Chapter 1: The Awakening

(POV: Aria)

The forest had always been my refuge. When the noise of life pressed too close—deadline fever at school, customers at the bookshop who arrived five minutes before closing with twenty minutes of errands, the way our small house could feel crowded with silence—I came here. The path behind our backyard wasn’t just a place I walked; it was a route my body knew without thinking. The maple that leaned like a drunk over the trail. The old oak with roots like knuckled fists. The log split clean down the middle, as if a giant had tried to bite it. I knew where puddles formed after rain, where the mushrooms came up like tiny ears. It was predictable. It was mine.

Tonight, nothing felt predictable.

The moon had risen huge and white, not soft but stark—like a coin hammered flat and nailed to the sky. Its light made edges cruelly clear. The moss didn’t blur into shadow; it glittered with frost. My breath came out in ghosts. The air was so sharp with pine and damp soil that I tasted it, resin and metal at the back of my tongue. Somewhere far away, water moved. Somewhere closer, something else did.

Usually the forest at night is a choir. Crickets. Leaves whispering. Small lives going about their business. Tonight it was a held breath.

So was I.

A twig cracked off the path to my left—one precise sound. I stopped, every bit of me pulling tight. Nothing moved. The trees were just trees: birch bones, the black scribble of firs, the snag of a dead branch caught on another like a hook. I told myself it was a deer. I told myself I was being dramatic. I told myself to keep walking.

I kept walking.

Crunch. My shoes on grit. The sound was too loud. Beneath it I heard my heart thudding, and beneath that I heard—something else. The air pressed on my skin, prickling along my forearms as if a thousand faint sparks had settled there. At first I thought: adrenaline. Then the feeling crawled upward to my shoulders and throat and down my back into my calves. Tiny shocks, little flashes, like when you shuffle across a carpet and touch a doorknob. Only constant. Only everywhere.

I stopped and bent forward with my hands on my knees, trying to breathe deep enough to settle it. “Get a grip,” I whispered, and hearing my voice say anything helped, except it sounded too loud, like I’d shouted into a church.

Heat slid under my skin.

It wasn’t the warm flush of embarrassment. It was a flare, sudden and absolute, lighting me from ribs to wrists. My knees gave way. I dropped to my hands without grace, fingers digging into dirt gone crust-brittle with frost. Pain ran up my arms like wires snapping, clean and bright. I tried to pull in air and my throat locked; I tried again and it came clawing down, a scrape all the way. The world narrowed to a circle of dirt and my own breath and the terrible, beautiful clarity of a hundred things I shouldn’t have been able to hear: the click of a beetle in bark, wind sifting through the pine needles, a bird shifting one foot to the other far above.

My mind did what minds do when they’re afraid: it tried to label. Panic, it said. Hyperventilating. Adrenaline surge. Then the labels melted and something older moved beneath them, a rhythm that wasn’t mine and was.

Breathe, said a thought that didn’t feel like mine either. I gripped it. In, out. The in tasted like iron and sap. The out tasted like fear. I swallowed and the swallow came with knowledge I couldn’t have—there had been something heavy along this path hours ago; it had stepped neatly over a branch not to snap it; it had gone toward the creek. The understanding dropped into place like a tool into a fitted slot. It should have terrified me. It made my heart beat steadier.

The heat surged. I made a sound that wasn’t a word. Something inside me twisted. My hands went deeper into the ground; I felt grit and stones and rootlets against my fingertips and then past them, because my nails weren’t nails anymore, not exactly. Pressure, scraping, a give; when I glanced down, I saw four clean furrows carved into cold dirt where my fingers had gone. For a second all I felt was amazement, then revulsion followed so fast it stole my breath again.

“This isn’t real,” I said. Trying to anchor the world to language. “This isn’t—”

“You’re stronger than I expected.”

The voice came so calm it cut through everything else. I jerked my head up, and there he was: tall, shoulders squared as if he’d grown that way, not from posture but from a constant readiness. He stood where the moonlight thinned into shadow and changed the shadow by standing there. And his eyes—his eyes were not night-animal shine. They were gold, reflective in a way that turned my own pale outline into a dim echo in them.

I rocked back and nearly fell. “Who are you?” It came out thin and frayed. “What are you?”

“I’m Kai,” he said, as if that should be enough. His voice wasn’t loud; it didn’t need to be. It carried the way water carries. “And you…” The gold didn’t leave my face. “You’re not entirely human, are you?”

There are moments when denial is the only rope you can find. I reached for it and my hand closed on air. The truth was already inside me, beating at my bones.

Before I could decide whether to run or scream or laugh, the forest changed shape again around us, a small ripple. My skin prickled in a line to the right of him, through a clump of undergrowth where the moon pooled like milk. I didn’t see eyes. I felt them the way you feel when you wake and someone is watching you: a weight, a pressure, a patience.

“Don’t,” Kai said, and I didn’t know if he meant don’t look there or don’t listen to it or don’t lie to yourself. He didn’t look away from me. He didn’t seem to need to. “You don’t have to understand everything right now,” he went on. “But you do need to understand yourself. There are powers in you that others would kill to control.”

