The forest exhaled a damp, metallic chill, its skeletal trees clawing at the bruised twilight sky. Ghost's boots sank into the loam as he paused, the silence between gunfire stretches too thick, too wrong. His mask clung to his face like a second skin, breath fogging the air as his gaze swept the perimeter—meticulous, predatory. That's when he felt it: the absence. A hollow where Vixen's presence should've been, sharp as a knife pulled from its sheath.

He pivoted, the weight of his SCAR-L rifle a familiar anchor, and found Price crouched behind a fallen oak, the green glow of his night optics painting his grizzled face like war paint. Ghost's voice emerged as gravel wrapped in steel. "She's gone."

Price didn't flinch. A man carved from the same stone as the mountains, he thumbed his comms unit, static crackling like broken bones. "Soap. Gaz. Converge on my position."

They materialized from the shadows—Soap with his sleeves rolled past tattooed forearms, Gaz's jawline tight enough to crack walnuts. Both wore the same flicker behind their eyes: Not her. Not the damn fox.

"Perimeter sweep," Price growled, the order laced with unspoken stakes. "Double-time. You know her patterns—check the blindspots she'd haunt."

Soap's gloved hand flexed, the leather creaking. "If they took her—"

"They won't keep her," Ghost cut in, the promise a serrated edge. He remembered Vixen two weeks prior, disarming a mercenary with a credit card and a smirk. How her laughter had unspooled the tension in their ribs after extraction. How her bootknife always found the gap between a man's third and fourth rib.

Gaz was already moving, a spectre in the fog. "She'll leave a trail. Always does."

The forest swallowed their footfalls as they fanned out, the dark pressing in like a living thing. Somewhere in the void, a twig snapped—too deliberate to be the wind. Ghost's finger hovered over his trigger, the taste of copper sharp on his tongue.

Find the fox. Burn the hunt.

SCENEBREAK

The scent of burning feathers clung to your tongue as you jolted upright, ribs heaving. Stone bit into your palms—real, unforgiving—as the last wisps of the dream dissolved: fields of wheat, a blue-checkered apron, your mother's hands unmarked by scales. Now only dampness remained, the cave's black maw breathing rot and wet granite. Water dripped somewhere, a metronome counting down to the moment your eyes adjusted.

To the moment you saw her.

It crouched ten paces away, talons curled like scythes against the stone. Moonlight bled through a fissure above, glinting off skin that shouldn't exist—a patchwork of melted wax and keloid scars, bubbling as if the creature had clawed its way through magma. Yet its eyes... Pupils slit vertically, gold as a hawk's, but rimmed with the same warm brown as your childhood lullabies.

Your throat tightened. "Wh-Who—?"

"Don't you recognize your own mother?" The voice was wrong, a chorus of locust wings and cracking embers, but beneath it hummed the melody she'd once sung to ward off thunderstorms. Your knees locked. This wasn't the woman who'd braided your hair with chamomile stems, nor the beast from village tales that devoured trespassers in the woods. This was something between, a wound that hadn't decided whether to heal or fester.

The raptor's neck arched, scarred feathers rattling like poisoned bells. "Smell them on you," she hissed. "Smoke. Iron. Their sweat." A talon jabbed at your jacket—the one stitched with the emblem of the human settlement you'd sworn to protect. "You let them mark you."

A shadow detached from the wall, resolving into a man built like a fortress. Geto's brow, crosshatched with a jagged surgical stitch, furrowed as he stepped between you. His boots silenced the echoes, as though the cave itself feared his tread. "Easy, Louve," he rumbled, voice the low grind of millstones. "This is your daughter. Not your enemy."

"Enemies bleed the same." Louve's laugh sharpened into a whetstone screech. "You wouldn't understand, curse-stitched fool. You don't wake to her stench in your den—human hands on her skin, their lies in her ears—"

"I wake to your screams shaking the mountain," Geto countered, calm as a coiled viper. "To you tearing your own feathers out each time she chooses them. You think she doesn't hear?"

