Chapter Text
The prince
Under the mortal ring
Prisoner to his king
Never to leave
The Dead Woods swallowed him whole.
One step past the treeline and the moonlight died. One moment, there was manicured grass, pale and frost-stiff under the moon, and then there were the trees—tall, lightless things with bark the color of old ash. No wind moved through them. No birds or animals sounded. No insects sang.
Toge’s boots crushed the dead leaves that made no sound. That was wrong. He knew it was wrong. He ran anyway.
Behind him, the palace lights were already shrinking. Distant gold blurs in the black. The Solarium was the place he had once called home. The place devoid of warmth, where the floors were polished to such a mirror-sheen that Toge had grown up seeing his own reflection everywhere. The soaring columns were wrapped in gilded laurel leaves that climbed toward the ceiling.
There was gold everywhere. Gold leaves on the doorframes. Gold threads in the tapestries. Gold filigrees crawling up the window casements. Even the light was gold, filtered through amber glass until the entire palace glowed like the inside of a sun.
There were no soft carpets to muffle a footfall. No hidden corners for a child to hide. Everything exposed. Every sound echoed. Everyone watching.
The horns had sounded even before he’d reached the treeline. Two long blasts screeched through the night. Torchlights flickered at the edge of the woods, a line of orange lights spreading out like fireflies. The palace guards were trying to find where he’d entered. Their voices carried across the frost-grass in fragments.
Normally, they wouldn’t take one step near these woods, but they were desperate. Those men knew the King’s temper and feared it more than the Dead Woods. A shout rang out from behind him. Someone had gone in, someone who was braver or stupider than the rest, crashing through the underbrush.
Toge pressed himself flat against a trunk, his hand clapped over his mouth to trap the sound of his breathing.
The footsteps were near, then they slowed and eventually stopped. The guard was close enough that Toge could hear his ragged breathing. The man had crossed the first line of trees and was now standing in the moonless dark. He must have realized that the dark in here was not normal, and he hesitated.
For a long moment, the guard didn’t call out, nor did he advance. He stood there while the silence of the Woods pressed down on both of them.
Then, the footsteps started again, retreating this time, uneven, faster than when they came. The torchlight bobbed and shrank as the man rejoined the line. Toge didn’t breathe again until the last flicker of it was gone.
His hands were shaking. His fingernails had pressed into his palm hard enough to leave crescent marks. He couldn’t let himself be captured; the life that followed would be worse than anything these Woods could do to him. He pushed off the trunk and kept moving.
Shame upon the bloodline.
He could imagine what his father would say when he heard the news. The words pulsed in his head with every heartbeat, every step, every throb of the wound in his side. This would not be the first time he had said those words. It certainly would not be the last.
He ran until his lungs burned. Then he ran further.
Three weeks.
That was how long it had taken Toge to memorize the rotation of the inner guard. Twenty-one nights of feigned sleep while he counted footsteps in the corridor outside his chamber. Twenty-one days of walking the palace grounds with his head bowed and his eyes open, mapping the blind corners, the servant passages, the places where the torchlight didn’t quite reach.
He had learned that the eastern gate was unguarded for exactly four minutes during the midnight shift change. He had learned that the frost-grass beyond the inner wall held footprints for less than an hour before the cold erased them. He had learned that Captain Iori took her evening tea in the armory alone, and that she was the only person in the palace who might think to watch the exits instead of the entrances.
He had learned, and he had planned, and now it was time.
Toge eased the door of his chambers open. The corridor beyond was dark, lit only by the guttering torches set into the walls every twenty paces. He counted heartbeats and listened.
Footsteps fading, the night guard was moving toward the east wing, right on schedule.
He slipped out.
The Solarium was a labyrinth at night, all long shadows and gleaming marble; every surface threw back the torchlight in strange angles. Toge kept to the edges. His soft-soled boots made no sound. His traveling cloak was dark, chosen specifically for this, the hood pulled low.
