Rain. Again.

Caiden tugged the dark blue hood a little farther up on his head, listening to the raindrops pitter-patter off the leaves of the woods surrounding the road. A plain dirt road, so well-packed from years of steady travel that it barely even threatened to turn to mud.

Down this path was a little town called Deepwell. Just a dot on most maps, if that. Plenty of cartographers overlooked it in favor of more important landmarks – larger cities like Kyjovia to the north or the hill dwarf territory barely to the south. No one much cared to pay attention to Deepwell sitting precariously in the foothills, stranded in all but the middle of nowhere.

Maybe for that reason, the town was now having trouble not often found in the Empire: people were being killed in the night, ripped apart in their homes or maybe dragged off. Hadn’t taken them long to panic, suspect monsters, and summon the Venatori for help, sending a messenger raving about bloodstains and tooth marks.

Deepwell was a place full of superstitions, or so he’d been told. The kind of people who nailed holy symbols to their doors – and smeared some animal sacrifice’s blood on it for good measure.

Not like back home. People there knew the difference between mundane and magic.

They also knew how to be on time.

Caiden shot another look over his shoulder, gazing into the heavy mist and waiting for any sign of a rider. But there was nothing. He heard only his horse huffing as it finally found a sizable mud puddle in the road, enough to splash on its black-and-white legs.

The Venatori – the Empire’s formerly-elite order of monster hunters – hadn’t seemed too together from the minute he joined. They weren’t a military outfit; he had to remind himself of that. This wasn’t the Red Legion. This wasn’t even a local town militia. This was an old monster hunting order, and like a lot of old things, it hadn’t aged well. People called it washed up. Useless. Hell, maybe it was.

So far, he had encountered wise-cracking elves, an understocked kitchen, tarnished silver weapons – and now, he had a partner late to their first mission.

This was what being dishonorably discharged from the Legion felt like, then. Nowhere else he could go except something like this. No order, no discipline.

As if on cue, hooves thundered up the road behind him, bringing with them a whirl of sensations that hung in the air as thick as the mist.

There was frustration. Anxiety. Embarrassment too. So much of it that it made a knot in this pit of his stomach – filled it with things that didn't belong there to begin with. Didn't belong to him.

Caiden set his jaw.

It had been like this for as long as he could remember. Emotions that weren’t his. Thoughts, or things like them, riding whispers in his head that he couldn’t silence. Memories that he didn’t remember making. Sometimes other, stranger things.

He had never known why, or how— let alone how to make it all stop. Though he had found out one thing early enough: not to tell anyone. Not to come ask for help, since that only earned him looks, stares, or quick, confused questions. And always the surge of fear, even before the confusion that followed. Fear, because people couldn’t feel, couldn’t know, things like that.

Or, at least, they weren’t supposed to. But he did.

“Morning!” the rider said as she approached alongside him, forcing a smile Caiden could barely see for the now steady rainfall. “You’re Caiden Voros, right?”

The anxiousness coming off her reached a point of making Caiden’s shoulders tighten up even more. And he was already sitting arrow-straight.

“Yeah,” he answered, quickly glancing her over. “Gwenevere Vergil?”

He briefly sized her up. She wore a nice leather jerkin. Carried a bow and quiver on her back. Dark blue Venator cloak, like his, silver brooch perfectly in place – unlike her timing. Potions lined a bandoleer across her chest. She was lithe, strong, and, he had to admit, attractive. Fairly tall, maybe. Hard for him to tell.

“Call me Gwen,” she practically blurted, her anxiety almost crawling over his skin like ants.

Nervous as hell.

He nodded. “Gwen. Alright.”

She fidgeted with her reins. Pulled her cloak around her shoulders. Squirmed in the saddle. Caiden glanced at her and didn’t say a word.

Definitely not a soldier.

“You’ve got to be the tallest Venator I’ve met,” she said, pointedly staring up at his face. “And you’re all…” with a gloved hand, she rubbed at her chin poking out of her hood, “really chiseled— I mean shaven. Venatori usually don’t do that. Were you military?”

He snorted. She was perceptive. Good thing to be in this line of work.

And he said, “Yeah. Redfield, Red Legion.”

Gwen’s mouth fell open slightly. “Ohhh… Red Legion. Aren’t they supposed to be the Empire’s best?”

Caiden nodded. “Some of them are,” he answered, his tone unchanging.

