The tolling of the unseen bell was the last thing I heard before a fitful sleep claimed me, and the first thing I heard upon waking. It hadn’t stopped, a slow, rhythmic doom-knell that had woven itself into my nightmares. I opened my eyes to a world of gray. The fire was a pile of skeletal charcoal, offering no warmth against the piercing pre-dawn chill.

  Bartholomew was no longer on my lap but perched on my pack, meticulously grooming a paw as if the fate of the world wasn’t hanging in the balance.

  “Did you hear that all night?” I rasped, my voice thick with sleep.

  “Indeed,” Bartholomew replied without pausing his ablutions. “One posits it is either a summons or a warning. Given our current locale, I suspect the distinction is academic.”

  Kaelen was already standing, a silhouette against the brightening eastern sky. He’d donned his dented cuirass and was tightening the straps on his vambraces. He had heard it too, of course. His eyes were fixed on the Gloomwood, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

  “It’s a Sorrow Chime,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Forged by the Old Kings to be rung from watchtowers in times of direst need. They were meant to be heard for leagues, a plea for aid. But this one sounds wrong. Corrupted.”

  “Great. So it’s a demonic ‘come hither’,” I muttered, pulling myself to my feet and stretching until my spine popped. “Let me guess, we’re heading towards the creepy, corrupted doom bell?”

  “It is the only clear path forward,” Kaelen stated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He slung his shield over his back. The silver gryphon etched into its surface seemed to grimace in the pale light.

  There was no more ceremony to it than that. We ate another joyless meal of dried rations, packed our meager camp, and walked towards the black wall of trees.

  The moment we stepped under the canopy, the world changed. It wasn’t just a dimming of the light; it was an active smothering of it. The air grew heavy and cold, thick with the smell of damp soil and something faintly sweet and cloying, like flowers left to rot on a grave. The mournful tolling of the bell seemed louder in here, echoing in the space between the trees and the space between my thoughts.

  The trees themselves were monstrosities. Gnarled and black-barked, they grew in agonized shapes, their branches like skeletal fingers clawing at the impenetrable roof of leaves. There were no birds. No squirrels chittering in the branches. The silence, when the bell wasn’t tolling, was a physical pressure against my eardrums.

  “Stay close,” Kaelen murmured, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. “The very air here is poison to the soul. It preys on doubt.”

  “Well, I’m screwed then,” I said, trying for a joke, but the words came out thin and weak. Doubt was practically my middle name.Bartholomew, now riding regally on my shoulder, hissed softly.

  “A most disagreeable miasma. It reeks of forgotten magic.”

  We picked our way through the twisted roots that snaked across the forest floor like veins on a dying giant. The ground was spongy, covered in a carpet of black moss that seemed to drink the light. Strange, phosphorescent fungi grew in clusters on the sides of trees, pulsing with a sickly green glow that did more to deepen the shadows than illuminate our path.

  After an hour that felt like a day, a new sound broke through the tense silence.

  It was a sob.

  Faint, high, and utterly desolate, it cut through the oppressive quiet like a shard of glass. My head snapped up, my ears straining. It came again, a desperate, hiccuping sound that scraped at something primal and protective inside me.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered, my voice cracking the stillness. “It sounds like a kid.”Kaelen froze, his head cocked, his expression hardening into one of absolute caution.

  “I did,” he said, his voice a low growl. “And you will ignore it.”

  “Ignore it? Kaelen, that’s a child crying.” My modern-world sensibilities, already battered and bruised by this medieval hellscape, screamed in protest. You don’t leave a crying kid alone in the woods. That was Rule Number One of Not Being a Sociopath.

  “There is no child, Paige,” he insisted, his eyes scanning the gnarled trees around us, his hand now gripping his sword’s hilt so tightly his knuckles were white. “This wood is a predator. It does not hunt with tooth and claw alone. It weaves snares for the heart.”

  “A most artful deception,” Bartholomew chimed in from my shoulder, his fur bristling slightly. “The timbre is designed to pluck at the heartstrings of the soft-witted and the sentimental. It is, if you will, auditory bait.”

  The sobbing came again, louder this time, followed by a faint, trembling call.

  “Mama?”

  Oh, hell no. My heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. Soft-witted be damned.

  “I don’t care if it’s bait. What if you’re wrong? What if some poor kid actually wandered in here?”

  “We would have found tracks. We would have heard the parents. It is a lure,” Kaelen said, his voice taking on a dangerously sharp edge. He took a step towards me, his gaze intense. “This is precisely what I warned you of. The forest preys on doubt. Your doubt that this is a trap, your hope that it is a child—that is the poison.”

