The chase begins anew.

Longer than their first game of cat and mouse, her lungs burn past the point of typical exertion. Every muscle screams at her to cease but she cannot. Run or die, the only mantra she can recognize.

Her sense of self returns when the terrain changes, part blistering ice, part prickly thorns. Pain snaps her out of her panic, ironically enough. A long slice along the bottom of her foot leaves blood trailing in her wake. A death sentence for prey such as her.

And yet… no paws crunch in the snow behind her. Somehow, she has lost him.

Rey stops to scramble for breath. In truth, she should celebrate – she outwitted the predator once again, has lived to see another day – but she cannot understand why she finds such a thing more disappointing than anything else.

Where is he?

She whirls around but the only silhouettes she finds are the frost-covered trees, hundreds wedged so closely together and barely visible in the mist. In truth, no one knows how far the dark forest stretches. No one has dared to find out.

It takes her a moment to realize her surroundings are all too familiar. Lit by the full moon, a break in the trees reveals the clearing and the ravine on the other side. The planks of an infamous rickety bridge clack together in the breeze, an ominous lullaby.

Rey forces herself not to shake as she steps forward to peer through the thicket.

At the center of the clearing, she finds Han.

In a great deluge, memories rush back to her. The cloud passing over the moon, shrouding them all in the darkness. The pain and betrayal on her mentor's face. Flashes of claws and teeth.

The Han resting in the clearing is already dead. The pallor of his skin matches the snow and his eyes gaze up at the night sky unseeing. Peaceful enough if he were alone.

The black monster stands over him.

Crimson eyes pin her in place, two beacons slicing through the darkness. Piercing her soul as readily as his teeth crunch through Han's ribcage. Blood splatters in the frenzied search for his heart.

"Your dreams are strange," Rey whips around behind her, coming face to face with Kylo Ren – man, once again. "We both know it didn't happen that way."

A part of her knows that, of course, but she still reels from the truth of the matter: Han is dead because of him. "You're going to pay for what you did, murderous snake!"

His guarded eyes glance past her, but where she saw Han's devoured carcass there is nothing but snow. Not even a stain of red. "Where are you?" he says with blatant disregard for her initial outburst. "I can't tell. You seem… far away. But if you had left the forest I would know."

"You lost," she spits. "I found Luke Skywalker and he's going to destroy you."

He snorts at that as if the very idea is ridiculous. His eyes narrow. "You're in the heart tree. Aren't you?"

Rey stiffens, grasping for a sword not at her side. Did her dreams not think to arm her?

Kylo Ren makes no move forward. "Don't worry. If you're with Luke, he'll eat your heart out before I do."

She sputters, out of fear more than anything, "He's not like you." It certainly feels true when she says it. While Luke is eccentric at best, he cannot match the dangerous aura she senses every time she is around Ren. A monster's aura. Something decidedly not mortal.

"No," Kylo agrees, a spark of dark humor causing his eyes to alight, "he's worse."

Rey scans the gray sky for any hint of rain, though she knows Luke will not be deterred by something as trivial as the weather.

"Where are we going?" She hops over a tangle of shrubbery with a child's excitement. "Some secret training ground? Is that where you keep your weapons?"

"I have no need for weapons," Luke says rather mildly, no doubt used to her bouts of ridiculous questioning after a week has come and gone. "No harm will come to those within radius of the heart tree's roots."

Her eyes snap to the ground. "But… how do you know once you've stepped outside them?"

"Oh, you'll know," he muses. "I imagine Kylo Ren will be there to tear you limb from limb."

Rey purses her lips. "That's not funny."

"Hm, still a touchy subject, I see."

Luke leads them further in search of some arbitrary marker. Only then does she contemplate whether the old man has lost his mind after all these years of solitude. The more she thinks about it, the more likely it seems.

He comes to a standstill in what must be the fifth clearing they've ventured through. It looks like all the others – a sea of yellow and white flowers floating in the breeze, grass high enough to brush against her knees.

"Sit here, legs crossed."

She drops to the ground, not necessarily eager to begin their lesson, but certainly relieved that she can give her taxed legs a rest.

Luke crouches down next to her, picking a single flower and twirling it between his hands. He only speaks, she thinks, when her impatience becomes palpable. "What do you know of the forest, Rey?"

"It's… an evil place," she manages, her head swiveling from side to side to survey the trees again. Just in case. "No one within the Settlement can venture into it without explicit permission from Leia. You can get lost, run into horrifying creatures. The few that do survive never come back the same."

