The foreboding feeling didn't fade once I entered the forest.
If anything, it grew sharper.
At first I told myself it was just the trees. The shadows. The way the branches reached over the path and tangled together high above me until the daylight came through in broken strips instead of anything whole. The air felt different here too, cooler, damp enough that every breath carried the smell of wet earth, old bark, and things rotting where sunlight never reached. Even the sounds were wrong. Sometimes the forest was too quiet, the silence stretched so thin that the scrape of my boot against a root sounded like a shout. Then, without warning, something would rustle violently in the brush or wings would burst upward from somewhere unseen, and my whole body would lock up before I could stop it.
But it wasn't just the forest.
The feeling stayed beneath everything, cold and persistent. A pressure riding down my spine. A warning that did not care whether I understood it or not.
I tightened my grip on the sword and kept moving.
The trail was barely a trail anymore, just a narrow stretch of packed dirt and exposed roots winding between trunks thick enough that three men together might not have been able to reach around them. Moss clung to the bark in long dark strips. Ferns crowded the ground where the light still reached. In the deeper shade, the undergrowth thinned into bare patches of damp soil littered with broken twigs and old leaves turning black with rot.
I didn't know what I was looking for.
That became obvious almost immediately.
I knew how to watch a street corner. I knew how to listen in an alley. I knew where people usually hid, how footsteps changed on stone, how a city breathed when something was wrong. The forest didn't breathe like that. It breathed in a thousand smaller ways, all at once. The creak of branches high overhead. The whisper of wind sliding through pine needles. Something skittering under leaves. A distant crack that could have been a dead limb falling or something large stepping wrong.
After ten minutes, I realized I was making too much noise.
After twenty, I nearly stepped straight into a patch of sucking mud hidden beneath a slick carpet of leaves.
By the time I caught myself on a branch and hauled my foot back out, cursing under my breath, Finn finally spoke.
"You move like a wounded horse."
I wiped dirt off my boot against a root and glared uselessly at the path ahead. "Helpful."
"It is meant to be descriptive," he said. "You are placing your weight badly. You snap branches. You slide where you should step."
"I've noticed," I muttered.
"Then improve."
I stepped over the mud patch more carefully and forced myself to slow down. That was the problem. I hated slowing down. It felt like weakness. It felt like giving the forest time to close in around me. But every time I rushed, I made noise. Every time I made noise, the foreboding feeling sharpened.
I drew a breath through my nose, ignored the pull in my healing side, and tried again.
Watch the ground. Place the foot. Shift the weight slowly. Don't let the roots decide your step for you.
It helped.
A little.
Not enough to make me good at it. Just enough to make me less terrible.
The forest opened into a low stretch of ground where water had once run and now only left the earth soft and dark. Broken branches lay strewn in unnatural patterns here, not fallen cleanly from above but snapped sideways, as if something large had forced its way through without caring what stood in front of it.
I stopped.
"What?"
Finn was quiet for a moment.
Then: "Look down."
I did.
The soil near the far side of the clearing held impressions too large to belong to any animal I knew. They were half-filled with muddy water and leaves, but still visible, deep, broad shapes with claw marks sunk into the earth at the front edge. One track sat close enough for comparison that I could have laid my whole chest inside it and still had room left over.
A pulse of cold moved through me.
"That's new?"
"Yes."
I crouched stiffly, not too close, and studied the edge of the print. The dirt there was still dark and wet where whatever had made it had driven down hard.
"How long ago?"
"You ask questions beyond your current ability," Finn said. "But not long."
I looked up slowly.
The clearing no longer felt open. It felt exposed.
My eyes moved over the tree line, the brush, the broken branches leading deeper into the forest. More signs appeared once I knew what I was looking at. Bark scraped away in high ragged lines from a trunk to my left. Underbrush flattened in a broad path that cut away from the trail. Something had been dragged there too, judging by the fur caught on one branch and the darker stain half-hidden in the wet leaves.
My hand tightened on the sword.
"Something big."
"Yes."
"Bigger than the beginner-class things."
A pause.
"Obviously."
I stood and kept my voice low without meaning to. "You sound more serious."
"I am."
That did more to sour my stomach than the tracks had.
We moved on.
Or rather, I moved on. Finn had no body to slow me down. But I could feel the difference in him now. He'd been alert before. Sharp. Sarcastic. Coldly practical. Now there was something more focused on the weight beside my soul, as if all of his attention had turned outward into the trees with mine.
I swallowed. "What exactly am I supposed to do if we run into it?"
"Not die."
"Again, helpful."
"Avoid open ground," he said. "Watch the trees above as well as the brush below. Listen before you step. And if you smell blood strongly enough to taste it, do not follow it."
I almost asked why. Then I looked once more at the snapped branches and thought better of it.
The path dipped lower over the next stretch. The air grew colder. I found water eventually, not a stream, just a narrow ribbon of clear runoff slipping over stone between two roots, but I drank from it anyway after crouching and staring for a few seconds to make sure nothing in it moved. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache. I drank until my stomach cramped slightly and then forced myself to stop.
Food was another problem.
Every time my mind drifted toward it, all I could think about was the fact that I had nothing. No pack. No dried rations. No fire. Not even the faintest idea of what in this forest might be safe to eat without poisoning myself in the attempt.
"You will need shelter before full dark," Finn said.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist and rose. "I know."
"And food soon after that."
"I know."
"You do not sound like someone who knows."
I glared at a tree. "Do you have a point, or are you just enjoying this?"
"My point," Finn said, calm as ever, "is that you continue to think like a city boy with a sword rather than prey in unfamiliar territory."
That stopped me for half a second.
"Prey?"
"Yes."
The word settled badly.
I started walking again, jaw tight. I hated how accurate he was. Hated even more that the forest seemed determined to prove him right.
The first monster I saw after that looked almost harmless compared to the things in my memory.
Almost.
It crouched beside a rotting stump just off the trail, its back to me, tearing strips of flesh from what looked like some small forest animal. Its body was lean and low, vaguely catlike if someone had stretched a cat over the wrong bones. Its spine rose in ridged knobs beneath skin too dark and tight. One of its hind legs bent at an ugly extra angle.
Long ears twitched independently as it fed.
Beginner class.
Weak, compared to what else might be out here.
It hadn't noticed me yet.
Finn spoke at once. "Keep walking."
I stopped anyway.
The monster's shoulders moved in quick, ugly jerks as it fed. Blood darkened the leaves beneath its mouth.
"I can kill it."
"You do not need to."
I shifted my grip on the sword. "If it follows me later, I will."
"That is not why you want to fight it."
I said nothing.
Because he was right. Again.
Part of me wanted to test myself. Part of me wanted to see if the lessons from the road had actually stuck. And part of me, some colder, uglier part, simply didn't like the idea of leaving a monster alive behind me.