Wren moves before she thinks it through — three clanking steps that plant her between the brook woman and the treeline, sword half-out of its scabbard, the sound of it embarrassingly loud in the quiet. The armor obliges by being large in all the wrong places; her elbow catches the guard and she nearly drops the blade entire, but she manages — mostly — to look as though this was planned. The Thornwood gives nothing back. Black trunks. Mist. The place where the wrong-shaped presence stood is now just a gap between two oaks, ordinary as anything, which is precisely the kind of ordinary Wren does not trust. Behind her, the brook woman speaks, unhurried. "I have walked this wood longer than you have been alive, child." A pause that is gentle and pointed in equal measure. "The Watcher does not come for me." Another pause. "I find myself wondering very much who it has come for." The sun clasp gleams on the box at the rock's edge, and Wren's grip tightens on a sword that isn't hers.