After walking for a long and dreadful amount of time, Grey found himself sprinting through the woods, his spirit energy flaring as he pushed forward.
When Kaz had said he was close, he had taken it quite literally. Who would have thought that he would walk a distance spanning over five large cities and still not be anywhere close to leaving the forest.
Just an endless tunnel of identical trunks and drifting fog.
'Close, he says,' Grey thought, ducking under a low branch without breaking stride. 'I've been walking long enough to grow a beard. If I had one.'
He couldn't deny though that the time spent walking had been productive. The idea had come to him early on. He could absorb spirit energy while sitting still, so why not while moving? It seemed logical enough.
So he tried splitting his focus three ways at first, one part absorbing energy, one part keeping his feet moving and one part staying aware of his surroundings.
It was a complete disaster.
His young mind simply refused to hold all three at once and he had pitched forward and passed out against a root for what felt like a full minute, coming back to himself with his face in the dirt and a new understanding of his own limitations.
'Okay,' he had thought, spitting out a mouthful of forest floor. 'Two things. Just two.'
He dropped the awareness and kept the other two. Absorbing while walking, with just enough attention left over to avoid walking headfirst into a trunk. Kaz had promised nothing would harm him so he decided to take the Divine Bat at his word and stop worrying about what he couldn't see.
Even with only two things to focus on the strain was real. He stumbled more times than he was comfortable admitting and stopped occasionally to let his mind settle before pushing on.
For a while he half expected Kaz to appear from the fog purely to laugh at him, but the Bat stayed quiet. Whether that was consideration or indifference Grey couldn't tell. He didn't know enough about Camazotz yet to read him properly.
Still, he kept at it. He had no practical reason to learn this skill. Spirit energy didn't exist in the outside world, only a different type that nobody had figured out how to access yet.
So absorbing spirit energy here would become useless the moment he stepped back through the root node.
But something in him refused to stop.
'If I can do it here, maybe I can figure out the other type eventually,' he thought. 'Or maybe I'm just stubborn. Probably both.'
He kept walking, absorbing and heading North.
Somewhere in the rhythm of it his thoughts drifted the way they do when the body is occupied and the mind is left to wander on its own.
He thought about what came after. When he bonded with Kaz, if he bonded with Kaz, he would dedicate real time to learning things properly.
No more skipped lessons. No more deflecting with jokes when someone asked him something he should have known.
He had spent years treating ignorance like a personality quirk and it had nearly gotten him killed twice today already.
He would do better.
His forest friends would miss him. He felt a small pang at that. The animals had always been easier than people. They didn't care that he was an orphan.
They didn't have expressions that sharpened when they wanted to draw blood. They just came to him because something in him was familiar to them, and he had always been grateful for that even when he didn't say so.
But he couldn't stay in the forest forever. He had known that for a while. Today had just made it impossible to ignore.
He might even turn Seaside into a proper city one day. The thought was so far-fetched that he almost laughed at himself for having it.
Then he remembered Kaz calling him capable of bringing change to the world and decided maybe far-fetched wasn't quite the right word.
Maybe it was just premature.
'Give it time,' he thought. 'Give it a lot of time.'
He was still running, somewhere in those thoughts, when he crossed into a new territory without noticing.
The change came gradually. The trees grew shorter. Their branches spread wider and heavier, leaves overlapping into a canopy that blocked out most of the ambient light.
The air thickened against him in a way that had nothing to do with Kaz's presence. A different kind of heaviness, pressing and close, like a held breath that had been going on for centuries.
The fog thinned but the darkness deepened and the spirit energy in the air became sparse, less of it available with each step he took.
He slowed and looked around.
The giant trees were behind him. These ones were recognisably the same species but stunted and malnourished, their bark pale and cracked.
Whatever had drained them had been doing it for a very long time.
'Well this is cheerful,' he thought.
He was about to keep moving when the presences appeared.
Not one or two. All around him simultaneously, emerging from behind the stunted trunks with the slow patience of things that had done this many times and were in no particular hurry.
They had the translucent ethereal form of spirit beasts, the luminous quality, the swirling energy visible at their cores. But their shape was wrong. Humanoid, upright, two arms and two legs.
Their faces were worse. No mouth, no nose, just two flat dots for eyes and a pair of oversized ears that tracked every sound with precise and unsettling attention.
They came out of the trees in their hundreds, encircling him completely, their white glow cutting through the oppressive darkness of the forest and lighting up the space around him like something ceremonial.
'Why does everything in this place want to kill me,' Grey thought, with the specific exhaustion of someone who has arrived at the same conclusion too many times in a single day.
'Is it the hair? I think it might be the hair.'
"I see human!" one of them cried. Its voice was extraordinarily high pitched, the last word curling upward into something close to a squeal.
"I see it too!" another replied in exactly the same manner.
"A real human! A real human!"
The sound multiplied. Dozens of voices building on each other, overlapping, spreading outward through the dark trees and bouncing back from every direction at once.
Grey pressed his hands hard over his ears but it was already too late. The sound found the gaps between his fingers and crawled through regardless, worming its way past hearing and taking hold of something deeper and quieter inside him.
He didn't know why they were shrieking with such delight. He only knew that something was very wrong and getting worse by the second.
The trees began to warp.
Their trunks twisted slowly, the bark reshaping itself, pulling into faces he recognised. His mother's face, which he had never actually seen and had spent his entire life constructing from fragments and guesswork and the careful way people avoided looking at him whenever her name almost came up.
The ferret's face, small and still. The faces of the village children, mouths stretched wide, screaming without sound.
Grey stood in the middle of it and felt something crack open inside him that he had spent four years keeping carefully sealed shut.
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't loud. It was just suddenly there, the way a wound announces itself when the numbness finally wears off. All of it at once.
The years of laughing things off.
The years of pretending he hadn't heard what they said.
The years of going into the forest and sitting alone because the forest was the only place that didn't remind him of what he was missing.
The ferret.
The Chief sitting beside him in the dirt without saying a word because words weren't the right thing and somehow he had known that.
The smile he had worn every single day like a coat he wasn't allowed to take off.
The screaming faces of the village children stared back at him from the bark of the stunted trees, silent and endless, and Grey looked at all of them and felt every bit of it.
'So this is the hurdle he talked about huh,' he thought, to no one in particular. 'Fine. Alright. Come on then.'
In the corner of his vision the spirits raced toward him, gliding through the dark air and colliding with each other in their eagerness, their white forms blazing. Reality was slowly dissolving at the edges.
The ground beneath him cracked like glass, fracture lines spreading outward from where he stood, and then the glass gave way entirely.
He was rapidly falling.
Falling.
Falling.