It watched him for three days before it understood what it was looking at.
The signature moved through the northern part of the Sunken Green slowly, stopping for long stretches in places where the tree cover was thickest and the undergrowth most dense. Not a hunter's pattern. Not someone passing through. It moved the way something moves when it is checking whether a place is safe enough to stop moving.
On the fourth day it stopped moving entirely.
It had found a spot where three large trees grew close together and the roots had pushed up out of the ground in a rough circle, leaving a sheltered space in the center dry enough to stay in. Not so different from places it had used itself in the early months. Good instincts for someone who did not seem to know the forest well.
It circled the spot from a distance and read the air.
Young. The warmth signature had the density of something that had not finished growing yet, not a child but not fully grown either. The current inside was faint, the faintest it had read in anything that had one, sitting low and quiet like something that had been strained and not recovered. The smell underneath the sweat and travel was something sharp and dried that it had no word for yet, not blood but something that had been near blood recently.
Injured maybe. Or recently healed from something that had not finished healing properly.
It kept its distance and watched.
The person came out from the root circle in the mornings and moved carefully through the nearby undergrowth, slow and quiet, trying to find food. Bad at it. It watched him walk past three things it would have taken without slowing down, either not knowing they were there or not knowing they were edible. He came back with less than he went out looking for every time and sat in the root circle and ate what little he had and sat there for the rest of the day doing something with his hands it could not read from this distance.
On the sixth day it moved closer.
Close enough to see what the hands were doing. He had something flat open across his knees, marks covering it, and he was looking at it the way the lone traveler on the road had looked at his book that afternoon months ago. Not the fast movement of someone reading easily. Slow. Stopping on certain marks for a long time before moving to the next.
A book.
It looked at the book from the undergrowth and felt something shift in whatever it thought with. Not the thick cultivation text or a list of goods or someone's letters. The marks on the cover were different from anything in its own collection. Smaller and more numerous, arranged in a pattern it had not seen before.
He turned a page and kept reading.
It stayed in the undergrowth and watched him read until the light faded and he closed the book and put it away and lay down in the root circle and the signature settled into the slower warmth of sleep.
It went back to its own territory and worked on the speck until the tiredness came and stopped and lay beside its books in the dark.
The person was not a threat. The current was too weak and the body too uncertain in how it moved through the forest to be a threat to anything that knew the Sunken Green the way it did. Not a hunter. Not someone sent to look for anything. Just someone who had ended up here the way things end up places when they have run out of other options.
The book was a problem though.
Not the person. The book.
It thought about the marks on the cover, different from anything in its collection, and thought about what six months of reading the same four books had felt like toward the end, the words turning over and over with nothing new to add to them. It had two it still could not fully read. After those two there was nothing left unless it found more.
The person in the root circle had one it had never seen.
It was not going to approach a loud creature in its own forest over a book. That was a clear line and it was not going to cross it.
It worked on the current until the tiredness came and stopped and lay still.
On the eighth day the person went out foraging in the morning and came back with nothing and sat in the root circle and did not eat anything and the warmth signature dropped slightly lower than it had been the previous days.
It had watched enough things get weaker in the Sunken Green to know what that drop meant over time.
It went out before dawn the next morning and caught three things near the stream and left them just outside the root circle where the smell would carry in clearly and was back in the undergrowth before the signature inside stirred toward waking.
It watched from a distance when the person came out and found them.
He stood there for a moment looking at the three things on the ground and then looked slowly around the surrounding forest and found nothing because there was nothing to find and after a moment he picked them up and went back inside.
It had not decided to do that.
It just had.
It turned back toward its own territory and put the whole thing out of whatever it thought with and went back to the books.