The creatures moved with a speed that belied their bulk.
Arlen tightened his grip on the saber, sweat slicking his palm. The smaller beast cocked its head, stones glittering in its eyelashes, muscle rippling beneath hardened skin. It chittered a sound like rocks grinding against each other.
His heart slammed against his ribs. He'd trained with blades since childhood, but those lessons had been conducted in sunlit courtyards with padded targets and careful instructors. This was something else entirely.
The horned creature shifted its weight, orange fur on its shoulders bristling. Its companion responded with another chitter, revealing teeth like obsidian shards.
"What the hell are these things?" Arlen whispered to himself, backing away.
The voice in his head remained silent. Useless.
The smaller one lunged.
Arlen slashed in a wide arc, movements guided by muscle memory. The saber connected with the creature's forearm, steel scraping across hardened skin. Sparks flew. The beast barely noticed. It swiped at his face with stone-clawed fingers, missing by a hand's width as Arlen staggered back.
His heel caught on a rock. He stumbled, recovered, but lost ground. The horned one had circled wide, cutting off his escape.
"Bastards," Arlen spat. He pressed his back against a jagged outcropping, saber extended.
The creatures exchanged chatters before advancing together, forcing him to divide his attention.
Arlen feinted left, then bolted right. The saber lashed out as he passed between them, connecting with something softer than rock. A shriek tore through the air. But there was no time to look.
He scrambled down the rock face, boots sliding on loose stone, free hand grasping for purchase. Scrabbling sounds followed—claws on rock, the beasts giving chase.
Arlen wove through the stone forest, blood pounding in his ears. The yellow grass whipped at his legs. A stitch formed in his side, but fear kept him moving. He'd always been fast—but these things moved like nothing human, eating the ground with terrifying swiftness.
A shadow fell across his path. The horned beast had bounded over him, cutting off his escape. Arlen skidded to a halt, spinning to find the smaller one closing from behind. Trapped.
The voice in his head remained conspicuously silent.
"I know you can hear me," Arlen growled, unsure if he was speaking to the Heir or simply losing his mind. "If you've got any ideas, now's the time."
Nothing.
The horned creature charged. Arlen sidestepped, bringing his saber up in a clean counter-strike. The blade connected with the beast's shoulder and stopped dead, as if he'd hit solid granite. Pain shot up his arm.
Before he could recover, the beast's elbow connected with his chest. The impact launched him backward. He collided with a stone outcropping, air exploding from his lungs in a painful gasp.
The saber tumbled from his grip, vanishing in the grass.
Dazed, Arlen tried to stand. The smaller beast was on him in an instant, pinning him with one hand. Up close, he could see hundreds of tiny shards embedded in its maw, opening and closing in an unnatural rhythm, secreting something dark that hardened on contact with air.
Its free hand raised, claws extended. Arlen thrashed beneath its weight, but it was like fighting a mountain.
The claws descended. Arlen twisted, narrowly avoiding having his face sheared off. The stone fingers raked across his shoulder instead, shredding his shirt and the skin beneath. Pain flared white-hot. Blood soaked what remained of the fine fabric, staining the silver inlay woven through it.
He hammered a fist against the creature's jaw, accomplishing nothing but bruising his knuckles. It cocked back its arm for another strike.
Arlen drove his thumb into one of its black eyes. The creature shrieked, recoiling just enough for him to wiggle partially free. He kicked at its midsection, connecting solidly with what should have been a vulnerable point. The beast didn't even flinch.
It grabbed his leg, claws puncturing his breeches and the flesh beneath. With terrifying strength, it hoisted him into the air and slammed him into the ground. Stars burst across his vision. He tasted copper.
The horned creature joined its companion, clicking and chittering. Were they communicating? Deciding how to kill him?
Arlen rolled onto his stomach, fingers clawing at the dirt, trying to drag himself away. His right leg didn't respond properly—something was torn or broken. Blood trickled into his eye from a gash on his forehead.
A heavy foot planted itself on his back, grinding him into the earth. Arlen felt ribs crack under the pressure. He screamed, the sound strangled and desperate.
"Any time now," he wheezed, eyes squeezed shut against the pain. "If you can hear me, you bastard, you'd best do something before your new home gets torn apart." He mumbled, waiting for the trees and light around him to bend and twist like once before. Nothing.
The smaller beast grabbed his hair, yanking his head back to expose his throat. Arlen felt its breath—hot and rancid—against his skin. This was it. He'd survived execution only to die in this alien place, torn apart by monsters.
Something inside him shifted. Not quite a voice, but a presence, finally stirring. The scar on his chest burned like fire.
The smaller beast suddenly released him, its attention drawn by something else. Through pain-blurred vision, Arlen saw it dodge as a beam of cobalt light sizzled through the air where its head had been a moment before.
The horned creature whirled around, just as a second beam punched through its shoulder, leaving a smoking hole. It bellowed, a sound like rocks tumbling down a mountainside.
Arlen dragged himself toward a nearby bush where he'd spotted the gleam of his fallen saber. His fingers closed around the hilt as a blur of motion streaked past him.
A man, thin but corded with muscle, vaulted over a rock. A cloth was pulled tight between his teeth, making his jaw bulge oddly. From a sheath barely large enough for the hilt extended a blade that seemed impossibly long, flashing in the dim light as he engaged the horned beast.
