He was drawn away from his own wandering at the recognition and the unnatural silence. There were different kinds of quiet in the world, but this was not the hush of snowfall or the stillness before a storm, this was absence. A strange hollowing of the forest where all life seemed to understand that something had stepped among them that did not entirely belong.

Darkness folded around him as he slipped between the pines paws finding the earth with practiced precision. He had heard Rhaegal ahead some time ago and had been following the faint disturbance of his brother's passage. Familiar color assembled immediately within Achlys's mind, painting the shape of his brother somewhere ahead. He slipped soundlessly between the pines until something else began bleeding into that constructed world.

The scent was difficult to understand, death was there but it was not the ordinary decay of something left too long. This was deeper, threaded through something that was in fact — alive.

....Achlys? Rhaegals voice confirmed exactly where he was.

Achlys emerged from between the trees, coming alongside Rhaegal before settling subtly between the boy and whatever stood before him. Usually scent gave him certainty. Shapes formed naturally from the information surrounding him, allowing Achlys to understand where something began and ended, how it stood, where it moved.

This creature was different and its outline assembled strangely within his mind. There were gaps where there shouldn't have been, places where the scent of flesh abruptly ended and old bone began. Yet within the center of it... life, blood, a beating heart.

Achlys's head tilted and something stirred within him. Recognition came without memory, crawling from somewhere far deeper than this life. While he didn't know this creature directly, he knew things like it, or had. Death had surrounded Achlys for longer than his memories could account for. He had served it, walked beside it, delivered others into its keeping again and again and again.

Some things belonged to the living, some belonged to the dead. And some lingered strangely between, Don't run, the words came quietly, directed toward Rhaegal without Achlys turning toward him. There was none of the horror in him that ought to have existed. If anything the creature had awakened a calm, something ancient inside him seemed to settle into place comfortable within the presence of something that should have been unnatural.