Cadence took a deep breath of the fresh air, and let out a contented sigh. The biting chill of winter had finally given way to the refreshing breeze of spring, and every breath filled her lungs with the scent of budding plants and made her soul rejoice in the magic singing through the air. She felt energized, despite how late she had stayed up after sneaking out for a walk.

This far into the forest, Cadence knew she was alone. Most days the hunters would be out, crawling through the dense trees in a search for any sign of monsters, but they were all back in town today, discussing their patrol routes and what they had defeated in the course of the prior months, as they did on the first day of each season. Winter was the most dangerous time to live outside of the cities, but for those brave hunters willing to take advantage of the season, there were great rewards to be had. Now, as spring began, it was time to consolidate those gains and losses alike and plan for a new season.

Cadence was relaxed and happy. She had always preferred her own company to that of the other kids in Felisen, and wandering the woods just felt… right. It was where she was happiest. And despite her solitude, the forest was far from quiet. The slender girl was immersed in the sounds of the forest. The rattling leaves and breaking twigs caused by smaller animals scurrying through the undergrowth, the chirping and buzzing of insects flitting through the air, the songs of the birds as they glided between trees to snap up their tiny prey.

Cadence’s mother had taught her the cycles of the forest bordering their sleepy little village since she was old enough to remember. Through autumn, the magic of the forest built up, leading to an increased series of manifestations. The hunters and loggers of the village took advantage of this time to forage, collecting plump berries that gleamed with the magic they drank in, branches and logs of shimmering white wood, and golden mushrooms that never spoiled. These reagents represented a large portion of Felisen’s economy, as craftspeople and alchemists from the cities would eagerly pay for such naturally magical resources.

As the season deepened into the chill of winter, the manifestations would become more intense. That was when bramble-spawn and other magical beasts would become more common. Only skilled hunters, like Cadence’s mother, braved the wood come winter. Their efforts (when successful) not only protected the village from potentially dangerous creatures, but supplied additional rare reagents and even totem relics. The gradual magical recession of spring and the mystically barren summer months then allowed for the hunter teams to clear out any lingering manifestations before the cycle began again.

All of that to say, this was the perfect time for Cadence to slip off into the woods and satisfy a curiosity that had driven her mad for most of the past few years. Deep in the forest, more than five miles out from Felisen, was a remote region simply called “the barrens” by the locals. No one went to the barrens, outside of a single expedition each spring. That expedition included every hunter in the village, as well as nearly every gifted adult whose blessings could contribute in a dangerous situation, but even Cadence’s own mother was tight-lipped as to the actual point of the trip.

Even more mysterious was that nothing ever seemed to happen. The expedition always returned in the same condition it left in, raising yet more questions as to the point of the exercise. Cadence had never understood why exactly the barrens were so frightening, and her mother, along with every other adult in the village, refused to explain it. Any time the village children asked about them, they were brushed off.

“The barrens are a bad place.”

“It doesn’t matter why.”

“Stop asking, they’re just forbidden!”

But if they were so scary, why did the expeditions come back fine every time? Cadence wasn’t naive–she knew that her mother faced considerable danger in the course of the duties expected of everyone who had a gift of the hunter. She knew what it looked like when a hunter returned from a close encounter with a dangerous beast or an unexpected bramble-spawn. She had even attended two funerals for hunters who didn’t return from their patrols. As far as Cadence could tell, winter was far more dangerous than the barrens ever were.

That made the dangers of the barrens a mystery, the kind of mystery that Cadence couldn’t help but wonder about. Her friends growing up–or, more to the point, her peers, as she had never really been very friendly with most of them–were all willing to accept what the adults said about the barrens, to take the evasive answers at face value.

But today, Cadence would finally get her answers! It was the safest time to wander the forest. The magic was beginning to recede for the spring, and all the dangerous manifestations had been hunted by her mother and the other hunters throughout the winter. With those same hunters at the bonfire hill, Cadence could be sure she wouldn’t get caught sneaking off into the woods. The air was cool and invigorating, and her pack carried a skin of water in addition to a small loaf of hearty bread, a pair of fresh apples, and a precious little pouch of glintcaps.

