Night clung to the forest like a shroud.

  Kael jerked awake, every muscle stiff from clinging to the rough branch. His arms trembled, his legs half-numb where they pressed against the trunk. For a heartbeat he wondered what had startled him—then he felt it.

  The silence.

  Not the natural hush of a sleeping forest, but a sharper quiet, coiled and deliberate. A silence that meant watchers. Hunters.

  Then came the sound: the faint pad of paws against earth.

  Kael’s pulse spiked. He forced his good eye downward, squinting into the gloom. Darkness wavered, his half-blind sight splitting shadows into false shapes. Yet he saw them—lean bodies weaving through the brush, slipping soundlessly between the trees. Two yellow sparks caught the moonlight. Eyes.

  A growl rippled from the dark, low and hungry.

  Kael’s fingers locked on the branch until his knuckles whitened. His chest heaved, each breath a shallow rasp. The wolves had never left. They had lingered here all along, patient as death itself.

  The pack fanned beneath his perch, pacing, circling. Their paws pressed silently over leaves, yet the weight of their hunger pressed louder than any noise. One leapt suddenly, claws raking bark, scattering chips of wood. Kael flinched so hard he nearly lost his grip, hugging the trunk in blind terror.

  He was trapped prey, suspended above their teeth. Too weak to run. Too empty to fight. His ruined vision betrayed him; with one eye gone, every shadow warped, every distance lied. The ground itself seemed to shift with every glance.

  The wolves knew. They smelled his weakness in every faltering breath.

  Minutes crawled by, heavy and endless. Kael’s stomach snarled in protest, gnawing itself hollow. His lips cracked, his throat parched raw. Exhaustion pressed on his body like lead weights. His hands cramped around the branch until pain throbbed through his arms, but still he clung. His good eye burned from staring too long into a darkness that offered no safety.

  The pack’s patience outlasted his strength. They prowled, tested, retreated, returned. Their movements had rhythm, as though they played a game only they knew. A snap of jaws here, a low whine there—each sound pricked deeper into Kael’s frayed nerves.

  One wolf sat directly below, head tilted, eyes gleaming. Another circled wide, its shape vanishing and reappearing between trunks, each appearance closer. A third kept springing at the tree, claws grinding bark, jaws snapping at air. Kael’s whole body quaked each time they leapt.

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  His breath hitched. His chest ached. His own heartbeat felt loud enough to draw them higher. He bit down on his lip until blood welled, copper burning his tongue, silencing the whimper clawing its way from his throat.

  And then the fever struck.

  It came without warning, cruel and sudden. Heat flared under his skin, racing through his veins. His body trembled with violent chills even as sweat soaked his brow. His gut twisted, bile surging up, the poisoned berries clawing inside him like knives.

  The forest tilted sideways. Wolves blurred, doubling, splitting into jagged shadows. Their yellow eyes became dozens, then hundreds, surrounding him on all sides. His blind Eye pulsed in its socket, pressure building as if something alive stirred behind the scar.

  Kael cried out, low and broken, nails digging into swollen flesh around his temple. Pain flared white-hot, searing through his skull, dragging him back to the fireball’s blinding light. His body lurched. His grip slipped.

  Darkness devoured him whole.

  ---

  He was back at the orphanage.

  Rain hammered the roof, dripping into rusted buckets. Damp straw clogged his nose. He was small again, curled beneath a thin blanket.

  But the room was wrong. Too wide. Too dark. Shadows crawled where no shadows should.

  From the corner, a whisper slithered.

  “Kael…”

  His name carried on a voice not singular but layered, a chorus breathing as one.

  Eyes blinked in the dark—not wolves’, not human, but molten gold, endless, multiplying. His cursed Eye stared back at him from every shadow, a thousandfold.

  “You opened me,” the voices hissed. “You bled me. You burned me. Now you pay.”

  Kael staggered back, but his legs bent like twigs, brittle and wrong. The floor split apart, dropping him into endless black.

  He fell.

  Children’s laughter echoed after him, cruel and sharp. “One-eyed freak! Cursed brat!” Their jeers clawed at his skin as he plummeted. He screamed until his throat tore raw.

  The fall broke into another vision. His mother’s face—Serena—appeared above him, tender, blurred by memory but achingly familiar. He reached for her hand. But her eyes burned gold, her smile twisted into fire. Her touch dissolved into ash between his fingers.

  Then came his father’s voice. Not gentle. Not kind. A phantom command, cold as stone.

  “Survive, boy. If you cannot, you are nothing.”

  Kael sobbed, curling inward as fire and darkness swallowed him whole.

  ---

  Reality seeped in jagged fragments.

  The wolves were still there. He heard their snarls, their paws circling, claws tearing bark. Yellow eyes gleamed up at him whenever moonlight broke through the canopy. They leapt, raking, snapping, never tiring.

  Kael’s body no longer obeyed him. His grip slipped, caught, slipped again. His fever blinded even his good eye, the world swimming in delirium. His chest rattled with shallow breaths.

  Somewhere in the haze, a single thought flickered: Is this how it ends?

  Not in fire. Not in glory. But starving, trembling, too weak to resist the jaws below.

  ---

  Time broke apart. Kael drifted between nightmare and waking, the border dissolving. Sometimes he heard wolves. Sometimes whispers. Sometimes both.

  The cursed Eye pulsed like a second heart, each throb scattering his mind into white-hot agony. He saw faces in the shadows—children, strangers, his parents—blurring into beasts, jaws wide with hunger. He couldn’t tell which were real.

  His body sagged, slipping further down the trunk. Bark scraped his arms raw. His blood left faint trails, and below, the wolves scented it. Their growls deepened, hungry and eager.

  But dawn came.

  A pale glow bled into the trees, soft and gradual. The forest’s silence broke as birds began to stir, their calls trembling through the branches.

  The wolves grew restless. Their pacing slowed. One by one, they slunk into shadow, fading like ghosts. The last lingered longest, eyes locked on Kael’s broken frame, before melting back into the brush.

  Kael did not see them go. He sagged against the trunk, lips cracked, skin fever-slick, his breath rattling shallow. His arms hung limp, his legs heavy as stone.

  The fever had not broken, but exhaustion had shackled him. He dangled by a thread, closer to death than life.

  Above the hollow earth, on a high branch, a broken boy swayed between waking and the dark.

  And

  even in his fevered dreams, one vow lingered, whispered through clenched teeth and burning lips:

  “Survive.”