Chapter III The Forest of a Thousand Souls
«Sometimes guilt weighs more heavily on the soul than death itself before one's eyes.»
The nights were the worst.
During the day, at least there was movement. Walking, searching for food, keeping the sword sharp, choosing a path among the many that led nowhere. The body had tasks to fulfill, and while it fulfilled them, the mind could be kept at bay, locked in the cage of routine like a dangerous animal that should not be let loose.
But the nights belonged to memory.
Without the tent that for months had been his only shelter —abandoned along with the mercenaries' camp, along with the corpses and the graves and the smell of blood that winter would take weeks to erase— Estus slept where he could. Under rocks, among roots, in the hollow of fallen trunks. The cold was a constant companion, a presence that worked its way into his bones and did not leave even when he managed to light a fire.
And when he closed his eyes, the voices came.
Frederik's: «Brother, help me, please...» Abigail's: «If you keep this up, you're going to die alone.» His father's, drowning in his own blood. His mother's, pleading for a mercy that never came. And beneath all of them, like a bass note in a symphony of nightmares, the dry sound of the guillotine falling. Over and over and over again.
With time —days, weeks; he had stopped counting— Estus covered distances that would once have seemed impossible. He crossed frozen fields where snow stretched as far as the eye could see, passed through abandoned villages whose inhabitants had fled from some war whose name no one remembered, walked past frozen corpses at the edges of roads that no one had bothered to bury. The world, beyond the empire's walls, was a landscape of beautiful desolation: vast, white, silent as a tomb.
When the walls of Ignis finally disappeared behind the horizon, Estus felt something strange. Not relief, exactly. More like the sensation of having cut a rope that had tied him to a place he did not want to be part of. The empire, with its castles and its plazas and its guillotines, was left behind like a memory he chose not to revisit.
Before him stretched a field of wildflowers covered by a thin layer of frost. Petals peeked out beneath the ice like prisoners behind glass, frozen in the act of blooming, and that image stirred something in him he could not identify. It was not sadness nor nostalgia. It was perhaps the recognition that beauty could exist even here, even now, in a world that had dedicated itself with determination to destroying everything beautiful.
A few kilometers ahead, according to the maps he had memorized in his previous life —when books were still accessible to him, before books had cost him a brother— a forest began. Dense and ancient, of enormous pines that rose like columns of an abandoned cathedral, whose canopies interlocked so densely that sunlight barely touched the ground.
They called it the Forest of a Thousand Souls.
The name was not metaphorical. That woodland had been a battlefield during the endless war between the empires. Thousands had died there, and their bodies had been absorbed by the earth, feeding the roots of the pines, nourishing a forest that grew atop a cemetery. It was said that at night, whispers could be heard among the branches. It was said that the trees remembered.
Estus did not believe in ghosts. He had seen enough real death not to need invented death. But when he entered the forest and the light reduced itself to pale threads filtering through the canopy, when the silence became so thick he could feel it against his skin, he understood why that place had the reputation it had.
There was something there. Not ghosts, not spirits. Something more subtle: a presence, a density in the air, as if the forest itself were alive and conscious and was watching him with an ancient, patient curiosity.
He decided to stay. At least a couple of nights, while he decided which way to go next. He found a natural clearing among the pines, sheltered from the wind on three sides by a semicircle of thick trunks, and began setting up a rudimentary camp. He gathered firewood. He lit a fire. The orange glow of the flames invaded the forest's shadows, creating shapes that danced between the trees like curious specters.
With the sword —that long, heavy sword he never let go of even to sleep, that was an extension of his arm and more faithful a companion than any human being— he felled one of the nearest pines. The blows echoed through the woodland like the heartbeat of a wooden heart, and snow from the branches fell on his shoulders as he discharged his frustration, blow after blow. He did not seem to feel the cold. He did not seem to feel anything.
When the trunk gave way and fell with a crash that startled the birds from the canopies, Estus returned to the fire. He drove pieces of meat onto sharpened sticks and placed them over the flames. He sat. He stretched his hands toward the warmth. And for a moment —only a moment— something resembling calm descended on him.
