Jaye didn’t care that the haunted forest held death for all who entered, all that mattered was that it wouldn’t be at the hands of the Beast Hunters who pursued her.

When she’d started her run, it hadn’t been for herself. There had been a Prize Wagon transporting her and the several other children her age which had slid off the narrow hillside road thanks to the storm that was still lashing down. Jaye hadn’t been thinking anything about the other until there’d been a scream from outside of the road starting to give way and the hurried cries of the Beast Hunters who’d cut the horses loose from the wagon so they wouldn’t topple down the hill with the wagon.

Jaye fought through a moment of confusion try to understand why the horses were being free. It was the children who were the Hunter’s prizes? Why weren’t the Hunters trying to save them? Children, after all, were too small to fight back, relatively easy to transport, and, in this case, bereft of rights for the crime of being Mongrel Born. In theory, that should have guaranteed their safety, at least until they reached the market in Embervale, but some god of mischief had perhaps been listening to Jaye’s prayers and chosen to grant them in as typically cruel a fashion as the gods are wont to respond to prayers.

Not that it had seemed cruel at first. At hearing the Hunters yelling in panic and disarray, the anger which burned in Jaye’s heart had leapt into a flicker of fierce joy.

But then the wagon had tipped and the screaming at had started.

She hadn’t screamed with the rest of the children. She didn’t feel any braver than they did, she was simply too focused on not being hurled into anything, or anyone, that would shatter her bones to dust.

That was the world for Ravenkind. Humans were born from the dust of stones and the words of the gods. They were durable in form and mighty as vessels for magics of all types. The Mongrel Born, or Nature Blessed as Jaye’s father had insisted was their proper title, carried blessings from the creatures they shared a lineage with, and the magic which let them walk the would in the guise of either of their two halves.

Jaye’s people, the Ravenkind, were gifted with a lightness of body and the quick minds of the cleverest of avians. Her magic made the skies her domain, but it came at the cost of bones that could not weather the shocks most others could.

Bound in short chains within the captive’s compartment of the wagon, she’d been keenly aware of the size and weight of the other children around her. A Tauren boy had been thrown in beside her and took up most of the bench on their side, with only a bit of room which a toddler-aged Catkin girl had been stuffed into.

Across from her, the knees of a Deerling lad had left her with little choice but to pull her legs up to her chest to allow him room to fit at all.

Beside him sat a Mulekin girl and a Foxkin girl, with another toddler, this one a Foxkin boy, filling in what little space was left before the thick and sealed door they’d been tossed in through.

Jaye hadn’t learned their names, in part because the Hunters had ‘discouraged’ conversation, and in part because she knew none of them would ever see one another again once they’d been sold.

That didn’t mean she didn’t know them though. The Bull boy, or Tauren as her father would have insisted, already bore the marks of a labor collar. He was old enough, and Tauren were strong enough even when very young, that he’d already been part of a labor crew. How he’d escaped Jaye couldn’t tell, but crew managers weren’t renowned for their diligence and runaways did happen from time to time. No one kept the binding spells renewed perfectly, especially not on ‘naturally slow ox boys’.

He wouldn’t sell for as much as he could have, since anyone with enough wit and will to run away once might do so again. The Hunters had to know that already though, and with Embervale only being a couple of days away the price of transporting him was clearly less than whatever they thought they could get for him.

The others, apart from Jaye, had come from the fallen villages of Cropshare and Dawnfield. The Hunters had gotten lucky there. The same Darkshard Uprising that had sent enough monsters pouring forth to ravage Cropshare had uncovered the nameless refuge Jaye had been raised in. 

Jaye didn’t like to think of that.

She’d seen the losses the people of her small village had taken in turning away the monster from beneath the earth, only for the ones who walked its surface to arrive and carve a bloody swath through the remaining men, women, and most of the children. Those they’d spared, like Jaye, had been divided between the three parties of Hunters, with Jaye being consider a top prize for the rarity of a captured Ravenkind child.

As the wagon slid down the hillside, Jaye felt the sharp pain of her left arm snapping as the Deerling boy’s legs lashed out to brace himself.

“Hold onto me!” the Tauren boy said and braced himself between the roof and the floor which had become the new walls of the wagon after it tipped. 

With the wagon gaining speed as it flew down the hill, Jill tried to throw her good arm around him but the short chains held her back.

For another five seconds.

Then she was in freefall for an instant.

An instant when she was able to call out to a spark of the Ravenkin magic within her. She wasn’t able to float everyone. The Tauren boy was too heavy, and the Deerling had already braced himself solidly. The toddlers though we effortless and the other girls were only agonizingly hard to lift, but she was already in agony so what was a little more?