He caught his reflection in the marble as he moved. A strand of silver-white hair had slipped free from underneath his hood, bright against the dark fabric. The one thing about him that no cloak could hide. He tucked it back with quick fingers, pulling the hood lower. In the Solarium, that hair was a crown. Out here, it was a target.
His pack bumped against his spine with every stride. Inside it was three rice balls wrapped in lotus leaves, a waterskin, and a bundle of dried fish. Enough for three days if he rationed.
A roll of linen bandages and a small clay jar of salve, the kind the palace healers used on training wounds. He’d gotten those by faking a pulled muscle during sword practice, limping convincingly enough that the healer had left him alone in the infirmary with a poultice and a pitying look. He had hidden the bandages and the salve under his garments before she came back.
A curved blade strapped to his hip beneath his cloak. A chalkboard and three sticks of chalk wrapped in cloth so they wouldn’t break.
And pressed flat against the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth to keep the damp out was his mother’s journal. A small and leather-bound notebook filled with her handwriting from before she died. The only thing in the palace that had ever felt like it belonged to him.
Twenty steps to the first corner. Fifteen to the servants' stair. Eight minutes until the next patrol.
He rehearsed the route in his mind as he walked.
The first corner came and went. He pressed himself into an alcove as a servant hurried past—a kitchen maid, arms full of linens, muttering to herself about tomorrow’s bread. She didn’t look up. Why would she? No one expected the prince to be skulking through the halls at midnight. No one expected the prince to be anything but exactly where they’d put him.
Toge waited until her footsteps faded before he moved.
The servants' stair was narrow and unlit, spiraling down into the belly of the palace. He took the steps two at a time, one hand trailing along the rough stone wall for balance.
Six minutes.
At the bottom of the stairs, a corridor stretched in two directions. Left led to the kitchens, where the night cooks would be preparing dough for the morning. Right led to the servants' quarters, and beyond that, the passage that opened onto the kitchen gardens.
Toge went right.
Around the corners came voices. He froze and quickly pressed himself flat against the wall. Two servants—men, by the sound of them—talking in low tones around the next corner. Something about a wager. Something about the captain of the guard.
Move, move, move. Toge chanted in his mind as though he could will them with it.
One of them laughed. Footsteps shuffled, then a door opened and closed.
The corridor returned to its silence. Toge counted to ten before he peeled himself off the wall. His hands were slippery from the sweat. He clenched them into fists around the edge of his cloak and kept moving.
The servants' quarters were a maze of narrow doors and narrower hallways, all of it built for function rather than beauty. No gilded moldings here. No marble floors. Just rough stone and worn wood and the smell of lye soap. Toge had spent half his childhood in these passages, trying to hide from tutors, escaping the weight of the crown. The servants had learned not to see him. It was safer that way, for everyone.
Four minutes.
The passage to the kitchen gardens was behind a door that looked like a supply closet. Toge had discovered it when he was nine, fleeing from a particularly brutal etiquette lesson. He’d spent three hours sitting among the mops and buckets, breathing in the smell of old soap and mildew before anyone found him.
He found the door now, pulled it open, and quickly slipped inside.
The passage was barely wide enough for his shoulders. He moved sideways, one hand on the wall, his pack scraping against the stone behind him. The air was stale and cold. Somewhere above him, the palace hummed with life—servants and guards and nobles, all of them sleeping or working, none of them knowing that the prince was disappearing through the walls like a ghost.
Two minutes.
The passage ended at a wooden hatch set into the floor. Toge knelt, fingers finding the latch in the dark. It had been rusted for years, but he’d oiled it three days ago, late at night, when the gardeners were asleep. It opened without a sound.
Cold air rushed up to meet him. The smell of frost and growing things.
He dropped through.
The kitchen gardens were silver in the moonlight, herbs growing in neat rows beneath the winter sky. Toge landed in a crouch, scanning the shadows. Nothing moved. No one called out.
He rose and started walking, carefully at first, then full-on running.
The inner wall rose ahead of him, pale stone luminous in the darkness. The gate was a black rectangle at its base, the space between the two guard towers where the torchlight didn’t quite reach.
Thirty seconds.
