Water flows downhill, so on past the gorge’s crest, the land declines. Sharply, too. The creekwater rushes through rapids, and the three nymphs interlock arms to safely descend, half-falling, half-stumbling from plant to plant, hanging onto trunks or stems. In the process, they uproot one fern. On this side of the hill, more metataxites creep up, even with the angle. (Perhaps the great lichens were eeking out where the trees had more trouble.)

They sought what they could not find above: level ground. It’s a ways before the steepness stops, and still longer before the arboreals thin enough for their purposes. Ooliri sits by the side, marking segments off a rope. “I want to see how long they are,” he says. They are going to test the wretched raptorials.

Makuja nods, and looks towards Awelah sloughing off some bags. The pale nymph’s load is lighter, owing to her injuries — something that presented a recurring source of argument, the Asetari arrogating loads that Ooliri would have to negotiate down.

The red nymph goes to stand over in the clearing, and her partner follows after a moment. They bow to each other.

“Don’t try to kill each other this time, please.”

Awelah has opted to start the fight at the same distance as the last one, not forgetting about Makuja’s other new trick. The issue unforeseen, however, is that this initial distance gives Makuja the liberty to pick when the engagement really starts. The red nymph has gained adeptness, tarsigns coming quicker as she dances around the bigger nymph. The fight proceeds, and the rhythm is once again different.

It’s, all told, not fair. Awelah still aches from her injuries, limiting the strain her prothorax can take (ruling out most use of her raptorials), and without the Umbral Body or Volatile Body (techniques that would only not kill if they missed), she has no advantage to match Makuja’s spells.

“I can stop,” she says, after pinning Awelah to the ground. “Stick to only martial arts.”

The Asetari is torn between asserting that she doesn’t need her to, and the fact that she does.

If their spar were broken into rounds that end when one of them hits the ground, three more rounds pass. Two more end with Makuja victorious, and with the last one, Awelah seizes victory on account of Makuja stopping to stare at her side, looking strained, expecting something to happen.

Even that upset doesn’t impart enough suspense to hold one’s attention forever. Ooliri, where he sits at the edge of the clearing twiddling his rope, leans down onto his raptorials and the soft moss, and nods off into a light nap.

When he comes to, they’re still at it, Awelah looking dead on her feet, swaying, Makuja hardly looking better.

With a frown, he stands, and walks over. “Um, Makuja? I understand your… intense desire to practice your new spell, but, well, we need to save some energy for traveling. And defending ourselves, if we encounter hostiles.”

Awelah, sighing through spiracles, stops and folds into a sit, stretching her legs and lying them down.

When her foe stops, Makuja falls to the ground. Not (wholly?) in despair, but perhaps because the momentum of battle was the main thing keeping her on four legs. “Am I cursed? I had it again. I felt it. And now…”

“If,” Awelah starts, taking a moment to steady her voice. “If the missing component was the mind of a predator, then a spar was the wrong way to test it. You aren’t fighting me like a hunter.”

“Reassuring, at least, I hope?” Ooliri says.

“Perhaps we should try to kill each other, then.”

“We should get moving. If we can find the guardian of earth, if we can get a teacher, they’ll surely know how myxokora manifestation works.”

Further on, they’d covered enough land to reach the road they’d spotted in the distance, yesterday. It leads southeast, and they take it. The flatness reprieved them of climbing logs and hills, cutting through ferns, and the enveloping fear that a new (or old) monster would come all asudden out from the occlusion of foliage.

Mud pooled between the stones of the road, and in long tracks at the edges. A consequence of the flatness, puddles litter the ground all around. Had it rained harder, on this side of the hill? Ooliri makes a game of hopping from stone to stone on parts of road where the puddles dominate. Awelah loops around through moss, and Makuja walks straight through. Ooliri learns well what opaque muddy puddles can hide when he slips on a stone, and plunges into water that might be half a meter deep.