The crash of the wagon impacting on the streambed below the short cliff sounded like standing inside a thunderbolt, but from its wreckage all of the children emerged, though decidedly not in one piece in Jaye’s case.

The storm above them had turned the late day sky to a solid wall of shadow, leaving only the dim illumination of twilight to cover the land. Visibility was damped even further by the rain itself, to the point where it took a moment for Jaye to distinguish the water which beat down on her from the swollen stream that roared past the wreckage of the cart.

“Is everyone alright?” the Foxkin girl asked.

“Yeah, somehow,” the Mulekin girl said.

Jaye look down at her broken arm. The bones were still inside it, but the shattered wood had torn a long, deep gash in that arm as well. 

Her magic had protected the rest of them though. She didn’t feel good, good was out of reach after all that had happened, but she felt something at that knowledge nonetheless. Something she wasn’t ready to name or examine.

“We need to go,” the Deerling lad said. “They’ll be here soon.”

“We can’t,” the Mulekin girl said. “They’ll just find us again, and what are we supposed to do if we run off now?”

“Live.” 

Jaye hadn’t meant to command everyone’s attention, but they all turned to her, so she continued.

“They can’t transport us alive anymore.” She didn’t need to add that the Nature Blessed were also useful dead, to the right human casters. The only question in her mind was whether they would bring back the children’s corpses or just the most valuable bits?

“But they can track us,” the Mulekin girl said.

Jaye looked back are her arm and let whatever her earlier feeling had been guide her.

“Not us. Just me.” She held up her arm, unable to hide the wince of pain at moving it at all.

“Oh no! How did that happen?” the Deerling lad asked, no recognition of his role in her injury showing in his face.

“Ravenkin,” she said, which was enough to explain it all. Everyone knew the avian-blooded were fragile. No need for the Deerling to bear the guilt of something he hadn’t chosen and which no amends could be made for.

“What are you going to do? Stay behind and fight them off with one arm?” the Mulekin said. “I’m not leaving you like that.”

“No. I’m going to run,” Jaye said. “They’ll track my blood. You all go the other way. Be safe.”

“What about you though?” the Tauren boy asked.

“I’ll lead them into the forest and get them lost,” Jaye said.

“You can’t. The forest is haunted. There’s a witches curse on it. Everyone who goes in dies!” the Foxkin girl said.

“Good. If they follow me, then they die,” Jaye said.

“What about you?” the Mulekin girl asked.

“I can fly away. They can’t catch me again,” Jay said. “You have to go now. There’s no time.”

And there wasn’t. From far up the hill, they all heard the distant yelling of the Beast Hunters organizing to retrieve their prizes.

“Go!” Jaye said, any feelings of doom were pushed away by the frustration at the others wasting time they did not have.

Lightning crashed behind her, shattering one of the trees and sending flaming chunks out into the forest.

That was enough to break the other children’s reticence. The Tauren boy picked up the two toddlers and the six of them took off at a run, disappearing around a bend downstream before Jaye’s defiant stance could waver.

With them gone though, a voice whispered how easy it would be for her to simply collapse into the wreckage. The Hunters were going to find her anyways. There was no flying away from them. Even if she’d been willing to chance to tumult of the storm, taking her other shape was not going to fix her broken arm. 

That voice was stupid however.

She was not going to let the Hunters capture her. For one thing the longer they chased her the farther away the others would get. For another, if there really was a witches curse on the forest, then the further into the woods she could draw the Hunters the better the chance was that it would get them too.

Most of all though?

Most of all she just didn’t want to die to them. A death in the forest wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant but it wouldn’t be the abomination the Hunters would inflict on her.

And so she ran, racing through the undergrowth, being as intentional as she could about leaving her blood on smeared on trees and dribbled onto the forest floor. Even under the shelter of the trees, the rain was still pouring down and a brief fear sang through her that it might wash away her scent as well as it did the others. That fear was banished though and replaced by another when she heard the shout of Hunters entering the forest behind her.

They had her scent, with whatever magics they employed, the Hunters had found the trail of blood leading them to her and none of them had broken arms slowing them down.

That was when she started running for herself.

Was she making noise? Was she leaving a more obvious path than she needed to? Was she missing places she could have hidden?

It didn’t matter.

They were close and she had to be far, far away from them.

For the second time, she prayed, and for the second time she was answered, though once more not as she’d hoped to be.

“Take us all Curse,” she’d prayed, trying to imagine a witch powerful enough to fell a team of irate Hunters.

There was no witch to hear her plea.

Not within the forest.

Not for many, many years.

But there was a Curse.

And it answered with a silence that stilled even the raindrops.

The Hunters had been drawing near. They should have caught up to her. 

Instead something else did.

“Well, well, what have we here?” a shadow said as it blotted out the fading twilight and enveloped her.