Hearthfire did not look back until the sounds had died away. They had faded quickly in the gloom of the forest, or perhaps she had run further and longer than she realised. She was dizzy with lack of air, breath wheezing across her lungs like a saw, and her limbs were leaden, uncoordinated. She could run no further.
She slid into the lee of a nearby trunk, curling herself into the hollow of the tree’s roots where they dug into the rock. The light was still visible up ahead, perhaps as far again as she had just come. Had it really been that far away?
She should turn back, help, see if the others were okay.
She didn’t.
After a while, she managed to stop shaking, dabbed at her eyes.
There were no sounds of pursuit, no sounds at all. The dead forest was deathly silent, and she was very, very alone.
When she felt strong enough to move, she crept out into the dark. Her lantern was gone, and even if she still had it, she would not have dared to leave it lit, no more than she dared to light her way with magic. Better to walk in the dark than to be visible for miles.
That was how she went: in inky blackness, always stumbling, tripping over tree roots, every timid hoof ringing a cacophony with each fall. Waiting for the second when the dark would open into slavering jaws fresh with speckled blood and swallow her whole. She found herself afraid to lift her gaze to look at the distant light, unable to bear the thought of a dark shape gliding silently across it, briefly eclipsing it and signalling that the hunt was on once more. Much better not to know. Better for the dark to reach out and claim her without a fight. Perhaps she wouldn’t even have time to scream, or even feel the pain.
Once or twice, she thought she heard her name being called, but when she would stop to listen all would be silence again; and other times, she could hear mad laughter, or the creak of thin ice under strain, and knew that she was hearing things that weren’t there.
The light never seemed to get any closer, when she dared to look at it, until she stepped across the threshold and found grass beneath her hooves.
The glade was warm, and the sunlight was bright enough to hurt her eyes after months lived by lantern-light. Here, the trees were full of life, boasting leaves in a hundred shades of green, some with branches overflowing with sweet-scented blossoms. It was a dream, a hallucination, an impossibility. The beasts had come for her, and torn her life from her before she even felt them, and she had been sent to some endless afterlife of summer; that was her only explanation. Looking back proved her wrong; she was only a few paces into the glade, and she could clearly see the dark and twisted dead forest extending as far as her eyes could pierce the gloom.
The grass was long, tickling her belly as she walked, interspersed here and there with ferns and patches of vibrant forest flowers. With no real plan, guided only by a desire to be as far from the cold, dark forest as she could, Hearthfire headed towards where she judged the centre of the glade would be.
The trees thinned out, giving way to younger saprolings and wide open spaces. Looking directly up, to view the sky, produced a slight nausea. It was as if she were viewing one of those magic-eye pictures. One eye saw a painfully bright summer’s day, wisps of cloud scudding overhead, while the other saw the cold, blazing night sky of the north, pinpoint stars and a razor’s sliver of moon. The two superimposed in her vision, and her brain could not work out which it was meant to be seeing. It didn’t take her long to just pretend it wasn’t there, and enjoy the strange warmth.
Her horn tingled pleasantly, resonating with the ambient magic, but there was a dissonant note in there, too. A dissonant note in the magical harmony; and a harsh, ear-strafing undercurrent in the silent glen.
It was a toothy sound, from somewhere head, closer to the centre of the summer circle. Hearthfire crept closer with her heart in her mouth, darting from tree to tree as swiftly as she could. Whatever was creating the sound, it surely could not be any worse than what awaited her back out in the dark, she reasoned; but did not have the heart to believe it. There was something intensely unsettling about the sound, a rhythmic rising falling buzz, a sound that would be produced by a swarm of angry insects circling right overhead. It made her ears twitch involuntarily.
There was a huge tree. It should have been impossible to miss, but it filled her vision with such little warning that she startled and skittered back behind a trunk in surprise. When she stuck her head out again, it was still there, and the buzzing noise was emanating from the base of the trunk. The tree was groaning and swaying, as if rocked by a wind Hearthfire couldn’t feel, and even as she watched, leaves were falling from its branches, and black mould raced across its bark.
She shut her eyes and counted, five four three two one, and forced herself out of her hiding place, keeping her head down for the scarce concealment the long grass offered. The tree turned out to be set into a hollow in the ground, and peeking from the border of the grass at the lip, Hearthfire got a clear view of the source of the noise.
“Wolf” was the first thought to cross her mind, but it was too big. She had seen the Timber Wolves of the Everfree, and terrifying though they were, they were at most half the size of this monstrous creature. Its shape was wrong, too, the snout elongated and bearing a hint of reptilian influence, the legs incorrectly jointed to the body, its shoulders protruding almost vertically from its back. It was not wholly there; she thought she understood now, what Audir had meant when she said that it had been like trying to hold smoke. It blistered and shimmered, a mirage made into mangy flesh, and everywhere the sunlight fell on it, it seemed to be... dissolving. Chunks of fur and pieces of flesh evaporated from it, slowly boiling away in grotesque puffs of ghostly organic matter.
It paid no mind to its own steady destruction. Its jaws were clamped on one of the great tree’s roots, and it was chewing with ravenous gusto at the bark and the sap-filled flesh beneath. This was the source of the buzzing; each time its jaws squeezed, grinding ever further into the root, the buzzing would reach fever pitch, such that Hearthfire was forced to clamp her hooves over her ears, then fade to almost bearable levels as the beast shifted for a fresh grip before soaring back to painful heights once more.
She had no idea what to make of the scene, but every fragment of her being was telling her that she was witnessing something terrible, something wrong on a most fundamental level. The tree was dying, was being murdered, and that was not something that she should allow. She glanced around for a weapon, a rock to throw, a stick to wave. Nothing. Sugar.
“Hey! That’s right, I’m talking to you!”
It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t even the idea of a plan. If she wasn’t so busy trying not to scream at the very thought of trying to get the beast’s attention, she’d be cringing at her own stupidity. It released the tree root it was gnawing on, and the sound faded to a low idling humm - at least until it snapped its jaws at her with a crash like a thousand hornets taking wing in a lightning storm.
That was as far as the un-plan went. She turned tail and ran. Distract it, try to stay ahead of it.
Try not to die.