Chapter 2: Shadows at the Glade

Claire

They advanced further into the ruins of the forest, boots rasping over a burial shroud of ash. Each step brought a fresh layer of soot up their legs, caking skin and fabric alike, until even the delicate lines of their footprints blurred away. The path itself, once a muddy vein twisting through maple and birch, was now a gray streak, arterial and scorched, threading through stands of trees so blackened and contorted they seemed carved from a nightmare.

Claire inhaled through her scarf. The air was almost liquid with chemical tang: char and copper, ozone and some sharper undertone that stung the soft tissue behind her nose. There was no birdsong, not even the insect whirr that usually underpinned the woods; silence pressed close and cold, broken only by the brittle chime of their own movement.

The others felt it, too. Archer had gone rigid, his combat stance instinctual, every muscle packed and waiting. Even Elira, whose stubborn disregard for danger had survived four field assignments and two house fires, kept her head low, eyes flickering over the margins of every tree.

It was Archer who spoke first. He paused at a root bolus, hand hovering over the bark but not quite touching. “Look,” he said. The word was almost reverent.

Once all three had caught their breath again and kept their hearts from escaping the cage of their ribs, Claire stepped closer, fighting the urge to retch. The tree’s trunk was ringed with alternating bands of deep red and black. At first, she thought it was burn residue, but a closer look showed the layers to be too precise, too regular. Cut into the flesh of the wood, she saw nested geometric scars, a sequence of interlocking chevrons, each radiating outward from a central point. They were not random; they were glyphs, each one humming with a dull, hateful energy.

She shivered. “Brotherhood script,” she said, forcing the words past her lips. “Specifically, containment glyphs. Old design, but… adapted.” Archer nodded, tracing the outermost ring with a finger. Where he passed, the wood bled a thin film of oily sap, dark as arterial blood. “Not for holding,” he murmured. “For focusing.”

Elira stepped in, returning to the task at hand. She produced a tiny lens from her jacket. She squinted through it, muttered a string of arcane metrics. “Sigil density’s off the charts. And it’s layered. Some of these are counter-rotating, someone’s deliberately overcharging the matrix.”

“They’re turning the whole forest into a binding array,” Claire realized, nausea ballooning in her gut. “That’s what’s bleeding through, the hollow resonance, it’s leaking from every point.” Archer’s mouth was a tight line. He moved ahead, scanning the perimeter, the forest's silence somehow louder for his passage.

The farther they advanced, the more overt the corruption became. Every few yards, another tree bore the glyphs; in places the undergrowth had receded, leaving only burned dirt and veins of stone that glistened in the half-light. Once, Claire bent to examine a patch of bare earth, only to find the soil under her nails sticky and dark, as if it had grown a thin crust of dried blood overnight.

She stood, brushing her hands against her pants, then stopped short.

Ahead, at the base of a massive fallen oak, the ground bulged upward in a smooth, almost flesh-like dome. The surface was scarlet, laced with black webbing, and in its center someone, or something, had carved a spiral so deep it nearly reached the root core.

Archer stared at it for a long time before speaking. “Not a natural decay,” he said softly, almost lost in the hush. “The entire forest is saturated with a death-bound aura. Something deliberately malevolent.” Claire’s skin crawled. She glanced over at Archer, whose grip on his weapon had whitened his knuckles. “How far does it go?” she asked. “All the way to the source,” he replied, face grim.

Claire tried not to imagine what the source would look like, but her mind supplied an image anyway: Theron, strung up in the bones of the forest, every nerve hooked to some vast, invisible circuit. Her own brother was reduced to a raw node in a system of agony.

Ahead, the path narrowed into a tunnel of trees, every trunk so tight to the next they barely admitted light. The ash grew thicker here, rising almost to ankle height, collecting against the trunks like a dirty snow bank. Breathing became harder, each inhalation a gamble.

They continued in a single file. Archer on point, weapon never wavering, while Elira paced beside Claire, her eyes restless, lips twitching as she ran silent calculations.