  But the cry came again, choked and terrified, and it broke something in me. Logic could go screw itself. I saw the face of my little nephew, lost in a department store once, his face red and crumpled with fear. I couldn’t just stand here.

  “I’m just going to look,” I said, already backing away. “Just a quick peek. I’ll be right back.”

  “Paige, no!” Kaelen’s command was iron, but I was already turning, breaking into a clumsy run, my worn leather boots slipping on the slick, black moss. “By the gods, woman!” I heard him curse behind me, the sound of his heavier tread starting in pursuit. “Do not leave the path!”

  But there was no path. Only a nightmarish tangle of roots and grasping branches. The child’s cries were my compass now, drawing me deeper into the gloom. The air grew colder, and the sickly green light of the fungi seemed to pulse in time with my frantic heartbeat. Branches tore at my tunic and scraped against my leather armor. I dodged a low-hanging limb shaped like a skeletal arm, its fingers tipped with thorns, and Steve skidded on a patch of wet moss, barely avoiding the trunk of a leering, twisted tree.

  The sobbing was closer now, just ahead. It was coming from a small clearing, a strange, almost perfect circle where the oppressive canopy of leaves had parted just enough to let a sliver of the perpetually overcast sky show through. In the center of the clearing, huddled with its back to me, was the small figure of a child, no older than five or six, its shoulders shaking with each sob.

  Relief washed over me, so potent it made me dizzy.

  “See?” I muttered to the empty air, to the pursuing Kaelen. “A real kid.” There was no answer. “Hey,” I called out, my voice softer now, gentler. “Hey, it’s okay. Are you lost?”

  The figure didn’t turn. It just continued to cry, a heartbreaking, rhythmic sound. I tied Steve the pony to a branch and took a step into the clearing. The ground here was different, not spongy moss but cold, bare earth, cracked and dry.

  “Don’t be scared,” I said, taking another step. “I’m here to help. My name’s Paige.”

  As I got closer, a strange wrongness began to prickle at the back of my neck. The child was wearing simple homespun clothes, but where they should have been smudged with dirt from the forest, they were pristine. And the hair… it wasn’t quite right. It seemed to shift and waver at the edges, like a heat haze on a summer road.

  “Paige! Get back!” Kaelen’s roar echoed from the edge of the clearing, filled with genuine panic.

  His voice broke the spell of my misplaced confidence. I froze, ten feet from the child. The sobbing hitched, and for a moment, it stopped. Then, it started again, but the sound had changed. It was thinner now, reedier, like air leaking from a punctured lung. The comforting sound of a lost child was gone, replaced by something hollow and predatory.

  The figure slowly, deliberately, began to turn.

  It wasn’t a child.

  The shape was roughly that of a small boy, but the face was a smooth, pale oval of skin, utterly featureless. There were no eyes, no nose, just a single, small, perfectly round mouth that gaped open, emitting that horrible, whistling sob. The air around me plunged in temperature, growing unnaturally cold, and a wave of profound despair crashed over me. It was a feeling more potent than simple sadness; it was the utter certainty that all hope was lost, that my friends were gone, that I was going to die alone in this godforsaken wood, forgotten and unmourned. My doubt, my fear, my homesickness—it was all being sucked out of me, amplified, and fed back in a loop of pure misery. My knees buckled.

  “Its form is woven from sorrow,” Bartholomew’s voice hissed, tight with alarm, from my shoulder. “It feeds on despair! Do not let it take hold!”

  But my limbs felt like lead. The featureless face was fixed on me, and the round mouth opened wider. The draining sensation intensified. It wasn’t feeding on my body; it was feeding on my soul.

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  Suddenly, Kaelen was there, a blur of motion as he shoved me bodily to the side. I stumbled and fell hard on the cold earth, the impact jarring me. He planted himself between me and the creature, his sword still sheathed. He wasn’t reaching for a weapon. Instead, he ripped the silver gryphon clasp from his cloak, holding the polished emblem forward.

  “Vana, umbra! Discede!” he commanded, his voice ringing with an authority I’d never heard before. The ancient words vibrated in the air.

  The silver gryphon flared with a soft, clean white light, cutting through the murky green of the forest. The creature flinched back, and the sobbing sound twisted into a high-pitched shriek of pain and fury. The featureless face began to melt and run like wax, the child-shape distorting, collapsing in on itself. The intense wave of despair receded instantly, leaving me shivering and hollowed out, like I’d just survived a fever.

  With a final, aggrieved wail that was absorbed by the silent trees, the thing dissolved into a puddle of viscous black shadow on the ground, which then evaporated into a foul-smelling mist that rushed off into the darkness of the forest canopy.

