The next day didn’t start.

  It just continued.

  The night had been a string of half-sleeps, my eyes opening every time the wind changed or a branch creaked, every time the dog shifted its weight and the straw beneath us whispered. My mind didn’t let go. It never did. Even when my body sagged into exhaustion, some part of me stayed upright inside my skull, listening for the first sign of teeth or footsteps. When dawn finally thinned the darkness, it didn’t feel like relief. It felt like permission to move again.

  Cold had already settled into my hands.

  My fingers were stiff when I uncurled them. The joints complained, a dull ache that sat under the skin like bruises. My nails were rimmed with dirt that wouldn’t scrub out without hot water. My throat felt raw, scraped by dry air and old smoke in cloth, and when I breathed too deep the inside of my chest tightened in a way that made me cough once—short, controlled, swallowed fast.

  The cough tasted like rust.

  I didn’t look back toward the hollow with the bodies.

  I didn’t need to. The smell clung to me anyway, faint but present: that metallic sweetness, that rot edge, a memory that my nose kept finding whenever the wind shifted wrong. I’d wrapped the small knots of cloth tight inside my bundle, buried deep, but the idea of them sat heavier than their weight. I could feel them like stones I hadn’t swallowed but couldn’t spit out.

  The dog shook itself once and then waited. It didn’t whine. It didn’t wag. It had learned me too well. It just watched, ears turning to track distant sound, ready to follow.

  I picked a direction and kept to it.

  North, as best as I could tell.

  I didn’t have a compass. I didn’t have letters or maps I could read. I used the sun when it bothered to show itself, the slope of the land, the way the wind came colder from one side, the way certain moss sat heavier on tree trunks. It was crude, but crude was enough when the goal wasn’t “arrive.” The goal was “not there.”

  The forest changed as I pushed north. Pines thickened. The air got sharper and drier in some stretches, then suddenly wet again when I dropped into low basins where fog pooled and refused to lift. The ground never stayed consistent. One hour I walked over hard-packed dirt that saved my ankles. The next I was in sucking mud that pulled at my boots and left my legs heavy, coated, numb at the edges.

  Mud was everywhere.

  It got into seams. It dried and cracked and rubbed skin raw. It caked my pant legs until they felt stiff, and when it rewetted it turned slippery and cold again, sliding against my shins like something alive. My socks stayed damp. Damp feet became numb feet. Numb feet became clumsy. Clumsy meant a fall, and a fall meant noise, injury, blood. Blood meant scent.

  I walked carefully.

  Every step became a decision. Not conscious—my mind didn’t narrate decisions—but my body assessed constantly: firm ground, hollow ground, roots, stones. My eyes stayed on the next ten paces, then the next. I stopped thinking in distances. I started thinking in breaths.

  Hunger arrived in waves.

  At first it was just a dull pull, like my stomach was tightening a strap inside me. Then it became sharper, gnawing, insistent. Dry food only blunted it. The grain cakes scratched my throat when I chewed too fast. They tasted like dust and old sackcloth. They swelled in my mouth without becoming satisfying, and swallowing them dry made my throat burn.

  Water helped, but water was its own problem.

  Streams were cold enough to hurt. The first swallow would make my teeth ache and my jaw tighten. Sometimes the water tasted clean—rock and moss and pine. Sometimes it tasted wrong—stagnant, metallic, sour. Once I drank from a shallow pool because I couldn’t find anything else, and the water tasted like old leaves and something dead at the bottom. My stomach clenched later, and I spent the afternoon walking with a hot nausea sitting behind my ribs, my mouth filling with saliva that I had to keep swallowing because spitting felt like wasting fluid.

  The dog drank whatever I drank. It didn’t complain. It only sneezed sometimes, offended by cold.

  The cold never left.

