The Coven's central settlement was not what Arvella expected.
She had imagined — vaguely, in the way that people imagine places they've never seen, filling in the gaps with assumption and projection — something like Silver Fang's compound. Buildings. Structures. The architectural evidence of a community organized around a central point. Walls and roofs and the particular geometry of a society that had decided where to put things and then put them there.
The Southern Coven had done something different. They hadn't built on the forest. They had built with it.
The settlement existed in the trees — not treehouses, not the elevated platforms and rope bridges of children's adventure stories, but a seamless integration of living wood and human habitation that blurred the line between architect
