Lyn traces the newest mark on her wrist with her thumb, feeling the raised skin still tender from its arrival. Three weeks until the full moon. The pattern she's been tracking for months just broke, and she doesn't know why. She climbs the crooked steps to her cabin, pushing through the mist that clings to the warped slats. Inside, her walls are covered in sketches and measurements. Every symbol, every dream, mapped in careful rows by moon cycle. The sequence should repeat every six months. It always has. But this mark appeared early, out of order, burning itself onto her skin while she slept three nights ago. She pulls out her notes and starts measuring the new rune against the old ones. If the pattern broke, there has to be a reason. She just needs to find it. She spreads her diary open on the table, its purple cover worn at the edges from constant use. The pages are dense with ink — dates, sketches, measurements taken at precise intervals. She flips to the chart where she's tracked every rune's appearance. Six symbols, repeating. Six symbols that should have waited another three weeks. The new mark doesn't match any of them. It curves where the others angle, splits where they connect. She copies it carefully onto a fresh page, measuring the width of each line with a ruler. Outside, the large display board catches the morning light. She nailed it to the oak tree last spring so she could see the full sequence at once. Six columns, each moon cycle marked and dated. She pins a sketch of the new rune beside the others, stepping back to study it. The pattern is broken. The new symbol sits there like a crack in glass, and everything she thought she understood about getting home just became uncertain.

Lyn needs more data. The new mark appeared early, which means someone else might have seen this pattern before. She grabs her coat and heads into town, keeping her wrist covered. If the sequence broke for her, maybe it broke for someone else too. She finds herself at the edge of the forest where an old tree stands, its trunk marked by a glowing purple rune that pulses like a heartbeat. She's walked past it before but never stopped to study it. Now she pulls out her diary and sketches the symbol. It matches her newest mark exactly — the same curve, the same split. Her pulse quickens. She's reaching to trace the bark when footsteps crunch behind her. An older woman approaches, stops, and stares at Lyn's exposed wrist. The woman's face drains of color. She fumbles in her bag and pulls out a photograph, its edges worn. The image shows this same tree, but younger, with a figure standing before it. The rune on the figure's wrist is identical to Lyn's new mark. "I took this thirty years ago," the woman says quietly. "The tree burned three days later. Everyone said the mark died with it." Lyn takes the photograph with steady hands, but her thoughts are racing. The mark didn't die. It waited thirty years and appeared on her wrist three weeks early. The pattern didn't just break — it connected her to something that was already destroyed. She thanks the woman and walks back toward her cabin, the photograph pressed between the pages of her diary. She came looking for confirmation that her mark meant something measurable. She found it. But now she knows the sequence isn't just shifting. It's pulling her toward a point of destruction that already happened, and she has no idea what that means for getting home.

Lyn carries the photograph back to the cabin, Boosie weaving between her legs as she walks. The tree at the forest's edge glows brighter now, the purple rune pulsing in steady rhythm. She needs to understand what connects her mark to that tree, and why it appeared early. She sets up her measuring tools in the clearing just beyond the tree line, close enough to observe the rune's behavior. Boosie settles beside her, purring as Lyn sketches the pulse pattern in her diary. The runes on her sleeve brighten in time with the cat's rumble. She marks the intervals — three seconds between pulses, consistent and measurable. Then Boosie's head lifts. The cat stares at the tree, ears forward, and the purple glow intensifies. Lyn reaches for her, but Boosie bolts toward the trunk before her fingers connect. Lyn runs after her, but stops short at the tree's base. Boosie has vanished. No prints in the soil, no rustle in the underbrush. The rune pulses faster now, brighter, as if it swallowed the cat whole. Lyn's chest tightens. She calls Boosie's name, hears nothing. Then she spots the collar lying in the dirt — the one engraved with faint runes she'd traced weeks ago. It's warm to the touch, and the symbols etched into the leather match the mark on her wrist. Lyn picks up the collar and turns it over in her hands. The pattern is identical. Not similar — identical. The tree didn't just pull Boosie in. It responded to something the cat carried. She writes the observation in her diary with shaking hands, then underlines it twice. She came here to measure a connection. Now she has proof: the runes don't just glow when Boosie purrs. They act. And if the tree took her cat, Lyn has to assume it can give her back — or it already burned once, and this time she'll lose more than data.