There is something powerful in fear. With my actions, I instilled fear in beings who rarely know the sensation. Fear is empowering, if you are wielding it and not subjugated by it.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

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  Droplet by droplet the spirit crept, slipping inside the mouth of the vial. The glass wasn’t made to contain the str?luciele, yet somehow every drop squeezed in.

  The wind whipped up as he worked his magic, and though the other iele had gone invisible, he felt them circling the hollow. Their confusion and fear must have held them from acting against him.

  Surely it was that.

  As he placed the stopper on the vial, he tuned into their angered howling. He placed the glass gently in the box of iron shavings and stood up with it in his palm.

  “You would have taken my life! Instead, I took one of yours! I will free her when I am safely out of your woods!”

  Dragos turned slowly, glaring around the glade.

  These were not the most powerful beings in the forest. He knew it as one knew a storm when they saw it on the horizon. A mere human—had he really thought that? A simple hunter wandering in the area would have become a skeleton in the pond.

  He was no simple hunter.

  The spirits knew it, after his demonstration. He hoped it would continue to make them cautious. He swept iron filings over the vial and closed the box. It was a torturous prison, and he regretted the heavy-handedness, but in fairness, she deserved it.

  The unseen iele moaned and bayed, likely confused as to how a mere mortal took one of their own. Upset, but too cautious to move on him.

  Dragos tucked the container back into its place and closed his peddler’s box. He shrugged it back onto his shoulders and strode off towards the Spineback once again, hoping to avoid the presence he felt.

  The thinness of the veil kept his arms in goosebumps under his shirt, and had nothing to do with the early fall air. Dragos left the iele-infested hollow, an ear pricked for any warning of retaliation. The howling cries faded as he left them behind. It didn’t seem like they followed, however, should they have hexed him…

  What was one more curse? Blestem followed him like an unruly puppy.

  Dragos roiled with dark thoughts as time passed on his lonely hike. He climbed the next hill and looked into the valley below. At first, it was more of the same; huge trees obscured everything.

  Until a flash of white caught his eye.

  It pierced his vision, and he squinted, eyes watering instantly. It felt as if something thumped against him, not his flesh, but the subtle body of his soul. He sucked in a breath and held it.

  Below, a massive white stag wove through the trees.

  Cerbiele st?panul p?durii.

  Dragos shifted behind a leaning beech and eased down to a crouch, as if that would help. The ghostly stag likely knew where he was and what he’d done. Whether it cared or not, that was all that mattered.

  With a carefully calmed breath, Dragos tried not to think about the captive iele he carried on his back. He scrubbed his face with his hands and tried to soothe his pounding heart. Just that glimpse had rattled him, but if it came near, he’d have to stay calm and move fast.

  To it, he was a mere marten, a little songbird. Nothing.

  He intended to remain that way.

  Dragos stood up and stepped away from the tree, plotting his course more north by the gleam of the sun on the rooftops. With careful steps to stir no leaves, he picked his way along the ridge, gaze flitting about for a hint of anything spirit or natural.

  Coming upon a bear would be almost as bad as running across the cerbiele’s path.

  A stony outcropping blocked his straight path, and he circled around it, pausing to glance past it before walking. He was glad he did.

  Not one hundred feet away, a procession of spirits moved along the shadowed trail, following the largest stag he’d ever seen. It stood easily twice as tall as he did, its massive rack splayed wide and tall, a hundred points that curves gracefully above its wedge-shaped head and thick neck.

  Dragos lowered his gaze instantly. To meet the eyes of a spirit lord was to choose insanity, at best. He tucked himself back around the rock and shut his eyes.

  His ears told him whispers. The air tingled like lightning would strike. A cloying sweetness filled the air, as if a garden of spring flowers had sprang up in the midst of fall, yet an icy chill fell over the woods. The stone his hands pressed against felt bitter and biting like it had lain under snow for a season.

  To be sure time passed, Dragos began to count the seconds. He did not dare open his eyes until he’d slowly counted to five thousand. Only then did he dare.

  One squinted eye cast over the collection of boulders. He slowly leaned to peek around and saw the hint of iele walking dutifully in the distance behind the stag lord. Flashes of feminine curves formed out of wood and leaves slowly disappeared into the gloaming.

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  Dragos sucked in a long breath, and it was as if time began again. His heart, which had fluttered like a butterfly, roared in his ears. He gasped again, realizing he’d held his breath too long. The forest's silence came back to life, as the rest of the living world came back to normalcy.

  He stared down the trail the stag and its entourage had taken and knew that where they walked, the veil had no consequence. The difference in worlds ceased to exist in the presence of such a powerful being.

  Another thought struck him.

  That he could feel the differences was significant. Before, he’d been sensitive. As a student, he was aware, but not like he was, now. His old student self might have bumbled into the stag’s path, unaware, as any foolish mortal might have.

  What was he, now?

  Experienced, he told himself, and let it go.

  Dragos pushed himself to move faster once he’d passed the procession’s wake. He’d never crossed this parcel of woods, nor traveled this side of the mountains extensively, unlike the other on the western side. The east was largely new territory for him.

  The primeval woods he strode through rose at a slant as he climbed the foothills. He dared to stop only for brief moments to sip water or find a dried strip of meat to suck on as he went. While he walked and climbed the rocky traverses, he couldn’t help but think.

