The businessman was the first to move toward the sounds, though his steps were careful, almost reluctant, like his body knew better than his mind what they might find.
"We should check if someone needs help," he said, but his voice had lost all the authority it held at the bus stop.
"Are you insane?" The wedding woman grabbed his arm, her fingers digging in hard enough to wrinkle his suit jacket. "We don't even know where we are."
"Someone's hurt." One of the teenagers, the taller one who'd been doing most of the shoving earlier, started forward too. "We can't just stand here."
More of them began moving despite the protests, drawn by that human need to help or maybe just to understand what was happening. Rou found himself walking with them, not because he particularly wanted to see what was making those sounds, but because standing still felt like waiting for whatever it was to come to them instead.
The wedding woman let go of the businessman's arm but followed anyway, along with five or six others, while the rest hung back in the clearing, huddled together like they could make themselves invisible if they just stayed quiet enough.
The trees were thick here, older than seemed possible, their trunks wider than anything Rou had seen outside of nature documentaries.
The ground between them was soft with decades of fallen leaves that muffled their footsteps, though branches still cracked under their weight, each snap making someone flinch or pause before continuing.
"Maybe we should call out," someone suggested, but nobody did it, nobody wanted to draw attention from whatever had made those terrible sounds that were still echoing in their heads.
They moved between two massive trees, the businessman leading now though he clearly didn't want to be, his face pale beneath his morning stubble. The smell hit them first, metallic mixed with something else, something that made the back of Rou's throat close up in recognition.
Then they saw it.
The thing crouched over what used to be a person was shaped vaguely like a dog if dogs were the size of bears, if their fur was patchy gray skin stretched over too many bones, if their mouths opened sideways as well as up. Its teeth, there were so many teeth, worked at pulling something free from the ribcage it had opened up like someone cracking apart a lobster for the meat inside.
The person, what remained of them, wore a rough brown tunic that might have been wool, now soaked through with red that had spread out in a pool, reflecting the sky. A leather pack lay torn open nearby, its contents of dried meat and hard bread scattered across the ground, and a small knife, useless against something this size, had fallen just out of reach of fingers that had tried to grab it.
Their face was turned away, which was the only mercy in the whole scene.
Nobody screamed, screaming would mean accepting this was real, would mean their brains had processed what their eyes were showing them. Instead they stood frozen, the wedding woman's hand pressed over her mouth so hard her fingers were definitely going to leave marks.
The teenager who wanted to help started taking tiny steps backward without seeming to realize he was doing it.
The creature lifted its head, strings of something hanging from its sideways jaw, but it didn't look at them, just went back to its meal with wet sounds that would live in their memories forever.
'Back up,' Rou thought, but his legs weren't responding properly, like the connection between his brain giving orders had been severed by the impossibility of what he was seeing. 'Just back up slowly.'
Someone else had the same idea, starting to ease backward, then another, the whole group trying to retreat without making any sudden movements that might draw attention. They might have made it, might have gotten back to the clearing, back to the others, if the wedding woman's phone hadn't chosen that moment to explode with her alarm.
The cheerful digital chime of whatever reminder she'd set shattered the quiet like a gunshot.
The creature's head snapped up, those sideways jaws opening wider than physics should allow, revealing rows of teeth that went back into its throat like some nightmare of recursive consumption.
It moved faster than something that size should move, abandoning its meal to launch itself at them with a sound that wasn't a roar, more like metal tearing.
The wedding woman tried to run but tripped over her own feet, going down hard while fumbling with her phone to stop the alarm that kept playing its cheerful tune.
The businessman grabbed the teenager, shoving him aside as the creature's jaws snapped shut where he'd been standing.
Others scattered, crashing through undergrowth, all thoughts of staying quiet abandoned in pure panic.
Rou threw himself sideways as the thing's bulk rushed past him, close enough that he felt the heat coming off its body, smelled something like sulfur mixed with rotting meat. It spun with impossible agility, focused on the woman still struggling with her phone on the ground.
That's when she appeared.
The woman who materialized between them and the creature looked exhausted, her long dark hair hanging limp around a face marked by deep shadows under her eyes. She wore something that might have been a dress once, but it was so patched with different fabrics it had become something else.
She raised one hand, fingers splayed, then closed it into a fist.
The creature compressed.
Bones snapped, meat squeezed through gaps that shouldn't exist, eyes bulging then bursting as the thing became smaller and smaller until it was just a ball of flesh the size of a basketball, steaming.
The wedding woman's alarm finally stopped, leaving only the sound of people vomiting, the businessman on his knees bringing up his breakfast, one of the teenagers crying while bile dripped from his chin.
The witch looked at them with exhausted eyes that seemed to catalog each face before dismissing them. She spoke, but the words that came from her mouth meant nothing, sounds strung together in patterns their brains couldn't parse, a language that had evolved centuries away from anything they knew.
She paused, noticing their blank stares, then muttered something that sounded like a curse in any language. Her fingers traced a pattern in the air, and suddenly her next words reformed themselves in their minds, not translated exactly but understood.
"Which of thee bears the name Kasy Romansha?" Her voice carried the formal cadence of someone who learned to speak when language itself was more ceremony than communication. "Mine blood calls to thine."
Nobody answered because nobody could speak yet, their throats closed with the horror of what they'd witnessed.
"Kasy Romansha," the witch repeated, her patience fraying at the edges. "Three and twenty years of age, labors with the keeping of merchant accounts, bears the mark of the crescent moon upon her left shoulder." Her eyes moved across them again, searching. "Mine descendant, mine blood through time. I have need of thee."
From back in the clearing, drawn by the commotion, more of their group appeared through the trees, including a young woman in business casual who froze when the witch's gaze landed on her.
"There thou art," the witch said, something like relief flickering across her face. "At last, the blood returns to blood."