Orrin Pike's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Orrin set the skull on the stone slab beneath the open sky. The bench was old, its cracked granite stained dark from years of work. He spread his tools beside the bones and weighed down a small leaf-pressed journal at the corner. The queen's grief sat inside those pages. He had four days, and he needed every scrap of fur he could still find in the wilds. He walked the treeline at dawn and stopped short. A carcass hung high in the branches, stripped pink, fur scattered in the dirt below. Claw marks scored the trunk. Scavengers had moved through here, and they were moving toward whatever the dire-wolf had left behind. Orrin tracked them hard. He found the rest of the wolf's remains in a shallow hollow, a pack circling close. He drove them off with fire and noise, then gathered what he could into his pack — a strip of hide, a foreleg, tufts of guard hair stiff with frost. He carried it back to the bench and laid it beside the skull. The journal lay open in the wind. He had won the race, barely. But one of the scavengers had followed him home, and it was watching from the trees.