  Even when the sun climbed, it didn’t warm much beneath the canopy. It only turned the mist into wet beads on branches that fell like needles onto my neck. When wind found me in open stretches, it pushed through my clothes and pressed against my ribs until my breathing turned shallow again. My hands stayed pale. My fingertips split in places from dryness and cold, tiny cracks that stung when water touched them. I wrapped them in cloth when they got too bad, but the cloth got wet, and wet cloth rubbed worse.

  Every discomfort stacked.

  No single thing would have broken a normal man. Together they became a slow grinding, like stones in a mill.

  I didn’t panic.

  Panic was loud. Panic was wasted movement. Panic made people die faster.

  What the wild did to me wasn’t panic.

  It was erosion.

  My personality had already been shaped by cruelty. Town had taught me to hold everything inside, to keep my face blank and my voice flat, to treat pain like weather and humiliation like background noise. Out here, there were no voices to insult me, no stick cracking across my shoulder. Out here, the world didn’t care enough to hate me.

  That should have been easier.

  It wasn’t.

  In town, suffering had a source. A hand. A mouth. A face. Something you could learn, predict, avoid.

  Out here, suffering was ambient.

  It came from the ground, the air, the water, the sky. It came without intention, without pattern a man could bargain with. There was no one to blame, which meant there was nowhere for anger to go. My anger didn’t have a target, so it turned inward and sat there like an extra organ—heavy, cold, taking up space.

  Silence was worse than shouting.

  In the village, noise was constant. Even in the shed, there were coughs, footsteps, distant voices, the clink of bowls. Out here, the silence had layers, and every layer made room for thoughts I’d learned to smother.

  My mind started replaying things at the wrong times.

  Not in a dramatic flood. In sharp flashes that cut into the present and disappeared. Old Wang’s breath, the wheeze and catch. The sound of the stick cutting air. A word spat with contempt. The void’s endless dark. The taste of blood.

  I would be stepping over roots, and suddenly the memory of my stepfather’s glare in the other world would slide across my vision like a shadow. I’d blink, and it would be gone, replaced by moss and bark and cold air.

  The wild didn’t distract me.

  It gave my mind space.

  Space was dangerous.

  I found myself listening to the dog’s breathing just to have a steady sound. When it padded beside me, nails clicking softly on stone, the rhythm anchored me. When it stopped to sniff, I stopped too, and the pause felt like a knife held in air. Movement was safety. Stillness was invitation. My body didn’t know the difference between “rest” and “waiting to be hurt.”

  By the third day, sleep became a negotiation I kept losing.

  I would lie under a fallen tree or in a shallow hollow between rocks, wrapped in my thin blanket, the dog pressed against my legs, and my body would sag with exhaustion so deep it made my limbs feel hollow. Then a sound would snap me awake—an owl call, a branch shifting, something small skittering through leaves—and my heart would slam once, hard, and I would lie there rigid, breath held, listening until my ears hurt.

  Sometimes nothing followed.

  Sometimes I’d hear distant movement—heavy, slow, something large pushing through brush far away—and I’d stay frozen until it faded, my muscles cramping from holding still. The dog would tremble, and I’d keep my hand on its back, not comforting, just controlling, keeping it quiet because quiet mattered more than anything.

  On the fourth day, I saw tracks that weren’t deer.

  Deep impressions, wide, with claw marks that dug into mud like chisels. The spacing told me the thing that made them was big. Big enough that if it decided I was food, running would only delay the end.

  I changed direction without thinking, angling more north, keeping higher ground where mud wasn’t as deep and scent didn’t collect in hollows. Higher ground meant wind, and wind meant cold. I accepted the cold because cold didn’t chase.

  The dog followed without question.

  By the fifth day, my body began to feel like it belonged to someone else.

  My joints hurt in new places. My knees ached from constant wet and uneven ground. My back tightened from the bundle strap. My shoulders stayed hunched against cold even when I tried to relax them. My stomach burned when empty, then cramped when I ate too fast. My lips cracked. My tongue felt thick.

  I started to smell like the wild.

