A warm wind howled across the cliff face and ripped at the lone climber who braced against the red rocks. Rook curled one arm around the rope that tethered him to a tree at the top. The other hand, scraped and bloody, gripped an anchor of stone that protruded halfway down the sheer drop. His sword rattled against his back as if it might escape. The wind bludgeoned his dragon-steel helmet with a ringing drone that shook his eardrums. His throat rasped dry; he'd brought no drink. Deep below, whitewater roared and frothed through the canyon.

With a long breath and controlled slack in the rope, Rook rappelled down the cliff. Through the teeth of his helmet he scanned the rocks and the water below, searching for signs of a sleeping god.

Each one breathes different. Some could form themselves to the fissures in the rock. Others were the rocks. This one, as described by the ancients who lived atop the neighboring mountain, was bristled and masked, black and red. It had many arms, they said, and it moved like a centipede up and down the cliff face. It sleeps during the day and unfurls with the full moon. It breathed moonlight, they said. It was harmless, perhaps sacred, and they discouraged his hunt.

The creature's mask was its lie, his employer had said. Anyone or anything that wandered close to the edge of the cliff would be snatched by one of those many hands and devoured to become another set of appendages. The number of arms that propelled the monster was proof of the number of victims it had swallowed. In the new moon, under cover of complete darkness, it sneaks into villages and steals children from their beds. The ancients know nothing. The creature was destined for the sword.

Rook pushed out from the cliff and spotted the mouth of a wide cave below, just at the end of his rope. He approached with a soft descent, all sound masked by the roar of the whitewater.

The roar of the water, echoing out of the bottom of the chasm, masked the sound of a voice calling from above. Hey--

It was the movement of wings, a shadow flickering overhead, that drew Rook's initial attention. He expected a buzzard, maybe an eagle guarding a nearby nest against an intruder. He held still and nonthreatening against the rock face while he squinted up out of the shadow of the cliff.

The appearance of a winged person made his brain misfire for a moment, and he briefly wondered if those elders might have slipped something into his drink. Then his eyes adjusted: that familiar navy capelet, and especially the shining white mana stone, explained his new situation in infuriating clarity. A godsdamned Royal Hunter was chasing the same kill, and he was dangling on the side of a cliff like a spider. He would have much preferred the drugged drink.

"Go back to your pretty castle, Chimaera." He braced himself against the wall, an arm curled around the rope while he glared up at the figure hovering against the sun overhead. Those hunters that worked for the crown were renowned for their stolen appendages and grafted powers. From the perspective of the underground hunters' organization, the queen was killing off the beasts just to hack them apart and reassemble them into an army of superhuman puppets that would inevitably turn on them once the monsters were gone.

Rook leaned out from the cliff, gauged the angle down to the cavern mouth, and rappelled down another short drop. "Unless you plan to grow another pair of arms, this one's useless to you. Go home and claim you killed it. I'll take it from here."

Team up with a Royal Hunter? A dark storm roiled in the back of Rook's throat, sulfuric at the idea of joining forces with a transmogrified weapon. He hadn't lost the shift of her fingers into talons or the way that unnatural sharpness slipped into the rock. How much power should the Crown be allowed to collect? Surely a power that belonged to the ancient earth should be distributed among the people, not hoarded by a single puppeteer.

At the same time, that purposeful power was keeping the Old Gods from claiming more victims, no matter the motive. If Rook failed alone, his wouldn't be the last pair of hands to be added to the monster's gait.

He braced against a whistling wall of wind. The water below seethed white and angry. The low and wide cavern entrance opened only a little farther below his feet, and his arms were getting tired.

"Killing blow gets the shard." It wasn't an agreement to work together, but it wasn't a refusal. If this meant he could knock out this Old One with fewer of his own broken bones and keep another God Shard out of the Crown's mana factory, he could tolerate playing nice with a chimaera.

Rook dropped the rest of the way, then swung a quiet landing at the corner of the cavern's mouth and tied off the rope for the way back. The water was close enough now that the rock floor glistened slick and spray misted the black inside. Just beyond the darkened wet rock, the cavern walls were covered in thousands of pale handprints.

