Normally, Seren loved the dim quiet of the forest; to her, it may as well be her second home. For as long as she could remember, she spent her afternoons amongst the trees, letting herself trek deeper and deeper into the shady treetops, testing her own apparent inability to get lost. Her parents, they had been worried at first, afraid that one day she'd overstep her own boundaries, but there had never been a day when Seren didn't know what she was doing.
Even now, she muttered quick calculations under her breath, using her fingers only occasionally for tricky geometry, while scribbling a sketch of the area out on her pad of parchment. The paper was dusty – if she let her fingers glide across the page, a pasty residue would slide off on her tips of her digits – but it was sturdy, reliable, paper utilized by cartographers by herself. The scrap of lead she held between her fingers was whittling down to a stump by now, but she was halfway there, nearly done carving out a map of this area. If she could hold out just a little longer...
The ice staff was strapped by her side, held there by a belt looped around her skirt. She hoped it served as a warning to any wild animals lurking in the forest, that she was not just some girl who could not defend herself, but something told her that if something wanted to attack her, it would. Still, it made her feel more comfortable, even if the staff did nothing but make her aura feel colder. Every so often, Seren would lift her head, curious, looking left and right – never seeing anything suspicious, no, but she couldn't help but feel like someone, or something, was watching her. It gave her the chills, like bugs were crawling under her skin, but there was nothing she could do about it, was there?
Suddenly, she stopped – unable to shake that eerie feeling. "Hello?" she called into the forest, her lone voice echoing off the trees, unanswered. Of course no one would answer her – if someone was following her, why would they answer back? She shook her head at her own stupidity, but she had hoped – prayed – that maybe the person she felt in this forest alongside her was just a simple traveler or something, someone shy who happened to be going her way, whose presence she could feel but not see. Either that, or she'd have to believe that it was something more sinister – and she'd rather leave her project unfinished (an abhorrent thought) than believe that.
But she knew something was here. It was something she felt, even though she couldn't confirm it with her own eyes – but such a belief was out of character for her. How could she be sure, if she couldn't even see this so-called mysterious figure? Perhaps she was just nervous, even if that was out of character for her as well. There was just something about today, something about this forest that set her on edge.
"Get a grip, Seren," she told herself, and decided maybe she needed to sit down, to relax. She knelt down near the lake, her legs tucked underneath her so that her skirt wouldn't be ruffled out of place, and looked out over it, back turned toward the woods, trying to clear her mind with soothing equations.
She had walked around this lake, taking its measurements – now to figure out how large it was. Seren muttered math under her breath, sketching out more details onto her parchment, that small bit of lead whittling away. Math, to her, muttered while ciphering, was more soothing than anything else – tangible with truth, it grounded her in reality, let her slip into peace, unaware of her surroundings.