TIMING: Current LOCATION: Lostwoods Labyrinth PARTIES: Cairn (@cairnivore) and Owen (@bladesandtrades) SUMMARY: After Owen gets attacked by a ghoul, he crosses paths with Cairn. The interaction is tense, but eventually, for some reason, the two decide to find a way out of Lostwoods together. Cairn continues to give off weird vibes but does share some genuine curiosity and intrigue in Owen. Unintentionally, maybe the two share a bit more than expected and find what they see in each other might be more similar than one might think.
This was a fucking mess. There were so many reasons to not work with the undead motherfuckers but Owen genuinely hadn’t taken into account the fact that for some other, even more mindless species, the undead were a damn delicacy. Ghouls were absolute menaces, even though they tended to avoid the living, they were still so much fucking trouble. Right now, they had been trouble specifically for Owen and even more trouble for the zombie Owen had been here to make a deal with.
Owen wouldn’t be caught dead complimenting a zombie so he decided to focus on the fact that the dumb idiot had only managed to kill two of the ghouls before getting himself permanently killed, leaving Owen to deal with the remaining three ghouls. He did deal with them, of course he did, still a slayer despite all the other asterisks that came with his job title now, even if the bastards had managed to leave him with a decently sized scratch to his arm. Stumbling away from the gruesome scene of torn apart zombie and ghouls either decapitated or sliced from navel to throat, Owen shuffled forwards in search of the cemetery gate, definitely not thinking about who might be called in to clean up this mess. “Motherfucking fuckers,” Owen grumbled elegantly, using the torn up scraps of his jacket sleeve to stem the bleeding from his arm, a task that was proving annoyingly difficult with just one hand and on the move, finally relenting and stopping to hopefully make better progress. Where the fuck was that entrance?
—---
She hadn’t meant to end up here. She’d meant to follow the trail, muddy prints too wide for human feet, dragging behind like something wounded or wrong and see where it led. And it had led her here, to the woods. But these were different. Now, the world outside felt like it had closed its mouth behind her. Some of the soil here looked normal enough, firm, leaf-strewn, even undisturbed. But Cairn could tell the difference. The way the moss grew differently in patches, the faint sink of rot beneath the surface. It wasn’t just damp earth. It was the kind that would collapse the moment you trusted it. She kept to the edges, skirted soft spots like they were traps. If her heel sank too far, she stepped back. Always back.
When she heard movement ahead, she crouched low. Breath shallow. Hand on the blade she kept hidden under her coat. She wasn’t sure when the bleeding man showed up, only that he was the first living voice she’d heard since the woods went quiet. She didn’t call out right away. Just watched him from a distance. He was muttering, injured, trying to keep pressure on his arm with one hand and no leverage. She considered walking the other way. Instead, she stepped out from between two crooked headstones, her voice low and even.
“You’re bleeding too loud.” It wasn’t a warning, or a joke, just fact. She had heard him after all and that meant others might have too. If not heard, then maybe smelled. Cairn didn’t get closer. The soft earth beneath her boots gave too much, like it hadn’t fully settled, like something under it still breathed. She shifted subtly, sure-footed, like she knew what not to trust. Her gaze lingered on the way he tied off the bandage. Efficient. Practiced. He wasn’t panicking. Not fresh to this. She didn’t offer help. Just watched. “You know what you’re doing,” she said after a beat, voice quieter now. Not impressed, just confirming. “How long have you been in here?” She didn’t move yet. The wind had shifted once or twice, and she didn’t like the way it didn’t bring sound with it. Something was listening. Or waiting. Maybe both.
–
The makeshift tourniquet wasn’t quite working or maybe Owen just didn’t have the patience to make a proper attempt at it. It wasn’t an arterial bleed, he would have bled out sometime after killing the first, maybe second ghoul if that had been the case. But he was leaving a trail of blood which, even caustic to vampires as it was, wasn’t a great thing. The healing would kick in soon enough but if he lost too much blood before that, he’d end up as useless as Eve slumped against that van. And there was no one coming to rescue his reckless ass all the way out wherever the fuck here was. So maybe the anger combined with just a bit of blood loss and the focus on his arm allowed him to let someone or something sneak up on him, halfway decent pressure finally put on his arm when a flat voice startled him.
