They leave the cave before dawn.
Not because the light is safer.
But because staying would mean accepting being found.
The night has not yet completely let go of the forest.
A low mist clings to the roots, the stones, their ankles.
It muffles sounds, distorts distances, makes every movement uncertain. Lunaya feels as if she is walking through a world that is still hesitating to exist.
Kael leads the way.
He never looks back.
Not out of indifference. Out of necessity.
His body is tense, like a string ready to snap.
Each step is silent, precise,
calculated to leave nothing more than a faint trace,
something you notice too late.
Sometimes he stops without warning, raises his hand,
tilts his head slightly, as if listening to a breath that the others cannot yet hear.
Behind him, Lunaya follows.
The black-silver thread is calm, but that calm is deceptive.
He has not calmed down. He has concentrated.
She feels Erynd like a distant but insistent presence,
a fixed point of pain in a moving world.
Each step brings her closer. Or further away. She no longer knows.
Dravik sometimes closes his eyes as he walks.
The heat beneath his skin pulses in time with his heartbeat.
He contains it with almost violent discipline.
The forest is dry in places. Too dry.
One poorly controlled breath would be enough to reduce everything to ashes. He has never been afraid of fire.
Only of what it protects.
Sahr observes everything.
The trees.
The ground.
The silences.
And above all, the absences.
"We're being followed," he finally says.
Kael doesn't slow down.
"Since when?"
"Since we stopped being invisible."
A moment passes.
"Since she spoke aloud what the world preferred to ignore."
Lunaya clenches her teeth but doesn't answer. She knows.
Since the clearing, since the night before, something has changed.
This isn't a typical hunt. Not footsteps behind them.
Not shadows too close.
It's worse.
They are being watched.
Dravik stops abruptly, placing a hand on the ground.
His fingers sink into the damp earth.
Heat descends from his arm, subtle but real.
"It's not the Guardians of the Ritual."
Kael turns to him.
"Then what is it?"
"Those who only move when the rules cease to function."
He raises his head.
"The witnesses."
The word falls heavily.
Kael raises his fist. The group stops instantly.
In front of them, the forest opens onto a narrow clearing.
Too perfect. The trees form an almost mathematical circle,
their trunks marked with pale veins,
as if the sap itself had hesitated to continue flowing.
An ancient place.
Charged.
A threshold.
"We go around it," Kael says without hesitation.
"No."
Lunaya's voice is calm. Too calm.
They all turn to her.
"If they marked the ground, it wasn't to stop us."
She inhales slowly.
"It's to see how I react."
Kael stares at her.
"You know what that means."
"Yes."
One step forward.
"If we avoid every threshold, they'll decide for us."
A tense silence falls.
Sahr looks at her differently. Not as a temptation. Not as an enigma.
As a variable that has become uncontrollable.
"You understand that they will record your answer," he says softly.
"Then let them watch."
She enters the clearing.
The world contracts.
No light. No attack.
Just pressure.
Something descends upon them, slowly, methodically.
A foreign, cold consciousness that needs no words to ask a simple question:
Are you compliant?
Kael instantly steps in front of her.
Not by choice. By reflex.
"One more second, he says without looking away,
and we're leaving."
"Okay."
The pressure intensifies for another heartbeat.
Then it recedes.
Not repelled.
Not defeated.
Accepted as a given.
When they finally leave the clearing, no one speaks.
But they all feel it: this was not a warning.
It was a rating.
Sahr is the first to break the silence.
"They're not going to wait for you to break anymore."
Lunaya raises her head.
"Then they're going to be disappointed."
Dravik smiles grimly.
"The world hates disappointment."
Kael doesn't slow down.
"Let it learn."
And far behind them,
in places where names are still weapons,
someone is already beginning to choose sides.