saudade (n.) a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for something or someone that one cares for and/or loves.

This, then, must have been what the poets meant by the forest primeval: the trees seemed to murmur in soft harmony, bent low and bearded with moss, garbed in green, indistinct in the grey light which preceded true dawn. Subtle fragrances, melodies of birds, the gold-on-gold of sunlight, the colour of her eyes, falling across broad yellow leaves. It was like a thousand sweet enchantments, pure and good – and it was false, all of it, false. A shining, golden lie.

Shadows moved in shadows, on shadows, through shadows. The druj were omnipresent here, even unseen, even unheard. They pressed close. The forest seemed to tighten, golden and beautiful and awful.

He hadn't told her. Why hadn't he told her?

His hands were still stained bloody; it had dried, now, into a thin brown crust that flaked off onto the fallen logs and stones over which they scrambled, that rubbed off on his cuffs when he pushed up his sleeves, that stained his face when he touched his mouth and his cheeks and his eyelids, like he was trying to remind himself that he still had human form, that he was still here, that he was still him, that he was not at risk of falling apart into some abstract conception of a human being.

Past and future alike had yawned wide in that moment, yawned wide and tried to swallow him whole. And it had been so tempting to fall into the easy forgetfulness of prophecy – to forget that he was Zoran, who loved Ina, who had been Zoran, who had loved Ghjuvan, that he would be Zoran, who loved them both without ever finding a hook upon which he could hang that love and trust it would hold fast… It would have been easier to fall. To be Matthias, or Arek, or Dimitar, or Nadzieja, or Gracjan. But that, too, would have been love and loss and falling, evermore falling.

They were still ghosting there, at the edge of his consciousness – not only the Hierophants who had been and who would be, not them merely, though yes they clustered in his skill and pressed close and clamoured for sight and voice and a chance to be the present once more. Not only.

There was more, spiralling: futures unattached to presents, destinies without obvious bearers, ends without stories. He could have lost himself. It would have been easy.

Instead – he forced himself to focus – yes. He was here. He was present. The sky was carpeted green, and the trees rose on every side, and the air was scented with something close to apple blossoms, and Nez's steps behind him, soft breathing, was an unspoken threat. This was not Siarka. This was Illéa. This was Illéa, and he was the first Hierophant to ever set foot here, and this was real, and he was real, and Ghjuvan was dead, and Nez had killed him, and Ghjuvan was dead.

It hurt. Love, in his experience, often did, always did – particular a love like this one, that went out howling, that came back limping, that found there was nothing left to attach itself to. He hadn't felt like this six months ago, he thought dully – oh, he had cared about Ghju then, there was no denying that, their shared childhoods had assured that much at the very least. If something had happened to Ghjuvan at initiation, he could have cried, he thought. Now… his eyes were dry. His hands were covered in blood.

He had killed one of the things that had killed Ghjuvan – the druj, that awful thing, with a strange human mouth and blood-red eyes crazed with hunger and pain and fear. Zoran hadn't seen it happen, either part, not really. Ghju had died, and Zoran had not been there – gone, Matthias reaching through time to draw his attention away to some petty memory about dirt being kicked up and dark eyes watching from the sidelines and murmured apologies, and when he had returned (if this was, indeed, him returned) his sword was lying beside him, stained deeply black with ichor and the druj was lying behind him, looking strangely relieved to be dead, and Ghju was lying in his arms, less a person than some strange, ugly approximation of the same. His face hadn't been a face anymore; there had been an enormous black hole in his chest where his heart should have been. He had rattled in a gasp – or maybe it had rattled out of him, dead as he was – and then he had been gone, and Zoran's arms had closed over nothing.

Someone must have called him away. Thinking that now was the closest Zoran's grief had come to the surface in all the past long hours – someone had called him away (Ghjuvan!), expecting their friend, living and smiling, to appear at their side, as he did, as he always did. Who? Had it been Azula or Ilja? Kinga or Khalore? Ina? His heart lurched for each, and worse each time, until he thought of Ina and could barely breathe. Had they called him because they, too, were in trouble? Maybe he had joined another corpse somewhere in Illéa, two among many while the druj rained down destruction. Who had seen that broken body appear before them in lieu of their comrade, unable to understand, unable to know the awful, ugly way he had been betrayed?

Nez's footsteps sounded closer now. He hadn't spoken to her since they'd left the tunnels, only ensured he knew where she was at all times, that he had his sword near to hand lest she consider some hasty action to hide what she had done. Death begat death; he didn't trust Nez not to play with the odds in that respect. In training, he could have been sure of taking her in a simple one-to-one fight, but she could skew things now. After all, they were both xrafstars.

But only one of them was a Warrior.

