The girl drops her gaze to the leather book, still clutched against her chest. She opens the cover with trembling fingers. The first page — where the word is written — looks the same as always: one line, storm-grey ink, the letters curling at their tips like smoke. But now, with the Fox's syllable still hanging in the cold air between them, she reads it differently. She mouths it once — seevar, sevren — and something shifts. Not in the letters themselves, but in her understanding of them: the word is not a name, or a greeting. It is a question. She cannot say how she knows this, only that she does, with the same certainty as knowing her own hands. She looks up. The Fox is watching her, patient and perfectly still, its amber eyes faintly lit. Whatever it breathed into the air a moment ago is still waiting for her to answer.