By the next afternoon, they were soaring over the rolling, blue-hazed peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains. The air was cooler here, rich with the scent of damp earth, decaying leaves, and a trillion pine needles. Skógr landed with a soft crunch on a bed of moss and fallen leaves in a particularly deep and ancient-looking hollow. Sunlight struggled to pierce the dense canopy, casting the world in a cathedral-like green gloom.
Eris immediately tensed, her head on a swivel, her eyes darting into every shadow. She clutched a handful of Skógr's mane like a lifeline.
Dáinn, feeling the rigidity in her posture, leaned forward. "What is it?"
"I'm waiting for it," Eris announced, her voice a dramatic whisper. "The assault. The attack spell, the ambush, the whatever! Our last two outings were a magical obstacle course! First a perception spell, then a tornado! I'm not falling for the 'serene ancient forest' trick!"
Dáinn felt a chuckle rise in his chest, a strange, warm sensation that seemed to melt the frost that had gathered around his mood since the previous night. The atmosphere lightened simply because she was in it. He nudged Skógr forward a few steps, his voice dropping into a teasing, conspiratorial tone. "Then stay vigilant, hunter. In a place this old, anything could happen."
Eris straightened her spine, adopting the most focused, intense expression she could muster. "Oh, I intend to! I will not be caught off guard this time!"
"And what," Dáinn asked, genuine curiosity in his voice, "do you intend to do if we are, in fact, beset by some form of magical assault?"
Eris froze. Her dramatic pose deflated. "I… have no idea!"
Dáinn threw his head back and laughed, a rich, full-bodied sound that seemed to startle the birds into silence. "How about you let me worry about deflecting curses and tearing apart storms," he said, the amusement still dancing in his eyes, "and you focus your considerable energy on finding the hare."
Eris pouted, just a little. "Okay, but…" she trailed off, scanning the dense undergrowth. She could see a few spirits—a flicker of a Cherokee hunter, the faint echo of a pioneer child—but they were moving on, their business their own. "The wild animal spirits… they don't linger like the people ones. It's like they already know their purpose and move on quickly once it's fulfilled." She looked up at him, her confidence vanishing again. "I have never tracked anything before. Not even my keys."
Dáinn smiled, a real, unhurried smile that transformed his entire face. "I think I might be able to help with that." He gestured with his chin toward a patch of soft ground near a trickling stream. "First, we start by getting off this horse and learning to see the story the forest is telling."
The tension of the flight and the memory of the previous night's violence melted away as Dáinn's hands found her waist to lift her down. This time, there was no hurried release. His hands lingered, his thumbs making a slow, unconscious arc against the fabric of her jacket. A silly, unguarded grin spread across his face, one that reached his eyes, crinkling the corners and making him look centuries younger. Eris felt her own smile bloom in response, a warm, answering glow in her chest.
Then, as if remembering himself, he let go, the professional hunter's mask sliding back into place, though the warmth in his eyes remained. "Now," he said, his voice low and intent. "Watch."
He led her to the patch of soft, damp earth near the stream. The forest was a symphony of quiet sounds—the gurgle of water, the rustle of leaves in the high canopy, the distant call of a bird. Dáinn knelt, his movements fluid and silent. He became part of the landscape.
"Forget what you think you know," he began, his voice a murmur that blended with the forest whispers. "Tracking is not about chasing. It is about listening. The land is writing a story all the time. Most people are too loud to read it."
He pointed to a barely noticeable depression in the moss. "See here? The story is of a deer, a young one, who passed at dawn. The edges of the print are soft, filled with dew. The sun has not yet burned the moisture away." His finger traced the air above it. "And here," he moved a few feet, pointing to a broken fern, "the stem is snapped, but the break is fresh, the sap still wet. This tells us the direction and the haste. Something startled it."
Eris knelt beside him, her brow furrowed in concentration, nodding as if her life depended on memorizing every syllable. She was the perfect, if overly earnest, student.
He showed her how to distinguish the scuff of a raccoon's paw from the slide of a possum's tail. He taught her to read the language of nibbled leaves—the clean, angled cut of a rabbit versus the ragged tear of a insect. He picked up a tiny, pellet-like dropping. "This is the voice of the owl," he said, crumbling it between his fingers to reveal tiny bits of bone and fur. "It tells you what it ate, and when."
"It's like… forensic science, but with moss," Eris whispered, utterly captivated.
