The Eater of Paths

The branch whipped across Sage’s face, leaving a stinging, bloody welt on her cheek. She ignored it, sucking in a ragged breath that tasted of pine needles and panic. Behind her, the baying of hounds grew closer, a sound of slobbering, inevitable doom. Captain Varus’s voice cut through the noise, a drill sergeant’s bark that promised a slow, inventive death.

Her satchel, containing the damning ledger, bounced against her hip, a constant, bruising reminder of why she was running. Two days. For two days she’d been crashing through the Mawwood, the sun a distant memory through the choking canopy of ironwood trees. Every snap of a twig, every rustle of leaves, sent a fresh jolt of adrenaline through her exhausted limbs. She was a city-bred archivist, not a survivalist. Her gambit to expose the Guildmaster’s corruption had been bold, but the follow-through was a frantic, desperate scramble she was rapidly losing.

She burst through a curtain of hanging moss into a small clearing and froze. The air here was different. Still. The relentless hum of the forest, the insects, the birds, the wind was gone. The silence was so profound it felt like a pressure against her eardrums. In the center of the clearing, half-buried in the damp earth, was a single, flat stone. It was a perfect gray square, its surface as smooth as polished river rock, utterly alien to the tangled forest floor. From its edge, another stone was set, and another, forming a path that snaked away into the darkest part of the wood, where the trees grew so close they looked like the bars of a cage.

The path didn't look old or weathered. It looked like it had been laid yesterday.

A hound bayed again, so close now she could hear the clink of its chain collar. Varus bellowed her name.

It was a choice between the monster she knew and the mystery she didn't. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the unnatural quiet. With a choked sob of desperation, she stepped onto the first gray stone.

The world went silent.

Not just the forest hum. The dogs, Varus’s shouts, the crashing of his men through the undergrowth—all of it vanished as if a door had been slammed shut. Sage whipped around. The clearing was empty. The path stretched behind her, but the woods she’d just run from looked… thicker. Darker. Impenetrable. A tremor ran through her, a cold that had nothing to do with the damp air. She had not found a shortcut. She had crossed a threshold.

She turned back to the path ahead. There was no other way to go. Her footsteps on the stone made no sound. The trees that lined the way were ancient behemoths; their bark gnarled into shapes that looked disturbingly like screaming faces. A sickly, pale moss hung from them in long, trailing veils. Nothing grew at the path's edge, not a weed or a blade of grass. The soil was black and barren, as if sterilized by the stone’s mere presence.

A deep, primal instinct screamed at her to get off the path. She took a hesitant step sideways, her boot hovering over the black soil. Before it could touch down, a thorn-covered vine, thick as her arm, lashed out from the treeline with serpentine speed. It didn't try to grab her; it simply barred her way, a living wall of spikes. She flinched back onto the stone, her breath catching in her throat. The vine retreated, melting back into the shadows.

She was not on a path. She was in a channel. A gorge. And the walls were alive.

Panic, sharp and glittering, seized her. She ran. Her feet flew over the silent stones, her lungs burning, her gaze fixed forward. The path twisted and turned, a disorienting gray ribbon through an endless twilight. She lost all sense of time and direction. Was she running for minutes or hours? The oppressive silence was broken only by her own ragged gasps and the frantic pounding of her heart.

Then she heard a sound. A single, sharp crack of a twig breaking. It came from ahead.

She skidded to a halt, pressing herself against the trunk of one of the monstrous trees. Its bark was cold, unnervingly smooth beneath the moss. She held her breath, listening. There it was again. Footsteps. Heavy, clumsy. Someone else was on the path.

Hope, fragile and stupid, fluttered in her chest. Another lost soul? Someone who knew the way out?

Captain Varus strode into view around the next bend.

His uniform was torn, his face scratched and smeared with dirt. His usual brutish confidence was gone, replaced by a wide-eyed, hunted look. He held his sword in a white-knuckled grip, scanning the monstrous trees as he walked. He hadn’t seen her yet.

Sage’s blood ran cold. The forest had taken him, too. It had swallowed her pursuer and spit him out on the path ahead of her. This wasn't a sanctuary. It was a trap for everyone.

She ducked back behind the tree, her mind racing. She could wait for him to pass, then double back. But was there a "back"? The path felt wrong, like it only flowed one way.

Varus stopped. He was sniffing the air, his head cocked. Like one of his hounds. "I know you're here, rat," he growled, his voice low and shaky. "This cursed forest… it plays tricks. But it can't hide your stench."

He began walking again, slower this time, his eyes sweeping the shadows. Sage knew in a gut-twisting moment of certainty that he would find her. The path was too narrow, the silence too complete. There was nowhere to hide.

