The next day dawned dull and gray, a hush over Westmere as though the town itself had taken to holding its breath. Brann lay in the narrow bed, his back half turned to the window, watching dust motes drift through a shaft of morning light. He had not slept, not truly, his body ached, but not from wounds alone. His thoughts circled endlessly like a wolf pacing a cage, always returning to the same place, Oakrin, impaled and carried into the forest like some bloodied trophy.

  The image played over and over again, each time sharper, more savage, each time the cold anger in his chest thickened and clung like oil to the walls of his heart. He had done nothing. He could do nothing, he was powerless, again. It sickened him.

  The door creaked open.

  Jorlan Kett stepped in, flanked by two guards in the pale green cloaks of Westmere’s watch. The light caught on the steel of their bracers and buckles, and for a moment they looked like a judgment come walking.

  Kett nodded once. “Brann, we need a word.”

  Brann sat up, slowly. The ache in his hand pulsed with his heartbeat. “Does talking ever help?” he muttered, sharper than intended.

  Kett ignored the barb. He motioned with his chin, and the two men at his back slipped out into the hall, the door shutting with a soft but final sound.

  “This is important,” Kett said and pulled a chair closer, then sat with his hands clasped between his knees. “We’ve watched the forest four days now. Nothing, no movement, no sign of corruption spreading, no unnatural growth was reported. The trees are quiet.”

  Brann blinked at him, confused. “So?”

  “The problem,” Kett said, voice low, “is that Riven claims he saw something, a creature and you… You were there.”

  Brann frowned. “Of course I was there. You found me there.”

  “Aye,” Kett said. “We did, unconscious, at the forest’s edge, but here’s the trouble, lad. We have one dead guard and one missing man. And only two witnesses.” His eyes narrowed. “One of them a child.”

  The words struck like a slap. Brann felt his jaw tighten.

  Kett went on, tone even. “No signs of a druid taking a Heart. No trace of battle on the other side. No spreading blight. And yet… a man is dead, another vanished. People have started to whisper, Brann. You’ve not walked the streets, but I have. There are questions.”

  Brann stared at him, and slowly, something dark began to unfold inside his chest. “You think I did it.”

  Kett didn’t answer.

  “You think I killed Oakrin and the guard?” Brann rose to his feet now, pain forgotten. “That I threatened Riven into lying for me? What kind of fool do you take me for? You found me unconscious, or is that part of some trick too?” He paced, shaking his head. “Or maybe you think Oakrin did it, and I’m covering for him. Is that it?”

  Still Kett said nothing he just sat, elbows on knees, watching Brann with a soldier’s calm.

  “Light burn me,” Brann growled. “This is madness.”

  “It’s caution,” Kett said finally, quietly. “We’ve seen what the forest can do. We’ve seen worse things than druids, worse even than creatures without names but we’ve also seen what desperate men are capable of.”

  Brann’s fists clenched at his sides, white-knuckled, fire burning in his eyes.

  Kett stood now, matching his height. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Brann. I like you. Oakrin liked you. Torvil trusts you. But people are frightened and we need to know what we’re facing, or we’re all blind in the dark.”

  Brann’s voice was tight. “And if I say I don’t know?”

  Kett’s expression didn’t change. “I have ways of getting what I need, I always get to the truth, one way or another.”

  Brann stood by the narrow window, half-veiled behind the curtain, one hand braced on the sill, fingers tapping nervously. The street below was unusually quiet, but not silent, people walked past in ones and twos, slow, deliberate steps, heads turning. Some only glanced toward the inn; others let their eyes linger a moment too long, as if expecting to see a ghost staring back. No words reached him, but he knew well enough how gossip worked. Stories needed little more than silence and a corpse to thrive.

  He turned back toward the center of the room. Kett hadn’t moved, Brann met his gaze and said “The creature was real,” his voice firm now, his doubt buried beneath the edge of a rising fire. “Unlike anything I’ve ever seen… If I have to, I’ll go into the forest myself. I’ll bring back proof.”

  Kett watched him in silence for a long moment, eyes like flint beneath the heavy furrow of his brow, then he nodded once, slowly.