He was halfway across the garden when he heard the footsteps.
Toge dropped, hitting the ground between two rows of rosemary, the frost-stiff leaves scraping against his cheek. His heart was a drum in his chest. His breath came in shallow gasps that misted in the cold air.
A guard walked past. It was close enough that Toge could see the glint of his spear, the lazy way he held it. He must be a night watchman, bored, and not expecting anything to happen.
Suddenly, the guard paused.
Toge’s breath went still.
For one eternal moment, the man stood there, head tilting, like he’d heard something. Maybe he had sensed a presence. His spear shifted in his grip.
Then, because he found nothing, he yawned, scratched his jaw, and kept walking.
Toge waited until the footsteps faded into nothing. Then he waited another thirty seconds, just to be sure. His fingers were numb against the frozen soil. He pushed himself up, brushed the frost from his cloak, and kept moving.
The gate was unguarded as he’d planned.
He was through it in seconds and out onto the frost-grass. He was heated despite the cold. The treeline was a hundred strides away. Beyond that was the Dead Woods, where even his father’s men feared to tread, where Toge would finally be free.
Fifty strides.
Twenty.
Ten—
“Your Highness.”
Toge stopped.
Captain Iori stepped out of the shadow of the wall. She was still in her evening clothes, no armor or helm, but her sword was drawn. Her eyes were narrowed on him. She had been waiting.
“I wondered when you’d try,” she said. Her voice was almost gentle. “I’ve been watching you for a while now. I know what you’re up to. You’re clever, Your Highness. But not clever enough.”
Toge’s hand went to his sword.
“Don’t.” Iori hissed, raising her blade higher. “I don’t want to hurt you. You’re fast, I know. The dueling masters say you’re the best student they’ve had in a while. But I’ve been fighting since before you were born. You are no match for me.” She took a step forward. “Come back inside, and we’ll tell your father you were sleepwalking. He doesn’t need to know.”
Toge could feel the Command was building in his throat. The lyre strings etched along the line of his neck burned. Seven thin lines of gold traced down his throat from jaw to collarbone, following the path of his vocal cords. They were not ink or tattoos, but something that had been there since birth. He could feel them warming now, each string vibrating with the Voice pressing beneath it, the heat climbing from his throat toward his jaw like fingers reaching for his mouth. All he had to do was part his lips and say sleep, and Iori would fall where she stood. Say forget, and she would wake with no memory of this night. Say die—
Toge drew his sword.
The fight was short.
Iori was better than him—he’d known that. She had thirty years of experience and a body that had been trained for combat. But Toge was faster, and he was desperate. He was willing to take risks that no sane duelist would consider.
He feinted left, then right, then threw himself directly into her guard. It was a suicide move. Iori didn’t expect him to do that. Her blade came up to intercept, and that was exactly as he’d wanted.
Toge twisted.
The edge caught his ribs instead of his heart. A long, deep cut that burned like fire and immediately began to bleed. But he was past her, past her blade and her reach, and he was running.
“Toge!” Iori’s voice rang out behind him. She has dropped the honorific, not Your Highness anymore, just his name—the name she’d called him when he was a child, and she’d taught him to hold a sword for the first time. “Toge, stop—”
He didn’t stop.
Every Inumaki of the Solari Dominion was born with the High Tongue. It was the sacred language of the Kings, a power that could bend the will of men and the fabric of reality itself.
They called it a Blessing. Toge called it a Curse.
The First King had stood upon the Sunspire, the highest peak in the realm, when the world was still a fractured mess of warring tribes. He had made a bargain with the Gods of Olympus for a way to unite the continent and stop the screaming of the world. Apollo had answered, descending in a chariot of fire that had turned the mountaintop to glass.
The god had offered a drop of his own golden blood, a liquid resonance that vibrated with the music of the spheres. “You shall have the Voice,” Apollo had promised, his own voice a terrifying harmony. “You shall speak, and the world shall settle into the order you decree. But know this, the High Tongue was never meant for mortal vessels. It will burn the throat that holds it. It will hunger for what it was born from: life itself.”
