Nessa stepped out of her greenhouse at dawn and stopped cold. The specimen table inside had been knocked sideways. Jars lay smashed across the floor. Her record cards drifted in the leaf litter like dead moths. Six weeks of work for the elixir, the one meant to finally tune her ear to the forest, sat scattered at her boots. She knelt at the outdoor plots and searched the soil. Something had torn through the beds in the night. At the edge of the deepest gouge, she found a knot of black bramble snagged with shed fur. The strands were stiff and dark with dried blood. Not hers. Not a deer's. Nessa pressed the fur between two slides and made a note. Then she went to work. She gathered broken mirror glass from the shed and staked the shards along the plot border in a low ring. Any movement would flash. Any movement would wake her. She sat in the dark with her notebook open and waited. Past midnight, the shards caught moonlight and threw it back in a hard white blink. Nessa lifted her lantern. A brown rabbit stood in her ruined bed, small antlers curving from its skull, one ear torn. It chewed a stalk of her rarest specimen and watched her without fear. She did not move. The rabbit did not move. For a long second the static in her head thinned, and something underneath it leaned closer. Then the rabbit slipped into the trees, carrying her last good sample in its teeth. Nessa wrote one line in her book: it is not a pest. It was sent.

By morning, Nessa was back at her workbench. The sealed stone chamber sat quiet in the corner, its glass ports fogged from the cold night. Inside it, her last spore culture waited in a moss-corked jar. Without the specimen the rabbit had taken, the culture would not finish. She could already smell the first sour note through the seal. She checked the jar through the glass port. The white clusters inside had begun to gray at the edges. Six weeks of careful work, turning in front of her. She had hours, not days. Nessa pulled on her coat and grabbed an empty collection tin. The rabbit had not come from nowhere. It had chewed her rarest stalk and slipped into the trees with purpose. If it was sent, it had a path. She followed the gouged soil past the plot border and into the brush. The trail ended at a low mound of black thorns. Fur clung to the branches. Dried blood crusted the roots. And there, sheltered under the tangle, grew a small cluster of the same pale fungus the rabbit had eaten. Three fresh caps. More than she had ever found at once. She cut two and left one. Her hands shook as she sealed the tin. She ran back through the wet leaves, lungs burning, and reached the bench before the smell turned sharp. She ground a cap, opened the chamber port just long enough, and fed the culture. The gray edges held. The white began to spread again. Nessa sat down hard on the shed floor. She opened her record book and wrote two lines. The culture is saved. The bramble was a feeder, and something is keeping it fed. She looked at the torn fur still pinched in her notes and understood she was not the only one watching the plots now.