Over the next hour, I pushed deeper into the forest, cloaked beneath the towering canopies and tangled embrace of brush. The sunlight grew thinner here, reduced to flickers of dull red that barely reached the moss-covered floor. Silence reigned, broken only by the occasional creak of trees or the soft crunch of my own steps.
I wasn't necessarily looking for danger. I was looking for children first—or at least, what remained of them. I can always come back for the monster.
It had been hours since I left Port Lenning, and with every mile, the forest felt less like a place and more like a separate world—quiet, festering, ancient. My boots crunched over broken twigs and pressed into soggy earth. Vines tugged at my legs. Still, I pressed on, eyes sharp, instincts on edge.
Then, I saw her.
Across a narrow break in the trees, nestled awkwardly in the clutch of a thorn bush, lay the small figure of a child. Her body was still, unmoving, draped over the brambles as if she'd simply fallen there and never gotten up. The forest around her was dead silent.
I held back, watching for a moment.
There was no movement. No breath. No signs of life. Just a soft buzz of flies hovering in the thick air.
I approached slowly, the weight of the moment pressing down on my shoulders like a storm about to break. The closer I got, the more the smell hit me—dense and foul, the unmistakable stench of rot. I drew my sword and used its tip to gently flip the body over.
She was a girl. Maybe nine. Her face had begun to collapse inward, skin shriveled and peeling back to expose teeth and brittle fragments of bone beneath. Her frame was shockingly thin, her limbs starved down to little more than sticks beneath torn clothes. Thorn scratches crisscrossed her arms and legs like dried red ink on paper.
There were no wounds. No blood. No signs of a struggle. Just... emptiness. A slow, cruel wasting.
Starvation.
The people of Port Lenning must carry the weight of this like a chain around their hearts. But I reminded myself—this isn't real. The grief, the suffering, the innocent dead... they were all constructs in a world built by an author's pen. My purpose was to guard the story, not mourn its tragedies.
And yet, I couldn't look at her for more than a few seconds.
I sheathed my sword and stepped back, but a dark smear on her arm caught my eye. It was thick, tar-like—almost black, and glossy under the faint light that filtered through the branches.
Instinct kicked in. I raised my wrist and activated the holowatch.
A soft chime broke the quiet, followed by a ripple of blue light. I angled the scan toward the substance. The watch hesitated for a few seconds, then displayed a diagnostic reading:
[Hestromonacicide]
Known locally as The Ink of Death, this nerve agent is produced by an unidentified creature inhabiting the Green Woods.
All contact should be strictly avoided. Side effects range from headaches and nausea to hallucinations and total loss of motor control.
For emergency protocols, see entry 386.
I took an involuntary step back, suddenly hyper-aware of my proximity to the girl's corpse. I checked myself for any signs of contamination—no burns, no numbness, no creeping sickness in my limbs.
Lucky. This time.
I looked back at the girl, lying twisted in the thorns that had shredded her skin. A thread of sorrow passed through me—not the deep, paralyzing kind, but more like a brief flicker. A human reflex.
What kind of author creates a world where a child dies like this?
What twisted narrative required a fate so cruel?
There was no answer waiting for me. Only more forest. More silence.
I turned away, brushing a hand over my sleeve to deactivate the watch. The blue glow vanished, and the shadows seemed to deepen again around me.
But I didn't get far.
Just beyond the undergrowth, the trees gave way to a wider clearing—and the breath caught in my throat.
Children. Dozens of them.
No—corpses.
Strewn across the clearing like broken dolls, their small bodies were in various states of decay. Some slumped over roots or propped against trunks, others collapsed mid-crawl as if they had died, desperately trying to escape something that offered no escape. Ragged clothing. Hollow eyes. Emptiness.
I didn't move.
It wasn't just the horror of it. It was the scale. The sheer number of them.
A massacre. Or something worse—something slow.
I stepped forward, each footfall measured and quiet, as if afraid to disturb the dead. The same dark substance—Hestromonacicide—was present here too, smeared across bark and pooled in the dirt like spilled ink from some divine pen gone mad. The air shimmered faintly. I reached up to my temple. Dizziness pressed in for a moment, but passed.
Don't breathe too deep.
This was no battlefield. It was a graveyard. A warning written in bodies. A silence loud enough to crush thought.
Some part of me—the part that still remembered training, protocol, the Citadel—urged me to keep moving. To document, observe, and leave.
But a deeper part of me, something buried, asked why.
Why create this horror?
Why let children die in fear, abandoned and forgotten in a cursed wood?
I cant let myself linger here to long, I have a monster to purge.