Apollo’s golden eyes had held no mercy, only truth.
“It must be fed, mortal. It must be given life, or it will take life. This is the balance. This is the cost. You may speak as a God, but only if you pay as a God pays, in the currency of sacrifice. Offer its due, and it will be quiet. Refuse, and it will consume you from within, until every word you speak is a command and every silence is a scream.”
The First King had accepted. He had drunk the gold and felt his vocal cords turn to lyre-wire. With his first breath, he had commanded the wind to cease. It had worked. But he had never laughed again.
For every word that left his lips carried the weight of divine decree. He could not say good morning without compelling the sun to rise. He could not say I love you without binding the heart of the one who heard it. He united the continent, yes. He forged an empire from blood and absolute command. But he did so in silence, speaking only when war demanded it, writing his wishes on slabs of black stone that his servants learned to read.
His children inherited the Voice. And their children. And theirs. Each generation born with throats of lyre-wire and tongues of fire, each one a living weapon who could never ask for water without commanding it to flow.
It was the Third King who discovered the loophole.
His daughter had been born with the strongest Voice in three generations. By ten, she had not spoken in four years, not since she’d whispered go away to a nightmare and her nursemaid had walked into the sea. The silence was killing her slowly, making her a ghost in her own body.
The Third King had begged Apollo for clarity. What sacrifice? What life? Tell me what to give.
The god did not answer him. In his desperation, the King tried everything. He offered his own blood on the altar—nothing. He fasted until his bones showed through his skin—nothing. He gave up wine, meat, music, all the pleasures of his station—nothing. The Voice did not care about symbolic sacrifice. It wanted something real.
The histories do not record who gave him the idea. The private journals say only this: I brought a prisoner to her chamber. A man already condemned to die. I told her to speak the word, just once. I told her it would not be murder if he was already dead in the eyes of the law.
She had wept and refused. But she was dying too, dying of silence, and her father was the King.
In the end, she whispered die.
The prisoner’s heart obeyed. And one of the strings on her throat went dark.
Just one. The outermost string, the thinnest, dimmed from gold to nothing. The pressure in her throat eased by a fraction, but enough to where she could feel the difference. Six remaining strings still burned, still pressed, still coiled around her voice like wire. But one had gone quiet, and the relief of that single silenced string was enough to make her sob.
The Third King looked at his daughter’s throat. At the six strings of glowing gold and the one dark line where light had been.
He understood.
The journals do not record what he felt in that moment. They record only what he did next.
I brought six more.
One by one. One word per life. With each death, another string went dark. The second was a woman convicted of theft. The third was an old man who had no family to claim him. The fourth and fifth were soldiers captured in a border skirmish. The sixth was a debtor.
The seventh was a boy.
The King’s daughter didn’t want to do it. But her father held her face and pointed her toward each prisoner in turn and told her to speak. And so she did.
When the seventh string went dark, she spoke her father’s name.
Just his name. No Command in it. No divine weight. Just a girl saying father the way any child would, and the word did nothing but hang in the air, small and ordinary and free.
She laughed. Then she wept. Then she laughed again, and the sound was so foreign in the palace that the servants in the corridor stopped and stared at one another, because the princess had not made a sound in four years.
She spoke normally for a year. She laughed. She sang. She called her father’s name without fearing what the word might do. When the year ended and the Command coiled tight once more, she understood the price. So did her father.
Seven lives for seven strings. Twelve months of freedom.
The Third King called it the Rite of Silencing. He codified it, wrapped it in ceremony, and dressed it in sacred language until it no longer looked like what it was. The priests blessed the sacrifices. The histories recorded each Rite as a holy necessity.
No one called it murder.
No one except Toge.
Most Inumaki children underwent their first Rite before they turned seven. The Voice woke young, and the first accident always followed—a whispered word that stopped a heart, a cry that cracked stone. The families learned to act fast. Seven lives. One ceremony. And then the child could speak like any other. By the third Rite, most stopped crying. By the fifth, they stopped asking about the prisoners.