At intervals, the wind shifted, bringing with it a sound so faint Claire almost missed it. A howl, not the wolf-like cry of the first nightmare, but something more wounded, more human. Each time it came, she stopped, heart hammering against her ribs, and waited for it to fade. The others pretended not to notice, but she could see the set of their jaws, the slight quickening of their step.

Another hundred paces, and the trees began to change. Instead of glyphs, the trunks were ringed with puckered scars, each the size of a human head. Claire reached out, ran her fingers over one. The texture was wrong, too slick, too yielding. She pressed harder and the surface gave way, exuding a drop of clear, viscous fluid.

She wiped her hand on her coat and looked to Archer, who stood motionless, eyes fixed on a tree directly ahead. “It’s getting stronger,” he said. “We need to be ready for whatever comes next.”

Elira stopped and unpacked a bandolier of copper rods, each etched with a different sequence. She handed two to Claire, three to Archer, and kept the rest for herself. “For counter binding,” she explained. “If the resonance spikes, drive these into the ground and channel your own signature through the core. It might buy us a few minutes of relative safety.”

Claire nodded, tucking the rods into her satchel. She felt the now-familiar chill in her stomach, the anticipation that always came before things turned violent. They moved on, each member of the team locked into their role, the forest closing in on all sides. It was Archer who halted them, holding up a fist. “There,” he said, voice low. “Clearing ahead. High visibility, but also no cover.”

They approached with caution. The clearing was circular, maybe thirty feet across, the grass all burned away to reveal wet, raw earth that gleamed under the muted sky. In the center, a spike of black iron had been driven into the ground, its length inscribed with yet more Brotherhood script. Around the base, the soil pooled with a dark fluid that steamed gently in the cold air.

At the periphery, the trees had drawn back, their branches fused into a solid wall. On that wall, hundreds of faces stared back: some animal, some human, most an obscene amalgam of the two. Their mouths hung open in frozen screams; their eyes were glassy, lifeless.

Claire staggered, bile threatening to choke her. She looked at the others. Archer’s skin had gone white as bone, his hands flexing at his sides. Even Elira, usually impervious, had gone quiet, her knuckles bleached around a copper rod.

Archer assessed the clearing, eyes flicking from the spike to the faces on the trees. “Trap?” he asked. Elira shook her head. “A siphon. They’re draining everything, energy, will, even memory. This is how they stabilize the array. If we linger here, it’ll start on us next.” Claire forced herself to focus. “Then we don’t linger.”

She skirted the clearing’s edge, careful not to step in the black pools. The faces in the wood seemed to follow her, eyes tracking every twitch of her body. She pushed down her fear, tried to remember the lessons from Kade’s old training: focus, analyze, adapt.

At the far end of the clearing, the path resumed, this time paved with slabs of stone. Each slab was engraved with names, some in common tongue, some in languages Claire didn’t recognize. Some bore only numbers, or the Brotherhood’s spiral sigil. She stepped onto the first stone and felt a pulse run up her leg, a low, insistent thrumming, like a heart still beating inside a dead thing.

The others followed. Archer made a gesture over his chest, a ward or maybe a prayer. Elira tapped each stone before stepping forward, the rods in her hand vibrating with silent resistance.

At the fifth slab, Claire stopped. The name on it was familiar, her own, but spelled in the archaic script of her family line. Her breath hitched. Elira leaned in, scanned the inscription. “They know we’re coming,” she said, voice so low it was almost a thought. “They want you, Claire.”

“Too bad,” Archer muttered. “They’re getting all of us, or none.”

They pressed on, following the unnatural path through the woods. With every step, the forest grew more alien, less like a living thing and more like an autopsy in progress. The trees were no longer trees, the soil no longer earth; it was as though they’d stepped out of their own world and into a diagram of someone else’s suffering.

