The forest grew eerily quiet as we started to make it to the edge of the coven on the other side. I glance to where my house is just beyond the trees, but continue walking in silence with the others. Wey took the lead, Masy close behind him, trying in vane to hide that she was keeping to him for comfort in her anxious mood. Iren walks slightly behind her, Ebony soon after, and I draw up the rear. The trees around us are still oaks and some aspens, but soon they will again turn into the denser forest with pines and spruce that obstruct the sky. While we only have two light sources, two runed balls attached to the back of Wey’s bag that lights up when we add the activating oil that is easily made, we plan not to use them this first night. The moon is full enough now that we will not be in absolute darkness as we go through the forest, but we keep a tight line so as not to lose each other.

I hear the faint rustling that starkly contrasts the otherwise still air once again, and now I can hear it getting louder.

I barely have time to register that it sounds an awful lot like footsteps when the ground beneath Wey suddenly starts to glow white. He manages to emit the start of a surprised shout before the roots below him, gnarled and deformed, almost decayed looking, shoot up from the ground and start to curl around him.

“Wey?!” Masy screeches as she tries to claw the tightening roots off of her brother, and although they flake away easily, there are so many of them that they regenerate just as fast. The dying roots shoot onto her wrists and the glow on the ground starts to spread towards everyone else.

Iren jumps and pushes Ebony and me back, and she swiftly grabs rocks and climbs a tree, throwing the rocks at the roots, but to no use.

“We need to go!” Ebony frantically call up to her as she grabs my hand and yanks me, running away from the scene, not in any particular direction. I stumble, frozen and in shock, trying to process what was happening, and almost pull us both down, but Iren had hopped down from her perch and she steady’s us and we run together. I look back at Wey and Masy, tangled in the roots, and see someone coming from the forest to them. I cannot make out who it is, but for a moment we lock eyes, and they are almost fully white, whatever color in it almost completely taken over, the pupil nowhere to be seen. They lift their hand towards us and the white glow quickly starts to chase us, though it also quickly fades as it grows further from the hand which seems to control it.

I am yanked to the left as my right side bashes into a tree, and, now quite a distance from the person, Ebony and Iren start to slow, looking back with me.

More people join the first one, and one of the now eight goes up to the still kicking Masy and Wey, takes something out of their pocket, blows it at them, and they go slack.

“Shit!” Iren says, hands on her head as they are untangled and another person comes over to help carry them back to where the people came from.

The coven.

The others look to disperse, looking for something, some coming at us.

Ebony drags us into running once again, and soon we come to a stop at a small cave on the bottom of a small mountain that was more akin to a tall hill. We slip into it, and Iren starts to grow the foliage around the entrance into a door that could conceal us.

“Evika, a little help here!” she grunts through panting breaths.

I run over and try to help, realizing I should have done so immediately, and as we hear the footsteps that follow us get closer, running now as well, we finish covering the cave with sheer plants with few leaves on them. We press ourselves against the walls on the side of the entrance and slowly start bulking the cover up with grasses and overhanging moss, using all of our power to make the leaves grow on the barren branches.

The whole time we did this, we held our breath, hoping the people would not notice, as they inspect the clearing, shining a glow-ball similar to ours in as many directions as they could. As the suddenly, the curtain nearly complete but with very obvious peepholes, the people pause.

“There!” I hear one of them say, and I almost gasp before clamping a silencing hand to my mouth.

What was happening?

They slowly walk closer and closer and we stop growing for fear of them seeing it moving. Ebony quietly reaches underneath her skirt and starts untying one of her petticoats, which she gives a corner to Iren, who is on the other side of the entrance. Iren, seeing what she was doing, holds the grayish petticoat, a similar color to the rocks, up against the vines. They squat with arms raised to the roof for only half a moment before we hear them arrive right outside the cave. I do not believe that anyone breaths as they look around.

“They might have climbed.” The voice says, and I realize what they had seen earlier. Our footprints were likely quite visible in the fallen leaves and damp soil.

“Lets go around.” Says another voice, and I hear heavy fabric shift as I can see the outline of one of them point towards something. They run off and we all jump as we hear wolves howl in a broken way in the distance.