Your breath hitched. Memories erupted unbidden: a campfire's glow on a hunter's smile, Louve's talons gutting the same man three nights later. The way she'd purged your clothes in the river after, whispering, "Filth sticks, little ember."

Now her molten gaze locked onto yours, a plea and a threat fused into one. "You'll forget your true skin. They'll make you small."

Geto's hand hovered near your shoulder—not touching, never touching. A courtesy. A warning. "She's not yours to break," he said, too soft for a man carved from violence.

The cave held its breath. Somewhere, water met flame in a hiss.

Louve's talons flexed, carving grooves into bedrock. "Come home, daughter," she rasped. "Before I have to burn it out of you."

The word mother hung between you like a shard of glass—beautiful, lethal, cutting your throat from the inside as you spoke it. Her scent flooded your nostrils: charred sage and clotting blood, nothing like the lavender oil she'd once rubbed into your skinned knees. The cave's walls seemed to pulse, stalactites fang-like in the gloom, as Louve tilted her ravaged head. Her confirmation struck like a talon to the ribs. Yes.

She moved then, a fluid ripple of corrupted grace, claws tick-tick-ticking against the stone. The ragged cloak of her feathers brushed your cheek—cold, despite the feverish heat rolling off her body. You flinched. Her pupils dilated at the reaction, a low, guttural keen rattling her throat. "Y/N," she crooned, the name warped by malice and mourning. "My clever girl. My greatest mistake."

Her tail lashed, cracking the air like a whip. "You lick their boots. Let them leash you. Do you even remember the hunt?" Spittle struck your face as she leaned in, her breath reeking of gangrenous meat. "The taste of elk heart, still steaming? The song we sang when the pack feasted?"

You remembered. Oh, you remembered. Nights curled in the hollow of her feathered flank, her voice a low thunder purr as she recited the old truths: Claws do not apologize for tearing. Teeth do not bargain with prey. But you'd also learned other songs since—campfire harmonies, a hunter's boy teaching you guitar chords, his calloused hands guiding yours until the strings bit your fingertips.

"They're not what you think—"

"We are Dakota raptors!" Her roar shook dust from the ceiling, a primal sound that stripped the cave to its bones. "Not groveling komodos hissing in the mud! We ruled the red valleys! Tore T. rex*'s throats out for sport!"* A talon jabbed at your chest, pinning you against the wall. "And you... you gamble our glory for pet*-status? For* scraps*?"*

Geto moved faster than his bulk should allow. One moment he was a shadow; the next, his forearm blocked Louve's killing strike, her claw buried to the knuckle in his muscle. Blood—thick and copper-sweet—drenched his sleeve, but his voice stayed glacial. "Enough. You're not a monster anymore.**"

Louve froze. The words were a blade twisted in a wound you hadn't seen: the stitch across Geto's brow pulsed black, tendrils of cursed ink snaking toward his temple. You'd heard rumors. A former enforcer, they said. A man who'd once carved villages to the bone before something (or someone) clawed the beast out of him.

"You don't know what I am," Louve whispered, the first crack in her fury. Her claw slid free of Geto's flesh with a sickening shluck. "What they made me. What she makes me."

For a heartbeat, the madness cleared. You saw her—truly saw her. The way her left wing hung crippled, snapped mid-ulna and healed wrong. The scar where a human collar had chewed into her throat. The trembling, almost human, curve of her lips as she stared at your face—searching, perhaps, for the hatchling who'd once nuzzled her scars without flinching.

Geto pressed a hand to his bleeding arm, unfazed. "She's still your daughter. Still yours*. That's why it hurts."*

Louve recoiled as if struck. The cave filled with the sound of her ragged breaths, the drip of Geto's blood on stone, and the terrible silence where your childhood memories used to live.

"Come home," she said at last, voice crumbling like ash. "Before the human rot takes root. Before I... can't save you."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. The guitar boy's laugh echoed in your skull, tangled with the memory of Louve teaching you to disembowel a buck—"Quick, little ember. Mercy is a lie predators tell themselves."

Some choices scorch the soul no matter which way you turn.