Neverwinter Forest Spare me your remedial incantations.

A day or two after this thread

The forest was spacious on the outskirts, and dense the further he strolled through it, mostly with saplings. The sound of crunching leaves gave way to silence as the earthen floor became littered with pine needles. It smelled wonderful; Reyes could detect traces of sea salt among the pines that indicated he was on the right track.

Reyes paused by a weathered stump for a bathroom break, and as he scraped the earth to cover the mark with some of those prolific needles, he found something he hadn't expected: a partially buried jaw bone.

It was small; the teeth set within the bone were flat rather than pointed. As Reyes drew it from the loam he tossed it forward and then chased after it, doing this a few times, as if he were a boy playing catch with himself or something.

Maybe it would be worth it to bring a gift to his intended meeting - or back home, to Teya. As he scooped it up one more time, he carried it with him through the trees.

There was only six of them in these woods. Mother. Inkalorë. Vaïre. Wilwarin.
Mother’s friend. 
He preferred not to think of him.
Then Lómion himself.
Six faces he knew well. This man was not among them.
The boy studied him from the cover of foliage. He was so.. hypnotized by him. The fringes of his scarlet fur glowed in the sunlight that trickled through the trees. It reminded him of the fox pelt he wanted oh so badly. He could not look away.
Wherever the man went, Lómion quietly followed behind.

Once he'd decided what to do with the bone (opting to hide it for now, so that he could come back this way and collect it later), Reyes set about finding a good place to stash it. His meeting wasn't for another day or two, if that, and so he had time to waste.

When he came upon a dried up husk of a stump - something that towered over him by a few inches in height - he knew he'd found the best hiding spot. He wedged his head inside the crevasse of the splitting walls and looked for any gaps in the woodwork, where he began to dig. After scraping away some of the earth that had been trapped within the hollow of it, he placed the bone and covered it over.

There was nothign altogether remarkable about this hiding place. Reyes didn't want to forget where he'd stashed the bone, though, and when he removed himself from the depths of the stump, he made sure to scrape the ground and mark it in such a way that he could find it again.

Through it all, oblivious to his present company.

The man made his way to a stump, worn down by years of bartering unknown to the boy. He began to dig next to it, and then placed his claimed bone into the hole he made. All the while Lómion watched silently from afar. His ear flicked about, his nose twitched, but he did not move beside that. And the man was none the wiser to his presence.
After months of quiet observation perhaps the boy had grown a natural to it. 
Part of him wishes to stay hidden and continue to watch for as long as he could. But he’d be noticed eventually, so he thought, and would rather avoid that awkward situation.
He could turn now and leave the stranger to his business, but another part of him (an extension of his urge to stay hidden) wanted to know why he roamed around here in the first place.
And so Lómion steps out from his cover. 
I haven’t seen you before. The awkwardness he had attempted to avoid rushes into his nerves. Um, are you one of mother’s friends?

There was a voice behind him. The sound alone made his hackles rise and as Reyes twisted to stare towards the stranger, he realized it was only a child. He felt like he was grimacing; he was tense but not quite as aggressive about being caught here unawares as he had been in the past.

(Caracal's little body hitting the dirt, flashes in his mind for an instant.)

—are you one of mother's friends? The boy had a soft voice, and the way he looked down and away from Reyes in that instant helped to ease some of the shock that the moment had wrought out of him.

I—... I didn't know anyone was living here. Whose your mom, kid?