At last, the trees parted, and the heart of the corruption stood revealed: a vast pit, dug deep into the ground, lined with sheets of reflective metal. The bottom glowed with a dull orange fire, and from its center rose a pillar of what looked like fused bone and iron. Atop the pillar, a shape writhed in agony, half-man, half-wolf, and haloed with a storm of Hollow fire.

It was Theron.

Claire could see, even at this distance, the lines of torment etched into every inch of his body. The Brotherhood had not merely caged him; they had transformed him into the locus of their entire working, every drop of his power and will stretched to the limit. She reached for Archer, who steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. “We’re almost out of time,” he said, his own voice raw.

Elira nodded. “We need to break the circuit, or he’ll burn out before we even reach him.” She began prepping the rods, her hands moving so quickly they blurred. Claire stared at her brother, then at the vast array that anchored him to this place. All her life she had wanted to save him; now, all she could do was hope they reached him before he broke for good.

They advanced together, a unit, every step an act of defiance against the will that had warped the world around them. The forest watched, silent and hungry, as the four survivors descended into the heart of the nightmare.

And from the center of the pit, Theron howled, a sound of pure, bottomless need. The noise tore the silence open, and through the wound, Claire heard his voice at last.

Help me.

She would. Or die trying. At the rim of the pit, Claire’s momentum failed her. The rest of the world did, too.

She froze, as if the air had been replaced with transparent glue. Her heart stuttered, then beat so loudly she thought the others would hear. She pressed a hand to her sternum, but the gesture did nothing; the pressure, if anything, increased. “He’s here,” she whispered, the words falling out without permission. “But it’s not… it’s like something’s wrapped around him, controlling him.”

The phrase “wrapped around” felt insufficient, a child’s attempt to describe barbed wire with the language of cloth. Theron’s presence radiated out of the pit, thick and sticky, but layered beneath it, like a fungus colonizing a living host, was something that did not belong. Where his energy should have burned wild and hot, it pulsed with a cold, autocratic rhythm. No rage, no pain, not even the primal ache that had haunted her dreams. This was an imposed order. The smell of burning had become clinical, antiseptic.

Her fingers went white around the protective amulet at her throat. She felt sweat break cold on her forehead and slick her spine. Her field of vision constricted to a narrow tunnel, the world flickering at the edges.

“Claire. Sit,” Elira said, voice stripped of all pretense. She eased Claire down onto the raw earth at the pit’s edge, then crouched to run her hands through the silt and leaf mold. Elira’s movements were all economy now, her magician’s hands sketching runic chains into the dirt, murmuring a sequence of syllables that peeled the air back, one layer at a time.

Behind the action, Archer stood sentinel, eyes fixed on the struggling figure at the pillar’s apex. Archer maintained a careful perimeter, weapon never so much as trembling in his grip, but Claire noticed his thumb gently tracing the protection rune, a gesture of readiness she’d seen him use before, in the seconds before things turned terminal.

Elira inhaled sharply, as if doused with cold water. “Brotherhood magic,” she said. “Double-helix. There’s an outer shell, but the main control point is run straight through the spine. Whoever set this, they weren’t planning for the subject to survive long-term.” Archer shot a glance at Claire, then at the trembling form atop the pillar. “Which means we’re working against a clock.”

Claire’s eyes adjusted to the gloom of the pit. She could make out the pattern now: every sigil on the pillar was mirrored in a latticework that radiated through Theron’s body, inscribed directly into the skin. It was all so precise, so methodical; the casual cruelty of a prison architect designing a cell he never planned to visit.

“I can try to break the bindings,” Elira said, “but it’s going to trigger a failsafe. It might kill him, or it might just kill us.” She delivered the news with a clinical calm, not looking away from her work.

Archer crouched next to Claire, voice pitched low. “You need to know: even if we get him out, there’s no guarantee he’ll be the brother you remember. The Brotherhood doesn’t leave their weapons unmarked. Even in the best-case scenario, there’s going to be... collateral.”

