Chapter 101

Behind me, footsteps approached soft, measured. Isla.

“You shouldn’t be this close,” she murmured.

I didn’t look up. “It showed me something.”

She came to stand beside me, her presence grounding. “The bridge?”

“Yeah.” My voice came rough. “It remembers the war.”

Her gaze lingered on the roots. “Then maybe we should remember it too.”

POV: Isla

The next morning, the mist finally broke but the light that came through it wasn’t warm. It was pale and watchful.

Kieran had doubled the guards again, and Lyra began sketching new sigils around the clearing. The elders prayed quietly near the fissure, old words for older wounds. And Tristan

Tristan hadn’t spoken since last night.

He just stood there sometimes, staring at the bridge as if waiting for it to speak back.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen in his eyes when he turned to me like he was carrying something he didn’t understand yet. A piece of the past that had chosen him to remember.

The war might’ve ended a hundred years ago.

But the bridge hadn’t forgotten.

And maybe, deep down, neither had we.

POV: Isla

The forest felt heavier now.

Not loud. Not violent. Just heavy as though the air itself had a pulse, slow and deliberate, pushing against our lungs each time we breathed. The guards whispered about it when they thought I wasn’t listening, how their dreams were restless, how the earth under their feet seemed to shift when they weren’t looking. Even the birds had changed their songs shorter, cautious, always ending too soon.

I tried to focus on normal things helping the elders gather herbs, patching the western walls, pretending life still made sense. But every time I passed near the clearing, that hum found me. Soft. Patient. Calling.

I’d begun to dream of it.

The bridge in its golden days bright and endless, humming like the inside of a heartbeat. Faces I didn’t know. Wolves that looked like us but older, their eyes bright with purpose. Then blood. Always blood. A river running red through the cracks.

When I woke, my palms felt ice cold, as if they'd been pressed against ancient stone throughout the night.

Kieran discovered me that morning lingering at the clearing's edge, my gaze fixed intently on the twisted roots that emerged from the soil like grasping fingers.

"You've been standing here since dawn," he said, concern etching lines around his eyes.

"I couldn't sleep," I replied, rubbing my hands together to chase away the lingering chill. The dreams had been too vivid, too insistent.

He stepped closer, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "You feel it too, don't you?" His eyes searched mine, looking for confirmation of a shared madness.

"Yes." The admission came easier than expected, a weight lifting from my shoulders. "It's not something I can deny anymore. It's like it's breathing pulsing beneath the earth."

He nodded once, a sharp movement that betrayed his tension. "Tristan says it's remembering," he murmured, his fingers absently tracing the old scar along his wrist.

I turned to look at him, studying the shadows beneath his eyes that hadn't been there weeks ago. "You believe him?" The question hung between us, fragile and dangerous.

Kieran's jaw tightened, a muscle flickering beneath his skin. "I don't know what to believe anymore," he admitted, his voice rough with emotion. "But I know this if the bridge remembers, then it remembers us. What we did. What we became." His eyes darkened with memories I knew mirrored my own.

His words lingered in the air long after he left, hanging like mist in the clearing, seeping into my bones alongside the cold that wouldn't leave my hands.

And for the first time, I wondered if the bridge carried memories, did it also carry guilt?

POV: Tristan

The forest had always spoken in its own way, but now it whispered in a language that scraped the edge of my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw flashes gold, red, the echo of a war I’d never lived. Wolves standing against wolves, their howls breaking against a sky filled with fire.

I hadn’t told anyone how deep the visions went. If I did, they’d think the bridge was twisting me. Maybe it was.

That night, I walked the perimeter alone. The moon was a thin scar in the sky, silver bleeding through cloud. The air tasted of metal like the first hint of rain before a storm that hadn’t yet decided to fall.

When I reached the fissure, the ground pulsed faintly beneath my boots. Once. Twice. Then stillness. It was waiting again.

I knelt, my breath fogging in the cold, and for a moment I let the hum thread through me. It wasn’t evil. Not yet. Just awake. Watching. Testing.

Behind me, soft footsteps. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was.

“You’re here again,” Isla said quietly.

“So are you,” I murmured.

She came to stand beside me, her shoulder brushing mine. “The elders said it used to bind everything. Maybe that’s what it’s trying to do again.”

I looked at her then the faint light catching her hair, her eyes reflecting something older than the stars. “Bind us or break us. Sometimes there’s no difference.”

For a while, we just stood there. Two figures against the glow of something ancient and alive.

Then she whispered, "Do you think it remembers love?"