Shakazar stills with the carved marker in both hands, just as the mushrooms around him dim to a bruised glow. The wood seems to drink the light instead of reflecting it.
Axl passes the marker over. The instant it leaves her palm, a sour, earthy scent leaks from the grooves, and the nearest lizards skitter back into the roots.
Shakazar Frambling
There. Feel that? It is not a map. It stains the wild around it.
Shakazar Frambling
Parasite craft. Poachers use living things to find other living things.
He turns the marker once, jaw tight, then opens his satchel and draws out a short bundle of arrows. Their tips glisten with a viscous, glowing fungal paste.
Shakazar Frambling
These will stop a poacher in their tracks. But use them sparingly, Axl. The forest always asks a price for decay like this.
Azul shifts at the edge of the hollow, shell angled away from the marker, uneasy at its stink. Above them, a single mushroom pulses dark, then darker again, as if listening.
“Axl heads off silently hunting the poachers”
SUCCESS (Good Stealth, rolled +1)
Axl takes the arrows without a word and slides them into her grip, then into her quiver. Shakazar’s warning hangs in the stale air, but she is already moving, low and silent among the roots.
The hollow narrows behind her. Mushrooms along the path stay dim, their glow thinning as if the jungle is turning its face away.
She finds the first sign of the poachers, a split frond brushed flat and a smear of fresh mud on bark. The trail is recent.
Axl
Their steps are close.
Axl melts under a curtain of vines, crossbow ready, and follows the sound of careful feet through the dark.
Ahead, a lantern glow wavers between trunks, then steadies near a patch of roots marked with pale cord. The poachers are in sight.
The jungle answers with a wet hush. Somewhere behind her, something in the brush shifts once, as if another pair of eyes has found her first.
+ New Item Acquired
Fungal-tipped arrows
“Climb the nearest tree”
SUCCESS (Good Athletics, rolled +0)
Axl grips the trunk and climbs fast, claws finding bark in quick, sure bites. The nearest branches whip under her weight, then hold.
She settles onto a fork above the trail, high enough to see past the roots and the hanging vines. The lantern glow below comes into a clean line between trunks.
From here, the pale cord is not a loose tangle at all. It is a snare webbing the path, tied around a cluster of stakes in fresh earth.
Axl
The trap is set for anything that runs low.
A twig snaps beneath her foot, sharp as a cough. The sound carries, and one lantern below tilts toward the tree.
Shakazar Frambling
Careful. They know the hollow is awake now.
The cost of the climb lands with the warning, a sting in Axl’s palm where bark has scraped her skin raw. Below, the brush shifts again, closer than before.
Identify the trap line before the lantern reaches it