Chapter 21: Concern
The goat-herder boy’s name was Leif. He was all sharp elbows and knees, shivering by their makeshift campfire as Runa draped a woolen blanket over his shoulders. The story spilled out of him in choked bursts.
His family’s hut was on the high eastern edge of the pass, where the trees thinned into shale and scraggly grass. The Gloom had come up the mountain three weeks prior, a slow-rolling mist that smelled of wet stone and sour milk. First, the goats went silent, then frantic, then dead in their pen, eyes clouded with that same swirling darkness. Then it started whispering.
“It knew things,” Leif mumbled, staring into the flames. “Dad’s secret pride that his own father was a lowland tax collector. Mom’s shame over a stillborn sister she never told anyone she still mourned. It would recite them at night, just outside the door, in our own voices.” He swallowed hard. “It didn’t want to kill us. It wanted to… to curdle us. To make us hate each other with the truth.”
“What happened?” Caius asked, his voice deliberately soft. He was sharpening his knife, the rhythmic shink-shink a grounding sound.
“Dad cracked. Said if it wanted truth, he’d give it truth. He walked out into the mist calling it a coward. We heard him… arguing. With himself. Then screaming. Then nothing.” Leif’s knuckles were white where he gripped the blanket. “Mom took my little sister and ran down the south trail. I… I stayed. Hid in a root cellar. I heard it wearing Dad two days later. His body came back to the hut, called for me by my baby name. Told me to open the door.”
Astrid sat on a damp log, cleaning her seax with a rag. “You didn’t.”
“No,” Leif whispered. “But I wanted to. That’s the worst of it. Part of me wanted to, just to see him again. The Gloom… it feels that want. It lives there.”
The admission hung in the firelight. It was the same poison it had used on Garrick, on them. The crack of a loved one’s voice, the terrible, yearning pull toward a familiar ghost.
For weeks, they didn’t leave the Blackwood.
The kings would be expecting a quick return, a report of victory or defeat. Caius, through a fraught conversation with a taciturn Garrick sent back as a messenger, argued for time. The Gloom wasn’t a beast in a lair; it was the lair itself. To leave was to let it fester, to let its understanding of them grow stale. They had to become a constant, united irritant. A thumb pressed into a wound.
They moved camp every few days, a frustrating game of hide-and-seek with an opponent that could see through the trees and smell their regrets. Sleep was taken in shifts. Conversations were had in careful, deliberate code. They learned to recognize the signs: a sudden, biting cold spot in the air, the way shadows would cling just a moment too long to a person’s shape, the faint taste of metal on the tongue.
And through it all, Astrid and Caius stuck together like burrs on wool.
It wasn’t performative. It was survival. They fell into a wordless rhythm. He watched her back during watches, his eyes catching the subtle shift in foliage she might miss. She intercepted the Gloom’s psychic probes aimed at him, her own fierce, straightforward mind a briar patch for its subtle manipulations. When it whispered to Caius that Astrid saw his cleverness as a weak man’s weapon, she’d simply reach over, grip his forearm hard enough to leave bruises, and say, “Don’t buy into that crap. Your brain is the only reason we’re not already wearing our own corpses.”
When it hissed to Astrid that Caius found her roughness unfeminine, a grating noise in his refined world, he’d laugh, a real, surprised bark of sound. “Unfeminine? You held a burning rag in your hands and challenged a demon. My dear, you’ve redefined the entire concept. I’m in awe.”
The forced marriage was a distant memory, a dry legal document buried under layers of shared terror and pragmatic reliance. They talked at night, voices low, about more than tactics. He told her about the suffocating pressure of Eldorian etiquette, the hidden thrill he got from subverting it. She confessed her fear that ruling would mean becoming like her father—all blunt force, losing the nuance of individual people.
One evening, after a day spent navigating a bog that tried to suck the boots from their feet, they found a relatively dry cave. The others took first watch outside. Inside, the world shrunk to the circle of light from a single candle, the smell of damp stone and their own sweat.
