Goldrick advanced through the damp vegetation with cautious steps, careful to take in every detail of his surroundings. Around him, the forest north of the village of Ravast was shrouded in a cold half-light. The trees, though mostly bare, hindered the passage of the early-afternoon sunlight with an impenetrable tangle of dry branches. Only a few feeble rays managed to pierce the skeletal canopies and reach the muddy ground, covered with tufts of grass that emerged here and there among an endless multitude of fallen, multicolored leaves. Between moss-covered trunks and twisted roots, the uneven soil was dotted with small shrubs and barren bushes. Despite this, the visibility through the undergrowth allowed them to see with reasonable clarity for several dozen paces in every direction.

A circumstance that was proving quite useful to Karak as he followed northward the footprints they had spotted around the Ravast residence, which had led them all the way here. Tracks left by someone who, after climbing down from Lord Lucas’s bedroom window, had first stolen a pair of horses from the nearby stables and then ventured into the forest through the rear garden of the estate. Someone who must have been of considerable build, judging by the size and depth of the footprints in the mud. Someone who must have acted under cover of night.

Continuing to survey their surroundings carefully, Goldrick realized that he had fallen a little behind the others. Karak, at the head of the small group, had been moving for several minutes now with his back hunched even more than usual. His head was lowered, his eyes fixed on the ground, while his hands, wrapped in large leather gloves, were often busy brushing aside all those leaves and clumps of grass concealing the trail he was following. A few steps behind him, Tiresio and Liris followed closely in silence. Although the former appeared rather calm, the latter could not conceal the same unease Goldrick himself was feeling. It was clear that, like him, she was troubled by the whole situation. A visceral uneasiness, a sense of foreboding that both of them tried to conceal so as not to negatively influence the others, yet which they were unable to drive from their minds.

The questions that had inevitably arisen in their thoughts, the middle-aged man reflected, were probably the same. Questions concerning the actual truth behind the reasons, vaguely expressed in Lord Lucas’s note, that had driven him to leave the village with Anastasia. The fact that two horses were missing from the stables seemed to confirm that much, but doubts also remained as to who, specifically, might have pressured the betrothed couple. And over what, exactly. Not to mention the reasons and circumstances surrounding that strange nocturnal flight, as well as the questionable correspondence, in Karak’s opinion, between the footprints they had found and those that Lord Ravast himself should have left behind.

Trying to put those thoughts aside for later and focus on the present, the middle-aged man glanced over his shoulder. The undergrowth, with its oppressive shadows, revealed no sign of anyone else besides themselves. Their only companion on the march through the vegetation was the distant call of some raven, occasionally echoing from deep within the forest and lending the moment an even more nervous and restless atmosphere. All the more so because Goldrick had never liked ravens.

As he quickened his pace, turning his eyes back toward the path ahead in an attempt to drive those thoughts away as well, Goldrick noticed something that caught his attention. An old dead tree, its trunk split wide open and parted in the middle like a flower just beginning to bloom, stood to his right atop a small rise in the ground. Its twisted shape, rotting bark and branches sprawled across the earth would ordinarily have meant nothing.

But this was not the case.

For he had already seen that tree, identical in every respect.

In a dream.

A strange dream he had had the previous night.

For a moment, he hesitated, disturbed. It was not the first time he had experienced what felt like the sensation of living through something he had already lived through, in precisely the same way he had experienced it. This time, however, it was different. He had not lived through it before. He had dreamed it, only a few hours earlier.

Instinctively, he turned his head away, hoping that by looking elsewhere he would not receive the confirmation he feared. Confirmation of a growing sense of unease, born from an awareness that was worrying him even more than he already was. Confirmation that, unfortunately for him, he did receive.

For after the split tree came the thick brambles growing alongside the path they were following. Brambles in which his cloak caught for a moment.

Then came the shallow ditch into which they ventured, and the fog that suddenly enveloped them at that particular point in the forest.

A fog that had appeared from nowhere, dense and heavy, covering the damp ground like a veil and slowly spreading across it like a wave endowed with a life of its own.

All things he had already seen.

Clear as day in his dream.

Or rather, he should have called it a nightmare.

“But what… perhaps we should turn back…,” Liris suggested in a low voice, visibly troubled as she stared at the strange mist now curling around her waist.

“Wait. I smell something. An odor… blood, dead flesh…,” Karak whispered, sniffing the air and anticipating any other response, “…straight ahead of us. It’s close…”

It was an answer Goldrick would never have wanted to hear.

“Just like in that nightmare…,” he thought to himself, struggling to maintain his composure, “…this isn’t possible… what is happening…?!”

But his composure had already abandoned him.

When he focused again on what lay before his eyes, he already knew what he was going to see.

The ditch they were following opened into a wide depression in the ground, where the forest grew sparser, though its shadows remained thick and heavy. Shadows that loomed over everything, made even more oppressive by the strange mist clinging to the ground.

The middle-aged man instinctively turned his gaze toward the place he had never wanted to look.

And when he saw what he had already dreamed of, he recoiled.

He stopped dead, standing motionless in the fog while his companions ahead of him slowly crossed through it, struggling to part it like travelers making their way through milky waters. Every step was a slow swim, and the mist, rising to their waists, clung to them like stubborn water that refused to let them pass.

Directly in front of them, at the opposite end of the depression, a large dark mass barely protruding from the fog lay sprawled across the mud among the leaves. A black cloud enveloped it, accompanied by an intense, disturbing and ominous buzzing that constantly changed its shape, like a creature unable to maintain its own form.

A cloud of insects and flies.

And something else was moving among them.

Something indistinct.

When a foul and nauseating stench of death reached his nostrils, Goldrick stood petrified in the middle of the clearing. And now so did his companions, who had stopped a few steps ahead of him, not far from the shapeless heap, disoriented and uneasy as they stared at the scene in turn.

The middle-aged man swallowed loudly, unable to tear his eyes away. Neither his mind nor his mouth seemed capable of thinking, let alone uttering a word.

And then, when Karak took a step toward that dark tangle in the surreal silence that had suddenly descended upon them, Goldrick already knew what was going to happen.

The last thing he had seen in his nightmare.

A large raven, its plumage black as coal, rose cawing from the mass sprawled upon the ground, beating its great wings in a chaotic whirl of feathers. As the frightened bird took flight toward the skeletal canopies of the trees looming above them, the cloud of insects scattered, drifting away from the heap as well and revealing it, if only for an instant.

A brief instant.

An instant that was nevertheless enough for the middle-aged man to see what it was.

Something utterly unknown and unexpected to him.

Something that even his nightmare had not revealed.