It did not last.
A howl shattered the silence. Distant at first, then closer. Another answered from a different direction. And another. And another.
Estus did not move. He remained seated, relaxed, with the posture of someone listening to falling rain. He knew what it was. Wolves. The deep forests were full of them, especially in winter, when prey was scarce and hunger made them bold.
But when he saw the first one between the trees, he understood those were no ordinary wolves.
It was enormous. The size of a young bear, with thick, greyish fur that blended with the forest's shadows. Its eyes gleamed in the firelight, and its half-open jaws revealed fangs the length of a finger.
And it was not alone.
They moved between the trees with a coordination that betrayed intelligence, surrounding him slowly, closing the circle with the patience of predators that know their prey has no escape.
Estus began to count them.
One. Three. Five. Seven. Nine.
He analyzed their movements. He identified the leader: the largest, a black-furred male that kept to the back, watching, waiting for the others to do the dirty work.
—Come then... —he murmured, and a smile that had nothing human in it spread across his face—. Come.
He put on his helmet. He took the sword.
They attacked all at once.
The first leapt straight for his chest. Estus received it with a horizontal cut that severed its forelegs in midair. The animal hit the ground with a howl that was more surprise than pain, bleeding out onto the snow.
The second received the blade from below. The steel passed through its snout, separating bone, flesh and tongue in an instant. It fell still alive, half its face split open, convulsing in sounds that barely resembled those of an animal.
The snow turned red.
Estus kept moving. Not with elegance —nothing he did had elegance— but with a brutal, mechanical efficiency, like a steel storm that makes no distinction between one target and the next. Every blow was lethal or incapacitating. No flourishes, no unnecessary movements. Only the cold geometry of death.
But then he felt something.
A presence. Different from the wolves, different from anything he had ever felt before. It was like a tingling at the back of his neck, like the sensation of being watched by something that did not belong to the world he knew.
The distraction cost him.
One of the wolves lunged at his arm and sank its fangs in. The pain was immediate, a hot stab that rose from the wrist to the shoulder. Estus did not cry out. He did not retreat. With his free hand, he grabbed the animal by the throat. His fingers —fingers accustomed to gripping steel and digging graves in frozen earth— sank into the fur, into the skin, into the flesh. And with a brutal jerk, he tore the trachea from the beast.
The body fell convulsing. Blood soaked his forearm.
Six remained. But none of them attacked.
The leader advanced.
It was larger than the others. Its black fur absorbed the firelight as if it were made of solid shadow. It growled as it approached, a low, continuous sound that made the air vibrate.
Estus removed the chest armor with a quick gesture and let it fall onto the snow. He would fight unprotected. Vulnerable. But free. Faster.
To provoke the animal, he picked up the mutilated snout of one of the fallen wolves and tossed it into the air, catching it with one hand, tossing it again. A deliberate taunt, calculated to ignite the leader's rage.
It worked.
The black wolf lunged with a roar that reverberated between the trees. It sought Estus's exposed chest, that expanse of skin and scars offered as an irresistible target.
It did not reach him.
Estus slid beneath the animal at the last instant, using the snow as a sliding surface, and in the same movement —a single fluid arc of steel and will— drove the sword upward, under the wolf's jaw.
The blade passed through the skull.
The animal fell dead on top of him, its weight crushing, its hot blood soaking the snow and Estus's skin. In its last attempt to bite, the wolf's jaws had torn the helmet from his head, and its fangs had passed centimeters from his throat.
Estus remained a moment beneath the animal's body, breathing with difficulty, staring at the pine canopy above his head. The sword still embedded in the beast's skull. The remaining wolves, leaderless, retreated between the trees and disappeared.
Silence returned.
A different silence than before. Heavier. More expectant. As if the entire forest were holding its breath.
He pushed the carcass off him. He stood. He shook off the snow and someone else's blood with the same mechanical gesture one uses to shake off dust.
He pulled the sword from the black wolf's body. He rested it against the ground while he cleaned the blade with his forearm.
He sat again beside the fire, which miraculously was still burning, and bandaged the wound on his arm with a strip of cloth torn from his own clothing.
