Sylvara Shadowbark crouched inside the green-draped hill that had hidden her for six years. From outside, her shelter looked like a mossy mound, its arched stone mouth wrapped in vines and crowded with flowers. From inside, she watched torches move between the trees. The enforcers were closer than yesterday. She had spent her whole life preparing to take back the throne her bloodline lost. Tonight, the throne-holder's men were walking straight toward the place where she slept. She slid the twin daggers from their rack by the door. Their red stones caught the low light. She had kept them there for this exact moment — small enough to carry, sharp enough to answer trouble, ready to leave with her at a breath's notice. She pulled her dark elf magic around her shoulders like a second cloak. Sound dropped away. Her shape blurred into the doorway's shadow. She stepped past the first torch close enough to smell the pitch, and the man never turned his head. She led them wrong. She broke a branch east. She scuffed a print north. By dawn the enforcers were three valleys away, beating empty brush, and her shelter sat untouched behind its curtain of vines. Sylvara walked back inside and set the daggers down. The refuge was safe. But the sweep meant they were hunting in earnest now — and the old man who carried her mother's letters was somewhere out there, slow and honest, with a target on his back.

By midday the wind shifted, and Sylvara heard what she had feared since dawn — the high, hungry baying of hounds. The enforcers had circled back. Dogs did not chase broken branches. Dogs chased her. Her dark elf magic could hide her shape and her sound, but it could not hide her scent. She grabbed her twin daggers from the rack and ran. She cut south toward the river she had mapped years ago for exactly this kind of trouble. The water ran brown and fast over moss-slick stones. She waded in to her thighs and walked the current downstream, letting it pull her smell apart. Her boots slipped twice. She did not fall. When she climbed out on the far bank, the baying had thinned to confusion. It did not last. A new sound rolled through the trees behind her — a hunting horn, sharp and certain. Through the trunks she saw a green flame burning on a tall metal torch, held high by the lead enforcer. That flame was not for seeing. It was a signal. More men were coming, and they would not lose her twice. She climbed. The ground rose into a mossy stone face scarred with old claw marks, taller than any beast she knew. A narrow gap split the rock near the top. She pressed her back to the cold stone inside it and pulled her magic tight around her shoulders. The hounds reached the base below and lost their voices. They circled. They whined. They could not climb. She heard the lead enforcer curse and call them off, promising the rest of his men by nightfall. Sylvara waited until the green light moved away. She had shaken the dogs, but the hunt had grown teeth. By dawn there would be a net here, not a search. Her shelter was burned to her now. She tightened her grip on the twin daggers and turned her face toward the long road to the old man who carried her mother's letters. She would reach him first, or no one would.