His first bounding step inside, and there was already a leshy waiting for him. Right in his path, where it looked to have always been, but certainly hadn’t a moment ago. Aaron stopped, his flanks quivering, his tail raised.

There was a heavy thump behind him. Aaron did not turn around. The wind brought crushed grass and the dry-sharp scent of dragons, not that he needed either to know what had landed there. A shame she’d landed in the grass, instead of a few steps nearer the forest; she might have broken a branch or two.

The leshy continued not to move. Which was a less reassuring thing, when he knew they didn’t need to before they started pinholing a fellow with branches.

If you must enter, the old woman at the foresters’ village had told him, touch wood first. Take only what you need to, lives included. Leave nothing unwanted.

Well. He was already a bit late on that first step. But he wasn’t dead yet, so he wasn’t as late as he could be. Aaron reached out, very slow, and touched the nearest tree trunk with his nose. This did not seem to impress the leshy either way.

He looked over his shoulder, being very careful to keep his antlers from rattling any branches. The dragon was the rather unremarkable shade of the yellow-green grass she stood in, with a strip of brighter colors flashing down her sides. She was staring right at him, in a way that made him quite certain she’d like to immolate the patch of forest in which he stood, except that she knew that wouldn’t be the wisest of ideas. Aaron stared at her. She stared at him. The leshy continued to stand.

Aaron couldn’t leave the forest with her there. She probably wouldn’t risk entering, with the leshy there. And if she did, it would probably be on two legs instead of as a dragon too large to fit between the trees. A stag should be able to outrun a human. So long as he didn’t step on something he shouldn’t, or snap a branch in his haste, or break some forest rule he didn’t yet know and wouldn’t be given long to think over before he was rather too deceased to care.

…Safer to stay exactly where he was, unless she forced the issue. This thing they were doing seemed the sort they’d meant to get over with quickly. Far be it for Aaron to get in their way; he’d just watch, like a good little journeyman spy.

With exceeding care and a great deal of gently moving fern leaves out of the way with his nose, Aaron lowered himself down to a clear spot on the forest floor and resolved to not nibble anything, no matter how good they might smell, nor how close to his face they might be.

The colors cycling down the dragon’s side got rather bolder and more complex, in a way he strongly suspected was annoyance. She glanced over her own shoulder, to where another dragon had climbed up on the guard station’s roof. It flashed something back, the colors cupped on the underside of its wings, where they couldn’t be seen for any great distance. The rest of its scales had settled into a stone-gray.

Huh. They were… talking? That seemed rather a lot like talking, despite no one ever telling him that dragons used their colors for more than camouflage. But then, the human half of a dragon doppel wouldn’t know the language, and the dragon half would generally turn themselves bipedal if they’d a thing to say to humans. Probably someone knew about it. Maybe a lot of someones. But it was a new thing to him, and rather pretty to watch. And it made a great deal of sense, for a species that was generally further apart than a polite roar could reach, but which had excellent eyesight.

The gray-scaled dragon shifted human, and slid down from the roof. He went inside the guard station.

He came back out with a bow.

Ah.

Aaron bolted.

It wasn’t really a thing he thought about, until he was already out of sight of road and station. He just rather blanked, and then he was in a cluster of safe concealing pine trees, with his sides heaving and a sort of feeling like maybe stags weren’t actually the bravest of animals. Nor the best at long-term thinking. He didn’t know why that surprised him, except that it seemed that a thing with so many knives on its head shouldn’t need to run quite so blindly. At least he’d apparently picked a path that didn’t leave leafy destruction in his wake; not enough to bother the leshy, in any case. Or maybe it just viewed him as a regular animal while he was dressed up like this: surely it didn’t stab every deer that broke something it shouldn’t. How could animals even eat in this forest, if it did?

He stood a moment, catching his breath, and fighting the urge to curl up on the thick pine needles under him until a more sensible time of day. Like dusk; dusk would be good. Too little light for dragons, too much for griffins. An excellent time of day.

Aaron did not want to be in this forest at dusk. Or right now, really. Which required moving. Away from these very nice trees, and the lingering smell of something that had found safety here a few days past. Not a deer, but a similar cousin: an elk? A reindeer?

