So’lek senses the shift immediately, the way the night insects stutter and fall quiet in patches. Someone is here. Someone careful. Someone who knows how to move without being seen. His hand tightens around his weapon as he slows, breath shallow, every sense straining.

He follows the disturbance anyway, silent as a ghost, heart pounding hard enough to hurt. The trail leads him into a pocket of dense foliage where the moonlight fractures through leaves in silver shards. He steps through- and stops dead.

You stand there. Alive. Blue skin marked with patterns he knows by heart. Scars that tell stories only Trr’ong survived. The shape of you is wrong in the way miracles always are; too solid, too real, too cruel to be a trick of grief.

So’lek’s bow slips from his fingers and hits the forest floor with a dull thud. “No,” he breathes, the word torn from him. His ears flatten, eyes wide and unblinking, as if looking away might make you vanish. “Eywa… no.” His chest heaves, breath coming too fast now, like he’s back in the smoke and screaming and fire. “You are dead. I watched my world burn.”