  Not sweat and smoke anymore. Damp earth. Wet fur from the dog brushing against me. Rot from leaf litter. Blood, faint, from cracked fingers and split lips. The smell made me feel less human in a way that wasn’t sad. It was just another change.

  The psychological effect wasn’t fear.

  It was narrowing.

  My world shrank to immediate needs: water, ground, shelter, movement. Everything else became distant. The concept of sects, immortals, towns, even revenge—those were ideas. The wild demanded reality. It demanded that I pay attention to the bite of cold and the pull of hunger and the way the wind shifted before a storm.

  One evening, snow started as small, dry flakes.

  They looked harmless, drifting through branches. They melted on my sleeve at first. Then the temperature dropped, and the flakes stopped melting. They began to collect in thin layers on needles and rocks. The air turned sharper, cleaner, and colder. My breath came out thicker.

  The dog’s coat dusted white.

  I kept walking until my legs started to shake.

  Not from fear. From fatigue. From cold that had reached into muscle.

  I found a shallow overhang where rock jutted out, forming a low ceiling. The ground beneath it was drier, sheltered from falling snow. I scraped away wet leaves and pulled my blanket out. The blanket was thin, but it was something.

  I sat with my back against stone, knees drawn up, and the dog curled tight against my shins. Its warmth seeped into me slowly. My fingers ached as they thawed, pins and needles stabbing. My stomach gnawed.

  Outside the overhang, snow kept falling, soft and indifferent.

  Inside, my mind tried to fill the silence again—old voices, old hands, old darkness.

  I didn’t let it.

  I kept my eyes open until they burned. I listened to the dog’s breathing until my own matched it. I stared at the pale edge of the world beyond the rock lip and waited for exhaustion to win, because it always did eventually, and because tomorrow would be the same as today: cold, mud, hunger, and north.

  Snow came in thin, dry sheets through the trees and didn’t make a sound when it landed.

  It just piled. On needles. On rock. On the dog’s back until the black fur turned grey and then white in patches. My breath fogged hard in the low space under the overhang, and the fog lingered because the air didn’t move much in here. It smelled like cold stone, wet earth, and animal heat. That last part was the only reason my legs weren’t numb all the way through—because the dog stayed pressed to my shins like a living stove.

  I didn’t sleep clean.

  I shut my eyes and opened them again to the same pale line of snow beyond the rock lip. When I drifted, it was shallow, full of half-heard sounds and sudden jolts where my body decided a shadow was a hand reaching for me. My muscles stayed tight even while my mind tried to sink. That was the wild’s trick: it didn’t beat you, it just refused to let you relax long enough to recover.

  Some time before true dawn, the dog’s ears pricked. It lifted its head and stared out into the snow-dark.

  I froze immediately, heart tightening as if a fist had closed around it. My breath stalled in my throat.

  Nothing moved. No shape crossed the white. No branches swayed. The forest held still the way it held still before.

  But the dog had smelled something.

  I tasted the air the way a man tastes soup he doesn’t trust—careful, searching for poison. Cold, clean snow. Damp bark. And underneath, faint, almost imagined, the sharp metallic sweetness that had clung to the clearing where the three things had slaughtered each other.

  I didn’t know if it was real or memory. My body didn’t care. It tightened anyway.

  I waited until the dog lowered its head again and exhaled, slow, through its nose. Only then did I move.

  Slowly, I stood.

  My knees complained. My feet were stiff in damp socks. When I shifted weight, pain flared in my toes like needles and then settled into a dull ache. I flexed my fingers inside my sleeves. The cracks in my skin tugged and stung. Everything in me felt used up and half-frozen.

  I didn’t have the luxury of warming up.

  I ate a small piece of dry food, chewing until it softened enough to swallow without scraping. It tasted like dust and old grain, but it gave me something to burn. I drank snowmelt from a shallow depression in the rock. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache. I swallowed anyway.