Claire wanted to argue, to insist that some essential spark of Theron would remain unbroken, but the look on Archer’s face, grim, braced for betrayal, told her that hope was now an enemy as dangerous as any ward. Still, she couldn’t help herself. “He reached out,” she said. “That means something. Even if they’ve buried him under all this, he’s still in there.”

Elira looked up from the pit, shadows striping her face. “He may be fighting,” she agreed, “but we have to give him the best chance. If we hesitate, even for a second… ” “We won’t,” Archer said. He set a hand on Claire’s shoulder, not to comfort, but to steady. “Whatever happens down there, you follow Elira’s plan. Understood?”

Claire swallowed and nodded. Her breathing finally settled into something almost normal, but her body felt light and glassy, as if a single word could shatter her. She fixed her gaze on the figure at the heart of the pit and forced herself to see not just the monster, but the brother beneath.

Elira finished the last of her runic chains, hands now smudged black to the wrist. “Ready on your call,” she said. Claire closed her eyes, reached for the core of herself, and let the world reassemble around her. When she stood, she was steady. Not calm, never that, but ready. “Let’s do it,” she said.

The others took up their places around the pit’s edge, forming a perimeter of intent. Beneath their feet, the earth began to tremble, responding to the old and desperate magic about to be set in motion.

If Theron was still in there, she owed it to him to try. If not, if only the weapon remained, she owed it to the world to see it ended. She gripped her amulet, not as a shield, but as a promise. Then she stepped forward, and the ritual began.

The air at the bottom of the pit was neither warm nor cold. It simply was, thick as congealed syrup and so dense with the reek of burning and blood that each inhalation scoured the lining of Claire’s lungs. She advanced first, unwilling to cede even a step to the Brotherhood’s predatory design.

The earth here was sticky, and the black mirror walls that ringed the pit magnified the already intolerable presence of Theron at its center. Each of Claire’s steps sent up tiny puffs of ash, and every time her boot settled, the detritus reformed, refusing to remember she had ever crossed it. For a moment, she wondered if the entire forest, the pit, her own memories, were just a recursive loop, an oubliette designed not to contain her brother, but to exhaust anyone who dared try to reach him.

Elira followed close behind, gait careful, eyes scanning every plane of the perimeter. Her left hand worked the rods together in a complex rhythm, her right holding a jury-rigged reader built of quartz, copper, and three trembling lines of her own lifeblood. Archer took up the rear, covering all angles; even now, his vigilance had a strange tenderness, as if guarding not only the team’s bodies but the core of their resolve.

They halted twenty paces from the pillar.

Theron hung from the iron spike as if crucified, suspended by bands of living fire that bit into his wrists, chest, and thighs. His head hung at an impossible angle, matted hair fused with what remained of his face. Where his eyes should have been, Claire saw two glowing hollows, rimmed with sigil-burns. He made no sound, but the pit vibrated with a pulse of pure, unnatural hunger.

Elira swept the reader across the pit’s floor, then checked the rods. “It’s everywhere. The control logic. There’s no central weak point; we’ll have to counter bind on the fly. Archer, help me with the recursion.” Archer knelt, driving the first rod into the ash, fingers splaying to trace counter-runes around the base. The pit reacted, the air becoming suddenly charged, the scent of ozone rising above the smoke.

Archer moved quickly to Claire’s side, his voice pitched just for her. “Whatever comes out, you do what you have to. No hesitation.” It wasn’t a command; it was permission. She nodded. Her pulse was thready now, but steady. She slid her hand to her weapon, not the talisman, but the actual piece: cold, clean, made for finality.

Archer then paused, looking up at the monsterized figure of Theron. “The strings,” he said softly, “they’re not just in the body. They’ve webbed the mind. The Brotherhood doesn’t just break their subjects, they rearrange the architecture, until the weapon can’t remember what it used to be.” Archer spat into the ash. “Fuckers.”

Claire’s mouth was dry as stone. “Is there anything left of him?” Her voice trembled, but only slightly. Archer moved to finish a circuit of the counter-runes and stood, his presence more solid than ever. “Enough. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have found us here.”