  The silence that rushed back in was heavier than before.

  Kaelen stood there for a long moment, his chest heaving, before he turned to me. His face was a mask of fury and stark relief.

  “What in all the hells were you thinking?” he bit out, striding over and hauling me to my feet. His grip on my arm was bruising.

  “I… I thought it was real,” I stammered, my whole body trembling.

  “I told you! I warned you this place was not to be trusted!” He wasn’t just yelling; he was shaking with the fading adrenaline. “Trust and sympathy will be the death of you here, Paige. Do you understand me? They are a liability we cannot afford.”

  I just nodded, unable to form words. He was right. He was completely, infuriatingly right. Doubt was my middle name, but so was Hope, and the forest had used it against me like a weapon.

  He must have seen the genuine shock on my face, because some of the anger drained from his expression, replaced by a weary concern. He let go of my arm.

  “Are you harmed?”

  “Just my pride,” I said, the attempt at sarcasm sounding pathetic even to my own ears. “I didn’t know that dementors were on the table.” I took a deep, shaky breath. “Thank you, Kaelen.”

  He just grunted, fastening the gryphon clasp back onto his cloak.

  “It would have drained you of all will, leaving you a hollow shell for the forest to consume. You were fortunate.”

  “Indeed,” Bartholomew added, preening a feather-ruffled patch of fur on his chest. “A close shave with psychic exsanguination. Now, if we are quite finished with these emotionally manipulative phantasms, I would much prefer to find lodging that does not actively wish to devour one’s very essence.”

  Kaelen shot me one last, hard look—a look that said, this conversation is not over—before turning and striding back towards the direction we’d come from. I untied Steve’s reins and fell into step behind him, wrapping my arms around myself, the phantom cold of the Grief-Lure still clinging to my skin. The silence of the black woods no longer felt empty. It felt watchful. And it knew my name.

  We pressed on for what felt like hours, the only sounds the soft thud of the horses’ hooves on the damp earth and the rustle of Kaelen’s cloak. The silence was a coiled snake, and I kept waiting for it to strike again. The silent treatment from a medieval knight, I decided, was a special kind of awful. It was potent and judgmental, radiating from his broad back in palpable waves. I found myself studying the intricate silver gryphon clasp on his cloak, focusing on its polished curves rather than the suffocating tension in the air.

  Suddenly, a new sound pierced the quiet. It wasn’t a child’s voice this time, but the thin, terrified whimpering of a puppy. It sounded lost and in pain, a sound genetically engineered to twist the heart of any decent human being. My hand, of its own accord, tightened on Steve’s reins. My feet slowed.

  “Do not even consider it,” Kaelen’s voice was a low growl, not even turning to look at me.

  “It’s a puppy,” I whispered, as if that explained everything.

  “It is a nexus of psychic energy manifesting as a sound you find pitiable,” Bartholomew corrected languidly from his perch on Steve’s saddlebag. “That is to say, it is a lie with teeth you cannot see, my dear. These creatures, these Sorrow-Swallows or Grief-Lures as they are sometimes called, are not truly sentient in a way we would comprehend. They are more like an emotional fungus.”I blinked at him.

  “A fungus?”

  “Indeed. They are parasites of the spirit. They put out these aural spores, these phantom sounds tailored to the regrets and sympathies of whoever passes by. A lost child for a grieving mother, a cry for help for a dutiful knight, a sound of familial distress for a…” He paused, glancing at me with his unnervingly intelligent yellow eyes. “…a homesick traveler. When a victim investigates, drawn in by their own compassion, the Lure latches on. It does not eat flesh, but feelings. Hope, love, determination… it drains them all, leaving behind only despair. It is, to put it in your vernacular, the ultimate buzzkill.”

  The whimpering faded, replaced by the ever-present, watchful quiet. An emotional fungus. The description was so bizarre and yet so fitting that it scraped away some of the lingering supernatural terror, replacing it with a more manageable, biological dread. Like finding out your house has sentient, soul-eating mold.

  “So they’re basically psychic anglerfish,” I concluded. “Dangling a little light of hope in the darkness to draw you in before they drain your everything.”

  “A crude but remarkably accurate analogy,” Bartholomew conceded, giving a self-satisfied flick of his tail.

  We continued on, Kaelen’s pace unwavering. He navigated the Gloomwood with a certainty that was both reassuring and unnerving. To me, the forest was a chaotic mess of gnarled, black-barked trees that all looked identical. There was no path, no trail, no sign of passage. Yet Kaelen moved as if following a clearly marked highway, making only slight, deliberate turns that seemed utterly random to me.

