The forest warned me before I understood why.
It wasn’t dramatic. No sudden silence, no sharp cry. Just a subtle tightening — the way the air thickened, the way the birds shifted higher into the canopy, the way Asher’s presence sharpened from calm to alert.
Slow, he said.
I stopped walking immediately.
The late afternoon light slanted through the trees, catching dust and pollen in pale threads. Everything looked the same as it had moments before — trunks rising straight and dark, moss clinging low, the ground uneven with roots and stone.
But the land had leaned away from something.
I breathed in carefully.
Not pack.
Not animal.
Human.
My shoulders tensed. “They followed.”
Not you, Asher corrected. The disturbance.
That didn’t make it better.
I stepped off the path without thin