She paused and gave him a look, but she didn’t push it. As they continued down the road, she respected the silence he bred between them and kept her eyes ahead – save for the occasional glance stolen in his direction. At least she wasn’t asking questions.

That went on for a while. Until, slowly, after Caiden was thoroughly sodden from riding in it for hours, the rain started to slack off. Right in time for Deepwell to appear over the next rise.

Nestled in a valley near the Blackrock Foothills, at the base of the impossibly tall Jagged Edge mountain range that ran the spine of the world, Deepwell looked in every way like the exact kind of village that’d be asking help from monster hunters.

Because it seemed quaint. Welcoming. Isolated. And quiet. Too quiet.

Pleasant wooden houses dotted the landscape as the forest gave way to the valley, opening up to make room for a gentle blue lake forming the epicenter of the town, each building connected by narrow paths of dirt. So, it was fairly poor – no walls, no cobblestone roads. Too far on the edge of the Empire to see much benefit from all the wealth circulating in the Heartland.

Gwen stopped her horse at the top of the hill as the rain gave out, throwing the hood from her head and shaking free a short auburn ponytail. “That’s better,” she remarked, and with dark green eyes, gave him a quick look like she was waiting for him to do the same.

Caiden’s hood stayed where it was.

He nodded down toward Deepwell. “Start with the baron?”

“Sounds good,” she replied with a shrug.

Reaching the local baron was easy enough. The people in the streets gathered and stared like they rarely saw a horse that wasn’t half donkey – much less riders wearing weapons, leathers, and potions. No one pestered them, other than a few whispers.

Which was enough to bother Caiden – more than enough. The instant he crossed Deepwell’s borders, emotions filled the air around him. Mostly fear this time, and it only got worse as more people came to stare, like the whole town had to be here at once.

Confusion. Worry. A bit more fear, fear of them. All of it clashed with the warm, desperate hope that came off others, the need for someone to fix what was happening.

There was something Caiden didn’t sense that set his own nerves on edge. Something he always felt off others back in the Legion, when he led his soldiers to a village torn by war or raiders, when someone would hear him give orders to find and evacuate the wounded. Something more than just hope, though their hope had burned far hotter than this.

Respect. It was missing here. And he thought it again: maybe he’d been told right about the Venatori.

Caiden set his jaw and tried to focus, to push away all the surging emotions building around them like a storm – one to which Gwen was oblivious. She was too busy leaning forward ever so slightly, probably trying to peer under his hood, while pretending she was only looking at him from the corner of her eye.

Unluckily for her, Caiden had grown up with a little sister. He was used to this. So, when she tried to be discreet about it and failed extremely, Caiden looked right back at her. That got a blush in her cheeks, and she quickly turned her attention to some of the villagers instead.

He huffed. So, he learned something else about the Venatori: having focus wasn’t a membership requirement.

Deepwell’s baron lived in a sizable home at the edge of the lake. Sizable, at least, when compared to the other houses. A trio of servants welcomed them in; two took their horses, and the third led them into the manor.

It wasn’t richly furnished. Looked about the same measure of wealth as everything else in this town. Tapestries and paintings were few and far between, and no weapon sets or suits of armor offered added decoration to the one soft rug in the foyer.

This baron wasn’t a soldier, either. Never had been. But at least he didn’t hoard his gold.

Once they were inside, Caiden threw the hood from his head. Gwen took a step forward, her eyes on him. She seemed to be staring at his dark, short-cropped hair, like it was something of great interest.

“You really are a soldier,” she commented, sounding surprised.

He hm’ed. “Don’t get many soldiers in the Venatori?”

Before she could answer, the baron appeared. A simple man wearing what looked like slightly lower-end noble clothing mostly made of dark, drab colors, he descended a set of stairs to greet the two of them and gesture them into chairs around a fireplace. Taking a seat came with something to drink and a bit of shortbread to chew on, offered on a small silver platter by a servant.

Caiden took one and sized up the tiny thing. One bite.

Nevermind. Maybe this baron was stingy.

“Thank the gods you’ve arrived,” said the baron as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, so he could look as gravely as possible into Caiden’s and Gwen’s eyes. “I’m sure the messenger spared no detail.”

“We heard a lot about missing people and chewed-on bodies,” Gwen said, taking a tiny bite of her shortbread.

