“I heard the Aethosi are launching a campaign along the coast. They’re going to take Cliffbream and Vaestorm in a week, then blockade Trident Bay.”

“I heard you’re a fat little idiot who believes whatever he hears.”

Reegan sighed as Vance swelled up like a balloon. “When the Chiaata comes and kills us all, I pray it takes the two of you first. Then at least I’ll have something fun to watch before I go.”

“Look, all of you shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” Endon turned back to the wizened old elm tree. There was a strange black gash along the largest of its roots, and it was leaking.

Vance was talking again. “I want it to be known that my rumor is not that far-fetched. Remember the mountain invasion I told you guys about? And how you didn’t believe me?”

Asha rolled her eyes. “We didn’t believe you because you told us they’d be riding in on phoenixes. Which they didn’t, by the way.”

Endon rubbed his forehead. “So you guys just ignored my thing about shutting up and letting me work?”

Reegan crouched down beside him with a sheepish smile. “Sorry. So what am I looking at?”

The vein in the roots was steaming now. “It’s fresh, by the looks of it.”

“Well, yeah. Every tree for twenty feet would be dead if the venom soaked for even a day, right?”

“Fresh meaning an hour, Ree.”

“W-what?”

“Yeah, this thing’s close.” Endon dipped his finger in the bubbling pit of black and pulled back before the solution could burn him. He studied his index, now coated in a thick layer of something glossy and tar-like. “You want to do the honors, or should I?’

Reegan grinned. “You do it.” She nodded over at Asha and Vance, who had now begun pushing each other. “I’m babysitting.”

Endon took a deep breath and pressed his tongue against the venom. Immediately he gagged. He could only hold the black in for a second before spitting it out, but that was enough. When he stood up again his eyes were swimming, and there was an unquenchable bitter taste in his mouth.

Reegan eyed him nervously. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Endon managed. “It’s way stronger than I thought. Can’t have been more than ten minutes.”

“We would have seen it if it was that close. And what’s it doing out anyway? It’s almost noon.”

“Dunno.” Endon rubbed his eyes and looked around. Black wisps of smoke had begun appearing in the air, wisps Endon knew only he could see. He watched and waited as they condensed, until…

Endon swore. “It’s nesting in the southern caves. That’s why we didn’t see it. It’s under us.”

“Dammit. Which entrance do we take? Worm Tunnel’s closest. But if we go by Black Chasm, we can put ourselves between it and the village.”

Endon glanced at her. “You think it’s going to the village?”

Reegan didn’t speak, but he knew what she was thinking. If a Chiaata this big caught the village unawares, they’d all be dead in minutes.

Asha now had Vance on the floor and was rubbing mud in his hair. She looked up when they stopped talking. “What?”

The venom was starting to make Endon’s head spin. “Chiaata, big one. In the southern caves.”

Asha’s eyes widened in horror and she scrambled to her feet. “M-my pa’s house. It’s right outside the entrance.”

“Don’t panic,” said Endon. “It’s noon right now, the thing’s probably sleeping. We’ve got an hour or two before it wakes up, plenty of time to take it out. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll use that side entrance by that thicket of oak trees. That leads right into the tunnels. There, we’ll split ways. Reegan and I will take the northern tunnels to block it off from the back, you guys take the south passage.”

“Endon, if the thing was here ten minutes ago, there’s probably some other passage nearby that we don’t know about.”

“There’s nothing we can do about that. Let’s just pray we get to it before it wakes up.”

And with that, they were off. They veered off the trail they were using, cutting through a few back-alley paths that Asha knew, and in minutes, they were at the thicket.

Vance lit two torches with his piece of flint and handed one to Reegan. “Lead the way, Endon.”

Endon dove through the gap in the trees and fell six feet into the cave. Then he rolled out of the way as three consecutive thuds meant Reegan, Asha, and Vance had followed.

He got up and took a deep breath, letting the residual venom filter deep into his tongue and his mind. The wisps of black sharpened and coalesced again… and suddenly, the maze of tunnels before him no longer seemed an enigma. There was a path now, winding through the network of dirt and mud, marked ever so faintly by whispers of black smoke that the venom let him see.

Endon grinned. The bitter, gag-inducing taste was still in his mouth, yet with it now was the sharp tang of adrenaline. “Follow me.”

Endon followed the trail of black mist and the rest fell in line behind him. In seconds, the dark earth had closed around them, and they were surrounded by a sea of dull silence.

That didn’t last long though.

“You’re holding the torch wrong,” came Asha’s impatient voice.

“I’m holding the torch great.”

“I can barely see above my chest, maybe if someone tall held it–”

“I’m plenty tall!”

Endon tuned the both of them out. He couldn’t imagine any two people less alike, yet the two of them had signed up with the same level of enthusiasm to be hunters all those years ago. Vance he remembered the best, even shorter and stouter than he was now, with those two inch thick glasses and the constantly worried expression.

He’d lost the expression and the glasses, and was now much more a ball of muscle than fat, but he was still the same inside. He still spent every ounce of his free time reading the fables in Elder Coyne’s library of scrolls. He still spouted tall tales like they were fact, still fantasized about wonder and mystery. Endon hadn’t ever gone a day without hearing about the legend of the dragonking from Vance.

Then there was Asha. Asha was as tall as Vance was short, as skinny as he was stout, as dark as he was fair. Endon had never met someone more quiet and brooding. She spent more time on her own in the woods than she did with other people, though Endon couldn’t complain. It was her knowledge of the forests and caves that made their troupe so better at hunting Chiaatas than all the others combined.

They were nearing a fork now, and as Endon stared ahead, he saw the wisp of black split into two. One, much stronger, to the left, and a faint, fading one to the right.

“Alright, here’s where we part ways. The two of you–” Endon flicked Vance and Asha so they’d stop arguing, “–go that way. Reegan and I will catch it at the head.”
They split up, Reegan following close behind Endon with the torch. “You got a plan for when we come up on this thing?”

“Pray, I guess.” Endon allowed himself a smile. “You stay back. I don’t want you getting cut.”

Reegan scowled. “I can handle myself.”

“Not saying you can’t. But if I get a scrape, it’s no biggie. You, not so much.”

“I’ve got bandages…”

“That didn’t really help last week, did it?” Endon still had that visceral image painted in his head. It had just been the two of them on that hunt, the two of them against one alpha Chiaata. They’d done fine up until the end, when the thing’s claws had closed in around Reegan. Endon had speared it in the head immediately, but the damage had been done.

Endon winced at the thought of that giant scar across Reegan’s left leg. It hadn’t been deep, or even that painful (or so Reegan claimed), but didn’t matter. For the second the wound had opened, she had begun to bleed, glorious bronze blood, in stark contrast from Endon’s red. Blood that shimmered like the sun, blood that was a dead giveaway that she was half Aethosi.

Endon shuddered. And everyone knew what happened to Aethosis.

“We patched that up just fine,” Reegan complained.

“Yeah, and if one drop had leaked through by the time we got back to the village, they would have burned you at the stake.”

“You’re worrying too much. It’s–”

Suddenly, they heard a great roar from behind them.

Reegan swore. “How the hell did it get behind us?”

“W-what? It didn’t– the venom trail, it’s in front of me–”

Another roar came, this time, much closer, and much louder. It sounded somewhere between a scream and a lion’s roar, loud enough to shake the earth. And this time, it came from ahead of them.

Endon’s blood ran cold as the two looked at each other. “There’s two of them.”