  The dog lapped beside me, then shook snow off its back, sending tiny crystals into the air like ash.

  I packed my blanket and adjusted the bundle strap across my shoulder. The strap bit into the same raw place and made me hiss once through my teeth, a sound so small it barely existed. I stopped breathing after it, listening for any answer.

  None came.

  I left the overhang and stepped back into the forest.

  Snow muffled everything. My boots sank slightly with each step, and the surface gave a soft crunch when the crust held. Underneath it, mud still waited. I found it in pockets where the snow hadn’t covered well—slick brown beneath white, cold wet grabbing at my soles. My pant legs grew heavy again, wet at the hem. Cold crawled upward.

  I kept heading north.

  Not because I knew what north led to. Because I needed distance from the village, and the hills rose that direction, and rising ground felt less like being cornered.

  But now my eyes weren’t just on roots and stones.

  Now they kept flicking to the sides, scanning for unnatural gaps, disturbed brush, prints too deep, the wrong kind of silence. After seeing those three things tear each other apart, the forest stopped being just a place full of wolves and bears. It became a place where something could move that wasn’t part of any normal story.

  My body started reacting to shadows.

  A bent branch became a crouched shape until I looked twice. A fallen log looked like a back until I saw the bark. A patch of mist drifting low made my skin crawl because it reminded me of breath that wasn’t human.

  Skittish was the right word.

  Every time the dog stopped to sniff, I stopped too. Every time it lifted its head sharply, my heart jumped. I kept my breathing quiet, shallow, trying not to fog too much in the cold air even though that was stupid—animals breathed, fog happened—but stupidity didn’t always feel stupid when your nerves were stretched thin.

  I kept replaying the moment the boulder shattered. The way mass moved too fast. The way the air had tasted wrong.

  I was still just a mortal.

  My body could be broken by a fall, by infection, by cold. My mind could be broken by hunger and sleeplessness, by the wild’s constant grinding.

  If I met one of those things out here—alive, hungry, curious—I wouldn’t be fighting. I wouldn’t be fleeing far. I’d just… end.

  That knowledge sat on my shoulders heavier than the bundle strap.

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  As I walked, my mind started slipping back toward the village, not because I missed it, but because it was a place with predictable cruelty. Even Old Wang had routines. Even town abuse had faces. Out here, danger didn’t need a reason.

  I found myself thinking about the yard.

  About the shed door hanging crooked.

  About the trough water freezing at the edges.

  About Old Wang’s boots crossing the yard in the morning.

  Then I caught myself and realized what the thought really was: whether anyone had gone looking for him yet.

  I imagined it without trying to.

  A neighbor coming to borrow something and finding the house too quiet. Someone noticing smoke not rising. A drunk friend knocking at the door and getting no answer. A woman gossiping that Old Wang hadn’t shown up for market. The village didn’t care about him the way people cared about family. They cared about patterns. When a pattern broke, they poked at it.

  How long before someone poked hard enough?

  How long before they noticed me missing too?

  They would blame me. Not because they’d know. Because it would be convenient.

  “Temple-trash ran off,” someone would say, voice smug, like it solved the mystery.

  “Stole something,” another would add, because theft was the only motive people respected in someone like me.

  And then there would be talk of searching—not because they wanted justice, but because they hated loose ends. They hated the idea that something they’d owned the right to mock had slipped away without permission.

  I pictured a few men walking the road with sticks and torches, calling out in the woods as if the woods listened. I pictured Old Wang’s friends—if he had any—spitting and laughing, making it a hunt the way boys made games cruel.

  The image didn’t make my stomach drop.

  It made my jaw tighten.

  Not rage like fire.

  That same cold, tightening pressure.

  I kept walking.

  Snow fell lighter now, the flakes smaller. The wind shifted and pushed colder from the north, sharpening my cheeks and making my eyes water. My eyelashes stuck together briefly with moisture. I blinked hard until they separated.