Sure, she could wait just a couple more seasons. Cadence was sixteen now, old enough to accept her first gifts, and she anticipated that her mother would likely find a totem to bestow on her soon, if she hadn’t already that winter. Cadence had no doubt that once she had a totem gift and passed the trial of the hunter, she’d be let in on the mystery of the barrens–but where was the fun in simply being told the answer to a question? This was Cadence’s last chance to find the answer for herself!

The girl paused by the side of a river, fishing out an apple from her pack. She had come four miles already, and she was starting to get hungry. As she bit into the juicy fruit, she idly looked around the woods, smiling unconsciously at the simple beauty of the springtime forest. It really was a perfect day.

Cadence’s eyes caught sight of her reflection in the gentle water. She was small for her age. Even after she had hit her teenage years, when everyone told her she’d grow, she only gained a few inches of height–just enough to make what little weight she put on unnoticeable. Cadence didn’t mind though. Her mother was small too, but Ryme was the most respected hunter in Felisen. Besides, if she had gained the kind of figure some of the other girls in the village had over the past couple years, she wouldn’t be able to be Caden anymore!

Cadence grinned down at her reflection. Wearing plain, functional clothes of homespun linen, with a soft leather jerkin over the top, Cadence’s gender wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone who didn’t know her. She kept her sky blue hair cut short to add to the look. Sometimes, when the merchant caravans passed through, later in the year, Cadence would change her bearing and garb enough to slip among them as Caden, a mischievous boy who could get away with all the things the daughter of a respected hunter couldn’t.

In truth, there were days Caden felt even more natural than Cadence. But this wasn’t one of them.

On Cadence’s shoulder, next to the rougher cloth of her travelpack, rested her quiver. It had been a gift from her mother a couple years before, along with the shortbow that rested unstrung inside it. The arrows, she had fletched herself. Ryme expected her child to be self-sufficient, gifts or no gifts. Cadence had even purchased the little knife and the leaf-bladed hatchet she had used to fletch the arrows with money she earned helping out the artisans around town, and both tools rode on her belt.

Deciding to finish the rest of the apple while walking, Cadence nimbly hopped along a series of stones that just barely crested above the babbling waters of the brook, and continued on her way, treading ever deeper into the woods.

#

It was only an hour or so later that Cadence suddenly stopped. The endless rustling of the woods around her had changed in a tiny, near-imperceptible way. Cadence would have a hard time clearly explaining what she had noticed, but she knew that something was definitely wrong. The woods suddenly didn’t feel so welcoming or relaxing.

One hand slowly slipped down to her hatchet while she cautiously surveyed her surroundings. She was on a thin game trail, and the brush was heavy to every side. Cadence had just enough time to realize what all that undergrowth meant when there was rustle next to her, then a blur of motion shot toward her arm.

A burst of panic rippled through Cadence’s belly like a horde of butterflies had just burst out of their cocoons, but she was still her mother’s daughter. Quickly, the fear faded, and she wore an excited grin. For all of her practicing, this was the first time she actually got to fight something!

The vines that wrapped around her wrist were skinny, but there were quite a lot of them, and they were lined with tiny little thorns. That last part would’ve been a problem if Cadence hadn’t been wearing the hard leather armguards she used whenever she practiced her archery. Instead of digging into her skin, the bramble thorns caught on the tough material. Still, the vines were tugging insistently, threatening to tip her off balance and keeping her hand from reaching for her hatchet. Cadence frowned and leaned back against them. It was easy enough. The pulling vines weren't much stronger than an eager boy, and she had certainly fought enough of those off over the last couple years.

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Cadence turned to defiantly face the underbrush as her free hand reached for the slender knife she kept on the other side of her belt. The girl gritted her teeth, pulling on the vines until they were taut, their far end disappearing in the bushes a few feet away from her. Still grinning with adrenaline, she reached over her bound arm with her knife, and began sawing at the thin vines. They gave quickly, the top few flinging back with little bursts of green sap as she cut through them, and the bushes the vines had emerged from gave an odd whistling shriek.

“That's what I thought! Little bugger!” Cadence shouted at the bush. The finely-honed blade had cut through half the vines holding her wrist in just a few moments, but she didn’t cut herself free of the rest of them. Instead, she pivoted, placing a foot behind her, and pulled. The remaining vines weren’t strong enough to resist the motion, and after just a second’s quivering tension, the base of the thorny vines came flying out of the bush it was hiding in.

