Chapter 4: The Old Blood

Chapter 4: The Old Blood

The black feather was a splinter in Leo’s reality. He kept it wrapped in a tissue, tucked inside an old tin box that once held drawing pencils. Every few hours, he would retreat to his room, close the door, and open the box. The feather would be lying there, a sliver of impossible night. It didn't decay. It didn't lose its shape. It just was. A silent, terrifying promise.

His parents had settled into a routine of forced normalcy that was more unnerving than their initial panic. They spoke of installing motion-sensor lights, of trimming the hedge back. They talked around the problem, their words like cotton batting trying to muffle the sound of a ticking bomb. They looked at Leo with a mixture of concern and a new, terrible pity, as if he were ill. They saw his haunted eyes, his refusal to go out after dusk, and they didn't see a boy who had witnessed something real; they saw a boy cracking under the strain of a vivid nightmare. He was alone with his knowledge, a castaway on an island of terror while his family waved from the shore of their safe, rational world.

Desperation was a physical thing, a sour taste in the back of his throat. The rational world had failed him. Logic was a broken tool. He needed a different kind of answer, one that didn't require footprints or bent wires. And in the tightly-knit ecosystem of a small village, there was only one person you went to for that kind of answer.

Old Elodie.

She wasn't really that old, maybe in her late sixties, but the village had branded her with the title decades ago. She lived in the last house on the other side of the village, a small stone cottage that, like his own home, bordered the Ardenwood. But where Leo's family fought the forest back with a neat lawn and a trimmed hedge, Elodie's home seemed to have reached a truce with it. Wild vines crawled up its stone walls, her garden was a chaotic riot of herbs and wildflowers, and wind chimes made of polished stones and smooth pieces of wood sang a strange, tuneless song in the breeze.

The village kids told stories about her—that she was a witch, that she could talk to animals, that she danced in the woods under the full moon. The adults just shook their heads and called her an eccentric, a woman who had spent too much time alone after her husband died. They saw her as a harmless outcast, a relic of a more superstitious time.

But Leo remembered something else. He remembered seeing her once, standing at the edge of the trees, her face turned towards the forest with an expression not of fear, but of intense concentration, as if listening to a conversation he couldn't hear.

The decision to go was like stepping off a cliff. It was an admission that his world had broken, that he was willing to seek help from the one person everyone else dismissed as crazy. Maybe he was crazy too. At this point, he barely cared.

He slipped the tin box with the feather into his jacket pocket. It felt both heavy and insignificant against his ribs. He walked through the village, the afternoon sun casting long shadows. The familiar sights—Madame Dubois sweeping the pavement in front of her bakery, two old men playing chess outside the café—felt like scenes from a life he no longer lived. He could feel their gazes on him, the casual curiosity of a tight-knit community. They saw the Janssen boy, looking pale and skittish. They had no idea he was walking through their world like a ghost, haunted by things that rustled just beyond their perception.

As he neared Elodie’s cottage, the manicured tidiness of the village gave way to something wilder. The air grew cooler, smelling of pine needles and damp earth. The sound of the forest grew louder.

Her cottage was just as he remembered. A plume of woodsmoke curled from the chimney, and the stone-and-wood wind chimes clinked softly. It felt less like a house and more like a natural outcropping of the woods themselves. For a moment, his courage failed him. This was insane. He was a fourteen-year-old boy about to ask the village eccentric about shadow monsters. He should turn back, go home, and try to forget.

But the memory of the feather on his sill, of those cold, empty eyes, pushed him forward. He walked up the mossy stone path and knocked on the heavy wooden door.

The door opened almost immediately, as if she had been expecting him. Old Elodie stood there, and she was not what he expected. She wasn't a stooped crone. She was tall and wiry, her long grey hair tied back in a simple braid. Her face was a roadmap of wrinkles, but her eyes were startlingly clear and sharp. They were the colour of moss and held an unnerving intelligence.

She looked at him, and her gaze didn’t just skim his surface. It went deeper. He had the distinct feeling that she could see the fear clinging to him like a shroud.

“Well,” she said, her voice raspy, like stones rubbing together. “It’s been a long time since one of your family stood on my step.” She didn't smile. “You have the stink of it on you. The stink of the forest’s fear. Come in.”

She didn't wait for a reply, turning and walking back into her cottage. Stunned into silence, Leo followed. The inside was dim and smelled of drying herbs, beeswax, and woodsmoke. Bunches of lavender and strange-looking roots hung from the ceiling beams. Books were piled everywhere, their spines cracked and ancient.

“They’ve been paying you visits,” she stated, not a question. She was standing by a small, crackling fireplace, her back to him.

Leo’s throat was dry. “How… how did you know?”

She turned, and her moss-green eyes pinned him in place. “Because no one comes to this house unless the other answers have run out. And around here, there is only one question that has no other answer.” She paused, her gaze sweeping over his pale face and the dark circles under his eyes. “You saw them, didn't you? The tall ones. The silent ones.”

Leo could only nod, his carefully constructed composure crumbling under the weight of her immediate understanding.

“The Watchers,” she breathed, and the name hung in the air, full of power and dread. It was a relief and a terror to finally have a name for them. “They keep to the deep woods. They are supposed to.”

“They were on my lawn,” Leo choked out, the words tumbling out of him now. “In a circle. They left… this.” He fumbled in his pocket, pulling out the tin box. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely open it. He held it out to her.

Elodie glanced at the black feather, but she made no move to take it. A flicker of something—not fear, but a deep, weary recognition—crossed her face. “A token. They’re interested in you.”

“Why?” Leo pleaded, the single, burning question that had tormented him for days. “Why me? What did I do?”

“It is not about what you have done,” Elodie said, her voice dropping lower. “It is about what is awakening. There is a pact, boy. An agreement older than this village, older than the church steeple. A balance. The village does not trespass, and the Watchers… they do not cross. But the pact is fraying. It’s grown thin, like old cloth. The protections are weakening.”

Her explanation settled over Leo not with the comfort of understanding, but with the cold weight of a much larger, older story that he was now irrevocably a part of. The Watchers. A weakening pact. It was all too much, too big.

“But why are they watching my house? Why me?” he insisted.

Elodie took a step closer. The air crackled. She looked at him, truly looked at him, and he saw a flicker of pity in her ancient eyes. “They don’t choose at random, child. They are drawn to things. To echoes. To what is familiar.”

Before he could process her words, she moved with surprising speed. Her hand, leathery and stronger than he would have believed, shot out and seized his bare forearm. Her grip was like iron. He flinched, startled by the sudden contact.

She wasn't looking at his face anymore. Her sharp, moss-green eyes were fixed on the skin of his inner arm, right where her fingers were digging in. Her voice dropped to a harsh, urgent whisper, a sound that cut through the haze of his fear and confusion.

“They can smell it,” she hissed, her face inches from his. “They can smell the old blood.”