Caiden threw the whole cookie in his mouth. Gwen side-eyed him with a face that plainly wondered if he had even chewed. He’d gotten that look enough times by now to recognize it and the accompanying confusion.

The baron kept talking, almost blurting, “It started with a homeless man, so it took folks a while to notice – found him rotting in an alley a few hours after he’d died, people caught wind of the smell – and then the next night it took Gregor, he turned up almost the same way, but there was less of him left, house looked like it’d been broken into—”

“Slow down,” Caiden cut in, and instantly the baron fell silent. Again, Caiden felt a meager tide of fear lap against him like waves on a shore. Coming, going – getting a bit closer and pulling a bit harder each time.

Made it hard to think. It always did. Focus.

His pause only made the baron’s dread increase, and he didn’t have to look at her to know Gwen was staring at him again, because that anxious curiosity resumed breathing down his neck.

All of these emotions put together weighed on him, drove the scowl on his face to etch its place there even deeper.

“Be exact,” Caiden said. “When did it start?”

“Five nights ago,” the baron said instantly.

“Always night?”

“Yes, Sir.”

The curiosity stopped breathing on his neck from where it tried looking over his shoulder, like it went up in a puff of smoke and turned to nothing but blankness. From the corner of his eye, Gwen looked floored. Caiden tried to ignore it. He could ask about that later. Maybe.

“You said ‘less of’ Gregor. Earlier you mentioned bite marks. What kind?”

The baron fidgeted. “We aren’t sure.”

“Sharp teeth? Large, small?”

“There’s not enough left of the bodies to tell. They’re torn up, devoured. What’s left had bruises, what the watchmen could tell… And whatever it is leaves the bones.”

“You got a crime scene?”

The baron went blank, seemed to shut it all out, and simply nodded.

“It took another just last night. We… didn’t clean up the mess, so the Venatori – so you could take a look at it. Leaving the manor, it’s… only six doors down from here.”

With a nod, Caiden stood. Gwen promptly followed his example, straightening up and trying to match his posture.

“We’ll take care of it from here,” Caiden said. “Tell your men to focus on keeping people safe.”

The baron nodded almost meekly.

Didn’t take them long to get out of there, after a few courtesy thank you’s. Caiden led the way down the narrow streets, which were still damp and smelled like fresh rain.

“You really commanded respect out of that guy,” Gwen commented suddenly, picking up the pace to walk beside him.

He glanced at her. “That unusual for Venatori, too?”

She lifted a brow. “Not so much the Venatori’s fault. Most people don’t respect the order. I only saw it myself once, when my mentor let me follow on a mission – no one would listen to her.”

Caiden rumbled thoughtfully. At length, he said, “So, they’re desperate.”

“Who?”

“The townsfolk. They’re terrified.”

Gwen frowned. “I suppose. It makes sense – most people don’t have experience at all with monsters and all this sort of thing.”

Caiden nodded. That much was true. Most people, common or noble, went their entire lives without seeing anything close to a monster. Or magic, for that matter.

Hell, if this was a monster, it would be the first one Caiden ever saw, too.

The crime scene was one of the smaller homes along the main street. It stood out. Caiden felt it before he saw it – felt the frustration, suspicion, and impatience from the guards stationed at the front door. As they neared, several of the watchmen threw them looks that intensified the emotions they sent rippling through the cooling afternoon air.

Suspicion. Even anger, from at least one of them. There were too many things going through them to understand or translate, but frankly, none of it mattered. So he tried to block it out.

But that had never been as effective as he would have liked, no matter what he did. Thinking about something else didn’t work; that was too simple. Trying to drown it out with his own emotions didn’t work either. If his emotions were riled up enough for that to work, then he usually had a much bigger problem to worry about.

Instead, he did the only thing that ever had worked, even a little bit: he gathered information. Categorized it. Focused on it and nothing else – not the emotions, not what Gwen was saying to the guards – nothing but facts.

He started examining the exterior of the crime scene. No signs of forced entry. Windows were shut, probably locked. Glass was all intact, at least here on the side facing the street.

Glass. Meant whoever lived here wasn’t that poor, even if this building was a little smaller than the rest. Plenty of commoners couldn’t afford glass.

The door looked intact too. Thick, sturdy, with heavy metal locks. Yeah, whoever lived here had money, enough to want serious protecting, even from a quiet little town like this.

Gwen said something with a hint of finality to the watchmen and then came over to join him. Caiden glanced at her and gave a quiet grunt.