His mustache twitches. "And yet you went into the forest yourself." Luke cocks his head to the side. "You survived. You're somewhat sane, I hope?"

Her eyebrows furrow. "What's your point?"

"What led you to this tree? To me?" he asks. "You said so yourself that you had lost the map on the way here."

So kind of you to remind me. "Yes, I… saw Chewie's tracks. Then the stream."

"So?" he prompts. "What led you here?"

"The… forest I suppose?" she adds with a hint of frustration, unable to understand exactly what sort of angle Luke is reaching for.

He tries a new tactic. "And where does the water from the village come from? The game?"

"The forest," she admits.

"Then is it really such a bad place?"

She opens her mouth again, but no words come out initially. Rey takes a deep breath. "I… suppose not."

"What you hear of the forest comes from what people have told you. You yourself have never stepped foot in it until recently. Your fear stemmed from something you have never seen before, something you never took the time to understand."

Gently, he sets down the flower in his hands. He scratches loose a handful of dirt, burying it before speaking again. "I don't blame you for that. It's only human nature to vilify the unknown."

"But it is dangerous," she insists, her eyes still on the buried flower. "Full of creatures that want to do harm." Now that she had experienced firsthand.

"But does the forest itself want to harm you?" Luke presses. Naturally, she doesn't have an answer for that. "Close your eyes."

Her initial reaction is to chide him in how trivial this all seems. After all, Luke had promised lessons – not a meditation circle in the middle of nowhere.

With the ghost of a smile on his lips, he closes his eyes without waiting for her to follow. "Just… breathe. Reach out with your heart, one living force to another."

Without any other choice, Rey does as she is told.

The master takes her hand into his own rough and calloused ones, pressing them firmly against the dirt. The ground is moist from the melted morning frost but not sticky, at least. "Tell me. What do you see?"

Darkness.

Everywhere.

And not because her sight has been obscured. Even from behind shut eyelids, she can still envision the tree line surrounding them. The dark forest has always been an appropriate name for this place – the canopy shrouding everything for miles on end, a haven for shadows that move of their own accord.

And yet… light still streams in through gaps in the trees. Illuminating the stream, pouring life into the vegetation. The same vegetation hiding death beneath the soil, the remains of all the creatures of the past to grace the forest floor but regenerating new life as well.

"A…balance."

For once, Luke's voice hums with approval. Her gut tightens at the sound. "Balance, yes. There's good and evil in every man, and in the forest also. One cannot exist without the other."

The thicket rustles all around her. Her hand tightens into a fist.

"A deer," Luke assures her. Harmless. "You're terrified of the creatures in the dark, but know the truth when they come into the light, don't you?"

Wordlessly, Rey nods. Yes, she can see them in her mind's eye now. A doe with large brown eyes, the fawn scurrying at her side.

His hushed voice continues on. "The Hunters never could. It is why they failed at rooting all evil from the forest – they could not discern the light from the dark."

"They are one." Her own voice, so melancholy, so contemplative, surprises her.

"Yes. You can feel that through the roots, can you not? You can understand this?"

The roots. She did not see them when they entered the clearing, hadn't been persuaded by Luke's assurances that they were still safe within the heart tree's radius. The energy flowing through her fingers, however, is no lie. They still exist there beneath the soil, just barely out of reach. "Yes."

"The light is not something for a huntsman to defend," Luke affirms, sliding in his first lesson like a doting mother might slide a vegetable onto her dinner plate. "That is how it becomes corrupted in the first place."

But Rey does not mind the master's heavy-handed message. In a moment that seems both eternal and minute, peace washes away her fears like a flame devours a stick one lick at a time.

"But there's something else," she says after a time, when that little flame has burnt out and all she feels is cold. Her nails dig into the dirt and her mind digs deeper, bewildered. The root beneath her has a conscience, that much is clear, and it wishes to lead her somewhere.

"Just at the edge of the roots," Rey can interpret of the whirlwind of flashes she receives in her mind's eyes. A place—"

"The heart tree is light," Luke interjects, though where there should be confidence, she senses a twinge of concern. "Where there is light, death follows."

The root's lifeforce dies off, spitting her out in an unknown part of the forest where she hears no birds chirping, no small mice rustling. Only a black crater at her feet, who knows how deep.

"No. It's…" Hard to explain. Separate from the necessary death between the plant roots, the natural cycle of a body being broken down and reused for sustenance. This breaks the cycle, this is death for death's sake. "Rotten. It's… calling me?"

