Grey had been in the Unknown Realm for three days and the forest had not once given him the impression that it intended to let him leave.
He was currently perched roughly thirty feet above the ground, balanced along a thick horizontal branch of a massive weeping willow whose drooping leaves formed a dark curtain around him.
Beneath the tree stretched a shallow basin of black sludge, thick and slow-moving, the surface broken only by occasional bubbles that released a sour, rotting smell into the air.
It carried the scent of something ancient and decaying, the kind of odor that suggested the muck had been collecting the remains of dead things for far longer than Grey had been alive.
He crouched low against the bark, working carefully.
In his hands was the carcass of a Lesser Crawler.
The creature's long, segmented body hung limp as Grey used a shard of obsidian to peel its hide away in careful strips. The improvised blade was crude but extremely sharp, and he guided it slowly beneath the skin, making sure not to waste anything useful.
He did not use even a trace of spirit energy.
In a place like the Blackwood, where many predators hunted by sensing spirit energy fluctuations, wasting energy on something as trivial as butchering a scavenger would be a mistake that could easily get him killed.
Luna sat several feet away at the far end of the branch.
She had grown noticeably larger in the past few days. It wasn't dramatic yet, but the difference was clear to Grey. Her limbs were longer, her body leaner, her posture more confident. The faint silver flame at the tip of her tail burned low and steady, casting a pale glow over the bark of the tree
Her orange eyes were fixed on the forest below as she watched with the patient focus of a hunter learning the rhythm of its territory.
"Your grip is too tight" Kaz said.
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once his voice echoing in Grey's mind
Grey didn't look up.
"The hide is already torn."
"Yes," Kaz replied, "because your grip was too tight before."
Grey exhaled slowly and loosened his fingers.
The next strip of hide came free in a clean motion.
He folded the material carefully and slid it into the pouch at his belt before returning to the work in silence.
Around him the Blackwood pulsed with its strange, oppressive life.
The forest never felt quiet.
Even in stillness there was a constant underlying vibration, a deep thrumming that seemed to travel through the trunks of the trees themselves. It sounded almost like breathing.
Or perhaps like the distant heartbeat of something unimaginably large..
Luna suddenly went rigid.
The reaction was instantaneous. One moment she had been calmly observing the forest. The next, every muscle in her body locked into rigid stillness.
Her ears snapped forward and her tail flame dimmed to a thin thread of silver.
Her gaze dropped sharply toward a specific point in the darkness below.
Through the bond between them, Grey felt the shift before he consciously processed what had changed.
The air beneath the tree had grown heavier.
He slowly placed the strip of hide aside
"Kaz."
"Something came through the veil. A clean signature, it is nothing like the Aberrants here... But I think It's dying."
Grey was already moving.
He crossed the canopy quickly leaping from branch to branch with practiced precision. When he reached the edge of a small clearing, he slowed and settled onto a lower branch.
Down below, at the center of the clearing lay a man.
A man lay at the centre of shattered obsidian.
The man's robes were crimson and gold, though most of the color had been drowned by blood that had soaked the fabric until it darkened to near-black. His white hair clung damply to his forehead.
His breathing was shallow and uneven, each breath a wet rattle Grey could hear from where he crouched
From a jagged tear in his chest, violet light pulsed outward in slow rhythmic waves, the cold specific light of Void-Taint bleeding into the air around him.
Beside him lay the corpse of a winged lion. The wingspan covered most of the clearing. Still smouldering at the edges, the fur along its flanks burned away to expose bone.
Whatever had killed it had been deliberate and thorough.
[Identification: Unknown Human — Critical Condition]
[Threat: Immeasurable — Suppressed]
[Note: Void-Taint Detected / Spirit Core Fragmenting]
Grey stared at the wound in the man's chest. Void-Rifts were supposed to erase things. That much he knew, though he couldn't say where the knowledge came from.
The vague sense in his mind insisted that anything caught in one disappeared within moments.
Yet the man lying below had taken that power at point-blank range and was still alive. Grey had no explanation for it.
Then he looked at the torn collar of the robes.
Beneath the blood, stitched into the inner lining, a small insignia. Two crossed blades behind a snarling beast head.
[Insignia Identified: Beast Slayer Corps/Academy — Senior Rank]
[Note: Military Organisation, Second Generation. One of the most powerful independent forces in Mythos.]
Grey read the Interface notation twice.
He had no memory attached to those words, no face or place or feeling connected to them.