When they break sometime after midday (it’s hard to tell; despite glimpsing the sun, the clouds hadn’t gone anywhere — was it too much to hope it a sign of clear weather coming?), Awelah makes the suggestion that if Makuja can’t kill her — she had sworn loyalty, after all — then perhaps hunting game would be appropriate of a predator.

While they wait, Ooliri’s (emptied) barrel floats unsteadily in a deceptively deep puddle while he tries to balance on top of it. Awelah polishes her spear. Seeing the instrument, Ooliri wonders how much of her suggestion had been genuine, and how much covered for the fact that she couldn’t effectively hunt on her own, given her injury.

In the minutes they wait, Ooliri points out the calls of katydids early in the season. In a fit of pique, Awelah tries to imitate them — and then Ooliri gives his own attempt, higher and more accurate. It becomes a competition, then. There’s bird calls to imitate, too, but they don’t stridulate. Awelah stops suddenly, when they have company, but Makuja is silent, mandibles out, focused in a hunting mood.

Makuja returns first with a small longicorn nymph. Then a large crow. Then a variety of digging beetle Ooliri couldn’t identify.

“Don’t you think that might be enough?”

Makuja doesn’t respond.

“No luck with the technique, I take it?”

The most fractional nod.

“I have an alternative theory,” Ooliri starts. Makuja finally meets his eyes. “You’re just tired. Whatever it took to activate that technique, you don’t have enough of it to cast it again. Maybe you’ll be able to tomorrow?”

Awelah extends antennae out, and gazes into the woods around them. “So, how are we going to start a fire when it’s as wet as it is?”

The question cut right to a more distant concern. Since starting down this road, they’d seen no trees larger than saplings. Given their load, carrying firewood had never occurred to them.

“Well, conk should work just as fine.” Ooliri gestures to a metataxite.

“I hate the smell of burning conk.”

“You never got used to it?”

“Lucky you,” Makuja murmurs.

It’s a pitiful fire that they make, and Awelah only ends up cooking the crow. She takes raw bites of the beetle, and ties up the longicorn for later.

“I wonder if the smell of that is going to lure something to us.”

“Then we can eat that too.”

Further ahead, the flatness is broken up beside the road, where boulders and logs sit. They must have been pushed out of the way, to clear a path. A sign, the first they’ve seen, stands nearby.

Wisterun, 30 km →

“Hey, we’re on the right track! Maybe we’ll finally be able to sleep on something other than hammocks or bedrolls soon.”

Ooliri goes to run along the boulders, and while Awelah is detouring around the deep tracks in the road the passage of the debris left, she sees another sign — or the remnants of one. It’s blacked, burnt with a branching pattern to the scorch marks. Had it been struck by lightning? It must have rained harder out here.

As the journey continues, they’re on the lookout for trees to sleep in. They find metataxites, giant ferns, and even the occasional locust-leaf bush which usually took a vesperbane to grow and maintain. The longer they sustain this attention to the aboreals, the more aware they become of an inconsistency, a certain pattern. In patches, they saw taxites large enough it’s fair to call them ‘full height’. These patches stand separated by long stretches of land where the aboreals are much shorter — younger — and so shrubbery and weeds claim the expanse. It’s all like some second-growth forest, but intermittently.

Ooliri is the first to comment on it. “If we’re approaching a town or village,” he says, “you’d expect to see, before any of the settlement itself, farmland.”

Makuja gives the fields a closer look. “It’s derelict. It must have been abandoned long ago.”

“If we came all this way for an empty village, I’m gonna…” Awelah trails off. “What would we even do then?”

“The old lady said she gives clayware to the bugs in a village.”

“She’s old. She’s nuts. Maybe she’s been around so long she doesn’t realize it’s been years since her last visit. Or maybe she just forgot they all packed up and moved.”

“A town doesn’t just pack up and move, though,” Ooliri counters. “We haven’t even seen the town, we shouldn’t get lost speculating.”

