The stranger moved the weapon up and down, still pointing it at Saia.

“I’m the one who makes questions. Who are you?”

She didn’t have time for that: she could see movement among the rocks, she knew the rats were there even without feeling them. Mayvaru could be listening right at that moment.

A twang interrupted the silence, and the debris crumbled a bit, a dart jutting out. The movement had stopped: one rat had been killed, while the rest had dispersed.

The stranger extracted another dart and rearmed his weapon.

“So?” he said, completing the operation without looking down. “Start talking.”

Saia was reminded of her meeting with Beramas. How ridiculous her threats must have seemed to him.

“Shoot me,” she said.

“What?” the stranger asked.

“I have no intention of giving you my actual name, and any other information we would exchange would be a lie. So shoot me.”

He stared at her for one more second. He didn’t advertise his intentions with a change of expression or a gesture: there was just another twang, then the dart was flying in the air.

Saia slowed it down with a barrier of wind, then pushed it away with her hand once it was close enough. She didn’t want him to know exactly what she was capable of.

The stranger pointed the newly-armed weapon at her, almost out of habit.

“So that gray-faced bastard was right. You are powerful.”

Saia advanced toward him. To his credit, he didn’t retract.

“Lead me to them,” she said. “I hope for your sake you haven’t killed them.”

The stranger turned to descend from the opposite side of the pile of debris. With the extra viserite dragging her down, Saia sunk to her knee at each step.

They finally touched the barren earth, then the stranger led her toward another fallen building. Behind the structure, there was a series of large stairs leading into the ground, to a monumental square opening flanked by two statues. Their heads had fallen down, lost under a nearby mountain of debris that hid half of the opening, precarious enough to look like it could crumble and seal off the inside at any moment. The stranger crossed the narrow entrance, stepping into the darkness beyond. Saia could see a long corridor in the stone, the walls interrupted by more square openings on either side. The man moved as surely as she did despite the lack of light, keeping close to the left wall without needing to touch it to know it was there. There were stairs at the end of the main corridor, going down for so long Saia couldn’t see their end. But there was no need to go that far: once they had reached the third-to-last series of openings, she spotted a faint light coming at the end of a lateral corridor.

“Serit?” she called out, making the stranger jump. The word reverberated inside the structure.

The only answer was the sound of something shifting at the end of the corridor. Saia pushed past the stranger and accelerated toward the light.

Serit was sitting in a corner in front of a dying fire. Their head was uncovered and a rag was tied over their mouth, preventing them from speaking. Their hands were tied as well, behind their back.

They started mumbling something in a high-pitched voice while Saia was bending down to untie them. The knots were so tight she had to use one of her winds to cut the cloth.

As soon as they were free, Serit started coughing. Saia patted their shoulder and stood.

“Did he hurt you?” she asked, nodding toward the stranger.

Serit stared at him, as if wondering what to answer.

“No,” they said in the end. “A bit, to tie me. And I’m pretty sure he’d have killed me if I didn’t reveal I was a shilvé.”

Saia looked at the man. He had the decency to step back and raise his weapon.

“But he’s one of the hunters,” Serit added. “So we need him, I suppose.”

Saia nodded. She sat down next to them and pointed at the ground on the other side of the fire.

“Sit, we have a few questions for you.”

The hunter stared back at her, then seemed to realize he had no choice and obeyed. He held the weapon horizontally, the string relaxed between his fingers.

“They said you want to fight Mayvaru,” he started before Saia could speak. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Stopping projectiles is not enough to defeat her.”

Saia didn’t think she could get more irritated at him than she already was, but each of his words proved her wrong.

“Whatever,” he said, breaking the silence that had fallen after his last sentence. “Since you’re so strong, I’ll indulge you. If monsters destroy each other, it’s an easier life for normal people.”

“Did you just put me in the same category as Mayvaru?” Saia asked, lowering her voice to the point it could belong to someone else, someone feral.

It was the hunter’s turn to stay quiet and stare.

“Why don’t we start from the beginning?” Serit said, their voice starting out as forcefully cheerful, then ending on a tired note. “He’s Caydras. He’s been hiding here since Mayvaru defeated his group. The other survivors escaped long ago, he’s the only one that remained here, in their base. That’s all I managed to dig out of him. What do you want to ask, Saia?”

“Why did you fight her?” she asked. “Despite knowing who she is?”

Caydras lowered his weapon even more, until the tip of the dart touched the floor.

