Forbidden Temptation

Chapter Five

The ringing of water was the first thing that brought me back: the thin, clear voice of the brook, licking the edges of the stones. Then the cold: the chill rising from the ground, sinking into the bones, creeping slowly into me from the damp walls of the hollow. Among the roots, in the belly of a fallen pine, for a moment I didn’t know who I was; there was only the body – a map of bruises and a heavy sky of burning wounds. When I tried to move my arm, a stabbing pain shot from my shoulder down to my ribs, and my lungs protested with a short, choking sigh.

“Slowly,” my wolf inside me growled. “Don’t yank yourself back. Breathe with me.”

I obeyed. In, out. The cool air settled against the raw, scraped lining of my throat, then slid into my chest, where it did nothing now but exist. After a few long, held beats, the world began to take shape: dry leaves caught among the roots, the faded green of moss, the ashen-grey light of morning beyond the hollow’s mouth. Outside, among the trees, some bird cleared its throat and then fell silent.

I wanted to sit up. I dug my palm into the earth, and as I lifted myself, the cramp ripping through my belly struck as if an invisible hand had twisted some hidden nerve. I had to stop. I let my forehead drop back onto my arm, and let the tremor run down to my wrist. My wolf sat still inside me; I felt its weight holding me. It didn’t rush me, didn’t soothe me. It simply was – and its presence meant more than any word.

The second time I tried, I was more careful. I rolled onto my side, stretched my leg slowly, acknowledged my knee’s protest with a quiet growl, then propped myself halfway up on one elbow. The world didn’t tilt. I waited until the light around the hollow’s mouth fused with the narrow strip I could see through the slit of my eyelid. My hand slid onto my cloak – heavy and damp, but its weight held mine.

I crawled to the brook. I didn’t stand – on all fours, like a wounded beast, I slipped out from the shelter of the roots. The ground’s dampness seeped through my knees, moss touched my shins with cold fingers. At the water’s edge I knelt, dipped my hand into the stream. The cold startled me again – a sobering slap. I lifted my palm to my mouth, drinking in small sips so my throat wouldn’t rebel. My own stench – blood, smoke, fear – slowly gave way to the clean scent of the water.

I washed my face. My skin screamed at the cold, then quieted. I rinsed what remained off my thigh – I didn’t look long. Even the act of looking can cut; today I refused needless wounds. I wrung the hem of my cloak as best I could, then pulled it back over me. My body, like after a fever, was at once cold and leaden, yet still movable.

That was when I felt it: first in my chest, then somewhere behind my shoulder blades – a very fine, very faint stirring. Not pain, not the dull weight that had lodged beneath my ribs these past hours. Rather some inner current, as if it wished to choose a direction within me. A thin, almost imperceptible thread tightened in the center of my chest, then began to pull gently. Not sideways, not backward – forward, toward something I couldn’t yet see.

I turned my head that way. The pull didn’t grow stronger, but it didn’t fade either. Like when the wind strokes a single blade of grass one way, then leaves it so. My wolf lifted its head inside me.

“Do you feel it?” it asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “Like… like a call. Not a voice. More… a path.”

“It’s not from him,” said my wolf, certainty in its voice. “Nor from the pack. Different. Deeper. Older.”

I closed my eyes and listened inward. The pull wasn’t aggressive – it didn’t jerk or demand. It was like the tide: you barely notice as the water rises, until suddenly your ankles are wet, then your knees, and by the time you look around, the shoreline has redrawn itself. The direction was clear. From the hollow’s mouth to the right, down the hillside, into the thicker stand of pines, and beyond, to somewhere my eyes couldn’t reach – but my chest could.

“What is it?” I asked.

My wolf was silent. When it finally spoke, it was so softly that even my own breath nearly drowned it out.

“The earth’s. Not ours, yet it speaks to us. A boundary.”

The word struck both my skin and my bones. Boundary. The name whispered in rumors: the edge of the lands, where the air shifted as if another world breathed on the far side. Where tracks doubled in the snow, where foreign scents lurked under bark, where paths sometimes bit their own tails. They said it was the place of magic, where wolf and man were but guests. They said those who felt its pull never returned the same – if they returned at all.

“We can’t go there,” I whispered. My voice rang hollow above the water. “We’re weak… and we don’t know what awaits.”

“We can’t go back either,” my wolf replied. “That much we know.”

Between the two sentences, there wasn’t much air. The stones along the brook were slippery, but I could grip them. A dry twig snapped behind me – just a squirrel racing up and down a trunk – yet my heart leapt as though every gate of a fortress had opened at once. Meanwhile the pull, patient and steady, held its direction – not urging, not yielding.