Water, he knew from the elders, was vital to this Old One. Most of its body was water. It was sensitive to sound and vibrations, but its vision was poor. He tilted his head to peer up at the chimaera with a silent indication to keep quiet.

The moment Rook stepped into the greater glowing cavern, he forgot the reason he was there.

His sword grip slackened. He pushed back his visor to better see the clusters of mana that jutted shining from the floor, the ripples of light in the walls. He could feel them humming in his bones like the pale stones that pulsed in a dark library long ago. He could almost see the silhouette of that child against the cold wall, a shining blue stone cupped in both hands.

A whisper echoed softly, and Rook had turned toward it when a crash of splintered crystal exploded by his ear. His heart thrummed to action; he faced the escaping wisps of magic with a guarded stance, sword at ready, before his mind caught up to instinct. A crossbow bolt stuck deep in the rock behind the shattered dark crystal. Had she been aiming for him? No, a Royal Hunter wouldn't have missed that easy shot.

Something rumbled and hummed deep in the black spaces between the crystals. The air trembled. The pale blue light shivered on the cavern walls. In the distance, a sound like rain echoed in the empty depths, surging rapidly closer.

Rook couldn't see the Royal Hunter, but he tilted his glare in the direction the crossbow bolt had come from. So now the Old One was pissed, and it would be pissed at him for destroying that crystal. He flourished his sword and, with a snarl and a heave, he slammed the blade into another mana crystal that pulverized into escaping wisps of magic.

She had better be good with that crossbow or he would feed her to the monster himself.

The pattering rush of rain grew louder and louder, accompanied now by a sloshing sound like leather bags full of water.

Rook hopped up onto the jutting rock, the shattered remains of a mana crystal crunching under his boot. He drew a breath and roared loud, reverberating through the cavernous room: "COME OUT, COWARD!"

A gelatinous dark shape bulged out of a deep passage and stretched, threading along the wall and ceiling with the rainlike sound of a thousand hands on the cold stone. The cavern filled with a smell like cinnamon and rosemary as the creature whipped around clusters of shining mana crystals, shielding them with its long moving body while the mask of its porcelain face gunned directly for Rook.

Rook braced for impact, his sword held ready to shatter the moster's hollow expression, while he waited for the Royal Pain in the Ass to do something useful.

As much as he despised the Royal Hunters, he had to credit that shot: the Old One's mask popped neat as a bottle cap. The porcelain face-- with its mocking smile and empty eyes --crashed and scattered among the dimmed crystals. The fight should be over. That mask was its life force, its source of power, the difference between a monster and a mass of dead limbs.

But beneath that mask, howling out of black smoke with a watery shine of mana, cried the tear-streaked face of a wide-eyed child. Its many hands stretched for the hunter's wings, mana gathering and shimmering in each writhing palm. In less than a moment, that Hunter's hands would join the rest in the mass of wriggling fingers.

A cloud of warm, soupy mana enveloped the Royal Hunter and eased her wings closed while it tugged her gently down from the ceiling. The hands gesticulated wildly but did not touch her, as if she were a deadly spider that the Old God was desperately trying to shoo out of its house.

The voluminous blubber was too thick to slice through with any expectation of slowing it down, so Rook slammed down the visor of his helmet (his world clapped into silence, broken only by the perpetual ringing in his own head), charged the beast and slammed the sword hilt-deep into the wobbling trunk like a pin into jelly. The monster, predictably, flinched. Rook pressed his thumb against a yellow crystal in the hilt and braced for impact.

The blubber rippled. The black smoke shuddered. The mana holding the winged Hunter constricted and condensed the air around her then suddenly released her while the deep shockwave tone of a tuning fork swelled to fill the cavern. The Old God vibrated with the noise, all its thousands of hands shaken out and convulsing, as if its ability to move was interrupted by the bone-shaking sound. Its oily skin shook so rapidly that the creature was a shining blur.

Stalactites, shaken loose, dropped from the ceiling in a rain of crumbling stone, and the ear-splitting noise was only getting louder, though dampened inside the blubbery beast. Rook couldn't hear it, but his body shook with it. Though his arms felt like jelly and his heart stuttered erratic he kept his grip, one eye on the Royal Hunter. He couldn't keep this up for more than a few seconds.

