Robert Hansen's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Robert Hansen crouched beside the man who'd collapsed at the edge of his camp, blood soaking through furs that weren't thick enough for this cold. The wound ran diagonal across the stranger's chest, deep and clean. Too clean. Spal didn't cut like that. They crushed and tore. Robert pressed two fingers to the stranger's neck and found a pulse, faint but there. The man's eyes opened halfway, unfocused. His hand clutched something against his chest, a circular pendant covered in symbols Robert had never seen. Not trade marks. Not tribal. The stranger's lips moved, forming words that came out in a whisper. "Hollowgrass... the tree..." His fingers loosened. The pendant slipped free and hit the frozen ground with a dull clink. Robert stood and followed the blood trail back across the tundra. Fifty yards out, he found where the stranger had fallen the first time. The grass was pressed down in a perfect oval shape, bordered by a ring of small dark mushrooms that hadn't been there yesterday. Robert had walked this ground a hundred times. He knew what belonged and what didn't. Past the strange imprint, the blood trail continued another two hundred yards to a dead tree he'd never paid attention to before. It stood alone, massive and withered, branches clawing at nothing. The bark looked wrong, like something had been drinking from it. Robert walked back to his camp. The stranger was dead now, eyes fixed on the sky. Robert picked up the pendant and turned it over in his hand. The symbols caught the light in ways metal shouldn't. He'd come to the tundra to hunt Spal, to master the spear until nothing could touch him. But whatever had opened this man's chest wasn't a Spal, and the tree standing out there like a marker meant someone wanted him to know about it.