A blood covered hand immediately reached for a knife - obviously, it wasn’t a ghoul but a lot of creatures might perceive him as a vulnerable meal right about now. Not an undead, Owen’s skin still felt off but in a way that probably had more to do with the inherent cold the ghoul’s claws had left him with and less with an undead presence. “And you’re light on your feet,” Owen shot back, eyes narrowed in suspense for an attack. The stranger shifted but casually, nothing threatening in her stance or face. Another deadpan comment that had Owen neither lowering the knife he was holding in her direction nor threatening to toss it. “I do. Why are you approaching a bleeding stranger in the woods to be fucking weird?”
A stray drop of blood landed on the crisp grass, the crimson such a stark contrast to the way everything in here seemed a bit gray. Her question drew a scoff from Owen, as if he hadn’t also started to question her. Granted, his question was a bit more hypothetical while she seemed to actually want information. Information was valuable, however. “Tell me why you want to know and maybe I’ll answer.” A soft maybe but it might help him garner more information about the strangely still newcomer. Between them, the knife stayed in Owen’s hand, still stuck between defense and offense, still calculating. The first of many shivers to come broke through Owen’s resolve, jaw clenching to suppress the chatter of teeth. Fucking ghouls.
—-
Cairn didn’t flinch at the knife. Watched it, sure, but the way you’d watch a branch sway in the wind. A thing to be noted, not feared. Nothing in her shifted. Like she’d already taken stock of him and filed the danger somewhere manageable. He was wounded, already a weak spot bright and red in front of her. Less dangerous than whatever lurked among here—whatever had attacked him. Maybe it was his blatant vulnerability that made him hostile. Either way, Cairn gave no reaction, not caring for the display. She didn’t care to puff her chest, what mattered was her survival and it was other’s underestimation that kept her at an advantage.
She watched him the way you might watch an animal you weren’t sure would bite, curious but careful. Once, when she was small, she'd found a fox caught in old wire. It hadn’t barked or thrashed, just stared with glassy, ember eyes and waited. Pama had stood behind her, quiet as the trees and said, “Help when you can, but never without looking first. Some pain makes a creature mean.” Cairn had cut the wire anyway. The fox hadn’t bit, but it hadn’t thanked her, either. It limped off into the brush and never looked back. He reminded her of that fox now. Wounded, cornered, but with enough fight left to make you bleed if you misstepped. “You’re not asking the right questions.” Her voice was quiet, but steady. “I don’t want anything from you. Just trying to see if you’re going to slow me down.”
Cairn glanced at the knife still clutched in his hand. Not directly aimed at her. Not lowered either. Her weight shifted subtly in the soil, reading him like terrain, not a person. He was holding steady through exhaustion, but there were cracks, his shiver, the way his eyes kept track of her, not out of fear, but calculation. He could be like a dry slope after the rain—might hold your weight, might give way the second you trust it. “I'm not here to finish someone else’s mistake,” she added, eyes steady on his face. “But if you fall, and something hears it, we both end up dead. So. You holding onto that blade for me, or for something else?”
—-
The longer the stranger stared, the more Owen thought he might have preferred an overt attack. Actually, there was no question about it, he definitely would have liked for her to try and kill him instead of whatever the fuck she was doing now. Sizing him up? Trying to get a read on the hostile and bleeding stranger in the damn cemetery? If not to finish the job the ghouls had started then why? Morbid curiosity was a fucking pandemic in this town and so was a lack of survival instincts but something in the other’s gaze didn’t scream ‘I’m a fucking idiot, something come kill me because a fucked up.’ Or maybe that was just mild blood loss speaking.
She spoke again and Owen’s eyes narrowed - it could have been a patronizing comment if not for the way her voice genuinely did not shift cadence and honestly, what the fuck was her deal? Presumably, that wouldn’t have been a correct question either. She continued and it took a moment for the words to register. So what, she wanted to help? Owen didn’t trust kindness without mutual benefit, not anywhere but especially in a town like this, even less so when wounded. And from a total stranger? His hesitation must have shone clear on his features because she added to her dry statement and her wording drew a chattering huff of a laugh from Owen. Yeah, attacking Owen had most certainly been a mistake but something as brainless as a ghoul couldn’t really be faulted, even though the slayer was most certainly faulting them and wishing he’d caused even more suffering as he took them out.
