The huntress had been running since before the mist lifted.

She was skilled. Anyone watching would have seen that immediately. The way she read the ground, the way she moved through undergrowth without losing her line and the economy of her tracking even as the hours wore on. She had learned from the best. She had practiced longer than most. And she had woken before dawn, as she always did, because that was what serious hunters did. You gave everything. You left nothing in reserve. You earned the outcome by the weight of what you were willing to sacrifice to reach it.

By midday, she had covered half the forest. The prey was always just ahead… a broken branch here, a disturbance in the moss there. Close enough to keep her moving. Far enough to keep her empty-handed.

Avalon heard her first.

From her clearing at the forest's heart, she heard the crack of branches long before the huntress came into view. The sharp exhale of effort and the particular rhythm of someone who has been working at full capacity for so long that urgency has become indistinguishable from motion. She watched the woman pass through the treeline three times before noon. Each pass faster than the last. Each one tightening the jaw, narrowing the eyes and pressing harder against a forest that was, quietly, giving her nothing.

The forest gives nothing to force. This isn’t cruelty, it’s simply the nature of wild things. They recognize need the way water recognizes a crack in stone, and they move away from it.

Avalon did not move.

She had built her fire at dawn, not from strategy but from nature. It was what the morning called for. Warmth, stillness and the particular quality of attention that belongs to someone who is not trying to extract anything from the day. She tended the fire. She breathed. She let the light shift around her as the hours passed without chasing where it fell or what it meant. She wasn’t waiting for an outcome. She wasn’t practicing patience as a technique. She was simply being the kind of presence the forest had learned, over a long time, to trust.

There is a difference. She had learned it the hard way, in an earlier season of her own running. But that was another story.

By late afternoon the forest had gone entirely quiet ahead of the huntress. The prey knew, the way all wild things know, that something behind it needed something from it. And so it moved away. Not in fear. In the ancient, wordless wisdom of a creature that will not give itself to grasping.

At dusk, the deer came to Avalon's fire.

Not to her hands. Not performing. It wandered to the edge of her firelight the way water finds low ground, as if the clearing had always been its destination. As if there were nowhere else in the forest that felt this still, this safe, this unhurried.

Avalon watched it for a long time.

The huntress was still running somewhere in the dark.

She didn't catch it. She became worth coming to.

The question isn't what you're chasing. It's what you're becoming.