The wind screamed as they ran.
Not a metaphor. Not poetic. The wind actually screamed, through the trees, between the rocks, past the open mouths of the dead left behind.
Boots slammed into mud, tore through brush. Breathing was loud. Coughing louder. Someone tripped behind him.
Merlin didn't look back.
Rethan didn't look back.
He kept running. Legs burning. Shoulder scraped. Blood somewhere on his sleeve, he didn't know if it was his. Didn't check.
Cas sprinted beside him, sword half-drawn. His face was tight. Focused. But his eyes weren't forward. They kept flicking back.
"Don't," Merlin said.
Cas cursed. Loud. Real. "They're still behind us."
He could hear them too. No war drums. Just that awful, wet stomp of something not built to walk right.
Footsteps that didn't care about direction.
Only closing distance.
"You see Thom?" Cas asked.
They burst into a clearing that shouldn't have existed—flat ground, smooth, no cover. Merlin swore under his breath.
'This is where we die.'
He didn't say it out loud.
Cas slowed, skidding. "Where now?"
Merlin scanned the edges. Left: slope, no cover. Right: nothing. Forward, something. A split in the ridge, like a path, but too narrow.
Cas nodded, already turning.
Behind them, screaming. One of theirs.
A girl. That voice was too young.
"Don't turn around," Cas said. "Keep moving."
'They told me this memory was pain. They didn't say it would feel like I was choking on everyone's last breath.'
Mud sucked at his boots. His side cramped. He didn't slow.
Another shout, closer now. Someone was catching up. Not friendly.
Merlin shoved himself into the pass first, shoulder scraping stone. It tore his sleeve. He didn't care. Cas ducked in after him.
The world narrowed to ten feet of cracked rock.
They ran until the sounds behind them changed again, less chasing, more chewing.
The path bent. They came out behind a shelf of stone that dropped into another pit, steeper this time. No other option.
"We go," Merlin said.
They slid down the incline, gravel slicing into their palms. Merlin hit the bottom wrong, landed on his elbow, felt the crack but didn't cry out.
Cas rolled next to him, groaning. "This is the worst plan we've ever had."
Merlin stood. "You're alive."
Cas laughed once. Dry. "Asshole."
They kept moving. Limbs aching. Lungs on fire.
Behind them, no noise.
'Too quiet. That means they're flanking.'
They reached a shallow cave. No deeper than two grown men, no wider than five. Just a dent in the earth.
Merlin pulled Cas in with him.
Cas nodded, chest heaving. He was bleeding from the scalp. He hadn't noticed. Neither had Merlin until just now.
'What's the point of this memory? Just pain? Just dying in smaller groups?'
Merlin sat, legs out. Hands trembling. But he sat.
Merlin turned his head.
"Thanks. For not bailing."
Merlin didn't say anything. Just nodded once.
He looked out toward the forest again.
Then down at his own hands.
Smaller than his real ones. But stronger.
'I didn't bury this memory,' he thought. 'But I understand why someone did.'
The cave was too shallow to be useful. One loud breath, and it'd give them away.
Merlin sat back against the stone anyway, legs stretched, boots slick with mud. The gash on his forearm throbbed.
Not bleeding heavily, but steady. A thin, persistent line of red soaking into his already-wrecked sleeve.
Cas slumped next to him, groaning as he peeled off his jacket. The back was torn, more like shredded. Whatever had swiped him hadn't broken skin, but the bruises were blooming dark through the cloth.
"I've had better mornings," Cas muttered, tugging at a strip of torn fabric from his shirt.
"You're not dead," Merlin said.
Cas shot him a look. "Give me a second. I might get there."
Merlin didn't smile. He focused on untying the belt from around his waist, using the leather to loop over the worst part of the cut. It was a mess. His fingers weren't steady.
Cas shifted closer. "Give it."
Cas worked fast. Basic. Tight wrap, twist, knot. Not clean, but firm.
"Could've just let me bleed out," Merlin said, quieter.
"Then I'd have to keep talking to myself. No thanks."
Cas leaned back again, wincing as his shoulder hit stone. He closed his eyes for half a second, then opened them again.
