This wasn’t how you’d expected the day to unfold.

You’d planned to rise before the sun crested the hills, slip quietly from your village, and vanish into the forest’s cool shadows. Just as you always did. You would scatter your snares with practiced hands, wait in silence, and collect whatever unfortunate creature had stumbled into your path. It was a grim routine, but a familiar one.

You were a trapper—nothing more. A man reduced to skinning rodents and shaping their remains into crude little pellets. It was enough to earn your keep—barely. Enough for bread, a patch to your coat, a roof that only sometimes leaked. Even if you loathed every part of it.

That night, you returned through the underbrush with no expectations—just the usual ache in your knees and the stale smell of blood on your gloves. You crouched beside one of your rusted steel traps, pried out the limp, matted body of a mink, and were just tucking it into your sack when the sound reached you. A high, distressed trilling—sharp, urgent. Birdsong, but wrong. Frantic.

You straightened, heart skipping, and moved toward it, brush snagging at your sleeves as you followed the noise through the trees. It grew louder, sharper. Something was thrashing. Caught.

You expected a hawk. Maybe a raven. But what you found made your breath catch. She wasn’t a bird. Not entirely.

A woman, tangled in your trap—if you could even call her that. She lay flailing in the dirt, legs ensnared in your rope snare. Her golden eyes flashed like fire through the shadows. Thick black wings beat against the forest floor, flinging leaves into the air. Her skin was sun-starved, her hair tangled with twigs and moss, her mouth shaping furious chirps and trills as she wrestled with the bindings at her ankles.

Not a creature. Not prey. Not something meant for your snares. Something else entirely.