Helga Wulf Slayer's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The light changed as she pushed deeper. The dark pines gave way to older trees, their trunks thick and twisted. Moss hung from branches like torn cloth. The canopy above grew so dense that the forest floor turned dim even as morning brightened the sky. Helga slowed her pace and listened. No voices followed. No footsteps broke through the undergrowth behind her. She had lost them, but she had also lost any sense of direction. The trees here stood so close together that she could not see more than twenty paces in any direction. She stepped into a clearing where sunlight broke through in scattered beams. The glade opened before her like a held breath — towering trees ringed the space, their roots thick as her waist. Ferns and flowers grew in patches where the light touched ground. For the first time since the barbarians found her trail, Helga felt the tightness in her chest ease. This place was hidden, defensible. She could rest here and think. But as she moved toward the center of the glade, her boot caught on something beneath the moss. She knelt and brushed away the green carpet. Stone. Flat and carved, part of a pathway that continued under the earth and plants. Helga traced the edge of it with her fingers and felt the smoothness of old work. Not barbarian. Not human. The pointed ears her mother gave her suddenly felt heavier, more deliberate. The elves had been here. Their ruins were real. And if she could find their graves, she might find weapons — or answers about why her ears marked her different. She stood and looked at the glade with new eyes. The sword would be harder to find than she thought. But she had a direction now, and she had escaped the slavers who would have caged her. That was enough for today. Then torchlight flickered through the trees behind her. Helga turned and saw three barbarians pushing through the undergrowth at the glade's edge. The lead man carried a torch in one hand and a spiked collar in the other, its iron blackened from use. His eyes found her ears first, then her face. He smiled. The other two spread out to flank her, cutting off the paths she might have taken. Helga's hand went to her belt where her knife should have been, but she had left it behind at the slaver camp two nights ago when she ran. The man with the torch stepped forward. He said something in a tongue she did not know, then lifted the collar and shook it so the chains rattled. Helga looked at the stone pathway beneath her feet, then at the dense trees surrounding the glade. She could not fight three men without a weapon. But she knew forests, and she knew how to move through them faster than men weighed down by iron and torches. She broke left toward the thickest tangle of roots and ferns, her legs driving hard. The barbarians shouted and gave chase, but Helga was already gone into the green shadows, leaving only the echo of snapping branches behind her. She ran until her lungs burned and the voices faded to nothing. When she finally stopped, chest heaving, she found herself standing before a moss-covered stone tablet half-buried in the earth. The carving showed two figures dancing, their pointed ears and flowing robes unmistakable even beneath centuries of decay. Helga pressed her palm against the stone and felt its coolness. The elves had not just passed through this forest. They had lived here, built here, left their marks in stone that would outlast empires. Her ears were not a curse or a mystery. They were a thread connecting her to something older than her father's sword, older than the barbarians who caged and collared their captives. She could not return to the glade yet, not with slavers hunting her trail. But she knew now that the forest held more than one kind of answer, and that her father's sword might be only the beginning of what she would reclaim. The tablet remained silent beneath her hand, but it had already told her enough. She was not running anymore. She was tracking.