  The dog’s nose lifted again, and it slowed.

  I stopped with it.

  Ahead, on the slope, the snow had been disturbed. Not scattered by wind. Pressed down. A line of deeper impressions, unevenly spaced. Too big for deer. Too wide for wolves.

  I crouched and leaned close without putting my face too near. The cold air burned my nostrils. The print edges were sharp where the snow had been compressed, and beneath the snow the mud was exposed, dark and wet. The shape wasn’t a clean paw. It had… angles. Claw marks. Weight concentrated in a way that suggested something with joints that didn’t move like normal legs.

  The dog sniffed once, then pulled back, ears flattening. Its tail tucked. It let out a low whine it tried to swallow.

  I didn’t touch the track. I didn’t need to.

  My skin had already started prickling.

  I stood slowly and backed away, not turning my back fully, not running. Running made noise. Noise drew attention. I angled farther east, staying higher on the slope where the ground was rockier and snow lay thinner. It was colder there, wind more direct, but cold didn’t matter as much as not stepping into whatever path had made those prints.

  For the next hour, my eyes didn’t leave the trees.

  Every sound became layered. The crunch of my boots. The dog’s quiet panting. The distant creak of trunks shifting. The faint hiss of snow sliding off branches.

  And under it, always, the question I couldn’t stop asking even though no one would answer:

  Had they found him yet?

  Had they found the quiet?

  Had the village noticed the missing shape it used to kick?

  I kept heading north anyway, deeper into the wilds, because whatever waited behind me had hands and voices and memory.

  Time stopped being counted the way people in towns counted it.

  At first I still noticed mornings and nights, because cold changed and light shifted and my body demanded shelter when the wind sharpened. I still noticed hunger because it arrived in waves, and thirst because it made my tongue feel too big for my mouth. I still noticed pain because it had edges.

  Then the days blurred into each other until “day” was just the period where I could see far enough not to step into a ravine, and “night” was the period where I had to find somewhere the wind couldn’t peel heat off my bones.

  I headed north because north was away, and because the cold became a familiar enemy I could predict better than people.

  The wilds didn’t care about my reasons.

  They only cared about what I could endure.

  Weeks turned into something like months. I couldn’t have said how many. I couldn’t have marked them. I was illiterate, and even if someone handed me a calendar and a brush, the concepts wouldn’t have mattered out here. My body tracked time in degradation: my belt tightened another notch. My cheeks hollowed. My hands grew rougher, cracked deeper, knuckles split until every time I flexed my fingers the skin threatened to tear.

  Hunger became constant.

  Not sharp anymore—just ever-present, like a hand pressing into my gut without pause. When I ate, it didn’t feel like relief. It felt like the hand loosened for a moment before tightening again. Dry food ran out early. What I could steal from the land came in fragments—berries that stained my fingers purple and left my mouth sour; roots that tasted like dirt and bitterness; a handful of nuts that made my jaw ache from cracking them; small things that took more energy to gather than they returned.

  Sometimes I caught something alive.

  A rabbit snared with crude cord. A bird stunned with a thrown stone when luck decided to be generous. The first time I ate meat out here, it wasn’t a meal. It was a frantic tearing, fingers shaking, blood warm on my lips, the taste iron-heavy and shocking after so much bland dryness. I didn’t have fire most nights. Fire was risk. Smoke carried. Light carried. I chewed cold flesh and swallowed too fast and let my stomach cramp because cramps were better than emptiness.

  The dog stayed with me through the worst of it—until it didn’t.

  It grew lean with me. Its ribs began to show under black fur. Its eyes stayed bright but hungry. It learned to hunt small things better than I did, nose leading it into brush where mice and rabbits hid. Sometimes it came back with something in its mouth, proud in its own animal way, and I would split it with my hands and give it the larger share because it could still catch more if it lived.

  I didn’t tell myself stories about loyalty.

  It was the only living thing that kept choosing to stay near me. That was enough.

