They spent the hours after the encounter arguing quietly about what came next.
Nyx wanted to wait.
"If they meant to kill us, they had the chance," she said. "They left deliberately. That means another approach is possible."
Isole wanted to place something visible at the edge of the trees—a gesture of peaceful intent, simple enough to survive the absence of a shared language.
Mara dismantled that idea with characteristic efficiency.
"We don't know what peace looks like to them," she said. "For all we know, whatever we leave is an insult, a territorial claim, or an invitation to come collect the rest of us."
"It would show we're trying," Isole said.
"It would show that we did something. Those are not always the same."
More importantly, Mara pointed out, these people had likely never needed a word for peaceful intentions from anyone arriving through an Imperial-adjacent crossing method.
Nobody had an answer to that.