My first practical thought in that moment was an absurd one: I wished I’d brought water. The second was that my mother would be furious if I ruined my jeans. The third pushed the first two down and stood on them: if what he said was true, then the life I knew was a skin I could no longer zip up.

“I—” The word broke. “What is happening to me?”

“You’re awakening.” There was something like recognition in his voice when he said it. Not triumph. Not pity. A thin line of something that might have been… relief. “The forest is listening.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It will.” He flicked his gaze past me toward the presence I felt and back so fast it was almost nothing. “Not here.”

He held out a hand. He didn’t reach for me. He let it exist between us like a bridge I had to decide to step onto. The wind shifted and brought me his scent: cool air, a thread of sweat, crushed green—pine needles underfoot—and something warmer that unclenched the muscles that had been clenched since I fell. Taking his hand would be an admission. Not taking it would be one too.

I pushed myself up using the tree at my back. The bark printed itself into my palm, every ridge distinct as if my skin had suddenly grown eyes. I stood. The world swayed a little and then found itself. I didn’t take his hand. I walked, and he matched my pace like he’d already been walking there in his mind.

The thing in the brush did not follow. Or it didn’t need to. Its patience moved with us. The path recognized us by habit and still felt new, like someone had moved all the furniture half an inch to the left.

We were quiet for a long time. Quiet meant my thoughts got loud. The buzzing under my skin had faded to a hum, but my senses were still wrong, wrong, wrong—too much light in the dark, too much sound in the silence. And yet part of me could not stop being thrilled by it, like I’d found a window in a room I’d lived in for years and no one had told me it was there.

“Why were you here?” I asked finally, because the question had put a hook in me and I couldn’t walk forward without tugging it. “You just appeared out of nowhere.”

He didn’t pretend not to understand. “We’ve been watching the edges for weeks,” he said. “There are signs before awakenings. Things that stop singing all at once. Tracks that don’t belong. The air goes… still. Somebody had to be where you were before someone else was.”

“Someone else.” The phrase landed like cold water. “As in… more not-entirely-human people? Things?”

He let out a small breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “The forest isn’t empty, Aria.”

He knew my name. I stumbled. “How do you—”

He tipped his head toward the houses I couldn’t yet see but could feel by the smell of detergent and hot dust on the wind. “You’re the girl who walks alone. Who stands and listens long enough to be mistaken for a tree. Words leave trails.”

That should have been comforting. It wasn’t. “So you were watching me.”

“Watching for you,” he corrected, which was not the same thing but close enough to make my throat go tight. “And not only me.”

I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I reached the old oak with the rope of roots and put my palm down where I always did, the way you might greet a dog. As I stepped up and over, his fingers brushed my wrist to steady me. The contact lit under my skin like a fuse. Not the fire that had tried to break me apart; something cleaner, a heat that recognized me. My body wanted to lean toward it. My mind wanted to inventory it. I snatched my hand back because doing either felt like admitting something I didn’t have words for.

“Don’t,” I said, and immediately hated the way it sounded.

“I won’t,” he said, and didn’t offer again. The answer made me feel both grateful and irritated. I wanted to be treated like I was fragile and I wanted to be treated like I wasn’t, and either way I wanted to be the one to decide.

We passed the rotting log, the broken-saw grin. Somewhere deep in the trees a night bird called, three notes spaced like steps. I listened and knew, with the same impossible knowledge as before, that it sat in a fir three ridges over and had used that call to talk to others for a decade. The knowledge didn’t arrive in words; it arrived already assembled, slotted into me as if it had always lived there waiting for the door to be unlocked.

“Others would kill to control it,” I said, because now that my brain had space again it could circle back to the thing he’d said that mattered. “What is it?”

“Your blood,” he said. “Your bones. The way the world answers when you ask without speaking.” He shook his head once. “If I name more before you feel it, I risk shaping it for you. That makes people break.”

“You think I’ll break?”

“I think you won’t allow yourself to.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “That’s how people get hurt.”

We came to the curve where the path lifts, where the scrub gives way to saplings and then to the boundary where the trees thin and the sky widens. The houses were still invisible, but the air was already different—a little more human, a little less wild. I hadn’t realized how differently the two smelled until now. It made my stomach twist with an odd homesickness for a home I had just learned I might have in a place I’d never been.

“Am I dangerous?” I asked as we reached the last line of shadows. “To… other people?”

His answer was honest enough to sting. “You could be. Without control.”

I stared at my hands. They looked like hands. Dirt under the nails. A faint scar across the knuckle from when I dropped a box of hardcovers at the store. Hands that had just carved lines in the earth. Hands that had felt a tree as if it were a living thing with a pulse big enough to thrum through my bones.

The trail opened into our backyard like a curtain parting. The sagging fence ran its crooked line. The porch light was off, just as I’d left it, but the kitchen window glowed soft gold. Home. I reached for the feeling and it came—a thin blanket thrown over cold shoulders; not enough, but something. I took one step toward the grass and felt Kai stop beside me, not moving, not crossing onto the lawn. The shift in him was small but solid. The forest in him went quiet as if it had turned to face a door and was listening through it.

