Chapter 1: The Prophecy in Blood
The air in the clearing tasted of wet stone and old copper.
Corveth stayed absolutely still, a darker knot of shadow against the gnarled oak roots. The seers’ white robes were sickly and luminous in the moonlight. They stood around the obsidian altar, its surface still steaming faintly from the offering. It was just a dove this time. Its small, dark blood traced the etched channels in the stone, dripping onto the silver moss below. That meant they were probing. Asking for guidance. And that, he’d learned long ago, was always worse than the ceremonies with the bulls or the stags.
“Well?” The King’s voice echoed, too loud for the sacred space, a blunt tool wielded by a blunt man. He stood back by the treeline, a bulky silhouette flanked by armored guards whose mail jingled with every nervous breath. The forest recoiled from the sound.
A seer, ancient and bent like a wind-blasted hawthorn, lifted his head. “The signs are unchanged, Majesty. The rot spreads from the river to the root-cellars. The blight on the wheat is not of insect or weather. It is a weeping.” His voice was the scrape of bark on stone. “The equilibrium is broken. The pact demands redress.”
The younger seer, a woman with eyes like polished slate, finished the thought, her tone flat and final. “Princess Aveline must be given to the forest by dawn. The old debt, the one your line has deferred for generations, is called due. Her life for the land’s.”
Silence crashed down, heavier than the king’s rage. Corveth’s grey eyes narrowed. Idiots. They spoke of pacts and debts as if they were lines in a ledger, as if the Gloamwood was a merchant collecting a fee. It wasn’t. It was a living, breathing entity, and it was hungry. And hurt.
The King sputtered. “She is my only heir!”
“And without this, you will have no kingdom for her to inherit,” the old seer replied, not unkindly. It was just truth. “The forest accepts the blood of the line, or it will take the blood of all. The prophecy is clear.”
Prophecy. Corveth’s lip curled. Humans loved that word. It gave their fear a shape, made their barbarism sound like fate. He watched the king deflate, the anger leaching out of him, replaced by the pallid complexion of a man signing a death warrant. There was a murmured command, too low for normal ears. But Corveth’s weren’t normal. He caught the words “…the east tower… at first light.”
They filed out, the seers with their empty bowls, the king with his new burden, the guards with their ringing, invasive metal. The clearing was left to the moonlight and the slow seep of dove’s blood into moss. The hum in the air changed, deepening from a spiritual thrum to a visceral ache. He rose from the ferns, silent as mist.
He stepped to the altar, placed a palm on the obsidian. It was still warm. A faint, anguished tremor ran up through the soles of his feet, a pulse of pure distress from the mycelial networks beneath the soil. Images flashed, unbidden, in his mind: slick black tendrils choking the clean water of the river’s deep springs, the sweet life of the oak turning sour and spongy at the core.
This wasn’t just a royal debt. This was an infection. Sacrificing one young woman might soothe the symptom, but the deep wound was elsewhere. But the forest… the forest was not subtle. It felt the rupture most keenly where the royal line’s connection to it, their supposed stewardship, had been most callously neglected. In the person of the princess.
He had to see her. To understand what made her the focus point of so much silent screaming from the trees.
Corveth moved. He didn’t run so much as flow, his long legs eating the distance, weaving between the colossal trunks. His shadow seemed to cling to him, a second skin. The moonlight caught the faint, twisting patterns along his forearms—not tattoos, but something that lived just beneath the skin, shifting like branches in a slow wind. The Gloamwood opened paths for him, roots shifting aside, thorny thickets rustling open. It was a part of him, and tonight, it was frantic.
He reached the crumbling outer wall of the castle grounds an hour later. It was laughably simple. He slipped past dozing sentries, their torchlight casting feeble pools that he avoided without thought. The east tower was a lonely finger of pale stone, jutting above the lower roofs. A single, narrow window glowed near its top.
And then, he heard it. A voice.Not speaking. Singing.
It was a lullaby, thin and clear on the night air. The melody was simple, old, but the voice… It held no tears, no tremble of fear. It was steady, almost contemplative. It floated down like a feather, and for a moment, the roiling distress in the ground beneath him stilled, listening.
He scaled the tower, fingers finding purchase where no human hand could, the stone cold and rough. He rose to the level of the window and hung there, a creature of deep wood now clinging to hewn rock.
She sat on a narrow bed, her back against the wall, knees drawn up. Princess Aveline. Not a child, but not yet worn down by court life. Perhaps eighteen. Her hair was the colour of darkened honey, unbound and tangled. She wore a simple shift, not royal silks. She finished the lullaby, her last note fading into the quiet of the small, round room. The room was barren. No books, no finery. Just a bed, a chamber pot, and a bucket of water. They’d already begun to prepare her. To strip her of her humanity.
She turned her head, not to the window, but to the door, her profile sharp against the single candle’s guttering flame. “I know you’re out there,” she said, her voice conversational. “You breathe louder than you think.”
Corveth froze. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to the guard posted outside her door.
A gruff, embarrassed cough came from beyond the heavy wood. “Just doing my duty, milady.”
“Your duty is to keep me in until they lead me out to die.” She stated it flatly. “Do you have children, Jareth?”
A pause. “…Aye. A boy.”
“Would you slit his throat if your king told you it would make the harvest better?”
The silence was thick. The guard didn’t answer.
Aveline nodded to herself, as if confirming something. She finally looked toward the window. Her eyes were not the seers’ vacant slate, nor her father’s fiery bluster. They were a quiet, resilient green, like moss on the north side of an ancient stone. They looked, and for a heartbeat, Corveth was certain they saw the shape of him in the dark. Not with fear, but with a piercing, exhausted curiosity.
“The forest must be angry indeed,” she whispered, not to the guard, but to the night. To the shape at her window. “To want something like me.”
Then she blew out the candle.
Darkness swallowed the tower room. Below, Corveth felt the rootlets in the castle’s foundation give another violent, painful shudder. The final few hours until dawn stretched before him, taut as a bowstring. He dropped soundlessly to the dew-soaked grass, his mind racing, the ghost of her lullaby and the weight of her quiet green eyes clinging to him. The plan was simple.Observe. Understand. Let the humans clean their own mess.
But the forest’s pain was a constant thrum in his bones. And her voice… her voice had been the first thing in a century that had made that thrum ease, if only for a second.
He melted back into the treeline, storm-grey eyes fixed on the dark window. Dawn was coming. And he was no longer just a witness.