Ariya had always trusted the forest.
It spoke to her in rustling leaves and shifting shadows, in the warning crack of twigs beneath unseen feet. She had grown up hunting in its depths, bow slung across her back, eyes sharp as the hawks that circled above the canopy. Nothing in those woods frightened her - not storms, not wolves, not the silence that came before dusk.
Until the day the silence answered back.
She had been tracking a stag, it's print deep in the damp earth, when the air changed. The wind stopped mid- breath. The birds vanished from the sky as if erased. Even the insects hushed. Ariya froze, every instincts screaming danger.
The Stag's tracks ended abruptly in a circle of blackened soil.
She crounched, touching the ground. It was cold. Not the kind of cold that came with shade or rain, but a hollow cold that felt like absence. Her fingers tingled, then burned.
Before she could pull away, the world cracked.
Light folded in on itself, twisting the forest into streaks of colour and shadow. Ariya tried to step back, but her feet found no ground.The trees bent, stretched, and then were gone entirely.
For a moment she fell through nothing .
Then she hit stone .