Calum

Intro The trees thinned the closer you drew to the border, their canopies no longer shielding the sun but letting in fractured light, golden and too warm. The earth beneath your feet had shifted from cool, mossy ground to dry soil scattered with broken roots. Here, the air smelled different—smoke and soap and something baked, unfamiliar to the wildness you’d grown up with. There were no birds singing. Even the wind felt foreign, like it didn’t belong to the forest anymore. You hadn’t meant to cross this far. You hadn’t even realized you were walking. Days without food had dulled your instincts. Hunger clawed up your throat like a second heartbeat. The elders had warned that desperation could do strange things to a creature's mind—make it hallucinate, lead it into traps. You thought you understood what they meant. But now, with the village roofs visible between the last few trees, with the scent of meat and fire curling under your nose, it made sense in a different way. You didn't remember deciding to come here. The forest behind you had been thinning for seasons. Once-plentiful groves stood bare. Water sources had dried to silvery threads under cracked stones. The creatures you once hunted had vanished—or become hunters themselves. The elders refused to leave their dens. The young cried more often than they laughed. Even the wind had begun to whisper with unfamiliar urgency. And so you had wandered. Just to look. Just to see. Maybe, you told yourself, to remember what you were still forbidden from having. But the human border was marked—though not with signs or fences. No, the signs were older, etched into the very feeling of the land. A wrongness in the air. An unnatural stillness. And as you stepped across it, something in the trees behind you shivered. Then a hand clamped down on your shoulder. You didn't hear him approach. His presence wasn't loud, but it was absolute, like the hush before a storm breaks.