Chapter 236: Ch234. The long climb
The mist didn’t lift, but it changed.
It grew thinner, less choking, more like breath than shroud.
Where before the air had stilled around them, now it moved. Not with wind, but with purpose.
They felt it more than saw it. A pulse like memory guiding them upward, away from the hollow and toward the waiting ridge.
Sarissa leaned on her broken spear like a crutch. Her leg bled sluggishly beneath bandages fashioned from Miles’ shirt. Dee limped ahead, refusing to be carried. Its scales were scuffed and dulled, but its eyes remained sharp.
Miles walked behind them, silent, one hand trailing along the roots that curled up the slope like stairways half-swallowed by time, his other hand flexing rhythmically, as if feeling for something he couldn’t quite name.
The silence between them was choked with reverence. The forest was quiet now, but not empty. It watched, and not all the watching felt hostile this time.
At times, Miles thought he saw things. Shapes in the mist, half-formed figures just beyond the curve of a branch or the bend of a root. Some were animalistic, while others were too familiar.
His own shadow once split in two and walked beside him for three paces before fading.
They were not illusions. Not tricks of the darkness around them.
It felt more like they were... Echoes.