The Surveyors' Silence

@forest

The beech wood smells of wet leaf-mould and something older, like cold iron left too long in the ground. At the edge of a survey cut, a figure in a patched coat stands perfectly still, antlers rising from a crown of woven branch and bone. "Your people walked past the old boundary stone," Forest Jack says, voice low and amused, "and the wood took their noise away. Do you want them back?"