“They’re letting us in,” she said, nodding toward the door. “You want to lead?”

He nodded.

The smell coming from the building made the hairs on the back of Caiden’s neck stand up, even when he came within only a few feet of the open door. It pulled a low rumble up his throat.

Stepping into the building was something else entirely. Stench of death and decay filled the room, enough to knock someone down, like a palpable wall of disgusting, oily smell of rot and blood. But some of it was still coppery. Still fresh.

So why did he smell rot?

Caiden narrowed his eyes and kept walking. Nothing in the entrance, and all the windows on the sides of the building were intact too. So he kept moving.

“See anything?” Gwen asked, her voice teetering very slightly.

Caiden grunted. Gwen’s confusion tingled in the air, so instead he answered, “No.”

He led the way past the living room, following his nose to the origin of all the assorted stomach-turning smells. Gwen pulled her cloak around and held some over her nose, not seeming to pay a whole lot of attention. Caiden huffed.

Then they found the body.

Still in bed and still in what was left of his nightclothes, a fairly fresh corpse was twisted stiff in a pool of sticky blood saturating the sheets around him. Most of his clothes were torn off his body, shredded – strips of cloth thrown aside and lying everywhere. Some stained with blood, but most not.

The twisted corpse itself made Gwen gag, and Caiden felt a roiling sort of disgust emanate from her that made him shiver. She recoiled so primally it prompted him to glance back at her again.

He couldn’t help but feel like she was in the wrong line of work.

“You alright?” he asked, quirking a brow at her. Her face bordered on green.

“Fine,” Gwen said, though that involved opening her mouth – even under her cloak – so instead of adding anything, she coughed and held a thumbs-up instead.

“Good.”

Caiden refocused, turning back to the crime scene.

The point of entry was easy to find: a window on the northern face of the building. Something had smashed it in and left shards of glass everywhere. No bloodstains marred the impact point. They had used a weapon, not their limb, from the look of it.

No footprints led toward the bed containing the mangled body. Not boots, not feet, not paws…

Caiden hrm’ed and stopped near the bed, looking at the body itself. Bloody, mangled, and chewed on – plenty of meat missing, with some bone stripped clean. That, and the ripped-up clothes he’d noted before. Taking up the most intact piece of shirt he could find, he turned it over in his hands.

The tearing was ragged, uneven – too much for it to be claw marks. Like someone shredded the fabric from grip alone.

“What’s that smell?” Gwen asked, also poking around in the room, mostly checking the valuables.

Caiden threw her a look. “You mean the rot.”

“Is that what that is?”

He nodded.

Setting the tattered cloth aside, he went back to the window and carefully took a piece of the broken glass. Whoever had broken it left behind what looked like grime that smeared the shard around the shatter point, almost like oil.

With a scowl, he sniffed of it, and let out an involuntary grunt. Yeah, it was grime – and something rotten.

“Find something?” Gwen asked.

“Maybe,” Caiden said, holding the shard out toward her. “The rot isn’t the body. It’s a fairly fresh kill. It’s not decomposing that fast. What we’re smelling is the intruder.”

Gwen blinked at him. “You are a rookie, right?”

He snorted. “Yeah. First mission, but not my first crime scene.”

She took the glass and turned it over in her fingers. “Did your last criminal smell like a barrel of fermenting fish, too?”

“No.” Caiden turned back to the body and looked again, carefully folding away a stray piece of cloth to get a closer look at some gnawed-on flesh. Maybe those were tooth marks, but it was hard to say.

Plenty of information, but not enough to get them anywhere. Hrm.

With not much else to find, Caiden led the way back out. The moment they stepped into the streets again, Gwen let her cloak drop away from her face and took a deep breath of the fresh air.

“Gods…” She sighed. “We would have to find a monster that stinks like that.”

“You know of any that do?” he asked, already leaving the house behind. All he knew about monsters was what he’d heard from people in passing, usually when he had been patrolling various smaller Imperial settlements along the borders.

“A few—” she stopped talking to catch up with him. “Where’re you headed now?”

“Tavern.”

She scoffed. “Already? We just got here.”

“Good place to find more information.”

“I thought you were a soldier, not an investigator.”

“Some soldiers do a lot of things.”

She arched a brow back at him. “Like what? Were you Crypteia or something?”

Caiden simply huffed.