  Then, the forest tried again. This time, the voice was different. It was a woman’s, choked with fear and pain, and it called a name.

  “Kaelen! Please, help me! Kaelen!”

  I saw it then. The slightest break in his stride, a barely-perceptible hitch in his smooth, powerful gait. His right hand, which had been resting loosely on the pommel of his sword, clenched into a fist, white-knuckled around the worn leather. He didn’t stop. He didn’t turn. But for a single, terrifying second, the illusion of his invulnerability shattered. The forest knew his name, too. And it knew who to use to call it.

  He pushed onward, perhaps a fraction of a second faster than before. The voice faded behind us, pleading and desperate until it was swallowed by the oppressive silence. I looked at the rigid line of his shoulders, the tension in his neck. He was a fortress, but even a fortress has windows, and the Gloomwood knew exactly where to look.

  After another twenty minutes, the trees seemed to pull back slightly, opening into a small, circular clearing no bigger than my old living room. A sickly grey light filtered down, illuminating a circle of moss-covered stones. Kaelen stopped, finally turning to face me. The fury was gone, replaced by an exhaustion that seemed to carve new lines around his eyes.

  “We will rest here for a short while,” he said, his voice flat. He unslung a waterskin from his belt. “Eat something. Drink.”

  It was an order, not a suggestion. I nodded, sliding off Steve’s back and fumbling in my own pack for the hunk of bread and dried meat that had become my standard fare. The food tasted like sawdust, but I forced it down. The silence between us stretched, thick and uncomfortable. Finally, he broke it.

  “You cannot trust your instincts here, Paige.”

  “I’m getting that, yeah,” I mumbled around a mouthful of bread.

  “I am serious.” He took a step closer, and his grey eyes were as hard and unyielding as the stones around us. “That instinct you have—to help, to soothe, to offer comfort—it is a virtue in your world. Here, in this place, it is a fatal flaw. The Shadow that poisons this land thrives on such things. It twists compassion into a noose and uses hope as bait. You must learn to be hard. You must learn to be suspicious of anything that pulls at your heart.”

  “So I’m just supposed to switch off a fundamental part of my personality?” I shot back, the frustration and embarrassment of the last hour bubbling over. “I’m sorry, I’m not a stoic, battle-hardened knight who’s been dealing with soul-sucking fungi his whole life. This is a little new for me. Where I come from, hearing someone cry for help and ignoring it makes you an asshole, not a survivor.”

  His jaw tightened.

  “And that is why your world is soft and weak, and why it would be devoured by the likes of the Shadow Lord in a fortnight.”

  “Ouch. Don’t hold back on my account.”

  “This is not a game!” His voice rose, echoing slightly in the clearing. “This isn’t a story where the plucky newcomer teaches the grizzled warrior how to feel again! This is a war for the very soul of this world, and here, in this place, that war is much more personal. Your feelings are a liability I must account for. Your sympathy is a vulnerability the enemy will exploit. The Lure found weaknesses in your memory. It found… another in mine. It will keep trying until it finds the one lock your compassion cannot help but open. Do you understand the stakes?”

  I stared at him, my anger deflating under the weight of his desperate sincerity. He wasn’t just yelling at me; he was pleading. He was trying to hammer a lifetime of hard-won, brutal lessons into my head in a single afternoon. He was angry because he had been scared. Scared for me. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.

  “One cannot simply un-learn instinct, Sir Knight,” Bartholomew interjected quietly, grooming a paw with meticulous care. “One can only learn to mistrust it.”

  Kaelen shot the cat a dark look, but the interruption seemed to break the spell. He took a deep breath, running a hand over his tired face.

  “He is right,” Kaelen conceded, his voice returning to its normal, gravelly tone. “You cannot change what you are. So we must add a new instinct. A new rule.” He met my gaze, holding it. “From now on, if you see or hear anything that makes you want to run toward it, you look at me first. You do not move, you do not act, you do not trust your own eyes or ears until you have seen my reaction. Trust my judgment before your own. Can you do that?”

  It was a simple, practical command. An anchor in a sea of emotional manipulation. It wasn’t an apology, but it was something better: a strategy. A way forward.

  I gave a slow, deliberate nod. “Okay. I can do that. I look at you first.”

  “Good.” He seemed to relax, if only by a fraction. He tossed me the waterskin. “Drink more. We move again in five minutes. The Gloomwood grows hungrier as the light fades.”

  I drank, the cool water a welcome shock to my system. As I handed the skin back, I looked at him—really looked at him. The exiled knight, the grim soldier. He was carrying the weight of a dying world on his shoulders, and now, he was carrying me, too. My doubt was still my middle name, but Hope was a stubborn creature.