  In the months, my senses changed. The world narrowed and sharpened.

  I could smell water before I saw it—wet rock, moss, that clean cold scent drifting in thin threads on wind. I could smell predators too—musky fur, old blood, piss marking territory. I learned the difference between a bear’s smell and something smaller, between a wolf’s scent and a cat’s. My body would tighten before my mind could label it, my steps turning careful without thought.

  I learned to fear silence more than sound.

  Sound meant life. It meant animals, insects, wind. Silence meant something had made everything shut up. Silence meant eyes watching from brush.

  I started sleeping in shorter pieces. My body stopped trusting long rest. Every time I drifted too deep, I’d jolt awake with my heart hammering because the forest had taught me that deep sleep belonged to the dead.

  The psychological pressure wasn’t dramatic.

  It was constant.

  No human voices. No insults. No daily ritual of being put in my place. Out here there was only my own head, and my head wasn’t a kind place. It filled the quiet with old words and old hands and old darkness. It replayed what it wanted without asking me. Sometimes I’d catch myself whispering without meaning to—half-formed phrases, broken fragments—and the sound of my own voice in the trees would make me stop dead, listening like it belonged to someone else.

  I became superstitious in small ways.

  Not the village kind with charms and prayers. The practical kind that came from pattern: don’t step on the same place twice, don’t camp where you ate, don’t drink from still pools even if your throat burns, don’t follow animal tracks too long because they lead somewhere for a reason. I started circling around open spaces as if they were traps. I started avoiding certain trees because their bark smelled wrong, damp and sour, like something had rubbed against them that wasn’t normal.

  The pearls stayed hidden in my bundle.

  Sometimes I remembered them at night and my hand would drift toward the cloth knots instinctively, like checking that something important was still there. I didn’t open them. I didn’t examine them. I didn’t know what they were, and I didn’t trust anything that came from those bodies. But I couldn’t leave them behind either. They were the only proof that what I’d seen wasn’t delirium.

  And then one night, the dog died.

  It happened fast enough that my mind refused it at first.

  We were moving along a narrow cut between rocks, trying to find water, the air sharp with cold and the ground slick with wet leaves. The dog was ahead by a few paces, nose low, tail level, moving with that quiet confidence it still had even when it was starving.

  The forest made a sound—just one wrong sound. A faint rustle, too controlled, too deliberate.

  The dog froze.

  So did I.

  Something dropped out of the brush like it had been waiting above, weight controlled, silent until the last heartbeat. I saw only a blur at first—a long shape, low and fast, fur or hide blending with shadow. There was a flash of teeth. A wet snap that made my stomach turn inside out.

  The dog’s yelp was short.

  Cut off.

  I lunged forward without thinking, hand reaching—too late, too useless. My boot slipped in mud and I caught myself on a rock, skin scraping, pain blooming across my palm. I tasted blood because I’d bitten my own tongue.

  The predator dragged the dog backward into brush with a strength that looked wrong for its size. Leaves shook violently. I heard the dog’s claws scraping stone, frantic, then nothing but a low growl, a series of wet tearing sounds, and silence.

  I didn’t chase.

  My body wanted to, the same way it wanted to breathe after holding it, the same way it wanted to scream.

  But chasing meant entering brush blind. Chasing meant stepping into a place where something else had already chosen the ground. Chasing meant dying.

  So I stood there shaking, hands half raised, listening to the forest chew.

  The smell hit next—fresh blood, hot and metallic, pouring into cold air. It flooded my nose so hard my eyes watered. My stomach clenched and tried to empty itself. I swallowed bile until my throat burned.

  The predator didn’t return to attack me.

  It didn’t need to.

  It had what it wanted.

  When the sounds faded—when the brush stopped moving—I backed away on trembling legs and kept going in the opposite direction, because staying near a kill was an invitation. My chest felt hollow. My hands felt too empty. My steps felt wrong without the dog’s quiet padding beside them.

