Chapter 3: Chapter 2 - Watched

The forest did not care if I lived or died.

It held no affection, no malice, no memory. The trees remembered no names—not even their own. Snow clung to bark like old grief, silent and unmelting, while the wind scraped through the undergrowth without apology. This place was older than kingdoms, colder than kings, and it would outlast me.

They said the gods had shaped these woods long ago—cupping hills in their palms, carving rivers with their fingers—but then they left, or fell silent, or perhaps had never been at all. Their touch lingered only in the lean of trees when no wind blew, in the stones stacked by time itself. This was not a place guarded. It was a place abandoned. The creatures who survived here did so by will alone, not blessing.

The forest made space for all of them: deer moving like shadows, birds curled in their nests, small lives beating fast and fragile. And predators, too. Great hulking beasts with golden eyes and breath like fog. The Fenrathi.

Here, the forest did not care who you were—only that you were. It did not comfort. It did not pity. It yielded only to those fierce enough to claim it. These wilds belonged to the monsters of my childhood tales—creatures who could walk as men, even speak as men, their voices smooth enough to deceive. But when they smiled, their teeth gleamed too sharp. When they laughed, the sound rasped like claws on bark. And when their eyes caught the firelight, gleaming too bright, it was already too late.

My little clearing was no sanctuary. It was a cage of sky and shadow, pressed on all sides by an ancient wilderness that did not welcome, did not repel—only endured. Every snap of branch made my skin prickle. Every stir of leaves raised the hairs at my nape. I did not rest. I could not. My breath stayed shallow, soft—prey breath. My instincts screamed without sound.

Yet I had survived. Somehow.

The fire burned low but steady, coaxed into life by a single word I hadn’t meant to speak. It still felt strange, looking at it—this trembling orange heart beating at the center of stones. As if the forest had answered when no one else ever had.

The rabbit had come after, blundering into one of the snares I had long given up on. That had been days ago, but its bones still blackened in the coals, a charred crown over my fire’s heat. A small victory. A proof. For once, I had eaten until I was full. For once, I had slept warm enough that my dreams weren’t edged in frostbite.

But even in success, the lesson remained. The forest had not offered. It had not cared. It had simply taken the word from my mouth, the blood from my knife, the meat from the hare—and left me to wrest what I could.

Somewhere deeper in the trees, a branch cracked—heavy, deliberate. I did not flinch. If it was death, let it come. Better with a little warmth in me than with nothing at all.

I lifted my chin, jaw set, daring whatever prowled the dark.

“Come on then,” I whispered, my voice low and rough. “Make it worth the trouble.”

The forest did not answer. It never did. Only silence—thick, unending, older than gods.

I looked down at the fire, at the thin curl of smoke rising from bone and bark. I gathered my few belongings—the cracked pot, the rag of cloth, the last scraps of jerky I had hoarded though they tasted of mold and ash. I packed them with slow hands, the way one folds a flag over a coffin.

It had been twelve days since I’d seen another human face. Two since I had eaten anything but what I’d dragged bleeding into my hands. And always, always, the sense that I was not alone.

But loneliness and being watched were not the same. One hollowed you from the inside. The other pressed down on your skin like a hand at the back of your neck. This was both.

I rose at last. My knees crackled, my back pulled tight. Twenty-one years old and moving like someone twice it. My breath steamed in front of me, curling away like a ghost.

“You don’t get to win,” I said softly to the dark.

Not defiance. Not a vow. Just truth.

The forest didn’t answer. It didn’t need to.

It would still be here tomorrow.

So would I.

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The cold had crept up my spine and into my thoughts.

I curled tighter beneath the too-thin cloak, knees drawn to my chest, the fire’s glow brushing my face with shallow warmth. The smoke clung to my hair and the faint hiss of coals filled the clearing, soft as a lullaby I did not trust. I tried not to remember. But memories always came louder in the quiet.

Someone had once said—I couldn’t remember who now—"She doesn’t even cry when she’s hurt." As if that were a virtue. As if that made it easier to deal with. Simpler.

But I had cried. When I was still small. Before I learned not to.

Once, I was three. Small. Needy in that way children are allowed to be, just long enough to believe someone might answer. I should have been held then. Kissed. Picked up when I fell.

Instead, I had been hushed. Shushed. Moved by the shoulders like a rug someone hadn’t meant to trip over.

My father’s arms had once felt safe. I remembered them in fragments: a voice, deep and warm; a shadow across my door at bedtime; the smell of ink and cold metal. But those memories dulled quickly and ended when my father remarried.