She wasn’t wrong. He had joined the Legion once he’d been old enough to swing a sword – and old enough to mark his life away on a bit of parchment. Things went from there, and now here he was, hunting monsters like he knew the first damn thing about how to do it. Having something as familiar as a human corpse at a crime scene almost brought a morbid sense of comfort that he could do this after all.

Venatori didn’t march; they didn’t move in squads; they didn’t build forts from the ground up, form shield walls, or take or give orders on when to loose volleys. They didn’t do volleys at all. They apparently could barely manage to be on time. The potions were new; the training to let his body build up tolerance to them was new; the leather jerkin for armor and the silver weapons were new…

But a murder? He had seen those. Even helped solve one or two when they happened in the ranks, because despite what people liked to claim, the Legion wasn’t perfect.

Gwen’s personal flavor of anxious curiosity nipped at his back again, right between his shoulder blades, making him twitch. Caiden tried to ignore it.

He had only to follow the lingering trails of exhaustion and worry in the air to find the tavern. Probably named after some kind of joke on a snake’s appetite, from the picture of a bloated serpent painted on the signboard…

Not like he could really read the words painted on it. Literacy was experience he didn’t have. That didn’t come with being a common-born soldier.

Whatever the name, the tavern looked as roomy as the snake on the sign. The whole place was about the size of Caiden’s boot and filled to the breaking point with patrons from all walks of life. Still more sat out in the streets around the base of the building, drinking from dirty tankards.

Ignoring them and their curious stares, Caiden ascended the short steps to the tavern itself, shouldering past a drunkard by the door so he could get inside. Getting a table in a place like this was impossible, so Caiden reached the bar with the intention of only getting what they needed: a room. And, for him, a drink and some food, both of which Gwen had refused, since she’d made do with travel rations.

The moment he asked about a place for the night, the innkeeper stared at him, glanced him up and down, and then his cloudy eyes finally fell on the silver brooch hanging from Caiden’s dark blue cloak – the arrowhead brooch of the Venatori. Some Venatori personalized them… in Caiden’s case, his was carved with a wolf head. Fairly standard. Many Venatori defaulted to wolves, though Caiden hadn’t bothered asking why.

“Gods know, you’d have to be Venators,” said the innkeeper as he set a heavy tankard in front of Caiden. Smelled like decent ale, at least. “Ain’t nobody else wants a bloody room here at a time like this.”

“People leaving town?” Caiden asked, glancing down at the food presented to him next. That smelled good too, and it set his stomach growling. Suddenly, the idea to look for information here could wait.

“Aye, a whole mess of them. My whole inn pretty much cleaned out overnight after the second murder. Just locals comin’ to drink their worries away now.”

Caiden grunted. He pushed a few silvers over the bar, took the food and drink with a nod, and made his way back toward the door, shouldering his way through the largely drunk crowd. The air was thick with anxiety and the fear of death. Now and then, he heard a few patrons pass whispers to each other regarding how the town was cursed and a demon would rise from the lake.

Caiden took a long swallow of his ale. Should’ve gotten two.

He found Gwen in the middle of town, sitting in the grass and looking out across the lake. Caiden took a seat a few feet away from her, immediately drinking more – and the grass beside him rustled as Gwen inched her way a little closer. She moved almost cautiously, like she was approaching a wild animal and didn’t want it to run.

He lowered the tankard, glancing at her watching him. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said promptly, shrugging. “So, what do you think it is?”

“Don’t know.”

“I guess it could be a swamp troll; I’ve heard those are supposed to stink. But why wouldn’t it attack before?”

Caiden tore off half his bread with his teeth and wolfed it down. It was hard, probably a little old, but he was too hungry to much care. Or to chew more than minimally required.

He swallowed and said, “Could’ve gotten hungry.”

She didn’t seem to be listening. “I don’t think trolls can breathe underwater, though, so it would’ve had to come up for air, and people probably would’ve seen it… I was also thinking maybe a hag of some kind, one of those kinds that live in the foothills? But I don’t know where it could be hiding. Still, those supposedly smell like rot, and they leave filth on everything they touch. Some of them, anyway.”

Caiden shrugged. She was well informed, at least. Maybe that mentor she’d mentioned counted for something after all.

Clouds parted in the west, barely enough to let the setting sun wink blinding red at the two of them. Caiden gathered his things and got to his feet.

