The next trip out proved what Damien already suspected.
It wasn't that the forest had nothing.
It was that they were bad at taking it.
They went in a larger group this time—Mark insisted on it. More eyes, more hands, more people who could throw wind or spark heat or pull water out of a skin and pretend that meant the world had become manageable.
They came back with less than they'd carried out.
A bundle of green branches that were too wet to snap cleanly. A few sticks that would burn fast and die fast. No meat. No usable hide. No clean win.
One person returned with scratched forearms from pushing through brush. Another with a torn shirt. Nobody wanted to admit how close they'd come to running when they heard movement deeper in the trees.
They didn't say it.
But their faces did.
Mark dropped the branch bundle onto the stone with a dull thud. "We need to go farther next time," he said immediately.
Tasha stared at the wood. "So you want us walking longer, carrying heavier, and hoping we get lucky."
Mark frowned. "We weren't lucky today because we stopped too early."
Chris shook his head. "We stopped because we didn't find anything worth the risk."
Mark turned on him. "We have elements now. We can handle more than we could yesterday."
Damien watched the exchange without stepping in.
Mark's confidence wasn't fake. That was the problem. It was the kind that grew when nothing punished you quickly.
Chris walked over to Damien and lowered his voice. "We can't keep doing this."
"We can," Damien said. "For a bit."
Chris's jaw tightened. "And then?"
Damien didn't answer. He didn't have to.
Food was counted again, quieter than the first time. Water too. No one joked while they did it.
A woman offered to skip her share. Someone else said they weren't hungry and ate anyway once the food came around. The injured man from yesterday sat with his leg stretched out, face pale, pretending he wasn't watching the pile like it mattered more than dignity.
Leon slept on.
Every time Damien looked at him, he saw the same thing: a person who couldn't afford cold nights and long walks.
"This stone isn't giving us anything," Tasha said finally. Not to anyone in particular.
Mark's response came fast. "Then we stop camping on it like idiots and start using the forest."
"The forest is exactly where we got bit," someone snapped from the back.
"That was because nobody watched," Mark shot back. "We watch this time."
Tasha's expression hardened. "We watched today. We still came back empty."
Silence settled, uncomfortable.
Damien broke it.
"Those people," he said.
Heads turned.
Mark narrowed his eyes. "What about them?"
"They came back with wood and meat," Damien said. "Not much. But enough to make the trip worth it."
Mark's posture shifted immediately—suspicion and interest at the same time. "So what? They got lucky."
"They didn't look lucky," Damien said. "They looked like they'd done it before."
Chris nodded. "They also weren't loaded down with nonsense."
That landed on a few people. Bags shifted. Someone instinctively checked their own pack like it might defend itself.
Tasha crossed her arms. "You want to follow them."
Damien didn't deny it. "I want to know where they're starting from."
Mark let out a short laugh. "And if they don't want us there?"
"Then we find out," Damien said. "But we don't keep guessing in the same spot until we run out of food."
No one argued with that directly. Not because they agreed with Damien. Because they were tired of pretending the counts didn't matter.
Mark spoke anyway, because Mark always spoke. "Fine. We follow. But we're not walking into someone else's camp with our hands out."
Tasha looked at him. "We already are. You just don't like saying it."
Mark's face tightened. "We go to talk. That's it."
Damien nodded. "Talk."
Chris sighed like he'd been waiting for someone to say it out loud.
They moved within the hour.
Not the whole group. Not the injured. Not Leon. A small team—Damien, Chris, Tasha, and two others who could move quietly and keep their heads. Mark insisted on coming until Tasha reminded him someone had to keep order at the camp.
He hated that.
He stayed.
"Don't take long," Mark told them. "And don't promise anything."
Damien didn't answer. He didn't plan to promise anything he couldn't carry.
They headed inward along the stone, following the direction the other group had taken the day before.
It didn't feel different underfoot. That was the point. Humans didn't get warnings. They got patterns.
The first pattern appeared in the grooves.
Not the carvings—those were everywhere. The scuffs. The scuffed stone where the same feet had stepped again and again. Marks in the dust where bundles had dragged. Small bits of bark caught in cracks.
"Someone's been hauling wood this way," Chris murmured.
Tasha crouched by a shallow seam and scraped at it with her fingernail. "Ash," she said.
Damien looked. The residue was old. Ground into the stone. Not fresh enough to smell.
"They've had fire," Chris said.
"Or they burned something," Tasha replied.
Damien kept walking.