"Think anyone else made it?"
Merlin didn't answer.
Because the truth was probably no.
He looked down at the dried blood on his other hand. Not his own. Arlen's, maybe. Or someone else who'd grabbed him before they fell.
'There's not even a way to bury them out here.'
The silence stretched again.
Cas pulled a flask from inside his boot, shook it once, frowned.
Merlin raised an eyebrow. "Why the hell do you carry water in your boot?"
"I don't. That was vodka."
Merlin let out a short breath. Not a laugh. Just an acknowledgment that maybe, somehow, Cas had remained a little human through this nightmare.
Cas shifted forward. "Lemme see your side."
"You're hunched. Either you got tagged worse than you're letting on, or you've suddenly developed a hunchback."
Then tugged his shirt up.
Cas hissed through his teeth. "Shit, that's not great."
The bruise spanned across Merlin's ribs. Purple-blue, edged in red. It looked like a stone wall had collapsed on him. Probably had.
"Breathing hurts?" Cas asked.
He grabbed a pouch from his belt. The last bit of salve they'd taken before the march. He dabbed some onto his fingers and worked it gently over the worst of the bruising.
Merlin didn't flinch. But his jaw locked.
'Pain's easier than fear,' he thought. 'At least pain has a shape.'
They worked in silence for a few minutes more.
Then Cas leaned back again. "We can't stay here long."
"You think they'll track us?"
Cas shook his head. "Why us? What's the point? We were barely out of training."
Because the truth itched in the back of his throat, and he didn't want to say it aloud.
'Because someone has to remember it.'
Cas closed his eyes again. His breathing slowed.
Merlin didn't close his.
He let his back rest against the stone.
Let his mind wander, only a little.
To the faces they'd lost.
The names he still remembered.
The people who'd screamed for help and didn't get it.
And through all of it, something pulsed at the base of his spine. A heat. A memory of mana that didn't belong to this body.
The system hadn't spoken.
But the gods were still watching.
And he knew they hadn't brought him here just to observe.
They wanted him to carry it.
And if he didn't find a way to survive this memory, it'd become real enough to kill him.
'Keep moving,' he thought. 'Even if it's just crawling forward.'
He pulled his knees to his chest and waited for the next sound in the forest.
Something would come.
The forest didn't stay still.
The quiet snapped like a wire under too much pressure. First a rustle. Then a thud, soft, like someone dropping a sack of grain behind a wall.
Cas sat up so fast he nearly choked on his own breath.
Merlin already had his hand on the hilt of the broken sword they'd scavenged three hours earlier. It wasn't sharp. It wasn't straight. But it was steel, and that had to be enough.
Cas crouched beside him, whispering. "That wasn't a bird."
"Could've been a scout."
Cas's eyes met his. He nodded once, swallowed, and drew his blade.
The next noise was closer.
Something like a child being torn out of a pipe. Wet and high and desperate.
Then the underbrush exploded.
Something hit Cas before Merlin even saw it. A blur. Dark, low to the ground, too many limbs. It knocked him straight sideways, into the wall of the cave, hard enough that his head cracked the stone.
Merlin scrambled to his feet.
Cas was twitching. But not rising.
The creature turned. It had no eyes. Just folds of skin where a face might've been. A split mouth, too wide, too jagged, stretched from one shoulder to the other.
Another shape moved at the edge of the tree line.
They came fast. Low. Unnatural.
He didn't count them.
They weren't going to stop.
Straight through the bramble. His arms burned as thorns tore his sleeves, carved into his skin. He didn't look back. He heard the crunch of bone behind him, and he knew Cas was gone.
'Don't stop. Don't fucking stop.'
Something scraped past his side, missed his ribs by an inch.
He rolled down a slope. Hit the bottom hard. Elbow. Hip. Shoulder. Rolled again. Landed in mud.
There was a cry behind him. Short. Too short.
Another voice, Cailen, maybe? No. He'd seen him die earlier. Maybe that girl from the second tent. One of the quiet ones. Didn't matter.
Merlin found a ridge. Low, covered in moss, but the incline was steep enough to slow them.
For thirty seconds, the only sound was his own heartbeat.