Panic isn’t rational. It doesn’t ask permission. It takes.

It seized you in one breathless instant—your heartbeat spiking, lungs pulling at the air like drowning hands. You turned, fast, your feet slapping against cracked pavement, echoing too loud in the open night. Behind you: the sound of pursuit. Heavy. Human. Intent.

Ahead: the woods.

Dark. Watching. Waiting.

You didn’t think. You ran.

The treeline yawned open like the jaws of something ancient and hungry. Black branches tangled against the sky like skeletal arms, their silhouettes jagged under the cold eye of the moon. You plunged into the underbrush, breath ripping in your throat, thorns catching your clothes, your skin. The world narrowed to motion and noise—twigs snapping, leaves crunching beneath you like dry bones.

And then came the hush.

Not silence—never silence here—but the hush that only deep woods know. A heavy, breathing stillness. The kind that presses down on you like a weight. As if the forest itself is listening.

You stumbled on a root and dropped hard to your knees, palms slapping wet moss and loam. Earth and leaf rot filled your nose. Your heartbeat throbbed behind your eyes. You tried to listen, tried to sense where they were. But the dark had swallowed them—and you—whole.

And that’s when you saw him.

He wasn’t there a moment ago. And now he was. Half-shadow, half-moonlight. Towering.

The first thing you saw were his eyes—deep, lit from within by something that wasn’t quite natural, but wasn’t malevolent either. He wasn’t just standing among the trees. He was the trees. The moss on his shoulders gleamed wetly. His skin was bark and vine and muscle. He smelled of wet roots and old rivers. There was power in his stillness—an ancient, slow kind of power. Watching you. Measuring. Your breath caught in your throat.

He made a sound—deep and primal. A gurgling that bubbled up from his chest like water rising through mud, followed by a low crack, like a log splitting in fire. You couldn’t place it. Couldn’t understand it. But somehow, you did.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

One massive arm moved, slowly, carefully, fingers like curling branches gesturing past you, behind his broad back. A warning. A command. Hide.

You obeyed without hesitation.

You slid behind a tree trunk wide enough to shield your body, hands pressed to its moss-slick bark, the air thick with the scent of soil and something older. You barely breathed. Every instinct in you still screamed to run, but something in his presence steadied your limbs. Not comfort—but clarity. Like standing on the edge of a storm and knowing you’ve found the eye.

You watched.

The men who followed—their movements were frantic, loud, arrogant in the way humans are when they think they’ve conquered the world. They didn’t see him until it was too late.

He moved like rising tide.

Vines uncoiled from the forest floor at his feet, snapping upward with impossible speed. Roots surged like living things, breaking through the soil to wrap around legs, yanking bodies to the ground. Screams split the air, but the forest swallowed them quickly. Branches whipped from above like lashes. One of the men raised a weapon—and the gun was crushed in his hand by a sudden growth of thorny bramble.

And still Alec didn’t speak.

The swamp spoke for him.

Each movement was inevitable, like gravity. A force that did not hesitate, did not gloat.

When the last of them fled—stumbling, bleeding, their bravado rotted away like wet paper—he turned.

You met his eyes again. And for the first time, you saw something beneath the green glow. Sadness. No, deeper than that. Burden. The kind that doesn’t come from rage or duty, but from carrying something too large for too long. The kind of burden that changes a man into something else. Something more. Something alone.