The ridges in the stone rose and fell in shallow waves, cutting sightlines the way they always had. For long stretches, all Damien could see was pale slab and the dark wall of forest at the edge. The clearing felt bigger the farther in they went—not because it expanded, but because their early camp now felt small and poorly placed by comparison.
They crested a low rise.
And saw movement.
Not beasts.
People.
Silhouettes first—figures bending, lifting, shifting objects. Then shapes that weren't bodies: low stone stacks arranged like barriers against wind, branches laid out in lines, a few patched cloths stretched between poles.
A camp.
It wasn't impressive.
It was organized.
They stopped without being told.
Chris exhaled. "Yeah. That's them."
Damien watched for a full ten seconds before stepping forward.
No one ran to greet them. No one lifted a weapon dramatically. A few heads turned. Someone called out, low and sharp.
"Hey—who's that?"
The same woman from yesterday stepped into view, wiping her hands on her pants. She looked tired in a way that suggested she'd been tired for days.
Her eyes flicked over them. Counted them.
"You followed us," she said flatly.
Damien raised his hands slightly—not surrender. Just open.
"We didn't have much choice," he said. "We tried going out again. We came back with almost nothing."
The woman's expression didn't soften, but it changed. Less suspicion. More calculation.
Chris added, "We're wasting time out there."
Tasha kept her voice steady. "And we're not carrying enough food to keep wasting time."
That line hit differently than the others. It was too honest to ignore.
The woman glanced behind her. Damien caught the same quick look he'd seen the day before—toward the inner part of the clearing, not toward the forest.
Then back to them.
"How many of you?" she asked.
"More than we should have," Damien said. "One injured badly. Another hurt. People are tired."
"And you want to move here," she said, not asking.
"We want to stop bleeding for nothing," Damien replied.
A man behind her stepped up, eyes wary. "We don't have extra food."
"We're not asking you to feed us," Chris said quickly. "We can work. We can go out for wood and meat too. We just—"
He stopped, searching for the cleanest words.
Tasha finished it. "We're wasting time arguing and doubling back. We need organization. And we need to know which way actually works."
The woman stared at them for a long moment. Not judging. Measuring.
Then she asked the question that mattered.
"Why should we let a whole group in?" she said. "What happens when you run out of food and decide you want ours?"
Damien didn't flinch. "That's already what you're thinking we'll do."
The woman's mouth tightened. Not offended. Acknowledging.
Damien kept his voice even. "If we wanted to take from you, we'd have tried yesterday when we met you out there and you were carrying meat."
That made a few eyes in the camp sharpen.
The man behind her shifted his weight. "That's true."
The woman didn't look away from Damien. "And if your people panic? If they run? If they draw things toward us?"
"We'll keep them in line," Chris said.
The woman glanced at him like she didn't believe anyone could keep anyone in line.
Tasha spoke again, more practical than reassuring. "You can set rules. If we break them, you send us back out."
That got a quiet murmur from someone in the camp.
Rules were something people trusted when they didn't trust each other.
The woman finally exhaled. "Wait here."
She turned and walked back into the camp.
Damien didn't follow. He didn't look around too obviously either. He stood still and let his eyes take what they offered him naturally.
Their camp wasn't rich. It wasn't comfortable. It was just… functional. Wood stacked in small piles. A place for fire that had been used enough to leave ash in the stone. Water skins hung from a pole. A few crude spears leaned against a low stone wall.
People moved like they had jobs.
No one was sitting around talking about how safe it was.
Chris leaned in. "You see how they're set up?"
"Yeah," Damien said quietly.
Tasha's eyes tracked the deeper part of the clearing. "What's beyond them?"
Damien followed her gaze.
From here, the ridges opened slightly. The stone lanes stretched farther in. And beyond the camp's far side, he could just make out something vertical breaking the sky line—partly hidden by a rise, partly blending with the pale background.
Too far to identify.
Too straight to be another ridge.
Damien stared at it for a second longer than he meant to.
Chris noticed. "You seeing something?"
"Maybe," Damien said.
The woman returned with two others. Their faces were set in the same expression Damien was starting to recognize as the default here—tired, cautious, unwilling to pretend.
"We can talk," she said. "But not here."
She gestured inward, away from the forest line.
"We don't stand this close to the edge if we don't have to."
That was the clearest sentence she'd said yet.
Damien nodded once.
"Lead," he said.
And as they started walking, the vertical shape ahead stayed in his vision—still partly hidden, still unresolved—waiting for them to get close enough to see what it actually was.