Yes. The longer she peers into the hole, the more she sees. Worms crawling within, twitching in unnatural rhythms and a strange shade of gray. Neither dead nor alive. A gateway into another existence.

"Resist it, Rey," she hears the huntsman through some vague fog. But she cannot. Something within pulses like a faint heartbeat, another life onto itself. She reaches her hands towards it.

Her entire body, the ground beneath her, shakes.

"REY!"

Luke.

Luke is the one who shakes her back into this world, and she gasps as if breaking through the surface of a lake.

He draws his hand back as if he had been burned. "You went straight to the source." His mouth sets into a thin line. "Why am I not surprised?"

Rey clutches her chest in an attempt to still her racing heart. "No, I've seen this sort of thing before," she musters. "At the village. It's what's been killing the crops, poisoning the water too." She shakes her head, regaining her threads of consciousness. "What is it?"

Luke's mustache twitches. "There are times the dark is warped for… unnatural magicks." He pauses and she knows he is debating how much to tell her. "The heart tree was attacked deliberately there."

"Snoke?" Rey has heard many stories and those surrounding the sorcerer are the worst of all. No one knows for sure from whence he came – some speak of him as the son of a demon or a changeling left behind from the Fair Folk who once populated these lands. Nor do they know where he resides. Only that those who come from the deepest parts of the forest, kicking and screaming, have his name on their lips when they expire within a week's time.

He only gives a tentative nod. "It's fine. As I said, no one can do us harm here." Though it does not escape her note that Luke does not seem so convinced.

"Yes," Rey retorts, "well there's no heart tree back at the Ilenium Settlement. Nothing to protect us there. That's why we need you."

"Haven't you been listening to a word I've said?" he snaps. "Did you see the Settlement at all when you passed through the roots?"

Rey need not think hard. The Ilenium Settlement is a large village, easily heard from miles off when approaching on horseback. She shakes her head.

"And do you think this was a mistake?" he says even harsher. "Humans were the ones that burned those roots long ago. It has been closed off, separated."

She frowns. "But why?"

The master only moves to stand. "Who's to say? We spin our little web of civilization and think ourselves safe from the forest's influence, apart from the outside. We're wrong, of course – and any settlement reflecting such sentiment is doomed from the start."

The lack of hope in his voice, the willingness to accept things as they are – not as they could be – bothers her to the core. Luke had been a hero once, had brought hope to hundreds of wayward souls just like her. "But I saw a balance," she protests vehemently. "Why can't we have both?"

"It's just not the way," he dismisses, though with a knowing gaze. "At least, not for a Hunter. The creed dictates that there is no such thing as balance, only a never-ending war between good and evil. The problem is, we can never agree on what defines good and what defines evil."

Rey has no patience for such theological discussions nor for a creed she has never read. None of that will help her in what she seeks to accomplish. "What about your stance?" she challenges instead, hoping he will take the bait.

"I am the product of my upbringing, Rey," Luke says as if it should be obvious. He sighs. "I can only hope that such a philosophy dies with me."

Rey leaves the heart tree before dawn. Before Luke can rise from his bed and bombard her with an endless stream of questions. Though, in truth, she doubts he cares where she ventures to in the early hours of the morn.

For once, she does not feel lost traversing the woods without a map. The root had already provided her with one, searing her intended path onto the backs of her eyelids.

Rey charges through the forest with purpose, though her gaze lingers on the dew evaporating from the morning sun, whirls of mist rising from the half-frozen ground. She would have danced it in it as a child, pretending the phenomenon caused by some sort of fae magic. It calls to her longing for simpler days before her life as an orphan, existing in a world tinged in light, rosy hues.

Memories buried.

She cannot recall her parents' faces, nor the hobble they shared. Only promises of we'll come back soon, darling, never to be fulfilled. And though she eventually found a new home in the Organa-Solo household, the sting of abandonment remains.

A foul smell on the wind stems halts her wandering. She has arrived.

The clearing that greets her is not like the others she and Luke had trampled through yesterday. Its margins create a perfect circle, a sign of abnormality in such a wilderness. Nothing that could have been created by an ancient tree succumbing to disease, a bolt of lightning, or seasonal wildfires. The other clearings had shown signs of life, filled with grasslands and birds singing at all hours of the day.

No life grows here. A thin layer of soil covers a bed of gravel drained of all moisture. At its center, she sees the gaping hole from her vision.

Sweat breaks out on the back of her neck. She should have listened to Luke and left this matter alone, but it is too late to turn back now.

