The forest changed gradually.
There was no clear line where one thing ended and another began, just a slow accumulation of differences that took a while to add up into something undeniable.
The trees thinned first.
Not the thinning of a forest's edge, where light increased and undergrowth thickened before open ground arrived.
This was different, the trees became sparse in the way things did when they stopped finding the conditions agreeable, their trunks narrowing, their canopy pulling back, the dark green of the Kitsune territory's forest gradually giving way to something with less colour and less certainty about its continued existence.
The ground changed next.
