Venn and Guff had lain in the mud beneath the outcrop for hours before they noticed the watchtower. Some of the weaker walls had crumbled into nothing at the touch of the dragon’s breath, but the tower still stood, rings of green foliage stubbornly holding on around its perimeter. Nevertheless, a dull red glow emanated from its peak, and a curious brown smoke arose from within.

“It’s avoiding it,” Guff hissed. They wriggled deeper into the moss and dirt as the enormous creature soared and circled overhead.

“Summoned by the smoke,” Venn replied. “Some of the mouse-men retreated that way.”

“You’re not saying...”

“Yes. It must be in league with the enemy.”

It would explain why, after hundreds of years, the winged reptile spanning the sky (which could only be a dragon, from conversations with the elders) had returned to lands bordering their own. The levin had always skulked everywhere across the plains and scrub, yet in these past moons Venn and Guff had sensed a direction never told of in the master’s burrow back home. An expansion, an invasion, of organised effort. Paths and farms and destruction of their kind spreading from the vile heart. Jiharu.

And now, the inhabitants of that heart were cooperating with an even fouler species.

So it was that the young skern found the balance tipping once more. They had been ill-judged to declare themselves reclaimers of the old glory. Hours ago, they were the titans of the land. Now, they cowered in fear once again.

There was nothing to do, though, than obey the way to survival. At long last, the dragon seemed satisfied that nothing outside the watchtower could have escaped the plateau alive. It circuited the outcrop once more and flapped away westward with great strokes of its leather wings. When the shadow passed across their hiding place, each skern pretended not to see their companion duck.

“Let’s get out of this place,” Guff urged. “Before they bring it back. Or another.”

Slowly, they edged away from the eyes of the fortress. It was out of sight before they had realised they were creeping deeper into the levin’s homeland. Roads criss-crossed the land like the close scratches of a set of claws. The thick plants of the jungle had been cut back into narrow strips marking out borders of the fruit plantations amid which the mouse-men toiled. Most of their way, the skern’s route was dictated by what little cover they could find between these corridors and the neat wooden berry silos that interspersed the orchards.

No birds sang. Venn looked upon it all and knew it had not always been this way.

But where else would they go?

Guff finally said it when they had paused beneath a mighty gnarled gubtree to let a platoon of spearmice pass down the road mere feet to their right. “Can we stop them, friend?”

Venn considered. This was a show of power he had never expected. They had changed the very landscape as far as the eye could see. But they were still just tiny lumps of stinking fur for all that. He thought of master Skrenn’s yellow teeth as he had loomed over them. Each was as big as those sacks of meat.

“We can,” he concluded. “And perhaps only us. For only we have seen the levin for what they could become. Leave them to take a tower here, lay a farm there, and the clans will not see the danger until it is too late. Some are already gone.” That was now too clear to not accept. But equally clear now was the way to tip the balance for good. “But we have seen their weakness as well. We know how they rely on those shelled ones, telling them what to do. They are not independent like the skern, bound only by a will to dominate. Apart, they can only flee before our strength. And there is one place, we know, that tells them all these unnatural things.”

“Jiharu,” Guff said simply. “I’ve been thinking. That dragon was not just trying to kill us.”

“No,” said Venn. “It could have had my tail at least. But first it wanted to take our captive.”

Guff was getting excited. The levin were gone, and they crept on down the strip of forest. Eastwards. The shining eyes of a dozen beasts, fugitives from the dull farms that had replaced their home, gazed down mournfully on them as they passed. “Most important to them was us not finding the way. To Jiharu.”

Venn paused and extended his stubby neck. Further east, beyond the works of his enemy, a flash of red burst from the horizon. The Fiery Grove.

“But they were too late.”