“I’m bushed,” Gwen commented. “You get some rooms?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

His room was simple. Not that it bothered him, since that was usually the way he liked it. There was a bed to sleep in and a nightstand he could set his drink on, and that was all he needed. Everything else, including the bath, he could find somewhere else.

And he did have another drink – the second one he’d considered earlier, because he figured he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it. Not the way things were going.

Not with all the whispering voices, the feelings still pulling at him, the desperation of the tavern itself hanging like a damn shroud. He got his ale off the nightstand and stood before the window, taking a deep breath.

Caiden watched the sky darken, the sun disappearing low on the horizon, well behind the buildings and trees. And he wished for silence.

Sometimes he wondered what it was like, what that word really meant – silence. Must be something that people like him never got. There were always feelings, always whispers, voices somewhere you couldn’t quite pinpoint. Stray drifts of fear wandering past in the night, the frigid and screaming cold of nightmares – there was always something, no matter where he was.

Caiden finished the ale and refocused.

So, the attackers only came at night. That pointed to a few things, but none of them seemed quite right. Gwen had a few suspicions, but none of them seemed right, either. Hags lived in seclusion, from what little he’d heard in the past. They lured kids in with trails of candy, everything straight from the storybooks. Trappers, not hunters.

No, this seemed like something else. Still, he didn’t have enough information to go on, and that bothered him.

The Venatori worked with essentially nothing. They went in blind, and hell, they stayed blind. Especially the majority of them, the ones who couldn’t read what few books – mostly journals and old bestiaries – they had in Castle Greywatch, and the ones who had never even seen a monster before.

The ones like him.

But one way or another, he’d make this work. He had to. There wasn’t much else he could do. Going home was out of the question. Joining any Imperial military was out of the question. He wasn’t noble or somehow knighted otherwise, so no order would take him in.

This was the only shot he had to still make himself useful somehow, to help. To put his skills somewhere they would matter – since, not so long ago, one man had decided to try tearing him apart and burned Caiden’s life down around his ears.

Now all he had to rebuild with was smoldering rubble. But even that was doable.

Turning, he put the empty tankard back on the nightstand and put out the little candle still burning there. That took away the room’s only meager light, but it didn’t stop the invisible wisps lingering around him… Lingering, pulling at him. Greedy, almost.

Desperate. That word kept coming back to mind as he tried to pinpoint all these feelings, these thoughts. The emotions stirring everywhere in this town and starting to sink in like water in untreated wood, ready to make Deepwell rot and fall apart.

Desperate. Desperate and hopeless.

He grunted, pulled off his pieces of gear one by one: cloak and brooch, jerkin, fingerless gauntlets, heavy boots, swordbelt, crossbow and potion harness. All of it. Then he got into bed.

That lasted all of two minutes. Tossing, turning, occasionally letting a growl or some other noise slide out his throat as the specters tried to close in around him.

Emotions always worsened at night… Always. His and everyone else’s. That was something he learned a long time ago. His kid sister had been the best teacher for it and the very last one he had ever wanted.

Getting to his feet again, he pulled on some clothes, leaving his armor and gear neatly laid aside, and he tried pacing – looking around in the darkness, uselessly, for something to distract him.

Then he heard a thud, deep and sudden. He barely had time to turn and face the source before the window exploded inwards. Reflexively, he raised his arms to protect his face from the shattered glass, shards of it cutting his skin.

In that next second, something came at him. Footsteps – heavy, almost awkward, yet unnaturally coordinated. None of it made sense. None of it added up.

Something grabbed him. He couldn’t see. Greedy, wiry hands gripped at his arms. It lunged – teeth sank into him, hard enough to draw blood, right in his forearm.

With a growl, Caiden threw it off, slinging his arm out with all his strength and sending the thing flying. A pop ripped the air – his arm still hurt, still bled – and a heavy form crunched against a far wall, meaty sounds of impact against bone and sinew.

A blood-curdling moan drifted up from the darkness where he heard the body land. Limbs shuffled. Not giving himself time to think, Caiden lunged.

He went right for the sounds of movement, got a swing in – and felt his fist impact against a brittle jaw. That made another pop, this one louder, and a kind of wrenching snap like a tree branch breaking under a muffle of flesh.

The thing didn’t care.

Even if it sounded like he managed to break something, the creature actually had absurd strength. It got its hands on him again, reached for his throat, got a grip and squeezed. But before Caiden could try prying its fingers off or breaking its arms, it pushed him away and scrambled into the darkness.

