a frightened mind more than it guided a rational one.

  “Otto,” Halvdan said, a tone shaped to draw me in, “our maps do not lie, but they do omit. There are things in that forest which flee ink and compass both. We’re not merely navigating terrain. We’re navigating memory, trauma, myth. If the locals remember strange light coming from the east, we’d be fools to ignore it.”

  He tapped again at the edge of the forest. “We are to travel this route anyway. We should stop at the clusters. Record what we see. Speak to the locals. Going blindly into the darkness will surely be less fruitful than collecting relevant testimony along the way.”

  “There will be no warning from the sun or the heavens when we enter the forests,” John murmured. His voice, unusually quiet, held an unsettling weight. “Take heed and collect, when there is still light to observe. Once we pass beyond its reach, we will have only each other.”

  Their words needed to be pondered. I let myself study the ongoing blessings once more.

  Ahlia raised her hand, and I saw a boy flinch—from pain I could not tell, but maybe from the solemn finality of the gesture. She was finishing with one of the younger scholars, an apprentice I had not met before. His cloak still held the folds of packing, his hair slick with too much oil, his eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the Saint’s presence. Ahlia’s fingers traced the air before his brow, her throat parting gently as she whispered something into the hollows of his soul. A small line of blood welled from her slit neck and rolled down, catching the light like a bead of garnet. The boy trembled. Then nodded. Then stepped back into the fold, a changed thing.

  From the periphery, I caught movement—a flicker of discomfort. Three sellswords, clustered near the water barrels, watched the exchange with thin-lipped unease. One spat. Another scratched at a scab on his neck. The third met my gaze for the briefest moment, his expression unblinking and hollow. Then he looked away, as if to erase what he had seen.

  Men like that knew death more intimately than doctrine. They had buried friends, carved flesh, fought off starvation and plague not once, but again and again, in towns that would never be marked on maps. They had killed for coin, protection, survival. For them, horror was measurable. A blade’s reach. The stink of rot. The sound a man makes when he begs not to die. These they understood.

  But Ahlia? She confounded them. Her blood, her poise, her eyes too wide when she gazed at someone as if seeing through the centuries of their ancestry—these were not traits one finds in a fellow mortal. She bled and did not weaken. She blessed and the air grew cold. She walked among us, yet bent the weight of space around her like a fixed star in a sky gone mad.

  To such men, there could be no real difference between a Saint and an Anomality. Ahlia was not some holy intercessor in a world governed by God’s light. She was simply another unnatural terror to be endured or avoided. The sort of thing you didn’t look at too long in case it looked back.

  The sort of thing that reminded you how close your heartbeat ran to the void.

  I could not fault them. If I did not know her name—if I had only stumbled upon her in the wastes, throat unseamed and whispering to shadows—I would have drawn conclusions of a similar kind.

  She stepped away from the apprentice, now moving toward her place at the center of our procession. Her hands were clean again. The blood had vanished.

  Guitred sat on a different wagon, apart from the others, like a puppet left too long on a shelf. His severed head rested quietly in his lap, sightless eyes still glowing faintly with that unnatural light. This was his natural state now, after his turning—motionless, inert, awaiting instruction. He did not speak unless asked. He did not move unless bidden. Who knew why? Perhaps it was a mercy. Perhaps the pain of constant perception was too great. Perhaps his soul rested elsewhere now, looking out from a distant place beyond flesh and voice.

  One of the mercenaries muttered, “Don’t like it. Ain’t right.”

  Another replied, “Ain’t paid to like it. Just paid to follow.”

  And they would. For now. Because coin still flowed and command still had meaning.

  But I wondered, watching the flicker of revulsion on their faces, how long the line would hold when their fear of her began to outweigh the coin in their purse.

  The moment had passed. Reverence gave way to readiness. I straightened my spine and raised my voice, letting it cut clear across the courtyard like a bell.

  “Pack up! Ready the mules and the wagons! Clear the Saints, ready arms! We head east!”

  For a heartbeat, nothing moved. A moment of hesitation hung in the air. The scholars looked to me with uncertainty, eyes wide behind lenses and ink-smudged spectacles. The soldiers, less burdened by questions, glanced at me with indifference—measuring, weighing. Was I worth following? Was I just another soft-spoken man with orders and none of the spine to carry them?

  “The road is long,” I said, voice steadier now, “and much depends on us. We will search for the truth, and we will find it.”

  Just enough.

  Movement followed. Grumbling soldiers shouldered matchlocks, the clatter of steel on harness echoing between cold stones. Scholars folded maps, tucked quills, and gathered their parchment-filled sacks with a reverent haste. The wagon carrying Malin groaned against its axle, marble inscribed with holy restraint, its heat palpable even at distance. None but a single priest held the reins—a gaunt man whose eyes never rose from the road ahead. No others dared walk beside it.

  John was already moving, barking reminders about rations and pacing. The Bull Hounds fell into rank with disciplined resentment, their armor clinking like old chains. Halvdan remained beside me for a moment longer. He looked not at the Saints, nor the mules, nor the murmuring students still loading crates of ink and observation glass. He looked east.

  "Let us see what truths we find," he said.

  A faint smile traced his mouth.

  And then we marched.