Exhaustion was a physical weight. There was no ceremony to it. They simply helped each other remove wet gear, a practical intimacy. Her fingers fumbled with the clasp of his waterlogged cloak. His hands worked the stiff knots from the leather ties on her bracers. The silence wasn’t awkward; it was full of the unspoken language of two people too tired for pretense.
He winced as he peeled a sodden tunic from a raw patch on his shoulder where his pack had rubbed.
“Let me see that,” she said, her voice raspy.
He turned. In the candlelight, she inspected the abrasion, her calloused fingers surprisingly gentle. She rummaged in her kit for a small pot of salve, the one her mother had made from pine resin and honey. She smeared it on the wound, the action methodical, unsentimental.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
She just grunted, wiping her fingers on her trousers. Then she sat back against the cave wall, closing her eyes. He slid down beside her, their shoulders touching for warmth. The contact was electric and ordinary at the same time.
After a long moment, his voice, barely a whisper. “It’s not wrong, you know. The Gloom. I do wonder if you’ll ever see me as… enough. For this.” He gestured vaguely at the cave, the Blackwood, the kingdom waiting beyond.
She didn’t open her eyes. “It wonders if I’ll see you as a strong arm. You’re not. You’re a strong mind. A strong will. My father’s arm could split a tree. His will sometimes splinters like kindling.” She turned her head, her green eyes catching the candle flame. “I need the latter more.”
He looked at her, really looked. The dirt smudged on her cheekbone, the fraying end of her braid, the absolute certainty in her tired face. The amusement was gone from his expression, replaced by something raw and unguarded.
They didn’t kiss. Not then. The moment was too fragile, too important for that. He simply leaned his head against the stone, his temple resting against her hair. She didn’t pull away.
Later, in the deep watch of the night when the others slept, it was different. The fear and the cold and the sheer, mad proximity of living on a knife’s edge for days condensed into a sharp, desperate need. It was less about passion and more about affirmation. A frantic, silent communication in the dark.
Afterwards, sweat cooling on their skin in the chill air, she would lie awake, listening to the eerie silence of the wood. His head would be on her chest, his dark curls soft under her palm. The rhythm of his breathing was the most honest sound in the world.
She’d stroke his hair, her fingers tracing the shape of his skull, and whisper it into the darkness, a soft counter-charm against the whispering Gloom. “I love you.”
The first time she said it, his breath hitched. He didn’t say it back. He just pressed closer, his arm tightening around her waist, his face buried against her. That was answer enough.
By day, they hunted the Gloom. They used Leif’s knowledge of the high paths. They found the heart of it, or a heart—a sunken, moss-choked circle of standing stones in a high clearing. The air there was thick and syrupy, and the shadows moved on their own. They didn’t attack it. They observed. Elara made sketches, muttering about ley lines and spiritual silt.
They realized the Gloom was territorial. It couldn’t easily leave the Blackwood. Its power was tied to the ancient grief in the stones, the collective, bottled-up ‘Want’ of the forgotten dead. It could send its influence out, as it had to the castle, but its true form was anchored here.
“So we don’t kill it,” Caius concluded one afternoon, his face smudged with dirt. “We evict it. We satisfy the Want.”
“How in the frozen hells do we satisfy a centuries-old hunger?” Kael asked, sharpening a dagger.
Astrid watched Leif, who was staring at the standing stones with a hollow look. “We give it what it’s starving for,” she said slowly, the idea forming like a crack in ice. “It feeds on fractured things. On unresolved grief. On secrets that fester.”
Caius followed her gaze to the boy. “So we… resolve something?”
They started small. That night, by the fire, Garrick cleared his throat. He looked at Leif. “My sister. The ice. I was angry she called me a coward. But I was a coward. I was afraid of the fight. I loved her, and I let pride keep me from going after her.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “It was my fault.”
The words, spoken aloud in the open, seemed to hang in the air. The oppressive weight around their camp lessened, just a fraction. A barely perceptible easing, like the first subtle shift before a storm breaks.
The Gloom’s response was immediate and vicious. A wind ripped through the clearing, scattering the fire embers. A chorus of stolen voices screamed from the trees, a cacophony of rage and pain. It didn’t like that. It didn’t want the poison drawn out. It wanted the wound kept open.
