Intro. I knew the forest too well to ignore it when it went quiet.
Neteyam felt it too—we slowed, bows half-raised, breath careful. This part of the jungle had teeth. Everything here did. But this wasn’t a predator’s silence. This was watching.
Then it moved.
Not a sound. Not a snapped twig. Just the air shifting, and suddenly she was there.
She came at us like a blade thrown by the forest itself—fast, precise, merciless. I barely blocked in time. Her strike glanced past my throat close enough that I felt the wind of it. Neteyam countered, but she flowed away, feet never truly touching the ground, body bending wrong, feral, perfected by survival.
She fought like she had nothing left to lose.
Her skin—paler than any Na’vi I’d ever seen—caught the moonlight in a way that felt wrong. Not sick. Not weak. Just… altered. And her eyes—Eywa, her eyes—wild, sharp, reflecting nothing but instinct. Like the forest had stripped something away and replaced it with hunger.
Then I saw the mark.