Another shiver forced its way to the surface and Owen cursed inwardly. The cold that had seemingly crawled its way from the scratch on his arm into his very core wasn’t letting up and the combination of hypothermia and bleeding wasn’t a great one, especially not exposed and - Owen was very reluctant to admit that last part - seemingly lost. He wasn’t going to fall, fuck that, back straightening almost defiantly at her accusation laced question. “Both,” Owen replied honestly but he did let the knife move so it was slightly more perpendicular to his own body. A dog with its hackles still raised but no longer baring its teeth. For now. “Anything that attacks me,” he then clarified, sizing up the stranger with unease settling in his chest. Was it better to take the chance of death than teaming up with someone unknown? It shouldn’t have been as big of a debate as it was. “Attacks us,” Owen finally, reluctantly, added. As much of a promise of peace as he could offer.
—-
Cairn watched the knife shift, just enough to say he wasn’t aiming for her anymore. Not quite peace, but a pause. Like the way a wolf will break eye contact—not submission, just a warning spent. Her gaze flicked once to the weapon, then to his posture, which had stiffened with something like defiance. He was hurt, but not helpless. Not yet. Still enough of a threat that she’d keep the space between them measured.
She noted the way he shivered and looked to find any matching characteristics that would say he had undergone severe blood loss. Paleness. Claminess. Yet, she didn’t find that. Just… shivering. “Something got in.” She commented after his shiver. Her pama used to say something about that. The kind of chill that settled in bone-deep. It meant something had touched your life thread. Cairn wondered what it was. Wondered if he would tell her.
Her shoulders eased a fraction when he said “us,” though her boots didn’t move. Still rooted. Still watching. “As long as you’ll fight,” she said, nodding once. “That’s what matters.” Cairn had tried, at first, to follow the paths most worn. The ones where grass had given way to compacted soil. Trails. But none of them seemed to lead out. In fact, she felt she was deeper in following them as she tried to make her way out. Now she wasn’t so sure those were paths at all.
“Do you know the way out?” Cairn asked, wondering if he had some insight. She’d noticed that these designated paths had some of the oldest growth. Moss crept thick over the stones there, long unbothered. Trees leaned closer. It didn’t make sense. Or maybe it made too much sense, just the wrong kind. “The places with the most worn paths... feel the oldest.” She didn’t say haunted. She didn’t say wrong. But she hoped he understood what she meant.
—-
There were still no hints as to what she was. Shifter, hunter, fae, human, a fucking annoying illusion. Granted, Owen’s own identity was still hidden too, anyone or anything could hold a knife in a threatening manner. Something like a shifter was perhaps less likely to but they were still just two strangers, mysteries to one another, probably not intending to contribute to the other’s death. Another of her strange comments broke the silence, the heavy and almost suffocating air of it, and it made no sense but somehow it still did? Owen’s eyes shifted from her to the wound, barely trickling blood now, the edges of it ugly and torn. “It’ll be fine,” Owen assured her gruffly.
The grounds for this tentative cooperation were laid out and Owen huffed out a breath. Yeah, those were terms he could work with. “No risk of anything else,” he said, the knife at last losing its position at the ready, or at the very least losing that appearance. It would always be at the ready, always be less than a second away from finding purchase in flesh and veins if it needed to, whether it was resting comfortably by Owen’s side or tucked into a hiding place. Keeping it in his hand was simply a warning, not a necessity. It wasn’t a warning that would in any way work on something as mindless as a ghoul but Owen knew better than to assume there might not be other shadows lurking around a place with a feel so… daunting.
Now, it became more a question of what benefit this stranger was to Owen as she revealed herself to be just as lost as he. An extra pair of eyes maybe but that wouldn’t prove useful if she would only be able to witness something tearing her apart piece by piece. “Thought I did. This place isn’t… I don’t even properly remember where the fuck I entered from.” Following a zombie into some cursed fucking cemetery - a horrible way to go, really. “What, you wanna forge a new path? Fine by me, less chance of running into something. Just tell me what I can call you and then let’s fuck off before something takes an interest in this giant damn puddle of blood.”
___
Cairn didn’t ask again about the blood. He said it would be fine and maybe it would. The kind of “fine” that meant “not dead yet,” which was usually enough. His knife lowered. Not dropped, not forgotten, just... adjusted. She noticed the shift. Not the movement itself, but the choice behind it. It was enough to tell her he wasn’t running on panic. Fear and pain, sure. But not panic. Panic made people loud and sloppy. This one, even bleeding, even shaking, kept himself taut. That was something.
