Novelas y relatos de Tree Of Smoke Book Review

Chapter 4: First Light, First Command Dawn creeps through the oak’s hidden seams in thin silver threads. I wake with the book still open across my chest, pages pressed to my skin like cold fingers. My dreams were full of smoke and silver eyes watching from the dark—no faces, just the sense of being measured. Judged. Found… acceptable. The vibrations have stopped. No boots. No war-horns. Just the low, steady pulse of the tree itself—roots drinking deep, leaves whispering secrets to the wind I can’t hear. For the first time since the contract, the silence feels almost peaceful. Almost.

Hope surged through me, a raw, desperate thing. “Almost there, Rhys,” I gasped, though I wasn’t sure he could hear me. His breathing was shallow, his body alarmingly still. The smoke grew stronger, leading me to a barely visible path. It was narrow, overgrown, winding through a cluster of ancient, gnarled trees that seemed to stand guard. I stumbled, my feet catching on roots, my arms burning, but I pressed on. Finally, through a clearing in the trees, a faint, flickering light. A small, ramshackle cabin, tucked away in the deepest part of the woods. Smoke curled lazily from its chimney, a beacon in the oppressive darkness.

Slowly, his eyes followed the line of the treetops where a dark smear marred the pale sky. Elara caught the change in him instantly. “What is it?” He said nothing at first, his body rigid. Then, with a voice low and hollow, he murmured, “Smoke.” Elara’s stomach dropped. She followed his gaze through the branches, and there it was: a rising column, black and thick, unfurling across the horizon like the hand of some dark god. “No…” Ryker whispered. His axe slipped from his grasp, thudding into the moss at his feet. His legs carried him forward without thought, breaking through a cluster of ferns until the forest opened into a clearing.

Whispers in the Smoke Rissa’s POV At night, the trees whispered secrets. The air grew thick with a hum that wasn’t wind but something alive something ancient that had been waiting. I sat close to the dying fire, watching the smoke rise in thin curls. Each one twisted into a shape before fading. Faces, maybe. Warnings. Mark was awake too, though pretending to rest with his back to a tree. His knife was near, as always. Josh sat a little distance away, sharpening his blade like it was a habit he couldn’t break. The scraping sound carried through the stillness steady, slow, deliberate.

“You won’t refuse once you see what Kendric is really like.” The world shifts again, and I stumble as the ground beneath my feet hardens into scorched earth. The air is thick and oppressive. Smoke coils in the sky like angry spirits, blotting out the sun and turning everything into a dim twilight. The trees surrounding the clearing are half-burned, their trunks blackened, their leaves gone, branches reaching like skeletal fingers into the haze. The fire still clings to the roots in some places, flickering low and stubborn. There is no wind, only heat and silence broken by the occasional crackle of burning wood.

I didn't want Lyra to see how I was feeling, so I made an excuse to go into the nearby woods. But I'd barely left the hot spring area, before I could even calm myself, when I heard horrifying roars from the sky not far away. Then, thick black smoke, reeking of strong corrosion, spread rapidly from the direction of the stream we’d just left, towards the entire pack territory! The surrounding trees, upon contact with the black smoke, withered and rotted at a visible speed, turning into disgusting pools of black pus. The air filled with the pungent smell of sulfur and death.

The men around him stepped back but he… he stood there, in middle of the forest as everything around him caught fire. I quickly backed away as dry leaves in front of me caught fire. Burning embers flew in air, and with the warmth, I felt strange coldness. The smoke billowed around me, thick and suffocating. I staggered, my throat raw and lungs burning with every desperate gasp for air. The bark of the oak tree behind me sizzled, flames licking up its side, and in a frantic moment, I pressed myself lower to the ground. But it didn’t matter. I could feel him—his eyes on me, even though the blazing forest, as if the fire itself was his doing.

"See Mama Roux. I will deal with Callum, Lilith, and Cain. Go now, before whatever is coming gets closer." I did not argue. I rode north alone. Dominic knew I was going. No bikers behind me, no radio check-ins. Just the bike, the morning, my wolf reading every metre of territory as I passed through it, cataloguing the boundary markers, the tree coverage, the shift in air quality as the pack's formal infrastructure fell away. The smoke was visible before the house. A thin column rising from the chimney, steady, and calm, the smoke of something that had been burning for a while rather than something recently lit. The herbs were back in the window. Dark bundles hanging in their usual arrangemen

It hasn’t rained in at least a week, the forest is very dry. For a moment the flames dance in a way that makes me think they are trying to tell a story. I shake my head but the flames continue to form the shape of people. Suddenly the people begin the run from a darkness that makes the flames disappear for a moment. What is going on? The smoke fills my lungs and I begin to gasp for air. I look up, the smoke in the sky is black and thick. The smell of burnt pine is making it hard to breathe.