Chapter 4 — Echoes of Duty

Kael

The forest was restless tonight.

Kael could feel it in the way the air thrummed with tension, the faint rustling of leaves too deliberate, too alive. The towering evergreens seemed to close in on him, their twisted roots shifting subtly underfoot, almost as if the forest itself was stirring, uneasy. Shadows pooled between the trees, deeper and darker than they should have been, and the usual sounds of nocturnal life—the distant hoot of an owl, the skittering of rodents—were conspicuously absent. The encounter with Rose lingered in his mind, sharp and persistent, like a thorn buried too deep to remove. Her defiance, her refusal to back down despite the weight of his warnings, had unsettled him in ways he didn’t fully understand. That fire in her hazel eyes—it had stirred something old and uneasy within him.