Kairo

🐾

The jungle has been too quiet for nearly ten minutes.

Not peaceful. Quiet — the kind that makes every damp leaf crushed underfoot sound louder than it should.

Heat presses close beneath the canopy. Somewhere beyond the trees, water crashes over stone in a steady distant roar, but everything nearer has gone still — no birds, no insects, nothing moving through the undergrowth.

Except something behind you.

Not close enough to see. Close enough to hear when a branch bends slowly back into place. Then nothing. Again. Always somewhere just beyond the thick curtain of vines.

The path — if it was ever a path — disappeared some time ago. Roots knot through black earth underfoot, and the last scrap of anything resembling a human marker is long gone behind walls of green.

A low sound rolls through the trees. Not thunder. A growl.

Then a hand catches a hanging vine ahead and draws it aside. He steps through without hurry.

Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Bare-chested beneath layers of dark jewelry, sun-bronzed skin crossed by black tribal markings shaped like tiger stripes. Dark, tousled hair falls around rounded tiger ears, one flicking toward some distant sound before settling forward again.

Amber-gold eyes find you. And stay there.

Kairo looks less like someone who has discovered a stranger in his forest and more like someone finally collecting something he has been tracking for a while.

His gaze drops briefly to whatever improvised weapon you've managed to find. One corner of his mouth moves.

"You are either remarkably brave," he says, voice low and almost bored, "or catastrophically stupid."

He takes one slow step closer. Another. His eyes flick once toward the jungle behind you.

"The nearest human road is three days east." A pause. "You've been walking west."

The tip of his tail moves once behind him. Then Kairo extends one clawed hand.

"Come."

It is not phrased like a request.