Chapter 4: A Forest of Strange Stars (2)
A sound cut through her shock: wolves howling in the deepening dusk. Close. Too close.
Panic spiked fresh adrenaline through her veins. Seo-yeon clutched the pocket watch and ran toward the city lights, her impractical shoes slipping on loose earth. She had to reach those walls. Had to reach people, civilization, safety—
She burst into a small clearing and nearly fell over the remains of a campfire.
A woodcutter's camp, hastily abandoned. Tools scattered, a pot of cold stew still sitting on stones. And nailed to a tree, fluttering in the wind: a wanted poster.
Seo-yeon approached on trembling legs. The paper was fresh, the ink barely dried. It showed crude sketches of faces—men and women with foreign features—and bold text in medieval Astrean script.
Her dissertation had required reading medieval Astrean. She translated automatically:
"WANTED: Vipera Spies. Enemies of the Crown. Report suspicious foreigners to City Guard. Reward: 50 silver suns. Penalty for harboring: EXECUTION."
Below it, an official seal she recognized from a hundred documents: the signature of Duke Hammond, Head of the Noble Council.
Right. Seo-yeon's historian brain kicked into gear even as her heart hammered. This is one year into Theodore's reign. The paranoia about Vipera infiltration is at its height because the curse is manifesting. Anyone without papers is suspect.
She had no papers. No identification. No explanation for her existence that wouldn't sound like the ravings of a madwoman or the lies of a spy.
She found a dark, hooded cloak abandoned near the cold fire and pulled it on with shaking hands. At least it would hide her face, her strange features, the terror that must be written across every line of her body.
The wolves howled again, closer still.
Seo-yeon wrapped the cloak tight and ran.
The forest seemed to close around her as true night fell—both moons rising overhead, their double light painting everything in shades of silver and blue that hurt to look at. She followed the pocket watch like a compass, its warmth pulling her toward the city gates now visible through thinning trees.
And then she saw them: torches blazing in the darkness, guards in steel armor bearing the sun-sigil of Astra. The gates of Luminas.
She slowed to a walk, trying to control her ragged breathing. From the shadows of the tree line, she watched travelers approach the checkpoint. Each one presented papers to unsmiling guards who scrutinized every document with aggressive suspicion. Those without proper identification were turned away at sword-point. One man who protested too loudly was struck with a gauntleted fist and dragged into the guard house.
Seo-yeon's stomach turned to ice.
She couldn't approach. She had nothing—no papers, no story that would survive questioning, no protection. But she couldn't stay in the forest either. The wolves, the cold, the unnatural fog now rolling across the valley floor like a living thing...
Through that fog, she could see the castle at the city's heart. Castle Solarium, where King Theodore VII sat on his throne, dying by inches from a curse that would kill him in exactly eleven months. A curse she'd traveled five centuries to break.
She looked down at her hands in the moonlight.
Her breath caught.
For just a moment—half a second, maybe less—her right hand had been transparent. She could see the forest floor through her own flesh, see the pocket watch's chain passing through fingers that weren't quite solid.
Then it passed, and her hand was flesh and bone again.
Fading, she thought with cold certainty. The timeline is already trying to reject me.
The guards shouted at another traveler, their voices harsh with suspicion. A woman clutched two frightened children, pleading in a dialect Seo-yeon barely understood. They were turned away, sent back into the darkness.
Seo-yeon pulled the cloak's hood lower and stepped from the trees.
She had no papers. No plan. No way to prove she wasn't a threat to a kingdom balanced on the knife's edge of collapse.
But she had five hundred years of knowledge in her head, a king to save, and a watch that had torn her through time itself.
The guards' torches flickered like dying stars ahead, and Seo-yeon walked toward them carrying impossible truth and desperate hope in equal measure.
Behind her, the forest whispered with wolves and wind and the weight of a future that might never exist if she failed.
**