“Maybe this was a trap,” Makuja says.

“No speculating!”

“Danger must be anticipated.”

Not long after that, they see the first house, in a sense. From only construction, some inferences come, even from this distance. A mantid’s house is something vertical, of platforms to be climbed, like a tree inside and outside. A roach’s house is squished, flatter, with fewer windows.

Ant houses aren’t much more than a hole in the ground. The dirt is raised around it, from excavation or an expansion in size, and inside it’s undoubtedly labyrinthian. Outside, you don’t see much more than a colorful woven tarp to be thrown over the entrances in case of rain (it’s not thrown over the entrance), and intricate flags and banners raised to declare just whose hole it is.

They walk on, see more holes, and the various cloth adornments that remain look harshed by the elements, all soaked and muddy, torn, rotting away.

“Maybe,” Ooliri suggests, “it’s not all the way abandoned, and the ants are all hiding in their tunnels?”

“We saw ants yesterday. It could make sense.” Awelah has a tone awkwardly amassed of unease and ambivalence.

“All signs point to total abandonment,” Makuja says. The matter of fact statement stabbing a hole in their hope.

“I guess it can’t explain why the flags are… like that. The ants really like their weavings, don’t they?”

Before the conversation can continue, Awelah is shushing them.

“I smell something.”

“Him,” Makuja says. “Vilja.”

Awelah unfolds her spear. Ooliri grips a baton.

“Which way?”

“I only catch a hint. North, but it’s unclear how old or which way it’s moving.”

“Maybe it’s looking for other prey, now. We can’t be the only thing it ever goes after.”

“It doesn’t pursue us like a normal predator. It’s,” she pauses to find the right word, “obsessed. Scared of my projection, yet it keeps coming?” She shakes her head. “Stay alert.”

Other than slowing when they pass near woody patches, staying aware doesn’t hamper their speed by much — diamantis have a wide field of vision, and there’s not much overgrowth in the abandoned fields.

When they round a blind curve in the road, it’s there. A recurring fear waiting with utter patience.

Bone scrapes against bone as it rises from where it had sat, and slow steps are taken in approach. It gives three barks, ringing out in the emptiness around them. Those bloodshot eyes land on Ooliri, Awelah, and finally on Makuja. Then it starts growling.

Shifting her spear to a midleg, Awelah brings her foretarsi together.

“No,” Makuja says. “Allow me.”

Even as she says it, she doesn’t know exactly what she intends. She could fight Vilja now, with a renewed hope of winning.

But did she really want to hurt Vilja? Even after he bit her, she remembers.

No, she couldn’t. Should she let Awelah go ahead then? Or could she…

Unodha never taught her ⸢Blood Wolf Howl⸥, and a spell so advanced, a signature technique, couldn’t be something she’d easily learn even if her master still lived. But she pulses with her blood, and so does Vilja. There has to be some lingering connection. She knows firsthand what it feels like when the spell is used, and she’s in control, she’s powerful, now.

Does she remember what it looks like when her master would cast it? The tarsigns, different entirely from what she’s learned. More interlocking, tighter. In her memory, only one configuration is seen clearly enough she could hope to recreate. She hopes it means something.

One tarsus wraps around another, squeezing it, and the dactyls of the other rise despite, like a candle flame, or a water spout.

The whale sign.

She steps forward, and with each step, each bit of proximity sacrificed to the direhound that had nearly killed her, she feels her heart beat faster. Not fast enough. Not fast enough for it to truly be alive.

But she recalls the sensation, the pain she had felt as Unodha used the technique on her, as the first step of the plan that had killed her master. She feels her pulse in the bitemark that still remains from yesterday, even as the wound scars over. She squeezes her tarsus tighter.

Will this blind flailing of a technique do anything? She steps closer, betting her skin on something clicking. The direhound hasn’t taken another step, isn’t growling any more.

