Somewhere, the sun was rising over a world that had forgotten him. Fields and lakes and open sky, people waking to fires and bread and the smell of morning, horses in wet grass, smoke curling from stone chimneys. None of it knew he was here.

  The branch groaned under his weight.

  One hundred and three.

  He pulled himself upward again, arms shaking. Below him, the river ran its impossible crimson. Not the rust-red of iron or the brown-red of clay, but something deeper. Brighter. Wrong. One hundred and four. The river moved as rivers do, but it was warm where it should be cold, sluggish where it should run fast. One hundred and five.

  What was his name?

  He stopped the thought cold. That was one thing he would never let this place take. His mother had named him like a prayer, the way you name a thing you want to become true. She had drawn the word from the old stories she told him as a boy, those tales of the great beast that dragged ships into the deep, and she had given it to him like a dare she hoped he would one day make good on.

  Kraken.

  He had spent years being neither monster nor legend. Naught but a boy who mixed mortar and hauled stone and loved a girl who didn’t love him back. Now he pulled himself up again. One hundred and six.

  It was time to find a way out of this damned forest.

  He dropped to the ground, landing in a crouch. Steam rose from his shoulders in the perpetual twilight, where no sun had ever reached and no wind ever stirred. The trees here were vast and bare. No leaves, just trunk after black trunk rising like pillars of a drowned cathedral. High above, their branches twisted together into a lattice that sealed the forest from the sky. Nothing came in. Nothing left. Around him, on the matted forest floor, clusters of bioluminescent fungi pulsed with their bruised-violet light, almost breathing, glowing in time with something he could not see but could feel, like a heartbeat in the earth itself. The only light in here. The air tasted of copper and sulphur. Of things decomposing.

  The tree he had chosen as home, trunk as thick as a man's torso, stood ten paces from the river's edge. Close enough to use the water as a landmark. He had learned early that without that constant red current to follow, the forest's darkness swallowed direction whole. Too far from the river and a man wandered in circles until something found him. He had tried following it in the early weeks. Upstream, the path ended at a cliff face, a dark wound in the rock still faintly warm to the touch, as if whatever had struck it hadn’t finished burning. Downstream, the water simply disappeared into the earth, feeding nothing, going nowhere. The forest had no exits it was willing to share.

  Kraken walked to the trunk and drew the rusted shortsword from his belt. The blade had belonged to an Ethuum, one of the outpost's dead, cut down when the Grolg came through their settlement. In the space of that single brutal day he had encountered two races he had only ever known from elders’ tales. Creatures shaped roughly like men, yet so alien in feature that he still half-believed them fever dreams. The Ethuum had fought with whatever was in reach. It made no difference. All had died anyway. He had snatched this sword from the rubble during his escape, still warm and slick with fresh blood. The edge was pitted, the balance poor, but it cut when he needed it to.

  He carved another notch into the bark. The metal scraped with a sound like bone on stone. Something shifted in the canopy above him. He didn’t look up. He knew what it was, had known it was there for the better part of an hour, tracking him through the bare upper branches with the patience of something that had never needed to hurry. It would not come closer. He and the things that watched from the dark had reached an understanding. He had killed enough of them that the rest had learned the edges of what he was.

  Three hundred and sixty-five marks.

  A year. Give or take a few days when he had been too fevered to count, too lost in the hollowness of his own skull to know what day it was. He hadn’t died. This dreadful land had tried. It sent its creatures, its poisons, its suffocating darkness that pressed against his eyes even when they were open. He was still here.

  He stepped back and looked at the tree. The marks covered it now, spiralling up the trunk in tight columns. Higher up, above the notches, he had carved something else in the first desperate weeks, when the silence had been pressing in like something with weight and intent. A single word. Just the one.

  REMEMBER.

  He didn’t look at it anymore. Didn’t need to. It had long since worked itself into his bones.

  Three hundred and sixty-five days of pull-ups, of sprints through the dark where roots tried to catch his feet and things watched from the branches overhead. He slept in the hammock he had strung between the great tree’s limbs, cordage wrapped around his wrists and ankles to keep him from falling in his sleep, from plunging into the dark while nightmares thrashed through his skull. The cordage had spent so long pulling at the ends of his body, never slackening, that he was certain he had grown taller from the nightly ordeal. When he woke each morning, his joints screamed. He had stopped thinking of it as pain.

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  Three hundred and sixty-five days of raw meat. The wood in this lightless place refused to burn. He had tried every arrangement he could think of, every technique he’d learned back home in Alebrath. The timber sat there smoking and cold regardless. So he had learned to eat his kills fresh: the flesh of creatures with too many legs and eyes that reflected the fungi-light like mirrors. Bitter, dense, shot through with something that hardened his muscles like the resin in the bark around him.

  Three hundred and sixty-five days of thinking about the Grolg's face.

