The first thing I noticed was the silence.
Not the gentle hush of evening when birds fold their wings and the forest exhales. This silence was thick, startling and wrong, as if the trees themselves held their breath. My boots sank into the mossy carpet with a muffled sigh, and even that small sound felt too loud. I stopped, heart beating in my ears, and turned my face toward the wind.
There it was - the faintest curl of smoke. Not the sweet, steady burn of a hearth fire, but something harsher, pine pitch and singed fern, a bitter tang that prickled the back of my throat.
I tightened the strap of my satchel across my chest. The leather creaked, a thin protest in the stillness, and I began to follow the smell.
The late autumn woods were a tangle of shadow and amber light. Shafts of sun speared through the tall pines, gilding the dust motes like slow-falling sparks. My breath came in small clouds even though the air still held the day's warmth. I moved carefully, every sense reaching outward, listening for the scurry of rabbits and the wingbeat of owls, but the forest gave me nothing. Not a single chirp or rustle.
That was when the copper tang reached me - the unmistakable iron scent of blood.
I crouched, one palm pressed to the cool earth, and studied the signs. A patch of bracken crushed flat, and ferns snapped at waist height. The faint imprint of boots, heavy and wide-soled, scarred the loam... poachers! A slow, unwelcome memory stirred - stories told in the village tavern of hunters who took not what they needed but what would fetch a price, hide and bone, even the rare eggs of the great forest reptiles. I felt the old heat rise in me, part anger, and part dread.
The trail was fresh; ash still lifted in lazy spirals from the ground ahead. I followed it.
The clearing opened without warning, a wound in the forest's skin. Branches lay splintered as though a storm had torn through, blackened circles of trampled fern marked where fires had burned hot and fast. Here and there, shards of eggshell caught the dying light, thin curves of iridescence scattered like broken moons against the little dusting of snow that had arrived early this year. I swallowed hard, the air smelled of smoke and loss.
I stepped carefully among the wreckage. The ground was sticky with sap and something darker. No bodies remained, neither beast nor human, only the brutal evidence of a hurried raid.
Then, just beyond a toppled log, a glint stopped me.
At first, I thought it was a fragment of glass, but when I brushed away the ash, my fingers met the smooth and cool curve of a shell. It was whole, astonishingly so, a pale cream egg mottled with faint silver flecks that caught the fading sun. The egg was no bigger than my two hands cupped together. *Too small*, I thought, for the species that nested here. Its surface was warm, almost alive beneath my fingertips.
I glanced around the clearing. Nothing moved but the slow drift of smoke. The rest of the clutch lay shattered, empty, their contents taken or destroyed. A tiny pulse thrummed beneath the shell. Once. Twice. I drew in a sharp breath. "You're still fighting," I whispered.
The sensible part of me urged caution. Raising a forest beast, if that was even what this egg contained, would not be simple. I lived alone in these woods for a reason. But another part, the part that had carried me through years of solitude, felt the faint pulses like a heartbeat in my own chest.
I wrapped the egg in the wool scarf from my satchel; the fabric smelled faintly of smoke and pine resin. "Well," I murmured, holding the bundle close as if the forest itself might try to take it back, "I suppose you're coming home with me."
The smoke behind me thinned as twilight deepened. Somewhere far off, a lone nightbird found its voice and called into the gathering dark, as if the forest, at last, had started breathing again.