There, in the tunnels, he had withheld some more hideous sound – contained but barely – and asked her why, why she had done that, why she had killed him. She had told him some lie about panicking. In the reflection of those cold, snake-like eyes, he had seen her die a dozen times over, each future fracturing into the next, nastier, iteration – at Khalore's hands, with Kinga's sword, to Ilja's knives. Once, to Ina, and that had scared him, though he couldn't articulate why. But it had been a constant. Nez had no chance otherwise. The poor girl, he had thought, despite himself, despite the anger curdling in his chest. The poor girl didn't know that she had signed her own death warrant. Warriors did not forgive the death of their own.

In a kinder moment, he would have searched for ways to help her to avert this fate. But the kind parts of Zoran were, in this moment, gone – absent or frozen, amputated or cauterised.

So instead, they marched through the forest in silence, seeing no druj, until, after several hours had passed, Nez said, "how, exactly, do you intend to find this body?"

Zoran ignored her. He had promised Ina that he would come back. He did not intend to delay on making good that promise. Even if that meant wrangling his curse; even if that meant interpreting Matthias' nonsense notes come hell-or-high-water; even if that meant crossing every forsaken inch of this forest in search of the thing that had once been Mielikki. They hadn't been apart for longer than a half-day in the last six months; in the last six months, he had not slept a single night through. She still screamed. She still had nightmares. She still cried, sometimes, when she woke, though she could not fully explain to him why.

He had never asked her to explain.

He pulled out the notes now, knowing that they would say nothing and mean nothing, only to ripple their edges through his fingers. They were considerably more frayed now than when he had entered this forest first, all those long months ago; for the better part of a year, after all, they had lived on his walls, and covered all the reflective surfaces, and accompanied him to bed and to dreaming. Strings of letters had occupied his mind as he had worked away at whatever table or chair he had promised to fix for the neighbours; it had been almost meditative, like a mantra. He hadn't figured any of them out, of course; he had resigned himself to the idea that Matthias had been, simply, utterly, inevitably, insane.

As he soon would be. Soon. He might have six months, he might have ten years.

Or Nez might get to him first.

He held the notes, more like a talisman than anything else, as the forest floor sloped away into a kind of valley, deep and gloomy, the bottom of which had been lost deep beneath creeping ivy and shadows scuttering overhead. There was a soft ping as Nez flipped her coin with her nail. She was nervous; Zoran could sense it. Maybe she couldn't even see it in herself, but she was. He didn't blame her. Last time she had been here, Hyacinth had kept the druj at bay with her curse. Zoran's sword, comparatively, seemed a rather anemic defence.

He said, more to himself than to Nez, "not down there."

"No?"

He had seen Mielikki's body. Xynone Hanover had been standing over it when they had encountered him first; and after that, Ina had forced him to show them to the walls, wielding her curse expertly, like she had been born to it. And he did not remember fording this section of forest. He would have remembered, would he not? Something like this – primeval forest – yes, he would have remembered it.

"Let's keep moving," he said. "We need to go… north-west."

He could sense Matthias lingering again, and was more cognisant for the first time that Matthias was not standing behind him, or dwelling within a reflection, or living in his head. Matthias was, two years ago, sitting at his desk in Opona, working at his typewriter, hammering ink into paper. The clack-clack-clack seemed to strike Zoran's skull directly, and translate seamlessly into words, as though communicated by something like Morse, something more elemental than Morse.

Matthias said, "give me a moment when you have a moment."

He didn't have a moment. Zoran ignored him. Matthias' typewriter took on a new frenzy of hammer-and-relief.

Was this truly the dividends of all of their hard work? They were Warriors. They were to bring honour to the Kur. And theirs was to be a noble cause – to be entrusted to bear the burden of a Schreave Curse was intended to be special indeed. Instead, Mielikki and Ghjuvan were both dead to druj, and Azula and Nez had proven more dangerous to their own teammates than to their enemies, and the rest of them were buckling under the burden of their Schreave Curses.

Not buckling. He thought this firmly, as though thinking it firmly would dislodge it from his mind. Not buckling. Taking hold of it. Not fading. Finding form.

Please, he thought, like a prayer, like a mantra, like a plea, please. Let them be okay. Let them survive, until he returned. Let the rest of them get back to Irij safely, together. Let them live. He wasn't sure who he was asking. To whom he addressed the please. He just thought it, first and then again. Please.

A rustle overhead. Zoran looked up just in time to see something with long, furred arms – limbs twice as long as limbs should be – and an enormous skull-like face disappear into the foliage of the trees, like a half-imagined waking nightmare. Nez said, softly, "Hämäläinen said they were attracted to magic..."

"We'll be fine."

She threw him a derisory look, clearly questioning the confidence in his voice.

But Zoran stood firm. He had seen the reflections in her eyes; there were limited options when it came to destiny.