Toge’s Voice had woken at six. His father had first attempted the Rite at seven.
Toge had looked at the seven people on their knees and shaken his head.
His father tried again at eight, then at nine, at ten. Each year, the ceremony grew colder, the patience thinner. By eleven, the softness was gone entirely.
Toge was twelve when his father moved the Rite to the throne room and made it public.
The sun had been too bright that day, refracting off the white marble of the throne room until Toge’s eyes burned. In the center of the Solarium, the guards had brought them in. Seven people, all barefoot and trembling, their skin sickly and bruised against the blinding gold of the hall. They had been forced to their knees in a line, their hands bound in heavy iron that clattered against the polished floor in a staggered percussion that sounded like funeral bells ringing out of time.
“Kill them,” his father ordered, crossing his legs as he leaned on the side of his throne.
The vibration of his voice surged through Toge’s twelve-year-old body, making the marrow in his teeth ache. The King’s eyes were dark and empty, as if he had merely asked him to read a book—as if the lives trembling before them were nothing more than scraps of parchment to be torn.
Toge was shaking, blood drained from his face, and tears streaked his cheeks. He shook his head once, then twice, then non-stop as though he could shake the Command out of his head.
“Seven words,” his father said. “That’s all you need, and you will not have to be silent again. You can laugh at feasts. You can whisper secrets to friends. You can sing, Toge. Don’t you want to sing?”
Toge wanted. Gods, he wanted. Twelve years of silence already behind him, six years of chalk and gestures and the aching loneliness of a voice trapped in his throat. Six years of watching servants laugh in the corridors and feeling the sound like a knife between his ribs. Six years of sitting at banquet tables while the court sang and toasted and called each other’s names across the hall, while Toge sat with his hands in his lap and his jaw wired shut, smiling only when someone remembered to look at him.
He had learned to write before he could read because the chalkboard was the only way he communicated. He wore the words down to nothing, whole sentences reduced to shorthand that only a handful of people bothered to follow. Most didn’t. They just spoke slower and louder, as though the problem was that he couldn’t hear them.
He had memorized the shape of every word he wanted to say. He had mouthed them into his pillow at night, lips moving soundlessly in the dark, practicing conversations he would never have. Good morning. Thank you. I’m frightened. Please don’t leave. Simple things. The things that everyone else threw out without thinking, like coins tossed to beggars—meaningless to the giver, everything to the one who needed them.
The Command was a physical parasite. It coiled around Toge’s vocal cords, squeezing tight, demanding to be let out. It screamed in the back of his brain: DIE. WITHER. STOP. The words were right there, resting on the tip of his tongue like hot coals. All he had to do was exhale, and it would stop.
“Your silence is a rot, Toge,” his father’s voice dropped an octave, the sheer power of it forcing the guards to their knees. The prisoners wept, foreheads pressing against the cold marble. “A King does not weep for his tools. A King commands the end of things. Are you a King, or are you a broken reed?”
Toge clamped his hands over his mouth so hard his fingernails drew blood from his own cheeks. He collapsed to his knees, his head hitting the floor. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. He would rather the Command choke him to death than let it touch the innocent.
But the Command was too big for him. It slammed and slammed into his clenched teeth until his jaw went slack. When he’d opened his mouth, what came out was a scream of agony that shattered the nearby crystal vases. One of the seven—a boy not much older than Toge—scrambled to his feet at the sound and tried to run. But his shackles were too short. He took three steps before the chain yanked him backwards. He hit the marble hard, chin first, and the sound of his teeth cracking against the stone echoed through the Solarium. No one moved to help him. The guards looked away. The boy lay there, bleeding from his mouth, and whimpered.
Toge would hear that sound in his sleep for years.
The King let out a disappointed sigh. He didn’t even stand up. He simply looked at the line of seven and spoke a single word.
“Crumble.”
The sound was absolute. Toge watched, paralyzed, as all seven gave way. There was no blood, only the terrifying, silent collapse of seven human lives into heaps of dust and broken iron.
The King looked at the pile of ash, then turned his hollow gaze back to his son.