But they’d found a thread.
Weeks bled together, a cycle of wary travel, tense watches, and these deliberate, painful acts of emotional surgery. Runa confessed a jealousy she’d harbored for a rival hunter. Kael admitted he’d once taken credit for a kill that wasn’t his.
Each confession was a tug on the thread. Each one made the Gloom thrash, the shadows convulsing, the air growing colder. It was working, but it was also making the entity desperate, less calculated, more wild.
The end began on a morning choked with fog so thick they could barely see each other. They were near the standing stones again, ready to try something bigger. Leif had agreed to speak to the memory of his father.
But as they entered the stone circle, they found they were not alone.
In the center, waiting for them, stood a figure.
Not a corrupted corpse. A man. Alive, breathing, dressed in the rich, if now travel-stained, robes of an Eldorian courtier. He was older, with a neatly trimmed beard and intelligent, weary eyes.
He held up empty hands. “Prince Caius. Princess Astrid. My name is Alistair. I was sent by your father, King Aldric, two days after you departed. I have been… detained. The Gloom found the secret I have kept for twenty-four years.” He looked directly at Caius, his expression a mixture of anguish and profound relief.
“It is a secret about your mother. And about you. And I believe it is the final piece this entity clutches to its core.” He took a shaky breath. “It is the reason the veil here is so thin. It is a Want that was born in a palace, and festered here.”
The fog clung to Alistair’s robes like grasping fingers. No one moved. The standing stones loomed around them, dark teeth in the milky white.
“Explain. Fast,” Astrid said, her seax half-drawn. Her eyes cut to the tree line, expecting the Gloom’s puppets to swarm.
Caius just stared. “Alistair? You were my mother’s librarian. You vanished after she died.”
“I did not vanish. I was sent away.” Alistair’s composure was a thin veneer. His hands trembled. “The official story was a riding accident. The truth… the truth was a despair so profound it cracked the world a little. Here, of all places.”
Kael and Runa had bows nocked, covering the perimeter. Garrick’s sword was a steady line pointed at the ground, ready. Elara clutched her journal to her chest, a scholar witnessing a primary source shatter.
“Get to the part that matters to the evil mist,” Kael growled, not turning his head.
“Queen Elara,” Alistair said, and the shared glance with the cartographer was brief and eerie. “Not you, my dear. Her. She was… luminous. And utterly trapped. The marriage to Aldric was political, as all are. But her heart belonged to a Nordane shield-maiden who had served as her bodyguard during a youth summit.”
The air left Astrid’s lungs. Caius went very still.
“It was not a flirtation. It was a deep, quiet love. They had a plan to run. Here. The Blackwood was neutral ground, a place of passage.” Alistair’s voice broke. “The shield-maiden’s name was Val. She waited at these stones. Your mother never came. Aldric had discovered the letters. He confined her. He was not cruel, but he was proud. He offered silence, in exchange for her compliance.”
Caius’s face was pale marble. “She died.”
“She walked out onto the balcony of the highest tower and simply stepped off,” Alistair whispered. “But not just from grief. From a choice. She chose to deny everyone what they wanted. Her lover, her husband, the kingdom. She chose nothingness over a life of lies.” He looked at the swirling mist. “That choice, that massive, negative Want… it echoed. It found this thin place. It fed something. Or became something.”
A low moan filtered through the trees, not from one direction, but from all around them. The stones themselves seemed to hum.
“It’s her?” Caius’s question was stripped raw.
“No. Not her. It’s the ghost of her choice. The Gloom is the child of her refusal, feeding on every other fractured vow it finds.” Alistair finally looked at Caius, eyes pleading. “It is drawn to you because you are her son, living the same dilemma. It is drawn to your union because it mirrors her impossible one. It wants to see you break the same way. To prove its origin story.”
The revelation was a physical blow. Astrid saw Caius’s mind working, reconfiguring his entire history around this hidden, rotting core. His ‘amused expression’ was gone, annihilated.
“So how do we kill my mother’s bad decision?” he asked, his voice dangerously flat.
Before Alistair could answer, the mist coalesced.
