The path opened with a sound like splitting skin.
Roots pulled apart, shrieking as they tore, revealing a corridor of blackened trees that glistened with a viscous red sheen. The stench hit them instantly, thick and metallic, a blend of old blood, decay, and something sharper, like burnt hair and scorched bone marrow.
Kael's boots sank an inch into the mud as he stepped forward. Not just wet soil, this was saturated. Veins pulsed just beneath the surface, throbbing like the floor itself was alive. The air was heavy. Alive. Watching.
Behind him, the mouth of the Hollow sealed shut with a thunderous crack of root against root.
No turning back.
Seret stood beside him, silent. Her arms were smeared in drying blood, her flame-snare still flickering faintly in her palm. She looked at Kael, really looked, as if trying to see through him. Through the boy who fell into the Mouth… and came back something else.
He didn't meet her gaze.
He couldn't.
"Trial Two," came the Flayer's voice, whispered by the branches overhead. "You will walk the forest. You will find the heart. You will do it together, or not at all. The trees hunger. Feed them what you fear."
Kael's fists clenched. His fingers flexed around phantom pain, the memory of roots peeling back skin, voices digging through his mind like worms through meat.
He took the first step.
The forest closed behind them.
Within seconds, the sound changed.
No birds. No wind. Just the wet slap of boots on meat-mud and the ragged draw of their breath. The trees whispered, faint at first, like the brush of silk on skin.
Then came the first scream.
Kael flinched.
It echoed from somewhere between the branches, from nowhere at all. A child's scream. Sharp. Full of betrayal.
He knew that voice.
But he didn't know why.
Seret tensed, her fingers brushing the hilt of her knife. "Don't stop," she said. "Don't look back."
Kael obeyed.
But the scream followed.
The deeper they went, the redder everything became.
The trees bled openly now, thick gashes in their trunks leaking steaming, clotted gore. The bark peeled like old flesh, revealing veins and twitching tendrils beneath. Some had faces, twisted human-like visages warped into agony. Eyes bulged. Mouths opened in endless screams.
Kael stared too long at one and heard it speak.
"You left her," it said, in his voice.
He tore his eyes away, heart hammering.
Seret touched his arm. Her grip was firmer than it had ever been. "It's the forest. It lies."
"Feels real," he muttered.
"That's the point."
They fought before they knew they were under attack.
A beast came from the trees, wolf-shaped, but wrong. Too many joints. Bone-white skin, thin as paper, stretched over veins that pulsed black ichor. No eyes. Just a vertical slit across its face that opened into a row of twitching tongues.
Kael moved faster than he should have. No hesitation.
One step. One swing.
He buried his blade in its throat and ripped sideways.
The thing collapsed in a heap of steaming rot, tongues still writhing as it died.
Seret looked at him, not with awe. With caution.
"You didn't blink."
He didn't respond.
She added quietly, "You always used to blink."
Hours passed.
Or minutes. Or days. Time didn't behave properly here. They drank from a flask that never emptied. Ate jerky that didn't rot. Slept in ten-minute bursts beneath trees that whispered lullabies in the voice of Kael's mother and Seret's father.
Once, Kael woke to find her crying silently.
He pretended not to see.
Another time, she woke to find him standing too still, his face blank, staring at a tree that showed his reflection, except the Kael in the bark smiled with teeth too sharp.
He never said what he saw.
By the time they reached the river, the trees were weeping openly.
The blood ran in rivulets down every trunk, pooling at their feet, soaking into their boots, caking into the seams of their clothes. The air was wet with it. It got into their mouths. Their eyes.
Kael wiped a smear from his cheek, only for more to drip down from above.
The river was black and slick and full of bones.
They had to cross it.
On the far bank, the trees were burning.
But the fire didn't consume. It illuminated. Glowing symbols crawled across their bark like runes carved from embers. Shapes danced in the branches, memories pulled from Kael's mind and played on loop. He saw Seret slitting a man's throat in a cave. Himself vomiting blood after his first kill. The moment he realized the Hollow would never let him leave.
Seret spoke at last.
"This place knows you better than I do."
Kael, staring at the river, whispered back: "I'm not sure I ever really knew myself."
She stepped beside him.
"And if it makes you something else?"
