Chapter 71: Plan

I didn’t tell them about the Ouroboros.

My pulse was still hammering from a death none of them remembered me dying, and the words sat heavy at the back of my throat, aching to get out. Grab Arthur. Tell him what was waiting in the branches with strings made of shadow and a taste for other people’s minds. It would have been so easy.

I swallowed it instead.

Some instinct, quiet but absolute, told me that knowledge like this only worked if it stayed mine. A blade nobody else knew I was carrying couldn’t be knocked out of my hand before I got the chance to use it.

"We should walk through the forest," I said, and let Arthur think it was good sense that stopped me short of the tree this time, not memory.

Nobody argued. Nobody ever had.

On the way down the hill, I ran through everything I actually knew, turning each piece over like a coin, testing its edges. Eighty Calfeeths, still gorging themselves on a dead serpent.

Somewhere above them, patient and unbothered, Marionettist Choez, strings coiled and waiting. I knew exactly which Calfeeth would break first, exactly which direction it would come from. I knew exactly how many seconds Sera’s horn bought us before the herd stopped screaming and started thinking again.

What I didn’t know was whether any of it mattered, or whether this fight was rigged to end the same way no matter how clever I thought I was being. Whether the loop had a script it intended to keep, regardless of how many pieces I rearranged on the board.

Only one way to find out.

"Change of plan," I said at the treeline. "Sera, blow it the second we’re through, don’t wait. Arthur, wide containment, not tight, we don’t want them clustered on top of us. Theodore, keep moving, don’t root yourself."

"You got a read on this place already?" Theodore asked, one eyebrow raised.

"Gut feeling."

Mary’s eyes lingered on me a beat too long, searching for the crack in that lie, sharp and assessing in a way that made me want to look anywhere else. But she let it go, and I made myself hold still long enough that the silence didn’t look suspicious.

We stepped through Moon’s Door. The fog cleared on the same clearing, the same corpse, the same eighty pairs of void-black eyes turning toward us as one, and for a heartbeat the whole scene held its breath.

"Now, Sera!"

Light tore through the clearing before the Calfeeths had finished registering us, and this time none of them got a clean look at our formation before the screaming started. Arthur’s vines went wide instead of tight, herding instead of crushing, a full third of the horde stumbling into a disoriented tangle.

Theodore kept moving exactly like I’d told him, laughing every time a fist connected, never staying still long enough to become a target. It was cleaner. Faster. Fewer of them getting close enough to actually threaten anyone.

I didn’t stay to watch it finish.

I broke off from the fight and cut straight for the base of the tree Choez was perched in, scanning past broken coral and Calfeeth corpses, dagger already drawn, Thunder Sunlight blazing in my other hand. Heat rolled up my arm in waves that made my vision swim at the edges before I’d even started climbing.

The trunk was slick with rot, bark peeling in wet black strips under my boots. I didn’t have the luxury of finding good handholds. I grabbed whatever was there and hauled myself up, muscles screaming, half my attention on the climb and half on the branch above, watching for the first twitch that would tell me Choez had decided I was worth its attention. Below, faintly, I could still hear Theodore’s laughter cutting through the chaos, and it steadied me more than it probably should have.

It hadn’t moved yet. That was the problem.

If it dropped on me mid-climb, I’d have nothing to brace against, no ground to plant my feet on, nothing but empty air and eighty feet of fall waiting below, a straight drop into the same rotten mud that had already tried to swallow me once tonight. I needed to close the distance before it decided I was close enough to bother with.

"Edmund, what are you doing?!" Sera’s voice, distant, sharp with panic.

I didn’t answer. Answering cost time I didn’t have.

Ten feet from the branch, Choez finally moved, head tilting with that same lazy curiosity, and the first string unspooled from its horns, thin and dark, cutting through the air toward my chest with a speed that told me it had been holding back until now, testing how close I’d let myself get.

I let go of the trunk.

It was the only option that made sense in the half second I had to decide. Falling put me below the string’s arc, out of its reach for one crucial moment, and I hit the lower branch hard, boots skidding on rotten bark, arms pinwheeling for balance I didn’t fully have. Pain lanced up through both ankles, sharp enough to steal my breath for a second. I didn’t let it slow me.

I pushed off again immediately, throwing myself upward this time instead of climbing, blade leading, aiming for the gap between its wings where I guessed the strings actually originated. My whole body screamed at me to slow down, to think this through, and I ignored every bit of it.

Choez’s head snapped toward me, too late to dodge, too fast to fully block. Thunder Sunlight’s edge caught it across one wing, fire biting deep into feather and bone alike, and it shrieked, a raw, grating sound that had nothing avian left in it, more like something being unmade from the inside out.

I didn’t get a clean follow-up.

The recoil sent me tumbling past the branch entirely, gravity yanking me sideways before I’d fully processed the hit, and I grabbed for anything solid, fingers closing around a smaller limb hard enough to nearly dislocate my shoulder.

My whole body swung, momentum threatening to tear my grip loose, and for one gut-lurching second I was staring straight down at the fighting below, close enough to see Mary’s spears cutting silver light through the smoke, close enough to watch Theodore’s fist connect with something that sent it flying clean off its feet.

I held on, knuckles white, shoulder screaming, the fall below suddenly feeling a lot more real than it had a few seconds ago.

Above me, wounded and furious, Choez’s strings lashed out again, faster this time, no longer lazy, no longer curious, snapping through the air like something that had finally decided I was worth killing properly.

This time I guess, it really wanted me dead.