  Not screaming. Not cruel in any way that suggested malice. Just… satisfied. Mouth open, drooling froth, eyes dull with the simple pleasure of having killed something. Like something that had stepped on an insect in passing and felt the crunch. That expression haunted him more than screams ever could. He had replayed the moment so many times that other details had worn away. The exact colour of the sky, the sounds around them, the smell of the air. But the Grolg’s face never faded. Some part of him refused to let it.

  The thing had been coming for his head. Nine feet of muscle with eyes set too far apart on a face that had no business existing, a blade already swinging, and he had just stood there. One moment of pure animal terror, complete and shameful. And Tawny had shoved him aside and taken the hit meant for him.

  Her blood had been warm on his hands. He had pressed his palms against the wound. He knew it wouldn’t matter. He knew she was already gone. She looked up at him and tried to form the words. He had pressed harder. As if pressure could buy her more time. As if he could hold her together by sheer refusal to let go.

  Her hand had found his wrist. She pressed the torc against his skin one last time.

  “You can’t forget to—” she managed.

  She coughed then. A wet, final sound. Her fingers went slack.

  “I love you, Kraken.”

  And then she was gone, still wearing a look that said she had meant to tell him something important. Something he would turn over for the rest of his life and never find the bottom of.

  Kraken’s jaw clenched. He pressed his thumb against the torc on his wrist without looking at it. Moved on.

  “I will find you," he said into the darkness. His voice was rough, unused, barely more than a growl. “And you will know why.”

  He had said it before. Every day. Sometimes dozens of times a day, a mantra to keep his mind from fracturing under the weight of solitude. The words had lost their meaning long ago. By now they were just sounds he made to prove he could still speak. Now, at day three hundred and sixty-five, they were something else entirely.

  A promise written in scar tissue and stretched bones.

  He walked to the river’s edge, knelt, and cupped his hands in the crimson water. It was warm, always warm, no matter the hour, and it tasted faintly metallic. Not quite like blood, but close enough and he had long since stopped minding. He dr ank, then splashed his face and scrubbed away the day’s sweat and grime.

  When he looked down, his reflection stared back at him from the dark water.

  The face looking up at him was a stranger’s. Striking. Beautiful in a way that seemed almost unnatural. His copper hair hung past his shoulders now, long and wild. His features had sharpened, refined themselves into something that looked carved rather than born. His jaw was strong, his cheekbones high and defined. His neck was corded with new muscle, his shoulders broader than he remembered. But it was his eyes that truly arrested him. They blazed with an intensity that still unsettled him, bright and full of drive, burning with a purpose he recognised now as his own. Not cold. Not distant. Alive. Focused. Hungry.

  He barely recognised himself.

  For a moment he tried to find the boy he had been before. The one who had frozen when it mattered most. He couldn’t find that person in the reflection. Couldn’t find him anywhere.

  He stood. Dried his hands on his trousers. Then he turned his back on the reflection and walked.

  He made himself remember. Not by accident. Deliberately, the way he performed the pull-ups, the sprints. Because grief, he had learned, was a muscle too. Let it go soft and it became something that ambushed you.

  Tawny first. Always Tawny. Freckles across her nose. Blonde hair pinned back with an ivory clip. The blue dress that made her eyes look like pieces of sky.

  Then Rhoswyn. The way she had looked at him across their mother’s body, dry-eyed, because one of them had to be, and it had always been her. Twenty years old and raising him, already the backbone of what remained of their family. The last thing he’d seen of her was her figure, moving through the festival crowd, searching for him. He hadn’t told her he was going. He hadn’t said goodbye.

  That sat with him differently than Tawny’s death. Tawny he had lost to violence, sudden and absolute. Rhoswyn he had simply left. She would not know if he was alive. She would have carried that uncertainty every day of this year, alone, because that was what Rhoswyn did. He owed her more than a ghost's silence across a year.

  Above him, the thing in the branches had gone quiet, or moved on, or was simply holding still. It didn’t matter. He had stopped checking.

  He looked at the three hundred and sixty-five marks on the tree. At the single word carved above them.

  He did not know how to leave this forest. He had tried the river, tried the trees, tried following the sound of the creatures back to whatever periphery they emerged from, and the forest had returned him to the same stretch of bank every time. There was no clear path out. No map, no compass, no guide.

  But something had changed tonight. He could not have said what. Only that when he looked at the darkness beyond the tree line, it looked back at him differently than it had before. Like a door he had not yet found the handle of.

  Tomorrow he would carve no new notch.

  Tomorrow he would find a way out, or he would die trying.

  He closed his eyes and thought about Rhoswyn’s back moving through the crowd.

  He thought about Tawny’s unfinished sentence.

  He thought about the Grolg’s face, and what he intended to do to it.

  Sleep, when it came, came slowly.