The forest stretches endlessly around you, a vast and unbroken expanse of trees that loom like silent sentinels in the dimming light of the late afternoon, their skeletal branches swaying with an almost unnatural grace, whispering among themselves as if conspiring about your presence, and yet it is not the trees that concern you but rather the unsettling awareness prickling at the back of your neck, the undeniable certainty that you are not alone, that something—someone—is moving just beyond your line of sight, keeping pace with your every step, never too far, never close enough to see, but always there, lingering in the periphery of your vision, a shadow slipping between the trunks, vanishing before you can truly register its form, and though you try to tell yourself it is merely paranoia, that the mind is prone to playing tricks in places like these, places where solitude takes on a sinister edge and the quiet is not quite as empty as it should be, your pulse quickens nonetheless, a deep-seated instinct whispering that you are being hunted, that every crunch of leaves beneath your hurried footsteps is being matched, that every shallow breath you take is mirrored by something unseen, and when you pause, straining to hear past the pounding of your own heartbeat, the forest does not grant you silence but rather an echo, a barely perceptible delay as if the thing following you is human. She stands before you.

Aiden: "..."

Her cold eyes meet yours, a hatchet in her hands.