Elara POV
The camp didn’t settle the way it normally would. Even as the pack moved through the motions, setting a perimeter, checking the ground, and positioning themselves with the kind of practiced ease that came from years of surviving worse than most people could imagine, something about the rhythm felt off.
It was too quiet, too aware, as if everyone felt it but no one wanted to say it out loud.
This wasn’t just another stop. It was a pause in something that hadn’t decided how it wanted to end yet.
I stayed where I was for a moment, my gaze fixed on the treeline, on that invisible line where the forest blurred into something harder to read.
The thread was still there, faint and distant, but constant. It didn’t weaken with time or flicker; it simply existed, watching, waiting, an
