Chapter 2. Wolf Eyes in the Dark

They handed her the hatchet in the pale gray half-light before sunrise, wordless and deliberate. The blade was familiar—its edge worn blunt long ago by neglect rather than use, dull as a promise forgotten. The iron felt cool under her palm, its once-sharp arc now a gentle curve. The handle was marred with grooves, smoothed by countless palms before her, each ridge a faded fingerprint. Splinters jutted like tiny sentinels along the underside, and a strip of mildew–stained cloth was bound tight around its center, rotting softly with the damp. She didn’t bother to turn it over in her hands. The weight said all she needed to know: this task was not about firewood, but exile.

The sack they thrust into her arms was worse—coarse canvas, patchy with dark stains and already damp from last night’s thaw. She shrugged the heavy burden onto one shoulder without a word, the rough fibers cutting into her tunic as she turned toward the outer gate. No guard trailed her. Silence itself was her escort, the orphanage’s unspoken verdict.

Outside the nursery wall, frost had etched crystalline fractals overnight. Under brambles and withered ferns, ice clung to roots like sugar turned to stone. Her boots—thin-leather slippers with cracked soles—did little to shelter her feet, but she made no sign of hesitation. In this place, cold was a language everyone spoke, neither threat nor comfort, simply a constant.

Past the frost line, the forest inhaled around her. At first, trees stood sparse and skeletal—brittle limbs stretching skyward in brittle salute—but only moments later the undergrowth thickened, the trunks darkening, the air humming with hidden life. The narrow path behind the garden shed vanished, swallowed by leaf-litter and root tangle. No one had told her how much wood to gather or when to return. That was the point.

She walked until the hush of the orphanage fell away completely and the only sound was her own breath. She stopped in a small clearing encircled by young pines, all slender as arms and leaning eastward from some long-past storm. Their needles formed a soft carpet beneath her boots; a few broken branches lay like fallen arrows. A single thicker limb rested against a trunk, as if conceding its fall.

She set down the sack and knelt, brushing a finger over frost that glistened like powdered mica. The wood beneath was dry and cracked—perfect for burning, useless for almost anything else. She lifted the hatchet, its metal dull yet still stubbornly heavy in her grip.

Her first swing was measured, scarcely a bend of the wrist. The blade bounced off the branch with a muted clonk. She shifted her stance, squared her shoulders, and struck again, harder. The echo rippled up into the branches and died. Over and over she worked—strike, reset, strike—each motion channeling the cold ache of her fingers until the burn in her shoulder began to ease.

Then the air changed. Not the wind in the needles—they whispered as before—but the very stillness. It felt denser, as though someone had slipped into the clearing and drawn a quiet breath. She froze, hatchet lowered but not dropped, and slowly swept her gaze across the ring of pines. No twig snapped. No soft footfall. Just a weight in the air, expectant and patient.

She found it at last in a narrow gap between two trees, some twenty paces off: a shadow darker than the rest, utterly still. Too vertical for a deer, too silent for a bear, too deliberate for any creature meant to roam these woods. For a heartbeat she did not blink.

Then she stepped back—a single, deliberate retreat—and the moment shattered. The shadow was gone. No rustle announced its departure. Only the still, recalling pressure of its presence remained in her bones, neither fear nor relief, but recognition—ancient and deep, like the echo of a bonfire dying.

She did not speak. She knelt again, dropped the freshly split branch into the sack, reached for another, her movements even though a tremor of awareness lingered behind her shoulders. The brand on her back throbbed. Every breath, every twist of muscle reminded her it was there, etched beneath skin. Still, she did not let it hurry her pace.

When at last she stood—and the sack strained at her hip, neither scant nor excessive—she gave the hatchet one last swing before sliding it back into her hand’s hollow. She would not walk quietly. If the watcher had meant to be heard, it would have made itself known. Whatever had passed between those pines already knew her; she returned the knowledge.

The forest settled back into its gentle breath. The wind died to a low hum. Birds, if they were present, held their songs at bay. She emerged from the trees near the dry riverbed, its channel reclaimed by grass and stubborn young oaks. A crooked pine there held a shallow hollow at its base where something once nested, but she did not pause. Instead she halted at a straighter, unscarred tree and drew the hatchet’s edge lightly across the bark, carving a shallow diagonal gouge. Then she crossed it with another. An “X”—bold, unrefined, visible.

The mark wasn’t for the guards. It wasn’t for Sera, either. It was for this thing in the woods—her silent witness. She let the blade drop, its flat side coated in bark dust, then turned back toward the orphanage wall.

Cold crept back as the canopy thinned and frost-bitten grass reappeared underfoot. By midday’s first pale light she reached the gate—empty, unguarded, another intended slight. She crossed the yard under a sky so gray it seemed almost warm. No one met her. No one asked her burden. She delivered the firewood to the bins behind the kitchen, pausing only to empty the sack in silence. The scent of spoiled grain and wet wool clung to her as she turned away.

Inside the corridor, warmth and bustle returned. The stove’s smoke wavered in the wide nostrils of the chimney, and the sharp tang of boiled roots hung in the air. Her boots left wet trails on the flagstones. Voices murmured beyond doorways, low and cautious. At the turn before the nursery dorm two boys paused in their conversation. One stared at her. The other looked away, as though ashamed to be seen. Neither spoke.

Her own bed lay untouched, the blanket neatly folded as if awaiting her return. She sank onto the edge of the cot, hatchet weight still echoing along her forearm, and felt the brand’s ache flicker awake again.

Across the room, Sera sat cross-legged, fidgeting with a strip of cloth. Neither spoke until Sera rose quietly and slid onto the cot beside her.

“They said you went past the hollow stones,” Sera said finally. Her voice was a soft exhale. “No one’s sent out that far in weeks.”

Aeryn kept her gaze on the floorboards.

“I waited by the gate,” Sera went on. “Thought maybe they’d keep you there.”

Silence hung between them like a held breath.

“I’m glad you came back,” Sera whispered. “Even if they didn’t want you to.”

At last Aeryn lifted her chin, meeting Sera’s eyes.

“They watched me,” she said, her voice even, unshaken. “But they didn’t come to harm me.”

Sera’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

Aeryn looked out past the window, toward distant treetops. “I don’t know.”

They sat without another word, the orphanage’s warmth pressing in around them.

That night, in her dreams, she knelt once more in the courtyard—hands bound, knees cold against frost-slick stone, Matron’s veiled face looming above her. The branding rod burned bright in Matron’s palm. Aeryn did not cry out when the metal pressed into her flesh. She never did. But this time the agony grew, sharpened, cut through more than skin. The silent crowd faded, Matron dissolved, and the hard stone beneath her knees became soft pine needles and living earth.

Then claws brushed her shoulder—not violent, just firm, as if reading the brand stamped there. The pressure measured her, claimed her. She tried to rise, but her body stayed rooted, and the claws tightened once more—tugging, testing—before releasing her. Aeryn gasped and the dream splintered.

She woke in darkness, heart hammering. The dormitory lay silent, save for wind whistling through a crack in the stonewall. She slid from the cot, bare feet cold on the floor, and froze at what she saw spread beneath her bed: a smear of ash, damp and bittersweet. It carried the scent of pine and smoke that had never come from flame.

She crouched, hand hovering above the residue. The air in the room felt different—thicker, expectant. She did not wake anyone. She did not cry out. She sat alone in that hush, waiting for dawn, feeling for the first time that whatever had found her in the woods had followed her here, into the dark, to see if she would remember. And she would.