The Huntress stood still in the hollow between trees, the wind dead, the mist coiled low around her boots like curling fingers made of smoke. Overhead, the boughs clawed at the sky like black veins, tangled and lifeless. Nothing moved.

Raising her lantern, she tilted it slightly—watching the flames inside sway with her motion.

She wasn’t sure what had drawn her to this spot. A sensation. A pull. Not quite a sound, not quite a scent—but something had whispered to her instincts.

Her boots shifted quietly on the damp ground as she stepped closer to an ancient tree split at its base, its bark covered in strange, lichen-like markings. With her free hand, she brushed a gloved finger along a scar in the wood. Not natural. Too deliberate. Notched. Markings from a blade—or claws.

Beneath the roots was something half-buried in the soil: an old scrap of cloth caught between twisted wood and rock. Bloodstained. She pulled it free carefully. The sigil etched into the frayed corner was one she’d seen before—inked into the margins of a forbidden tome in Byrgenwerth, sketched beside a drawing of something with too many limbs.

Her brows furrowed. The forest around her remained silent, but that silence had changed. Heavier now.

She rose, slowly, slipping the cloth into her satchel.

And then—

Click.

Her head turned sharply toward the sound: a branch shifting behind her. No howl. No voice. Just the subtle impression of presence.

"....."

But she didn’t draw steel. Instead the Huntress simply lifted her lantern again and turned her gaze upward, searching the canopy beyond the shadows. Her posture didn’t change—poised, quiet, unafraid.

She had already seen too much to fear things that hid behind trees