A faint buzzing on the wind beckons her closer. Rey obliges, curious hand outstretched.

"I wouldn't do that."

She swallows a scream and frees the sword from her scabbard.

Kylo Ren peers at her from a break in the trees, customary dark waistcoat melting with the shadows. She wonders how long he has been standing there. Watching her.

In her dreams, he never seemed real. It was easy to glean over the planes of his face, the details in his dressings. After all, in the flesh, she had only met him as a massive wolf hellbent on killing her. Apart from the moment they had clashed in the snow and he had morphed before her eyes, bare as the day he was born.

The conjured image paints her cheeks red. If Kylo Ren notices, he does not let on. He studies their surroundings, attempting to solve a complex problem Rey is not privy to, yet expecting her help all the same. The nerve.

Naturally, he speaks first. "It called you here too. Why is the forest connecting us?"

She grounds herself, feeling the heart tree's essence beneath her. "I'm still within the roots. You can't touch me here," Rey bites back. "I'm safe."

He cocks his head. "For someone who's safe, you're awfully afraid."

His words send a jolt through her, so similar to the ones Luke had told her the day before. Even in human flesh, Kylo Ren moves like a wolf – though standing tall, his head bows forward slightly in interest. A tug at the corner of his lips illudes to a grin or a sneer, warping the red line splitting down the right side of his face.

In her dreamscape, he had never come to her with the scar – so bright and puckered, still fresh from their battle. It must have itched terribly, driving him mad enough to tear the forming scabs free with his claws. Had his thoughts strayed towards her in that time, knowing Rey had left such a visible mark on him for the world to see?

She doesn't know why that gives her such satisfaction. Her gaze lingers a moment too long.

"Appreciating your artwork?" Kylo Ren murmurs.

Rey does not bristle as is her first instinct. Breathe, she chants to herself. Just breathe.

A cloud shifts, illuminating the clearing.

He steps out from the tree line, but she remains calm. The light gives her strength. The wolf does not seem as threatening as he had before. Another callback to Luke's first lesson, and though she is not brave enough to test out the theory for herself, a creature like Kylo Ren preys on her fear. She refuses to give him such satisfaction.

Instead, Rey mulls over the previous words he said to her. "What do you mean it called you here?"

He appraises her in silence. Though she isn't sure what at all there is to contemplate. "If you don't realize by now that the dark forest has a mind of its own," he says finally, "then Luke Skywalker has failed you as a teacher."

Kylo's resulting look of disappointment allows her rage to stew once again. You need a teacher, his growl from long ago echoes in her mind. I can teach you the ways of the forest!

Rey grits her teeth. "And what could you possibly know about Luke Skywalker?"

In truth, she has no reason to defend the hermit of the heart tree. Luke has not been exactly kind to Rey in her brief stay with him, nor has he been very forthcoming on teaching her the ways of a huntsman, but he was still Leia's brother. Family.

Kylo Ren's reaction she does not expect. He throws his head back and laughs, the sound jarring against the eerie calm of this strange place. "Has he told you about me?"

Rey grits her teeth. "I know everything I need to know about you."

"You do?" He takes another step forward. Kylo does not hesitate from the proximity of her sword as Rey had hoped. Still, she assures herself that she is safe. He can do her no harm here. "Ah, you do. You have that look in your eyes from the night we first met. When you sliced open my face."

He seems almost proud of her as he says this, but Rey must convince herself that this cannot be the case. She lifts her chin in stark defiance. "All evil must perish by the sword one day."

Her words strike a chord. Kylo's mood shifts once more, his lip curling to reveal the same teeth that had sliced into Han. "If there is an evil that exists within this forest – it is him."

The conviction in his voice leaves her stuttering. It's a miracle Rey can even respond at all. "Even if I believed that to be true, why would do this to the heart tree?" In fact, harming the dark forest seems antithetical to all his talk of protecting it in the first place. "Have you no shame?"

He looks taken aback by her words, another thing she does not expect. "I had nothing to do with this."

"That's a lie," Rey says regardless, despite uncertainty curling in the pit of her stomach. "I've seen this before. The residue of your master."

Kylo glances to the rot again, schooling his expression into neutrality. "The wizard is wise. A true friend of the forest," he says quietly, though it rings of reassurance for himself more than anything.

Rey cannot be sure of the cogs turning in his head – but even if she did believe him, his being kept in the dark by Snoke does not bode well for her.

"Go home, mortal," Kylo Ren tells her finally, though it is he who turns away from her and the clearing, slinking back into the shadows like a true beast of the forest.