The creatures didn't come from one direction.
That was the first thing Varek understood when the reports started arriving — not a front, not a push from the forest's edge outward, but emergence from multiple points simultaneously, as though the forest itself had decided to produce them rather than harbor them. Villages in three valleys were hit on the same night. Four settlements have gone dark within a week. The pattern wasn't expansion. It was coordination.
He stood over the map with the other three commanders and said what the map was showing.
"It's not a migration," he said. "Something is directing them."
The oldest of the four, a woman named Sera who had been fighting these creatures longer than Varek had been alive, looked at the map for a long time without speaking.
"We've suspected that for two years," she said finally. "We didn't say it out loud because saying it out loud meant we had to find the source."
