Two days north of the overlook, the forest changed again.
Not in any way he could name at first. The birds still sang. The wind still moved through the leaves. But there was a tightness in the air, a stillness beneath the sound, like the moment before a storm breaks.
Durn slowed his pace.
He read the ground as he walked. Loose soil. Fallen leaves. The usual marks of life passing through. Deer tracks, rabbit trails, the scuff of a wild boar foraging near the roots of an ancient oak. Nothing unusual.
Then he found the drag marks.
Something large had been pulled through the undergrowth. Not by a predator — the marks were too narrow, too deliberate. A single line cut through the ferns, straight as a blade, as if whatever had made it knew exactly where it was going.
He followed it.
The ferns gave way to a small clearing. And there, half-hidden beneath a curtain of hanging moss, lay the body of a Feralas panther.
Durn stopped.
He had seen dead animals before. He had seen kills. He had seen sickness take a creature slowly, and he had seen predators work quickly. This was neither.
The panther lay on its side, its body already stiff. There were no torn entrails. No signs of feeding. Whatever had killed it had not come for meat.
He crouched beside it.
The wounds were wrong. Deep punctures, not claws or fangs — something sharper, more jagged, as if the panther had been pierced by shards of stone or bone. He turned the body carefully, and his fingers brushed against something hard.
He pulled it free.
A fragment of dark shell, curved and ridged, like the outer plating of an insect grown to monstrous size. It was warm to the touch. Not from the sun. From something else.
He found more. Lodged in the panther's flank, caught between its ribs, wedged in the muscle of its shoulder. Pieces of a creature he did not recognize.
Durn sat back on his heels and held the largest fragment up to the light.
Black, with a faint oily sheen. Dense. The edges were sharp enough to cut through leather.
He had never seen anything like it in Feralas.
He had never seen anything like it anywhere.
He wrapped the fragments in a strip of leather and placed them in his pack. The panther he left where it lay, the forest would take it back in time. But he marked the clearing with a small cairn of stones at the trailhead, so he would know this place if he ever passed this way again.
As he walked north, he found himself reaching into his pack.
Touching the fragments.
Turning them over in his fingers.
A thorn in his hand that he could not set down.