She breathes in, and her blood eagerly sucks up the fresh air. She moves her palps. “Begone,” she says. She breaks the sign, and bravado turns to caution as she jumps to her back up plan. Familiar seals. Focus. Louse.

But the direhound makes a sound, a… whining? It’s backing away, red eyes looking from her to Ooliri, to Awelah, and another bark, and then it turns. It runs off, the sound of old bones softening, occluded by the foliage. It runs north, at an angle to the road, off into the overgrown fields.

Makuja smiles. It seems the Asetari isn’t the only one who can scare off direbeasts so simply. She turns her small smile to the nymph in question, but Awelah has a deep frown that only deepens as her antennae work. Her eyes are on the fleeing hound.

“It doesn’t act like a predator at all,” she says. “I scented it to the north. If it could track us, the shortest path to catch us was not that. We can’t outrun it. Looping around like that only makes sense if—”

“He wanted to intercept us.”

“It was waiting for us. I can believe it — ambushes are a natural tactic. But something about it, with everything else…”

“Feels… It feels like we’re being herded. All these days, looking back… this was never a hunt, was it? If it wanted to hurt us, it could have. If it wanted to eat us, it would have given up.”

“Meaning, whatever is going on, something doesn’t want us continuing down this road.” Awelah looks southeast, down the procession of more abandoned tunnels and dead flags.

“We could turn back.”

“Backward is closer to Vilja.” Makuja places a hand on her melanized scar. “Forward means farther from something that has hurt us, and still could.”

No one wanted to go chasing after the direhound. Onward they walked, and hoped solace awaited them in Wisterun. Ooliri seems most shaken by the encounter, and stays close to Awelah.

“It’s evening,” Makuja says. “It’ll be dark soon. Still no trees.”

“We could stay in one of the antholes.”

“Sleeping in abandoned tunnels when we don’t know why they were abandoned is a stupid idea.”

“We could block the entrances, prevent Vilja from entering.”

“It’s spooky but,” Ooliri says, “it sounds safer than sleeping on the ground, or in a small arboreal.”

“If we up the pace, maybe we can reach Wisterun before it’s too dark,” Awelah says.

“I’m not sure I want to go there when it’s dark.”

“Why not?”

The discussion continues without anything new being mentioned or decided. Awelah turns Ooliri’s earlier ‘no speculation!’ back around at him, and at one point, someone suggests they dig their own hole. The conversation spirals into a weary, absurd back and forth that at least gets some laughs, eases some tension.

Above them, the sun might be closer to the horizon than the midpoint, but not by much. The way forward twists a bit, and the mud has dried enough that Awelah is able to kick a stone down the road. Then Makuja is pushing a stone forward with her new technique. And then Ooliri is showing Makuja how he finally managed bane blast, though it takes a false start for him to pull it off.

After the centipede encounter, the team is starting to get better at noticing when the absence of sounds is giving something away. Dimly, they notice the absence of katydid calls, or bird chirps.

Far along the road, they see tarp set over a makeshift shelter held up by bundled fern stems. A camp? Is the quiet due to hunters, perhaps?

They smell the hemolymph before they get close enough to see what died. The smell is old, has diffused throughout the area. Right now, the wind is behind them, and their smell is carried ahead.

They see the furry form moving. It’s fast. Its shrill screech cuts through the field.

They smell direblood. They see the size of its claws. Closer, the thinness of the muzzle, the bushy tail, puts a name to the creature.

It’s an anteater. A direanteater.

And that smell, those unmoving forms in the camp, must be the ants they saw yesterday.

The blood-crazed anteater is closing fast, and Awelah brings her tarsus together and weaves the seals. Ooliri doesn’t stop her.

The Asetari finishes, and opens her hands.

Nothing happens.

She has the time to run the tarsigns through one more time while that shrilly scream sounds again and still nothing happens. They stand face to face with a direbeast bigger than Vilja, and the spell that had saved them from the hound, from the erotyle, from the mantis-eating centipede, has failed them.