The gnarled gateway where the high reaches of the Hemoth Pines met the Bleed Bark canopy rose out of the gloom like a skeleton's arch.
Rapax and Doctor pushed through the choking undergrowth beneath it, their breath ragged but kept, and came at last to the exact place where Team Noctis had stood among the hanging choir the evening before. It was a place of deep, wrong stillness — a tangled geometry grown over countless bloody generations where two ancient species of tree had claimed the same vertical ground and never let it go. The branches did not merely touch. They had woven into one another, a strangling lattice of wood and bark like petrified black muscle locked in a long mutual suffocation.
They had no time for the sight of it.
