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The first thing he notices is the moss.
It is everywhere—tree roots swallowed whole beneath it, stones gone soft and green under its spread. It has climbed the fallen logs, crept up the trunks, furred over the ground in such thick wet abundance that the whole forest looks half-digested.
Kol pushes himself up onto his elbows and stares at it stupidly for a moment, dirt tacky on his palms, damp soaking through the knees of his trousers.
The earth has caught him, apparently.
How thoughtful.
Kol looks up and blinks.
Hm.
That seems unfortunate.
He squints harder.
The stars are wrong.
There are too few of them, for one thing, and the ones that remain have arranged themselves strangely. Kol stares harder, head tipping back, eyes narrowing. Nothing up there belongs where it should. No familiar scatter. No old patterns. No shapes he has traced from rooftops and ship decks and fields with some warm, clever girl leaning against his shoulder while he made a spectacle of himself in the name of some short lived romance.
Kol knows the night sky—he knows it from half the world over, knows it from every angle.
This is not his sky.
There's a shape up there, broad and ragged, almost like a pitch black scar cutting across the sky and the moon sits inside it, pinned like a beetle in a display case. The sight above him feels staged—cheap theatre painted by someone who had only ever heard secondhand what the night sky should look like.
"Yeah," he mumbles to himself, "I don't like that at all."
He gets to his feet.
The forest seems to gather itself around the motion—seems to almost rise with him. He looks around and thinks that the trees are standing the way people do when they have turned to watch you enter a room.
Kol really does not like that.
He knows woods, okay? He's been around woods his entire life! And woods aren't supposed to do that—aren't supposed to lean in close whenever you walk, like they're excited to see you. Moss clings possessively to his boots and he notices that there are small vines starting to climb over the sides the longer he stands still—a pale little climber loops itself over the leather as if introducing itself. He kicks free of it with immediate offense.
He squints up at those strange stars again and tries to pay attention to the sounds around him.
There isn't much, he thinks—and then the realization: there isn't any noise, save for his own breathing.
A wood at night ought to have something living in it. Insects. Leaves. The small furtive traffic of things with teeth and nests and burrows. Even silence has texture when it is listened to with his ear. This has... nothing.
He thinks there must be some kind of magic underpinning this entire thing—that someone must be trying to sell him a forgery and hoping not to be caught.
And as soon as the thought settles, Kol can feel it: a strange gleeful curl of magic wrapping around his throat.
Kol’s mouth flattens.
Oh, he is really starting to hate it here.
Kol makes himself a promise.
Later—when he has worked out what this place is, who built it, and how to tear a hole through it—he is going to make a very long list.
On the top will be the worthless doppelganger—inviting Originals into her home only to have them murdered there is the sort of thing that ought to come with consequences. Second, her idiot brother who thinks it's a good idea to commit said murder. Third, their gaggle of useless friends.
He will find them—once he claws his way out of whatever nursery-rhyme afterlife this is—and make sure every bone in their bodies remember that Kol Mikaelson is not a man who appreciates being toyed with.
And then—and only then—will Kol handle Nik and Rebekah.
He hears something then—faint, far off, a familiar voice dragged thin through the trees—and every thought in his head drops dead at once.
Kol runs toward it.
He really ought to have hit the edge of the forest by now—a clearing or ravine or a road, something—but theirs is only more of it. More trunks, more moss, more of that dreadful listening stillness pressed up against his skin. The feeling of being watched keeps pace with him.
"Kol."
His brother's voice comes from behind him.
Kol swivels before his brain catches up. "Finn?"
For half a second instinct rears up strange and useless in his chest—relief before thought, the old shape of brotherhood before memory catches up and ruins it. Then memory does catch up, and there is Finn as Finn has always been: severe, sanctimonious, and, on the last occasion they met, actively trying to kill him.
Rebekah had insisted afterward that Finn changed his mind after they’d thrown Sage at him—and perhaps he had. Kol never got to see him after that fateful night, having been exiled to Denver to play friendly with the boy who would later put a stake through his chest while the doppelganger and her merry band of idiots cut his eldest brother’s song short.
He had been angry, naturally—angry enough to want to kill them all for it, of course, but he wanted to avoid Nik's bloody dagger more.
He did the clever thing instead: he stuck around only long enough to help with the immediate danger—ridiculous, considering snapping the doppelganger’s neck would've handled it neatly, but Nik and Elijah wouldn't hear of it—before putting a hundred miles between them.
Then Rebekah asked for help, and Kol—idiot that he is where his sister is concerned—came back.
That had gone brilliantly.
Finn looks ghastly, pale as bleached bone in the moonlight, clothes torn, face sharper than Kol remembers it being.
“How long have you been creeping about in this charming little nightmare, then?” Kol asks. “Days? Weeks?” His gaze drops over Finn’s ruined clothes and the vines already winding up his legs. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken up gardening.”
Finn's gaze flickers past him—he looks afraid, Kol thinks and he dislikes it immediately—toward the trees that seem to lean closer with every word.
"I woke here the moment that boy staked me. One breath in our world, the next..." He gestures at the forest around them, "... this."
Kol exhales, slow. "Bloody marvelous."