It didn’t form corpses this time. It formed shades, silhouettes of light and murk. Two figures, holding hands before the tallest stone. The details were blurred, but the postures were clear—hope, anticipation. The image of Val waiting.
Then a third shade, alone on the other side of the circle, pulling at its own hair, a silent scream of agony. Queen Elara.
The Gloom poured itself into these forms, giving them volume. The air grew dense and hard to breathe, saturated with a century of stifled grief.
“CHOOSE.”
The word wasn’t spoken. It was implanted, a hot needle in the brain. The shade of Queen Elara turned its featureless head toward Caius.
“YOU HAVE HER BLOOD. YOU KNOW THE PRISON. BREAK THE VOW. SET ME FREE.”
The shade of Val extended a hand toward Astrid, a mocking mirror of their alliance. “THE NORTHERN BOND IS TRUE. THE POLITICAL ONE IS CHAINS. COME AWAY. THE MOUNTAINS ARE FREE.”
It was offering their own deepest, most secret thoughts back to them, weaponized. It was the tavern fantasy of running away, dressed up in tragic finery. A perfect trap.
Caius was shaking. Not from fear, but from a rage so pure it vibrated in his teeth. He looked from the shade of his mother to the shade of Val, then to Astrid. His breath came in short, sharp clouds in the cold.
“No,” he said.
The sound was quiet, but it cut through the psychic pressure.
“My mother’s choice was hers. It was terrible. It broke everything.” He took a step forward, putting himself between the shades and Astrid. “But it wasn’t about choosing a person. It was about refusing to choose. It was surrender.”
He turned his head, his light blue eyes finding Astrid’s. They were clear now, certain. “I choose the alliance. I choose the political chains. I choose the woman who kicks me under the table during councils and holds a knife to a demon’s throat.”
He reached back, his hand finding hers. His grip was crushing. “I choose the complicated, infuriating, real thing in front of me. Not a ghost of a simpler path.”
The shades wavered. The Gloom’s frustration was a sudden spike in the air, a smell of ozone and rot.
Astrid squeezed his hand. She addressed the shade of Val, her voice rough as granite. “I’m not your lover. And he’s not his mother.” She raised her seax, pointing the tip at the heart of the shimmering forms. “We’re the people who clean up the mess you left behind. And we’re done talking.”
The shades dissolved into a whirlwind of leaves, dirt, and screaming mist. The Gloom, its foundational story rejected, scrapped subtlety. It went for annihilation.
The ground erupted. Dozens of skeletal hands, some clad in rotted Eldorian mail, others in Nordane fur, clawed up from the soil. They were the larder—every victim it had ever consumed, reanimated as puppets of bone and hatred. They hauled themselves into the clearing, a clicking, jerking tide.
“Well,” Kael said, swinging his axe in a wide arc. “Guess we got its attention.”
The fight was a nightmare of disjointed movement and cold, grabbing fingers. Astrid fought back-to-back with Caius, her seax hacking through radius and ulna, his sword work efficient and desperate. He wasn’t a warrior, but he was a quick study, and he fought with the focused fury of a man defending a truth he’d just carved out for himself.
Garrick and Runa formed a lethal duo, hewing a path toward Leif and Elara. Alistair crouched behind a stone, useless but not running.
A skeleton in a tattered scout’s uniform latched onto Astrid’s leg. She stomped down, shattering its clavicle. Another grabbed her braid, yanking her head back. Caius pivoted and drove his sword through its skull. The motes of darkness spilled out like ink from a broken jar.
“Thanks,” she grunted.
“Anytime.”
They were holding, but they were being overwhelmed. The things just kept coming, a reservoir of stolen deaths. The Gloom’s presence was a shrieking static in their minds, flooding them with images of failure, of betrayal, of Caius turning away, of Astrid laughing at his weakness.
It was trying to rewrite the story they’d just written.
Astrid felt a cold dread. They could fight until their arms fell off and it wouldn’t be enough. They had to target the source. The stones. The anchor.
“The center!” she yelled, ducking a swipe of bone claws. “It’s in the stones!”
Caius understood instantly. “Garrick! Kael! Cover us!”
