Chapter 84: The Forest Clearing

POV: Georgia

I finally go looking for the place I’ve only ever seen from my window.

I’ve traded the brace for a cane this week, which the therapist called "a big step, Georgia," her voice bright with forced encouragement, which mostly just means I fall differently now. I still can’t walk fast. I still can’t walk far. But I can walk, and today, for the first time since I got here, I decide to walk somewhere I’m not supposed to go.

It’s late afternoon, the light slanting long and gold across the quad, and most people are still at practice or in the dining hall. Nobody notices me cross the grass toward the tree line, cane tapping against the ground, my bad leg dragging a little with every other step. My breath comes shallow. Sweat beads at my hairline despite the cool air.

*Just a little further,* I tell myself, gripping the cane tighter. *Just to see it once.*

I’ve looked at this forest from my window more nights than I can count. I’ve seen shapes moving between the trees. I’ve seen a massive shadow break the treeline and golden eyes lock onto mine. I’ve watched dozens of figures walk toward a clearing in total silence on a night when the whole campus held its breath. I’ve never gone to look at what’s actually there in daylight, when nothing is happening, when it’s just trees and dirt and quiet.

Today I want to see the actual place, the one I’ve only ever watched from behind glass. I want to stand where those figures stood and know for certain it’s real, not something my exhausted, grieving brain built out of shadows and moonlight.

The edge of the forest is cooler than the quad, the air thick with the smell of pine and wet earth. Somewhere overhead, a bird calls twice, sharp and questioning, then falls silent. I follow the treeline for a while, looking for the break where I remember the figures gathering. It takes longer than I expect. My leg burns after only a few minutes, and I have to stop twice to lean on the cane and catch my breath.

"Come on," I mutter to myself, frustrated, my knuckles white around the cane’s handle. "You’ve walked farther than this before."

Then I see it. A gap between two old trees, wider than the rest, like something has worn a path there over years of use. I step through, ducking beneath a low branch that snags briefly at my sleeve.

The clearing opens up in front of me, and I stop walking completely. My pulse thuds once, hard, against my throat.

It’s not what I picture on the frantic nights I watched from my window. In daylight it looks almost peaceful. The trees form a rough circle around it, tall and close together, like they’ve grown that way on purpose. The ground is packed hard and bare in the middle, no grass at all, like too many feet have crossed it too many times for anything to grow.

At the center sits a stone.

It’s flat and wide, half-buried in the earth, worn smooth on its edges the way old church steps get worn from a hundred years of footsteps. It doesn’t look natural. It looks placed, set there deliberately, the center of something.

I limp closer, cane sinking slightly into the soft ground at the clearing’s edge. When I reach the stone, I crouch down as best I can with my bad leg, one hand braced on the surface to keep my balance. My leg screams in protest, a hot pulse of pain shooting from knee to hip, and I bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.

That’s when I see the marks.

They’re carved deep into the stone, four parallel grooves, each one as long as my forearm. My fingers hover just above them, not quite touching yet. They don’t look like tool marks. They’re not straight enough, not even enough. They curve slightly, the way a hand curves when it drags across something. Claw marks. I don’t know how I know that so certainly, but I do. Something with claws did this, more than once, over what must have been years, because some grooves are worn soft with age and others look almost fresh.

I run my fingers along one of the deeper grooves. It’s cold under my hand, colder than the air around it should make it. A shiver climbs my spine, quick and involuntary, and I snatch my hand back before forcing myself to touch it again.

"What are you," I whisper, low and wondering, my fingertips tracing the curve of the mark, "and what did you do here."

The whole space feels wrong in a way I can’t explain. Not wrong like dangerous. Wrong like important. Like a church, or a courtroom, or a grave. Every tree around me seems to be standing at attention, and the quiet isn’t empty, it’s the kind of quiet that comes after something, or before it. My skin prickles. The fine hairs on my arms rise, one by one, like something is drawing static from the air itself.

I shouldn’t be here. I know it the way you know you shouldn’t be reading someone else’s diary, a certainty that has nothing to do with anyone telling you the rule and everything to do with feeling it in your body. This place wasn’t built for people like me. I don’t know how I know that either. I just do.

I should turn around and go back to the dorms and pretend I never found this. That would be the smart thing.

I don’t move.

I stay crouched by the stone, my fingers still resting in the groove of one of the claw marks, and I try to imagine what could have made them. An animal, maybe, something big enough that its claws leave marks a person could rest a whole hand inside. But animals don’t come here again and again to scratch the same stone in the same circle of trees. Animals don’t leave a place that feels like a courtroom.

*Say something,* I think, staring at the stone like it might answer. *Tell me what you are.*

Behind me, a twig snaps.

The sound cracks through the clearing like a gunshot. My whole body goes rigid, my hand freezing against the cold stone.

I turn, slow, my cane scraping against the dirt, the sound obscenely loud in the stillness.

At the edge of the clearing, right where the trees break to let in the last of the daylight, a wolf stands watching me.

It’s massive. Bigger than any wolf I’ve ever seen in a photograph or a documentary, its shoulders as high as my chest, its fur so dark it’s almost black in the shadow of the trees. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t growl. It simply stands there at the treeline, head tilted slightly to one side, watching me with an intensity that doesn’t feel like an animal watching prey.

*Don’t move,* some distant, rational voice in my head instructs, flat and clipped with panic. *Don’t run. Don’t breathe.*

I should be terrified. Some small, sensible part of my brain is screaming that I should be terrified, that I’m alone in the woods on a bad leg with a wild animal twenty feet away. My heart pounds against my ribs, fast and uneven, loud enough that I imagine the wolf can hear it too.

But I’m not. Not the way I should be.

Its eyes are gold, deep and bright even in the fading light, and there’s something in them that feels achingly, impossibly familiar. Something I can’t name and can’t look away from. Something that makes the air catch in my throat, not from fear, but from a recognition I don’t understand and can’t explain.

*I know you,* I think, the thought rising unbidden, strange and certain.

I stay frozen by the stone, and the wolf stays frozen at the treeline, and neither of us looks away.