He did not think about what he had just done. He did not analyze it or judge it. Violence, for him, was as natural as breathing, and just as empty.
He took a flower he had picked from the field at the forest's edge. A small, withered and frozen thing that, for some reason he himself did not understand, he had kept folded in his clothing. He brought it to his nose with the hand covered by the metal gauntlet. It smelled of almost nothing. Of cold. Of memory.
And while he looked at it, while the echoes of Abigail's words and the ghost of Frederik's smile competed for space in his head, he did not know that something was watching him from the shadows. He only sensed it.
Something that had been there before the wolves. Something that had watched him fight, kill, survive. Something that now, with a curiosity not entirely human, decided to step into the light.
«Even when the hands are stained with blood, love is the only thing capable of reminding the soul that it still deserves to live.»
The presence emerged from between the trees with the softness of the moon appearing from behind a cloud.
At first, Estus thought it was a woman. A human who had gotten lost in the forest: perhaps a refugee from some destroyed village, perhaps a thief, perhaps another mercenary looking to join a band that no longer existed.
But when the firelight reached her, he knew he was wrong.
She wore a white and delicate cloth, embroidered with golden lines that seemed to trace patterns too complex for the human eye, as if each thread told a story in a language forgotten millennia ago. The cloth wrapped a slender and refined body with the naturalness of a second skin. Her hair descended like a pale cascade, blonde and luminous, so long it nearly grazed the ground, and it shone beneath the moon with a radiance that did not seem to belong to this world.
But it was the ears that confirmed it. Long, pointed, extending beyond the hair like willow leaves. And the eyes: a blue so deep they seemed to contain oceans in miniature, with an ancient serenity in them, the serenity of one who has watched centuries pass and knows she will watch many more.
Estus rubbed his eyes. Not from surprise —he had lost the ability to be surprised years ago— but from the mechanical need to confirm that what he was seeing was real. According to the books he had read in another life, before books had cost him everything, elves were an extinct race. Myths. Legends written on pages that nobles kept as curiosities and scholars cited as fables.
And yet, here was one. Real. Alive. Looking at him with the same curiosity with which a naturalist observes a species he believed extinct.
He set the flower aside. He stood. He drew the sword.
His posture was relaxed, but his eyes were not. The eyes said what the posture tried to hide: that he was exhausted, wounded, and that the last thing he needed was another creature invading the only moment of quiet he had had in weeks.
—An elf... —he murmured.
—An elven woman —she corrected, and her voice was like a musical note in the middle of the forest's silence. There was something in that tone —a trace of ancestral pride, a superiority that was not arrogance but simple acknowledgment of antiquity— that made it clear she belonged to a different order of the world—. Curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to know what a human was doing here. None have ever stayed in these places.
The elf noticed the drawn sword and slowly raised one hand, palm open, in a universal gesture of peace that was probably older than any empire.
—I have not come to harm you. I simply found you in my path.
—Then leave before I regret it.
His tone was sharp, final. But there was something in the situation that unsettled him: he had not sensed her approaching. He, who slept with the sword in his hand, who could detect a man's footsteps fifty meters away through the vibration of the ground, had perceived absolutely nothing until she chose to reveal herself.
That unnerved him more than any direct threat.
—Tell me, human, what brought you here?
The elf had not moved. She remained standing several paces away, between the firelight and the shadow of the pines, as if she existed on the threshold between two worlds. She did not seem afraid, but she held an elegant caution, the caution of one who respects a wounded animal because she knows that is when it is most dangerous.
—That is none of your concern. If you don't want to get hurt, leave.
The threat was real. Estus had no desire to kill anyone —that desire had long since transformed into something more resembling inertia— but if she provoked him, if she made a movement he interpreted as aggression, his body would react before his mind, as it always did. The sword would move and then he would stand looking at another body on the ground, wondering if he'd had a choice.
But the elf was persistent. Or curious. Or both, which in her race perhaps amounted to the same thing.