She looked back toward the worn paths that wove behind them like roots, spiraling through the grave markers and arching crypts. Her eyes drifted toward a nearby stone wall, worn smooth with time, ivy clinging to its base like it was trying to drag it down. The moss there was thick. Too thick for something that was walked through often. She didn’t move yet. Just let the quiet fall back between them for a beat.
“Cairn.” She offered. It came out like a fact, not an introduction. Just something true. She then turned, not waiting for his reaction, and began to walk. Not along the worn trail but through the overgrowth, where roots still cracked the ground unevenly and the trees hadn’t learned how to bend just yet. It wasn’t optimism. It was instinct. You don’t follow the places that want to keep you. You go where the ground still says no.
“If that wound gets worse, tell me before you drop.” Cairn didn’t slow her pace, just stepped lightly over a patch of soft earth, expecting him to keep up. She thought for a moment as she weaved between two headstones then glanced back in his direction. “What did that to you anyway?”
___
Whatever she was, human or not, trained or not, she was calm. It was both comforting and unnerving, or maybe it just annoyed Owen who was, at least on paper, supposed to be the damn professional here. Still was, technically. Just a pissed off, shivering and directionless professional. Even if she served no other purpose than to provide company, to be a presence in a way that made it hard for Owen to lash out (at her or the headstones or the situation as a whole, screaming in a way that would for sure attract any other murderous things lurking around), he was… grateful for it. So she gave her name, or a name, Owen didn’t much care if it was actually hers or not, and began moving.
Following wasn’t in any way worse than wandering aimlessly in some direction by himself so Owen did exactly that, every bit of the untamed foliage trying to catch at their feet and tear at their clothes as they went. He wasn’t unused to the wilderness but that didn’t mean he fucking liked it. “Fucking…” Owen huffed, tearing his leg free from a particularly clingy bit of roots, grip on the knife tightening despite the freezing cold working its way through him with more vigour now. At least he had some faith that Cairn was keeping an eye out for any obvious danger - faith that was maybe displaced but Owen wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by better fucking choices right now. “I’m not going to drop,” he growled, which was all the assurance she would get.
Sighing as the path that wasn’t really a path became slightly less treacherous, Owen looked Cairn over again, reassessing her again. To trust or not to trust (to the capacity Owen was capable of, at least). “Ghouls. Brainless, undead things with–” a huff of breath as his diaphragm spasmed with a shiver, “really fucking sharp claws. That make you feel like you’re freezing.” It seemed like as good of a segue as any. “You’re human?”
—-
Cairn didn’t look back when he started explaining—just listened, steady in her stride. Ghouls. She didn’t know the word, but she noted the shape of it, the weight it carried. Whatever they were, they left wounds that bled cold and burned slow. That, she could recognize. She glanced once at his shoulder when he shivered again but didn’t comment. If he said he wouldn’t drop, she’d act like she believed him. Until she had reason not to.
His question lingered in the air behind her for a moment. It wasn’t cruel, just sharp. Curious in a way that didn’t feel innocent. There were words her pama used instead of answers. Not truths, not lies. Just things said to fill the quiet. Her pama never said she was wrong. Never said something’s off with you, Pebble. But Cairn still felt it. In the way she was kept from the world. In the way her pama watched her—like trying to see something she couldn't quite name. In the silence that came when Cairn asked why they couldn’t go into town. She never got the words. But she still learned the lesson.
She was something wrong. Something not like the others.
And the question had lived inside her longer than he had been bleeding.
“Yeah,” she answered over her shoulder. Clipped. Final.
The landscape was changing. The neat rows of graves had long given way to older, messier ground. Roots heaved through cracked stone, names half-swallowed by lichen. Cairn moved through it without hesitation, weaving past a fallen angel statue whose face had eroded down to a blur. Nothing here stayed whole. Nothing stayed where it was meant to. It was an interesting place, one she wished she had time to explore. Yet—she knew. Even curiosity could get you buried here.
She stepped over a low fence warped by time, one of its iron posts curled in on itself like it had tried to escape the soil. “You always like knowing what people are before you know who they are?” She didn’t stop walking, but the question hung there. Open, not accusatory. Like she actually wanted to hear what he’d say.
