Shadowglade Forest is older than Krypton Kingdom. The kingdom built itself around the forest the way a stream builds itself around an old stone — not because it loved the stone, but because the stone had refused, for too long, to move. By the time of Lieutenant Ryder's first command, the forest was patrolled but not understood. Its paths had been walked. Its rivers had been mapped. None of the maps explained why.
Ryder's platoon entered it under orders to establish stability, and the forest did not welcome them and did not reject them. It registered them, the way a still pond registers a stone, and returned to whatever surface had been there before. Then the wildlife began to thin in measurable bands. Birds died without cause. Footprints appeared inside the perimeter that began and ended in the middle of nowhere, with weight distributed as if a body were learning, very recently, how to walk.
The forest was not hostile in any way Ryder's training had prepared him for. It was not hunting. It was conducting a survey of the available material, and it had decided that men, animals, and water were three categories of material it was permitted to touch. It studied. It measured. When Raven joined the work and ordered the column deeper, the forest folded a clearing into itself that should not have existed, and a borrowed half-smile met them at its edge, and the clearing collapsed into trees that had been there all along.
Shadowglade was Drexel's first invisible front line. It is still working. A containment force holds it now while the chronicle moves elsewhere.