  The wild swallowed my grief the way it swallowed everything: without reaction.

  The days after that were worse.

  Not because I missed companionship in a soft way. Because the dog had been my early warning system. It had smelled water and predators and danger before I did. Without it, the forest felt bigger, and I felt smaller inside it. Every rustle became a potential mouth. Every shadow became a crouch.

  My food became scarcer. My water became riskier. I drank from streams even when they tasted wrong because thirst became a kind of pain that made thinking slow. My lips cracked until they bled. My urine turned dark. My head began to ache behind my eyes, a dull pressure that never fully left. When I stood too fast, the world tilted and sparkled at the edges as if the air was full of tiny lights.

  My body started failing in pieces.

  My legs cramped at night. My hands shook when I tried to tie knots. My skin grew dry and tight, stretching over bone. My feet developed sores where damp fabric rubbed. Each step began to feel like it was being taken on bruises.

  Then cold hit harder again—wind from the north sharpening, nights biting deep—and I realized I couldn’t keep moving the way I had been. Not at the same pace. Not without collapsing.

  I stumbled more. I caught myself on trees, leaving smears of blood from split knuckles. I started talking to myself without realizing it—short, muttered words that weren’t prayers and weren’t comfort, just sound to break the silence before the silence broke me.

  One day I walked until my vision narrowed.

  The world became a tunnel. The trees blurred. The ground rose and fell without me understanding it. I tasted metal in my mouth and didn’t know if it was blood or my own body breaking down.

  I fell once.

  Face-first into wet leaves.

  The impact didn’t even feel sharp. It felt distant, like pain had to travel too far to reach me.

  I lay there and listened to my own breathing—thin, raspy, too fast—and for the first time out here I didn’t immediately force myself up. The forest smelled like damp rot. The cold seeped into my cheek where it pressed the ground. My eyelids felt heavy.

  I could have died there.

  It would have been easy.

  Easy in the way giving up is easy: you just stop doing the work.

  Something in me refused anyway—not a noble refusal. Not a heroic one. A stubborn, hateful refusal. The same refusal that had kept me alive under Old Wang’s stick. The same refusal that had dragged me through the void.

  I rolled onto my side and pushed up. My arms shook violently. My legs barely held. I stood like a drunk and started walking again because standing still felt like deciding.

  I walked for what might have been hours.

  Then I smelled something I hadn’t smelled in a long time.

  Wood smoke.

  Not the faint old residue trapped in my clothes. Fresh smoke, thin and real, carried on wind. Under it, the smell of animals—livestock, manure, hay. And something else: cooked grain, warm, faintly sweet, like porridge.

  My mouth filled with saliva so fast I almost gagged.

  I followed the smell because my body moved before my mind could argue.

  The trees thinned.

  The ground leveled.

  Then the forest broke open into a field.

  Not a wide, proud field like a wealthy village’s land. A rough patch of cleared earth bordered by half-fallen fence. The soil looked worked, uneven rows cut into it. A low farmhouse sat beyond, roofline crooked, smoke rising from a chimney. A shed. A small pen. Shapes moving—maybe chickens, maybe goats.

  My knees nearly gave out at the sight.

  Not because it was beautiful.

  Because it was real.

  Because it meant people, and people meant danger, and people also meant water and food and warmth. My mind tried to weigh it, but my body had already started swaying, dizzy, my vision blurring at the edges.

  I stood at the edge of the trees, half hidden behind a trunk, and stared at the farm as if it might vanish if I blinked too long.

  My throat was so dry it hurt to swallow.

  My stomach twisted with hunger so hard it felt like it was trying to eat itself.

  My hands hung at my sides, fingers stiff, nails black with dirt, knuckles split.

  I was close to death.

  And there was smoke and food and shelter in front of me.

  I stayed in the trees for a long moment, breathing shallow, watching for movement, trying to decide whether walking into human land was survival or just another way to die.