Page 39 of Trapped With My Dark Elf
I look away first, which I dislike enough to remember.
I move forward without full certainty of terrain, outcome, or leverage. The sensation should resemble weakness. Instead it feels like standing in front of a locked door while hearing something valuable breathing on the other side.
11
AERYN
The forest deepens by degrees so subtle that awareness notices before thought does.
At first the changes seem ordinary enough, a thicker canopy, older trunks, roots larger than a man’s waist lifting the ground into ridges and hollows where shadows collect even at midday, yet with every mile something less visible tightens around us. Sound loses distance.
Bird calls arrive close and impossibly far in the same breath. The wind moves leaves overhead while moss at our feet remains undisturbed. Light slips through branches in narrow silver bands that never warm the skin. Even scent behaves strangely, wet earth and crushed fern one moment, smoke and cold iron the next, then sweetness from flowers no eye can locate.
We have crossed into a region the outer forest merely imitates.
Vaedros senses it too. He speaks less, listens more, and keeps one hand near the hilt at his side whenever the trees gather too tightly. His presence has become a constant pressure at the center of my awareness, measured footsteps behind me, the faint shift of leather when he turns his head, the resin and steelscent that belongs to him alone after days on the road. I tell myself I notice because vigilance requires it. That explanation grows weaker by the hour.
The path ahead narrows between two colossal roots arching from opposite trees like the ribs of some buried giant. Pale fungi glow beneath them in soft clusters. Water drips somewhere unseen in patient intervals. I step forward and the world ruptures mid-motion.
Three roads open at once. I am still standing between the roots, yet I am also already beyond them on three different paths that branch through the same forest and refuse to resemble one another.
On the first, I lead us left through a corridor of white-barked trees where the ground remains level and clear. We reach a stone circle half-sunk in moss, and at its center lies a black door set flat into the earth with silver symbols burning across its frame.
On the second, I guide us right along a ridge lined with thorn vines. The vines wake when we pass. They coil around Vaedros’s leg and drag him sideways over the drop while I scream his name too late.
On the third, we go straight into dense cedar shade where the air tastes of winter. We walk for hours without danger until we discover we have circled back to our own footprints filling with fresh rain.
All three futures pull equally.
My foot catches on nothing visible. I stumble hard, shoulder striking bark slick with moss, and pain snaps through my arm. Vaedros is beside me instantly, hand closing around my elbow before I can fall further.
“What happened?”
Too many answers crowd my mouth.
“Left,” I say, because the stone circle felt realer than the others, because choosing any direction is safer than standing still while my head splits open.
He studies my face for one sharp second, then guides us left beneath the white trunks. The forest changes within twenty paces.
The level ground buckles upward into roots that were not there a heartbeat ago. White bark darkens to gray. The neat corridor narrows into tangled undergrowth dense enough to claw skin through clothing. No stone circle waits ahead, only a wall of thorn and twisted hazel where no road should continue at all.
I stop so abruptly Vaedros nearly walks into me.
“That path was clear,” I whisper.
“Was?”
I turn slowly. Behind us the entrance between the giant roots is gone. In its place stands a slope crowded with ferns and black stones I do not recognize.
Cold slides down my spine. One of the futures was false. Or true only until we entered it. Or changed because we chose it. I hate all three possibilities.
“We go back,” I say.
“To where?”
He does not ask mockingly. He asks because there is no obvious answer.
I force breath into my lungs and reach again for the flickering remnants of the vision, trying to recover the ridge path, the cedar loop, anything useful before it fades completely.