Just the weight of information arriving without context, the way everything arrived now.
Senior rank in one of the most powerful organisations in Mythos, dying on black stone in a realm that had no name...
'That's a sad way to go' Grey thought.
"Kaz," he said quietly. "Can you read his aura from here."
Kaz was silent for several seconds.
"The Void-Taint is overwhelming most of it," he finally said. "But what remains underneath…"
Kaz's voice grew quieter.
"Whatever this man was before he was wounded… he was not someone you approached casually."
Grey looked at the dead lion and the damage across its body. Whatever had fought them had killed the lion first and done it carefully.
He swept the treeline with Echo-Sight and found nothing hostile in sight.
Which meant one of two possibilities.
Either nothing had followed the man through the Rift.
Or whatever had followed was something Echo-Sight could not detect.
And neither option made him comfortable.
Before Grey could make a decision, Luna dropped from the branch.
She landed lightly in the clearing and trotted directly toward the injured man.
Grey exhaled. Of course she had.
Luna stopped beside the wound in the man's chest. Silver fire flared gently along her body, her Silver Purge igniting automatically.
The pale flames pressed against the violet corruption surrounding the injury, slowing its spread in small, patient waves.
Luna looked back at Grey. Her expression was simple... She had already decided.
Grey sighed quietly and jumped down.
He landed several feet from the man and crouched beside him.
One hand rested near the hilt of the Midnight Stinger, though he didn't draw it.
Up close, the damage was worse than he expected.
The man's right arm was destroyed. Bone protruded through burned flesh, twisted at unnatural angles. There was nothing Grey could do for that.
Instead, he placed his palm carefully near the edge of the Void wound. Then he began channeling darkness-aspected energy slowly and carefully.
His power pressed against the boundary of the corruption, reinforcing the edges and slowing its spread.
His energy reserves began dropping immediately.
Then man's eyes opened.
One eye was bright sapphire blue. The other was pale and clouded, blind long it seemed before this moment. Despite the condition of his body, the blue eye was sharp and focused.
He didn't scan the clearing. He looked directly at Grey.
"The fox," the man said hoarsely. Each word came slowly, dragged out through failing lungs.
"Silver Purge… at that age."
His gaze studied Grey with unsettling clarity.
"Who taught you to hide your aura like that?"
"Nobody," Grey replied indifferently.
The man watched him for several seconds. Something subtle shifted behind the blue eye.
"How long have you been in this forest?" he asked.
"Three days."
"Alone?"
"Mostly." Grey nodded slightly toward Luna.
The man followed the gesture briefly before returning his gaze.
"The thing that followed me through the Rift," he said, measuring each word carefully.
"It tracked me across two realms before I went through. It is not fast but it does not stop. And it has been moving toward this clearing since the moment I landed."
Grey kept his palm on the boundary and watched the blue eye watching him.
"What is it," he said.
"Old," the man said. "Older than anything I have encountered in thirty years of hunting. I found something I should not have found." His jaw tightened briefly, the first crack in the composed surface.
"My beast died closing the Rift behind us. To buy time." The blue eye held steady. "But It did not buy enough."
Grey looked at the lion. At what remained of it. One second. Then he looked away because there was nothing useful in looking longer.
"I can slow the Taint," he said. "But I cannot seal it. I don't know of any technique yet."
"I know," the man said. "You are thirteen."
"How—How did you know?!" Grey gasped, his mask of indifference cracking slightly.
Although he looked young, he was actually quite tall for his age. Most people thought he was fifteen when he was still twelve years old.
So it was quite surprising that this old man could guess his age at a glance.
"The way you move," the man replied faintly.
"And the way you've been calculating escape routes since you landed beside me… while pretending you weren't."
The faintest hint of a smile appeared.
"My name is Aldric. Aldric Vane"
Grey wasn't really convinced with that answer. He looked at the insignia beneath the blood. The crossed blades and the snarling beast head that the Interface had just told him represented one of the most powerful forces in Mythos.
A senior member of that organization was dying on the stone in front of him. His bonded beast was already dead, and whatever had killed it was still somewhere in the forest, moving toward the clearing without any sign of haste.
"Grey," he said.
Aldric studied him for a moment, as if committing the name to memory.
"Grey," he repeated quietly. After a short pause, he added, "Of course."
Beyond the treeline, in an area Echo-Sight could not fully read, something continued moving toward the clearing. It didn't appear on Grey's senses, but the disturbance in the forest made its approach clear.
It already knew where they were.