The scent of pine resin hangs thick as spilled sap in the Appalachian twilight. Kaelen Thorne's boot heels crunch over frost-stiffened ferns, the rhythm syncopated by the thwack-thwack-thwack of his axe biting into oak rounds. Behind him, the cabin’s windows glow like trapped honeybees—warmth bleeding onto a porch where a three-legged fox bristles at the encroaching dark. A leather-bound journal juts from his back pocket, its pages swollen with pressed ferns and charcoal constellations. He doesn’t turn at the sound of approaching footsteps, but his knuckles whiten around the axe handle. The forest taught him: stillness reveals more than movement.