  “This forest,” the old captain said, voice lower now, more to himself than to Brann, “was always too quiet. That’s why I ordered the bridge rigged. You remember the bell post? My doing.” His eyes lifted to meet Brann’s again. “Folk went out to cut trees and never came to harm but I never trusted that. No wolves. No birds. Even the wind feels… wrong.”

  Brann only nodded, and for a time, the two men shared the silence, the kind that carried weight and warning both.

  Then Kett stood.

  “I’ll check with Mara,” he said, already moving toward the door. “See if your armor is ready. If it is, we’ll organize a small team. We’ll breach the tree line, search for signs, a trail a body… anything.”

  Brann stepped forward, heart quickening. “If we find nothing, we keep looking.”

  But Kett turned, voice sharp now. “No, if we find nothing, we turn back.”

  Brann opened his mouth to protest, but the older man raised a hand, cutting him short.

  “I’m already one step away from calling in the army, boy,” Kett said, jaw tight. “And if they come, they won’t search, they won’t ask questions. They’ll torch the forest down to its roots and salt the ground for good measure, prevention, they’ll call it.”

  He stepped in close, close enough for Brann to see the silver threads streaking his short beard, the years carved around his eyes.

  “So I need you,” Kett said, quieter now, but with steel in every word, “to listen to me. No half-mad charges. No lone hero’s run. We do this together, or not at all.”

  Brann held his breath a moment, then nodded.

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  Kett gave him one final look, then turned and walked out without another word.

  After Kett had left, the room seemed too still, the kind of stillness that invited brooding thoughts, and Brann had more than enough of those to last a lifetime.

  He was still by the window when Lysa pushed the door open with her shoulder, a neatly folded bundle of clothes in her arms. She didn’t say a word at first, just set them down on the chair where Kett had been sitting and turned to leave.

  Brann caught her just before she vanished from the doorway. “Lysa. Thank you.”

  She paused a moment, gave a nod that might have meant you’re welcome, or get dressed already, and stepped back into the hallway.

  Once dressed, Brann left the room, closing the door behind him. The hallway felt tighter than usual, shadows clung to corners that ought to have been empty, and his bare feet echoed too loudly on the floorboards.

  Lysa stood at the far end, arms crossed, eyes watching him like a hawk watches a mouse that’s almost clever.

  “Father wants to speak with you,” she said, voice cool as morning frost ”put on your boots and let’s go”.

  Brann tensed. “I don’t have time. We’re heading to the forest…to find Oakrin, ”

  But she cut him off with a glare, and it was as if the very firelight caught in her pupils. He remembered then the defiance she’d shown the boys by the riverbank, remembered thinking that she had steel in her bones.

  “You would do better to come when Torvil calls,” she said, the words more command than request.

  The next thing he knew, he was following her through the back of the inn, boots crunching softly on gravel as they crossed to a heavy wooden door he’d seen once or twice while chopping wood. It had always seemed like just another storeroom. Now, it stood open.

  Lysa said nothing more. She gestured. Down.

  The steps were old, older than the inn, perhaps, and the air that met him was thick with earth and damp stone. Brann’s back tightened with unease as he descended, his hand brushing the wall for balance. The candlelight was thin, set in niches along the stone corridor, flickering like breath in a fever dream.

  He frowned, the inn was only twenty paces wide, but this tunnel stretched on, much farther…too far.

  Was it a trick of the light? Or of the mind?

  Brann moved forward, boots scuffing along old stone worn smooth with time. The corridor turned once, then dipped into another flight of stairs. He hesitated, but only for a breath, then descended.

  At the base, a thick iron door stood ajar, groaning faintly on its hinges.

  Brann pushed it open with care.

  What lay beyond was not what he had expected.

  A round chamber opened before him, carved directly from the bedrock, its ceiling arched high, like the dome of some forgotten temple. Candles lined the walls in iron sconces, and the flames flickered in patterns that made the shadows dance strangely on the stone. The scent of crushed herbs lingered in the air, bitter root, and something else, something older.

  In the center of the room, Torvil sat on a plain wooden chair, one leg crossed over the other, his hands resting lightly on his knees. His green eyes gleamed in the low light, sharper than Brann had ever seen them.

  He didn’t smile.

  “Close the door behind you,” the cook said.