In a space walled with smoothened rock and cluttered mana crystals lay a hatchling. It was a thing of beauty, its head and tail tip glistening with vivid blue scales, the rest of its body a brilliant sapphire pink. But the hatchling neither knew or cared of beauty or what constituted as such, and so it slept, curled up with its snout tucked between its paws and tail curled around its form.

Lying so small and still, it seemed no different from the gem it resembled, if one were to disregard the rise and fall of its chest as it snored quietly.

The ground rumbled with movement of something large moving nearby. It was familiar movement, so the hatchling did not rouse. Instead, it was inclined to fall into deeper slumber for the comfort those rumbles brought it.

And so it curled up tighter, surrounded by the light of raw mana, content and at peace.


So. Raw mana.

The wizards who studied it claimed that it came from the heart of their world, a centre that was buried deep beneath the water and soil that made up their lands. Crystallised potential, some called it. Because that was what it was: potential, will, intention. The essence of what could and would be. The magic they held could be shaped, could be tamed, could be directed into anything its wielder wished it to be.

It was for these same reasons that raw mana could also be such a pain in the neck. There was no need for the mana to be crystallised or refined for the Old Ones to use them; they just did. Lia had ducked away from the hands that grabbed at her, but there was no escaping the thick plume of mana that wafted around her in a vapour that felt like nothing and felt like sludge at the same time. It draped around her wings, weighing them down, cushioning them. It invaded her lungs, even as she held her breath in vain. It embraced her, thick and cloying and warm. It said:

Be calm. Be calm. Be calm.

Reverbrations scraped through the air. The mana shook off her. The shock of free fall had Lia snapping her wings open, coughing and gasping as she got her breath back. How much time had passed? Had she actually stopped breathing because the Old One had asked? What the hell just happened? The questions flipped through her mind in rapid fire, but one look at the scene before her and she got the only answer that mattered.

Time to finish this.

Mr Helmet Man had put his sword to good use, after all – rammed it right up the creature’s gut. The Old One itself stayed where it was, hands limp, gelatinous body trembling. It had a face beneath that porcelain mask. A child’s. Its mouth was open in a silent scream.

Lia lifted her crossbow.

‘Draw.’

Out shot a jet of magic from the crystal embedded in her collarbone. Midnight blue, glowing ethereally, it curved and jammed into the rail of her crossbow, gathering and expanding impossibly in the tight space. Without hesitation, Lia aimed and fired.

The Magic Bolt disappeared into the Old One’s mouth in a split second.

For a moment, nothing.

Then the Old One’s head tipped back in a kneejerk motion. Moonlight shone out of its false eyes and mouth.

It howled.

Loud, mournful... and pointless. Screaming wouldn’t do it any good now. As if to prove her point, the howl stuttered off abruptly as something deep within its body gave off a muffled thoom. The moonlight faded. The raised half of the Old One’s body began to fall. Mr Helmet Man should probably move out of the way.

Before Lia could do so much as call out, though, something else pierced through the cavernous space. Distant. Shrill. Over and over it went, like a tiny, little alarm.

‘Eep! Eep! Eep!’

‘Huh,’ muttered Lia. It sounded a lot like one of those baby birds crying for their mother. ‘If this thing has a kid, the nerds are gonna have kittens.’

The Älvenkryp slumped to the ground with a thump.

Though the cavern boomed and shook and shrieked and cracked, Rook-- snug in the dim silence of his hideous helmet --heard nothing. He felt it, though: like a tuning fork, the sword conveyed to his bones every strike and howl. He felt the silent explosion deep within the Old One's gullet, he felt the release of moonlight, and he felt the slightest shift of angle that heralded the monster's fall.

Rook planted a boot in the Old One's baggy flesh, yanked out the sword with a glugging squelch of goopy water, and dragged the dripping weapon behind him while he scrambled and clambered over a sharp cluster of mana crystals that, a moment later, shattered under the weight of the fallen monster.