As Cadence suspected, it was a bramble-spawn. It was a tiny one though, as she had hoped, which must’ve been how the hunters missed it. If it was much bigger, Cadence had planned to just finish cutting free of the vines and run, but even without a gift, she was pretty sure she could handle such a minor threat. The core of it looked like little more than a ball of tangled vines, roots, and leaves slightly smaller than her head, though Cadence knew from her mother’s stories that there would be a bulb in the middle of the knot. That was the actual core of the thing, and what she actually had to break to kill it.

The bramble-spawn made that odd whistling noise again, and more vines shot out of the mass. Cadence had grown up hearing stories from the village hunters about the terrifying and exotic powers of the overgrown monstrous weeds that were so ubiquitous to the forest, but she was starting to think this one was too young to have anything more than the single attack it kept making with those vines.

Rather than try to bait out any other abilities it probably didn’t have, Cadence’s now-free hand grabbed her leaf-bladed hatchet from her belt, and she took a few careful steps towards the bramble-spawn. It just lashed with a few of those thorn-laced vines, clearly trying to menace the girl, but the thorns were too small to make it through even her simple leather vest and gloves, though they did succeed at poking through her woven shirt and pants, particularly around the more exposed fabric on her upper arms and legs. Even still, the scratches were barely more painful than those she had gotten from overly playful cats.

She crept closer to the bramble-spawn one step at a time, her hands held up to protect her face once she was close enough for the growth to reach that high. Then her keen bladed hatchet went to work and soon the monster didn’t have any more vines. Or at least, none to menace her with.

“Oh c’mon. I’m starting to feel bad for you now, little guy,” She muttered, watching the thing desperately force a few more little vines out of its central mass in an effort to roll itself away from Cadence. The girl sighed and, before it could get any momentum built up, swung her hatchet down. She grunted a little at the impact–while the tangle of plant matter around the weed monster’s core looked loose, it proved surprisingly dense under her hatchet, like when she hit a knot in a log.

Cadence wiggled the blade free and had just lifted it back up for another swing when the bramble-spawn surprised her. A particularly high-pitched whistle was followed by a single vine shooting out of the mass again. It caught her by surprise, and Cadence reeled back, falling on her butt as a line of scarlet pain erupted across her face. She hissed and lifted a gloved hand to the burning scratch.

While she was distracted, the little bramble-spawn made good on its escape, managing to start a rolling retreat in the underbrush. “You little bastard!” Cadence screamed after it. Desperately, she fumbled for her shortbow, but by the time she had an arrow nocked, even the rustling caused by its fleeing was gone.

Grumbling, Cadence dropped her bow and flopped onto her back, catching her breath after the brief tussle. Soon the adrenaline began to fade, and then Cadence’s exhilarated grin faltered as the stinging cuts on her arms and legs added to the burning pain on her face. Grumbling, Cadence fumbled around in her pack, eventually finding and pulling out a small soft cloth sack. Inside of it was the only reason she had been willing to try fighting the tiny bramble-spawn–a cluster of half-dozen skinny mushrooms with bright gold caps that glowed in the afternoon sunlight.

Like all the magical flora she had ever seen, the creatively named glintcap mushrooms seemed to shimmer with their own internal light, a result of the magic they had absorbed as they grew. The ambient magic that built up in the forest each year before dispersing had a wide variety of effects on the plants and animals that called the woods home. Her mother explained to her once how she believed the process worked.

“It’s all about the nature of the plants being affected,” Ryme had explained. “Most plants soak it in like ambient fertilizer to speed their growth, then the magic enhances some of their natural traits. So the big old oaks and elms turn into sturdier and more beautiful silverwoods. Shimmerberries become so packed with nutrients that a single one can sustain a hunter for a whole day, while weeds, which are already so fast growing and voracious, become hungry, choking bramble-spawn. But none of those are as important to our village as glintcap mushrooms.”

Ryme had held a cluster of the mushrooms, each about as long as Cadence’s fingers. It was the same cluster, in fact, Cadence now carried on her. “Glintcaps are filled to bursting with life magic. They can help the body heal from injuries, resist poisons, even survive disease.” Ryme’s tanned face had turned into a bitter smile. “We live in a dangerous place, Cadence, no matter what those fools in the bastion cities think. So I want you to keep these on you whenever you go into the woods, okay?”

