“Barely five minutes before the Zara broke through the defenses of the main campus, security was dispatched to the site of the Cavern to address an emergency call. They discovered evidence of widespread struggle. Seven deaths on site, four casualties. One of the injured was pronounced dead upon arrival to the hospital. We were unprepared for what had come to find us, in the end. The Zara had come looking for the eggs we stole.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

The sound of the river fills the trees. It dances between them, sinuous as a snake, fed today by all the wrath of the falling rain. Beside it, the wolf stretches into a gallop, digging dark claws into the frost-hardened soil. Around her limbs, rust-colored rings of fur catch the gray light from above, flashing gold against silver. Rain hangs on her thick hide, sending up a glittering spray as she careens through the forest. With every step, the mountains rise above her, dark and forbidding. There, where each night the sun descends into a fiery bed of ashen stone and blood red light, darkness stirs. Things that whisper of death and shadows, things that strike fear in the hearts of the living merely because they live, have woken to the strange workings of the beasts – workings of which she is part.

And the darkness spreads.

She, with Pelorin and Cea, had watched the Zara turn its wrath upon the humans gathered around the hole in the earth, and had seen the bodies left mangled and bloodied at the mouth of the great cavern where the dragon eggs once resided. They had witnessed the moment the Zara turned its crimson eyes to the brick buildings of the MASO. Just as the crow promised, they saw the barrier around the MASO fall as the shadows charged inward.

Death. The stench of it is still with her, clinging, but the wolf does not fear it; she follows it. Her eyes glitter with a keen intelligence and caution, alight with the chase. The alpha sends her now on a singular task on which the weight of all of their lives may rest. The pack will be with her, soon enough.

Today, they will fight. The Zara will fall by their fangs, and they will retrieve the eggs of the dragon, lost king of beasts. Today, the message will spread to all the beasts of the deepwood; the dragons live. Today…the wolf flares her ears as a new scent comes to her, and she recognizes the human, the object of her own chase, the real reason she runs so close in the wake of the Zara…today will decide the future of all beasts.

Ahead of her, the river widens. Mud slicks its banks, the trees leaning precariously as their roots sink into the swollen waters. Any other beast might have paused where she drove forward, emerald gaze taking in the great battle waged on the rivers’ shore. There stands the arching back of a bird large enough to carry her away, blood pouring from its pale feathers. She knows the guardian of the castle. It is locked in battle with a spirit from the darkest nightmares of the living, a dark haze with eyes like spilt blood, onyx horns lining its spine and wreathing the space above its indiscernible skull.

The shadow beast turns its gaze on her, and for an instant, the wolf is overwhelmed. There is meaning in that gaze, words so powerful they sear through her mind.

“I need the girl alive. I need her...but she waits for you. She must take the next step, but she will not take it alone.”

Trickery and deception. And even if they are not, it does not matter to the wolf. Even with the fear clawing at her belly and the Zara’s words like thunder in her skull, she hurtles forward, jaws open in a soundless snarl.

And then she is spinning, falling through open air, catching herself against the trees as pain fills the space between her ribs. The shadows move faster than her, and faster than the great guardian bird the Zara has nearly killed. But that is fine. No matter that the Zara’s deadening fear falls like a shroud among the woods, or that the air around it shimmers in a haze of glacial cold. No matter that the beast before her is death incarnate, and its soulless eyes promise terrible things. Failure is incomprehensible to her.

The wolf splays her broad toes, the earth crunching cold and icy between them as her nails sink into the ice below. Her ears swivel forward, alert to the shadow beast’s silence; it is the sort of silence that comes before the worst of storms. Eerie, ghostly, it hangs over everything, thick as fog, dark as shadow.

As Cea once promised, the Zara is no beast. Though the breath rattles between its jaws, there is no movement of life in its shadow flesh. Not even when it turns to the great bird on its other side, breathing a gout of fire as black as pitch. Screeching, the great bird takes wing.

Along the wolf’s spine, the fur bristles. Her eyes shine, and for just a moment, she, too, is transformed. Not a wolf, but a ghost with all the wrath of the living to spare. Again, her paws carry her forward, but this time she hears her alpha’s howl rising in a welcome crescendo. Familiar sounds behind her feed her strength. The tread of her pack, the yips, the howls, the echoing jumble of noise meant to confuse and baffle their prey. Then the creak of old and dying wood and the crash of broken trees.

The wolf’s jaws snap shut around the Zara’s limb, catching the beast in a moment of surprise. She knows what it must see. The trees are in motion. Creaking and groaning as their bark cracks and creases. Crusted snow falls in great clumps, sending up a haze of white. Silhouettes dance and flicker within that haze, the illusions conjured by her pack. There is nothing that can escape that haze once trapped within. It confounds the senses.

Before the illusion can come for her, the wolf flees, snapping her jaws as the coppery scent of blood – her own blood – fills her burning mouth. This is the power of the dark beast’s frigid scales; scales she holds between her jaws, bony and rigid, ripped from the Zara’s flesh. She can taste its poison, the taint of its magic. Its cursed flesh to any other beast might be death, but not to her. She has faced death a thousand times.

And she has won.

The wolf’s striking emerald eyes fix on the Zara now, unrelenting, as she dances to a stop several yards away. A feral snarl escapes her barely parted lips, and the Zara turns to her in the moments before the haze consumes it. Its fangs are also bared, deepest ebony, darker than night.

“Go to her, Elorian. Go to the girl, and together follow after me, on to the end of this world.”

Then the white comes, swallowing the beast. Still clenched in her jaws, its shadow flesh burns, but the wolf merely snarls again. She has no need of words. Something appears in front of her face then, fluttering and screeching. Messenger of the great bats, Itoru seems not to notice his diminutive size, even in battle. But his words pierce through her pain and rage. The human is gone, possibly with the eggs in tow, thanks to the help of the great bird and the river spirit.

The wolf rumbles around the scales, turning her nose to the wind, but the bat zips ahead of her, clicking frantically. Itoru would have her follow, but she turns back to the white haze instead. Beyond it, her pack lies in wait within the trees, prepared to do battle with the Zara; she will not leave them. Only her alpha’s howl of command pushes her after the bat – she does not hesitate once she hears it.

Along the bank of the river she lunges after Itoru, the pain in her jaws forgotten, the pain in her ribs the dull ache of a deep injury. Strange that the Zara’s words do not feel so close to lies now. Though the little bat says nothing, the wolf knows he senses it as well. If the wolves of the trees are her pack, so is this human. Beyond reason, beyond instinct. Every step brings her closer to the place where she must be. She feels it in her bones.

And if he is returned, the bat’s task is done. Her wild chase now is proof of his success. They need the eggs. They need the girl. What next, she does not know – the alpha plots, and the rest follow – but she will not stop until her task is done.