As the smoke clears from the ruined watcher post, the threads in the trees pulse again, hungry and rhythmic. The broken iron ring lies black in the mud, but the forest does not loosen its grip.

Beneath Kynes and Bren, the forest floor shifts and sinks. Pale bones surface in the roots, scattered travelers stripped clean by the same hidden tether.

The nearest strand twitches toward Kynes’s palm sigil, then lashes past him, testing for a new anchor. Bren steps in close, blade up, eyes fixed on the treeline.

A hidden mass stirs among the branches, drawing the pulsing threads inward. The woods answer with a dry rattle of bone, as if the road itself remembers every name it has taken.

The forest canopy tears open like a rotting shroud, revealing a hulking, multi-limbed horror woven from the very threads that ensnared the travelers. It hangs suspended between the ancient oaks, its form a shifting mosaic of stolen bone and violet light that mirrors the sigil on Kynes's palm.

Kynes raises one hand, and the horror jerks hard in midair as if an unseen hook bites into its ribs. Its limbs thrash, bone-threads straining, while Bren braces beside him, ready for the fall.

The creature is dragged toward him in a wrenching pull, violet strands snapping off its frame like wet threads. Its chest mark flashes, then buckles inward under the pressure.

Kynes crushes the thing in his grasp. The limbed mass caves, the stolen bones grinding together, and the web above gives a shuddering recoil.

Where the horror hangs, only a scorched knot of violet light remains, and beneath it a thin thread falls slack into the sinkhole of roots and bones.

The forest goes still for one sharp beat, except for the wet creak of the web tightening somewhere deeper in the trees, as if something else has noticed the loss.