The forest was the kind of quiet that had weight to it.
Not the comfortable quiet of the woods back home, where silence was just the space between birdsong and rustling leaves and the soft sounds of animals going about their business.
This was different.
This was the quiet of a place that had decided, for reasons of its own, not to produce any sound at all. No wind. No movement in the canopy above.
No small creatures in the undergrowth. Just Grey, and the trees, and the fog that drifted between the enormous trunks in thin, slow ribbons.
He sat with his back against the bark and let himself breathe.
His spirit form had stabilised somewhat after the chase, though it still looked more translucent than it had when he first arrived in the Heartlands.
He could see the faint flicker of it at the edges of his hands when he held them up. Like a candle in a draft, present but not entirely committed to staying that way.
He thought about what Priestess Kim had said. The spirit form was sustained by spirit energy. Without it, he would fade.
He closed his eyes and focused the way he had discovered he could, drawing the sparse fog around him inward, feeling it dissolve into whatever passed for his core in this form and strengthen him by small degrees.
It was slow work. But it was something to do while he thought.
And he had a great deal to think about.
Two spirit flames. One white, one gold. The white one had caused enough chaos in the temple to leave three experienced Druids temporarily unable to form sentences.
The gold one had apparently caused every spirit beast in an entire realm to simultaneously lose their composure and then start fighting each other, which suggested it was doing something the white flame was not.
He didn't know what. He didn't have the knowledge base to even guess intelligently.
He was really starting to resent his past self.
He also didn't know how much time he had spent sitting here. A week in the Heartlands equalled one day in the outside world, which meant time moved differently here, but he had no reliable way to measure either.
The sky through the canopy above was still the same flat grey it had been when he entered the forest, which told him nothing useful.
'I'm sure the others have found themselves really nice beasts by now,' he thought, and immediately wished he hadn't because the mental image that followed was vivid and annoying. The village kids, all of them, standing around comparing their bonded beasts while he wandered alone in a silent forest having accomplished nothing except surviving a stampede and absorbing fog.
He pushed himself to his feet.
Sitting here wasn't going to find him a beast. He picked a direction, as good as any other since they all looked identical, and started walking.
The trees were extraordinary up close. Each trunk was as wide as three adults holding hands in a circle, their bark a deep reddish grey that was simultaneously soft to the touch and unyielding under pressure.
He pressed a palm flat against one as he passed and felt nothing, no vibration, no warmth, nothing that suggested anything living moved within it. And yet the trees themselves were clearly alive, their canopies far above shifting occasionally in ways that had nothing to do with any wind he could detect.
He walked and tried not to think about the fact that every direction looked exactly the same.
"Pick a direction and commit," he told himself. "You're not lost. You're just exploring."
He was absolutely lost.
The uneasy feeling crept in gradually. A shift in the quality of the silence, maybe. A difference in the way the fog moved between the trunks.
Something that his instincts were processing faster than his conscious mind and filing under the category of pay attention.
He slowed his pace.
Then he heard it. A twig snapped.
He spun around and dropped into a low crouch, eyes scanning the trees in every direction. Nothing moved. Nothing was visible between the trunks except more fog and more trees stretching away into grey distance.
He looked down at his feet.
The twig was under his own shoe.
Grey straightened up and stood there for a moment in the silence.
"Right," he said.
He kept walking, faster now, less because he had a destination and more because standing still in this particular forest was doing nothing good for his nerves.
He had grown up comfortable in wild spaces, genuinely at ease among animals and trees in a way that most of the village children were not, and even he was finding the quality of this silence difficult to sit with.
There was nothing wrong with it that he could identify. It was just empty in a way that felt like it shouldn't be.
He broke into a run.
He had been running for a few minutes, trying to shake off the lingering unease, when the presence returned.
It didn't announce itself. It simply arrived, the way weather arrives, a change in everything at once.
The fog thickened around him in seconds, pulling in from between the trees until visibility dropped sharply. The atmosphere became heavy and close, pressing against his spirit form from all sides with a weight that was immediately and unmistakably familiar.
The same presence from the valley. The one that had frozen every spirit beast in that valley and drained the colour from the sky.
It had found him.
The pressure hit his knees first. He fought it, locked his legs and refused to go down, but the weight kept building, slow and inexorable, the way deep water builds against you the further down you go.
His knees bent despite him. His hands hit the ground and he ended up on all fours in the fog with his teeth clenched and every muscle in his spirit form straining against something that wasn't physical and didn't care about muscles.
The trees began to sway. Their enormous trunks, which had felt utterly immovable when he pressed his hand against them, bent like grass in a strong wind, their canopies crashing together far above, broad leaves and long branches raining down around him.
Then the voice came.
"I HAVE FINALLY FOUND YOU."
It came from everywhere at once, carried in the wind that had appeared from nowhere, resonating through the fog, the trees and through Grey himself in a way that he felt it deep in his spirit form.
Grey kept his eyes open and his jaw tight and said nothing, because nothing was what he was currently capable of saying at the moment.
"WHAT IS YOUR NAME, YOUNG ONE?"
The wind intensified. Two of the enormous trees at the edge of his vision gave up the fight and went down, crashing through each other with sounds like cannon fire.
Grey pressed his forehead toward the ground and gritted his teeth harder and held on, because going flat was not something he was willing to do. Not here, not for anything. Not even for something that could apparently knock over trees just by speaking.
The voice seemed to realise the situation as he felt the pressure ease slowly and painfully.
The wind died and the fog thinned. The weight lifted off him degree by degree until he could breathe again and feel his hands under him.
He tried to stand and his legs disagreed, so he sat instead, his back ack against the nearest trunk, and focused on absorbing spirit energy until the flickering at the edges of his form settled down.
"I hope you are feeling better now."
The voice was different this time. Still enormous, still carrying that quality of deep age and easy authority, but quieter. Measured.
It's spoke directly into his ear as though the source of it stood right beside him.
Grey looked left and right but there was nothing between the trees aside from the fog in the air.
"I am quite surprised," the voice continued, with something in it that might have been genuine curiosity. "To think that a mortal human, a child no less, could withstand thirty percent of my noble presence. I am impressed."
Grey processed that for a moment.
Thirty percent.
"That," he said slowly, still looking around him for any sign of whoever was speaking, "was thirty percent..."
It was not a question. He was simply repeating the number back to himself in the hope that hearing it aloud would make it feel less absurd. But It did not.
If thirty percent had put him on all fours and knocked down trees, then fifty percent would probably end him outright. A hundred percent was not something he was willing to think about in any detail.
"You referred to me as human," he said. "Which means you're not."
A pause. Then, with what sounded remarkably like satisfaction the voice replied "You are correct."
Grey pushed himself carefully to his feet and looked at the empty forest around him, at the fog drifting between the trunks, at the absolutely nothing that was apparently hosting a conversation with him.
Something with ancient power and thirty percent of a presence that could flatten him was hiding behind the trees and talking to him about being impressed.
He had a lot of feelings about that.
"I can see you have recovered fully," the voice said. "It is more impressive still that you are able to absorb spirit energy here. You are without question the right one. I have been waiting for someone like you for a very long time."
Grey stared at the empty space in front of him.
'He just waltz in, nearly kills me, and now he's talking about waiting for me and being the right one?' Grey was visibly angry and frustrated.
He took a deep breath.
"Hey! Who exactly are you? Show yourself and stop hiding like a coward."
He'd decided that the situation had reached a point where there was nothing left to lose by being direct.
The fog went completely still and the trees stopped swaying.
Every ribbon of mist between the trunks froze in place as though time itself had paused to see what happened next.
Then something moved in the fog ahead of him, coming closer.