“Shame upon the bloodline,” he whispered, standing up from his throne, hands brushing off the nonexistent dust on his golden robe.
He stepped over Toge’s trembling form as if he were nothing more than a stain on the floor, leaving the boy alone in the middle of all that heartless, beautiful gold, choking on the blood in his throat.
Eight years. Eight years of those words followed him through the polished halls like a second shadow. Eight years of being brought to the Solarium on the solstice while seven strangers knelt on the marble, and eight years of shaking his head while his father sighed and spoke the word himself. Fifty-six people. Toge had stopped counting after the first year. He had not stopped remembering their faces.
Eight years of silence so heavy it had become a second skin.
The wound in his side pulled suddenly, and Toge bit on the side of his palm to stop himself from gasping out loud. His other palm was pressed flat against a tree trunk, bark biting into his skin. The Woods stretched around him, silver-grey and endless. The throne room was miles away. The pile of ash was eight years gone.
But his father’s voice echoed still, rattling through his skull like a curse.
Shame. Shame. Shame.
He shoved off from the tree.
Keep moving. They’ll send the Arbiters. They won’t follow you into the Woods, not at night, but they’ll send the Arbiters, and the Arbiters don’t care about night.
The trees grew taller the further he went. Their branches locked overhead like cathedral vaulting, a ceiling of bone-pale wood that blocked the sky entirely. Below them, a silver fog clung low to the ground, thick enough to see but too thin to touch, giving everything a pale, sourceless glow that illuminated nothing.
The air grew heavier the deeper he went. Damp without moisture, cold without wind. The air tasted like iron on his tongue. The bark of the trees was smooth under his palm when he steadied himself, and it felt wrong. It was faintly warm, the way skin was warm, as though something circulated beneath it. The thought gave him chills, and he pulled his hand away.
The smell had changed, too. That hollow absence had given way to something older, something that reminded him of the crypts—stone dust, still water, and the rotten smell of flowers left too long in a sealed room.
He knew the Dead Woods by reputation, which was to say he knew almost nothing useful about them at all. The servants whispered about them the way servants whispered about everything that frightened them—obliquely, in the margins of other conversations, never quite saying the thing directly.
The Grey-lands are where the lost things go.
That was the short version. The long versions involved travelers who walked in and arrived somewhere else entirely, or didn’t arrive anywhere, or didn’t come back at all.
He stopped where two trunks had grown together, forming a narrow cradle of bark just wide enough to sit in. His hands were shaking as he shrugged the pack off and pulled out the linen and salve. The cut from Iori’s blade ran along his left side, just below the ribs. It was long, deep enough to see the dark red of muscle beneath, but clean. A soldier’s cut, she had been precise even in the act of failing to stop him.
He packed the wound with salve. The strings on his throat flared at the pain, the Voice surging forward the way it always did when his body tried to scream. He bit down on the inside of his cheek and breathed shallowly through his nose as he wound the linen tight around his torso. It was clumsy work. Wrapping your own ribs one-handed was not something he was used to, but the linen held, and the bleeding slowed to a seep. It would need proper stitching, but proper stitching required another person, and Toge didn’t see that as a possibility anytime soon.
He retied the pack and stood. The linen pulled with his movement. He ignored it.
Around him, the Woods were utterly still. He couldn’t hear the palace anymore—no bells, no shouts, no sound of boots on frost-grass. Either he’d gone far enough, or the Woods swallowed sound the way they swallowed everything else.
A low, guttural growl vibrated through the silver fog. Toge went still.
He couldn’t locate it. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere at once. The fog had swallowed directions, turning the grey woods into a featureless bowl of muffled nothing. He took one step back, then another. His shoulders found the bark of an ash tree, and he pressed into it, using the solidity of it to center himself.
The growl came again, closer this time.
Toge’s hand moved to the hilt of his blade. He held his breath and listened. Nothing. The silence stretched long enough that he almost believed he had imagined it. His grip on the hilt began to loosen.
