Renji turned slowly in place, looking at all of it.
"Nobody say it," he said.
Kaede looked at him. At the bones. At the walls of the basin above them, steep and crumbling.
"It's a nest," she said.
"I said don't say it."
Nobody moved.
The basin sat around them in perfect stillness — mist threading between ancient bones, the silence of a place that had swallowed too many sounds to bother making any of its own. Rei was trembling, not from cold. Ayra turned slowly in place, eyes lifted toward the rim above, reading the dark between the trees. Kaede had her sword in hand with her thumb on the guard, her whole body arranged around the question of which direction it would come from.
Renji raised one hand flat.
"Don't move."
