Read Chapter 6: Signs of the Ur

The morning mist clung to the glen like a wet shroud, muffling the world in grey. Callum stood at the edge of the treeline, the dirk cold against his hip beneath his jacket, and watched Ishbel trace a finger along the cracked surface of the first boundary stone.

“Aye, this is one of them,” she said, crouching low. Her voice was hushed, as though the forest might overhear. “They’re older than the clan, older than the Scots. The old folk said they were raised by the first keepers, to mark where the Ur’s influence ends and the human world begins.”

Callum moved closer, studying the stone. It was a blunt, unworked slab of granite, waist-high and moss-veined, but as Ishbel scraped away the lichen with her knife, faint spiral carvings emerged beneath. They curled inward like the rings of a felled tree, and at the centre sat a crude, horned figure.

“I’ve seen that mark before,” he said, pulling the dirk from his belt. The hilt bore the same spiral, the same horned head, worn smooth by generations of thumbs.

Ishbel’s eyes widened. “You had that on you when I found you? And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“I found it in my grandmother’s desk,” Callum said. “Morag said it’s used to renew the pact.”

“Renew.” Ishbel spat the word. “Sounds civil enough. But your grandmother’s dead, and the pact hasn’t been renewed, has it? What happens when the debt comes due and there’s no keeper left to pay it?”

The question hung in the damp air. Callum had no answer. The journal’s entries were fragmented, some pages blurred as though water had been spilled, others deliberately torn. What he’d pieced together painted a grim picture: a bargain struck in blood, an entity that fed on memory, and a debt passed from parent to child like a poisoned heirloom.

He turned from the stone and plunged deeper into the forest, following the map Ishbel had drawn from local lore. She fell into step beside him, her boots silent on the bracken.

“The boundary stones form a ring around the grove,” she said, consulting a scrap of paper covered in scratchy pencil marks. “Ten of them, if the stories are true. We’ve got four marked on this map—the rest are lost, buried under centuries of undergrowth.”

“Or removed,” Callum said. “Someone wouldn’t want them found.”

Ishbel glanced at him but said nothing.

They walked in silence for a time. The forest was unnaturally still—no birdsong, no rustle of small creatures in the leaf litter. Only the drip of moisture from overhead branches and the soft squelch of their boots on the sodden ground. The trees here were older than the ones near the house, gnarled oaks and rowans whose trunks twisted like arthritic hands clawing at the sky.

Callum felt it before he saw it: a wrongness in the air, a sweetness that turned his stomach. He stopped, one hand raised.

Ishbel halted beside him. “What is it?”

“Smell that?”

She tilted her head, nostrils flaring. Her face went pale. “Blood.”

They pushed through a screen of ferns and found the clearing. The second boundary stone stood at its centre, a taller slab than the first, and at its base lay the carcass of a red deer stag. Its throat had been cut with a blade, the wound clean and deliberate, and its antlers had been removed—sawn off at the skull and taken away. The moss around the stone was dark with blood, still wet.

“Poachers,” Ishbel said, but her voice lacked conviction.

Callum crouched beside the carcass. The stag’s eyes were open, filmed over, but there was no fear in them. No pain. It was as though the animal had died peacefully, willingly, before its throat was opened. He reached out and touched the wound, and the skin was warm.

“This wasn’t poachers,” he said. “No one takes a stag and leaves the meat to rot. And poachers don’t take trophies this clean.”

Ishbel knelt opposite him, studying the ground. “There’s no drag marks. No disturbance in the moss. Whatever killed it either carried it here or…”

“Or it walked here on its own.”

She met his gaze, and for a moment, he saw the same unease that had been gnawing at him since the journal’s first entry. Ishbel was a pragmatist, a girl who’d grown up in the hardscrabble edges of the highlands, who knew the land and its creatures better than most. She didn’t believe in curses or forest spirits.

But she was starting to.

“Let’s keep moving,” she said, rising. “There’s a third stone to the north, near the old burn.”

They left the stag behind, but the sweetness of blood clung to them. As they walked, Callum noticed the fungus for the first time. It grew in clusters at the base of trees, pale and glistening, forming patterns that seemed almost deliberate. Circles within circles, spiralling out from the trees’ roots like echoes of the carvings on the stones.

He stopped at one cluster, bending close. The fungus exuded a faint phosphorescence, a ghostly blue-green glow that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.

“Ishbel,” he said quietly. “Have you ever seen this before?”

She came to his side, her brow furrowing. “No. Nothing like that. And I’ve walked these woods my whole life.”

Callum touched one of the caps gently, and it felt warm—alive in a way that mushroom flesh shouldn’t be. He pulled his hand back quickly, wiping his fingers on his trousers. The glow seemed to intensify for a moment, then settled.

“The journal mentioned something,” he said slowly, trying to recall the faint, fainting script. “There was a passage about the forest ‘waking.’ She wrote that when the keeper’s time grows short, the Ur stirs, and the wood begins to change. She said it would send signs.”

“Signs like this?”

Callum nodded, gesturing back the way they’d come. “And that. The stag. The forest isn’t just watching me anymore. It’s acknowledging the keeper’s presence.”

A chill ran down his spine, and he realised with sudden, cold clarity that the burden he’d inherited wasn’t passive. His grandmother hadn’t just guarded the forest—she had been in dialogue with it, feeding it what it needed to survive. And now it was turning its attention to him.

They reached the third stone an hour later, at the edge of a narrow burn that cut through the glen. This stone was different—taller, darker, slick with moisture. And at its base, arranged in a neat circle, were offerings. Small carved figures of bone and wood, a lock of hair tied with red thread, a rusted knife, and a child’s shoe, worn and water-stained.

Ishbel recoiled. “What the hell is this?”

Callum’s throat tightened. He picked up the shoe, turning it over. It was old, decades old, the leather cracked and brittle. And as he looked at it, a fragment of memory surfaced—not his own, but his grandmother’s words, transcribed in the journal’s pages.

*The Ur demands what it cannot take. We give freely, or it takes more. Each keeper pays in kind, but the forest is never full. It is always hungry.*

He dropped the shoe as though it burned him.

“We need to find the fourth stone,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended. “And the rest. All of them. If the map only shows four, we need to reconstruct the others.”

“Why? What will that tell us?”

Callum turned to her, and he felt the weight of the dirk against his hip, the weight of his grandmother’s blood on his hands, the weight of a debt he hadn’t agreed to but couldn’t escape.

“Because the stones are the boundary of the pact,” he said. “And somewhere, on one of them, there has to be a way out. Or else I’m going to forget something I can’t get back.”

He didn’t tell her what he’d noticed as they walked. Didn’t tell her that when he’d looked at the stag’s carcass, he’d already forgotten the face of the man who’d taught him to fish on the river Tay. Didn’t tell her that his mother’s eyes were slowly fading from his mind, replaced by the brass gleam of a creature that lurked beyond the treeline.

The forest was stirring, waking to his presence.

And it was already feeding.