Gyrfalcon's Keep That I could be looking for

She did not appeal to him in the slightest, and he watched her as if bearing witness to the birds again. Perhaps she could feel his eyes upon her and that was why she held a staccato pace? Or maybe it was something else - something more primal that he should have been privy to, should have felt, or understood - and yet he was left in the dark, so to speak, and could only observe. That was how the world worked for Tetsubo though. How it would always work. Observation was all he could do, because surely feeling or responding was too much. Unless he was faced with battle, which the boy was thoroughly prepared for. Life had sculpted him in to a machine with one purpose and cast aside the rest of him, and so he watched.

There was something about her — he could not pinpoint exactly what — but the boy could not take his eyes off of her. Unlike the falcons, her movements were clunky and erratic. She was hardly soundless, and so he easily tracked her despite the ebb and flow of darkness, the pinpricks of light, the shifting of the branches and swaying leaves. The woman did not call out. so he assumed easily enough that she was oblivious to him. Tetsubo was not trained in stealth, he did not know how to be coy or sly or to sneak like a rat through the underbrush; to him, this marked the woman as weak, in the way that an unsuspecting deer might be weak. He did not hold it against her because he had no opinion on the matter, and his brain made the connections without fully informing him.

She just was, and he watched.

Gradually her pace outmatched him, because he was hardly moving at all, and Tetsubo began to pace after her with lethargic strides. His expertly placed steps kept him moderately well guarded against her perception, although that was more of a fluke than anything, and he followed after her for no other reason than to study her, or so he thought. The pull of any instinctual magic was lost upon the boy as he was ignorant of how things worked in that way, and utterly asexual in his desires, so far as he was aware. It was not his purpose to mingle, or breed, or spread the influence of the nether, or so his mentor had taught him; he was a weapon, and thus far there was nothing for him to bludgeon.