The branch shifts again — closer now, and this time it is not the wind. Wren does not deliberate. She steps sideways, planting herself between the Brook Woman and the treeline, one gauntleted hand dropping to her sword hilt with a clank that sounds considerably less impressive than intended. The mist is up past her knees and the stream keeps arguing with its stones and she is, she thinks, extremely far from home. "The box," she says, quietly, to the woman behind her. "Take it." Because whatever is out there was waiting — she felt it the moment their conversation began, that particular flavour of held breath that is not the wood's natural stillness but something borrowing it. Something that wanted them talking. Distracted. The Brook Woman does not argue. Behind her, Wren hears the soft scrape of wood on wet stone. In the trees, something exhales — long, and deliberate, like a word considered before it is spoken. Then a shadow detaches from the dark and moves toward the light, and it has a shape, and the shape is not nothing.