Lares scratched at the small leaf sprouting from behind his ear. Two months as a practicing Sapling in this country and some of the physical changes still didn't feel wholely normal. Thankfully, the process came at a smooth pace, giving all saplings ample time to get used to their metamorphosis. Between that, and the regular exercises they partook in, most all saplings were very adept at moving around the forests. As a matter of fact, this was precisely what he was trying to prove today.
Crouched within a large bush in the underbrush near the eastern side of Fauna's Cradle, Lares closed his eyes, touched the root of the plant, and Listened. As a young sapling, he was still getting used to this power, and the feelings he got were fuzzy, but... yes. It was definitely there. The faint sense of two pairs of bare feet, sprinting across the forest floor.

"Well? Anything?" a young female voice whispered down at him.
He slowly opened his eyes, letting the sense of the forest recede from his mind, then glanced up at Denna. Her chestnut brown hair cascaded over her soft facial features and stopped just past her shoulders. She was standing right over him, keeping a lookout of their surrounding, and he could just slightly smell her. The faint scent of wild flowers and dewy moss that most all female saplings had.
"Uuu...". The low and barely audible sound left his slips before he even noticed it.
"What?" she asked.
"I said 'Not far'. They're maybe 200 meters ahead of us, heading North, fast." He replied.
"Then we better get moving!" she said, quickly straightening, then dashing off in the direction he had indicated.
"Wait up!" Lares shouted after her, stumbling into a run from his crouched position.

With a quick sprint he caught up to her, then matched her pace.
"Do you think they're making a run for it? This far from their target?" he panted.
"They don't have to make it all the way to the northern elder tree right now" Denna huffed, "they just have to put distance between us and them and they'll eventually win this Hunt".
The Hunt. That's all that mattered right now.

Despite its somewhat aggressive name, the Hunt was just another Sapling game. Two teams, two people on each team. The prey team's goal was to get to a target elder tree; the hunter's team needed to track and tag both member's of the prey team simultaneously to win. Denna and Lares had been on this Hunt for two days now, and Lares was set on winning his first Hunt as hunter. Fauna-willing, it would finally cement his standing as a sapling in his clan.
And Denna was watching.

Lost in thought and concentration in weaving through the forest, it took Lares a second to realize he was running alone. His bare feet skidded on the soft soil of the forest floor as he stopped and looked back to see what had happened to Denna. She was only a few paces back, standing stock still, but her chest still heaving from running non-stop for the last 30 minutes.

"Denna?" Lares called out, taking a step toward her. "What's wrong-". He cut off abruptly as he read her face. Her eyes were wide, looking up into the tall canopies behind him.
Lares quickly turned to see what she was staring at.
Darkness.
A huge wall of it. As deep as the murk of a swamp at night.

He shook himself. That wasn't entirely true. His sense of the forest told him it was just more trees ahead, and once he started thinking more logically, his eyes adjusted.
They had come upon a section of the forest where the trees had grown taller than those behind him. Much taller. While the average height of the deeper forests they had been running through was something like 45 or 50 meters to the peaks of the trees, these in front of him were doubling that height, at the least. And more strikingly so, their appearance was sudden, lacking any other trees of intermediate height to show some sort of gradient. These majestic monoliths stood tall and contrasting, blocking so much sunlight from on high that seeing into their depths had given him the impression of looking into some sort of watery depths. They stood like sentries. As if forming a border. Or a boundary.

"Fauna's Cradle..." Denna slowly whispered from behind him.