Raif woke to silence.
Not the peaceful kind. Not the calm after rain. This silence was thick, wrong, like a held breath in the throat of the jungle.
He sat up slowly, his back sore and his hands stiff. The shelter was cramped and damp, the air heavy with sleep-sweat and the earthy scent of fungal rot. The others were still lost in uneasy slumber. Goss twitched in his dreams, mumbling something unintelligible. Eloin rolled over, his cheek pressed against moss. Naera was curled tightly in one corner, her expression unreadable, even in sleep. Lira was gone.
Raif stood and ducked out into the clearing.
The sky was the same endless green-grey, but the air felt different now. Sharper. Expectant.
No insects chirped. No frogs called. Even the ever-present drip of water seemed muted.
He scanned the treeline, squinting, searching for any sign of movement. At first, he saw nothing.
Then he noticed the marks.
Just past the invisible wall, where nothing from the forest should have reached, mud had been churned. Raif crouched low, inspecting the ground. There was a depression here, then another. Not hooves. Claws. Three broad digits, splayed wide. Each print deep and sunken.
Something had approached the boundary. Something large.
Raif exhaled slowly, his breath catching. "What the hell are you?"
The prints circled part of the camp and then vanished. No sign of a struggle. No broken branches. Whatever it was, it had moved silently, investigated... then left.
Footsteps rustled behind him.
Raif turned quickly. Thomund was there, chewing on a strip of moss like it was jerky, eyes fixed on the prints before Raif could even speak.
"You see this?" Thomund asked.
"Woke up to it," Raif replied.
Thomund crouched beside him, inspecting the prints. "That's not a deer. Not a boar either. Three toes, spread gait... weight here... see how deep? This thing's heavy. Real heavy."
Raif nodded. "And it knew to stay just outside."
"Or it couldn't get in," Thomund muttered, his voice low. "Which means it knows where the wall is."
A chill crawled down Raif's spine.
Thomund spat into the undergrowth. "We need trip markers. Early warning lines. Something to give us a head start."
"I'll help," Raif said, nodding.
The two of them set to work, collecting vines, thorns, and shards of sharp stone. As they worked, Thomund paused beside a crooked log, blanketed in pale yellow fungi. On a whim, he flicked one with a stick.
It popped.
Not loudly,but sharply, like wet knuckles cracking.
Raif turned. "What was that?"
Thomund hit another one. Same sound.
Raif crouched, then gently snapped off a small cluster of the fungi and crushed them between his palms. They made a soft, wet click, organic, brittle.
"Sound trap material?" Raif asked.
Thomund grunted. "Anything's better than silence."
By the time the others started stirring, Raif and Thomund had strung a perimeter of vine lines, each tied with bark slivers, thorn clusters, and those snapping fungi. Thomund had even rigged a bent branch with hollow seedpods that clacked together when jostled, an accidental wind chime of tension.
Lira reappeared, her shirt damp with morning mist, eyes unreadable. She gave Raif a nod, not approval, but acknowledgment.
Goss grumbled as he stretched. "Why does it feel like the woods are watching us?"
"Because they are," Thomund said, his tone heavy.
Raif stared toward the trees, unease curling in his gut. The forest felt... different now. Like it had turned its gaze on them, not out of curiosity, but hunger.
"Oi! Raif! You might want to see this!"
Goss's voice cracked across the clearing with too much volume, too much cheer for a morning like this.
Raif jogged toward the north side, his heart still uneasy from the tracks. Goss was knee-deep in a freshly dug trench, shirt off, mud splattered, waving at something with exaggerated gusto.
"I was digging us a shithole," Goss said, grinning. "And instead I hit treasure."
Raif raised an eyebrow, stepping closer. A wide, flat stone peeked through the dirt, partially uncovered, its surface slimed with moss and streaked with veins of darker rock. But it wasn't natural. It had straight edges. Carved lines.
Symbols.
Raif crouched, brushing soil away. Beneath the grime, the stone revealed a shallow relief, a spiral split by three notches at precise, equidistant angles. A triangle of squares enclosed a jagged symbol resembling a downward flame, its lines cut with eerie precision. Around the edges, faded glyphs curled like vines, none of them recognizable, but clearly deliberate. The whole thing felt more machine than art.
"System," Raif muttered, under his breath. "What is this?"
The orb pulsed faintly behind him.
Blueprint Fragment Acquired
Forge Infrastructure: 1 of 3 Fragments Located
Unlocks basic metallurgy upon completion.
Warning: Fire Catalyst Required. Risk Level: Medium.
Raif stared. "Forge..."
"What's it say?" Goss asked, climbing out of the trench and squinting at the slab.
"Part of a forge blueprint. We need three fragments total," Raif explained, his fingers hovering over the stone's etched lines. "Fire catalyst required. Risk... medium."
"Risk of what?" Goss asked. "Burning our arses or summoning jungle fire gods?"
Raif didn't answer.
Eloin and Lira joined them. Eloin crouched beside the stone, his expression sharpening the moment he saw the markings.
"That's a channel groove," he said, pointing at a long, narrow recess cut through the slab's center. "See how it narrows toward that drop point? That's meant for controlled flow, something molten. This isn't just decoration. This is casting."
"Casting?" Raif echoed.
"For metal," Eloin said, nodding. "It's designed to guide the pour, probably for tool heads or molding structural parts."
Lira scoffed. "So you're saying we've got part of a foundry buried under our toilet?"
Eloin nodded without humor. "And the design's good. Better than anything I've seen in a textbook."
Raif stood. "We're not there yet. It's just a fragment."
