The Soul’s Chorus

Chapter 17

The dawn of the hunt was a sharp, cold blade. It cut through the gentle confusion Kaelen had felt in the garden with Chloe. Here, under Corbin’s iron gaze, there were no mysteries, only orders. The senior Warden had assembled a group of five. Kaelen was included, a grudging acknowledgement of his direct experience with the howl. There was Gregor, broad and silent, his eyes always moving. There were two others, seasoned Wardens whose names Kaelen rarely used. They were tools in Corbin’s hands today.

“We find the source,” Corbin stated, his voice leaving no room for the howl to be anything but a physical thing. “Animal, human, or twisted thing. We find it. We end it. The border must be clean.”

They crossed the boundary at a different point, far from the fungus covered stone. The mist here was the normal, soft grey. But its normalcy felt like a trap. Every sound was too loud. The crunch of a boot on a twig was a crack of thunder. The call of a distant crow was a mocking signal.

Corbin led with grim efficiency. He was a master tracker. His eyes read the forest floor like a printed page. He pointed to a scuff mark on some moss. He noted a bent branch at a height no deer would make. But these signs were faint. They were whispers, not trails.

For hours, they moved in a tight, quiet formation. The silence between them grew heavy. It was not a comfortable quiet. It was a pot on a low fire, waiting to boil. Kaelen’s Lunarth power was a low hum in his chest, a nervous animal sensing a storm. He watched the trees, expecting the oily mist, the blue glow. He saw only familiar bark and sunlit leaves.

It was Gregor who found the first one.

He raised a fist, halting the line. He pointed, his finger steady.

There, in a small clearing where the morning light fell in a bright pool, was a dead fox.

But it was all wrong.

It lay on its side, not as if it had fallen, but as if it had been placed. Its fur, normally a vibrant red, was dull and matted with something dark. There were no clear bite marks. No signs of a struggle from a predator. Instead, its body was twisted. The spine seemed bent at a cruel angle. The legs were splayed in directions that made no sense for bone and joint. The worst part was the head. It was untouched, the eyes open and clouded. The mouth was pulled back not in a snarl, but in a silent, wide scream of pure terror. It looked frozen in the moment the howl had torn through it.

Corbin crouched. He did not touch it. He studied it with a cold, clinical eye. “No physical wounds,” he muttered. “No blood on the ground. It was not hunted for food.”

“Its insides are slurry,” Gregor said, his voice a low rumble. He used the tip of his knife to gently press the fox’s stomach. The body gave too easily, like a sack of wet grain. “Shaken apart.”

A cold knot formed in Kaelen’s stomach. Shaken apart. The sympathetic vibration in his own bones. The fox, a creature of simple life and instinct, had no magic to protect it. The howl had simply dissolved it from within.

“Move on,” Corbin ordered, his face stone. “Find the epicenter.”

The mood shifted. This was no longer a hunt for a rogue animal. They were tracking a sound that killed from the inside out. The air itself felt like an enemy.

They found three more corpses before noon.

A badger, similarly twisted, its powerful claws digging into its own belly in its final agony.

A hawk, fallen from its branch, its wings snapped in a violent, spiral pattern as if it had been wrung like a cloth.

And finally, a large stag. This was the hardest to see. It was a majestic creature, or had been. It lay on its side by a creek. Its antlers, a crown of bone, were driven deep into the soft earth, as if it had tried to ram the ground to escape the pain in its head. Its eyes had burst from the pressure. A thin trickle of blood ran from its ears into the creek water, a pink thread dissolving in the current.

The sight was a physical blow. The violence was not messy, not carnivorous. It was precise and total. It was an erasure of life from the inside.

Corbin stood over the stag, his jaw clenched. The fruitlessness of their hunt was a growing shadow. They had found the effects, not the cause. They were staring at the aftermath of a storm that had already passed.

“It’s clean work,” Gregor said, breaking the long silence. He wiped his knife on a leaf, though it had touched nothing. “Too clean. No beast does this. This is craft.”

“Meaning?” Corbin snapped, frustration edging his voice.

Gregor shrugged his heavy shoulders. He looked around the circle of Wardens, his gaze lingering just a moment too long on each face. “A wolf leaves a mess. A bear leaves a mess. Even a sick thing, a rabid thing, leaves a trail of its own chaos.” He nodded at the perfectly placed, internally destroyed stag. “This is not chaos. This is a message. A display.”

He paused, letting his words hang in the cold air. The creek bubbled innocently beside the dead king of the forest.

“Magic did this,” Gregor continued, his tone now casual, too casual. “Bad magic. The kind that doesn’t just happen. The kind that’s aimed.” He looked directly at Corbin, but his words seemed to blanket the whole group. “And bad magic needs a mind. A will. It doesn’t just wander out of the mist. Someone sent it. Someone who knows how to make sound into a knife.”

Kaelen felt a chill that had nothing to do with the forest shade. Gregor was voicing the unthinkable.

“Your point, Gregor?” Corbin’s voice was a whip crack.

“My point,” Gregor said, sheathing his knife with a slow, deliberate click, “is that we’re looking out there.” He jerked his head toward the human lands beyond the mist. “But a knife can be thrown from anywhere. Even from inside a crowded room. Even,” he let his eyes sweep over them again, a slow, weighing look, “from inside the pack.”

The word pack hung in the air. It meant their group. It meant the Wardens. It meant all of Silvathorne.

The paranoia was a seed. Gregor had planted it with the ease of a man tossing a stone into a pond. Now, the ripples spread. The two other Wardens shifted their feet. They did not look at each other. They looked at the trees, at the ground, anywhere but at the men beside them. The trust that was as vital as air on a hunt began to thin, to stretch.

Was Gregor just being cautious? Or was he directing suspicion? Did he know something? Or was he making sure that if blame was to fall, it would fall on everyone equally?

Kaelen’s mind raced. The howl was external. He had felt it come from beyond. But what if Gregor was right in a way he didn’t intend? What if the will, the mind behind it, was not out there, but in here? Someone making the door weak. Someone like… Chloe? The thought was a sickness. He saw her bloody, bandaged hands, her exhausted tears. That was not the face of a person who could craft sound into a killing knife.

But the parchment. The silver streak. The taint that might be a seal.

Corbin dismissed the idea with a sharp wave. “Superstition and fear. We are Wardens. We trust our own. The threat is external. It is clever. It hides. We have not found its lair today. That is all.”

But the seed was planted. As they turned to make the long, silent walk back to Silvathorne, the group was no longer a unit. They were five separate men, walking the same path. Each lost in his own thoughts. Each watching the others from the corner of his eye. The corpses they left behind were not just evidence of an attack. They were proof of a power that could kill without touching. And Gregor’s quiet words had asked the question that now echoed in all their minds: Who, in all of Silvathorne, could understand such power? Who might have a reason to use it?

The hunt had found no monster. Instead, it had brought back a new, more terrifying prey: doubt. And Kaelen carried it with him, heavier than any dead stag, a squirming, fearful thing that nestled next to the secret of the parchment and the memory of a blue rose petal on a stone wall.