The fire had burned to embers, and the air tasted of woodsmoke and burnt turf. Trenn sat before them, the ground beneath him vibrating with the rhythmic breathing of the resting Gem-Croc.

  Across the trampled earth, Ezy and Zeen worked over the disassembled parts of the Wolf Kin’s flintlock pistols.

  Zeen’s file was grating against a steel firing mechanism, kicking up a spray of tiny sparks. Beside him, Ezy’s new skeletal hand lifted the long barrel of her flintlock sniper, aligning the tube with her eye to inspect its bore for imperfections.

  "This barrel is amazing. But I prefer clockwork over flintlock.” She put the piece of metal down and gestured to the weapon’s stock. “And look at this. The carving is sloppy. It’s a lot heavier than it needs to be."

  "I don’t know, there’s something to be said about flintlocks,” Zeen countered. He held the mechanism up to the ember-light, turning it over in his hands.

  “It's much sturdier than clockwork… faster too. You could bury this in mud for a year, dig it up, and it would still punch a hole through a man's skull.”

  The corner of Ezy's mouth hitched up. “Provided the Explosion Rune hasn’t faded.”

  Across the embers, Mara knelt in the gore-stained grass, removing obsidian shards from the mangled flesh under the giant crocodile’s dead eye.

  Trenn pushed himself to his feet, making her ear twitch in his direction.

  Without turning, she gestured with the tip of her bloodied pliers toward the festering wound, way down the giant crocodile’s body, on its tail.

  “The ichor pushes back the rot,” Mara tilted her chin toward the mangled flesh on the reptile’s face. “This ancient beast is healed by its own blood. That scar never mended because it remained full of Skate’s shrapnel.”

  She held up a small glass vial, half-filled with the shimmering, golden liquid.

  “Norennald spoke of the highest Arcanas of Alchemy, only reachable with ichor reagents.”

  Her wide amber eyes fixed on his. "A single dose of an Ichor Potion erases fatigue, restores wounds, realigns and heals crushed bones,” she said with excitement.

  With potions like that, the One-Eye would never have escaped.

  "Make it," Trenn said. "Make as much as you can."

  Mara’s breath hitched. “Trenn. The highest Arcanas of Alchemy. I’m a… casual practitioner at best. I would probably brew a bottle of particularly vicious poison.”

  Trenn laughed and picked pliers from Ezy and Zeen’s sprawled out tools.”

  "I'll help you. This animal has suffered enough, caught between us and the One-Eye."

  The work was repetitive—tear, grip, pull, discard. The rhythm lulled his focus until the world beyond the wound resolved into the clear, silent landscape of his sonar.

  His perception swept across the field and found Almitad, floating silently next to a pile of giant broken bones.

  Necrotic threads wove themselves around a long shard of bone deep within the wound. The free ends snaked through the air toward Almitad and coiled around her forearm. She then braced her entire floating form, pulling with her levitation as leverage against the resistance.

  With a final release of tension, the broken bone slid from the Gem-Croc’s flesh and struck the ground, sending up a puff of dirt. The fragment was as big as a Wolf Kin's arm.

  The undead necromancer picked it up and set it aside.

  Trenn formed the words in his mind, sending them across the distance with his Message spell. “Almitad, why are you collecting bones?”

  Almitad’s distant form went still. Her skull turned toward the embers of the camp, but her voice boomed directly beside him, startling Ezy and Zeen.

  "God bones are ideal for rune scribing. I will fill its cavity with coagulated ichor to act as a catalyst for my enchantments. All we need now is a worthy metal."

  Trenn thought about his worn, goblin-enchanted club. "A weapon made of a god's blood and bones, runescribed and enchanted by the Shepherd of Loss…"

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  He began with the memory of a baseball bat—a smooth tool of polished wood, designed for a game. In his mind, he kept its simple form but drew out its length, transforming the piece of sporting equipment into a long, bludgeoning weapon. He sent the image through the tether to Almitad.

  "Think you can make something like that?"

  The sun was rising in the perpetually grey sky of the Valley of Dawn. Mara stood alone at the edge of their camp, a solitary figure staring out across the vast, untouched grassland.

  "With the mists gone, this place will soon be teeming with 'kins and ‘lings. There will be wars fought over this territory."

  Her amber eyes settled on the distant, hazy peaks to the West. "And the One-Eye is heading West. Wolf Kins, Goat Kins… why would it go there?"

  The team gathered behind her. At their feet, scarring the grassland, was a giant trail of massive paw prints. Each of them a crater the size of a small cart, gouged deep into the earth, next to torn up turf and soil.

  They were laid out in a straight, unwavering line, a clear, violent scar carving a path across the landscape toward the distant mountains.

