Flint Foxclaw's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Flint Foxclaw woke before dawn and reached for his blade before his eyes opened. His camp was small and tight, the way he liked it. The bedroll lay snug against a flat stone, straps still buckled at one end so he could roll and run in seconds. His sword rested within arm's reach. A beast-tamer learns to sleep like prey when he is hunting something that has outlived every hunter before him. And this one, the shapeshifter, had outlived a hundred years of them. He stepped past the dead fire and stopped. The dirt around his camp was stamped with tracks, a full ring of them, never once crossing into the cleared ground where he slept. Paw, then hoof, then the bare print of a human foot. The same stride. The same spacing. One creature, changing as it walked. It had circled him for hours and he had not heard a thing. At the edge of the ring, set neatly on a patch of swept earth, lay a small black stone. A fox had been carved into its face, sharp and careful, the eyes cut deep. Beneath it, scratched into the dirt in a steady hand, were five words. I know who you are, Flint Foxclaw. He crouched and did not touch it. For a long moment he only breathed. He had come here to learn what the beast wanted. Now he knew the beast had been studying him just as long, and longer, and better. Flint slipped the carved stone into his satchel beside the vial. His hand brushed the glass and lingered there. Then he drew it back, stood, and began to plan a trap built not for a creature, but for whatever it was that wanted him to know its name first.