The second day of marching started the same way as the first.
"Vanguard ready!"
"Guard group one ready!"
"Wheelbarrow brigade… as ready as they'll ever be!"
The line stretched through the trees in a long, uneven snake. Vanguard scouts at the front, first guard squad, bulk of the family clusters, Defence Six, then guards drifting along the edges, plugging gaps and nudging people back into formation.
They moved.
Harnesses creaked. Someone complained about a strap digging into their shoulder. A child whined about snacks. Another tried to chase a beetle until his auntie caught him by the back of his shirt.
Talia walked a little behind the vanguard, spear in hand, very aware of how many lives stretched out between the trees behind her.
"Message from the rear," a runner called, jogging up, cheeks flushed. "We've still got tails."
Talia's shoulders tightened. "How far?"
"Same as yesterday. Far enough we can't see them; close enough every scout can feel them."
"Numbers?"
He grimaced. "That's the weird part. They move like one thing. Then three. Then nothing. Dav says the aura's wrong for beasts. Joel says it's too quiet for humans."
"Of course they disagree," Talia muttered.
She slowed until Dav and Dom drifted up on her left.
"They still there?" she asked.
"Persistent as termites," Dav said, gaze flicking through the trees. "Mostly southwest side. Outside sight, inside sense. They know exactly where the edge is."
Dom added, "No branch snapping. No careless noise. They move like they grew up in this forest."
"Smarter than us isn't a high bar right now," Talia said.
"Hey," Dom protested mildly. "We've only almost died a few times."
"That's exactly my point."
She listened for a moment—feet on leaf litter, the soft clink of gear, the quiet beyond.
"Same plan as yesterday," she said. "We monitor. We don't chase. If they want to talk, they come into view."
"With their hands where we can see them," Dav said.
"And claws," she agreed.
The runner loped back with the update. Life rolled on behind them.
Somewhere in the middle of the line, a father groaned, "Stop chewing the basket."
Further back, an elderly man reclined on a stretcher like a minor emperor, hands folded over his chest.
"Left a bit," he instructed loudly. "Your other left. That tree has shade—we should rest there. Terrible sedan chair bearers. I want a refund."
On the flank, an injured man sat in a wheelbarrow, leg braced, pointing at a patch of foliage. "Look—Teagan's going to murder him. That's our plant researcher. The dancing one."
Ahead of them, one of the researchers really was bouncing on his toes, notebook clutched in both hands as he studied an ugly purple fern.
"It has triple-layer veins," he breathed. "Triple. This is a paper. This is three papers."
"It's a delay," Talia muttered when he tried to claim "just five minutes" and somehow lost fifteen.
Dav and Joel fell into step on either side of her.
"I want to resign," Talia said quietly. "This isn't a migration. It's a cursed school excursion."
Joel patted her shoulder with exaggerated sympathy. "Your Lord contract is no-refund, no-return. You should've read the fine print."
"There wasn't fine print," she said.
Dav clapped her other shoulder. "Just laugh. Internal bleeding from stress is bad for morale."
She snorted despite herself.
Ahead of them, Cael strolled with his girlfriend, Mirana and her parents, pointing out trees. "This variety will probably kill you if you chew the wrong part. Please don't test that."
"I like him," Mirana's dad said. "Honest guide."
Talia gave them a flat look. "…Traitors."
The land rose slowly. Trees thinned. The air took on a colder edge. By late morning, the forest began to peel back like a curtain.
The first person to see the mountain range swore softly.
The sound rippled down the line as more of them stepped out of shade and onto a wide, grassy shoulder.
The world opened.
The mountain wall rose in front of them like a spine of stone—sheer cliffs of blue-grey, streaked with white where ice clung to higher ledges. The peaks vanished into cloud. Waterfalls carved thin, bright lines down the faces, dissolving into mist before they hit the valley floor.
No road. No switchbacks. Just height. Indifferent and absolute.
Someone whispered, "We're not on Earth anymore."
Even the children went quiet for a heartbeat.
The scale made something in Talia's chest go very still. Every fight so far felt small next to those cliffs. They'd been here long before her. They'd still be here long after—unless something bigger erased them.
Her skin prickled.
A gaze.
Her eyes scanned the ridgeline, moving from ledge to ledge.
There.
A small shape on a narrow outcrop where no human had any business standing. Humanoid. Broad-shouldered. Something like hair trailing in the wind.
And wings.
Not decorative. Not metaphor.
Wings, folded partly behind its back, feathers catching light with a faint metallic gleam.
Talia blinked.
The figure didn't move. It simply watched.
She felt the weight of it like a cool hand resting on the back of her neck. No sharp hostility. No fear. Just a long, measuring regard.
For a moment she wondered if exhaustion had finally broken her.
Then a shift in the air brushed over her skin, a pressure. She didn't think about it, instinct kicked in and she bowed. Just a small dip at the waist, head lowered once toward the ridge.
When she straightened, the ledge was empty.
"Head?"
Theo had noticed the pause. He stepped closer. "You went very still and then bowed at a rock. Do we need to stage an intervention?"
"I've either finally snapped," she said, rubbing her eyes, "or I just saw a winged person."
