The Written Wilds

No One Spoke First The morning after the Spiral dreams, no one speaks. The campfire is long dead, but no one moves to relight it. Each person scans the others for cracks, searching for confirmation they weren’t the only one altered. But no one wants to be first to say it. The walk ahead begins in silence, with tension strung tight as drawn steel. The ashes from the fire hadn’t cooled. But no one stirred them. The cold didn’t bite. They barely noticed it. Roderic sat on a flat stone near the edge of the ridge, blade across his knees, untouched. Fenra stood watch facing the trees, but her gaze never quite landed on anything. As if looking at the wrong branch might summon something that remembered her better than she did. Nyrris was the only one moving. They were cleaning their knife with slow, deliberate strokes— scraping something off the handle. But there was nothing on the handle. Just the faint, unfinished pattern of a crown. Gaillard stood furthest from the...