The dry branches cracked beneath Rambo’s feet like breaking bones. He carried a bundle of firewood tied with old rope across his back, the weight dragging his thin shoulders down. Fifteen years old. He had existed in that world for fifteen years, and not one of them had been easy.
Fear Forest hadn’t been given that name for nothing. The trees grew crooked, packed so tightly together that their trunks looked like the bars of a prison built by the earth itself. Barely any sunlight made it through. The ground was covered in dark, damp leaves that muffled every sound—except silence. And the silence in there was the worst noise in existence.
Rambo stopped. He looked behind him. He looked to either side.
Everything was the same. Twisted trunks, green darkness, the smell of rotting earth.
He was lost.
His stomach clenched. Not from hunger—from fear. But Rambo clenched his teeth and swallowed it down, the way he had swallowed everything since his father died. He shoved it deep inside, where no one could see.
“Follow the moss back,” he muttered to himself, repeating what his father had taught him. “Moss grows on the north side. Follow the moss.”
But in there, moss grew on everything. Trunks, rocks, the ground. As if the entire forest were north. As if it wanted no one to leave.
Rambo tightened the firewood rope against his shoulder and kept moving forward. He had no other choice. He never had.
His mother was waiting for the firewood. His little brother was waiting for the food the fire would warm. And the bourgeoisie were waiting for all of them to die quietly, without complaining, without dreaming, without raising their heads.
Rambo raised his.
He always did.
A sound cut through the silence. It wasn’t a crack. It wasn’t the wind. It was something moving between the trees at a speed that made no noise—only displaced the air. Rambo felt the hair on the back of his neck rise before he understood what was happening.
He spun around.
Nothing.
Only darkness between the trunks. Only the smell of rotting earth. Only his heart pounding so hard it seemed ready to escape on its own.
Then he saw it.
Two yellow eyes. Low to the ground, gleaming between the roots of a dead tree. And black fur so dark it looked like a hole in the forest itself—a piece of night that breathed.
The creature moved.
Rambo saw its muscles roll beneath its fur like steel cables. He saw its claws—long, curved, the size of knives—sink into the earth as if the ground were butter. He saw its tail uncoil behind its body: thick, covered in spines that gleamed with a dark liquid. Poison.
It was a Shadow Jaguar. The creature even the most experienced hunters in Trom Aires refused to face. The creature that tore through iron like paper and moved so fast that most victims only realized they were under attack once they were already on the ground, bleeding.
Rambo dropped the firewood.
The creature growled. A low, deep sound that Rambo didn’t hear with his ears—he felt it in his bones. In his teeth. Deep in his chest.
He should run. Anyone with an ounce of sense would run. But his legs wouldn’t obey. And even if they did—where would he go? Running from a Shadow Jaguar was the same as running from death itself. It was faster than anything alive.
The creature lunged.
It wasn’t a leap. It was a blur. A tear in the air. Rambo saw the claws coming toward his face and did the only thing his body allowed: he crossed his arms over his chest and shut his eyes.
And then—it burned.
It wasn’t pain. It was something else. Something that began in the center of his chest and spread through his entire body as if someone had lit the sun inside him. His skin grew hot. His muscles hardened. His blood raced so fast he heard his own pulse like a war drum.
Rambo opened his eyes.
His arms were glowing. Intense white light poured from his skin as if he were cracking open from within and the light were escaping through the fissures. The Shadow Jaguar’s claws had stopped—caught against his crossed arms. The iron those claws tore through like paper hadn’t been able to cut his skin.
The creature backed away. For the first time, the yellow eyes showed something other than hunger.
They showed fear.
Rambo felt the energy rising. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know where it came from. He only knew it was overflowing, and if he didn’t do something, it would explode inside him. Fifteen years of rage—the rage over his dead father, his exhausted mother, his hungry brother, the bourgeoisie laughing while the people bled—all of it blended with the light and became one thing.
He screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of fear. It was a scream made of everything he had never been allowed to scream.
The light exploded from his arms in the shape of bolts. White, blinding, slicing through the air with a crack that made the surrounding trees tremble. The bolts struck the Shadow Jaguar in the chest. The creature was hurled backward, breaking through three trunks before hitting the ground with a dull thud.
Silence.
Rambo stood frozen, his arms still outstretched, the light fading slowly like an ember dying out. His entire body trembled. His legs gave way, and he fell to his knees in the damp earth.
The Shadow Jaguar was alive. He could see its chest rising and falling, its fur singed where the bolts had struck. But it didn’t get up. It didn’t attack. It lay there with its yellow eyes fixed on him—not with hunger, not with anger.
With something Rambo had never imagined seeing in a monster’s eyes.
Respect.
Or maybe it was only fear. Rambo didn’t know the difference. Not then.
He got to his feet. His legs trembled so badly that every step felt like the first step of a newborn. He picked up the firewood with hands that still tingled, tied it back across his shoulders, and walked on.
He didn’t look back.
He found the way out of the forest when the sky was already turning orange. The village appeared between the hills—a handful of houses made of mud and old wood, thin smoke rising from a few chimneys. The most miserable place in Trom Aires. The place he called home.
His mother was standing in the doorway. Thin, with deep dark circles under her eyes, her hands cracked from working so hard. When she saw Rambo, her face crumpled with the desperate relief only a mother could feel.
“You’re late,” she said. Her voice was calm, but her hands were trembling.
“I got a little lost.” Rambo set the firewood on the ground. “But I brought plenty.”
She looked at him. Really looked—the way a mother looks when she knows her child is hiding something. Rambo held her gaze. Fifteen years of learning to swallow things had been good for something.
“Go wash your hands,” she said at last. “Your brother’s hungry.”
Rambo went inside. His little brother was sitting on the floor, playing with pebbles, and broke into a huge smile when he saw Rambo. A smile that knew nothing. That didn’t know the world was cruel, that their father was dead, that his older brother had just barely escaped death.
Rambo tousled his hair and went to wash his hands.
The water was cold. He looked at his own hands—the same hands as always. Thin, callused, dirty. No glow. No light. As if nothing had happened.
But something had.
And as the water ran between his fingers, Rambo made a decision. No one could know. No one. In Trom Aires, power was a sentence. Anyone who stood out was taken away. Trained. Turned into a weapon. Or thrown into the arenas to die fighting.
He wasn’t going to be taken away. He wasn’t going to leave his mother alone. He wasn’t going to leave his brother with no one.
He would keep it hidden inside him. He would swallow this too—the way he swallowed everything.
But this time, deep in his chest, alongside the rage and pain and fear, there was something new.
A flame.
And it wasn’t going to go out.