With his back against the wall, Rook watched the dead mass for signs of movement or trickery. From afar he scrutinized the hundreds of wrists and fingers for twitching, but it seemed the thing was truly dead.

Only then did he pry his helmet off his head. His face felt immediately cold, and his ears stabbed by a rush of noise: the echo of roaring water outside, the residual thwoom of the monster's impact, and a faint shrill cry in the distance. He stretched his jaw, scrubbed a hand through his sweat-matted hair, wiped his sword on the sole of his boot, and approached the Old One with quiet guarded steps.

The first thing he noticed was that all the hands were the same. He'd expected limbs of different lengths, different ages, different shades of brown and beige to match the stories of the swallowed misfortunate. But these limbs were all nearly identical, differentiated by a few freckles and hairs but no more. He cut an incision around one of the arms and, through a goop of blubber, found that there was not a person attached to it, only more bones. He tried one more, just to be sure, but there was no one here to rescue, no swallowed victims to return to their villages.

By this time he was nearly covered in sticky pus, but at least it didn't stink. It smelled almost like rosemary. He sloshed through the growing puddle toward the head, where he planned one more autopsy in pursuit of the mana shard that should be embedded there.

The mana shard was the crystallized essence of the Old One: it was the core around which the rest of its shape attached and materialized and moved. Technically, a mana shard left alone for a hundred years would begin to grow anew, but none of them were allowed to remain stagnant so long. It was a mana shard embedded in his sword that hummed that destructive pitch, and another in his helmet that could, among other things, block every drop of sound. This one, he assumed while he sliced into the empty space that used to be the face of a screaming child, probably would grow more arms or something equally grotesque.

He palmed a sharp blue stone and rubbed a sleeve across his forehead, which only succeeded in smearing more goop on his face. He squinted into the dark in the direction of the tiny alarm.

"Sounds like a pig," he commented, picking up his helmet. Surely it was some animal trapped inside, maybe kept for the monster's midnight snack. But he couldn't shake the feeling that it was calling. His grip tightened on his sword as he clambered over the mana clusters toward the noise. "There was only supposed to be one of these things, right?"

The last thing he was prepared to deal with was a mass of many-armed monsters swarming down in response to the shrieking call.

Lia didn’t answer Mr Sword Guy’s question, because she was too busy glaring at the crystal that had disappeared into his hand.

‘Hey!’ She dropped out of the air, her wings folding behind her as she landed on the ground with a thump. ‘We agreed. Killing blow gets the shard.’ She stuck out the hand that wasn’t gripping a crossbow. ‘Give it.’

All the villagers felt it.

A sudden chill in the late morning air. The taste of ash sitting in the back of their throats. There was no distant howl, no vengeful roar; only a mournful quiet that settled over their hearts. Some children asked why the adults looked defeated. The rest continued as they were, youth guarded by blissful ignorance. The village elders, regardless of where they were, looked towards the horizon. In their hands they clutched perfectly round, shining pearls.

At the village edge sat an elderly woman in a wooden armchair, her long grey hair braided into twintails draped over her shoulders. She lifted her hand and kissed the pearl it held, long and tender. Footsteps drew close behind her. She did not turn her head; she knew that her son stood behind her.

‘We should be going after them,’ he said.

He was angry. They all were.

‘We should never have let them pass,’ he continued. The words hissed out between clenched teeth, calm only for the sake of propriety. ‘Following their rules is never going to change anything. They slaughter and pillage our gods, and–and now we have lost the River Guardian! We need to avenge her!’

Ah, the fire of youth. She lowered her pearl.

‘It is good that you love her so,’ she said. ‘Her loss will be a difficult change for us to adapt to. But we will adapt, my child. As much as we love her, the River Guardian lives... lived for an age that spanned far before my own birth, and...’ Her faint smile grew crooked. ‘Our understanding of her has always been tenuous at best.’

‘Are you suggesting that she allowed herself to be felled?’ said the young man, incredulously.

‘I am suggesting,’ said the elder woman, serenely, ‘that fate has its reasons for the losses we endure in life. Let the pieces fall where they may, my child.’

A deliberately controlled hiss of breath.

