It began with birds scattering.

  Hundreds of them. Their wings cut the sky in frantic spirals, dark shapes against a rising gray. They twisted and turned like leaves caught in a storm. Smoke clung to them, curling upward in streaks.

  Nethira dreamed she stood in a river.

  The water was cold, rushing past her ankles in a steady current. Leaves floated by, first green, then yellow, then their edges blackened as though touched by flame. She reached down to catch one. It crumbled between her fingers, soft as ash.

  She looked upstream.

  The forest beyond the banks stood silent, but she felt it screaming. The pulse of roots and wind was disturbed. It was like honey left too long in the sun, sweet turned sour.

  She turned, and the river carried her eyes further.

  A village stood at the bend where water met land. Wooden homes with thatched roofs. Narrow lanes lined with fences. People moved between them. They shouted. She could not hear the words. Then flame leapt between rooftops, climbing fast, devouring wood.

  Figures swarmed in the firelight.

  Not wolves. Not bears. Too upright, too deliberate. Scaled bodies, thin but strong, with eyes like coals and teeth catching the light. They struck with blades that glinted black. People fought back. People fled.

  One man braced his body against a door, trying to keep something out. His muscles shook with effort. Behind him, a child cried.

  A woman ran across a lane carrying a bundle. She fell. The bundle rolled from her arms, small legs kicking. She reached, calling out, but a scaled figure blocked her path. Its eyes gleamed red.

  Nethira wanted to move. She could not.

  The river kept her there, cold around her legs as the scene played out. Splinters floated past her. A child’s carved horse. A cloth doll. A strip of linen, dark with blood.

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  The fire reached the shore. Embers fell into the current, hissing. Boats pushed off from the dock, half-full, crowded with faces pale with fear. Oars dipped, too slow.

  Among them, she glimpsed a boy with dark hair. His mouth moved, shouting past the shore, calling to a woman. She could not hear him. Another voice cried out a name. Maruzan? Or Velthur? The sound was torn from her before she could be sure.

  Then silence.

  The water stilled.

  Smoke reversed its climb, slipping back into the sky like breath drawn in. Embers rose instead of falling, drifting upward until they became stars once more. The flames vanished. The houses stood whole again. The figures disappeared as though they had never been.

  She blinked.

  She was no longer in the river. She lay beneath a great cedar, its roots curved around her like arms. Moss cushioned her back. Morning light filtered through the leaves above, soft and golden. Birds sang. The wind stirred gently through the grove, cool and clean.

  Nothing burned here.

  Nethira sat up slowly. Her fingers dug into the earth. Her breath trembled, though not from fear. Dryads did not fear as other mortals did. They had seen storms flatten forests, seen winters starve deer to bone. But this was different. This was not the natural turning of seasons.

  This was sorrow.

  The vision slipped even as she tried to hold it. She remembered the village, but not its name. She remembered the rooftops burning, but not where they stood. She remembered a boy’s face but not his voice.

  Was it real? Was it memory? Was it a warning?

  Why had it come to her?

  Dryads did not dream like this, not unless the roots of the world whispered. Dreams for them were slow things, deep and green, filled with rain and growth. Not fire. Not red eyes. Not screams without sound.

  She touched the cedar’s trunk, pressing her palm against its bark. It stood quietly. Its life hummed steady beneath her hand. Unknowing. Unmoved.

  But she had felt something.

  Something had reached across distance and soil and stone to show her what she had seen. Something had bled into the earth itself.

  She closed her eyes, listening.

  Only the wind answered. Only the usual murmur of leaves and the scurrying of a squirrel on high branches.

  Still, she could not shake the feeling that far beyond this grove, something sacred had cracked. Something old.

  She lowered her hand and looked to the sky through the green-laced branches. The morning seemed no different than any other.

  But in her chest, a quiet certainty took root.

  The world was changing.

  And she wondered, as she sat there alone in the moss, if perhaps the trees themselves were crying out to her.