They fought their way toward the central plinth, a slow, brutal slog. Every step cost them in nicks and bruises and sapping cold. Leif, screaming a war cry that was too high for his boy’s voice, swung a stick at a skeleton, keeping it from Elara.
They reached the plinth. It was carved with runes so old even Elara didn’t know them. In its center was a depression, a bowl filled with stagnant black water.
The Gloom’s voice focused here, a deafening roar inside their skulls. “YOU CANNOT CLEANSE ME. I AM THE STAINS BETWEEN THE STONES.”
Astrid looked at the black water. The reflected mist swirled with faces—Queen Elara, Val, Leif’s father, the guardsman, countless others. A soup of unresolved Want.
Caius was breathing hard, his sword arm trembling. “It needs an answer. My mother’s choice. It needs a different ending.”
“We gave it one,” Astrid said, wiping blood from her lip. “It didn’t like it.”
“Then we make it physical.” His eyes locked on the depression. “It’s an anchor. We need a new one. Something… definite.”
He sheathed his sword. He looked at her, and in his face she saw the reckless, court-subverting boy he’d told her about. “You got any of that salve left?”
Baffled, she nodded, patting her belt pouch.
“Give it here.”
She handed him the small pot. He scooped out a generous glob of the pine-and-honey resin. Then, before she could stop him, he drew his knife across his own palm. The cut was deep, deliberate. Blood welled, shocking and red against his pale skin.
“Caius, what the hell—”
He didn’t answer. He clenched his fist over the stone depression, letting his blood drip and mingle with the stagnant black water. The Gloom’s shriek reached a new, almost painful frequency.
“My blood,” he said through gritted teeth. “From her. A choice she made.” He held out his bleeding hand to Astrid. “Your turn.”
Understanding crashed into her. Not a ghost. Not a negative. A new vow. A bloody, messy, real one. She took his knife and sliced her own palm, hissing at the sting. She joined her fist to his, their blood mixing as it fell.
“Our choice,” she said, loud enough for the entity to hear. “Our vow. Not to run. Not to die. To stand here, together, and tell you to get the fuck out of our forest.”
They pressed their clasped, bleeding hands into the stone depression, into the cold water and the echoes of despair.
The effect was not a bright light or a blast. It was a sudden, profound silence. The skeletons in the clearing froze, then crumbled into inert bone. The shrieking in their minds ceased, replaced by a ringing quiet.
The mist began to thin, not retreating, but dissipating. Actual sunlight, weak and golden, broke through the canopy for the first time in weeks. It fell on their joined hands on the stone.
The black water in the depression was now a diluted pink. The reflected faces were gone.
A single, final whisper brushed their minds, not angry, but exhausted, dissolving like sugar in hot tea.
“…satisfied…”
Then it was gone.
The silence that followed was the simple, empty silence of a deep wood. No malice. No watching presence. Just the drip of water from leaves and their own ragged breathing.
Caius swayed. Astrid caught him, her own hand slick with their shared blood. He leaned against her, his face buried in her shoulder.
“Did we just… marry a haunted forest?” he mumbled into her wool tunic.
A laugh, ragged and real, burst from her. “I think we just gave it a better story.”
Around them, their party gathered, battered and wide-eyed. Leif was crying silently. Alistair stared at the sunlit stones with an expression of exhausted peace.
The Gloom was gone. Not slain, but resolved. Their work was done.
But as the light grew, it illuminated something else on the far side of the clearing. Something the mist had hidden.
A path, clear and well-trodden, led out of the stone circle and up the mountain. And on that path, leading into the now-benign woods, were fresh footprints.
Not boots. Delicate, practical shoes.
Beside them, smaller ones.
Elara the cartographer knelt, her fingers hovering over the impressions in the soft earth. She looked back at Astrid and Caius, her face pale.
“The mother and the little sister,” she said quietly. “They didn’t run south. They came up here. Weeks ago.”
Garrick’s head snapped up, his haunted eyes scanning the peaceful, sun-dappled trees. The victory curdled in Astrid’s stomach.
The Gloom was satisfied. But the Blackwood still held its secrets. And somewhere in its now-quiet depths, two more souls were waiting to be found.