Her hand strayed to the hefty, leather-bound ledger in her satchel. It was all she had. An idea, born of pure desperation, sparked in her mind. She ripped a page from the back—a blank one—and crumpled it into a ball. Peeking around the tree, she saw Varus looking away, toward the opposite side of the path. She lobbed the paper ball as far as she could into the woods on that side.

It sailed through the air and hit the wall of thorns and vines with a faint rustle.

Varus spun, his sword raised. "Who's there!"

The forest answered. A dozen vines, far larger than the one that had blocked her before, erupted from the undergrowth. They were not green, but a dead, corpselike gray, and they moved with a horrifying, fluid intelligence. They swarmed the spot where the paper had landed, thrashing, tearing, their thorns ripping through the soil. Varus stared, his face paling, a string of curses dying on his lips.

It was the opening Sage needed. She broke from cover and sprinted down the path, away from him.

"You!" he roared. He had been tricked. The sound of his heavy boots pounding on the stone behind her was the most terrifying sound she had ever heard.

She was faster, lighter, but he had the brute strength of a lifelong soldier, fueled by rage. He was closing the distance. The path ahead opened into a wider space, a circular clearing dominated by a freestanding archway of black, basalt-like rock. It was massive, thirty feet high, and carved with spiraling patterns that seemed to writhe and shift in the corner of her eye. The archway led into absolute darkness, a blackness that seemed to drink the already dim light. It was the end of the path. It was the door.

Sage’s legs gave out. She stumbled, falling to her knees just before the yawning maw of the arch. The ledger spilled from her satchel, skidding across the stones.

Varus was on her in a second. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanking her head back. The point of his sword pressed against her throat, cold and sharp.

"Nowhere left to run, archivist," he snarled, his breath hot and foul. "You and your little book. The Guildmaster will pay handsomely for your tongue."

"It wasn't me the forest wanted, Varus," Sage gasped, her eyes wide with terror, staring not at him, but at the woods around them.

"What nonsense are you—"

He never finished the sentence. From the periphery of the clearing, shapes began to move. They weren't vines this time. They were tall, spindly things that had looked like dead trees, but now unfolded themselves with the slow, creaking grace of giant insects. They were made of gnarled wood and gray stone, their limbs cracking as they moved. They had no faces, no eyes, but Sage felt their collective, ancient attention settle on them.

Varus saw them. His grip on her hair slackened. "What… what are those things?"

The creatures ignored Sage completely. Their focus was entirely on Varus. On the sword in his hand, on the fury in his eyes, on the iron resolve that radiated from him. The forest had been a passive observer of her fear. But his aggression, his violence—that, it seemed to find interesting.

One of the stone-and-wood guardians took a long, scraping step forward. Varus, recovering his nerve, let out a battle cry and lunged, swinging his sword. The blade struck the creature’s torso with a shower of sparks, as if hitting solid rock. The creature didn't even flinch. A long, branch-like arm swung out and wrapped around Varus’s sword arm, the wood groaning as it tightened. Bones snapped with a sickening crunch.

Varus screamed, a high, piercing sound of agony and shock. The other guardians closed in, their movements slow, deliberate, and unstoppable. They wrapped their limbs around him, lifting him from the ground. He struggled, a wild animal in a cage of living stone, but it was useless.

They carried him toward the black archway.

"No! Please!" he begged, his rage shattered into pure terror. "Help me!"

He looked at Sage, his eyes pleading. She could only stare back, paralyzed with horror. The forest hadn't lured her here for her. She had just been the bait. It had been hunting for something stronger, something more defiant. It had been hunting for him.

The guardians carried him through the archway and into the all-consuming darkness. His screams were swallowed instantly, cut off as if they had never been.

The stone creatures did not return.

For a long moment, Sage didn't move. She knelt on the cold stone, trembling. Then, behind her, she heard a faint, grinding sound. She looked over her shoulder. The gray stone path was receding. It was sinking back into the black earth, stone by stone, vanishing back toward the way she had come.

The sight broke her paralysis. She scrambled to her feet, snatching up the ledger. She ran, not toward the arch, but back the way she came, chasing the disappearing path. The forest was waking up around her. The oppressive silence was broken by the chirp of a cricket, then the distant call of a bird. The air no longer felt dead and still.

The last stone sank into the ground just as she leaped from it, tumbling onto a patch of soft, normal, wonderfully alive moss. She lay there, panting, as the Mawwood returned to its natural state. It was just a forest again. Dark, mysterious, but no longer actively malevolent.

She had survived. She had the ledger. Varus and his men were gone. But as she finally pushed herself to her feet and found her bearings in the dimming light, she knew she would never truly be free of that place. She had walked the Eater of Paths, and she had seen what waited at its end. Some doors, once discovered, could never truly be closed again.