“I can’t speak for all of them. We had different reasons for doing our job, like money or glory or hate. But we all agreed that monsters like Mayvaru can only survive eating people, so they should all die. They were animals, then they tasted a bit of human flesh, felt a sparkle of intelligence, and refused to go back to the oblivion they deserve. We had the skill to send them back into it, so we used it.”

“I don’t understand how you’re even alive,” Serit said. “Why did you stay here? Why didn’t Mayvaru kill you?”

The man lowered his head so much that his expression disappeared behind the large brim of his hat.

“She keeps me here. She sends some of her creatures every once in a while so I can hunt and eat, even if they try to kill me if I’m not alert.”

“Why?” Saia asked.

“Because she enjoys torturing me. And because I’m useful in case one of the beast people she controls gets ideas of grandeur. There was a donkey, once, who was gaining popularity by speaking against her. Much easier to send someone like me than risk ruining her reputation.”

He adjusted his hat, revealing a lost gaze aimed at the embers.

“And I’m her emergency food, I guess. She’ll consume me like a snack once I’m not useful anymore.”

Saia felt a bit guilty for thinking so harshly of him.

“What was your plan?” she pushed herself to ask. “What went wrong?”

“Our plan was nothing special. She couldn’t be ambushed, so we just decided to hit her with everything we had, digging a tunnel through her animals until we could reach her. But we had prepared well. We built new weapons crafted from the darts left here at the ruins by the cloud bastards. We even convinced the blacksmiths to give us some of their experimental weapons.”

“Do you still have them?” Serit asked.

Caydras glared at them.

“No. After everything ended, the blacksmiths claimed we’d stolen all of it and took them back, even the ones we had created. As for what went wrong… Everything, of course. We were doomed since the beginning and we didn’t even know the extent of it.”

“The animals were too powerful?” Saia guessed.

“No, but they were too many. Even then, our resources might have been enough if it wasn’t for those damn rats. At least we forced her to reveal that they existed, otherwise she’d still be keeping them as her secret weapon. They came out from below, with the moles. Most of our weapons required viss to work, so we were massacred.”

A rippling tension crossed his face.

“The worst part is that she wasn’t even there. She flooded us with her animals and stepped away, and at some point during the fight we couldn’t see her anymore. She killed us from afar. It was all hopeless.”

Saia exchanged a glance with Serit. They scratched their arm between bicep and shoulder, a clumsy way to convey the word powerful. She was reminded of their warning about not underestimating Mayvaru and nodded.

“So that’s it, then?” she said. “I don’t want to minimize your pain, but we’re about to risk our lives as well, so any suggestion you have might help us win. And if we succeed you’ll be free, right?”

He looked at her for a long time. She noticed that the weapon was still balanced across his tights, but he wasn’t touching the string anymore.

“We took notes about her animals, before attacking. The majority of them have powers, so we wanted to know what we were dealing with in advance. You can consult them, but I won’t give them away without a fight: they’re all it remains of many of my friends.”

He quieted suddenly, as if saying that word out loud scared him. Saia wondered how old he was: he seemed to be at least fifty, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear he was younger.

“My memory is strong,” she said. “I’ll just need to read them a few times.”

He set the weapon aside and stood, leaving the pale circle of light for the corridors. Saia imagined he had all but disappeared to Serit’s eyes, but she could still see him until he turned a corner.

“What’s this place, anyway?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“A vault, I think,” Serit said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t collapsed yet.”

Saia was reminded of Caydras’s words.

“So the weapons outside are a gift from your people, uh?”

They nodded, but didn’t elaborate.

Caydras returned fairly quickly, without a sound. He was holding a thick book with two hands, the weapon strapped to his back. As he got closer, Saia saw that the pages were bound in smaller stacks held between the leather folds of the cover, but not tied to them.

“Here, handle them carefully.”

Saia took the book, pressing down on the cover to prevent the stack of papers from flying around. She skimmed them: they didn’t have drawings, except for some details here and there like the shape of the muzzle, tail or horns of a specific animal, but at least the descriptions were long and detailed. They were organized into sections, one of which was titled ‘weak points’. Saia wondered which other parts of an animal could be weak besides its legs and neck. But the notes were extremely specific, like ‘behind the left ear’ or ‘at the base of the tail’. Most of the animals’ ‘weak points’ sections were empty.

“What’s this?” she asked Caydras, pointing.

“It’s to block their powers. Most of them are just guesses.”

Saia held her finger on the page, waiting for him to elaborate.

“It’s a bit how you defeated the rebels the first time they tried to kidnap me,” Serit said. “They were using a tattoo not to fall asleep. It stopped working when you cut it.”