A silhouette – humanoid, but not right, with a head on askew and something hanging, dangling, off its face – shambled out the window. It should’ve been slow and awkward, the way it wheezed and moaned, twitching spasmodically like a heap of uncoordinated limbs.

But it was fast. Too fast. Watching it was like watching a nightmare happen and knowing it couldn’t have been real. That you could make yourself wake up any second, because this wasn’t how things worked.

And then it was gone. Out the window – knocking down more shattered glass as it went – and taking with it its aura of hunger, hatred, and blight.

Caiden’s muscles refused to relax. His hands refused to stop shaking. The hairs on the back of his neck refused to do anything but stand on end.

And he refused to let that thing get away.

He turned, grabbing just as much of his gear as he could. Even while he pulled on his harness and sword-belt, he vaulted out the window, ignoring the glass that cut at his arms, and ran after his attacker.

He should’ve gotten his partner. Should’ve found Gwen. But there wasn’t any time for that.

The thing didn’t stop. It ran as quickly as its unnatural gait could carry it, twitching and shambling over the grass in the town, sticking close to the lake, like maybe it made its home there.

No such luck.

Caiden ran after it, fast and hard, with no idea how he wasn’t gaining on it. He leapt over whatever fences got in his way, avoiding the roads just like the thing did. He followed its trail exactly, changing nothing but turning its erratic running into an even, practiced run that should’ve overtaken it with just a few long strides.

Maybe he should have reached over his shoulder, gotten his crossbow – tried to shoot it. But the thing weaved in and out of alleys, behind buildings, past trees – it went everywhere, like it knew he might try to do that. So if he did stop long enough to get the weapon and take aim, he would lose it instantly.

“Shit…“

He should’ve known; shouldn’t have been so stupid. They always attacked at night. He had come into this knowing that, and he’d still dropped his guard.

The thing left town, disappeared up a high, narrow road into the foothills – a road that led into a forest, one even darker than the backside of the town they ran through before.

It didn’t stop. It didn’t tire. They had run for maybe more than a league now.

Caiden steeled himself and kept after it, even while his legs started to burn and ask him what the hell he was doing playing at being a horse.

The night turned to forest and the forest to nothing but shadow. The monster, whatever it was, had gotten too far ahead now for Caiden to hear its nonsensical wailing – a sound only he seemed to have the power to sense.

Still he didn’t stop. He approached a rise, ran right up it…

And at the top, he saw the first sign of civilization since he left Deepwell’s limits. In the distance, nestled away in the woods, stood an enormous structure of intricate stone.

Lightning broke the shadows and lit up the facade, flashing in the building’s great, glass windows – expensive, noble, but not a fortress. A house? No. Not just a house.

A mansion.

Caiden winced at the lightning – he blinked and squinted into the darkness as it closed in again. He couldn’t make out many details, just enough to know this was a nobleman’s home, out here in the middle of nothing. Someone had wanted to live in seclusion. Based on the architecture, probably someone only a generation or two back. The manor was of a relatively modern design, far from ancient – yet it stood completely abandoned and in disrepair, like no one set foot here in many years.

Hooves came up behind him, bringing with them a sudden whirl of emotions – ones he recognized. They were quickly getting familiar. Almost too quickly for comfort.

Gwen.

“Caiden!” she called, stopping her horse beside him. “What happened!? I heard the glass—”

Caiden nodded. “I’m fine.”

His arm still stung – burned and protested with something that shouldn’t be there. Finally giving it a look, he found a distinct bite mark – deep, bleeding, but not like an animal’s jaws. And something was stuck in it.

Carefully, he pulled the foreign thing from his arm, gritting his teeth when he did, its removal prompting a fresh spurt of blood. It was a little smaller than the tip of his forefinger.

A human tooth. Caiden’s scowl deepened.

Gwen dismounted and looked closer at it, grimacing and looking like she wanted to say something but kept deciding it was a bad idea to speak at all.

Silently, he gestured toward the mansion up ahead in the forest, fog lingering on its grounds and hanging around its front door like an unwelcome guest. Gwen squinted – lightning flashed again, and she blinked.

“What is that? Is that a manor out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Caiden gave the tooth one last glance, then flicked it aside. He pressed his free hand on the bite in his forearm, trying to staunch some of the bleeding.

“That,” he growled, “is where it came from.”