The forest was a series of grays and blues for her, the air unnaturally still. Wary. Like a layer of electric tension draped across her shoulders. Only the pull of their breaths and the rustle of their steps among the leaf litter disturbed the air. She was reminded of Abiermar—finding the bodies, moon shining on blood, on mangled flesh, the way the stablehand’s face had been unrecognizable. The unearthly way the demon had unfolded from the ceiling, its poison barb gleaming in the dark as slick as a scorpion’s sting.

A game trail opened up, then led into a second. She ducked and pressed its branches to the side. Twigs pulled across her skin, skittered and scratched over her bracers and pauldrons. A spiderweb slung across her shoulder like the touch of a ghost. The prince followed in her shadow, smaller, taking her lead. As her woodcraft fed into her intuition, the fresh scent of pine and soil rose to her senses, water dampening the air close by.

The atmosphere hung around them. Quiet. Watchful.

All too soon, the smell of death came to her.

It was one of the fey horses. Ripped apart and strung across the ground in a grotesque, violent manner, what was left of its coat practically glowing against the forest floor, so pale was it. Blood splattered and smeared parts of its hair, muscle and viscera a mass of darkness against the leaf litter below its stomach, the harder slopes of its saddle juxtaposed into the mess. Several ribs jutted up, gleaming in the filtered light of the crescent sliver of a moon. Its head and neck lay limp on the ground, eyes closed as if in sleep. Leaf litter clung to strands of its mane.

Though parts of it steamed, its corpse had already been cooled by the air.

Her jaw locked as emotion threatened to choke her throat. She wrestled it down and forced her gaze to slide over it, calculating, dispassionate.

A quick kill. Violent. Near ripped in two. Three ripping teeth marks in its haunch brought the image of the hellhound’s jaws to her mind.

Two of them, most likely.

The horse’s rider was nowhere to be found.

“No sign of them,” she said, turning her attention back to the surroundings, skimming over the soil and tree trunks that faced them. The air lay silent around them, the forest still. So quiet, it felt like the entire world was holding its breath.

A light breeze shifted through the trees, bringing the first few tinges of smoke in the air with it. She frowned as her mind followed them, the scent glowing in her woodcraft senses like cooling iron in a dark forge room.

Up ahead, the forest felt… different. Hard. Hot. Except… She tilted her head, trying to reach through the connections with her woodcraft, but grasping only the bare minimum—like a root touching a different type of soil, or a person walking into a crowd of strangers. Still able to see, but the tone felt off. Unfamiliar.

“What’s wrong?” Nales’ eyes met hers, his frown a mirror of hers.

“Nothing. It’s—” She clamped her mouth shut and gave her head a small shake. No, keeping him out wouldn’t help anything. And, as much as she hated to admit it, he had already proven himself useful, especially when it came to matters involving demons.

“My woodcraft is acting up,” she admitted.

Given his education, he should have a good idea of what that meant. Plus, he’d seen her use it several times already.

“We’re going in blind?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I can still see things, but it feels off. It’s hard to connect.”

She winced. It jangled at her senses, kept slipping and sliding. It felt as if two images kept climbing into each other—what had the fey said? About ‘disruptions’? Like two places running together, as if the land itself had been sliced and transplanted?

That was precisely what it felt like.

She tilted her head, searching, trying to feel through the forest the way she normally could. The frown on her face deepened.

One spot in particular stood out to her. Where the rest was a background noise to her senses, this had a quiet, glow-like feel. Closer than the rest.

She grasped Nales’ wrist and pulled him forward again. “Come on. This way.”

He resisted, briefly—she felt the hesitation in his arm—but followed along, quiet and tense.

In another hundred yards, the ground suddenly diverged.

Both of her eyebrows shot up as the disturbance came into view.

“What the… fuck?”

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It was as if someone had taken two places and attempted to shove them together like old pie crusts. The earth was jagged and rough at the seam, pushed up in places, a mix of the darker forest on one side and a harder, drier type of soil on the other.

She squinted, trying to make sense of it. It still jangled in her woodcraft as wrong, but seeing it in person made the sensation slide.

“Is this what the fey were talking about? The ‘disruptions’?”

“It would explain the gate flare we saw that night. And verify their theories.”

Nales’ tone was quiet and low. She could feel him by her side, his body as still and wary as hers.