She did not approach immediately. She stayed where she was for several minutes that stretched in the forest's silence. Watching him. Studying the fresh wounds from the fight with the wolves, the blood staining his arms, the animal carcasses scattered around the clearing.
—There is something in your face —she said at last, tilting her head in a way that was curiously animal-like, like a bird examining something it does not understand—. You are a warrior, aren't you?
Estus did not respond. Not because he did not want to, but because he did not know what to answer. A warrior? The word sounded too noble for what he was. Warriors fought for causes, for flags, for ideals. He fought because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
The elf took a step closer. Then another. Each movement was slow, deliberate, as if she were walking on thin ice. She watched him with those blue eyes that seemed capable of seeing things beyond the surface.
When she stood before him, close enough that Estus could make out the design of the golden lines on her dress, she raised a hand and touched the armor on his chest. It was a soft gesture, almost reverent, like someone touching a relic.
Estus should have pushed her away. He should have stepped back, shouted, brandished the sword. That was what he did. That was what he always did when someone came too close: destroy the proximity before it could become something more dangerous than an attack.
But he did not.
There was something in her —he could not name it, could not even comprehend it— that produced an effect he had never experienced. A kind of calm. Not the calm of exhaustion nor the empty calm that followed violence, but something different: a stillness that seemed to come from outside, filtering through his skin and reaching places in his mind that had been locked shut for years.
—What are you doing? —he said, taking her by the wrist. His voice was hard, but the action came too late. She had already touched him—. I am not an object you can touch.
The elf was not frightened. She looked up at him —she was small, much smaller than him, and the difference in size between them was almost comical— with an expression that oscillated between curiosity and something more, something Estus could not interpret.
—I see you are someone distrustful, of few words. What happened to you to make you this way?
He ignored the question. Because the question was a door, and behind that door were things he did not want to see.
—A man, in this kind of forest, where years ago there was only destruction... What brings you here?
She smiled. An easy, almost childlike smile that contrasted disconcertingly with the gravity of everything else. And then, before he could react, before the reflexes that had killed nine wolves and countless men could activate, her hands touched his face.
The contact was soft. Barely a brush of fingers on his cheeks.
But the effect was devastating.
The elf's expression changed in an instant. The smile vanished as if it had never existed. Her eyes opened —truly opened, as if until that moment she had only been looking and now, for the first time, she was seeing— and what she found in that contact tore from her a whisper that was half astonishment, half horror:
—Oh... God... You... How much longer are you going to carry a weight that is not yours to bear?
Tears sprang from those blue eyes. Silent, incongruous with her serene expression, as if the weeping came from somewhere deeper than emotions, from a level of perception that humans do not possess. Through the simple contact of her hands on his skin, she had felt everything. Not the details —not the names, not the dates, not the places— but the essence: the crushing weight of guilt, the petrified loneliness, the pain compressed beneath layer upon layer of indifference that threatened to burst.
Estus looked at her in silence. He looked at her for a time he could not measure: seconds? Minutes? The world had stopped around them, or perhaps had merely become irrelevant. The fire crackled. The snow fell. But none of that existed anymore.
That touch had ignited something inside him. Something that had been extinguished for years, buried so deep he had forgotten it existed. It was as if a hand had found a door at the bottom of a dark room and opened it, and behind that door was everything: Frederik, his parents, Abigail, the fifty-some nameless faces of men he had killed, the cold nights, the empty mornings, the years of walking aimlessly through a world that had nothing to offer him except more blood.
Something in him leaned toward her. It was involuntary, unconscious, a movement his body initiated without consulting his mind. His face moved closer to hers, slowly, as if drawn by a gravity with no name.
What was this he felt?
What had changed in him to commit such an act?
Kiss a stranger? Why? He had never kissed anyone. Not even that night with Abigail, when their bodies had sought each other in the darkness, had there been a kiss. That had been friction and heat, animal need. But this was something else. This was...
Halfway there, his mind woke. Like an alarm that activates when the danger is too great, his consciousness broke through the silence and screamed what it had been screaming for years: Do not get close. Do not feel. Do not let anyone in.
He pushed her away.
—Step back, I told you...
