She couldn’t remember her name. Not even the shape of it.

Just the cold. And the trees.

Endless lines of them, stretching so far they might as well have been walls. She thought she’d been wandering for decades. In truth, it had only been a year. A year since the pilgrimage. A year since everything went terribly wrong.

The attack came before dawn with teeth in the dark and the sound of armor splitting. Screams that didn’t stop when the throats did. Coyote and hyena halfbeasts, rabid with something older than hunger.

She woke alone.

No caravan. No banners. No Moonmother to save her.

Just dirt under her nails and the faint iron taste of survival.

She tried to pray, at first. Old words. Familiar cadences. But nothing answered. Not the gods. Not the wind. So she stopped speaking altogether.

Days blurred. Weeks folded into one another. Seasons began to mock her. She learned to hunt, to skin, to survive because no one else would teach her. The great Serelis of House Vireth—though she didn’t know that name yet—reduced to bones and instinct. A creature stripped of memory and meaning.

When the recollections began to crawl back, they came wrong. Shattered. Cruel. The faces of the dead. The sound of her own screaming.

The truth, or at least what little she could piece together, was that she never made it past the borders of Nyrrh’thalas. She had been ambushed before faith ever reached the altar. The pilgrimage had been a graveyard before it was a journey.

She cursed the gods she’d been sent to honor. The Moonmother, especially. The goddess who promised serenity and gave her nothing but the ache of waking up alive.

If this was divine mercy, it was a cruel one.

By the time the year turned, she’d built her own house; a crooked little thing of bark and bone. She’d made her own weapons. Skinned her own meals. Buried her own prayers. The forest became her temple, her punishment, her only witness.

And she was its ghost.

Until the morning she felt eyes on her.

It started faintly—the prickle at the back of her neck, the weight of being watched. She told herself she was imagining it. No one came here. No one could. Still, her hand went to the spear she carved from ashwood and fear, and she moved through the trees with the caution of someone who’d been prey before.

When the twig snapped, she didn’t hesitate. She lunged.

The spear found a throat — soft, startled, human. No—elven.

A girl.

Small, familiar, and impossibly alive.

Serelis froze, breath caught halfway between prayer and panic. The face staring up at her was one she’d buried in dreams: the girl from the pilgrimage. The one who was supposed to be dead.

The girl gasped her name.

And everything inside her stopped.

The name hit like lightning to a drowning body. Serelis. Her name. Her name.

Her grip faltered. The spear fell. She staggered back a step, heart slamming against ribs that had forgotten how to hold it.

“It’s… you,” she whispered. Her voice came out like breaking glass. “You’re alive.”

Serelis laughed, or something close to it. A sound torn between relief and grief. She dropped to her knees in the dirt. “I thought—” she stopped herself. What did it matter what she thought? What did anything?

“I’m sorry. I thought you were—” she gestured vaguely at the woods. “A halfbeast.”

It felt wrong to speak after so long. Words scraped her throat raw.

After a year of silence, of gods who didn’t answer—someone had found her.

Someone remembered her.

She let out a shaky breath. “It’s nice,” she managed, voice low, uncertain, “to see another survivor.”

And for the first time in months, maybe in forever, Serelis Vireth—the pilgrim, the forgotten, and the forsaken—felt something dangerously close to faith.

Not in gods. Not in destiny. In the proof that she wasn’t alone. That maybe there was a way out of this hell.