Chapter 22: The Blocked Road
Morning came quietly. Strangely quietly.
The storm was gone, as if it had never been there, leaving only its work behind.
The forest looked completely different, unrecognizable. Snow covered everything now - the ground, the trees, the branches, the remains of their camp, the bodies of the monsters now just white mounds. The wind had pushed snow into large, smooth piles, burying almost everything around them up to their knees. The air was clean and brutally cold.
Danny slowly opened his eyes inside the battered tent. His body ached all over, a dull, deep ache like he had been beaten.
His hands hurt the most. A sharp, throbbing pain.
He looked down at them, still wrapped loosely with cloth.
The cuts from the rope were still visible, deep red lines across his palms, and the blood had dried against his skin, black and cracked. He flexed his fingers slowly.
Pain shot through them, bright and electric.
Danny winced hard, biting his lip.
But he didn’t complain. There was no point. No one would care, and complaining used heat.
There was no time for that.
The grey-haired man was already up and preparing to leave, kicking snow off their packs, his own hands wrapped but moving. His injured arm looked worse after the night.
"Get your bags. We move before the snow gets soft. If it melts, we sink."
The thin prisoner stood, groaning, and picked up his belongings, his coat torn.
Danny did the same, using his wrists more than his fingers.
They packed what little supplies they had left in silence. A few strips of worm meat, now frozen solid and wrapped in cloth. The water sacks, filled with melted snow from last night’s fire. The dead Awakened man’s thick coat, which Danny now wore, too big but warm. The boots. A few useful pieces of equipment - a knife, rope, a flint.
It wasn’t much.
But it was enough to keep them moving one more day.
The grey-haired man looked toward the forest, toward where the old road should be under the snow, and checked the sun’s position.
"Our destination isn’t far if we stay on the right path. The outpost is beyond this forest. If we stay on the road, we reach it by nightfall."
Danny said nothing. He tightened the straps around his bag, his bleeding hands slipping a little.
Then they began walking.
Their footsteps sank into the fresh snow with a heavy sound.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
For a while, nobody spoke. Only the crunch and their breathing.
Danny walked behind the two men, a few steps back, as always. He watched them carefully, not the forest.
He didn’t trust either of them. Not after everything.
The thin prisoner had already tried to use him as bait for the worm. The grey-haired man had been planning to sell him at the outpost as a cursed child for money. Neither of them had given Danny a reason to believe they had suddenly become trustworthy just because they survived a storm together.
_I have to be careful. They are not my friends._
Danny looked around the forest as they walked, his new coat keeping his core warm but his hands freezing. Everything was quiet.
Too quiet. The birds were gone. Even the wind was gone.
He remembered how quickly things had changed before. One moment, they had been traveling normally, arguing. The next, a giant worm had burst from the snow and swallowed a horse whole.
Then the eyeless wolf out of nowhere.
Then the storm that almost blew them away.
Anything could happen in this forest. Quiet never meant safe. Quiet often meant something was watching.
Danny tightened his grip on his bag strap, ignoring the pain.
_The future is uncertain._
He didn’t know where they were actually going - the outpost the old man spoke of. He didn’t know what waited ahead, if people there would help them or chain them again.
And he certainly didn’t know what had awakened inside him. That blue message - DoD bloodline, Echo awakening - it hadn’t appeared again since last night. He didn’t feel stronger. His hands still bled.
But he knew one thing, cold and clear.
He couldn’t depend on anyone else. If the rope broke, if a wolf came, he had to be ready to run alone, to survive alone. He had already killed once to do it.
The three continued walking.
Hours passed slowly, painfully. The sun slowly climbed higher into the sky, weak and white, giving no heat. Their legs burned from lifting out of deep snow each step.
Eventually, the trees began to thin a little, and the ground became slightly firmer. A sign they were nearing the old trade road.
Danny looked ahead, hopeful for an easier walk.
There was a path. Or at least, what used to be one.
He stopped abruptly. His breath caught.
The grey-haired man noticed he had stopped and turned.
"What is it? Why stop?"
Danny pointed ahead with his wrapped hand, not speaking.
The path was completely blocked.
Several large, ancient pine trees had fallen across the road during the storm, brought down by wind and heavy snow. They lay tangled, trunks as wide as a man, branches and broken trunks scattered everywhere like a giant had thrown them. Snow had piled on top, making it a white wall.
The storm had destroyed the road itself.
The grey-haired man walked closer and examined the blockage, his frown deepening. He put a hand on the fallen trunk, pushing. It didn’t move at all. Frozen to the ground.
The thin prisoner approached behind him, panting.
"So..." He looked at the blocked path, then at the dense forest to the sides. "What now? We climb over?"
The grey-haired man didn’t answer immediately. He stared at the fallen trees, calculating. They couldn’t simply walk through. They couldn’t climb over with their injuries and packs - the branches were sharp, tangled, and the trunks were higher than their heads. And under the snow could be gaps to fall into.
Danny looked toward the forest beside the path, the dark gap between trees where the road used to continue around. There might be another way, a deer trail, a way around the fallen trees.
But leaving the road could be dangerous. The road was safe because it was cleared. The forest beside it was where the worm lived, where wolves hunted.
He slowly looked at the two men. Neither spoke. They were both looking at him, oddly, as if expecting the kid to have an idea.
For the first time since the storm ended, since they had held the rope and survived, Danny wondered if reaching their destination would actually be possible at all.
They had survived the monsters.
They had survived the storm that tried to erase them.
But now the road itself stood in their way, a simple, stupid pile of trees. And nature doesn’t care if you survived yesterday.
The grey-haired man finally sighed, a long white cloud, and pulled his coat tighter.
"We’ll have to find another route. Through the forest. Around it. It will add half a day."
Danny looked deeper into the forest, into the shadows between the snow-covered trees where the sun didn’t reach.
He didn’t like the idea. Not at all.
Something told him, a cold feeling in his bleeding hands, that their journey was about to become even more dangerous than the storm.