Kael's jaw tightened.
"Then maybe that's who I was supposed to be."
The river pulsed like a wound.
It stretched a dozen yards across, a slick obsidian vein bubbling with black ichor and bone shards. Skulls floated lazily on the surface, mouths locked open in eternal screams, jaws broken wide by some final agony. Faint whispers echoed from beneath the surface, disjointed phrases, some in languages Kael didn't know, others in voices he couldn't forget.
"You could have saved her."
"She called your name until the end."
"Why did you stop swinging?"
Seret stared across the water. Her hand rested lightly on her hip, just above her twin daggers. Her fire was low now, more ember than flame. Tired. Diminished.
"We swim," she said, blunt.
Kael hesitated.
"What if it's not water?"
Seret shrugged. "Then we swim in blood. We've both done worse."
Kael almost smiled.
Almost.
The moment their boots broke the surface, the river screamed.
It wasn't a splash. It was a shriek, a chorus of trapped souls erupting from the black surface in a geyser of wailing fog. The liquid clung to their skin like oil, burning cold, pulling. Hands reached from the depths, boneless, fingerless, warped limbs like branches, wrapping around ankles, wrists, throats.
Kael kicked. Slashed. Tore through the limbs with his sword.
Seret moved like a flame. Her daggers flashed, one burning hot, the other cold as void. She spun through the mire, severing reaching hands, slicing memories that tried to become flesh.
They made it halfway before the river changed.
The temperature dropped.
Everything stilled.
And then it rose from the water.
It wore Kael's face.
Not the face he had now, the other one. The before one. Childish. Innocent. Bloodless.
But its eyes were wrong.
All black. Like twin voids that swallowed light.
It stepped from the water without ripples. Naked but not vulnerable. Its body was Kael's as he had been at seven, just before the fire, before the abduction, before the sword.
But when it opened its mouth, it spoke in the Flayer's voice.
"This is who you were. And who you failed to be."
Kael froze.
Seret moved forward.
It struck her without turning.
One flick of its tiny hand, and a wave of water exploded outward, launching her back into the shallows. She hit the mud hard, coughing, arms curling over her ribs.
The thing turned back to Kael.
"You were weak."
It stepped closer.
"She begged you to hide. You ran."
Kael's fists clenched.
"I didn't know what was happening."
"You knew enough to run. You knew enough to survive while she burned."
Kael swung his sword.
It blocked with an open palm.
The steel melted on impact, disintegrating into ash as it touched the false flesh.
Kael stumbled backward.
The child-thing didn't pursue.
Instead, it reached into its own chest, fingers vanishing into its sternum, and pulled something out.
Kael's old sword.
The one he'd used during his first real kill.
Still stained.
Still chipped.
It tossed it to the ground between them.
"Pick it up. Prove you're still that boy."
Seret groaned behind him.
She was trying to stand. Her flame-dagger sputtered beside her in the mud.
Kael looked down at the sword.
The weight of it wasn't in its steel.
It was in what it meant.
That moment in the alley. The screams. The way the blood stuck under his fingernails for days afterward. The blank look in his eyes when the cultists had asked if he felt remorse, and he'd said no.
He picked it up.
The world narrowed.
The forest held its breath.
And Kael attacked.
The duel was chaos.
The thing moved like a thought, effortless, silent. Each step it took left ripples of bone and smoke. Kael struck, again and again, rage fuelling his limbs, but it was like fighting his own shame, his own cowardice, his own childhood made flesh.
Every blow landed hurt him more than it did the creature.
Every wound it gave whispered another truth:
"You didn't deserve to live."
"You're just a shell they filled with hate."
"You will never be more than what we made you."
Blood ran from Kael's nose. His arms shook. His vision blurred.
He dropped to his knees, sword falling from limp fingers.
The child-thing raised its blade.
And Seret threw her dagger.
It struck the thing in the eye.
It didn't kill it.
But it distracted it.
Long enough.
Kael lunged.
Not for the sword.
For its throat.
He grabbed. Bit. Tore with his bare teeth.
The thing screamed, not just in pain, but in frustration.
It dissolved into black smoke, shrieking.
Kael collapsed.
Face covered in blood that wasn't his.
Chest heaving.