Queen Marden had arrived like a storm dressed in silk, smiling too wide and too often. And just like that, I wasn’t a daughter anymore. I was a reminder of something unspoken. A past that didn’t fit the new queen’s decor.

I remembered the words like splinters in my thoughts—old and sharp and never quite worked free.

"She’s not yours, not really,” Marden had sneered when she saw me clinging to his tunic hems "A little wild thing like that? No mother, no name. She’s just proof you made a mistake."

She had sidled up beside him and nudged me aside with a knee. "You’ll have real children now, Orisk. Let her go."

The worst part was how quiet my father had been. How still. He hadn’t argued. He hadn’t raised his voice. He had simply stood beside Marden and nodded. And I had known—at three years old—that something in me had been replaced.

Not broken. Not hated. Just... put aside.

And that hurt more than anything else ever could.

Marden played the part of a doting mother in public for the court’s approval. They still thought I was charming enough, innocent of the shame of my birth. She held my hand with the wrong kind of grip, though, tucked stray hairs behind my ear like it was a favor. But I felt the chill in every gesture. Marden never looked at me too long—not at my gray-gold eyes, not at my too-many teeth in my smile, not at the face that looked nothing like hers and not enough like my father’s. Too much like a stranger. The mistake of her husband’s past.

I was moved soon after—passed off from the nursemaids who lived near the king’s wing to others tucked down quieter halls, the kind who didn’t look me in the eye either. My new room wasn’t really a room at all. It was a broom closet, just off the servants’ passage that wound past the family’s quarters. Small, dark, and barely wide enough to hold a narrow bed and a hook for my cloak.

“She doesn’t belong here,” someone had whispered once, just outside the curtain where I pretended to sleep. “No one even knows who her mother was.”

Another voice, softer, sharper: “He should’ve sent her away. It’s a scandal, keeping her here like a ghost in the walls.”

I hadn’t known what scandal meant. Not then. But it had stung, even without understanding.

Even now, years later, wrapped in a threadbare cloak and huddled under stars that did not care, the memory tightened in my chest like a cold hand. That old silence, thick and suffocating, had felt too much like this one. There had been no words for it then—only the ache of being forgotten and the whisper of something deeply, terribly wrong.

I drew my cloak tighter and shifted my weight against the frost-hardened ground.

I didn’t cry.

Not because it didn’t hurt, but because even then, at three years old, I had learned: no one was coming.

My traps were ruined.

One had been torn clean through, the cord frayed in a way that suggested claws, not teeth—something large, something amused by the destruction. The second was bent at odd angles, mangled not by beast but by my own fumbling, sleep-starved hands. The third hung empty and open, as if something had triggered it just to mock me. The bait was gone. The air around it smelled of damp earth and laughter I couldn’t hear, maybe the laughter of an amused god. It was just what I deserved thinking I had a chance.

I didn’t curse. I didn’t sigh. There was no point. I crouched beside the wreckage with numb knees and a dull ache climbing my spine. One by one, I gathered the pieces, my fingers clumsy from cold but deliberate in motion. I moved like someone who had failed before. Like someone who knew failure intimately and had stopped pretending it surprised me.

Beneath a slick stone coated in frost and shadow, I found a root. I scraped it clean against the jagged edge of the trap spring. Dirt clung beneath my nails. I bit into the root raw. The taste was bitter and wrong, but safe enough not to kill me.

I didn’t smile.

Pain, I was learning, was a kind of truth—pure, unedited, undeniable. In the courts, truth had been a weapon. In the broom closet that passed for a childhood, it had been a sin. Too loud. Too ugly. Too much. But out here, under sky and branches and breathless dark, there was no one left to lie to.

So I let it come.

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The ache of cold that lived in my bones, the hunger that made my jaw tight and my thoughts sluggish, the tiredness—not just in my limbs, but deeper, in my marrow, in the place where hope once lived.

“I’m tired,” I whispered to myself, the words fragile and vapor-soft in the cold air. “I’m hungry. I’m cold.”

I didn’t say it to beg; there was no one listening. I said it to name the shape of what I carried.

“And I want to live.”

The words hovered. They hung there, heavy and gentle all at once.

It wasn’t a declaration. It wasn’t brave. It was simply true.

The trees didn’t care. The rocks, the roots, the sleeping gods—they had no stake in my survival. No songs would mourn her. No ghosts would weep.

But I would.

And that, perhaps, was what made me different.