…He should probably unclasp this cloak. He was twitchy enough all on his own: he didn’t need to wrap himself up in the mind of something that seemed to be a quivering mess of paranoia topped by antlers. But then he’d be slower. And also look more like something the forest didn’t want inside of it. Neither of those appealed.

He followed an animal trail out of the trees. It was easier to pick his footing when others had already trampled the underbrush into a neat dirt path for him. Presumably—hopefully—one that led somewhere safe. At least, his cousins had thought so.

Forests were, Aaron quickly discovered, noisy. There were birds shouting bird things, and insects that had no respect for the personal space of a fellow that didn’t have hands to swat them, and things that sounded like they weighed the same as a rockslide but turned out to be squirrels rummaging through the underbrush. One of them flicked its tail at him, standing on its hind legs to watch him pass. It was covered half in red fur, half in pale lichen, with a touch of frost clinging to the tips of its ears. It heard something he didn’t, and went racing up a tree. Aaron bolted. And kept bolting, until he realized that most of the things which hunted squirrels probably didn’t bother stags. Probably. He ran a bit further, to be safe.

The animal trail got wider. Joined up with others. There was a smell in the air, brought to him by the wind. He slowed, lifting his head to the breeze. There was the reassuring smell of ocean, persistent to his right; the direction he had to go to get out of this, when he was sure he was far enough from any dragons. And a new smell ahead, the one that had just reached him. Close to his own scent, in the same way the smell under the pines had been. Not a bad smell at all.

A few slower steps on, he reached a clearing. New grasses and the earliest slips of saplings competed for sunlight in the space. The grasses were helped along, and the saplings distinctly disadvantaged, by those that grazed there.

Reindeer. There were twenty-some odd of them. Mostly mothers with their new calves, or still round with them. A few of the males were already growing in the velvety stubs of their new antlers; a few of the females still had their full winter racks, which Aaron couldn’t help but be a bit envious of. Did they have to be so much larger than his? And more graceful in their curves, and better centered over their heads in a way that probably meant they had less tree branches to dodge. Like with the squirrel, moss and lichen grew as thick as fur on the adult’s flanks, and bits of frost still clung here or there. The babes, by contrast, were a riot of coiled fern fiddleheads and flower buds and other things wholly of the spring.

The herd had noticed him. But his smell must have been as inoffensive to them as theirs was to him, because none of them much seemed to care. It wouldn’t be the worst idea, to wait out a bit of the day with those that better knew the dangers of this place.

He stepped into the clearing, and just sort of… stood there, at the edges. If reindeer and deer had any particular etiquette to their greetings, he didn’t know it. How smart were reindeer? How smart were the reindeer in this forest? He didn’t know if he was dealing with people or not.

Well. He’d just be on his best behavior, then. He found himself a nice sunny spot, not too close and not too far, and settled down to wait again.

A few of the calves came bumbling up to him, all long legs and twiggy plant sprouts where they’d one day have proper antlers. One of them was even pure white, which rather made him doubt how important that color was. He decided a nose touch was a proper enough greeting. Though it did get them nudged back to the center of the clearing by their mothers, more often than not.

It took him rather longer than it should have to realize that the herd was twitchy. It wasn’t him the mothers were keeping their babes away from; it was the clearing’s edges. Which all the adults kept pausing to watch, heads raised and ears forward and mouths stilled in chewing, but all of them looking in different directions. Like they knew there was a threat, but not where it would come from. This did not particularly reassure Aaron.

And then they all lifted their heads, rather suddenly, towards the north. And started moving their babes along, the little ones having to trot every few steps to keep up with the adults’ longer strides. Aaron moved along with them, making sure he wasn’t in the rear of that particular procession.

They were going south, which was where he wanted to be. And they clearly knew something he didn’t.

There was something off, in the air. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. Humans and griffins and wolves and deer all had noses that picked up on different things, prioritizing this over that, like how he hadn’t recognized dragon scent through a deer nose even though he’d smelled them as a griffin.. This seemed a thing he half-recognized.

It was not a thing that smelled good.

