The sober air was a blade. For two days, Lauri had walked east, and every breath was a fresh reminder of what he had lost. The world, stripped of the nectar’s sweet haze, was painfully sharp. The scent of damp soil and decaying leaves was no longer a comforting blanket but a coarse shroud. His pathfinding instincts, once a seamless dance with the Verdant Maze, were now a clumsy stagger. His body remembered the way, but the song of the forest was a discordant murmur in his mind, a connection frayed by years of willful neglect and now screaming with the agony of withdrawal. He was functioning at less than half his former skill, a warden reduced to a trespasser in his own domain.
He moved with a hunter’s focus, but his prey was silence. He listened for the telltale snap of a twig that signaled a Regalis patrol, for the unnatural hum of their crystalline armor. His own senses were a liability. The persistent tremor in his hands had settled into a low-grade vibration, a constant reminder of his body’s betrayal. The weight of the leather pouch at his belt, heavy with the hundred-gram sample of the Tears of Ash, was a cold point of purpose. Beside it, the empty, cracked Nectar Flask bumped against his hip, a hollow echo of the man he had been. His goal was simple: cross the border, find the source, and make the bastards pay. He was so focused on the large-scale patterns of patrol routes he had memorized from old warden reports that he missed the small detail. The single, shimmering line stretched taut between two ancient pines, nearly invisible against the damp bark.
His ankle snagged. There was no warning, just a sudden, violent tension. A mechanism hissed, a sound like a snake striking from dry leaves. The world flipped. He was jerked off his feet, his body swinging upside down as a thick, fibrous web-line tightened around his ankle. Pain, sharp and immediate, shot up his leg. He hung suspended three meters above the forest floor, swaying gently, the canopy and the overcast sky now where the ground should be. He was caught. Immobilized. The price of his sloppy focus was his freedom. The forest, which had been his sanctuary, was now the architecture of his cage.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of his own ragged breathing and the slow drip of water from the leaves above. Then, they emerged. Three figures, detaching themselves from the dense foliage with a discipline that was alien to the woods. They did not blend with the forest; they imposed themselves upon it. Their armor was not metal, but interlocking plates of a hard, glowing substance that pulsed with a cold, internal blue light. Crystalline Myxoid, grown and shaped by the rigid doctrines of the Regalis Regime. They moved as a single unit, their leader taking the point.
She was tall for an Ailuropodine, her black and white fur impeccably groomed. Her face was a mask of severe, unwavering discipline. She stopped directly beneath him, looking up. Her inspection was not of a fellow creature, but of a specimen, a piece of contaminated fauna caught in a trap. Her disdain was a palpable force, colder than the light from her armor. This was Anastasya Orlova, an officer of the Regalis, and her eyes held the unwavering certainty of law.
— You stink of rot, both the forest’s and your own, — she said, her voice flat, without inflection, a statement of fact.
Lauri hung there, the blood rushing to his head, the world a dizzying swirl of green and grey. He managed a weak, humorless smile. It was the only weapon he had left. Her second-in-command, a broad-shouldered male named Dmitri Volkov, moved to check the snare’s tension, his actions pragmatic and efficient, ignoring the exchange.
Then, a sound cut through the tension. From a high branch, a forest bird began to sing. It was not a simple chirp, but a complex, cascading melody, a thread of pure, wild life woven into the damp air. It was a song Lauri had known since he was a cub.
Anastasya Orlova stiffened. It was a subtle, almost imperceptible reaction, but from his inverted perspective, Lauri saw it clearly. For a fraction of a second, the iron mask of her discipline cracked. An unreadable emotion, something that looked almost like pain or memory, flickered in her eyes. The moment lasted no more than half a second, and then it was gone, her expression once again a flat plane of cold authority. But he had seen it. The rigid officer had a secret, a crack in her crystalline shell.
Dmitri Volkov finished his check. — Secure for transport, Officer.
Anastasya gave a curt nod, her gaze once more unreadable. The bird finished its song and flew away, leaving only the quiet dripping of the forest. The moment had passed, but the information was logged. This automaton had a ghost.
