The forest was too quiet.
Sylva didn't know forests well, but even she understood that silence like this was wrong. No birds. No insects. No wind through the canopy overhead. Only the sound of her own ragged breathing and the soft crunch of undergrowth beneath her feet.
She had been running for a long time.
Her legs burned. Her lungs felt like crumpled paper. But stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering — the caretaker's voice, flat and certain: Stay away from her. Something's wrong with that girl. Children without flux aren't natural.
Sylva wiped her face with her sleeve. She wasn't crying.
She refused to cry.
―――
Flux. Everyone talked about flux.
It was the force that moved through all living things — the wellspring of magic, the fuel of the body, life itself given a shape. At the orphanage they had taught it like breathing: natural, effortless, inevitable. Even the weakest children could coax a small flame or a gust of wind from somewhere inside themselves. A flicker. A spark. Something.
Everyone except her.
Sylva's flux was barely there. Trying to shape it felt like reaching for smoke — she could sense the faint edge of it, but the moment she grasped, it dissolved. At first the other children had been curious. Then confused. Then afraid. Eventually they stopped talking to her entirely, and the caretakers had begun to look at her the way people looked at things they didn't know how to fix.
So she ran.
And now she was lost. Very lost.
―――
The forest had grown darker without her noticing.
Tall trees pressed close on either side, their branches twisting together high above until the sky was little more than pale fragments between the leaves. The air had turned cold. Sylva slowed her steps and tried to remember which direction she had come from.
Then she heard it. A soft step behind her.
She froze.
Slowly, she turned.
At first she saw nothing. Only trees, and shadows between them. Then something moved.
A deer stepped into the gap between two oaks.
Sylva exhaled. Just a deer.
The relief lasted half a second.
The creature was wrong. Its legs were far too long — skeletal, almost, lifting its body to an unnatural height. Its neck stretched upward at an angle that no living animal's neck should reach. And its eyes, when they fixed on her, glowed faintly. A dull, sickly blue.
Flux. The air around it shimmered.
The deer tilted its head. Too slowly. Too deliberately.
Sylva took a careful step backward.
The deer stepped forward.
Its joints bent at angles that made her stomach turn. Another step. Closer. The antlers were blackened at the tips, twisted like thorns. Veins of glowing flux pulsed beneath the thin stretched skin of its neck.
Its mouth opened. Too wide. The jaw didn't quite belong to the skull.
Sylva ran.
Branches whipped against her face. Roots caught at her feet. Behind her came the sound of something enormous smashing through trees — fast, far too fast — and then her foot caught and the ground came up hard and the air left her lungs and she couldn't get up. Her arms shook. Her vision blurred. She pushed against the dirt and her body simply refused.
A shadow fell over her.
Slowly, she looked up.
The deer stood a few steps away. Up close it was worse. The light in its eyes had brightened. Its mouth still hung open at that wrong angle, and one long leg rose from the ground — unhurried, precise — and she thought, distantly: so this is how it ends. Running from the only home I had, and dying alone in a forest I don't even know the name of.
The leg came down.
―――
"Move."
The voice was calm. Young. Almost bored.
Something grabbed the back of her shirt and dragged her sharply across the ground. A blade flashed — short, dark-handled — and struck the creature's raised leg with a crack of bone. The deer shrieked, a sound nothing like an animal should make.
Sylva blinked dirt from her eyes.
A boy stood between her and the creature. He couldn't have been much older than thirteen. Dark hair, slight build, and a stillness in his posture that looked almost lazy until you noticed how precisely his eyes tracked the flux beast's every movement. In his hand was a short dagger, its blade gleaming not with reflected light, but with something darker.
Behind him, armored knights burst through the tree line.
"Flux beast!" one of them shouted.
The deer lunged.
The boy didn't move. He said, almost to himself: "Too slow."
The dagger flashed. For a fraction of a second the air rippled with dark flux — shadow-tinged, dense — and the creature's front leg buckled and it crashed to the forest floor hard enough to shake the ground. The knights surrounded it instantly. Spears came down. The forest went quiet again.
The boy wiped his blade on the creature's fur, sheathed it, and turned around.
His eyes were sharp. Curious. Not cruel. The tips of his ears came to a faint point.
"You ran pretty far for someone your size," he said.
Sylva blinked. "…I'm sorry."
He frowned slightly. "Why are you apologizing?"
She didn't know how to answer that.
Behind him, one of the knights crouched over the creature and muttered: flux corruption. Likely what attacked the merchants. The boy glanced back briefly, then crouched so he was at her eye level.
"What's your name?"
"…Sylva."
He nodded, as though this was perfectly sufficient. Then he stood and offered her his hand.
"Well, Sylva," he said, like none of this had been particularly unusual, "you probably shouldn't wander forests alone."
"…You killed it."
"Not alone." He gestured at the knights.
"…Who are you?"
One of the knights nearby laughed softly. "You don't recognize him?"
Sylva shook her head.
The knight straightened. "You're speaking to Prince Nasu of Eldenheim."
The boy sighed. "You didn't have to say it like that."
But Sylva wasn't listening. She stared at him — at the pointed ears, at the dark dagger at his hip, at the complete absence of ceremony in the way he stood — and felt something shift quietly in her chest. Not gratitude. Not yet. Something earlier than that.
A thought, wordless and unfinished:
I want to stand beside him.