Chapter 19: Spirit Forest 2

{Kohaku}

Red flares went up.

[Oh, that’s not good.]

Red flares meant recall. Recall meant every first-year was to walk out of the forest ASAP because some big shit was happening.

We were south of the glade. Fleeing spirits went past my ankles and above my head.

"What in the world is happening?" Serena asked, seeing them.

I didn’t respond. I was too busy going through the situation in my head.

[Perrin will have definitel taken Lily to that one private spot deeper in. Lily won’t decline, because, I think, she’s probably falling in love by now. And... whatever just woke up, it’s in that direction.]

Lily was somewhere in there, in a maze of trees, in the exact direction every living thing was running away from.

[The recall is mandatory. The supervisors are coming. An extra’s job is to walk out with the crowd and let the professionals...]

I swallowed.

[No. I can’t just let Lily get hurt.]

So, I ran forward.

"MUTT." Serena’s voice cracked behind me like a whip. "The recall is THAT way! Where in frozen hell do you think you’re-"

"My roommate’s in there!" I yelled over my shoulder, not slowing.

[Don’t worry, Lily, I’m coming!]

What exactly I’d even do was not something I was considering right now. But, hey, if Lily was about to get eaten by some forest monster, I wasn’t about to let her be eaten alone.

And, hey, isn’t that what it means to be friends?

Suddenly, boots began catching up to me.

Serena was running behind me.

[Well, that makes the odds a bit better.]

---

{Marisol}

The staff funneled us toward the edge of the forest in herds, supervisors shouting sectors, Wilhelmina clinging to my sleeve. Some people had found and made contracts with spirits; others were sighing, dreading having to come back tomorrow.

And that was when I saw her: the fox, breaking from cover half a ridge over, sprinting flat-out in the wrong direction. Into the forest. Toward whatever made the red flares go up. With the Frostfall heiress running behind her, even.

The herd shoved me onward and I stood against the current, watching them shrink into the green, and my framework produced the only conclusion it was built to produce.

[The recall. Did she arrange it? Of course! Empty the forest of witnesses, keep the assets inside, and whatever the real objective is, it happens NOW, in a sealed forest, with a Frostfall as muscle. This is the operation. This is IT. Three weeks of surveillance and I am NOT reading about the result in a dormitory rumor.]

I pried Wilhelmina off my sleeve.

"You’ve done well, love," I told her. "I’ll be right back, okay?"

And I ran after Kohaku.

---

{Kohaku}

We felt it before we saw it. Every step the thing took made the ground tremble.

Then we broke through the trees and I saw the thing at the heart of the forest. My stomach dropped.

[Oh fuck. A forest warden.]

One of the few monsters I remembered because I thought it was cool as fuck when I came up with it. Twenty feet wide, moss-plated, with antlers like a crown. Its torso was like a collapsed cathedral, with two points of green light sunk where a face would go. It moved slowly, and yet it still felt like it was moving unreasonably fast.

Yeah, I definitely remembered writing it.

Looking at it, I understood its job on sight, the way you understand your own handwriting. It guards the thing at the heart of the forest. Simple as that. And, it wakes for one reason: to silence whatever disturbed it.

And, just a short distance away, was the thing that had called it. The warden wasn’t rampaging as it moved toward the intruder, it moved like a hunter. Tracking, stalking.

[It’s trying to find Lily, right?] I thought. Lily’s call probably made the damn thing wake up.

Soon enough, I saw her.

She stood in the open by a spring, sword up, feet planted exactly the way I’d taught her, holding her ground as her eyes scanned the direction of the ominous footsteps. And beside her was Perrin.

[Oh, okay, good. I can probably sit back at this point. He’s going to be courageous, he’s going to protect her, and...]

"I’ll go for help!" he announced with a voice so high-pitched I wondered if the deep one I’d heard had been faked. "Hold it here! That’s the smart play, someone has to reach the supervisors, and I’m the fastest, so, uh, stay in the open where they can find you!"

[... Stay in the open?]

And with that awful piece of advice, he then turned and ran. Big, long-legged strides, gone into the trees, just like that.

Lily watched him go.

I was too far to see her face. I didn’t need to. I’ve written that exact shot a dozen times, the held frame, the empty trail. Whatever I’d spent two weeks building between them didn’t crack. It snapped, clean through, permanently, and he’d done it himself, free of charge.

[There goes the beat,] some cold professional shelf of my brain noted. [There goes volume two.]

The rest of me was already sliding down into the bowl.

"LILY! RUN, DON’T BLOCK, IT’S TOO BIG TO BLOCK, RUN!"

Her head whipped around.

"Kohaku?!"

The Warden’s head came around too, as if going "oh, shit, something else to squash?"

What followed was the least dignified chase in the history of this forest.

"RUUUUUUUUUUUUN!"

We sprinted away.

"LEFT!" I screamed, and we went left, three of us now, Serena falling in on Lily’s far side with her blade out, and behind us the Warden came through the trees we’d just used, through them, timber bursting off its shoulders like spray.

I ran the map in my head. Or, well, I tried to.

[Come on, come on... Deadfall! There’s a deadfall east of here, I wrote it for the chase scene, Chapter forty-one!]

"EAST! THE DEADFALL! THROUGH THE GAPS!"

It was there. It was actually there, a hillside of collapsed timber, and we went through it like rats while the Warden hit it flat and had to climb. I heard it back there tearing the hill apart log by log, and that bought us thirty seconds, thirty beautiful seconds, and I spent them navigating.

[Okay, uhhhhhhh, past the deadfall there’s the hill. The long hill, it slopes down to the ranger station, we can—]

We cleared the deadfall at a sprint and the hill wasn’t there.

[FUCK.]

It was flat ground. A meadow. An open, exposed, running-room-for-something-with-a-forty-foot-stride flat, and I remembered, mid-step, with total clarity, one of my readers’ comments:

"Ehhh, the hill kinda killed the pacing. I think you should cut it."

[I CUT THE HILL. I LISTENED. THE HILL SLOWED THE CHASE SCENE SO I CUT THE HILL. READER, I’M GONNA FUCKING-]

"Where!" Serena barked.

"IT’S A MEADOW NOW! RUN FASTER!"

I looked back.

You’re not supposed to look back. Every coach in every story I’ve ever written says don’t look back, and I looked back. I saw the Warden standing planted in the meadow, not chasing anymore. Its antlered head lowered. The green points of its eyes fixed past me, past Serena, onto the caller that woke it up, and every plate of moss on its body pulled tight like a drawn bow.

Oh. Magic.

Right, magic was a thing in this world, and monsters could use it.

I jumped. I jumped before I even knew what I was doing.

... Not a good idea, actually.