Because somewhere, in the dark beyond my clearing, were creatures born to this place. Creatures whose bones did not ache in the cold, whose feet didn’t blister, who didn’t falter when hunger came. The Fenrathi thrived in these conditions—slept in the snow, hunted by scent alone, and disappeared between trees like shadows swallowing shadows.

This was their kingdom. And I, with my clumsy traps and my raw root dinners, was trespassing. They didn’t need fire to survive. I did. And I was failing at it.

I was the smallest, weakest thing in these woods.

And still, I said it again. This time, quieter. Fiercer.

“I want to live.”

No one heard me. But I had heard myself.

And in the stillness that followed, for the first time in my life, that felt like enough.

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The queen had screamed—sharp and joyful, not afraid—and then wept with laughter as the newborn boy was placed in her arms. The king had cried too, though his tears were quieter, caught behind his smile. The entire hall had lit up with noise and congratulations.

I had stood just beyond the archway, too small to see more than a swaddled bundle and Marden’s glowing face. Too young to understand what it meant, but not too young to feel it. The ache in my chest had bloomed without shape, without reason. A wrongness.

I had stepped forward. Just once. Just enough.

My father had seen me. His eyes had been red and shining, his smile real.

“Not now. Go,” he’d said, waving me off without thought, as if I were a servant coming at the wrong time.

I had, I realized with shame curling and my cheeks heating.

I turned and walked back down the corridor. Slowly. Quietly. I had sat outside the door to my father’s study for hours, my back to the stone wall, listening to the soft rise and fall of my brother’s cries from down the hall. No one noticed I was still there, waiting for my daddy. No one asked what I was doing.

Eventually, a maid had found me and shooed me away like a stray cat left too close to the feast.

I had not cried. I had dug my nails into my palms until the pain sharpened my breathing and memorized the sound of my father’s laughter and Marden’s cries and the baby’s wailing through the wall.

Later that night, I had climbed the tallest tree in the courtyard, my nightgown snagging on the branches. From the top, the palace windows had looked like distant stars. I had whispered apologies to my bones.

“It’s okay,” I whispered to myself, curling tighter against the cold. “It’s okay he has a new baby now. Daddy has a new baby.”

Then softer, barely breathed, “He has a new baby now. A real one. Not a broken one.”

I curled in tighter, my voice thin and shaky. “I’m not mad. I’ll be okay. I’ll be quiet. I’m okay.”

Even at five, I had known I’d been replaced. Even then, I’d tried to make peace with it.

I had crept back to the nursery door again the next day. The queen had survived. The boy had lived. The hall had settled into soft lullabies and hushed footsteps. And I, too small to contain the fear knotting my chest, had looked up at my father and asked, "Is Marden going to die now... like my mommy did?"

The air had gone still. Every maid and attendant and servant and staff frozen in place and every eye staring at me. Marden’s face was furious.

My father's face had hardened, his jaw clenched.

“Do not say that again,” he’d hissed, not loud—but cold. Sharp. Like steel that cut and hurt and wounded.

I had flinched. Not because he shouted, but because he hadn’t. Because the warmth had drained from him like blood from a wound, and in that moment, I knew I had asked the wrong question.

The fear stayed.

It wasn’t the baby I had feared, not really. Not the way its tiny cries curled against the walls or how its fists opened and closed like blooming flowers. I wasn’t afraid of the weight of it, or the way it squirmed in a cradle lined with linen and love.

I was afraid of what it meant. What I thought babies meant.

I had been the baby, once.

I had been born but I had taken my mother.

I had made my father quiet, had hollowed out the warmth that once lived in his arms, I had turned his eyes elsewhere.

That was the truth buried in the whispers. That was the story people told behind hands and heavy silks—that I was the reason. That my mother had died so I could breathe. That my life had been bought with blood. That was the debt I owed the world.

I didn’t know my mother’s name and my father had never spoken it. I didn’t know her face and my father had never described her or mentioned things about me that reminded him of her. All I knew was that I wasn’t her…She was dead because of me.

Even as a little girl, I had understood what others wouldn't say. That my life had come at a cost. That something had been taken—someone—so I could exist. And the older I got, the more that knowing settled in my bones like a quiet stone.

Sometimes I wondered what my mother had been like. She must have been wonderful to be loved by my father the way he once spoke of her, the few fleeting moments when Marden wasn't present and my father thought himself alone, but I was fortunate enough to be listening. "Fierce" he had once called her memory. She must have smiled softly. She must have smelled of something warm. She must have mattered.

And if my mother had mattered, then maybe my life would have been worth more than what it had become.

