"To watch is not to act. But it is a form of hunger."
— Verdant Eye Interrogator's Handbook
*Elisabeth POV*
The breath of the house changed.
I felt it before I woke up - just a prickle on my skin at the edge of sleep. A tension in the wooden walls, and the way silence pooled in corners it had no business reaching. I've learnt to trust these instincts I once called paranoia.
I arose slowly without disturbing the bed, Matthias beside me breathing steadily against the wall. Barefoot, I moved across the room and sauntered off to the front yard and knelt down to press my palm onto the junction between timber and the foundation stone.
The Qi was wrong.
Not broken - but worse. It was functional, but just not the way I had set it to work. There's a flicker to it, like a shimmer on glass, like it's listening.
I touched the jade slip tucked just under the beam, my fingers brushing the runes carved there weeks ago. The stroke pattern was intact, but the resonance... twisted. The glyph for "repel" now hums with a dissonant tone, slightly off-key. The tiniest warp that you would usually never notice.
They've turned it inside out.
The ward had been subverted and repurposed. We were indeed being watched.
I whispered the verification phrase under my breath: The golden stag has fled the pinewood.
Silence.
I went back to sleep, but not before checking every other rune in the house. They were untouched.
*Richard POV*
I woke up before the sun; not because of any sound or movement, but because the dream had ended too abruptly. I wasn't sure what exactly I had dreamt of, but the moisture across my eyes told me that it was something about home. Something about earth.
Instinctively, I reached under my pillow to adjust my sleeping position to get back to sleep. Instead, my hands touched metal.
A coin.
Well, fuck.
It wasn't cold, and that bothered me. Metal should be cold in the morning, especially silver. I turned it over in my fingers and listened for the wind, but the silence was absolute. As if the house had drawn in its breath and forgotten to let it go.
Immediately, I did as I was told and dashed to Elisabeth's room, waking her and her husband with a slight shriek. I opened my mouth to explain the situation, and:
"The golden stag has fled the pinewood."
Why did I say that? I didn't mean to say that, and I didn't even know what that meant.
Something in the house shifted, and I could see raw horror painted on Elisabeth's usually stoic face. She muttered something under her breath and moved past me, sweeping a finger through the air as if drawing runes in dust. The Qi moved with her - not flowing, but jittering in fear.
"Don't speak again until I say it's safe to do so."
I nodded.
"Where is it?"
I handed her the silver coin. It looked perfectly ordinary: silver, tarnished, and patterned with a stalk of wheat and an open eye. She shot visible jets of Qi from her hand and into the coin.
"The golden stag has fled the pinewood."
"The golden stag has fled the pinewood."
"The golden stag has fled the pinewood."
"The golden stag has fled the pinewood."
The coin repeated the phrase, and worse. In my voice.
I felt a chill run down my spine.
Elisabeth's jaw clenched not from surprise, but from annoyance. As though she had desperately hoped to be wrong, but was proved right.
She didn't say anything. Instead, she took the coin between both palms, carefully walked out of the bedroom and out to the back garden, and chucked it in the incinerator. Using extra Qi to up the flames as much as possible.
For a moment, it sounded like a conversation trying to start: overlapping tones of my own voice, twisted in pitch and tempo, whispering conversations from last night. A mocking mimicry of me.
And then, finally, silence.
Well, that was terrifying.
Elisabeth turned to me.
"You may now speak."
"What was that?" I finally ask.
"They're listening in. It means we're not staying," she replied, flatly. "Wake your parents and get packing. I'll be writing to some contacts to help us out."
"Where are we going?"
"Somewhere I escaped from a couple years ago."
I stood there for a moment too long, just thinking about how terrifying something must be for a monster like Elisabeth to consider fleeing to be the only option.
By the time I got to my parents' room, both were already up, having sensed the disturbances in the nearby Qi. My mother was standing by the window staring blankly into the horizon with the knowledge that she was too weak to handle things. My father sat at the edge of the bed, boot halfway on, looking like someone had just whispered war in his ear.
"Pack," I said. "Now. We're leaving."
My mother looked over at me, somewhat afraid but alert. "What happened?"
"They were listening," I said. "Through a coin they slipped under my pillow. El- Theo's mum burnt it. We're compromised."