The next sequence was muscle memory: Elira barking out code-words, Archer reinforcing the sequence before working with Claire to hold the perimeter as the rods began to thrum in unison. The air went from syrup-thick to brittle, crackling with a charge that made every hair on Claire’s arms stand at attention.

The first shockwave hit them like a punch. Claire staggered but did not fall. In the center of the pit, Theron’s body snapped upright, every muscle rigid, the bands of fire contracting. He opened his mouth, not a scream, but a data-dump of sound, every frequency from the whimpering low to a glass-shattering shriek. Blood spattered the floor; some of it was his, but some of it, Claire swore, was the forest’s.

Then, a voice: fractured, multiple, but undeniably Theron’s. “Who… am I?” For a moment, the air stilled. Elira signaled to Archer. “Now. Push the counterwave.”

He slammed the last rod down. The pillars of fire flickered and warped, the control glyphs twisting into new, unstable forms. For the first time, Claire saw real confusion in Theron’s posture. His left arm jerked, uncertain, as if the limb belonged to someone else. The right hand balled into a fist, then relaxed, fingers twitching in old, familiar patterns, a sign she had not seen since childhood.

Archer took two steps forward, then stopped. “This is where it splits. If he’s in there, we need him to fight the override. If not…” Claire stepped past Archer. “Let me try.”

She advanced to the base of the pillar, looking up through the haze of agony and Hollow fire. “Theron,” she said, voice steady as bedrock. “You know who you are. They did this to you. But you can still take it back.” The eyes, horrifying, luminous, locked onto her. “They… made me. Unmake me.” She bit back a sob. “We’re here to help. But you have to want it.”

A pause, long enough for the world to fracture. Then, quietly: “I don’t… want to hurt… anyone again.” Elira’s rods began to overheat, the metal searing red. “Claire, we’re losing it, either he breaks free, or the array collapses and takes us all.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, Theron wrenched his left arm free, ripping the band of fire from his flesh. The pain was absolute; the scream tore a seam in reality, but as the hand fell, it reached for Claire.

She met it, fingers laced through his, even as the heat blistered her skin. “We’re here. We won’t leave.” The array began to convulse, sigils shattering, fire spilling from pillar to ash. Elira yelled, “Down!” as a corona of energy burst out, flattening all of them to the ground.

Claire held tight, refusing to let go, even as the world filled with static and the taste of metal. In her mind, she heard the echo of that first nightmare: the wolf, the corridor, the endless doors. But this time, she reached through the residue, through the smoke and bone, and found the kernel of her brother’s self, battered but still alive.

On the other side, Archer was already up, one hand with weapon raised and scanning, the other supported Elira, whose arms were burned and trembling but whose eyes burned with savage triumph. In the center of the pit, the pillar had melted down to a slag of bone and iron. Theron lay curled at its base, body twisted and flickering, as if it wasn’t solidly in this place. The Hollow fire was gone; in its place, the simple, staggering relief of survival.

Claire dropped to her knees beside him, reaching to cradle his head. But before she could touch him, his eyes looked at her as his mouth moved. No sound came out, but every one there heard his voice inside their own minds before his image flickered once more then disappeared.

Find me

The others circled around Claire, each battered in their own way but alive. Above the pit, the sky was still gray, but in the new silence, Claire could hear birdsong, tentative, probing the edges of what had been lost.

Archer glanced down at the ruined weapon in his hands and shrugged, as if this was all in a day’s work. Elira knelt and dabbed ointment on Claire’s burns. “You know this isn’t over,” she said, her tone somewhere between a warning and a promise. Claire nodded. “But we get to decide what happens next. And we will find him.”

The wind shifted, scattering the last of the ash. For a moment, everything felt possible. They rose as one, battered but unbroken, and began the long climb out of the pit, toward sunlight, toward what came next, towards the last step to finding her brother.