The mouth of the den breathed cold air, and Achlys stood just outside of it. He wasn't pacing, or restless but present in the way a stone was. He'd positioned himself slightly off to one side where the shadows deepened and he'd been there long enough that the smaller critters had stopped noticing him. A sparrow had landed three feet from his forepaw, but he hadn't moved.

The young boy caught Fiora's scent before she had rounded the last bend, it was woodsmoke and something medicinal, herbs he didn't know the names of but recognized the shape of in his mind. There was pale green/gold the color of things that would mend.

Ebony crown would turn as she came into his range fully, those hollow sockets settling in her direction with the particular unhurried quality of someone who had never needed to blink. The meal grasped between her jaws was difficult to miss, the blood smell arriving well ahead of her and he heard the muffled boof around the hoof.

The small ones were sleeping, last I checked he offered in a low tone. But that might rouse them his expression was its usual arrangement, difficult to read and unsettling at best. But there wasn't anything hostile as he stepped a fraction away from the dens edge, which for him was more or less a welcoming gesture.