“It won’t cross,” he said. “Not tonight.”

“What won’t?” I asked, and my voice almost held.

“The one who watched,” he said. He didn’t dress it up. “He prefers to be seen when it suits him. Daylight makes him choose.”

“He,” I said, because the pronoun put a shape on the thing in the dark, and shapes are easier to hold than unnamed shadows.

He hesitated …“Darius.”

The name fell between us and went still, like a coin tossed in a well you know is too deep to hear the splash. I didn’t feel safer knowing it. I felt located.

The back door opened under my hand and the smell of old coffee and the lemon dish soap we buy on sale breathed out. A sticky note fluttered on the glass where I’d left it. Late shift, don’t wait up. —A. Inside was my life, measured in mugs and magnets and the steady tick of a clock I’d stopped noticing years ago.

“What do I do?” I asked. The question was larger than the yard. Larger than the house. Barely smaller than the sky.

“Eat,” he said, and almost smiled when my face did something involuntary. “Sleep if you can. Tomorrow you learn.”

“Learn what?” I stood with the door open and the warm yellow light at my back and the cold blue moonlight on my face, and felt the two worlds arguing over my skin.

“Breathe,” he said. “Control yourself. Know your ground. And learn to tell the difference between the call that’s yours and the ones that aren’t.”

“Yours,” I repeated before I could stop myself, and heat climbed into my cheeks for a reason that had nothing to do with surges and everything to do with the way the air changed when he stepped closer.

He looked at me as if my thought had brushed his. Something unguarded moved through his face and was gone before I could name it. “Early signs are confusing,” he said. “Don’t name what you can’t carry yet.”

It should have made me dig in my heels. Instead it felt like mercy. “So you’re not going to tell me.”

“I’m going to keep you alive long enough for you to find out,” he said. “And I’m going to ask you not to go into the trees alone until we’ve taught you how to listen.”

“Ask,” I said, and the word steadied me.

“Ask,” he echoed. “You choose.”

Choice. That was a thing I could hold on to. I nodded.

He inclined his head—not a bow, not exactly, but a recognition—and stepped backward into the dark. The forest received him. One moment he was a man at my fence; the next he was a presence I could feel without seeing, the way a current tells you a river exists even when you stand on its bank.

I didn’t go inside right away. I stood with my hand on the doorframe until my fingers went numb and the kitchen warmth tugged at me like a small insistent child. Somewhere beyond the houses a train called to nobody in particular. Somewhere in the trees something shifted its weight and settled.

Inside, everything was exactly where I had left it: the lemon magnet holding the grocery list, the cracked blue bowl drying on the rack, the half-empty jar of cheap instant coffee. I washed my hands and watched the water run brown, then clear, then brown again as I scrubbed dirt from under my nails. The half-moons there were pale and ordinary. My knuckles were a little abraded. My hands looked like mine and like not-mine, both true at the same time.

I ate toast because it was the food I could make without thinking, and because butter and heat can sometimes be a kind of spell. The calories filled a hole I hadn’t noticed opening. The clock above the stove ticked half a second slow. When the kitchen felt less like a stranger’s photograph, I climbed the stairs and stood in my bedroom doorway and tried to find the thing that had changed.

Everything. Nothing. My bed: small. My window: a square of night punched in paper. The curtain sighed in a draft I’d never noticed.

I crossed to the glass and pulled it aside. The yard laid itself out: patchy grass going silver at the tips with frost, the fence, the first rank of trees standing shoulder to shoulder like soldiers who had sworn not to move until told. The forest did not press close so much as lean in. If I tilted my head and listened the way Kai had asked me to, I could almost hear it, not as sound but as pressure. Waiting.

I didn’t see him. I still felt him, a thread in the air like the line of a kite you can’t see against the sky until it tugs. I let the curtain fall and switched off the light and lay on my back with my hands folded over my ribs because y breathif I didn’t hold myself, I might come apart again.

Sleep didn’t arrive. Something like it did: a floating just under the surface of thought where impressions gather. The bark’s ridges under my palm earlier. The gold in his eyes. The way my body had known a thing on the wind and named it—heavy, unafraid—without words. The remembered flare of heat when his hand brushed my wrist, not pain and not fear and not yet anything I had permission to want.

Sometime after midnight a sound lifted from far off, low and deliberate. It would have been easy to call it a dog. My body did not call it a dog. Every muscle tightened with the urge to answer. I pressed my tongue hard against my teeth and breathed until the urge moved through me and out, leaving me drained and a little ashamed and strangely proud.

I wasn’t the girl who had walked into the forest this evening. I didn’t know who I was yet. But I knew this: tomorrow, I would step into the yard and not run. I would listen until I could tell the difference between the call that wanted to claim me and the one that wanted to guide me. I would learn the names of what was mine.

Beyond the fence, the trees held their breath with me. And somewhere at their edge, patient and certain, something waited for me to choose.