The creature swiped at him, but the man was faster, ducking under the blow and slashing at the joint where stone-like skin met exposed muscle. Black ichor sprayed from the wound.
The smaller beast lunged at the newcomer, but another beam of light caught it mid-leap.
Atop a tall stone stood a woman, arm extended. Metal and wood twisted along her forearm in an intricate mechanism, unlike anything Arlen had seen. Each time she fired, air burst behind her, whipping her twin braids.
The wounded beasts retreated, circling warily, now on the defensive.
Using the saber as a crutch, Arlen hauled himself to his feet. Blood dripped down his leg, pooling in his boot. His ribs screamed with every breath. But he wasn't dead yet.
The smaller beast charged the woman, leaping with startling speed despite its injuries. She dove aside, firing another shot that glanced off its shoulder. It crashed into the rock where she'd stood, shattering the stone.
The man engaged the horned creature in a deadly dance, his strange blade finding gaps in its stone hide, opening weeping gashes. But he couldn't land a killing blow.
Arlen limped forward, saber raised. The smaller beast had cornered the woman against a sheer rock face. It didn't notice his approach, focused on its prey.
He struck with everything he had left, driving the saber into the creature's back where muscle showed through its armor. The blade sank deep. The beast arched, a screech tearing from its throat.
It whirled, the movement wrenching the saber from Arlen's grasp. The blade remained lodged in its flesh. One clawed hand caught Arlen across the chest, sending him sprawling.
The woman capitalized on the distraction, firing three rapid shots into the creature's face. Its head snapped back, one eye bursting. It staggered, then collapsed to its knees.
Arlen crawled toward it, determined to retrieve his sword. As he reached for the hilt, the creature made one final effort, lunging for his throat.
"Down!" the woman shouted, and with it, came the hoarse sounds, and he quickly realized based on her pale-greyed skin unlike the true whiteness of his own and those of Mazander, along with her narrowed eyes that she was Eskian. And he thought quickly, an instance of where he might have been.
Arlen flattened himself against the ground as another beam passed inches above him, striking the beast between its eyes. It jerked backward, then toppled sideways, twitching.
Meanwhile, the horned creature had caught the man's arm, its claws sinking deep. Blood spattered the yellow grass. The man didn't cry out. Instead, he pulled a black metal implement from one of his straps and jammed it into the beast's eye. He triggered something—a blade sprang from the device, disappearing into the creature's skull.
It released him immediately, stumbling back. The man pressed his advantage, his long blade finding the gap between plates at the creature's neck. He buried it to the hilt, then wrenched it sideways.
The beast's head remained attached by only a few strands of sinewy muscle. It collapsed with a ground-shaking thud.
Silence fell, broken only by labored breathing and the distant rumble of thunder.
Arlen pulled himself up, using the dead creature for support. He grasped his saber's hilt, planting a foot on the beast's back for leverage. The blade came free with a wet sucking sound.
Every part of him hurt. His once-fine shirt hung in bloody tatters, the silver inlay—the mark of his noble station—now dulled with grime and gore. His right leg throbbed mercilessly where the creature's claws had punctured it.
The man cleaned his blade on the yellow grass, then slid it back into the impossibly small sheath. As it disappeared, midnight blue embers flickered from the opening before fading to nothing. He pulled the cloth from his teeth, revealing a grimace that might have been pain or exhilaration. One of his ears was partially missing, the flesh cleanly sheared away.
The woman approached, the mechanism on her arm still humming softly. A scar bisected one eye, leaving the iris clouded like morning fog. Her black hair was pulled back in tight braids that wound behind her ears. Her clothing mixed practicality with intricacy—blues and whites threaded through fabric reinforced with metal plating across her shoulders, abdomen, and legs.
Arlen straightened as best he could, jaw clenched against the pain of his broken ribs. He kept his saber lowered but ready.
"You're a long way from home, Mazandrian," the woman said, eyeing the silver threading in his ruined shirt.
"Looks like you took a beating," the man added, voice rough. "Those rock-backs nearly had you."
"Rock-backs?" Arlen managed, tasting blood with each word.
"Local vermin," the woman replied. "Usually keep to the higher elevations. Been coming down more lately." Her good eye narrowed. "Question is, what's a Mazandrian noble doing out here? Alone. Armed. Looking like he's running from something."
Arlen swayed on his feet, darkness creeping at the edges of his vision. The adrenaline was fading, leaving only pain and exhaustion in its wake.
"Not running," he said, the lie coming easily. "Just lost, and I'm no high blood." his lie extended, but within himself, he felt a part of that last statement held truth.
The man snorted. "Nobody gets 'just lost' this far into the Woken Spine."
"Stow it, Vocht," the woman told him. "He's about to fall over." She studied Arlen with clinical detachment. "Seems to me we've got two choices. Leave you for the next pack of rock-backs, or patch you up and ask questions later."
Arlen met her gaze, holding tight to consciousness. "And which are you leaning toward?" he grinned, trying to ease the moment, but instead his highborn tendencies to jest amuck over everything seemed lost in this place.
A grimace ghosted across her scarred face. "Ugh." She scoffed, "I'd heard Mazandrians were all waggish, didn't think it to be this true." She tossed aside a nod, tossing a few strands away from his eyes.
"I think we best get you some aid." The one called Vocht said.