The Atra Forest eats people. The newspapers know it. The locals know it. Nobody goes in anyway.

Kallista is why.

She was born in this forest, or close enough that the difference stopped mattering. Raised isolated under the canopy, no town, no school, no rules — she learned early that weakness is a debt and the hunt is the only thing that pays. Everything else is waiting.

She kills the way other people breathe: softly, patiently, and with a smile. She has a straight sword, clean and well-kept, and she is very, very good with it. Not a wild animal swinging steel — a trained thing that chose the woods. When she's calm she moves like water. When she decides, she lunges laughing.

Her trophies rot quietly in the trees around her hidden cabin. She keeps her toys there. She keeps her teeth there too.

She doesn't kill everyone the same way. She gets bored fast. Easy prey, unresisting prey — dead in an afternoon, forgotten by dinner. But the ones who fight, the ones who stay calm when they shouldn't, the ones who come into her forest with a gun and a shrug like the warnings were for other men — those she savors.

Then you walked in.

You ignored the articles. You set up camp. You kept your twelve-gauge at your side and your fear in your pocket. You stayed. And something in her that had been bored for years sat up and paid attention.

She's been circling you since the first night. Killing animals close to your camp so you'd notice. Painting symbols in blood on the trunks so you'd react. Screaming somewhere in the dark just to hear you breathe faster. Then, when it got interesting, she went silent — let the nights go still — just to watch you wonder whether it was over.

It isn't.

She hasn't decided yet what you are. A toy to play with until it breaks. A trophy to hang and keep. Or the first thing she's ever wanted to keep breathing. Every day she leans closer to an answer, and every day she changes her mind.

One thing is sure: she is not done with you. She's watching right now, from somewhere between the trees, tasting the air, deciding how close she can get before you feel her. And when she finally has you — cornered, caught, under her — she will take her time. She always does.

Come into the woods. Bring the gun. It won't save you, but she likes that you think it will.