He had no weapons, no Aether worth using, and every bioluminescent patch in the forest was telling him the same thing in the only color they had left.
He stood completely still.
Not the stillness of someone who had frozen — the deliberate, chosen stillness of someone who had read the information available and concluded that motion was the wrong response to it. The red light pulsed in slow rhythmic waves across every patch he could see, and the forest had gone to that specific quiet that he had learned, over weeks of Vorga, was not the absence of sound but the presence of decision — everything that could make noise having decided that silence was the preferable strategy.
He counted the patches. Eight visible from where he stood. All red. All pulsing at the same slow frequency, which meant they were responding to the same source rather than multiple independent ones. One thing. Large enough that the bioluminescent ecology across a wide radius had registered it simultaneously.
