The Forest of Beasts didn't welcome visitors.
Long before the towns further out were established, its trees had already existed which were older than Dust Hill. Ancient and watchful as ever, they could fully engulf wolves and trip carriages with roots thick enough to do so. The fog was everlasting in the underbrush and even over here, wind took its time.
Kael could feel it at once... like a heavy weight of a deep ocean pressing the earth.
The poachers didn't notice. They stomped through the leaves with the arrogance of men who had done this a hundred times. They laughed. They joked. They spit.
Kael watched them, silently memorizing their movements.
They didn't offer him a name.
So he didn't give his either.
He carried the satchel tightly across his chest, clutching the Memoirs of a Forgotten Blade as if it were armor. The stolen dagger stayed in his sleeve, its rusted handle itching against his skin.
---
"Tell me something, runt," one of the men asked, his voice thick with boredom. "Why'd you really follow us?"
Kael didn't look up. "To become an adventurer."
The man scoffed. "There's a dozen better ways to die."
"I don't want to just fight beasts. I want to be the next name people remember. Like him." Kael tapped the book through his satchel.
The poacher snorted. "The Nameless Hero? That bastard's just a bedtime story."
Kael didn't argue. He'd learned when to stay quiet. He just watched the fog shift through the trees and noticed something strange.
For a moment, he swore he saw shapes moving inside it. Not beasts. Not bandits.
Eyes.
Watching.
---
The group reached an old overgrown shrine by dusk. Moss crept up the stone walls. Carvings of forest gods long forgotten were cracked and bleeding with lichen. The dungeon was hidden beneath it marked by a broken circular plate etched with a serpent eating its tail.
One of the poachers kicked it aside, revealing stone steps leading into blackness.
"We'll do a fast sweep," said the hawk-nosed leader. "Runt, stay at the back. If you fall behind, we leave you."
Kael nodded once.
He'd heard worse threats in the orphanage.
---
The dungeon stank of wet stone and stale blood. It was shallow, maybe only three or four chambers deep, but traps lay everywhere rune-sealed walls, pressure stones, hidden pits. It was meant to be a tomb, not a home.
But things lived here now.
In the second room we found a nest of chitin bats, which were shrill creatures with bone for wings and dagger for tongues. The poachers dispatch of them easily. One clamped to Kael's arm which they pierced through the eye, he suppressed his scream as the blood which hit his skin sizzled.
It burned like acid.
The hawk-nosed leader raised a brow. "Didn't expect you to last this long."
Kael grunted. "Neither did I."
He couldn't explain why, but something felt right. Like his body was sharpening itself bones lighter, eyes clearer. The dungeon's darkness didn't feel so dark anymore.
---
They set up camp at the shrine's perimeter after a successful run. Pouches of monster parts and glimmering shards rattled about the fire. Kael sat on a root near the tree while book in his lap and kept rereading a passage.
One of the younger poachers noticed. Toward the end of the Hero's Journey series, "Why do you get so fixated with that antagonist?"
Kael didn't respond right away.
Then, softly: "Because he didn't belong anywhere. And yet he changed everything."
A pause.
"I don't even know who my parents were," he admitted. "Sometimes I think maybe... I came from something important. Maybe that's why I can't let go of this."
He didn't realize how honest that sounded until it left his lips.
The poacher shrugged. "You'll probably die before it matters."
Then he laughed and tossed a bone into the fire.
---
That night, Kael dreamt of blood.
He stood at the foot of a mountain of corpses angels and demons alike. Above him, a shadow with his face sat on a throne of ribs. It smiled.
"Find me," it said.
Kael woke in cold sweat.
And realized he wasn't breathing.
---
End of Chapter 2
---
/> Lore Fragment – The Eradication War,
Volume III – Archivist Delnar
"The skies wept like the slaughtered, and the demons were losing... they unleashed a desperate tactic they called the Curse of Undying Hunger. From that day onward, we know it as 'vampirism'. The angels, furious, decided to completely obliterate the demons and everything associated with them. Or so the world thought..."
- From the Kirelmon Library, recorded 49 years ago