—
There was no telling what the hell Cairn thought of Owen’s explanation - whether she’d seen ghouls before, if she was interested or scared or had zero fucks to give, or thought that he was full of shit. Well, there was no telling what she thought about much, really, aside from the cryptic sentences she kept dropping that would have pissed Owen off more if he had the energy to spare. He’d tell her how goddamn annoying it was once they got out of here or if he ran into her again not shivering and just a tiny bit dizzy. He gritted his teeth, tensed his muscles in an attempt to force his blood pressure to spike, pushing at the edges of the dizziness. Obviously because Owen didn’t want to end up as a fucking meal to whatever lived here if he passed out but also because he’d made it clear he would not be dropping. Stranger or not, Cairn couldn’t be allowed to be correct.
In the same vein of being cryptic and confusing, the pause following Owen’s question had him speculating on the answer. Why not just confirm as much right away. Unless you weren’t. A fucking fae, then? Trying to find a way around directly lying? Or maybe something like Emilio, once human and now not, still in fucking denial… Yeah. Owen had almost expected the answer to never arrive once it did, the single word holding more emotion than anything else that had left Cairn’s mouth up until this moment. Which still wasn’t a whole fucking lot of emotion but it made Owen more at ease for some reason. Human (probably) and capable of emoting. Better than a lot of things she could have been.
As he stumbled over the landscape, trying to ignore the knot of what if that tightened every time his foot didn’t quite behave the way he wanted to, threatening to roll his ankle or otherwise trip him up, Owen found himself in some ways grateful for this stranger’s apathy. Both that she was a stranger and this display of weakness, however much he tried to hide it, wasn’t on display for someone who might use it, and the fact that she genuinely didn’t care. As long as he didn’t get her killed, which was fair. And then a question unlike the others. This one didn’t seem as practical, served no purpose in getting out of here safely. Was this Cairn’s version of small talk? Where the hell had she come from…
“Can’t really separate the two,” Owen argued, but whatever bite he’d meant for the words to have was lost amidst the chattering of teeth. It was a lie, anyway. He was often fond of the who in spite of the what, or ready to kill the what in spite of the who. It mattered and it didn’t. “Just like knowing what I’m working with, is all. You don’t?” She hadn’t asked. Maybe Cairn had assumed, even though Owen wasn’t exactly the epitome of fierce hunter at the moment. A shuffling sound off to the side cut through their conversation and a knife was at the ready in the span of a second, sharp end only shaking slightly from the cold tremors, pointed in the direction of the sound. There was nothing but grass and mist and creepy fucking statues. Owen huffed, slow to lower his knife.
—-
Cairn moved quiet beside him, boots wet with the breath of the grass. A mist clung like memory, curling around their legs, around stone and limb, thick enough to swallow the shape of the world a few steps ahead. Nothing seemed to hold still. Cairn couldn’t say it with certainty but even as she stepped forward, making a new path along the grass, she didn’t think her boots would make any impression. As if neither of them had ever been there. She noted, maybe, that was why it felt like time moved slowly around here. There were traces of time, worn gravestones, petrified stumps, but now Cairn was wondering if it was all placed and really, perhaps time didn’t move here at all.
He had said he liked to know what he was working with—and Cairn understood that. It made complete sense. It made it easier to draw the line between you and what’s not you. If you know something, you know its weaknesses, its habits. Whatever it is suddenly becomes easy to control, to fight. It gives one certainty. But… Cairn? Neither her nor her pama ever had certainty of whatever they were facing. They learned to live with the unknown, to watch for the signs that couldn’t be named, to listen to the silence between sounds. Survival wasn’t about control. It was about reading the world’s hidden rhythms, the things that slipped through cracks and shadows. Certainty was a luxury she’d never known. Instead, she had to be ready for anything, because the world rarely gave clear answers, only signs. And it was those signs that kept her alive.
“I’ve never known.” The words felt heavy, shaped by years spent in shadows and silence. She’d learned early on that some things weren’t meant to be named, some dangers couldn’t be pinned down. “You learn to move without it. To watch the cracks instead of the surface. To survive on questions, not answers.” She kicked at a tangle of roots, sending a cloud of damp leaves drifting in the thick air.
Her voice dropped, softer, almost a whisper meant only for the space between them. “Like the way the forest holds its breath before a storm—the scent of damp earth thickens, leaves stop trembling, and even the air feels heavy, like something unseen is watching. Sometimes it’s the quiet that screams loudest. The sudden hush of crickets, the way shadows lengthen before night falls, the cold that creeps up your spine. You learn to read the pauses between heartbeats… because those are the things that tell you where the danger lies, long before it’s too close to run.”
