Location:Virescent Expanse — Thorn-Hide Territory
Date/Time:TC1854.04.01-03
The jungle changed on the third day.
Not in ways that untrained eyes would have noticed — the canopy was still dense, the undergrowth still thick, the bioluminescent channels still threading through the wood in patterns that made the forest glow at night. But Raven's technomage awareness caught it the way a musician catches a key change. The trees were scored with markings. Shallow cuts in the bark, placed at intervals that looked natural and weren't — patterns that carried information in a language she couldn't read but could recognize as language. Territorial markers. Bio-craft encoding. Someone had written on the forest, and the forest was carrying the message.
"We're in someone's territory," she said.
Kairos, examining a cluster of flowering vines that had been growing progressively closer to his sleeve for the past ten minutes, looked up. "How can you tell?"
