Renni Ashfire's Arc

Chapter 2 of 12

The bright-maned shape vanished between the trunks, and Renni let it go. Mud pulled at her boots as she pushed deeper. Then she saw the prints. Each one swallowed her own boot twice over. Fresh. Water still seeping into the heel marks. She crouched, two fingers in the cold print, and followed. The tracks led her to a low shelf of stone hollowed into a shallow cave. Someone had built a fire ring there, stones stacked neat. The ash was cold. A journal lay open on the dirt, pages stained dark. She knew the handwriting before she read a word. The hunter she had lost had camped here last. She read fast. Notes on tracks. A sketch of horns. A final line, ink trailing: it is not what we wrote down. Beyond the camp, the kill waited. A minotaur. Huge, brown-furred, throat torn clean. Hours old, blood still tacky. Renni had hunted these woods her whole life and never seen one. The chronicles never named it. The beast had pulled down a creature out of old stories, and left most of the meat untouched. She stepped closer. The skull had been stripped to bone, horns banded with a strange blue shimmer that no chronicle described. Beside it, a pile of smaller bones, picked clean and stacked. Stacked. Not scattered. Something had arranged them. Renni stood slowly. Her plan had been to read the kill and learn the beast's size. She had her answer, and three more questions for every one. She closed the journal, slid it into her pack, and turned back toward the deeper trees. The beast was not the thing the guild had banned. It was something worse, and it knew how to leave a message.