  Ezy knelt, her skeletal hand hovering over the compressed, fractured earth of a crater's edge, her one good eye wide with a scientist's awe. "The sheer force..." she whispered, "the ground shear from the acceleration...the velocity... It's terrifying."

  Mara paced a few steps, her gaze following the unwavering line into the distance. "You can see by the angle and depth that it was carrying Dawn in its jaws."

  There was no debate. The path was there.

  Trenn turned to look at the Gem-Croc. Through the shimmering cord of their bond, he felt not a monster, but a victim. A vortex of pain, confusion, and a profound, directionless loneliness churned within the ancient creature. Another wound left to fester in his wake. The Wayrest. The Dam. Now this living, breathing casualty.

  The instinct to offer comfort, to promise a return, rose in his throat. The thought died before it could form. A promise was a lie. There was no coming back. The Shears were on their way to poison Earth..

  He had to leave it. He had to let it go.

  He turned his back on the creature, his focus locked forward, on the One-Eye.

  He grabbed Skate off the ground and placed it on his head. He looked up at the sky and saw Bomber’s pink and yellow fluff against the gray clouds. He looked at Mara, their shared resolve a silent, unspoken thing.

  She nodded once. "Let's move.”

  Without another word, Mara began walking, her boots finding the rhythm of the hunt as she followed the line of craters. The Scrapper crunched into motion behind her, a macabre skeleton on a grim pilgrimage. The team fell into their tactical formation, a broken but determined unit moving as one. They did not look back. The hunt had begun.

  They ate in a tense silence around a small, smokeless fire. Its heat was a thin defense against the chill seeping from the hardened land.

  The only sound in the quiet was the slow, rhythmic THWACK of Almitad’s tool against the god-bone. Zeen’s expression soured. He finally limped over, taking the bone and a smaller carving knife from her.

  "No," he stated, his voice a low grating. "You are terrifying and your runes are peerless, but you are not a sculptor. Let me." He didn’t wait for an answer and grabbed the giant bone with both arms and pulled on it.

  Almitad’s skeletal form remained still, offering no protest. Zeen grunted, taking the full weight of the god-bone. He braced his legs to keep from staggering as he began to haul the oversized object, which was longer than he was tall, back to his spot by the fire. The far end of the bone scraped a shallow line in the dirt.

  While Trenn chewed the dried meat, his senses maintained their silent, sweeping perimeter of the dark grasslands, a constant state of vigilance. A colossal signature registered at the far edge of his sonar, its movement heavy and deliberate. He focused on it, and the familiar tether solidified in his mind. The current of weary, simple purpose that flowed from the Gem-Croc was unmistakable.

  He lowered the strip of jerky to the rock beside him.

  “The Gem-Croc is approaching,” he announced, his voice even. “It’s not hostile.”

  Zeen’s file stopped its methodical rasp against the god-bone. Mara’s head tilted as her ears strained against the quiet. Ezy’s skeletal hand settled on the stock of her rifle, a reflexive gesture of caution.

  A distant crack of splintering wood carried across the grassland, a sound that made the hairs on Trenn’s arms stand erect. A colossal silhouette began to coalesce from the deepening gloom, its form blotting out the horizon.

  The Gem-Croc’s golden form advanced against the grey sky, moving through a thicket of trees as if they were nothing more than tall grass, each step a low, earth-shaking thud that vibrated up through the ground.

  A spike of raw, primal fear lanced through Ezy’s tether. He felt Zeen’s breath catch in his throat, his own hand tightening on the haft of his club. The creature was not charging; it was walking with an unhurried gait that was somehow more terrifying.

  It stopped fifty yards from their small campfire, its sheer bulk a living mountain range that reshaped the landscape. It's one good eye, a shield-sized orb, fixed on their camp.

  Trenn probed the tether, his own will a gentle question sent down the shimmering cord. The psychic current that flowed back was a vortex of ancient, directionless terror—the disorientation of a mind set free after weeks of puppetry, now lost in a world it no longer recognized.

  The bond's warmth was possessive, the desperate grip of a castaway to the one solid piece of wreckage in an endless sea. It was clinging to Trenn’s Charm spell.

  The realization settled in his gut, a feeling of profound, dawning horror.

  It was not following the team. It was following him.

  The silence in the camp stretched, thick and profound. No one moved. No one breathed. They were small, fragile things in the shadow of a traumatized god that had imprinted on their leader.

  Through the tethers, he felt a shared, stunned disbelief, a collective understanding that their entire world had just fundamentally and irrevocably changed.

  Mara shook her head, and Trenn felt a wave of pure, unadulterated exasperation through their braided tether.

  “You have the weirdest pets.”

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