The transition was as abrupt as a blade-fall. One moment, they were slogging through the endless, sucking embrace of the fen, the world a narrow palette of grey, brown, and sickly green. The next, the spongy peat gave way to firm, gritty soil, then to lichen-crusted rock. The mist thinned, shredded by a faint, cold wind that carried a new scent—not the fecund decay of the bog, but the dry, ancient reek of dust, stone, and something else. Something meaty, old, and profoundly dead.
They had reached the foothills.
But these were not the gentle, forested slopes that bordered the Whispering Weald. These were broken, jagged things, like the crumbling teeth of a buried giant. Sheer rock faces rose in fractured shelves, riddled with dark, yawning mouths—caves that gaped like screams in the stone. The air here was clearer, but it carried the chill of deep shadows and the whispered promise of bones.
Briar halted, his ears flat against his skull, his nostrils flaring as he sampled the new, terrifying atmosphere. A low, anxious rumble vibrated in his chest. He planted his hooves, refusing to take another step forward without clear command. His instinct was screaming.
Kestrel stopped beside him, her own sharp senses on high alert. "He's right to be afraid," she murmured, her eyes scanning the labyrinth of rock and shadow. "This is a larder. Not a hunting ground. A larder."
Arrion saw it then. What he had taken for scattered white stones amidst the scree were not stones. They were bones. Sun-bleached, wind-scoured, and shattered. They lay in drifts and piles, some half-buried, others arranged in unintentional patterns by scavengers and time. He saw the broad, curved plates of what might have been a giant fen-turtle. The long, slender ribs of something serpentine. The massive, moss-grown skull of a horned creature, its eye sockets dark voids larger than his head. The ground was a mosaic of death.
He turned and looked back the way they had come. At the very edge of the fen, where the bog met the rock, shadows moved. Lean, six-legged shapes with glowing green eyes. The Fen-Stalker pack, or another like it. They paced the border, their growls faint but carrying on the wind. They sniffed the air, their heads lowered in unmistakable wariness. They looked at the bone-strewn hills, then at the three intruders who had crossed into them. They did not follow. A line, invisible but deeply understood, had been drawn. This ground was not their domain. It belonged to something that made even the apex predators of the fen think twice.
That realization was more chilling than any number of glowing eyes.
"We're in its territory now," Kestrel said, stating the obvious with grim finality. "Whatever it is, the things behind us would rather go hungry than tangle with it."
Arrion nodded, his own unease a cold knot in his gut. The Verdant King's thorn pulsed, not with warmth now, but with a low, warning thrum, like a plucked bowstring. This place was anathema to its essence—a realm not of growth or even clean decay, but of static,accumulated ending.
They had to move. Staying on the border was to be caught between the unwilling Stalkers and whatever lurked in the caves. But moving blindly into the labyrinth was suicide.
His eyes fell on the bones again. Not as grave markers, but as material. His quiver was still well-stocked, but arrows were for precision and distance. He had a feeling that whatever lived here might require something with more heft, something to keep it at bay. Among the skeletal litter, he saw long, straight shafts—the leg bones of massive creatures, the ribs of great beasts. Some were as thick as his wrist and twice his height.
"Keep watch," he told Kestrel, handing her Briar's reins. He strode to the nearest pile, his boots crunching on brittle fragments. He selected a femur that was relatively clean, straight, and about nine feet long. It was incredibly dense, heavier than a comparable timber. He tested its balance. It was crude, but it had a deadly heft. He found another, slightly shorter and sharper where it had snapped.
Using a length of rope from his pack and strips cut from the boar hide, he set to work. He bound the strips around one end of each bone to create a rough grip. He used his belt axe to sharpen the other end, grinding the ancient calcium against the rock until it formed a wicked, splintering point. They were not elegant. They were brutal, Neolithic things—bone javelins. But in his hands, with his strength behind them, they would hit with the force of a ballista shot.
Kestrel watched him, her expression unreadable. "Planning to spear a mountain?"
"Planning not to be eaten by one," he grunted, finishing the lashings on the second javelin. He hefted them. The weight was good. They would fly true for a short distance, and in close quarters, they could be used as stout, crushing clubs. He slung them across his back alongside his bow.
Thus armed, they ventured deeper. Briar's skittishness forced them to move slowly, picking a path through the scree and bone-fields that seemed to lead vaguely east and slightly upward, away from the largest cave mouths. The silence was profound. No insects buzzed. No birds sang, not even the death-birds from the fen dared this air. The only sound was the crunch of their footsteps, the clatter of dislodged stones, and the wind sighing through the canyon-like passages between the rocks.