Cadence grinned at the memory, turning the cluster of little mushrooms around in her hand. “Thanks Mom,” She muttered to herself. Then she promptly pulled a couple of the mushrooms off of the cluster and popped them in her mouth. She grimaced as she chewed–no matter how often she ate them (and she had needed them quite a few times over the years), glintcaps tasted just as vile, like sawdust soaked in the cheap ale Denning had given her a sip of one night. But still, she forced herself through, and she hadn’t even swallowed the mass down before the little pains all over her body began to tingle and itch. A few minutes later, the only evidence of Cadence’s ill-fated struggle with the bramble-spawn were the little tears in her shirt and pants and the blood she was washing off one cheek.

“Too bad I didn’t kill it though,” Cadence reflected. Killing her first monster would’ve been a fun thing to tell her mother about, and at her age, it might’ve even earned her the gift of the hunter.

Oh well. There would be other chances. And besides–at least it had been exciting!

#

Cadence felt it when she crossed into the ill-defined area of the barrens. The feeling of ambient magic changed even as the trees and bushes around her darkened. In the rest of the unnamed wood that bordered Felisen, the subdued magic of spring felt like a person at the end of a long day, tired and ready for bed but still moving about. The magic of the barrens felt more like… standing on one side of a thick, secure door, like the one that barred the root cellar in the center of town, and hearing movement on the other side. Her nose wrinkled at the odd, almost musty scent of the magic that filled the place.

Cadence’s steps slowed for the first time since her fight with the little monster, and she looked around the woods the way her mother had taught her. It wasn’t her imagination, the foliage really was different up ahead. It was mild, almost imperceptible at first, but the wood got noticeably darker the deeper she looked into the barrens. Cadence swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, but she hadn’t come all the way out here, risking her mother’s wrath, to chicken out at the very edge of the mysterious barrens.

Her steps were more careful as she proceeded, though. Her heart was pounding in her chest with an anxiety she couldn’t quite place. There was nothing around her that should be making her this nervous. Without thinking, her hands quietly pulled her hatchet from her belt. Its presence made her feel more secure. It would be wholly insufficient if she was actually attacked, but it might buy her the time to start running. Hatchet in hand, Cadence grit her teeth and proceeded deeper into the ominous barrens, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, then another, then…

Suddenly, Cadence stopped, blinking in confusion. What was she doing? She was so dead set on just moving forward that she hadn’t even been examining the surroundings for clues as to what made this place so forbidden. It was like she had forgotten anything but going deeper into the dark grove. The girl looked around wildly, suddenly struck by a disconcerting flash of panic. How far had she come?

The barrens were silent around her. No rustling rodents. No buzzing insects or singing birds. There was none of the undergrowth and loose leaf detritus that perpetually coated the forest floor like the rest of the wood, though the trees around her weren’t evergreens. In fact, Cadence couldn’t place what they were, exactly. Their trunks were thinner than she was used to, seeming to curve and twist in a troubling way. Her eyes traced the weirdly sinuous trunks up to their branches, which were far higher than they were on most trees.

Those branches were just as twisted as the trunks they sprung from, and they had wrapped around each other in a distinctly unnatural way. Dark wood and black leaves formed a canopy so dense that barely a trace of sunlight could filter through. That was why it was so dark here, why there was no undergrowth. Nothing could grow with only such dim light to sustain it. That at least meant no bramble-spawn, but it was still unsettling, leaving only the spread out tree trunks and the dark dirt they grew out of.

“That must be it,” Cadence breathed to herself. Her voice was soft, but it still helped to break the silence and take a little bit of the edge off of her anxiety. “These trees must have been some sort of magical manifestation. They just… devour light instead of giving it off like a brightbush.. Yeah… yeah, that makes sense.”

That was enough of an answer for Cadence. The barrens must be host to a dangerous form of magic, different from the rest of the wood. Even if there were no weeds to turn into bramble-spawn, Cadence had no doubt that the aura of dread that filled the darkened grove was a product of the magical trees. That dark magic might even be dense enough to make more powerful monsters, the way really bad blizzards could. It was time to go.

The teenager had just made up her mind and turned around when there was a resounding bellow, the roar of a beast larger and angrier than any she had ever heard.

And it was between Cadence and the way she had come.

She didn’t think. She just turned back around and ran from that terrifying sound, deeper into the barrens.