Finn does not answer.
Kol looks around again, slower this time. “I’ve met creatures who came back from the Other Side—None of them mentioned any of this.”
“I do not think this is the Other Side.”
Kol opens his mouth but Finn cuts in, "We need to keep moving before it finds us."
“Pardon?”
Finn does not so much as look back—he just strides deeper into the trees with that same grim, joyless purpose he has brought to every family interaction for the past thousand years.
Something cold and slick winds round his ankle then higher—over the top of his boot, up beneath the hem of his trousers. He looks down to find the vines no longer content with his laces.
Kol swears and kicks hard, tearing himself loose before the bloody things can decide to make a meal of him. One snaps with a wet little sound. Another clings stubbornly to his heel until he bends to rip it free and fling it into the moss with tremendous personal offense.
By the time he catches up, Finn is several paces ahead and still not slowing.
“Would you care,” Kol calls after him, brushing dirt from his hands, “to explain what exactly we are running from, or is this one of those delightful elder brother situations where I am expected to supply my own terror?”
Finn’s shoulders tighten, though whether at the question or Kol’s tone is anyone’s guess. He keeps moving.
“I haven’t seen it clearly,” he says at last.
“Comforting.”
“But it has been following me.”
Kol glances over his shoulder, then up into the trees, then back to Finn’s rigid spine. “And what, precisely, are we trying to hide from, brother?”
Finn does not bother answering him and pushes forward.
“Brother,” he says, sharper now, “I am speaking to you.”
“I know.”
“Then do me the courtesy of becoming informative.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“So we are fleeing a mystery then.”
Finn steps over a root half-swallowed by moss and does not look back. “It learns.”
For a moment Kol thinks he must have heard wrong. “It what?”
“It learns,” Finn repeats. “The first few times it came near, I heard it before I felt it. Branches shifting. Weight in the undergrowth. Afterwards it grew quieter.” He ducks beneath a low branch, waits just long enough for Kol to follow, then keeps moving. “Then it stopped moving like an animal—stopped moving like anything I know.”
Kol opens his mouth, finds nothing adequate, and closes it again.
“Sometimes it stays just out of sight for what feels like hours. Sometimes it disappears long enough that I think I’ve lost it.” His voice has gone flatter. “Then I turn around and find it has been standing there all along.”
That is upsetting.
Kol decides not to say so.
Instead he says, “You still have not described anything, which I find selfish.”
“I told you. I haven’t seen it clearly.”
“How does one fail to see something that has apparently been stalking one across a haunted forest for weeks?”
Finn is quiet for three steps.
“Because,” he says at last, “it dislikes being looked at.”
Kol stares at the back of his brother’s head.
“Well,” he says after a moment, “that is not a sentence I care for.”
Finn makes a sound that might once, in a kinder century, have become a laugh. “No.”
They keep on.
The ground slopes without seeming to. Trees appear where Kol could swear there had been space a moment before. Twice he glances over his shoulder and sees the same split trunk standing behind them at two entirely different distances. The second time, there are claw marks in it that had not been there before.
His hands itch.
He is going to make that dopey doppelganger and her irritating little brother pay for this in blood and strips of flesh and ripped-out fingernails. Perhaps he will make them eat each other slowly—yes, Kol thinks, that would probably make him feel better.
They keep walking, moss dragging at their steps.
After a while Finn asks what happened after his death, and Kol gives him the short version: the sirelines, the creature once known as Alaric Saltzman, Elena Gilbert’s transition, the cure, his own murder.
“Sage is dead, then?”
“Very, I’m afraid.”
Something twists across Finn’s face at that.
Mean little thing that he is, Kol pretends not to notice. Unfortunately, another part of him nearly feels bad enough to offer comfort. He does no such thing
They go on walking.
After another stretch of this damp green misery, Kol says, “Please tell me you have a plan beyond wandering until the foliage kills us.”
Finn doesn’t even pause. “We need ingredients for a ritual, if we are to have any chance of leaving this place.”
Kol lifts a brow. “Oh? Have you found a witch skulking about, then?”
Finn cuts him a look—that look. The old sour, elder-brother look that has always suggested Kol is a moral failing in human shape. Kol has missed it about as much as gangrene.
“You haven’t noticed it yet?” Finn asks.
“Use your words, brother.”
Finn’s mouth tightens. “It seems dying and ending up here has stitched something back between us and Nature—”
Kol stops dead.
Ah.
He throws out a hand.
One of the nearby trees erupts in sparks and open flame. Fire races up the trunk in a bright hungry sheet, fast enough to make him laugh out loud. The force of it knocks him back a few steps.
Oh, Kol loves it here.
He howls, delighted, grin breaking wide across his face, and turns to demand whether Finn saw—
“Brother,” Finn says.
His gaze is fixed over Kol’s shoulder.
Kol turns.
There are eyes in the dark.
One pair, then another, then seven more blinking open between the trees, all of them too close together and set at the wrong heights, like someone had attempted an animal from memory and grown bored halfway through.
Kol lets out a low whistle.
“That,” he says, “is spooky.”
Finn, dry as old paper, says, “Really? That is all you have to say?"