Dear Reader

Hi everyone,

I have something a little different for you today.

I’ve been spending more time in the world of They Came from the Trees lately, and an idea started taking shape: what about the other survivors?

There are people scattered across this changed world who will never meet the characters from the main series. They have their own groups, their own stories, and their own ideas about what it takes to stay alive.

So I started writing some of them.

The story below is the first glimpse at one group I’m considering following in a series of companion stories that would run alongside They Came from the Trees.

Meet Tristen, Sable, Jasper, and McKenna.

They’ve learned that there are rules to surviving after dark.

Unfortunately, some of those rules are wrong.

What the Fire Couldn’t Reach

I feed another branch into the flames and watch the sparks climb through the trees until the dark swallows them.

My father used to say a fire was only as good as the wood you fed it. I never understood why he bothered telling me things like that. How to split a log so it caught fast. How to keep rain out of kindling. How to tell when a fire would carry through to morning and when it wouldn’t.

Tonight I wish I’d listened to everything.

Sable sits across from me with the map spread over her knees, running one finger along the ridge line for what has to be the twentieth time, like the trail’s going to rearrange itself if she looks hard enough. Jasper’s on his back with his boots too close to the coals, telling McKenna some story about his cousin’s dog that got loose at a wedding.

Nobody’s listening. Not to Jasper, anyway.

I’m listening to the trees.

The birds disappeared an hour ago. The crickets went quiet not long after that. Even the wind’s died somewhere past the clearing, and all that’s left is the fire snapping and the occasional shift of someone’s boots against the dirt.

“Animals don’t come this close anymore,” Jasper says, apropos of nothing, still talking about the dog. “Not like they used to.”

He’s not wrong. I’ve noticed it too, the way the woods have gone thin of anything that used to live in them, deer and rabbits and the kind of birds that made noise just for the sake of it. Nobody talks about why. Nobody’s had to, not since the world changed and stopped asking permission.

“Tell him to stop,” Sable says without looking up from the map.

“I’m keeping morale up.”

“Morale isn’t the problem.”

McKenna reaches forward and drops another log on the fire. Flames climb around it, bright enough that our shadows stretch out across the clearing and vanish between the trees. For a second, I watch my own shadow reach all the way to the tree line, farther into the woods than any of us have gone since the sun went down.

Something snaps out there.

Jasper stops mid-sentence. Sable looks up. I already have the fire poker in my hand.

“Could be a deer,” McKenna says.

Thirty yards out, the forest is nothing but black trunks stacked one behind the other, and whatever made that sound didn’t seem to care whether we heard it.

Another crack.

Something passes between two trees. I only catch it for a second, but it’s tall, too tall, moving through the gaps.

Sable folds the map. “Pack up. Now.”

I reach for my pack when something shifts on the other side of the fire. Close enough that the flames catch the edge of something long and pale, low to the ground, gone again before I can call it anything.

We’d built the fire because the fire was supposed to mean something. Every group that’s made it this far tells the same story, that the things out there don’t cross into firelight, that you’re safe as long as the flames hold. Nobody ever says what happens when something’s already standing in the circle before the flames go up.

“Run,” Sable says. “Run, now.”

We go for the tree line on the far side, away from whatever’s behind us, and the woods swallow the fire’s light within a dozen steps. I hear McKenna ahead of me, and Jasper somewhere off to the left, and I’m three strides behind all of them when my boot catches a root, and the ground comes up hard enough to knock the air out of me.

By the time I get up, I can’t hear anyone.

I don’t call out. I’m not stupid.

I move low, following what I hope is the same line the others took. The trees close in tighter here, packed close enough that the moon barely makes it through. Something’s tracking parallel to me, keeping pace off to my right.

I stop, and it stops.

I hold still. I hear my own heartbeat. It holds still too, patient in a way nothing in these woods used to be. There’s no rustle of leaves settling, no shift of weight from one foot to another. It just waits, the same way I’m waiting.

I can finally see it properly for the first time, through a gap in the branches. Nothing that used to live in these woods moves like this. It’s less like watching an animal and more like watching something that studies animals from a distance and gets most of the motion right.

I don’t run. No point.

I dig the lighter out of my pocket instead, the good one, the one my father gave me before all of this, and I light the driest handful of leaves I can grab in the dark. I hold it up.

It stops at the edge of the light.

Then it steps back into the trees.

I keep the flame going, and I move fast now, toward where I think the others went, and the small fire in my hand throws just enough light to keep whatever’s out there at the edge of it and not closer.

I find Sable and McKenna at the ridge, both of them out of breath, both of them turning fast when I come through the brush. Jasper’s already there, blood on his hand from a fall of his own, but standing.

“You had fire,” Sable says, staring at what’s left of the leaves burning down toward my fingers.

“It worked,” I say, and I don’t know yet if that’s the whole truth or just the part I got to keep.

We don’t talk about the thing that was already in the circle before we ran. Not tonight. But I keep turning it over anyway, the way it didn’t cross into the light from outside, the way it was simply there, like it had been standing in our fire since before we built it and we just hadn’t noticed yet.

I used to think the danger was always going to come from the trees.

I don’t think that anymore.

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Want to go deeper into this world?

Tristen and the others don’t know it yet, but the fire was never the only rule they had wrong.

Their story is part of a new companion story—and potential series—I’m developing alongside They Came from the Trees, following different survivors trying to make their way through the same dangerous, changing world.

If you want to discover the world that Tristen, Sable, Jasper, and McKenna are fighting to survive in, it all begins with They Came from the Trees.

ENTER THE WORLD OF THEY CAME FROM THE TREES WITH BOOK ONE:

And I’d love to know what you thought of Tristen and the others. Should I keep following them? Hit reply and let me know. Their next story might depend on it.

One more thing — free books!

If you’re looking for something new to read, I’m also taking part in a group promotion featuring FREE science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal stories from a collection of authors.

So if strange worlds, impossible creatures, magic, science fiction, or things lurking where they probably shouldn’t be sound like your kind of reading, have a look through the collection and grab anything that catches your eye.

Happy reading,

Christopher Francis