Karn Chiselclaw's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Karn Chiselclaw crouched at the edge of the deep brush and counted the tracks his rival had left in the mud. Three sets, all heading south, all fresh. The other hunter was widening his range. Karn had spent a season measuring the man's skill and found it sharp but short of his own. That gap would close if Karn did not move first. He needed a weapon the rival could not match, and he knew what it had to be made from. He rose and walked the boundary of his ground. A cracked stone pillar stood at the north edge, scratched with old runic marks, planted there long before Karn worked the brush. He had claimed it as his marker the day he first dragged a mantis carcass home. He pressed a palm to the cold stone, then turned toward the smithy he kept hidden in a stand of trees beyond the creek. Steel chipped. Wood rotted. Bone cracked. Chitin did none of those things, and a blade of chitin would settle the question of who owned the brush. The smithy sat low under a slate roof, its forge cold, its anvil clean. Karn had built it for one purpose and used it for smaller work while he waited. Inside, his racks held cured plates from the common brown mantis he hunted for meat. He lifted one and bent it across his knee. It held, then split. Brown chitin was not enough. He needed the green kind — the tall one, the Verdant Mantis, with plates thick enough to turn a spear. He had heard hunters speak of it. He had never seen one. He did not know where it nested. He set the broken plate down and stood in the doorway. Without a kill, the forge stayed cold. Without a nest, there was no kill. He thought of the rival's tracks heading south and felt the season tighten around him. He could wait and lose the brush, or he could go find a creature he had never hunted in ground he had never walked. He took his hooked spear from the wall and shouldered a coil of rope. At the threshold he stopped and looked at the bare patch of mud where he meant to plant his hunt-marker when the work began — a bone stake bound with the front legs of the fallen mantis, the sign that the forge would soon burn. The patch was empty. It would stay empty until he found the nest. Karn stepped past it and walked south, into ground that belonged to no one he knew.