A Familiar Fear

The air in the clearing, once thick with the cloying sweetness of alien blossoms, now carried a metallic tang, a scent Robin had come to associate with the acrid bite of cordite and the coppery bloom of spilled blood. He’d felt it shift, a subtle change in pressure, a tightening in his chest that had nothing to do with the thin, unfamiliar atmosphere. Elara had gone still beside him, her usually fluid movements arrested, her gaze fixed on a point beyond the shimmering veil of the twilight forest.

“It approaches,” she’d murmured, her voice barely a breath against the rustling leaves. “The Weaver stirs.”

Robin’s hand instinctively went to the worn leather of his rifle sling, a phantom weight on his shoulder. He knew that feeling. That prickle of dread that crawled up the spine, the instinctual urge to seek cover, to brace for impact. It was the same primal fear that had gripped him moments before he’d fallen through the rotten floorboards of that Belgian farmhouse, the roar of artillery a distant symphony of destruction.