“If we go home, we die,” said my wolf. “If we stay, hunger will find us. If we follow what calls, perhaps there’s something that won’t devour, but receive.”

“We don’t know it,” I objected weakly.

“It doesn’t know us either,” it said. “But the earth knows of us, or it wouldn’t call.”

That thought caught my breath. The idea – that not some stranger’s whim tugged at me, but something older than my own birth – gave the pull a weight I could no longer blur with fear. I rose carefully. My ankle jolted on the slope, but my body – as if carrying less burden – obeyed the small steps more readily than I’d expected.

I set out in the indicated direction. There was no mark. No path. Only the thin, soft tension in my chest, correcting every stray step with a subtle, inner nudge. Like someone guiding you with a touch on the inside of your arm – not gripping, just brushing, yet sure. My wolf kept watch over both the outer world and this inner guidance; its ears twitched at the slightest sound, its eyes behind my brow tracked the play of light.

The sun emerged from the clouds. It brought no warmth – only clarity. Light perched on the tips of fir branches, water gleamed in the litter. Birds chattered bolder, two sparrows quarreled over nothing, a woodpecker hammered patiently nearby. The colors weren’t brighter – I was more awake. I set aside each shade in my mind, like bread saved for later.

At one point, the pull grew stronger. Not tugging or jerking – more like the air thickening in a band. I felt it on my skin too: the wind stroked my arm differently here, scents bent differently, silence held another weight. I stopped. On the ground, tiny, irregular stones stood in a half-circle – not placed by man, yet forming a pattern. On the bark of trees, long, fine scratches ran: not claw marks, not blade marks – as if cold itself had drawn the fibers tight.

“Here it is,” said my wolf. “The edge.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s not to be seen. It’s to be felt.”

My foot stepped back on its own. Instinct – the same that keeps you from leaning too close to fire – raced up my spine. The thread in my chest quivered softly. It didn’t scold me for retreating. It only waited. Its waiting wasn’t indifferent – more like the patience of trees with winter: they know it will pass.

“What happens if we step through?” I asked.

“Other,” said my wolf. “And you must go through the other, if you don’t want the now to end with you.”

I tasted the dry tang of fear in my mouth. I set my palm on my chest – as if to grasp the thread from outside – and felt it tighten under the skin. My wounds buzzed beneath the cloak, cuts rasped against cloth, my body shouting that all resources were bent toward survival. And yet: the pull grew lighter. As if the choice had shared the weight.

I took the first step. Nothing happened. The trees stood as before, the air moved as before, the birds chirped as before. Then a fine shiver coursed from my hip to my spine, like stepping into cold water on the first day of summer. The hairs under my skin rose. The air’s temperature hadn’t changed – its substance had. I took two more steps. Behind the brook’s ringing, far off, a deeper drone began, which I couldn’t tell was water, wind, or something else entirely. Into the fir resin’s scent slipped something alien: not bad, not good – like when you enter an unknown house and smell the lives within.

“It keeps us awake,” said my wolf. “Don’t dream. Pay attention.”

I paid attention. The pull in my chest was no longer just direction – it had rhythm. With time – I don’t know how long – the rhythm synced with my breath, and a terrifying thought struck: if I stopped, the beat would still go on inside me. It wasn’t leading from outside – it was opening doors from within.

I reached the edge of a clearing. The grass was lighter here, mud spread wider. On the far side, tall trees with dark trunks stood, their bark touched with a faint sheen as though sprinkled with water. Tiny, almost invisible motes danced in the air, and when they passed among the trees, they seemed to move more slowly for a heartbeat. I stepped into them – they neither slid nor clung. They simply were.

In the clearing’s center I stopped. The thread in my chest thrummed softly. I had two choices: left, where the trees grew denser and the light fell in strips; right, where the ground rose higher and rocks broke the surface beneath the grass. The pull was clear. Right.

“We should eat,” murmured my wolf. “And bind your belly.”

It was right. I tore a strip from my cloak’s lining, wrapped it tight around my waist and abdomen. The pain beneath my skin resisted, but the strong, steady pressure soothed it in time. In my pocket I had a crumpled linen pouch: the healer’s leftover tea. I chewed a few leaves – their bitterness angered my stomach, then calmed it. I drank once more from the brook, then moved on.