Saia nodded, mentally shuddering at the memory.

“Well, the animals have patterns running inside their bodies, like all of us,” Serit continued. “The ones with powers can instinctively change the course of part of their viss to obtain another pattern with a set effect. But if you damage the body parts through which that pattern flows, it won’t work anymore. Right?”

They looked at Caydras, and he nodded.

“So if I hit them there…” Saia began, but trailed off. The problem wasn’t where to hurt the animals, she had enough strength to destroy them as soon as she got a hold of them. The problem was expanding her domain enough to reach them, with all the viss-eating rats Mayvaru had at disposal.

She skimmed some more pages, taking in the descriptions. She recognized some of the animals that had accompanied Mayvaru when she’d met her for the first time. The reddish ones were called raccoons, apparently: they had been imported from a land on the other side of the world, and were usually gray. Mayvaru’s raccoons could eat anything, and their weak points were unknown.

The beavers, instead, could bend branches and trees. They had been modified during the experiments of the Dulrir’s clan. Their weak point was at the base of the tail.

Then there was the gray bull. Another creation of the Dulrir’s, that had mixed it up with another creature that came from the other side of the sea, a black and white herbivore with a short trunk. They were suspected to have powers, since their fur was an unnatural color for the species, but the hunters hadn’t discovered what they were.

The mentions of the Dulrirs increased the more Saia read.

“Why did you work for people that created monsters, as you call them?” she asked Caydras.

He shrugged.

“As long as they didn’t try to become human, they weren’t a danger. Besides, we didn’t know we’d have to fight against them, after the beastforgers’ tragedy.”

Saia nodded. She closed the notes, with the intention of examining them better later. There was also the question of where, exactly, it would be better to fight Mayvaru. The forest was a candidate, the ruins another. Both provided too many hiding spots for the rats, but at least inside Darasa there were plenty of structures Saia could collapse on top of whatever horde of animals Mayvaru would unleash.

“What happened to this place?” she asked.

“I’m not a historian. I only know that it was attacked by the Arissians centuries ago, or maybe millennia? I don’t know. They stole all of their riches and used them to build Aressea as it is today. The Golden Lands have been in decline ever since, even before the invasion.”

“So why are there shilvé weapons around?”

Caydras frowned at that word, but the question wasn’t aimed at him.

Serit sighed.

“You’re not going to let me get away with it, are you? If it really happened that long ago, most of the cloud cities were going through a piracy phase.”

Saia snorted out loud.

“That’s what your textbooks call it?”

“Story-bottles. They were stealing resources from the lands below out of necessity, at least at the beginning. Because the spirits had abandoned us, and they were the ones visiting the land.”

“And ‘stealing resources’ includes destroying buildings?”

“Yes, if they contain them or are connected to a defence system. The strategy was sending a dart first, to disrupt, and then a grapple or net to gather resources. The loot was only sorted out at the end. But I bet most of the destruction you’ve seen was the Arissians’ fault.”

Saia glared at them, and they retracted a bit.

“I’m not saying my people were innocent, I’m just describing what they used to do.”

“Used to,” Saia repeated in a flat voice. “What made you stop?”

“The major cities put up protections. Patterns that created barriers, physical shields over the cities, some of them even trained sprites to attack us in the skies. Eventually commerce became more profitable, so we abandoned piracy. Most of us, at least.”

Saia thought of the attacks on the mountain, but didn’t feel like arguing.

“On the plus side,” Serit said. “The weapons here are very old, the kind I had to study at the beginning of my career. I bet I can find the launchers around, since sometimes they detached after shooting a certain amount of darts.” They shook their head with a light smile on their lips, as if it was unfathomable for a modern weapon to behave in such an unreliable way. “I bet I can do something with them. Maybe a portable version, or one that can attack from afar…”

Saia thought about the plan. If Serit was actually able to create that kind of weapon, there was something else they could try against Mayvaru. But they wouldn’t have liked it, so she kept the thought to herself.

She tapped the book of notes to get Caydras’s attention.

“Thank you for everything. We’ll only stay here to memorize this, then we’ll be on our way. We could bring the fight to the ruins in the next days, but we’ll stay away from your hiding spot.”

“No, please, bring her in range,” he answered, grabbing the weapon and mock-aiming it at the ceiling. “I’ll be glad to help you.”

Saia nodded, thinking she’d have avoided that, in case Mayvaru took him hostage. Still, she was glad to have people like him or Teormu to help her. It made her feel like her plan wasn’t that crazy, after all.