She fell quiet, the echo of her words settling between them. It wasn’t often she spoke so much. Not like that. Not about the things that lived under her skin, the ways she’d learned to listen to the world when it wasn’t speaking plainly. A part of her wanted to pull it all back, fold the words up neat and hide them where no one could touch them. But the air was still. Maybe he was listening, maybe she had been heard. Cairn glanced at him then, brow drawn, not with suspicion, but like she was testing the ground before continuing. “...What do you do,” she asked, voice low, “when the answers turn out to be lies?” A beat. “When the thing you knew shifts its shape. When all that certainty... comes undone?”
—--
Really, Owen hadn’t expected a straight answer from Cairn, since the question had been mostly hypothetical and she hadn’t provided a sentence that didn’t sound like a riddle since her arrival. On that note, he wasn’t even sure why he was bothering with a conversation. Maybe because he had a hard time shutting up or to prove to her that he wasn’t about to drop like a sack of potatoes or just maybe because the not-so-quiet silence of this place was a fucking palpable thing that seemed to slither in through cracks and opening if it wasn’t dispelled by sound. Either way, Cairn seemed content to answer his hypothetical question and then some.
As the borderline riddles continued, Owen found they didn’t annoy him quite as much. It could have had something to do with the growing exhaustion or just how, the tiniest bit, her nonsense was becoming slightly less nonsensical. Obviously Owen wasn’t regularly listening to the fucking forest or whatever the fuck but… the anticipation. The unnamed sense for shit about to hit the fan, for things about to go wrong, the kind that was only born from wading through fire again and again. Owen knew that sense, had it and on very rare occasions, listened to it. You could be aware of oncoming danger and still choose to run headfirst into it.
Owen didn’t share any of that with the odd stranger, his harsh and chattering breath the only thing filling the silence when Cairn paused but there was maybe a silent understanding there. Not that he expected her to take note of it, she didn’t know Owen well enough to gleam that silence was a rarity that held just as much (if not more) meaning than some bullshit he tossed out. But then the option for staying quiet was challenged with a question and Owen met her curious gaze, properly this time. If she really was a human, she wasn’t just a human.
A new shiver wracked him at the question, this one laced with discomfort and the notion that somehow, Cairn knew. Just how intimately Owen had experienced a shift, how his certainty had been undone again and again, each time fucking him over more than the rest. Fingers flexed and relaxed around the knife’s hilt, assessing. For malice, for intimate knowledge. There was only something genuinely curious. “Break things,” Owen answered earnestly and later he would blame the sudden honesty on the freaky fucking vibes of this cemetery. “Hurt people.” Himself included but that was a step too intimate to reveal. Maybe it hung in the air, till, unspoken. “Might as well make everything else undone, too, right?”
–
His words—Break things. Hurt people.—landed too close to somewhere she kept wrapped up in thorn and stone, inside a body that was strangers with ease. She thought of her pama. The rules they’d believed in. The safety they’d built their life around. It hadn’t held. It hadn’t been real. And when it shattered, it wasn’t Cairn who paid the cost. Her pama had fought like stories do, like myths do, like they didn’t expect to survive it. That fight bought Cairn her escape. A path cleared by blood that she hadn’t stopped running down since. She hadn’t even looked back. She didn’t cry. Couldn’t. There hadn’t been time. Not then. Not after.
Every step since had been with the feeling that something was still chasing her, still watching, still waiting for her to stop long enough to mourn. And maybe she had, right here, in this town. Maybe she’d finally slowed down enough to feel the weight of it, like a bruise blooming only when the danger passed.
The quiet stretched between them, but didn’t break. When she looked at him again, really looked, her eyes caught his and she didn’t look away. It wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t trust. But it was recognition. A flicker of something bare. Shared. Like they’d both just been seen. She had understood him. She’d felt that too. Teetered too close to the edge of that.
Cairn had to look away and as she faced forward, she noticed things were different now. Maybe it was the moment she shared with him or maybe she had just been right about going down an unmarked path. Either way, the quiet had shifted. The birds had returned, tentative but brave. The wind passed through the trees without flinching, brushing against her skin like a hand that meant no harm.
They walked on, side by side. Not together, not apart—just enough. A stretch of path unclaimed by answers. Maybe they'd follow it until it split beneath their feet, until the woods made strangers of them again.
But for now, their paths would run parallel.