As I climbed the stony slope, the rhythm of the pull shifted again. Shorter, more insistent – not impatient, but warning. My wolf wanted to howl and to slink at once, two instincts pressed together like pups in a narrow den. The air thickened. I didn’t hurry. I watched every step. On one stone – bloodstain. Not mine. Fresh. Its scent was unfamiliar. Not fox, not deer. Wolf – but not our kind. Fir and smoke in its coat, iron behind its gums. The hair along my back bristled.

“We’re not alone,” I warned.

“We’re not,” my wolf answered. “But that’s not bad in itself. It depends who they are.”

The thought clung to the pull. How can something be both inviting and dangerous? The forest’s answer was simple: like this. The world doesn’t choose between the two – it is both.

Stepping past the rocks, I came to a higher ledge. Below lay a wider valley – firs and beeches mingling, and in the distance a grey band, mist or smoke. The air’s current carried something from there: not a scent, but a sense. Authority. Not the dominance of my pack – that was built on command and habit. This was deeper, older. Like stone. Like water running downhill.

“Do you feel it?” I asked.

“I do,” said my wolf. “Not an alpha. Something else. Earth-voice.”

At that word – earth-voice – the pull in my chest quivered gently, as though echoing. It answered. That made me at once lighter and heavier. Lighter, because I wasn’t stepping into nothingness; heavier, because anything that answers has something to say – and a price.

The day climbed higher. My body tired, but the pain stayed manageable. My strength rearranged itself strangely: where yesterday I would have fallen, now I stepped over; where yesterday I would have kept going, now I stopped. The order behind the pull was weaving itself into my legs. I no longer wanted to ask how far – only how.

At a fallen beech I paused. Beneath its bark, beetles worked; their faint, steady scraping was like some ancient prayer. Beyond the trunk the earth softened; in it, a fresh track – large, heavy paw. It hadn’t skidded or struck – it had stepped. Its scent wasn’t aggressive, only attentive. Someone had passed not long ago. The air grew like a great hall falling silent at one man’s entrance.

“Shall we go on?” I asked.

“We can’t avoid it,” said my wolf. “The pull leads there.”

Step. Another. The air held tension – not the kind before battle, but before choice. The far side of the edge – the knowledge that there was a far side – had been a tale. Now the ground shifted beneath me, reforming with new order. The thread in my chest twitched once, softly, for the last time – like a hand brushing your shoulder before you set out into the dark, saying: I’m here.

“Let’s go,” I said.

My wolf didn’t answer. But I felt its fur rub against my inner walls, its teeth click together – not in threat, but to give sound to silence if needed. My foot stepped forward. The air that had rasped my throat with smoke was now thicker, damper; light broke differently through the branches, birdsong dropped a shade lower. Nothing dramatic happened. And yet: something irreversibly changed.

I walked until afternoon. Not fast, not far – only as much as body and pull allowed together. When I stopped, I found shelter behind a low, stony ridge. The sun slanted, the rocks warmed my palms. The wind caught in my hair, and behind my own scent slipped something faint, unknown. Not promising danger. Order. The kind of order that doesn’t ask, because it doesn’t need to.

I sat, rested my head on my knees. The pull was quiet now inside me; not asleep, only resting, like a horse reaching its trough. My wolf stretched in the inner shadow, ears still flicking – I watched each twitch of muscle as if it were the one certain proof: we live.

“When we arrive,” I finally spoke, “what then?”

“I don’t know,” it said. “But I know what’s here, and what’s behind us. That’s enough for today.”

I tried to smile. Failed. But the corner of my mouth pressed against something that wasn’t bare pain anymore. The sun slid lower, light brushed the edges of stones. In the air’s droning – which till now had resembled no source at all – I thought I heard a syllable. I didn’t understand it. Maybe it wasn’t sound at all. Only the pull’s new, subtle tuning. Somewhere far, someone or something was watching – not man, not wolf, but not enemy.

I leaned my head against stone. My eyelids closed. My hand – by reflex now – slid to my belly. Beneath the skin there was only my own heartbeat, and the soft vibration of the chest-thread. Grief hadn’t gone – it had rearranged itself. It carved space for itself in me, and left another strip free: the path pulling toward the unknown. And I – however much I feared it – would follow. Because the unknown isn’t always another name for loss. Sometimes it’s for survival. Sometimes, when the earth calls, it’s not to swallow you – but to lead you through.

The last band of sunlight tilted over the rocks. The wind whispered something into my ear I didn’t understand, and my wolf rumbled softly in my chest at it: “We heard.” On my next breath the pull grew more noticeable again – not urgently, only enough to tell me: I hadn’t been mistaken. Somewhere in this wild, unknown land, another rhythm was waiting. Whoever’s it was, whatever it was, for me it was now the way.