Nessa Coil had tracked the moth swarm for eleven days, and she was not going to lose them to weather. She crouched on a ridge above the pine line, notebook open on her knee, watching the pale cloud of wings drift east toward the pass. Every mark in her book was a piece of a map no one else had drawn: the full migration path, birthing cave to resting ground. Her father had died believing that path was myth. She meant to bring it home on paper. The wind changed while she was writing. One moment the moths climbed on a warm draft. The next, snow came sideways off the peaks and swallowed them whole. She lost sight of the swarm in three breaths. She shoved the notebook into her coat and ran down the ridge. The moths could not fly through a blizzard. They would drop into whatever cover they found and cluster there until the storm broke. If she didn't reach that cover before the drifts closed the trail, eleven days of work ended here. Halfway down the slope her boot caught a root and she went sliding. She stopped against a wall of woven willow branches, thick as her arm, curving up into a low green dome. The snow had not yet reached under its canopy. She had walked past this place twice on the way up and never seen it. A sanctuary, then, meant to stay unseen. Something moved inside. Nessa drew the sword at her hip. She kept it plain and sharp and never named it anything clever. A small creature stepped out of the dark — scaled, six-legged, wings folded like colored paper. A spiderdrake, no bigger than a cat. It looked at her sword, then at the sky, then trotted back inside and waited in the entrance. She followed. The willow chamber was warm. Moon moths clung to the inner branches in a shivering silver blanket, hundreds of them, wings folded tight. The little drake had already led the swarm here. It watched her count them, head tilted, as if checking her work. Nessa sheathed the sword and sat against the trunk. She opened her notebook to a clean page and wrote the date, the storm, the shelter, the drake. The trail was not lost. It had a new guide, and a new question: who had built this place to hide the moths, and why did they want her to find it too.