I didn’t know if the trade had been fair. I didn’t know if I was worth the price paid in death. And that uncertainty lived in my chest like a second heartbeat.

It was a strange thing to carry—that kind of guilt. That kind of inheritance. But I did.

And on nights like this, here in the strange forests, when the wind curled sharp around me and the trees felt like sentinels of old grief, I wondered if it would have been better if the trade had gone the other way.

I hadn’t understood it at first. But I did now.

Now, curled beneath a cloak that wasn’t warm enough, surrounded by trees older than kings, I whispered again.

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice cracked like bark in the frost. I wasn’t sure if the words were meant for my bones or the child I had once been.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the shadowed night, though I wasn’t speaking to it. I was speaking to the little girl inside me—the one who had waited outside doors, who had climbed trees to get close to stars, who had believed, for one fragile moment, that love might be free and not something to earn through perfection and silence.

"I'm so sorry for believing them."

I exhaled slowly, chest tight and aching. “I’m sorry you hoped. Sorry you tried so hard to fit. Sorry you thought being quiet and good and small would make them see you.”

The wind didn’t answer. But something inside me did—an old grief stirring, loosening.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I whispered at last, clutching the cloak tighter and hiding my tears in the shadow it cast. “You were just a little girl.”

There was no answer but the soft rustle of trees.

But my chest loosened just a little.

I had told myself the past didn’t matter. That I had survived it. That survival was enough.

But tonight, as alone as I had ever been, I admitted the truth:

It had all mattered. My mother's death had mattered. The lies and the hurt and the loneliness had mattered.

Night pressed down now—full, endless, and consuming. The dark crawled into my clothes, into my hair, into my mouth. It settled beneath my skin like frost and weight.

I lay beneath my cloak, curled as close as the heat of the fire allowed. I made no sound, let no breath come louder than the wind. I didn’t fidget, didn’t sigh. There was no one left to impress. No audience. No eyes waiting for me to falter or perform.

But something inside me softened, uncoiled, and came undone in a way that was quiet, deliberate, and long overdue.

It wasn’t collapse. It wasn’t weakness.

It was recognition—the slow, aching acknowledgment of all that had been carried for too long. A lifetime of silence mistaken for strength. A childhood pressed into shapes that did not fit. Years of aching and shame mistaken for survival.

Pain was truth. Tears were truth.

And truth, for once, did not need to be swallowed down like something shameful. It could sit beside me in the cold and be what it was.

Because I was still here.

And that mattered.

I did not need the forest to love her. I did not need a god or a man or a mother to give my worth.

I was worth it because I was here. Because I had not died. Because even now, even after everything, I still cared enough to whisper into the night like it might answer.

I was still my own.

And that was enough to keep me breathing.

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Something crouched just beyond the edge of her scent—where the wind curled and carried the shape of her sorrow to flared nostrils and darting tongue. It studied her beyond the warmth the human failed to hold, beyond the flicker of breath too shallow to matter.

The thing in the trees watched her.

Not with pity.

With precision.

It did not blink. Did not stir. Its breath was silent. Its body still. Every heartbeat of hers echoed in its ears, every twitch of her fingers translated through the subtle grammar of muscle. The girl wept—not loudly, not with fear. She wept like a ritual. Like something ancient being honored in the quiet.

It tilted its head.

The salt of her tears carried a story. Not desperation. Not surrender.

Loneliness. Ache. Defiance.

It understood these things in the language of scent and motion, in the way the body speaks when the mouth will not. Her shoulders curled not in submission but in defense. Her hand at her chest was not defeat—it was reverence.

It did not understand.

She should have screamed when the cold found her. Should have run when she ran out of food and her traps did not catch. Should have panicked when her fire failed. Should have fought or fled or begged the night for mercy.

She did none of these things.

She cried.

But not for help.

She cried for herself.

And that—that was wrong. That was strange.

What kind of prey mourns her own body?

What kind of prey bleeds without fear, weeps without witness, and cradles the vessel that pain made of her?

It leaned forward, not enough to break a twig, but enough to breathe her fully. Her scent was defiant and salt-wet. Her movements were weary, but unbowed.

It knew prey. It had chased them across snowfields and mountain ridges, had tasted fear on their skin before they’d even seen the shadow that ended them. This girl did not smell like fear. She did not smell like surrender.

She smelled like something else.

It did not know what.

So it waited.

Not because it was kind.

Because it was curious.

Because maybe this girl—this strange, still-burning human thing—was not prey at all.

And maybe the thing that watched her was not ready to decide what she was.