Chapter 13 Into the Forbidden Woods

Two months after the fall, life had found a new shape.
The family had moved into a small house on the quiet edge of a town, a long way from the halls they'd grown up in. Fewer rooms, fewer servants, a handful of guards where there had once been a garrison. Only the people who'd chosen the Drakhars over their own safety had stayed. Like garrick


Julius never said a word about any of it. The manor was gone, and the title, and the money. But his mother slept safe under this smaller roof, and Lyra still woke up laughing at things only she found funny, and his father still walked through the low doorways like he'd been born to them. As far as Julius let himself say out loud, that was enough.
"As long as they are safe "

He hoped that everything ends soon and there life gets better but,

It wasn't, and he knew it.
julius still rembered the celebrations.
crowd chanting to his father name.
The medal
The speeches
How people use to greet his father 
His father had fought Titania's wars and bled for its borders and come back half-dead more than once for a crown that wore his loyalty like a cloak. And the one time House Drakhar needed that trust returned, Ragnar had looked at his oldest sword and picked the doubt.
Julius hadn't forgiven that. He didn't plan to.
His father still told him strength wasn't the thing that mattered most, that it couldn't cut a rumor or argue down a lie. Julius listened, and nodded, and quietly decided his father was wrong. The men who'd broken his family hadn't done it with truth or honor. They'd done it because they could, and nobody strong enough to stop them had bothered to care. So Julius would be the one who was strong. That was the lesson he took, whatever lesson his father had meant to give him.
Valen still hoped that king will not abandon him and everything will might get better .
But julius thought otherwise
He trained like it was the only thing he had left, because some mornings it felt like it was.
He had no Aura to lean on, so he built everything that wasn't Aura. By eleven his body had outgrown boys years older than him, hard from work instead of power. His swordwork sharpened week on week. His reactions had turned into something that put a crease between the eyebrows of anyone watching, a way of moving to meet a strike a breath before it landed, like he'd read it off the other fighter's shoulders. Julius was always observant type so his hobby was to observe pattern , habits and flow thats why his prediction was so great and he made his body react that way .
It got bad enough that even Aiden couldn't enjoy a spar anymore.
"You shouldn't be able to do that," Aiden said, stumbling back after an exchange that ended with a wooden blade resting against his collarbone. NO AURA 
Julius lowered his sword. "Do what?"
"Everything."
"You'll have to be clearer."
"You're Stage Zero."
"And?"
"I'm Stage One beginner."
"And?"
Aiden jabbed a finger at him. "That means I'm supposed to win."
Julius laughed. "You do win."
But not the way i want .
"Not enough."
"98 times out of 100 is enough"
"No , I am stage 1"
They went again.
A few days later the two of them were sitting on top of an old stone wall at the edge of what used to be Drakhar land, looking out at the trees.
The forest ran on past anything Julius could find the end of. Old growth, dark even in daylight, the kind of place the town kept a name for and a wide berth from. The locals called it the Forbidden Woods, and they weren't being poetic about it.
Aiden was already shaking his head. "No."
"I haven't said anything."
"You don't have to. I know that face."
"You don't know any face."
"You're about to tell me we should go in there."
Julius smiled.
Aiden tipped his head back and groaned. "See."
"Technically I wasn't going to."
"You absolutely were."
"Maybe."
Aiden swung his legs over the wall and dropped down. "I'm going home."
Julius caught his sleeve. "Come on."
"No."
"We stay near the edge."
"No."
"We just drill where the ground's flat."
"No."
"We might find something worth seeing."
"No."
"We could hunt."
Aiden stopped.
Julius watched it land before his friend could cover it, and had to bite down on a grin. "Hunting sounds good," he said.
"It does not sound good."
"It sounds great, actually."
Aiden stood there fighting with himself, and Julius already knew how it ended. He'd known the second the word left his mouth.
"One hour," Aiden said, holding up a finger like a weapon.
"One hour."
"Near the edge. No going deep."
"Near the edge."
"No stupid decisions."
"When have I ever."
Aiden's eyes narrowed. "I don't trust you."
"That stings."
Aiden smiled
Half an hour later they were nowhere near the edge.
Julius had walked them a good deal further in than one hour could account for, and he wasn't really pretending otherwise. He couldn't help it. New ground had always pulled at him the way nothing else did, and the deeper they went the more there was to look at. The more julius got excited.
"You're a liar," Aiden said.
"I'm just good at convincing"
"You said we'd stay where we could see the way out."
"We can almost see it."
"Julius. We can't see it at all."