Lira crossed her arms. "You sure it's safe to even touch?"
Raif shrugged. "The system hasn't burned me yet."
"Yet," Lira echoed.
Naera knelt beside the stone. She didn't touch it immediately. Her eyes lingered on the spiral, then the downward flame. Only after several seconds did she press her palm to the surface. No glow. No change. She stood and walked away, silent as always.
Goss rubbed his chin. "So what now?"
Raif exhaled slowly. "Now we decide if we're willing to make fire."
No one answered. The jungle, once again, held its breath.
"Fire's a risk," Lira said flatly. "You light that up, and everything within a kilometre knows exactly where we are."
Raif stood near the center of the clearing, orb behind him, the forge fragment now covered again. The group had assembled like an impromptu council, though no one wanted to claim the title.
"We need heat," Raif said, his voice steady. "For drying clothes. For cooking. For morale. For survival."
Lira scowled. "We survived the rain without it."
"Barely," Eloin cut in. "We won't keep building if we're soaked, cold, and eating half-rotted fern roots."
"It's not just about warmth," Raif added. "That forge, if we ever finish it, will need flame. We have to learn how to manage that risk."
Goss shrugged. "I say light it. I'll fight whatever comes sniffing."
"You'll be the first one eaten," Lira snapped.
"Then I'll die toasty," he grinned.
"I agree with Raif," Eloin said. "Fire is essential. The sooner we start controlling it, the better."
The argument stalled when they noticed movement at the shelter's edge.
Naera knelt at a patch of bare earth. She'd already begun shaping a small pit, surrounded by three flat stones. Her hands moved with silent focus. Beside her, a handful of dried moss and cracked bark lay prepared.
"She didn't wait," Goss muttered. "Sneaky little pyro."
"She's right," Raif said, walking toward her. "We do it now. We do it carefully."
Lira followed, arms still crossed. "You're going to get us killed."
Raif turned. "And if we don't prepare, we'll die anyway."
Naera struck flint against stone. Once. Twice. A third time.
A spark landed. Smoke curled.
Then fire caught.
A tiny flame bloomed, flickering low and fast.
Everyone stared.
Lira didn't move. Her mouth pressed into a hard line.
Eloin stepped beside Naera and began adding small twigs in a tight triangle.
Goss took a step back and raised his arms. "There it is. Line in the sand."
Raif watched the fire catch hold. No one cheered. No one clapped. The flame danced alone.
The fire cracked gently as night fell, casting flickering amber light across the damp clearing. For the first time, they weren't cloaked in darkness. The glow didn't push the jungle back, it only made the shadows deeper, but it gave the group something to anchor to.
They sat in a loose circle. Goss stretched out with his hands behind his head, smoke curling past his boots. Eloin used a coal to mark lines on bark, muttering calculations. Naera sat close to the flame, silent, her eyes reflecting the fire's glow.
Raif cleared his throat. "We should know who we are. We've all been guessing. That ends now."
Lira snorted. "You want a meet-and-greet around the campfire? What's next, roasting marshmallows?"
"Something like that," Raif said. "We've bled together. We nearly starved together. If we're going to survive, we need more than labour. We need trust."
Silence.
Then Thomund nodded. "He's right."
One by one, they spoke.
Thomund had served as a frontier warden in the frozen hills of Galruin. "Tracked beasts, bandits, and border skirmishers. Not much else to do when the snow's thicker than the trees."
Eloin had apprenticed under a stonemason guild near the ruins of Wrenhal. "Most of what I know's from cutting granite and rebuilding collapsed temples. I don't build pretty. I build sturdy."
Goss chuckled. "I was a street runner in the Daggerdocks. Ran coin for petty lords, slipped poison into cups, sometimes got paid."
Naera didn't speak.
Raif hesitated. "I… don't remember. Just fragments. Something about charts. Ledgers. Maybe I kept records. I know how to count rations, if that's worth anything."
Lira tilted her head. "That all?"
Raif met her eyes. "For now."
Her gaze lingered, but she didn't push.
When her turn came, she stood. "I was a pit-fighter in Baltrune. No rules. No odds. Just steel, fists, and whoever bled last."
Then, soft, like wind through reeds, Naera's voice.
"I studied the old tongues. Traced ruins beyond the Red Valleys. My master said I heard voices in stone."
Everyone turned.
She looked at no one. Just the flame.
Raif smiled softly. "Thank you."
[Loyalty Increase Detected: +1 KE]
The orb pulsed gently in the dark, unnoticed by all. From the jungle's edge, something called out. A long, low moan, neither bird nor beast. The fire snapped louder. No one moved.
Raif took first watch.
The fire's glow didn't reach the far edges of the clearing. Out there, the jungle returned to silence. The noise traps hung like mute ornaments, trembling in the air currents.
At first, nothing happened.
Then one snapped.
A sharp pop from the north vine line.
Raif jolted upright.
The others stirred but didn't wake. The fire was low now, a pile of embers and red veins.
He crouched and moved toward the edge, slow and careful.
Another crack. Then the seedpods rattled, two clicks, maybe three.
He raised a branch, eyes locked on the treeline.
And saw them.
Two eyes. High up. Reflecting firelight in the dark like mirrors.
They didn't blink.
Didn't move.
Raif's breath stopped.
Then slowly, the eyes turned and vanished into the trees.
The traps stopped clicking. The clearing held its breath.
He waited. Ten minutes. Nothing.
Raif backed away and threw two more branches on the fire. Sparks leapt, orange and sharp.
He didn't sleep that night.
He watched the jungle watch him.