The trees to his left creaked, a groaning sound, like something heavy was leaning against them. There was no wind, yet the fog moved. Something was moving through it. Something large. Toge tracked the disturbance. Thirty strides. Twenty. The fog closed behind it like water.
The air thickened. Then, the fog in front of him split open.
The beast came through the bone-pale thicket, four limbs hitting the ground in a heavy, loping sequence. It was enormous. Its shoulders hunched upwards, and the spine curved into a predatory bow. The body was matted black, covered in tangled filaments that hung and dripped from its flanks in slow ink-dark strands that turned into smoke before they hit the ground.
Its head hung low between the shoulders. It had no eyes that Toge could find.
What it had instead was a mouth. Facing downward, splitting the underside of its skull were rows of overlapping teeth the color of old bone, each one the length of Toge’s finger. Between them was a darkness that had no bottom. Something colorless dripped from its open mouth.
The beast cranked its neck and sniffed the air. Toge forced his breathing to slow, pressing harder into the bark behind him, willing his heartbeat quieter.
The massive head snapped toward his direction. It had found him.
It lunged.
Toge drew his sword in one fluid motion, the steel screeching as it cleared the scabbard. He spun away from the beast’s path, the arc of his blade catching the dim silver light as he slashed upward. The steel bit into the creature’s flank, but instead of blood, a puff of acrid, dark smoke billowed from the wound.
The beast shrieked and whipped around. Its tail came from behind, something Toge hadn’t tracked in the dark. Whip-thin at the tip, thickening to something cable-dense at the base, ridged with barbs the color of old bone, each one curved backward like a fishhook. It caught him across the ribs in a single horizontal sweep and launched him. He hit the ground rolling, the impact stripping all the air from his lungs at once. He came up gasping with the sword still in his hand through sheer stubbornness.
Something was wrong.
The wound on his ribs had torn open, wet heat spreading beneath the wrapping. But there was a pressure below his left hip that had not been there before. Toge looked down to find a barb from the beast’s tail had broken off in his side, buried to the base in the soft flesh above his hip. Dark fluid wept from the entry point, a mix of his blood and something thinner that smelled like wet iron and rot.
He reached for it. His fingers closed around the base of the barb and pulled. It didn’t move. The hook held fast, curved deep into the muscle. His vision whited at the edges from the pain of trying.
He couldn’t afford to try again. The creature had already closed half the distance. Low to the ground, those ink-dripping flanks rippling as it moved, the massive head swinging with the heavy pendulum motion of something that located the world through vibration rather than sight. It was tracking his heartbeat. He was almost certain of it. Every time his pulse spiked, the head oriented toward him with that blind, absolute precision.
Stop panicking. Control it.
He set his feet and held his blade up. The beast was favoring its forelimbs now, the left rear leg where his first cut had landed dragging slightly with each step.
The beast was not done with him yet. It lunged again, lower this time.
Toge ducked and closed the distance. Inside the arc of the forelimbs, where the geometry of its own bulk became a liability. The curved blade went up through the dripping underbelly. He turned his wrist. More smoke, more of that terrible smell, and then the mouth found him on his right forearm.
The teeth were surprisingly not sharp. They didn’t puncture so much as press, the jaw closing around his forearm in a tight compression that Toge could feel his bone cracking. His vision was fading at the edges. He lost control of his fingers and dropped the sword.
The pain was so intense that Toge clenched his teeth to stop himself from screaming. His throat burned along the lines of the lyre strings. His instinct was screaming at him to use the Voice. The word shatter sat right behind his teeth, ready to be used. The strings pulsed in time with his heartbeat, the heat climbing toward his jaw. It would be so easy. One syllable, and the beast would come apart like the prisoners on the throne room floor. One syllable, and he would be exactly what his father had spent eight years trying to make him.
A King commands the end of things.
He bit down on his tongue until he tasted blood instead.
Then I am no King.
The metallic taste brought him back. He couldn’t feel his trapped hand anymore, but he could feel his legs, and his legs still worked. He drove his knee up into the underside of the beast’s jaw. Once. Twice. The grip released on the third impact.
