Krayzor's Arc

Chapter 7 of 16

Krayzor left the meeting ground at a hard run and hit the storm's leftovers before the sun was halfway up. The cliff above the gorge had been split by lightning in the night. A long black scar ran down the stone, and burnt rock still smoked at its base. Boulders the size of huts lay scattered across the only fast path back to the cave. He climbed over the first one and kept moving. Halfway through the gorge he smelled it. Wet fur. Old blood. A starving thing breathing hard behind a fresh wall of slid stone. The rockslide had penned a predator into the narrow cut with him, and the beast lifted its head and saw him before he could step back. Yellow eyes. Ribs showing. No way around in time. Krayzor pulled the strips of salted meat from his pack and threw them, one by one, in a line away from the path. The beast lunged at the first strip and tore it down. He dropped a second farther off, then a third, walking the hungry thing away from the cave road one bite at a time. His hand stayed on the haft of the spine maul at his hip. He did not draw it. He was not building something that started with killing a starving animal either. When the last strip was gone the beast lifted its head toward him again. Krayzor was already moving, climbing the loose slope of the fresh slide, hands bleeding on sharp edges. A rock turned under his boot and he went down hard on one knee. He heard the beast coming. He shoved off the stone and rolled over the ridge of the slide and down the other side, out of the gorge, onto the path that led to the waterfall. He stood up shaking and counted what he had left. No rations. A torn knee. The sun already past its peak. But the gorge was behind him and the cave was ahead, and the fox was still waiting behind her wall of poison flowers. He started running again. Sundown would not wait, and neither would he.