Enstranged Hearts

The Unseen World

Aria returned to her cabin that evening, the first true tremor of acknowledgment she’d felt since. Next to her back porch was a very large pawprint—impossibly large. Not a wolf print. Something different. The sort of thing that implied a being that was somewhere between being and non being.

Her phone rang. Unknown number.

There was a deep voice saying, 'Stay alert.' Kai.

She couldn't respond, the call broke up.The breakthrough came and with it a confrontation. As she got up for her sunrise photography session, he emerged from the forest, like a manifestation of her most complicated dreams, here is Kai. Tall. Muscular. With a grace that suggested that which wasn't human.

He simply said ‘We have to talk.’ It was immediate and categorical. “No. We don’t.”It was an avoidance dance as she tried to pack her equipment. Move the camera. Turn slightly. Pretend he wasn’t there. Amused half smile playing over his features, Kai watched.“You can’t see what’s really going on.”To this Aria answered, ‘I’m a wildlife photographer.’ “I document what exists. I don’t entertain fantasies".

Kai’s laugh was unexpected. Deep. Rich. She was the one full of layers of meaning she couldn’t yet fathom. “Fantasies?” he repeated.

“What happened in the forest, are you saying that is what has been called? And if I hadn’t intervened, then those wolves would have killed you when they would have?”

The tension still hung them in the air between them. A dormant part of Aria became aware that her carefully built up walls of denial were filling up with tiny cracks.

“I was fine, I had it under control,” she told the lie.

Kai stepped closer. Not threateningly. They listened but with an intensity that made the forest around them stop, to listen.

“No,” he said softly. “You didn’t.” For a moment, something in his tone — a bit of protection, a bit of revelation — broke through the resistance. Something in his eyes for just a moment. A depth. A history. A connection that lasted more than this single moment. Her strength was resistance. Her shield. She turned having said, 'I'm not interested.'

Kai’s answer was just as clear.“You don’t have a choice.”

There wasn’t any threat in the statement. It was a fact. One might say the words as she might talk about weather or make scientific observations, with the same matter of fact tone.The forest around them changed as he spoke. Shadows lengthened. It seemed like the trees were slightly leaning closer now. Electricity... was suddenly in the very air, and no further explanation was necessary.

Aria Lockhart—is about to learn some boundaries are meant to be broken. There were mysteries that needed more than observation.They demanded participation. And everything was unfolding in front of her.

These next three weeks were a masterclass in deliberate ignorance. Aria Lockhart turned her life work into a process of evasion, and every bit of her finely honed analytical brain was channeled into a massive wildlife documentation project that, like everything a person should be doing, called for 100 percent attention.

For her latest assignment from National Geographic, she had to track migration patterns in the Silver Ridge ecosystem very extensively. Perfect: A scientific endeavour with no space for supernatural speculation. Precise. Methodical. Rational.

It was like any other morning she started her intensive field research. Dense pine forests cast their predawn light filtering, as if inviting into a misty landscape which seemed to breathe an airborne quality of its own mysterious energy. She had all her equipment in top shape: many cameras, GPSs, thermal imaging devices, and such specialized recording instruments only used for spotting the most trivial ecological interaction.

She chose not to explain what she didn’t understand. Nor could she explain what was changing subtly in her world.

Animals behaved differently. Not dramatically. In ways apparently not likely to trigger immediate scientific alarm. But enough differently that an experienced wildlife observer, like herself, would notice.The deer herds she would normally have scattered at human presence watched her with an uncomfortable calm.

When she drew near, they didn’t just stop talking; they acted as if they were moving in concert with a degree of intelligence that was, by natural standards, impossible. It was synchronised even in the smallest creatures – ground squirrels, pine martens, woodland mice — and felt orchestrated.

On her third day of field research, something utterly remarkable happened which she filed away to the depths of her professional rationality. She saw perfectly still a massive elk —a bull of at least 700 pounds—standing thirty yards from her position. Not just still. Watching.

Its eyes had intelligence that went beyond ordinary animal sense. When Aria jerked her camera up, the elk made no move. Didn’t twitch. It fixated upon simply observing her with an intensity almost… deliberate.A developing intuition she could not exactly pinpoint against professional training warded. Something extraordinary was registered by her thermal imaging equipment.

Their body temperatures didn’t vary as they would normally. Instead, the thermal profile of its heat signatures held anomalies which suggested something more complex than the expected biological function one might expect from a mammal, among other things.

She muttered to herself, 'Just an equipment malfunction'.But she knew it wasn’t. It was that evening that watching her collected data in her cabin's meticulously organized research station, Aria came across yet another unexplainable event. The subtle inconsistencies in her photographs—thousands of high resolution images of small interactions between wildlife—were her photographs. Non environmental lighting that didn’t match shadows. Something that seemed to be drifting across the image edges, blurred movements, faster than the camera could capture. Glimpses of… something. Not quite definable. Not quite human. Not quite animal.

It demanded explanation for her scientific training. A more profound thing was happening, her emerging intuition said.

Stories were told long ago by the local Native American community of Silver Ridge of shape shifters. It's official — nothing depends on seriousness — and the futures of hundreds have been handed over to us to protect — first they told us legends of protectors who could turn between human and animal forms, guardians of ecological balance. These were dismissed by most researchers as cultural mythology.

Aria was always different. She saw where other wildlife documentarians saw folklore—potential ecological complexity, waiting to be understood but this time around, everything felt different.