He threw himself backward, scooped the sword off the ground with his left hand, and ran, putting distance between them using every tree in reach as cover. The creature pursued, but it was slower now, both flanks trailing smoke, its back leg limping behind.
If Toge was fast enough, he could outrun it.
But when he leaped over a fallen trunk, the barb in his hip shifted. A spike of white-hot agony hit him mid-air, and his landing came wrong. His foot caught slick moss instead of solid ground, and his legs buckled. The beast was on him before he could recover, slamming its massive shoulder into his chest.
Toge went flying, his back hitting a tree trunk with a sickening thud. The curved sword clattered to the ground, out of reach. He tried to scramble for the sword, but the beast was already over him, fluid dripping from the edge of its opened mouth. He could smell the rot of the void and the cold vacuum of the creature’s breath.
His hand went to his throat. He would have to use his Voice.
The beast pressed closer, its massive weight pinning him against the roots. The jaw cranked open, widening beyond what any living thing should allow.
Toge opened his mouth.
The world went silent.
The shadows around Toge coiled. A sudden chill swept through the hollow, turning Toge’s breath into a cloud of ice. The beast went rigid. Every muscle locked at once, its jaw still open above Toge’s throat, its body trembling against an invisible force. The snarl in its chest collapsed into a whimper.
A blade, so dark that Toge could only see the edge flashing as it slid through the beast’s neck from behind. A clean, effortless stroke. The creature howled—and then there was smoke, dissipating into nothing before the body could fall.
The silence returned. The Woods went back to its stillness as if nothing had happened. The only sound left was Toge’s own breathing, ragged and thin, and the thunder of his heartbeat in his ears.
“You don’t belong here, little Prince.”
A voice came from somewhere in the thicket of fog, distant and cold.
Then the crows came.
They drifted in from the grey nothing between the trees. They settled downward, finding the white branches one by one and then in clusters, their talons clicking against the wood with the sound of bone on bone.
The canopy began to fill. A dozen. Then fifty. Then too many to count. The white vaulting of the trees became a living, rustling darkness, the branches weighted and black with them, bowing slightly under the gathered mass. Their feathers were the color of stagnant ink, slick and iridescent, catching the sourceless silver light of the Dead Woods in a way that made them look wet.
The birds did not crow. They watched with cold, dark eyes, devoid of judgment as they shifted on their perches. The hollow had become a gallery of the dead.
When the last branch had been claimed and the trees stood fully black, a figure emerged.
The figure was tall, taller than seemed quite right. A hood shrouded his face, dark fabric the color of a bruise. His robe hung from one shoulder and was pinned at the collarbone with a clasp of dark metal, leaving the other half of his torso bare. Silver geometric lines ran from shoulder to wrist that could have been scars or scripture. The fabric moved when there was no wind.
Two wings swept back from his shoulders in a massive span, black at the roots and deepening into deep purple where the feathers frayed and bled into nothing.
The scythe was as tall as he was, the handle silver. The blade arced out, pale and glowing, still humming with the memory of the kill. Set into the flat of the blade, where metal met handle, was a watching eye. It was open and unblinking, alive in a way nothing else in the Woods was.
He held the scythe loose. The way someone holds a thing they’ve held for centuries.
His eyes were on Toge, and they were grey—a very clear grey. They were not the grey of the stone or fog or the grey of tree bark, but the grey of the moment just before dawn. The grey of the space between worlds. They held neither malice nor mercy.
The Dead Woods are a border region. They exist in the space between the mortal world and the Domain of the Death Warden. Entry is inadvisable.
The words of his tutors echoed in Toge’s head. They had warned him when Toge was seven and wandered too close to the treeline.
They had also said: If you go in there, he will come for you.
He, they had said. Not something. Not it. He.
Toge had thought about that a lot, over the years. The specificity of it.
Now he understood.
The Warden did not breathe. There was no rise and fall of his chest, no mist forming in the freezing air when he spoke. He simply existed in place as a promise of ending, a still point in a moving world.
Death had come.
And he was beautiful.