A true smile touched his lips. "It is the first science. The one written in the dirt and the rain." He led her on, a slow, meandering path deeper into the woods. "Look for the disruptions in the pattern. A stack of stones that has tumbled. A spiderweb rebuilt in a new place. These are the punctuation marks in the story."
He paused by a ancient oak, placing a hand on its gnarled bark. "And the trees… they are the librarians. They hold the oldest tales. The scratches on this bark, high up? A bear, marking its territory years ago. The moss grows thicker on the north side, always pointing the way when the sun is shy."
Eris watched him, not just the lessons, but the man. The way his immense power was channeled into such infinite patience. The reverence in his touch when he handled a leaf or a stone. This wasn't just a skill to him; it was a religion, a conversation with the world he was born to protect.
"So," she said, after he had spent a long while explaining how the weight of an animal compresses the soil differently. "We're not just looking for a hare. We're looking for a story about a hare."
Dáinn looked at her, and the approval in his gaze was a tangible thing, warm as sunlight. "Yes," he said, his voice soft. "We are looking for the story of a creature that walks between, a tale written in midnight fur and footsteps that barely touch the ground. And you, Eris Sylvie, are learning to read."
For a long, breathless time, they moved as one with the forest, a slow, silent dance of observation. Eris's eyes, now trained to see beyond the obvious, scanned the patterns of leaf and shadow. Then she saw it—a flicker of silver, the ghost of a hare, darting between the trees ahead, a spirit already untethered from its mortal coil. Her hand shot out, gripping Dáinn's shoulder hard.
He froze instantly, his voice a whisper softer than the rustling leaves. "What…?"
"There!" she breathed, pointing at the fading ethereal form.
Dáinn's eyes, sharp as flint, saw no spirit. But he saw what it left in its wake—a shifting shadow, a disturbance in the dappled light on the forest floor. Eris tensed to spring forward, but his hand clamped down on her shoulder, holding her in a crouch. "Wait," he murmured, the word a bare exhalation.
In one fluid motion, his bow was in his hand, an arrow nocked with a soft snick of wood on string. Eris stayed low behind him, her heart hammering against her ribs, as they became predators stalking a story's end. They crept forward, using the massive trunks of hemlocks as cover, until they peered around a thick, moss-covered oak.
The scene was both brutal and serene. A lone red wolf, its coat the color of dried blood, stood over the body of a hare as black as a starless midnight. The wolf's head was lowered, its jaws busy with its grim work.
Dáinn lifted a single finger to his lips. Eris nodded, her eyes wide. He turned, the great bow rising, his body becoming a part of the weapon itself. He drew the string back to his cheek, his breathing stilled. There was a soft thwump as the arrow flew.
It didn't strike the wolf. It buried itself in the soft earth precisely between the creature's front paws.
The wolf flinched violently, its head snapping up. Its golden eyes locked not on the threat, but directly on Dáinn's. There was no snarl, no growl. A silent conversation passed between hunter and beast in that single, stretched-second gaze—a challenge, an assessment, a recognition of hierarchy.
With a dismissive flick of its ears, the wolf dropped the black hare, turned, and trotted off into the undergrowth without a backward glance.
Eris stared after it, then up at Dáinn. "You… you didn't kill it."
He lowered his bow, a faint, proud smirk touching his lips. "No. There was no need. A creature driven only by hunger can be reasoned with. A ravenous one can only be challenged. It understood the message."
"Wait," Eris bolted upright, the tracking lesson momentarily forgotten in the face of this new wonder. "You can talk to animals, how come you didn't just… ask it to leave?"
"Because a demand, spoken from a position of strength, is a language all creatures understand," he explained, walking over to retrieve their grisly prize. He scooped up the hare. "We have it. The blood of a creature that walks between."
He turned, a rare, unburdened triumph in his eyes, ready to share the moment with her.
The space where Eris had been standing was empty.
His heart slammed against his ribs. "Eris?"
There was no answer. Only the indifferent whisper of the forest.
He spun, his gaze frantically scanning the familiar greenery that had suddenly become a wall of terrifying possibilities. "Eris!" he called again, his voice sharp with a fear he hadn't felt in centuries.
He ran to the spot where she'd been, the damp leaves showing only the faint impression of her sneakers. She was just… gone. Vanished into thin air.
A cold, sickening dread washed over him, followed by a wave of furious self-recrimination. He cursed himself, a guttural, ancient oath. He had let his guard down. He had been so focused on her, so wrapped up in her laughter and her learning, in the simple, human joy of sharing his world, that he had stopped paying attention to everything else. And the forest, old and wild and full of tricks, had taken her.