Seret stumbled over to him, collapsed beside him in the mud.
Neither spoke for a while.
Then she whispered, "You didn't hesitate."
Kael turned his head, breathing hard.
"I don't know if that's a good thing anymore."
They continued forward for a while, walking became a chore and the sights stayed the same the same trees, the same shrubs on the ground, until finally they came upon a clearing in the forest.
Smoke seemed to exhaled from the ground.
The smoke didn't dissipate.
It seeped into the trees, into the roots, into the blood-thick air, until the forest itself breathed with it. Every branch exhaled shadows. Every leaf shivered, whispering Kael's name with a hundred voices that sounded like his own.
He and Seret stood together at the edge of the clearing. Neither spoke.
In front of them, the trees parted to reveal the forest's heart.
A single tree stood in the center, if it could be called a tree at all. Its trunk was made of fused bone, twisted together like petrified sinew. Its leaves were ribbons of skin, tanned and translucent, fluttering in an unfelt wind. At its base, hundreds of blades were stabbed into the earth, swords, daggers, axes, spears, every weapon used in every killing the cult had recorded.
And at the top of the tree, embedded like a cursed fruit, was a heart.
Massive. Beating. Alive.
Each pulse sent shockwaves through the ground, like a war drum announcing an execution.
Kael's mouth went dry. His hands still shook from the river.
"Is this it?" he asked.
Seret's voice was ragged. "The Flayer said we had to find it."
Kael took a step forward.
The tree groaned.
The air turned viscous.
Seret reached for him, but something pushed her back, a pressure wave from the tree, a wall of agony shaped like sound. She fell to her knees, clutching her ears, blood running from her nose.
Kael didn't feel it.
The tree wanted him.
Each step closer made the world blur.
The forest faded.
The air thickened into smoke and screams and blood. Visions assaulted him, flashes of every death he'd witnessed, every wound he'd dealt. The face of the first man he'd killed in the alley. The child-soldier he'd strangled with a chain. The hollow look in Seret's eyes after their worst mission together.
And still, he walked.
The heart pulsed louder.
And then, it spoke.
Not with words. With sensation. With memory.
Suddenly, Kael was back in the Hollow. Back in the pit.
He was six again.
The smell of rotting flesh. The chanting in the dark. The pain of his bones breaking the first time they "corrected" him. The sound of his own voice screaming for a mother who would never find him.
And the voice of the Flayer, whispering…
"You are rage. You are death. You are our answer to a world that forgot its monsters."
Kael blinked.
He was back in the clearing.
Before the tree.
Before the heart.
And in his hand…
Not his sword.
But a dagger.
Black. Pulsing. Alive.
Forged from the forest's will.
A voice echoed inside his skull.
"Prove it. Prove you're worthy. Carve the heart. Become the thing we made."
Kael raised the blade.
And stopped.
Seret was beside him again, staggering to her feet.
Her voice was cracked and raw.
"Don't you do it."
He didn't look at her.
"I have to. It's the trial."
She stepped closer, trembling.
"Kael, listen to me, this place wants to consume you. It doesn't care if you survive. It just wants you to kill something so it can feed. That's not a trial. That's a trap."
He looked at her then.
Eyes wild. Pupils dilated. A tremor in his lip.
"I've been killing since I was a child, Seret. Maybe this is who I really am."
She grabbed his wrist.
Tight.
"Then fight it. You didn't survive the Hollow just to become another weapon."
His hand trembled.
The dagger pulsed.
The heart moaned.
Then…
Kael stabbed the dagger into the earth.
Not the heart.
The ground cracked.
The heart screamed.
The tree split open, gushing black fire and shattered bone. The forest howled in betrayal.
Kael fell to his knees, shaking.
Seret caught him before he hit the ground.
The clearing went still.
The tree was gone, turned to ash.
The weapons at its base rusted into dust, then blew away like smoke.
The forest sighed.
A low, final breath.
Then silence.
The roots behind them pulled apart, another path revealed. One leading out. Lit by cold starlight filtering through ash-gray leaves.
Seret helped Kael to his feet.
"You did it," she said quietly.
Kael looked down at his hands.
Still shaking.
Still stained.
"No," he said. "I just didn't fail."
They walked in silence.
Side by side.