They had gone perhaps half a mile when they found the first intact skeleton.
It was not scattered. It was articulated, laid out as if in repose, but on a scale that stole the breath. It was a draconic form, but lesser than a True Dragon—a wingless, serpentine drake. Its bones were the colour of old ivory, and it was immense, longer than the longhouse in Hearthstone. Its skull, the size of a wagon, was tilted to the side, and in the center of its forehead was a single, perfect hole, as if pierced by a lance of incredible force. The bones around the hole were not shattered, but sliced, as if by a blade of impossible sharpness.
Arrion stopped, a cold finger tracing down his spine. This was not a creature that had died of age or in a fall. This had been killed. And recently enough that scavengers hadn't reduced it to scatter.
Kestrel sucked in a sharp breath, pointing wordlessly. A few yards beyond the drake's skeleton, partially buried in a slump of gravel, was another. This one was humanoid, or had been. A giant of a figure, clad in the rusted remnants of plate armour so thick it could only have been worn by a Goliath or a particularly massive breed of Ogre. The breastplate was caved inwards, not by a blow, but as if something had crushed it in a single, all-encompassing grip. The helmet was missing, and the skull within was gone.
The story was written in the dust and the dry air. This was a killing ground. A place where things that thought themselves powerful came to die.
A low, grating sound echoed through the canyons. Not a growl, not a roar. It was the sound of something very large dragging itself over stone. It came from above and to their left, from the direction of a particularly vast cave mouth that yawned like a throat at the top of a steep scree slope.
Briar let out a panicked whinny and tried to bolt. Kestrel hauled on the reins with all her weight, barely holding him.
"Up there," she hissed. "It's waking up. Or it knows we're here."
Arrion's gaze swept the terrain. They were in a wide, bone-littered basin. The way back was blocked by the Stalkers. The way forward led past the drake's skeleton and up a narrowing defile. To their right was a sheer cliff. To their left, the slope leading up to the cave.
The dragging sound came again, closer now. He saw a shadow move in the depths of the cave mouth. Something long, grey, and segmented shifted into the light. It was a leg. A leg ending in a foot with three long, taloned toes that scratched grooves in the bedrock as it moved.
It was enough. He didn't need to see the rest.
"Run!" he barked. "The defile! Go!"
He didn't wait. He turned, planted his feet in the scree, and drew one of the bone javelins. He wasn't trying to kill. He was trying to buy seconds. He focused, drawing on the same well of will he used for his thunderous strikes, and hurled the javelin not at the emerging creature, but at the unstable rock face above the cave mouth.
The heavy bone shaft flew with a strange, whistling sound. It struck a protruding ledge with a tremendous CRACK. The ancient, weathered rock, already stressed, sheared away. A cascade of boulders and rubble roared down the slope, crashing across the cave entrance in a cloud of dust and noise, momentarily sealing it.
The dragging sound stopped, replaced by a muffled, earth-shaking bellow of rage that made the very stones beneath their feet tremble.
It wouldn't hold it for long.
Kestrel was already running, dragging a terrified Briar behind her. Arrion snatched up his second javelin and sprinted after them, his long legs eating up the ground. They plunged into the narrow defile, a crack in the world barely wide enough for Briar to fit, the walls rising fifty feet on either side.
Behind them, the avalanche's dust was still settling when they heard it—the sound of immense, irresistible force. A sound of boulders being shoved aside like pebbles. The thing was digging itself out.
They ran until their lungs burned, the defile twisting and turning, offering meager protection. The bellowing faded behind them, but the sense of being tracked, of being measured by a patient, timeless hunger, did not.
Finally, the defile opened into a slightly wider canyon, still littered with bones but with more options for cover—huge fallen slabs, deep erosion hollows. They couldn't run anymore. Briar was lathered in sweat and trembling with exhaustion. They needed to hide, to rest, to hope the creature's territory was vast and it had lost their scent.
They found a hollow beneath an overhang, shielded from view from above. Kestrel slumped against the rock, her chest heaving. Arrion leaned on his javelin, listening. The canyon was silent again, save for the wind.
He looked at the bone weapon in his hand, still smeared with rock dust from the avalanche. It had worked. A weapon born of this place of death had bought them a sliver of life. He looked at the bones around their makeshift shelter, no longer just symbols of fear, but a potential arsenal. In this domain of the ultimate predator, they would have to arm themselves with the bones of its past meals. The irony was not lost on him. To survive the eater of giants, they would wield the giants' own remains.