  And Brann did.

  Then silence, except for the sound of his own heartbeat, thudding low and hard in his ears.

  Torvil’s gaze held Brann in place more surely than chains ever could. Those green eyes, always curious, always amused, now glowed faintly in the dim candlelight, not as flame glows, but as emeralds might beneath moonlight. There was no humor in them now.

  Brann stiffened, every muscle drawing taut, a pulse in the back of his neck beat like a drum. The air was different here, thicker somehow, and it pressed on him as if the stone walls themselves were holding their breath.

  Then, like a trick of the mind, like a dream rising unbidden, came the sense of something familiar unmistakable and cold.

  He had been in a similar situation before.

  Not in this room, not beneath this inn, but in the black tower. That cursed chamber of carved stone beneath the ruin, the one where he had met the man with red eyes and no name, the one who had closed the only exit behind him and smiled with no joy.

  Here the door was just behind him but what good did that do?

  If Torvil wanted to stop him, gods, the man could outrun him. Brann knew it now. There was more to the cook than stew and warm smiles.

  But Torvil did not move, he simply sat, watching.

  And then finally he moved, slowly, deliberately, he lowered his foot from its perch on his knee and placed it on the stone floor with a dull thump.

  It was the sound of decision.

  Brann’s instincts screamed. He spun toward the door, but then the sound came, a shivering rasp like claws in soil, or something much worse.

  Rrrraakk.

  From the stone near the door, thick roots erupted in sudden violence, like serpents uncoiling. They twisted and curled, wooden sinew snapping taut as they wound through the iron hinges, through the cracks, around the handle, gripping it, claiming it, sealing it.

  The door groaned once, then held fast…trapped.

  Truly, this time, there was no way out.

  Brann turned back slowly, hand trembling near the side where no weapon waited.

  Torvil had not moved.

  “You are not in danger,” Torvil said, his voice still calm, but no longer soft. It had weight now. “Not if you speak the truth. And make no mistake, boy, you will tell me everything.”

  He stepped forward once, the roots shifting around the edge of the chamber like they listened. “I knew Oakrin when you were still in diapers,” Torvil said, voice like stone grinding slowly shut. “He is worth more to me than ten of you… So speak.”

  His eyes bore into Brann. “Tell me what happened near the forest. Then tell me how you met Oakrin, and who you truly are.”

  There was silence in the room, save for the faint sound of something shifting deep below the stone floor, as if the roots themselves awaited the shape of Brann’s words.

  Brann did not hesitate, not because of the roots, or the locked door, or even the command in Torvil’s voice. He had come to this town seeking answers. And now he understood, as plainly as if a veil had been torn from his eyes, that this was the man the whispers warned of, the one who spoke to the trees, the one who knew the old paths…the druid.

  And Brann’s goal had always been to find the druid if he existed.

  So he spoke.

  The words poured out slowly at first, cautious, but as he found no interruption, no flare of anger, no judgment, he gave them freely. He told Torvil everything.

  The jungle, the mission that ended in disaster, the shattered tower filled with whispers and shadow, the creature with red eyes, and the frozen burn that still lived in his right hand. He told him of the chimera-beast and the gateway that tore open to deliver him at the orchard’s edge, how he returned to a town that felt like a dream remembered.

  Then he spoke of Oakrin, the old man’s snoring, his dry jests, and the quiet steadiness that had accompanied Brann through days and nights beneath the open sky.

  He recounted the bridge, the cold wind, the unnatural stillness as the sun fell beyond the treetops, the creature of bark and thorn that had taken Oakrin into the forest, and the cave of seven doors where Brann’s hand had frozen again at the third.

  And he told Torvil the hardest truth: he didn’t know who he truly was.

  Not yet.

  His memories were shards, pieces that did not fit together, faces without names, skills without origin. A soldier, yes, but no badge, no banner, a man returned from a place where time itself twisted.

  He told all of it.

  And the roots stilled.

  Torvil listened without a word, unmoving save for the slight narrowing of his eyes when the third door was mentioned, and the shadow of something long buried flickered behind his face when Brann spoke of the soul-bound frost.

  At the end, Brann stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, breath steady, eyes locked on the old man’s face.

  He had nothing more to give.