She kept her mouth shut, feeling the spark of anger flare within her—she was still pissed off at him, however unreasonable it was—and instead turned her focus to the area itself.

It was rough, lighter-colored. Hard and compacted, with a heavier mix of rock and sand than the normal, springy loam of the rest of the forest, a different mix of minerals, and it had a dry, acidic tinge to it. The air above it also felt dry and a touch acidic, as if something in the soil exhumed pieces of atmosphere like a foul smell.

Her fingers curled back like claws.

“It’s definitely foreign,” she said. “I can sense demon here, too, though the smell is faint.”

The sulfur, at least, she could smell. It seemed to be coming from the soil itself, which might partially explain its lighter color. It seemed to exude it, the same way it made the air drier. It pricked at her skin like a miasma, almost visible in the surroundings. Underneath hung the distinct odor of rotting blood and viscera that seemed to come with them.

“Perhaps one came over with the land.” The prince’s eyes moved back and forth, human-blind but doing their best to survey the land in the dark. “Any blood?”

“Hard to say. That tree’s been hit, though.”

She made a gesture to the side, where the seam ripped right across the angled trunk of an older poplar. The scent of sticky sap almost overpowered the sulfur she smelled, and the wound at its base stood out like a shock of white, half-ripped and splintered through—as if someone had carved out a chunk with their bare knuckles rather than a saw, or kicked it out.

Other bits jumped out at her now that she’d noticed it—roots ripped all along the seam, a log near torn in two, branches displaced. Part of the scene looked as though a drunk castle groundskeeper had taken a pair of clippers to a segment, just to get it out of his way. Cleared right in a specific area—which told her that the cut, or transplant, or whatever it was, was not confined to the ground. They just hadn’t noticed it in the air as much, due to its fluid nature.

But yes, there was a distinct hole in the canopy where this clearing stood.

Gods alive. What happened to the worlds?

She blew out a breath. Nothing good, that was for sure. But she suspected the prince was onto something.

The gates definitely had something to do with it.

“Let’s keep going,” she said. “There’s something bigger up ahead. Similar to this, but I can’t get a focus on it.”

This patch of earth still jangled at her, but the sensation had played down once she’d set eyes and feet on it. The other, however, still rolled in her mind like a batch of raw, wet cotton.

Beyond, a much larger presence filled the back of her mind.

The demon lord? No, probably not. This felt more like a place than a person.

Once again, she took his wrist and pulled him forward.

They found a second horse a quarter mile away, similarly butchered, its guts spilling down the slope in a grotesque tumble, as if something had caught it mid-stride. This time, they found signs of struggle—flattened earth, scuffs, bent and broken branches, the black glisten of demon blood partway up the trunk of an ash. She almost gagged at the overpowering stench of rot and sulfur.

Fear spooled in her gut like fraying wire. The closer they got, the more the world seemed to tremble in her woodcraft. Little fluctuations, like the flutter of moth wings, pulling at her skin, eating away at her nerves like ants on wires. She couldn’t help the tension that clamped her jaw as they drew closer, and by some unspoken agreement, both she and Nales slid into a more careful approach.

Tension pricked at her skin like an approaching stormfront.

Then, they found the first demon.

The hellhound hadn’t been mauled like the two horses—in fact, judging by the blood on its mouth, it had likely been doing the mauling—but she recognized the clean cuts that marked its sides.

Blades. Most likely fey.

Hope sprung in her chest.

Maybe they were still alive.

Maybe they had won.

A jittery bundle of nerves and excitement ran through her, but she suppressed the shiver before it could enter her muscles. She moved forward, leading Nales on at a faster pace, unable to conceal the tension that ran through her. She could feel the fear tremble through her gut, the way it hijacked her nerves. Her left hand went to the hilt of her blade, ready to unsheathe it, finding some calm in holding the weapon she’d trained with for years.

After another ten minutes, they came to the edge of a clearing where the forest began to slope into the funnel of the river valley. She pulled Nales down beside her, next to a bush for cover as she surveyed the changes.

At first, it was hard to make sense of what, precisely, her eyes were telling her. Half the valley had been mauled—a big trench of earth cut through its center as if the talon of an extremely large bird had scratched through, digging deep enough to uproot trees, rip up sod, and scratch the rocks below. Temdin, it looked as if a child had gotten to it and used the valley for a game of matchsticks.

And beyond it…

Well, the river valley where Ulchris sat was, quite simply, gone.