We reached the elven border village the next morning, bruised, bandaged, and very aware of how badly we smelled.
It wasn't a proper city—more like an arrangement of living wood. Homes carved into tree trunks, bridges woven from vines, glowing moss used for light. The air smelled like herbs and rain and old secrets.
A few elves glanced at us from balconies. None looked impressed.
"Are they always this welcoming?" I asked.
Lyra didn't even look back. "They're assessing whether you're worth the trouble. Spoiler: you're not."
Teralen wasn't on any human maps. That was intentional.
It was a warding post, deep in the green border—the place where the human kingdom blurred into elven wildlands. The kind of village that didn't exist until it had to. Mostly scouts, druids, and healers.
And, apparently, Lyra.
She led us to a healing hall grown from a hollowed-out cedar. She pushed open the door, dumped her satchel, and immediately started rearranging tinctures like she was trying to forget we existed.
"You can stay in the guest lodge," she said, not looking up. "It has beds, mostly. Try not to fall in the compost pit. And don't touch anything glowing unless it's apologizing."
Silas leaned close to me. "Do you think she wants us to die a little?"
"Only until she finishes emotionally investing."
We stayed two days.
Long enough to walk again. Long enough for Velis to argue with Lyra about the chemical balance of fire-resistant salves.
"Alchemical reinforcement scars the tissue," Lyra snapped.
"Temporary burns are less permanent than being dead," Velis replied.
Iria sat nearby the whole time, quietly tending to Edelbrecht with ritualistic care. Every time Lyra changed her dressing, Iria bowed. Every time she bowed, Lyra sighed like her soul was leaking.
"You really don't have to salute me while I'm putting herbs on your stab wound."
"It is custom."
"It's giving me secondhand tension."
I ended up near Lyra more than I meant to.
Maybe because I got hurt the most. Maybe because I asked the dumbest questions.
Like:
"Does that tea always glow?"
"Why do the squirrels look mad?"
"Is this potion supposed to taste like betrayal?"
She always answered. Grumpily. Accurately.
And then one night, while Velis was off inspecting a local leyline post and Iria was praying by moonlight, I sat beside Lyra outside the healer's hut, watching the lantern-moss sway in the trees.
"You didn't really want to join us," I said.
"No."
"So why'd you stay?"
She didn't look at me.
Then: "You got hit in the face with a cursed log trap. Then apologized to it."
"It had runes."
"You're going to die one day, Kaname."
"I'm trying to make it interesting."
She huffed. Not quite a laugh. But not a dismissal, either.
Velis returned with a map.
She laid it across a table in the lodge and tapped a thin line marked with fading glyphs.
"This is a leyline root. Weak, but active. It runs beneath this forest—part of the old druidic network."
"Old," Lyra said. "But stable. Usually."
Velis didn't answer. Just passed around a glowing shard she'd pulled from a warding tree.
Iria frowned. "Corrupted?"
"Cracked. It looks like something tried to rewrite the ward signature and failed."
Lyra took the shard, turning it over.
"That's not human magic," she said slowly. "It's not ours either."
Silas leaned back. "Another foreign spell signature?"
"No," Velis said. "This one's local. It's like... something native to the leyline was twisted."
We all looked at each other.
No one said it.
But the implications were obvious.
Something was corrupting the land from inside.
The next morning, an elven scout arrived at Lyra's door.
She whispered something in Elvish. Lyra's eyes narrowed.
Then she turned to us.
"A druidic site west of here just went dark. No contact. No signals. Nothing."
I felt it before she finished speaking—a hum in my artifact. Like a heartbeat behind the trees.
I looked up at her.
She looked back at me.
"I'm going with you," she said. "Only to stop you from touching things."
Velis raised an eyebrow. "You could just let us die."
Lyra scowled. "I said I'm not burying five corpses in my favorite forest. I didn't say I like you."
Silas grinned. "That's basically affection."
She kicked his chair.