Once they are assuredly gone, Iren and Ebony drop the fabric.

“The wolves…” Ebony whispers, and we all know that they were likely taken over using inuriagi, and were now…

Hunting us.

That’s is what was happening.

We are being hunted.

We are witches being hunted by witches, our own families in some cases even.

A moment passes as we are all frozen in shock at this shared revelation, for we can all tell from each others faces that we all see it.

“W-we have to go back!” Ebony is the first to shake it off.

We fallow her careful out of the little cave, looking around endlessly as we make our way back to the coven, assuming that is where they were taken.

As we creep through the forest, we hear wolves howl in the distance.

We pause as they start to get closer, and panic is apparent on all of our faces, even in the dim glow of the moon, which is now high above us and starting to make its way back down.

I look up and notice that the trees have strong branches, all intersecting one another.

I point to them and Iren and Ebony look up, realizing what I was suggesting, and start climbing. While somewhat louder, it allowed us to have more time should anyone show up unexpectedly, namely the wolves.

And whomever was controlling them.

I am quite honestly not sure how far they are willing to take this, seeing as they blatantly used inuriagi to capture Masy and Wey, and knocked them out with something.

We all pause suddenly on our way through the trees as we hear the wolves practically surrounding us. we are high enough in the tree to not be noticeable immediately, but if they look directly up with a light we will surly be caught. We squish ourselves against the thickest part of the branches we are on and pray silently to the sprites and spirits of the forest that they will not see us or our packs which I remembered we still had on as we started to climb.

The wolves appear below us, and at first glance they look normal and healthy, but as they move I begin to notice an odd cadence to their steps, almost gangly, and some patches of fur have already been dragged off by most likely a plant that they had run through.

We hold our breath once again as the poor creatures below us, eyes fully white, mouth slightly drooling, sniff around the air. They go back and I can hear them circling the tree that we climbed to get up. Soon we hear heavy footsteps approach the wolves. I hear them scratching at the tree and running ahead to where we are and continuing to sniff the air. My heart races as the person fallows the wolves and looks up, eyes equally white and bloodshot, light filtering up towards us as he peers through the dense leaves.

The leaves below Ebony, who huddles on the lowest and thinnest branch, begin to glow white and wither. She gets up, frantically trying to get to another, but the branch snaps and she falls, landing on her side, her wrist contorted in an entirely wrong way.

She screams and as the person rushes to her to blow the powder in her face, it is as if I jolt awake from her raw scream.

I jump down onto the person, and the wolves jump into action, swarming me, but by the grace of the spirits not attacking, simply trying to pin me. Ebony somehow gets herself up and tries to pull them away, but the fur simply rips off of them.

Iren follows my lead and jumps onto one of the wolves, saying a profuse apology to it, and together we tangle their paws and the hands and legs of the man in the roots beneath us.

I almost fall from the sudden burst of exhaustion so soon after the burst at the cave, but I find it in me to stay up and catch Iren as she does fall. As the wolves start to howl and yip, I push Iren back up the tree, then help Ebony as best I could, but every time she hooked her right elbow or moved it, she sucked in a deep breath, obviously in much pain, but I simply hope that she can get further up the tree to where we cannot be spotted before her adrenaline wears off.

Finally, with a few gasping grunts, we make it up and Iren and I help support Ebony as she starts to grow somewhat lucid from the pain.

“What do we do?!” Iren asks through confused and fearful tears.

I can only shake my head, the words not being able to go past my throat.

I gently take Ebony’s forearm and look at the wrist, almost gaging seeing how it was so off kilter.

I try again to say something, but it is no use. I attempt to sign to Iren that we need to brace her wrist somehow and she looks confused, then she realizes and nods.

“I-I have some twine in my bag, and we can use the bark.” She says as she hurriedly slings off her bag and rifles through a small outside pocket. “What about the witch? They probably saw where we went!”

I look down and shake my head, pointing to me, then down, then pretending to hit my head, attempting to signal that I believe I knocked them out when I fell. I see her nod tentatively, then I swing to another branch where the bark looks ready to come off in thick chunks, and harvest two decent sized pieces.

Below, the wolves slowly start to quiet, as their command fades with the commander no longer there to give it.