Prologue | No Tracks

Mud pulled at Varian’s boots as he climbed toward the outpost. Garrick followed a step behind, breathing through his nose like the air itself offended him.

The girl’s eyes had lodged behind his own. Not fear in the abstract. Fear with a shape. Fear that stared past him at the treeline as if the trees were a doorway.

“Sleep?” Garrick asked.

“No.”

“Same.”

After that, words felt like noise you made right before something found you.

Alden waited by the captain’s door. Both hands on his spear. Not leaning—bracing. His face had lost its color, and that did more to Varian than any alarm bell.

“Riders,” Alden said. “Frontier villages. They’re with the captain.”

Varian knocked once and went in because waiting felt like a luxury.

Eldric stood behind the desk, hands flat on the wood. Two men in mud-spattered cloaks faced him, shoulders rounded like they’d been carrying something heavy for leagues.

“…three more cattle,” one was saying. “Throats opened.”

Eldric looked up. His expression was the one he wore before storms hit the wall.

“Varian. Garrick.” Two names, clean and clipped.

“They didn’t take the meat,” Garrick said, because he was fast enough to see the wrong part.

The rider nodded. “Left them where they fell.”

The silence landed on Varian’s shoulders like a physical weight.

“Sir.” He forced himself to say it straight. “Village incident last night. A girl. Clawing at air. No attacker.”

He didn’t say how her eyes had fixed on the forest like she’d seen something leaning between the trunks.

“No tracks,” Eldric repeated, testing the sentence for weakness.

“None. But she stared at the trees like they were standing too close.”

Eldric dismissed the riders with a nod that meant: go, before fear spreads. When the door shut, he didn’t show the weight. That was the point of him.

“No one crosses into Grukmar.”

He said it like a boundary line on a map that existed because men died past it.

“We watch. We guard. We don’t go hunting.”

The sun climbed higher—a cold eye behind scudding clouds. Varian paced the village edge until his legs ached. Every shadow looked like it was waiting.

By dusk he found Garrick in the armory, running a whetstone along his blade.

“Quiet?”

“So far.” Garrick didn’t look up. “Feels wrong. Like a storm you can smell but can’t see.”

“And when they cross first?”

“Then we’ll be ready.”

First watch they took together. The forest lay utterly still. No wind. No birdsong. Nothing but the creak of their boots and the sound of their own breathing.

“The stories,” Garrick said. “About goblin rituals. You believe any of it?”

“Meant to scare children.”

“But you don’t?”

For a long moment Varian didn’t answer. “I believe something lives in that forest that doesn’t think the way we do. Maybe the goblins serve it. Maybe it uses them. Either way, only a fool goes looking.”

Garrick froze. “There.” His torch jabbed toward the treeline.

Varian squinted. Movement. A flicker, there and gone.

His blade slid free. They stood frozen while the night pressed close.

A branch cracked.

Varian spun. A shape burst from the trees—

A rabbit. A terrified rabbit that scampered between the posts and vanished.

Garrick sagged against the wall, laughing shakily. “Found our goblin.”

Varian didn’t smile. When he sheathed his sword, his hands weren’t steady.

Rest proved elusive. Varian tossed on his narrow bed while shadows crawled across the ceiling. The girl’s face swam behind his eyes. The old trees, their branches reaching like fingers.

When sleep dragged him under, it was full of looming shapes and the thick copper stench of blood.

Grey dawn. Grey sky.

Garrick waited in the yard, face drawn and haggard.

“Patrol’s back. They found tracks.”

Through the gate, toward the treeline. A knot of men stood in tense silence. They parted as Varian approached.

In the damp earth: prints, long and splayed, unmistakably inhuman.

Garrick crouched, tracing one with his finger. “Half a league along the border.”

Varian stared into the forest—into those dark spaces between the trunks where anything might be watching.

The men dispersed. Varian stayed where he was.

He thought of the farmers who worked their fields within sight of that treeline. Brave fools, or blind ones. He’d never been able to decide.

The wind shifted. For a moment, he could have sworn he smelled something underneath the pine and loam. Something wrong.

Then it was gone.

End of Prologue 6 — continues in Prologue 7: The Screams in the Mist