Our camp in the jagged foothills of the mountains was a miserable affair. The wind was a relentless, biting thing that seemed to find every gap in our armor and cloaks, and the hard, unforgiving rock offered little comfort. Morale was as low as the bruised, grey clouds that clung to the peaks above us. Faelar was grumbling into a half-empty ale-skin, Liam was silently staring at a map that was mostly blank, and Willow was trying to coax a tiny, pathetic-looking mountain flower to bloom from a crack in the stone.

  It was in this grim, quiet moment that a new light appeared. It wasn't the sun, which had long since surrendered to the oppressive twilight. It was a moth, a large one, that fluttered into the meager light of our campfire. But its wings, they didn’t just reflect the light; they seemed to create it. They shimmered with a faint, hypnotic, multi-colored glow, leaving faint, glittering trails of dust in the air that seemed to hang for a moment too long before fading.

  Elmsworth, who had been trying to identify the type of rock we were camped on, gasped. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated, academic ecstasy. He dropped his rock, his eyes wide with fervor.

  “By the nine spheres and all the forgotten axioms!” he breathed, his voice trembling. “A Lepidoptera Chrono-phasmatis! A chronomoth! They are said to be living distortions in the fabric of time! Their wing dust can cause minor, localized temporal loops! An incredibly rare, theoretically impossible, and immeasurably valuable specimen! I must… I must capture it for study!”

  He began to rummage frantically through his pack, searching for his specimen net. But he was too slow.

  Nugget, who had been dozing on Elmsworth’s shoulder and had turned a rather competitive shade of vibrant orange, saw the shimmering moth. The chicken seemed to view the beautiful, glittering creature as a personal rival for the position of “most ridiculously colored thing in the immediate vicinity.” It was an affront to Nugget’s very being.

  With a single, indignant squawk that was a declaration of war, Nugget took flight. The chicken shot from Elmsworth’s shoulder, a blur of orange feathers, and made a direct, clumsy lunge for the chronomoth. The moth, startled, darted away. It led the chicken on a wild, erratic chase, flitting away from the camp and down a narrow, overgrown game trail that was little more than a crack in the rock face, a path we would have otherwise completely ignored.

  “After him!” Elmsworth shrieked, his face a mask of panic as he finally untangled his net. “The moth is exhibiting unusual evasive maneuvers! And Nugget's chronal signature could become dangerously unstable if he gets too close to it without proper shielding! The temporal backlash could age us all into dust! Or turn us into babies! Or, worst of all, slightly alter the sequence of my memories of a particularly good sandwich I ate last year!”

  Liam, who had just managed to get comfortable with his back against a rock, didn’t move. “Are we seriously,” he said, his voice a low, dangerous monotone of pure disbelief, “abandoning a defensible campsite, in the middle of the night, in a monster-infested mountain range, to chase a chicken that's chasing a bug? No. Absolutely not. The chicken is a grown… whatever it is. It can take care of itself.”

  “It’s better than sitting around waiting for more of those drakes!” Faelar boomed, already on his feet and grabbing his axe. “A bit of a chase will do us good! Stretches the legs! Besides, I want to see what happens!”

  “We can’t lose the chicken,” I said, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. It was a tactical reality. Our most powerful, most unpredictable, and most infuriating asset was currently flying off into the hostile wilderness. I looked at the dark, forgotten path, then at the exasperated look on Liam’s face. “Gods damn it,” I sighed. “After them! Stay together!”

  The chase was a nightmare. We stumbled through the darkness, following the faint, shimmering light of the moth and Elmsworth’s frantic, shouted instructions. The path descended sharply, a treacherous track of loose scree and tangled roots that led us deep into a narrow, mist-filled canyon. My boots slipped, sending a cascade of pebbles into the darkness below. Faelar swore loudly as a branch whipped him in the face.

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  “I think it’s slowing down!” Elmsworth yelled from ahead.

  We noticed the change then. The frigid, biting wind of the peaks softened into a warm, humid breeze. The dead, grey rock under our feet gave way to damp, living earth. The skeletal trees of the blighted lands were replaced by lush, green ferns and massive, unfamiliar trees whose leaves were the size of shields. We heard the impossible sound of a gurgling stream, a sound of life we hadn’t heard since leaving Oakhaven.