The herd moved faster. Drew in tighter, nudging their calves to the center and shoving Aaron out to the edges, which was fair enough. They stopped moving forwards. Started circling, instead, in a way that would probably make it hard for a predator to single out any single one of them, and risk being trampled over if any tried. Probably this worked well for wolves and suchlike.

It didn’t do much against the Winter Lord.

The bear didn’t come out of the woods with a roar, or a charge, or anything so dramatic. It stepped from the trees, its steps dragging. Its fur was even more drenched in snowmelt than the last Aaron had seen it; where the ice had been thickest about its shoulders, pieces had broken off entirely, leaving raw red skin underneath. The spring flowers about its eyes wept pollen so thickly that Aaron doubted the Lord of Seasons could see more than a tortured blur. It raised its nose towards the herd. Huffed. Then simply waded through the adults, swatting some aside like the insignificant bothers they apparently were.

It killed the first calf it reached, with a stomp of paw and a dip of its head. Its jaws came up red, stained by blood and flower petals. Then it kept killing.

Aaron was already running by then. The herd followed not long after, like he knew where he was going, or they hoped he did. Which was not exactly a responsibility he wanted, nor a bear-magnet he desired stringing along after him. There was a sharp fork in the trail; he broke one way. The herd continued on the straighter path.

The Lord of Seasons followed after them, its breathing as heavy as its footfalls, its pace steady. A string of animal Deaths followed after it, equally unhurried. They were all going to the same place, after all; and they’d be exactly on time whenever they got there.

Aaron hid in a copse of aspens as they passed. Because the stag’s mind insisted, and he quite agreed, that a thing hunting something else was best left to pass without drawing its eye.

It paused once, just parallel to where he hid. Raised its nose. Then it reared back, placing both its paws against a pine, and bringing its full weight against the trunk. The tree groaned. Splintered. Fell. Aaron had an excellent view of red squirrels fleeing from it up into the aspens around him, as if those trees would hold any longer. And of the Winter Lord, dragging their leaf nest from the downed pine to crush underfoot. It stood over the remains a moment, its breaths labored. Then it turned and kept following the reindeer herd.

* * *

Aaron followed the smell of salt back to the coastal road. He was far enough south that he couldn’t see the guard station the dragons were using. Not far enough south that they wouldn’t see him, if one were in the sky. But as he’d learned that last time, if he could see the sky, then it was already too late to hide from anything that might be circling up there. And he was rather done with the Lord of Seasons’ forest.

Hours later found him standing in the grass outside the boundary stones, his stag cloak still firmly in place, staring at the messenger station he should have reached near mid-morning. The sun wasn’t far from setting, now.

He could go in. Have something hot to eat, a place to sleep, and start on the road again tomorrow. Send word out about the dragons, while he was there.

But this was no proper town, no place with spare fighters to send out to clear the road. Any messengers riding back towards the enclave just now might run across the same dragons he had, and any heading south wouldn’t be of much more use than just carrying the news himself.

The messenger station smelled of horses and hay and humans. All perfectly reasonable, ordinary scents. But it was so close to the guard station, only a few miles south. The dragon’s original plan had been to switch out the humans up there with no one the wiser. If he hadn’t warned King Orin, they’d likely have done it. A messenger outpost would be just as valuable a base as a guard’s station. More so: they’d be sure to have the latest news moving through here.

It didn’t smell like dragons. But Aaron didn’t smell particularly human, and it hadn’t even been a day since he’d put on this cloak.

He had four working legs, good as any horse. It would take him longer to get back to Salt’s Mane like this. But he rather liked the idea of getting back.

He bedded down in running distance of both the messenger outpost and the forest. As good a place to catch his breath as any, and wait the night out. Keep his options open, no matter what directions things might come hunting from. He even nodded off some, which would be good for his strength tomorrow, but bad for his chances tonight.

He jerked awake to a set of eyes reflecting the moonlight from a tree at the forest’s edge. The wind was the wrong direction for scenting, but he didn’t need it to know that particular silhouette. The last he’d seen her, she’d been similarly perched, and rather memorable.

Aaron stood, his antlers pointed towards the mountain lion with her split tail.

The kaibyou stared down at him. Then she gave a slow blink, and turned away.

Aaron was very, very done with today.