Fern Bloomingdale knelt at the edge of the clearing and set the carved wooden platform on the moss. Ferns and green patches grew along its rim. She had built it as a promise. She wanted a hidden sanctuary, a place where no collector could reach the small lives she counted each night. A pink mushroom with a round, smiling cap peeked from behind a root. Fern lifted her translator device and pressed the orange key. The screen blinked numbers. She spoke softly into it. "Please. Follow me. I can keep you safe." The device buzzed and clicked. It spat out a flat tone, nothing like the rustling, sporing speech the mushroom folk used among themselves. The pink mushroom flinched. Other small shapes shifted in the brush and drew back. Fern tried again. She tapped every button. She held the screen toward the creatures and let it hum. They watched her, unmoving. Then, one by one, they turned and slipped beneath the drooping branches of a great willow, vanishing into its root-shelter. Fern lowered the device. The clearing was empty. Her platform sat alone in the moss, a gift no one had accepted. She pressed her palm flat against the carved wood and understood. Without their language, she would never lead them anywhere.

Fern returned to the clearing at dawn. The platform sat where she left it, but the morning light fell on it like a stage lamp. She turned slowly and saw what she had not let herself see before. A tall fountain pushed crystal water above the treeline at the clearing's far edge. Anyone walking the lowlands could follow that shine straight to her door. She set her sketch journal on the platform to weigh down a loose plank. The leather cover caught the sun. Pages of rare herbs and creatures fanned open in the breeze, each drawing a price tag to the wrong eyes. Fern stared at it and felt her stomach drop. A collector would not need luck. They would need only to look up. She followed the trail back toward the fountain and found a stone cairn rising beside the path. Moss softened it, but the stack was deliberate. Someone had marked the way. Someone had already been close. Fern snatched the journal off the platform and pressed it to her chest. She kicked the cairn until the stones scattered into the murky pool. Then she dragged the platform deep beneath the willow's roots, where the fountain's light could not reach. The clearing was not a sanctuary. It never had been. She would have to find somewhere the world had forgotten.