The forest had gone quiet in a way that made Karna's skin crawl. No birds. No wind. Just the low hush of held breath, as if the trees themselves were watching.
Beside him, Arjuna adjusted his grip on his bow, sensing it too. "Something's wrong."
Karna didn't answer. His eyes had already found it — a single tree at the clearing's edge, its bark rippling faintly, like skin stretched too thin over something that didn't belong underneath.
A shapeshifter.
He drew his bow in one motion and loosed the arrow before he'd finished the thought.
"Karna!" Arjuna's voice cracked with alarm. "What are you doing?"
"There's a dark-blood demon in that tree." He was already turning, already shouting for the one person who would know what to do. "Bhishma!"
The old warrior appeared as if he'd been waiting nearby all along, his calm the only stillness in the clearing that didn't feel dangerous. He looked at the tree Karna pointed to and frowned.
"I see nothing there."
Then his face changed. Karna had seen that look only once or twice before — the moment Bhishma stopped being an old man and became something ancient and precise. His hand found his bow without seeming to move at all.
"Let me see clearly, then."
The arrow he released didn't look faster than Karna's had been. But it felt different — like it had already arrived before it left the string. It struck the tree dead center, and the bark screamed.
Karna would remember that sound for the rest of his life. Not a natural sound. A sound like something ancient tearing itself out of a smaller skin, thrashing once, twice, and then collapsing into a heap of shadow that dissolved before it hit the ground.
For a long moment, none of them spoke.
"Master." Karna's voice came out rougher than he intended, hungrier than he wanted anyone to hear. "Teach me that."
Bhishma didn't turn around right away. When he finally did, there was something almost like pity in his eyes. "You don't know what you're asking for."
"Then tell me."
"That skill doesn't just kill demons, boy. It unmakes things. It doesn't distinguish between what deserves to die and what's simply in its path." He let that sit. "I can teach it to you. But only after you've earned the ones that come before it — every one."
"I'll learn them all," Karna said, and meant it with the kind of certainty that only exists before you've paid for anything.
"So will I," Arjuna added, stepping up beside him.
Bhishma looked between the two boys — because that was still what they were to him, whatever they believed about themselves — and sighed like a man agreeing to something he already regretted. "Then you both follow the same road. No shortcuts. Not for you," his eyes flicked to Karna, "and not for you, either."
He turned and studied Karna a moment longer than felt comfortable, as if he could already see the shape of what Karna intended to do with power like that. Whatever he saw settled something in him.
"There will be a trial first," he said. "Three conditions. You go in blind. You go in unarmed. And you go in alone — into the dark forest, where nothing will make it easy for you."
The clearing went silent again, but this time it wasn't the forest holding its breath. It was Karna.
"Master—"
"No!"
The word tore out of Allalkshmi before she'd even reached them, her sandals slapping against the packed earth, her hands finding Karna's arm like she could anchor him to the ground by will alone. "You can't. Bhishma, please, it's too dangerous, he could—"
"You have one hour," Bhishma said, not unkindly, and walked away before the rest of her sentence could reach him.
Allalkshmi didn't let go of Karna's arm. Her fingers were trembling. "Please," she said, and her voice had dropped from fury into something smaller, more frightened. "I don't want to be a burden on my father's house. I don't want — I can't lose you to prove a point."
"You're not a burden," Karna said. "You never have been."
"Then don't do this."
He took her hand — really took it, the way you hold something you're afraid might slip away if you're not careful — and for a moment neither of them said anything at all. He watched the fight drain out of her, watched fear replace it, watched the tears come even though she tried to hold them back with the same stubbornness that had made her run across the clearing in the first place.
"Let me go into that forest," he said quietly. "I need to know what I am if I take that blindfold off and I'm still standing."
She cried harder at that — not because he'd convinced her, but because she understood him well enough to know arguing further wouldn't change anything. Eventually she just held onto him, her face pressed against his shoulder, and he let her.
"Come back," she whispered. "That's all I want."
"When I do," he said, "there's something I need to tell you."
He felt her go still against him. But he didn't explain further — just pulled back, torn his own shirt from his shoulders in one motion like he was shedding the last piece of who he'd been before this moment, and walked toward where Bhishma waited.
What Karna didn't know was that Bhishma had heard every word of it from the treeline — the fear in Allalkshmi's voice, the way Karna had answered her. It did something to the old warrior's face that he quickly smoothed away, though not quickly enough to hide it entirely. He thought of his own wife, decades gone now, and the promises he'd made her before wars had taken the rest of his choices away from him.
Everyone pays for power in the same coin, he thought. Just not always the way they expect.
"I'm ready," Karna said, when he reached him.
Bhishma knelt and dipped his fingers into a bowl of goat's blood, marking Karna's bare chest with it in lines that meant something older than either of them understood fully. Then he took the blindfold and tied it tight, sealing the world away.
"If something goes wrong in there," Bhishma said, his voice close to Karna's ear now, low enough that it felt almost gentle, "call for me. You don't need to win in there. You only need to survive."
"Understood."
There was no more warning than that. Bhishma's hands closed around him and threw him into the dark.
Karna hit the forest floor hard, air punched out of his lungs, and rolled through brush that tore at his bare skin. He forced himself still, forced himself to listen instead of panic, because panic was the first thing this place would take from him if he let it.
The forest was alive with wrongness. He could feel it — things moving that shouldn't move that quietly, breath that didn't belong to anything he recognized.
Something crashed past him on the left, close enough that he felt the wind of it. He rolled the opposite way on instinct alone.
Then came the sound that turned his blood cold.
Ssssssssss.
A long, dry hiss, low to the ground, patient in a way that made his skin crawl worse than the crashing thing had. A snake. He tried to measure it by sound alone — how long the hiss lasted, how far it seemed to travel before dying out — and guessed at something dangerous, but not impossible.
He found a tree by feel and started climbing, hand over hand, trusting his grip more than his blinded eyes.
The hiss followed him up.
Not around the tree. Not past it.
Up it.
Karna's stomach dropped as he understood, with sudden and total clarity, that whatever he thought he knew about the shape and size of the thing hunting him had been wrong from the very first sound.