The ground shook and rumbled violently under the hooves and paws of countless beasts.
Colourful wings made of translucent spirit energy blotted out the aurora sky piece by piece until the light above was more wing than sky, and the future was looking very bleak for Grey.
He stood at the riverbank and stared at the approaching wall of beasts and felt, for the first time since stepping through the root node, genuinely afraid.
Not the performative kind of afraid he had displayed on the cliff ledge this morning with Lysa, the kind that was mostly theatre and a little genuine vertigo. This was the real thing, quiet and cold, sitting in his chest like a stone that had always been there and had only just made itself known.
He had never wanted any of this. A carefree life in the forest was all he had genuinely ever wanted. Not power, not ascension, not the title of Beast Mage that the other kids had spent years dreaming about. Just the trees and the animals that came to him without being called and the particular peace of a world that didn't ask anything too complicated of him.
But the Chief had asked him to go for it. And the Chief had promised to tell him something about his mother.
That was the only reason he was here. Nobody in the village talked about his parents. The villagers were kind to him, fond of him even, charmed by his silver grey hair and pale eyes in a way he had always found slightly odd.
The village children were a different matter entirely. They had spent years reminding him at every available opportunity that he had no family, and he was tired of it in the deep quiet way that sits below anger and takes much longer to shift.
He wanted to know who and where he came from. He had always wanted to know.
So here he was, standing at the edge of a glowing river with beasts closing in from three directions, because of a promise made by an old man with blue eyes who was the closest thing to the family he never had.
The aquatic beasts churned the river into chaos behind him. The sky was already gone, replaced entirely by the undersides of countless wings. The ones on land were close enough now that he could feel the displaced air of their movement pressing against his face.
Grey exhaled slowly and dropped into a fighting stance.
It was not a particularly informed fighting stance. He had not attended those lessons either. But it felt better than standing there with his arms at his sides, so he held it.
"Alright," he said quietly, eyes moving across the approaching horde. "Alright. This is fine. This is completely fine."
It was not fine.
"Priestess Kim said nothing would attack me." He watched a colossal beast the size of a small building barrel toward him. "She was very clear about that. Very professional. Very confident."
The beast kept coming.
"Such a stupid way to die."
He was about to do something reckless and charge directly into the horde when the horde stopped.
Grey froze mid-step.
Every beast in front of him halted at exactly the same moment, as though a single signal had passed through all of them simultaneously. He looked left and right.
Behind him at the river, the aquatic beasts had gone motionless beneath the surface, their luminous forms suspended in the glowing water.
The silence that followed was total.
Grey stood very still in the middle of it.
"Okay," he whispered. "That's weird."
Then the chaos erupted. Not toward him but among themselves.
The spirit beasts turned on each other with a ferocity that had no apparent target except whatever was immediately closest.
Thousands of beasts barreled through each other without any care for their own preservation. Bursts of energy cracked through the air as colossal creatures collided, the ground splitting beneath the weight of giants going down hard.
The river behind him erupted in geysers of luminous water as the aquatic beasts tore into each other, blasts punching skyward every second across its entire width.
And through all of it, not one beast came within arm's reach of him.
They moved around him. Swerved at the last moment without appearing to choose to, as though some invisible boundary existed around him that the chaos instinctively avoided crossing.
Grey stood in the middle of a war between what felt like every spirit beast in existence and slowly lowered his fighting stance.
He watched a beast the size of a barn crash fifteen feet away and shatter into cascading light fragments. The fog absorbed them without ceremony. One moment it existed, the next it simply didn't.
"Right," he said softly, watching the empty space the beast had left behind. "So that's what happens."
The cold feeling in his chest got colder.
That could happen to him just as easily. His spirit form was not special in that regard. If something large enough and careless enough clipped him by accident, he would dissolve just as neatly.
And somewhere in the outside world, a full day from now, the Druids would open the root node and he would not come back out.
He didn't linger anymore and started moving.
Low and quick, reading the motion around him and anticipating collisions before they happened so he could steer clear.
He ruled out the river immediately. Ruled out the air for obvious reasons. That left the land and the dense forest he had spotted from the mountain to the east.
He just had to get through a few thousand feuding spirit beasts to reach it.
"Simple," he muttered. "Completely simple."
A massive explosion to his left threw up a wall of dust and Grey dove into the cover without hesitating, moving fast and low.
A huge eagle the size of a small hill descended directly above him and he threw himself flat as it crashed into a giant ape, both of them tumbling past him close enough that the displaced energy made his spirit form flicker at the edges.
He scrambled up and kept running.
"Don't think about the flickering," he told himself. "Do not think about the flickering."
More beasts poured in from directions he couldn't track, amplifying the chaos further. He sidestepped a charging bull by inches and watched it crash into three smaller beasts, all four dissolving into light before they hit the ground.
"Four at once." He ducked under a sweeping tail. "Fantastic. Wonderful place this is."
A colossal mammoth lurched forward and fell directly in his path. Grey ran straight at it and climbed, hauling himself up the translucent hide and reaching the top in seconds. From up there above the worst of it he could see the treeline clearly. Close enough.
The mammoth began to dissolve beneath him.
"Not yet, not yet, not yet—"
He jumped before the last of it went, hitting the ground and sprinted, pushing his spirit form past what felt like its reasonable limit.
He broke through the edge of the horde.
The treeline was right there and he ran for it, the noise falling away behind him. He was almost through when a presence hit him from behind like a wall of cold air pressing against every inch of him at once.
His legs stopped on their own.
"No, no, no—" He pushed against whatever had seized his body and his legs refused to cooperate, planted where they were as though the ground had decided to keep them. "Move. I'm telling you to move. Move."
They did not move.
He turned around despite himself and looked back at the valley.
Every spirit beast had gone completely still. The aurora had drained from the sky, leaving a flat heavy grey above a landscape of frozen beasts standing silent in thickening fog.
Not one of them made a sound.
They held themselves in the posture of creatures that had collectively decided to be as small and unnoticeable as possible.
The pressure increased. Steady and slow, bearing down from above with a weight that had nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with sheer ancient presence. It pressed on him from everywhere at once and made his knees want to bend under it.
Grey gritted his teeth and forced one foot forward. Then the other.
"Whatever you are," he said through his teeth, to the grey sky and the silent valley and the thing he couldn't see, "I am walking into that forest."
He pushed into the treeline and the pressure vanished instantly.
He ran anyway, deep into the trees, until his legs finally made their feelings clear and he stumbled to a stop against one of the enormous trunks.
The forest was completely silent. No beasts and no wind. Just the shimmering fog above and the massive trees rising around him in every direction.
He slid down the trunk of a nearby tree and sat on the forest floor.
He was lost but still alive.
He tilted his head back against the bark and stared up into the dark canopy.
"One lesson," he said quietly. "I should have attended one important lesson."