The words came out, but his body did not fully obey. He could not move. He could not pull away. Something kept him there, pinned to that moment, as if a force greater than his will had decided that this time he would not run.
Their gazes connected in the darkness of the night. They looked at each other the way two people look who want to say something but do not know the language. A silence more eloquent than any word.
And then, without understanding why, something in him broke.
Not gradually. Not with the dignity of a controlled collapse. It broke the way a dam breaks when the water has been pushing too long: all at once, without warning, without remedy.
—What did you do to me? —he exclaimed, pulling away with violence. Confusion. Fear. A fear that had nothing to do with death or battle —those fears he had tamed long ago— but with something infinitely worse: the fear of feeling.
He was sweating cold. His hands were trembling. Those hands that had torn the trachea from a wolf without trembling could not now keep still.
—What did you do to me?! Say it!
He struck his fist against the trunk of the nearest pine. Once. Twice. Three times. The blow resonated in the silent forest like dry thunder. He clutched the rough bark to keep from falling, because his legs had turned to water and the ground moved beneath his feet like the deck of a ship in a storm.
The elf watched him. She did not understand that sudden violence, that collapse of a man who had seemed made of stone, and in her blue eyes there was a mixture of compassion and bewilderment that made her look, for the first time, as lost as he was.
—No... I didn't do anything to you... —she answered, with a small, honest voice.
Estus, with unsteady steps, picked up the sword he had dropped —when had he dropped it? He never dropped the sword, never— and, violently, drove it into the ground with the edge pointed at the elf's throat.
—Speak! What did you do to me? —he demanded, but his voice was trembling. And that was what terrified him most: that his voice trembled. That his body betrayed him. That everything he had built —the wall, the invisible armor, the indifference that was his only defense against a world that had taken everything from him— was crumbling before a stranger in a forgotten forest.
The elf's face went pale. Tears fell down her cheeks, tears that were not of fear but of something Estus could not understand: empathy. Pure and ancient empathy, the capacity to feel another's pain as one's own, a gift —or a curse— of her race.
She could see his suffering. She felt it clinging to his flesh, embedded in every scar, in every line of his face, in the tension of his shoulders, as if everything that man had lived was a second skin he could not remove.
Even knowing she stood before someone who could kill her —who had killed, who would kill again— she extended her hand and pushed the sword away from her throat with a softness that was almost maternal.
And then she saw it.
What no one had seen. What he himself had forbidden himself from showing during eight years of blood and silence.
Estus's eyes filled with tears.
They were not the tears of a defeated warrior nor of a man seeking pity. They were the tears of a child. A sixteen-year-old child who could not cry when they beheaded his brother because crying meant being discovered and dying. A child who did not cry when he killed his parents because the shock sealed his ducts like cement. A child who grew up without crying, who became a man without crying, who killed and killed and killed without crying, and who now, after so many years, after so much blood and so much silence, was crumbling.
The sobs came out of his chest like caged animals that finally find the door open. Broken, ragged sounds that were lost between the trees of the forest, echoing among the branches like the sound of all the tears he should have shed and did not.
He felt tired.
Sickened by being who he was.
By having been born into the world he was born into.
By not having been able to save Frederik.
By having killed his parents.
By having killed Abigail.
By having killed so many that he no longer remembered their faces.
He blamed everyone. His brother for dying. His parents for making him what he was. Those who governed from their castles while the world burned at their feet. And above all, he blamed himself. Because in the end, it was always his hand that held the sword. Always his fingers that were stained red.
—Why...? —he spoke brokenly, and the words came out shattered, like glass breaking as it falls—. First my brother... then my parents... those people... I took their lives as if I owned them...
Tear after tear. Torment after torment.
—Is it not enough? What more do they want? Tell me! What more do they want?!
The elf listened. She did not speak. She did not try to console him with empty phrases or with the wisdom of her ancient race. She only listened, because sometimes —and she knew this with the certainty of one who has lived for centuries— the only thing a person needs is for someone to listen to the sound of their soul breaking without trying to fix it.
She let him cry.
She let him fall.
