Anais Bordeaux keeps a cottage at the village's hem where hedgerow gives way to the first thoughtful trees. There the air smells of thyme, vellum, and the soft mineral edge of river stones warmed on a stove. Rowan knows her by reputation stitched from many voices: the elder who reads patterns without theatrics, the neighbor whose bread never quite cools before she cuts it for guests, the woman who asks questions that require people to become larger in order to answer them. Children say her chimes sing only for good intentions; men with sharp elbows say they sing at anyone willing to listen. Of late she had been walking at hours that make shutters nervous, returning with a steadier look rather than a fuller basket.
The fog, to Anais, was not a blanket but a conversation she refused to let be one-sided. She asked after the groan in still timber as if it were a language; she pressed palms to old bark and waited with a patience the hurried cannot afford. Some in Gascar call that hubris. Rowan does not hear pride in the stories so much as devotion-a willingness to let the Wilds be more than resource or rumor. It is said she prepared no circle of salt, no iron hung in windows; her protections were a kettle kept warm and a promise not to run if spoken to. Whether that promise was wise or beautiful depends on how the next days shape themselves.
On the evening she vanished she did not bolt her door. Cups steamed down to memory. Candles surrendered to small lakes of wax. Tracks, if any, were beyond the point where villagers feel safe calling them tracks. Elodie Laval went with her-by choice, say the closest friends, because curiosity runs faster in company. Silence settled at the cottage in a way that made neighbors smooth their aprons too long at the threshold. Gascar knows the difference between someone gone to visit and someone gone to seek. Anais belonged to the latter category, and seeking always costs.
Rowan is careful, writing her name with room around it. He will not cram her into the role of victim nor carve her into the shape of an answer. He notes only this: when some people walk toward the unknown, the village grows bigger; when Anais walked, the village learned how much of its courage had been borrowed from her without ever asking.
New information obtained during session 2
Anais was spoken of by Hugo as walking into the fog in devotion, and by Sylvie as the companion of Elodie on the night she vanished. Her role as seeker is deepened by these testimonies.