‘I am grown,’ said her son. A beat of silence, where he seemed to ponder on a choice of words that he would not immediately regret. ‘I will not sit by and make excuses for the ignorant thieves that toddle through our lands at the bidding of their fat and greedy masters.’

He stormed off. There were many things she might say to stay him, but she stayed silent, thumbing the pearl in her hands.

Though they were far from the waters that lay at the bottom of the chasm, she heard it still:

The bubbling roar of a steadily swelling river.

Something was bad.

The hatchling had woken from its slumber, startled by the abrupt jerk that had shaken the ground. It wasn’t like all the other times the ground rumbled with familiarity. This one was different.

And the ground had been still since.

That was around the time the hatchling had begun to cry. Constantly. Insistently. Carrier had come before, when it cried. Carrier always came.

But the ground was still.

And the hatchling’s cries continued to echo into silence.

At the royal command-- while the cavern walls echoed with the tinny shriek-alarm and the Älvenkryp's corpse seeped fragrant water that pooled viscous at their ankles --Rook dropped the shard into the water at his feet with a bright *plunk* and hiked deeper into the cavern. He hoped the damn thing had fallen into the crevice of a broken mana cluster or shattered on the stone, anything to make the royal hunter's life just a tiny bit less pleasant. He was fairly certain that the powers of that shard were horrible and useless. Perhaps he would get to see her accidentally trigger it on herself. His face twisted between amusement and disgust.

The Älvenkryp deflated like a punctured water balloon. The arms were shriveling, the fingers cramped and stiff, while smooth salty water gurgled over the mummifying shoulders and elbows. The water swirled and sloshed against the mana crystals. Blue sparkles spun and shimmered on the surface, casting a pale shifting glow upon the collapsed remains of the monster.

The shrieking noise was coming from beyond a crevice of smoothed rock, like a thousand hands had worn it away with constant passage, where the mana crystals shone closer and brighter. Rook could feel the push of energy tingling on his face, so he sheathed his sword and pushed the helmet back onto his head. Inside, clear air circulated with the alertness of pure oxygen and a wide view of his surroundings fed directly into his senses. He could see the royal hunter, the pooling beast with its dried brittle limbs, and the shrieking thing among the crystals.

Rook slipped inside the narrow smoothed crevice and clambered between the mana crystals, warm and shimmering under his hands, until he laid a boot on one of the bright crystals and looked down to see an ugly pink thing with reflective blue scales sparkling on its face and tail. It had its mouth open like a baby bird while its long body wormed in distress.

His hand went immediately to the hilt of his sword, but he paused short of unsheathing it. This thing didn't look anything like the Älvenkryp, and it was almost too small to hide a mana shard. But if it wasn't a new Old One, then what was it? The elders on the mountain had never mentioned another thing in their stories. Maybe this was something that the Älvenkryp had stolen, something that belonged somewhere else. Or perhaps it was the dangerous creation of the Old One, or a source of its power. With the hilt of a hunting knife he poked the loud little monster to see if it would spit fire or slither away. If he didn't know better, he might think it looked a little like a-- but no, the current state of the planet was inhospitable to dragons: mana had long ago been absorbed into the ground and no longer floated freely in the wind. Even if dragons weren't extinct, they wouldn't be able to breathe in the magic-stagnant air. The mana crystal hummed under his palm.

Meanwhile, the watery ripples on the cavern floor were quickly rolling into waves. A hiss of current foamed in through the entry passage through which they had come and was rising rapidly. Mana shone and shimmered, making the rising water glow pale blue. The walls shifted. Fissures in the rock shone brightly like veins of starlight. The deflated remains of the Älvenkryp floated on the frothing surface.

Water sloshed at Rook's knees while he dug his knife into one of the mana crystals, carefully prying it out of the stone without entirely shattering it. He shoved the crystal inside his jacket then, holding his breath, cradled the little monster into his hands to do the same.

By the time he'd managed to secure the shrieky thing and the crystal together against his chest, the blue glowing water in the crevice had risen to his elbows and was gushing in from the main cavern. Surely the royal hunter, he thought as he pushed and swam against the tide, had escaped long ago.