  We pushed through a final, thick curtain of sweet-smelling vines and stopped dead.

  The sight before us was impossible. We stood at the entrance to a small, hidden valley, bathed in the soft, ethereal glow of luminescent mosses and flowers. A clear, steaming stream, its water glowing with a faint blue light, ran through its center. The air was warm and smelled of wet earth, night-blooming jasmine, and a dozen other strange, sweet blossoms. It was a pocket of impossible, vibrant life, a secret garden in the heart of a dead and dying world.

  We stood there, panting from the chase, stunned into a rare, unified silence.

  Faelar was the first to break it, his voice a low, bewildered rumble. “Where in the seven hells are we? There’s… there’s plants everywhere. It’s not right. It feels… soft.”

  Willow, on the other hand, looked like she had come home. Tears of pure, unadulterated joy welled in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She dropped to her knees, pressing her open palms into the vibrant, glowing green moss. “It’s alive,” she whispered, her voice choked with emotion. “Oh, it’s alive! The earth is singing here! I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  Liam, predictably, was immediately and deeply suspicious. He had a dagger out, his eyes scanning the trees, his body coiled and tense. “It’s a trap,” he murmured, his voice a low warning. “An illusion. A lure. Places like this don’t exist in a world like this. It’s like the pretty light on an angler fish, just before it eats you.”

  Elmsworth, meanwhile, had found Nugget. The chicken had the exhausted chronomoth cornered against a large, glowing mushroom. It was standing over the moth, its feathers puffed out, looking immensely proud of itself. Elmsworth was torn, his attention darting between his retrieved companion and the impossible ecosystem around him. “The geo-thermal activity required to sustain such a biome in this climate is staggering! And look at this flora! Is that a Spectral Orchid? I thought they were extinct!”

  As he crept forward to get a better look, a sound, sharp and clear, cut through the air. It was the snap of a twig, followed by another, and another.

  We were not alone.

  In an instant, they were there. Silent figures emerged from the glowing trees, their movements fluid and silent as falling leaves. They were clad in clothes made of woven vines and bark, their faces painted with streaks of mud and pollen. And they were all armed. Short, darkwood bows with arrows nocked, and spears tipped with wicked-looking, sharpened obsidian, were all aimed directly at us.

  We were surrounded.

  A woman stepped forward from the trees. She was middle-aged, her face weathered and stern, her grey-streaked hair pulled back in a tight braid. Her eyes were as hard and as sharp as the obsidian spear she carried. Her gaze swept over us, taking in our blood-spattered armor, our heavy, steel weapons, Faelar’s axe, my spear, and the general air of chaotic violence that clung to us like a shroud. Her lip curled in a faint sneer of disgust.

  “Outsiders,” she said, her voice low and devoid of any warmth. “You are not welcome here. You bring the smell of ash and iron, the taint of the dead world, with you.”

  I held up my hands, palms open, a universal gesture of peace. “We mean you no harm,” I said, keeping my voice calm and even. “We were lost. We were just…”

  “Chasing a chicken!” Faelar interrupted, his hand instinctively going to the handle of his axe. He was tired, irritable, and in no mood to be threatened. “And who are you to tell us where we can and can't be? We’ve had a long day, and we’re not lookin’ for a fight, but don’t think we’ll run from one.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed dangerously at Faelar’s belligerent tone. Her gaze flicked to his axe, then back to my face.

  “You are warriors,” she stated, the word an accusation. “Killers. Your kind has no place in Veridian Refuge. This is a place of life. You reek of death.” She took a half-step back, her grip tightening on her spear. “Leave now, the way you came, or we will make you leave.”

  We stood frozen in a tense standoff, surrounded by two dozen hostile archers in a supposedly peaceful valley. We had stumbled from the frying pan of the blighted mountains into the fire of a paranoid, isolated community that saw us not as people, but as a contamination. And Faelar, as always, was already making things worse.