Dad stood up without hesitation. "What do we bring?"
"We bring what we can. Elisabeth - Theo's mum - is writing a letter to someone for help. Probably for a place for us to hide. Quick, we probably don't have much time before they can hear us again."
My mother narrowed her eyes. "That damn Verdant Eye."
Verdant Eye. So that's what the group's called. Sounds kind of cringe... why couldn't they have a cooler name? Oh yeah, look at me, getting hunted by a group of what sounds like a ragtag group of bandits...
They moved quickly. Not rushed, not panicked - just decisive.
My father pulled out a thick cloth roll from under the bed and began unsealing a few inner compartments - maps, ration slips, old travel documents. My mother folded what few plain robes we had left and tucked them into a satchel. I ducked out to check the corridor, where Matthias' eyes met mine for a brief moment. Enough to convey his message.
Elisabeth is sealing the perimeter - we don't have long.
***
We didn't look back when we crossed the old boundary marker at the southern footbridge.
Matthias had knocked out Theo with some sort of spell back home in order to stop him from making a fuss or slowing us down. He'd have to ask any questions later, for right now, time was dire.
"Keep moving," Elisabeth whispered from the front.
We had to walk at the pace of mortals - at my pace - to prevent leaving behind any traces of us in the Qi. To prevent us from being followed.
We passed through dense undergrowth and out into the lower birchlands, on a ridge overlooking the flooded plain where Elsternwald used to be a proper township. And finally, we reached a scattered marsh of ruin and reed.
That was where she found us.
She came from the mist like she'd always been there - broad-shouldered, white-haired, wrapped in thick traveler's robes dyed in lapis blue and crow-ink black. Her Qi was faint, obscured, but impossibly deep. Even Elisabeth straightened at the sight of her.
"Olivia," Elisabeth called, bowing down deeply.
"Little sister," she replied. "I told you not to contact me again."
"And yet here you are."
Olivia snorted. "The last time I saw you, you were running out of the sect with..." she pointed at Matthias and Theo. "With liabilities. And now here you are, with three more."
"The last time I saw you, you said I made the right choice."
"A right choice is not always a good choice, sister. Especially considering what's happened now. Did Verdant Eye really make a come back? They wouldn't have been able to find you all had you stayed in the Inner Sect."
There was a pause of silence and something sharp in the air.
Then, Olivia turned to the rest of us, her eyes scanning each of our features.
"So," Olivia began, "you want to return to the Adlerheim Clan. With new names and new identities. I can only promise to put you in the Outer Sect so that you maintain a low profile and don't catch any further eyes... and, besides, we don't want you endangering the core disciples."
"All we want is safety."
"Same thing. Follow me."
***
The road to Adlerheim wasn't paved on the ground, but rather formed of many old trade routes taking shortcuts haphazardly to get to their final destination. Olivia led us down the paths without hesitation, plling us deeper into the eastern ranges, and out towards the Outer Sect boundaries.
Three days passed in a blur. Theo was still being kept unconscious, his father sustaining his body with Qi instead of food. I wish I had that treatment - all that walking was really bothersome with my current body.
We stopped only to eat and sleep, and even then, only with warding arrays and multiple shifts on watch. We saw no one. But that didn't mean no one saw us.
Finally, on the fourth morning, we stood on the edge of a valley that curved like a bowl beneath distant cliffs. Hidden under layers of fog and camouflage talismans lay the clustered stone dwellings of the Outer Sect of Adlerheim.
Olivia turned to Elisabeth.
"I can give you cover identities, half-pay, and an Outer Sect permit for each of them. But that's it. No more than that. You vanish, you obey rules, you start again."
"That's all we're asking."
"Then come," she said. "There are a few empty residences here for your families, and you will soon receive a delivery containing your identities. Once you have your tags, make your way to the Outer Sect Office and register with those names, saying you were recommended by Elder Luke. With that, our deal is done."
Before we could thank her, Olivia disappeared before our eyes.
New names. New papers. New lies. And above it all, a new world surrounded by cultivators.
Everything we were was now hidden under someone else's name.
But as the valley opened up before us, and the fog began to thin, I realised that this was the kind of world people died to enter.
And just then, I felt what could only be described as...
Excitement.
== End of Volume 1 ==