It was the first time she had seen a human being so broken. She had known mortals in her long life —curious merchants, strayed soldiers, fearless explorers— but none like this. None who carried a weight so monstrous with such silent determination.
When the sobs calmed —not because the pain was exhausted, but because the human body has a limit for everything, even for suffering— the elf approached. She wrapped her arms around his waist, because he was too tall and she too small to reach any higher, and embraced him.
Pressing her ear against the chest of that shattered man, she heard the beating of his heart. An electric sensation ran through her, raising the hair on her skin, climbing her spine like a shiver that was more revelation than physical reaction.
—That weight... that presence... —she murmured, with a soft and calm tone that seemed to come from very far away, from a place prior to language.
She stroked his wavy hair, his cheeks, his chin covered by a short beard damp with tears. Every gesture was slow, deliberate, as if she were deactivating traps around a minefield.
She moved the sword from his hand. And that was the hardest part, because Estus clung to it like a child clings to his most precious toy, as if that blade were the only thing separating him from the abyss. But the elf was patient, and in the end the fingers opened, and the sword fell onto the snow with a dull sound.
He was only a twenty-four-year-old man yielding before a stranger, yet one who had made him crumble simply by being there.
The elf took his face in both hands. She looked into his eyes —those eyes reddened by weeping, swollen, exhausted, the eyes of someone who has stopped fighting against himself— and smiled. A smile that was not joy nor compassion nor pity, but something older: recognition. As if in looking at him, she could see something he could not. Something that perhaps only reveals itself when all the walls have fallen.
—It's all right... it's passed now... —she whispered.
With slow gestures, she unfastened what remained of the armor and set it aside, like someone undressing a wounded person before treating them. There was no desire in her hands, not yet. Only the need to remove the layers —of metal, of leather, of years of solitude— that separated him from the world.
And when the last tear fell, when silence settled over the forest again like a bird returning to its nest, something happened that neither of them had planned, nor expected, nor even imagined.
They kissed.
It was not a kiss of passion or desire. It was something stranger and deeper: two solitudes that found each other in the darkness and decided, for an instant, to stop being alone. Two souls who had no reason to trust one another, but who, in the absolute absence of anything else —in that empty, cold and soulless forest, where thousands had died and the earth still remembered their cries— chose the only alternative to destruction.
They chose each other.
What followed was slow, and tender, and desperate, and silent. There were no words, because words belong to the rational world and this was not rational. It was something more primitive, more true: the instinct of two broken beings who find in the other the missing piece, if only for one night, even if tomorrow everything returns to what it was.
Two strange souls bound by a destiny they had not yet understood.
An intimate moment in a place where intimacy was a heresy.
And when it ended, when silence returned for the last time and the night closed its fist over the Forest of a Thousand Souls, they both stayed there, wrapped in one another, breathing at the same rhythm, as if the universe had decided to grant them a truce.
Only one night.
To create something new in a place where everything else had died.
⁂
When Estus woke the next day, the cold was the first thing he felt.
He was inside the hollow of an enormous tree, covered with blankets he did not remember having, sheltered from the winter wind with a care that did not seem to belong to this world. The dawn light filtered between the branches in golden threads that illuminated motes of dust suspended in the air.
He was alone.
There was no one else.
He poked his head out of the hollow, blinking against the light, and what he found was his armor arranged neatly to one side, each piece clean and ordered with a meticulousness he never had.
But of her —of the elf, of that impossible creature that had stepped out from between the trees and pulled from him something he had believed dead— there was no trace. No footprints in the snow. No scent of her presence. Nothing, except the echo of a contact that his skin still remembered and that his mind was already beginning to question.
—Was it a dream? —he thought, trying to fit the pieces together as if half of them were missing.
He stood motionless for a moment, looking at the place where she had been. Trying to remember. Trying not to remember. Oscillating between the need to cling to what he had felt and the instinct to bury it as he buried everything else.
In the end, as always, instinct won.
He dressed. He put on the armor piece by piece, with mechanical, precise movements. He took the sword —his companion, his curse, the extension of an arm that only knew how to destroy— and sheathed it at his back.
And he walked.