  Where had Zgavra gone, and what had it done? What was he to do with a str?luciele, unwillingly bound to him? Would he run out of food before he found the border of P?durea Ielelor?

  His mind circled those things as he hauled himself up a slope that was as much root as stone, fingers scraped and bleeding. Throat dry, he coughed, but he dared not refill his water skin. Not in the forest where the spirits of nature had form and figure.

  At length, he stopped to assess his path.

  The obstacle he surveyed was taller than the other short shelves and ridges Dragos sucked the last drop from his water skin with a disgruntled groan, then held up his hand to measure the cliff.

  It rose three times as high as he was tall, but he had a good feeling about it. It wasn’t a sheer face, and above… he might be free of the cerbiele’s forest.

  The sun hung low, threatening to steal away the light, but if the top of the cliff was outside the P?durea Ielelor, he would rest easier.

  He looked at the scrapes on his fingers and sighed, then started up. Much of the climb was a matter of grasping saplings or roots. Only the last ten feet had a sheer face, with crags enough for his fingers and toes.

  Wind gusted against him, tugging at his peddler’s box. He held still, suspended over a rocky slope below, and plotted his course. Each slip, every pebble sliding from under fingers or toes re-woke the burst of chill fear that drove his heart to bang against his chest and clenched his lungs.

  It took until nightfall to pick his way up. When he finally crawled out onto the ledge, he lay there on his stomach, a foot dangling over the precipice. He pressed his cheek to the slant of granite and let some of the heat from the climb seep away into it. Harrowing as it had been, the effort was necessary.

  Dragos still lived. He’d become fairly good at it, in his time beyond the school, the cohort, and his red-haired teacher. He survived the climb as he had everything else.

  Eventually, he pulled himself up to sit and look out over the treetops of P?durea Ielelor. The air felt thicker, unblended with the breath of which did not know life and death the way mortals did. He sat above the spirit world and reveled in the pounding in his chest as it calmed to its usual rhythm.

  Before the sun’s last rays were gone, he found enough fallen wood to build a fire.

  The trees were less eldritch at the top of the cliff, and the mountains beckoned, looming high in the sky. Close, but not close enough. Not yet.

  Until he saw the fallen gates of ?oloman??, he didn’t dare relax.

  And even then, he wondered.

  What if that which Necaz summoned still lingered? What of his cohort?

  He thought of them and almost avoided it again. But, as he sparked a tiny fire away from the ledge, under an outcropping, he stopped himself.

  Avoiding their names would save him nothing. Soon, he would be face-to-face with every loss he felt and buried, unnamed.

  As the stars pricked through the firmament, one by one, he thought their names with careful purpose. ‘lula. Johan. Ion. Sofia. Adrian. The children he’d grown up with, in the seven years of infinite darkness.

  Emil, the brother lost early, when they’d left ?oloman??’s dark comfort for the harsh rays of sun, and its harsher realities. The Umar had taken him. Swept him away in its madness. Even Mirel couldn’t recover him.

  All the old aches he avoided leaned in. It took everything not to push them away.

  Hot tears cooled on his cheeks as he buried his face into the crook of his arm. Better now. Later, it would come again, but if he let some out now, it would be easier.

  He hoped.

  A pressure in the atmosphere made him drop his arm and snap a look around.

  “Are you crying?”

  The zmeu strolled up into the dim dance of orange light, its black scale gleaming. It lowered its rangy body to sit right beside the little campfire. Dragos sniffed. It sounded a lot wetter than he wanted it to.

  “What do I have to cry about?” The wanderer asked with a bitter tone. He scrubbed the back of his hand against his cheeks and let his irritation take the forefront. It was so much easier to handle. “What did you do to the Surorile?”

  Dragos hoped it said something stupid. He was irrationally itchy for a fight. Their usual back and forths, if nothing else.

  “I chased them back to the road. They didn’t seem prepared for a zmeu. Seems they’re more used to fighting men than Nerostit?.” Its chuckle was grating, but Dragos couldn’t find fault with its actions.

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve and nodded absently.

  Just then he remembered the str?luciele. He straightened and tugged his well-worn peddler’s box around, weighed whether he should tell it, then blurted, “I caught a water spirit.”

  “Like one catches a cold?” Zgavra said, its draconic mouth falling open in its weird way of expressing mirth in its natural form.

  “No,” Dragos said, pulling the iron filings container out and opening it. He brushed aside the rust-dusted metal bits and tilted the box to show the vial to the creature.

  Dragos had never seen the monster startle, until that moment. Its scaly body shuddered as it shouted, “What?!”

  The Owl's Bastard here. It needs a constant stream of stars in order to keep growing.

  Iele: Nature spirit

  Blestem: Blasphemous curse

  Cerbiele st?panul p?durii: Deer spirit lord of the woods.

  Cerbiele: Deer spirit

  str?luciele: Spirit of spring waters

  P?durea Ielelor: Forest of spirits

  ?oloman??: School of dark magic, run by the Solomonari

  Umar: Elbow, or crook

  Zmeu: Romanian shapeshifter dragon

  Nerostit?: Unspoken. All things strange and unnatural.