He wasn't fully listening. The woods were worth the trouble. The trees stood higher than any he'd ever been under, the light came down green and broken, and small things shifted in the brush on every side. The air itself felt fuller here, thick in a way he had no word for, like the whole forest was more awake than the world outside it.
Then something moved up ahead, and both boys went still.
A grey-furred animal about the size of a wolf, nosing through the roots. No Aura came off it, nothing dangerous in how it held itself. A Grey Fang, one of the lowest things that lived in these woods.
Aiden's nerves broke into a grin. "First hunt?"
Julius nodded.
They moved the way they'd drilled it a hundred times in the yard, quiet and low, splitting wide. The beast caught their scent a beat too late. Aiden slid into its eyeline and pulled it around, and Julius came in off its flank and put his blade where it needed to go.
It was over fast.
The two of them stood looking down at it, then up at each other, and for no reason either could have said they both started laughing. Their first kill. The first time the training had meant something outside the practice yard, with a real heartbeat on the other end of it.
And the second it was done, Julius wanted to do it again.
"More," he said.
Aiden's grin slipped a notch. "More?"
"I want to do that again. I want to know what it's like to be the one doing the hunting, not the one getting chased home."
"I think," Aiden said carefully, "we should head back now."
They didn't head back.
An hour later Julius was crouched over a line of deer tracks, fresh ones, pressed clean into the soft ground.
"They went this way."
"We've been out way too long," Aiden said.
"One more."
"You said that two hunts ago."
"One more."
Aiden let out a long breath, and then he followed, the way he always followed.
The tracks took them in deeper. The trees crowded closer and the light thinned, and somewhere along the way the forest changed without either of them deciding to notice it. The birds had stopped. The brush had gone still. It got quiet in a way that wasn't restful, the kind of quiet that means everything smaller than you has already left.
Julius stopped walking.
Something was wrong. He felt it before he understood it, the same cold drop in the gut that came a half-second before a blade he hadn't seen yet.
Then he found it with his eyes.
It stood between two trees up ahead, watching them. Close to three meters of it, built like a great black panther and then made into something worse. Six red eyes sat in the long skull, every one of them open. Spurs of bone pushed up through the fur at its shoulders. A dark haze leaked from its mouth and thinned into the air.
Everything in Julius told him to run before his mind had finished taking it in.
Beside him, Aiden had gone white to the lips. "Julius." His voice came out thin. "That's a Stage One beast."
It didn't feel like prey they had tracked down. It felt like they'd walked into something's home, and it had been waiting to see how long it would take them to understand that. The weight of its attention sat on Julius's skin like a hand. The bloodlust coming off it was a real thing, heavy and close.
The beast lifted its head, slow, and all six eyes settled on them and held. It wasn't charging. It was measuring. Reading how they stood, where their weight sat, how far off the trees were.
A second went by. Then another.
Then it drew its mouth back off its teeth in something that was almost a smile, and came.
"RUN."
They broke together, both of them, branches whipping past, the ground tearing up under their boots. The thing came through the trees behind them like the trees weren't there. It was faster than either of them by a wide margin, much faster, and its roar rolled through the woods and brought the leaves down.
Julius made the mistake of looking back.
"F***"
It had already swallowed half the distance. Twenty meters, then less. He snapped his head forward and threw everything he had into his legs.
"FASTER," he shouted.
"I'M TRYING."
"Then try harder"
The ground went out from under them.
For one strange weightless instant there was nothing beneath Julius's feet at all. Aiden's shout cut off short. The earth had simply opened, a whole sheet of old soil and root letting go at once, and the two of them dropped through it into the dark.
Roots tore loose around him. Stone cracked somewhere below. Dirt came down past his face in a curtain. Above him the beast threw itself after them and caught itself at the very lip of the hole, hauling back from an edge that even it wouldn't take.
Then the last of the ground let go.
In the half-second before the dark closed over him, Julius saw what was waiting underneath. Stone. A great shape of worked stone buried beneath the forest, walls and pillars that had no business being there, older than anything he had a name for. Something built, then forgotten, then buried under so many years that the woods had grown across its roof and no one alive had known.
A temple.
Then they were falling through the last of the branches, and the dark took them both.
Like they were never there.