Vern stopped just beyond the last ward marker, where the Academy’s influence thinned into habit rather than force.

  “This is Ashren,” he said.

  The woman stood a few paces away, fully visible. No effort made to mask what she was.

  Feline ears rose cleanly through her hair, angled forward, tracking sound beyond human range. Her tail rested loose behind her, still but unrestrained, the tip barely brushing the leaf litter as her weight shifted.

  She wore a small insignia. No visible weapon.

  Senior scout.

  Ashren didn’t acknowledge Lysara.

  “She’ll be judging your readiness,” Vern continued. “Field-ready or training assignment.”

  Not if. Which.

  Ashren’s ears flicked once — not at Vern’s voice, but at something deeper in the trees. Her tail lifted slightly, then stilled again, a controlled counterbalance as she changed stance.

  “She operates independently,” Vern said.

  Ashren’s gaze finally cut to Lysara. Brief. Exact. Already measuring posture, breath, reaction time.

  “If you are discovered,” Vern added, “you disengage.”

  “You are not here to win,” he said. “You are here to return.”

  Ashren turned away without ceremony. She didn’t lower her ears. Didn’t hide her tail. She moved upward, silent and unhurried, the forest accepting her passage without protest.

  Then she was gone.

  Vern stepped back.

  “Begin.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The forest thickened as soon as they crossed the line.

  Not sound.

  Presence.

  Her senses should have opened — stretched outward, tasted the air — but they didn’t. The new potions dulled everything, blunted edges that usually cut clean. Even Ashren was gone. No pressure shift. No absence.

  Blind.

  Lysara slowed immediately. Counted steps. Let the ground speak where her blood would not.

  The corruption trail was old. Human. Dragged and uneven, marked more by what had been avoided than what had been touched. Whoever it was had learned to move while breaking.

  She followed damage. Bent grass. Bark shaved thin. Stone scuffed where it shouldn’t have been.

  The mage announced himself badly.

  Mana displaced the air behind her — clean, disciplined, Academy-trained. Light burned bark pale as bone where her head had been a breath before.

  She turned—

  —and the shadow moved.

  Not from the trees.

  From between them.

  It slid along the ground like a thought half-formed, folded upward without sound, and struck her ribs hard enough to steal breath and orientation at once. Cold followed the impact — not pain, not heat — something wrong and empty.

  Asher.

  She didn’t try to name its shape. She let gravity take her instead.

  Lysara dropped downhill, rolled through leaf rot and stone, shattered a vial behind her without looking. The scent-break burst sharp and acidic, not masking — erasing. The trail ended too suddenly to follow.

  The shadow hesitated.

  That was all she needed.

  She scraped a circle into bark as she moved — incomplete, uneven — jammed the mana stone into the break and twisted.

  The rune flung the mana wide.

  Light tore outward in a soft, blinding wash, swallowing edges instead of burning them. Depth collapsed. The shadow recoiled, its shape losing coherence at the margins.

  Lysara rolled bitter liquid over her skin — wrong, flat, not-human — and ran low, breath measured, ribs locked tight against the ache.

  The mage stopped casting.

  The shadow did not pursue.

  She dropped into stone and water, slid beneath exposed roots where the earth had eaten itself hollow, pressed flat and still while the forest relearned its sure.

  Time passed.

  When she moved again, it wasn’t forward or back.

  She widened first, shallow and patient, letting the broken trail continue where it wanted to go. She marked noise where it would be noticed, not where it would matter, bound it loose and late, then cut hard to the side into stone and root that punished pursuit.

  She paused once — only once — long enough to hear the forest disagree with itself.

  Then she continued her withdrawal.

  Vern waited where the forest thinned back into patrol ground.

  He didn’t ask where she’d gone. He only checked her stance, her breath, the way she held her ribs.

  Ashren emerged several minutes later, unhurried. Leaves didn’t cling to her. Her ears were forward. Her tail moved once, then stilled.

  She looked at Lysara.

  “I lost you.”

  Vern nodded.

  “Field-ready, you may return to the Academy.”