The days following the glade were quieter, but not calmer.
The air was thicker. The birds returned, but their songs came less often. Children played close to their mothers. Warriors sharpened their spears more slowly, more often, and with eyes turned toward the trees.
Arã helped repair a granary roof with bark tiles and vine rope. He spoke little, but his hands worked with precision. Each knot he tied felt like a thought held still — every motion, an answer not spoken aloud. The others noticed. They didn't ask him to lead, but they no longer moved without watching him first.
Ma'kua watched him from a distance. So did others. And though no title had changed hands, something in the way they made space for him spoke volumes. The village was shifting. Quietly, but surely.
The elders spoke with fewer riddles. The young practiced with less boasting. Even the dogs seemed more alert, their ears twitching at unseen things. The nights stretched longer, and fires burned lower. Conversations grew short. Feet padded more softly over the forest floor.
Then came the smoke.
One morning, it curled through the trees like a wounded snake.
Not from their fires.
It came from beyond the eastern ridge.
A red thread in the sky. Thin. Unnatural.
The wind carried its scent — not just burning wood, but something sour beneath it. Hair. Bone. A smell the forest itself seemed to recoil from.
Scouts returned before the sun was high. They knelt before Ma'kua and spoke in hushed tones. Ma'kua's expression did not change, but the way he held his spear did. He planted it harder into the soil. His fingers curled around the shaft like someone gripping time.
That evening, the council gathered in the grove of talking stones. The wind whistled through the branches above them like breath through old flutes.
"The Irac — they've returned," said one elder. "And they are not hunting alone."
A younger warrior muttered, "They move with ghosts now."
No one laughed.
Arã did not speak. But his jaw tightened. He had heard the stories, and more than stories, he remembered the looks passed between elders when the name was mentioned. He remembered the scars on warriors who refused to speak of how they got them.
The Irac were no mere tribe. They were remnants of something broken — scavengers who wore painted skulls and walked in silence until they struck. They didn't speak their dead's names. They wore them.
They came at night. They left no trails. Only silence, ash, and absence.
And they had come too close.
Ma'kua spoke no words of alarm. He only pointed.
The warriors moved before he did. They knew. The time for gathering moss and cutting vines had passed. The spears were no longer tools, but warnings. Shields woven from turtle shells were pulled from the stores. The watchers at the forest's edge doubled.
That night, Arã sat by the central fire, silent.
Tika joined him. He didn't ask questions. He simply sat, sharpening a bone-bladed knife. Their silence was agreement.
Behind them, Iwame braided herbs into small knots, burning one at a time. She murmured old songs — protective ones, the kind her grandmother had whispered during storms.
The jungle didn't sleep.
It leaned in.
And the Ayruam listened — because the Irac never made noise.
They arrived in silence.
And so the forest, and every soul within it, followed suit.
Two nights passed. Nothing came.
But nothing also left. The jungle grew too quiet. The birds stopped flying east. The prey vanished from snares. The water of the stream turned colder, though the rains had not come. Even the insects fell mute — the buzz, the chirp, the nighttime chorus faded into a pause too long.
Frogs stayed hidden. Roots twisted oddly in the morning fog. Something beneath the leaves was listening.
It was on the third night that Arã heard it — not with his ears, but with the skin of his chest.
A rustle. Then stillness. Then a sigh that did not belong to any creature they knew. Not loud. But real.
Tika heard it too. His head turned, but his body remained still, like prey before the leap.
They did not light torches. They did not call out. Instead, Arã rose and moved to the northern edge of the village, where the trees met the woven fence. Each step was careful, not in fear, but in calculation.
There, half-buried in the earth, was a bone charm.
Fresh.
Not Ayruam.
Thin twine. Smoke-burnished edges. Teeth not from prey, but from hands. And blood — not much, but there. Dried, but recent.
He called no alarm. He simply turned to Tika and nodded. Tika vanished like smoke.
By dawn, Ma'kua had summoned the warriors.
The council stone was again circled. This time, no one sat. All stood. Spears were present, points grounded but held firm.
"We are being watched," Ma'kua said.
A murmur. Then silence. They all knew it already — the air had told them.
"We will not provoke. But we will not be caught sleeping."
Arã stepped forward, his voice quiet: "Let them watch. Let them believe we do not see. We'll draw their eyes to one place… and strike from another."
No one interrupted.
Even the elders who once paused before giving weight to a youth's words remained still.
And though Ma'kua did not smile, he said only, "Then speak where the blow should fall."
Before dawn, the plan moved.
No orders shouted. No chants. Just gestures — fingers curled, eyes flicked, spears tipped. Warriors moved in pairs, in silence, into the brush.
Children were gathered with mothers into the central ring, pretending to sleep as the men faded into trees. Tika led three trackers into a crescent sweep northward. Arã, with four others, crept east.
Every trap they'd ever learned to set — from vine-snap snares to pit hollows covered in leaves — was employed. But more than tools, they used patience. They used stillness.
And they used the certainty that they were no longer being hunted — they were being tested.
The Irac would not find panic.
They would find a forest watching them back.
The jungle itself seemed to shift.
Every branch, every vine, every still pool took on the weight of a waiting gaze. The Ayruam did not move through the trees — they became part of them. Eyes gleamed faintly in the undergrowth, not from firelight, but from resolve. Bark-scars, old clan signs, marked key trails now covered with fresh layers of leaves, softening steps that would be taken quickly if blood called.
Takarê sat cross-legged behind the firepit that hadn't burned in days. He wore the pelt of an old capivara, its whiskers singed in some long-ago ritual. Around him, small stones were arranged in the pattern of the Ayruam circle — twelve for the first river clans, one missing in the northern quarter. That stone had never been replaced. It waited like the tribe did.
His voice was low, dry, carved from breath:"Let them come as shadow. We are not the ones who forget names."
He touched ash to his own brow, and to the earth.
Elsewhere, the children watched their parents work.
No one told them to hush — the silence was already part of them. Some held wooden birds in their hands, carvings made for sleep. Others gripped polished stones from the riverbank. Talismans. Their mothers whispered stories of the sky behind the leaves, of how the forest protected those who listened to it. These were not bedtime tales.
Iwame moved between the circles, singing — not aloud, but within her throat. A breath more than a song. In her hands were bundles of burned root and dried caapi. She placed one beside each sleeping space, muttering:
"So you will dream only of branches, not blades."
One boy sat upright — the youngest, barely walking last season. His eyes did not blink as Arã passed nearby.
"You're not afraid," the boy said. Not a question.
Arã paused, crouched beside him, and answered without words — he touched the boy's chest, above his heart, and nodded once. Then he moved on.
To the north, in the undergrowth, Arã knelt.
He pressed both palms into the dirt. Felt it. Not warm. Not cold. A breath between. He imagined his hand melting into the soil, fingers becoming root. He whispered not to the spirits, but to the world itself:
"If they come through here… let them hear my name in the silence."
The warriors around him — older, scarred, unsure of their place beside him — watched how still he became.
One of them, Naram, leaned closer.
"You're not like your father," he said.
"I am," Arã replied, "but I don't want to be only that."
Then came the wind — not strong, but constant. It bent reeds but did not break them. It passed through the forest like a scout, warning both sides that the night would end soon.
And when it did, someone would bleed.