Wisp Sweet Pea pressed her fingertips to the bark of the oldest tree she could find, the one closest to the boundary where her wings had gone numb five times before. She needed to understand what lived inside the forbidden forest, and every failed crossing only sharpened that need. A body hit her door before dawn. Wisp opened it to find a stranger in black sprawled across her threshold, bleeding from claw marks that ran the length of his back. He wasn't dead, but he was close. His fingers were locked around something small, a carved figurine of a duelist with a tiny sword raised. Wisp pried it from his grip and turned it over. The wood was from inside the forest — she could tell by the grain, darker than anything that grew on this side of the boundary. Someone had carved it in there, which meant someone had been inside. The stranger's wounds meant something had noticed. She pressed her palm to his shoulder and felt her healing warmth spread through him, but her eyes stayed on the figurine. The forest wasn't just forbidden. It was occupied, and it was protecting something worth bleeding for. Wisp looked past the stranger's body, following the drag marks in the snow. They led north toward the boundary, but beyond that she could see the walls of a fortress made entirely of storm. Ice and snow swirled in constant motion, a structure that shouldn't exist but clearly did. It stood just inside the forest line, visible now that someone had crashed through the barrier and left a gap. The fortress hadn't been there yesterday. The forest was hiding more than trees. Wisp set the figurine on her table and checked the stranger's pulse. He would live long enough to answer questions. And when he woke, she would finally have a map to follow.