025 ~ The Fifth Witness~

"I'll send a maid to check up on you later; pack duty calls." Victor turned towards the door.

It had barely clicked shut behind him before Selene sank onto the edge of her bed, the journal finally free of her cloak and open across her knees.

Her hands were still unsteady from the confrontation, and she pressed them flat against the pages to stop the shaking, forcing herself to read instead of replaying the look on his face when the words had slipped out of him.

"You think he abandoned you because he wanted to?"

She pushed the memory aside and made herself focus. The torn pages had taken the guard's confessions with them, but the final surviving entry wasn't the last mark on the paper.

There was a faint sketch, crushed into the margin beneath it, half-erased by water damage, easy to miss unless someone was looking as closely as she was now.

A hollow oak, rough and childlike in its lines, with a single word scratched beneath it.

It didn't exactly pinpoint any location or explain the dilemma her heart was riding on. It was just a drawing left behind by someone who'd known enough to fear writing anything more specific.

Selene turned the journal toward the light from the window, tracing the curve of the trunk, the notch where two branches split, and recognition settled over her slowly at once.

She'd seen that tree before— once, years ago, at the edge of the old forest where the attack that shaped everyone's fear of that territory had taken place.

She'd never had a reason to go back. Now she had every reason in the world.

She closed the journal and sat with it, lost in time, thinking not of what she might find, but of how quickly the last attempt to investigate had ended with a blade nearly finding her throat.

Whoever had come for her in the woods hadn't been acting alone, and whoever they answered to clearly already knew she was asking questions. If she vanished the same way twice, no one would call it a coincidence. Would they?

She waited until the corridor outside her chambers had gone quiet, until the patrol rotation changed and the guards nearest her door drifted toward the kitchens for their shift meal, before she moved.

And so as not to attract stares, she pulled a plain cloak low over her face, with the journal hidden against her ribs, tucked into her belt where it wouldn't shift or fall.

She took the servants' stair instead of the main hall, the one that let out near the old stables rather than the courtyard where half the pack seemed to linger at this hour.

A groom nodded to her without really looking, too used to seeing her come and go to think anything of it, and she was grateful for once that no one in Ashfang paid her enough attention to notice when she disappeared.

Once outside, Selene didn't head into the dark tree line just beyond the eastern pasture. She circled wide instead, cutting through the orchard and doubling back along the fence line, watching every shadow for the particular stillness that meant someone was watching her instead of simply standing there.

Only when she was certain the path behind her was empty did she finally slip between the first trees and let the forest swallow her whole.

It hadn't changed. She'd expected it to, somehow— expected five years to have softened the twisted roots and blackened earth into something ordinary, something a person could walk through without feeling the past reach up to grab at her ankles.

Instead the trees pressed close and familiar, the canopy strangling the light to a gray haze, and the silence that met her had nothing to do with peace.

Neither birds called, nor wind moved through the leaves. It was only the sound of her own boots against dead ground, and the growing certainty that she was walking somewhere she wasn't meant to survive returning from a second time.

The hollow oak, when she finally found it, hours of walking twisted into an uneven pain in her ankles, wasn't the ruin she'd braced herself for. Smoke curled from a crude chimney built into the tree's split trunk.

A path had been worn into the earth before it. It was deliberate and repeated, the kind of trail only made by someone who'd lived there long enough to stop hiding their presence from the forest itself.

Selene stopped at the edge of the clearing, with every instinct within screaming at her to turn back, but she stepped forward anyway.

"You shouldn't be here." The voice came from behind her, with each word dragged out like it took the breath out if it's speaker.

Selene's hand found the dagger at her hip before her mind had finished processing the sound. "Show yourself."

A figure emerged from the dark of the tree's interior, slowly coming into sight. His eyes were clouded white, scarred tissue running from his brow down across one cheek in a pattern she recognized instantly— claw marks, old and deep, left by something far larger than a man. He was ancient in the way survivors were ancient, aged by more than years.

"Who are you?" she asked, even though something in her chest had already started to guess.

"I was the fifth guard on duty the night this territory bled." He tilted his head toward her, unseeing eyes finding her with an accuracy that unsettled her more than blindness should have allowed. "Everyone believes I died with the others."

The clearing seemed to tilt beneath her feet. "That's impossible. The records only name four."

"The records were written by the people who wanted only four remembered." His mouth curved into something that didn't pass as a smile. "I've had five years to learn how thoroughly they rewrote what happened."

"Who rewrote it?"

"The same people hunting you now." His clouded eyes narrowed, and for the first time something like urgency cracked his calm. "You've been asking questions. Pulling threads that were meant to stay buried with the rest of us."

Her breath caught. "How do you know that?"

"Because the forest talks, even when the people in it have learnt not to." He reached out, and though she flinched back, his hand only found the air between them, feeling for a presence rather than reaching to harm her. "I've watched wolves pass through this territory for five years. Different faces. Same purpose. They come looking for anyone who remembers too much."

"What do you remember?"

The old wolf went very still as something old and unspoken passed across his ruined face. "Enough to know that what happened here wasn't an accident, and wasn't the work of rogue wolves acting alone. Enough to know that the men who claim to protect this territory were the same men who let the blood spill."

"Names," she said, her voice breaking despite the steel she tried to put behind it. "I need names."

"Names won't save you." He shook his head slowly, his shoulders lower as though the weight of everything he'd survived rested on him. "You've already done the one thing that matters. You've started looking. And they know it."

"How could they possibly know?"

His unseeing eyes fixed on her with a certainty that chilled her more than any answer could have, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something quiet and final.

"You've come too late, Blood Moon child," he said. "They're already hunting you again."