A brief silence.
"Actual angel," Luke asked hopefully from nearby, "or fantasy 'human with wings and unresolved issues'?"
"Or," Joel said, "a weird-shaped rock and sleep deprivation."
"I'm tired, not blind," Talia muttered.
"Human-beast hybrids," one of the cousins offered immediately. "Half-eagle, half-human. Or dragon. Or—shapeshifters."
Luke jabbed a finger in his direction. "Yes. That. Shapeshifters. I've been saying this since the sky antelope."
"Shapeshifters are pure fantasy," an older auntie said.
"Flying antelope were also 'pure fantasy' last week," someone pointed out.
The conversation slipped into low-level speculation—wingspan versus gravity, local magic, evolutionary nonsense. Talia let it buzz at the edge of her hearing. Her eyes stayed on the cliffs.
Something up there had watched them. Hadn't attacked. Had simply… noted them.
That counted as a kind of mercy.
"Move," she called finally. "Pretty or not, this isn't home. Vanguard, you have your next waypoint. Everyone else—keep up."
As they angled along the base of the range, the trees closed in again. The cliffs slipped in and out of sight between trunks. The unseen presence at their back never quite faded.
By early afternoon, a side scout jogged up, breathing hard but controlled.
"Tracks," she said. "Lots. You should see."
Dav, Theo, Talia, and the Professor followed her a short way off the main path. The soil there was softer, dark and damp, holding impressions neat and clear.
Beast prints first—large, heavy, four-legged. Big-cat wide pads with the hint of claws.
Beside them: bare human-shaped footprints. Some narrower, some smaller. A few impressions showed leather wraps. Toes, arches, heels. Strides that matched adults, with scattered shorter ones between.
In places, the tracks overlapped, as if one set turned into the other mid-stride.
"Someone's faking these," a guard muttered. "Messing with us."
"Explain the mechanics to me," the Professor said mildly. "Moulds? In this mud? Without anyone seeing?"
Talia crouched, fingers hovering above one of the prints. The human track was deep but clean. The beast one ahead of it had a strange, almost deliberate placement.
Luke bounced on his heels. "Shapeshifters," he said, doing a bad job of not sounding smug. "Human to beast. Beast to human. I'm calling it again."
"Or locals walking with tamed beasts," Teagan said dryly.
"We don't have proof either way," Theo said. "Yet."
"Which means," Dav added, "we don't stab anything first unless it's already trying to eat someone."
"What if we already offended them?" someone from the guard line asked quietly. "The ones following us…"
"If they were offended," Talia said, straightening, "I don't think they'd trail us politely from the treeline. It feels like they're… observing. Judging. Same as whatever was on that ridge. The locals know we're here. They're just not done deciding what that means."
The tracks angled ahead for a bit, then curved back toward the mountains and vanished into rocky ground.
"Whatever they are," she said, "they're faster, lighter, and know the terrain. File that away. For now—back to the path. I refuse to invent 'lost in the woods after dark' this early in our survival career."
They rejoined the main route. The story of "possible shapeshifter tracks" ran down the line faster than any runner. By the time the logistics team's waypoint markers appeared, the mood of the convoy had shifted.
Still hopeful. Just sharper around the edges.
Camp noise rose—messy, warm, alive.
Talia stood at the rough entrance for a moment, watching it all settle. Legs aching, nerves thin, but that small, stubborn thread of satisfaction warming her chest.
Dav and Dom approached quietly.
"Followers stopped at the trees again," Dav said. "Didn't cross into the clearing."
"Same distance," Dom added. "Feels like a boundary."
"Respect line," the Professor suggested from behind them. "Or caution line."
"Or we smell strange," Joel said. "We're still short on soap."
"Add 'soap-making' to the urgent list," Talia said automatically.
Later, in the small side-tent they'd claimed as a war room, they stood around the map again—Talia, Theo, Dav, the Professor, Mum, Dad, Grandma, a couple of department heads. New notes marked the edge of the mountain range and, in one corner, a small symbol: overlapping prints. Tracks?
"So," Theo said. "Let's assume Luke isn't entirely wrong."
Grandma snorted softly. "Stranger things have happened."
"The possibility of shapeshifters isn't the problem," the Professor said. "Our behaviour is."
"Rule one," Theo said, writing, "no random heroics. No one initiates contact alone."
"Rule two," Joel added, "if something watches instead of hunts, we don't poke it."
"Rule three," Grandma said, "children learn early: not everything that looks like an animal is safe to chase, not everything that looks like a person is safe to follow."
"Rule four," Talia said, "any confirmed contact gets reported immediately. No secret forest friendships."
Dad gave her a look. "You watched too many horror movies."
"And yet," she said, spreading her hands at the map, "here we are."
They talked until the sky outside shifted from gold to deep blue and the sounds of dinner washed through camp. When they finally stepped back out, the first stars pricked through gaps in the leaves.
At the edge of the cleared zone, the tree line stood dark and dense. Somewhere beyond it, in the deeper shadow, eyes watched—steady, unblinking.
The caravan settled for the night, unaware that whatever trailed them had seen their patterns, measured their lines, and, for now, chosen to stay in the trees.