The path did not appear on any map Vane had seen.
Ashe walked it from memory, the specific muscle memory of someone who had been walking it since childhood, her feet finding the route through the forest's undergrowth without her eyes needing to confirm it. The trees here were older than the ones around the compound. Wider through the trunk, the canopy higher, the light coming through in the specific long bars of a forest that had been a forest for a very long time without interruption.
Mara walked beside him. Denro walked beside Mara, hands in his pockets, reading the forest with the open attention of someone who had grown up at the base of a mountain that produced the world's strongest cultivators and had therefore developed a specific tolerance for unusual environments that most thirteen-year-olds did not have.
He ran the Usurper passively.
