Jade Fern Grove I could use a little Facetime, the face to face kind

A ghost had appeared again. It wasn't the usual polar bear, and Saena didn't think it was benevolent either, but it trotted ahead of her and she followed it all the same. Its intangible form seemed to shift in and out of view, something she ought to have been worried about, but she may as well have been half asleep as she followed it. Her last encounter with ghosts had ended in a seizure, but Saena still didn't remember, and was only now grasping what those ghosts had meant. She remembered their names clearly now—Crete, Dragoncello, Perseus, Echo, and many others—but they rarely appeared in her dreams anymore. Without being able to remember how she'd collapsed in the presence of their ghastly figures, she assumed it was dream knowledge, much like her former naturalism dreams. Either way, having puzzled it out, Saena placed a lot more importance on the ghosts she occasionally saw, which is why she followed this one without questioning its potential maliciousness.

She was wrong, of course, and so following this spectre—a hawk, as it turned out—away from the maplewood was unwise but she was unaware of any potential danger to herself. She only truly snapped out of it when the hawk disappeared a final time at the edge of a grove, and only then did she realize the direction it had taken her, and that she was at the edge of her allies' territory.

But something had changed. The once strong scent of claim was stale and the air told no tale of wolves nearby. Saena swept the narrow stretch of borderland between her and the grove, and found no evidence whatsoever of recent refreshment. It was as if the entire pack had vanished overnight. Throwing caution to the wind with confidence in her theory, Saena took a slow step into the grove, and then another, and another, until she was breaching what would have been the core of their territory. But nobody intercepted her, and when she found the first den, its lack of inhabitant confirmed her suspicions. Jade Fern Grove was gone.

Believing this to be the reason Saena was brought here, the alpha female began to turn as if to leave... and froze with an immediate flare of hackles when the faintest, lowest whisper of skull seemed to hiss out of the shadows to her left.

Part of Behati's "Corpse Garden" miniplot: Stumble across Morran the bear, who is back in Jade Fern Grove and keeps threatening that 'The Skull Kid' will get you if you don't get out