Vlad's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Vlad had hunted the beast of Gloomweald for eleven days, and now the trail was dead. He crouched over the last claw mark he'd found and watched the rain fill it. By morning it would be mud. He was fifty, gray in the beard, and he knew cold tracks the way he knew his own hands. This one had gone cold. Every day he waited, the beast slipped further into the deep forest, and no man had killed it in a generation. He needed a fresh sign. Someone who had seen the thing and lived. So Vlad went to the three men who might have. The trapper he found first, hunched in a hut of stretched hides. Silas Creekmoor, half-mad from too many winters alone, wore a fur cap crusted with old blood. He didn't look at Vlad. He looked past him, at the door. "It doesn't leave tracks when it don't want to," he whispered. "I set forty snares. It ate them. Ate the iron." His hands shook. He would give Vlad nothing but fear. The shepherd was next. Matthias Stone leaned on a crook, a widower who counted his flock twice each dusk since his wife died. He pointed his crook toward the high pasture. "It took two ewes under a pair of old oaks," he said. "Big trees, twin trunks. I ran. I should've stayed and watched where it went." His voice broke. He knew the place, but not the path. Vlad walked to those oaks at first light. He found them easy, two great trunks rising side by side, bark deep as a plowed field. Beneath them lay a scatter of wool and a dark stain. But the rain had washed the ground clean. No prints. No direction. He'd come a full day too late again. He was near giving up when the hermit found him. Silas Moorwind came down the slope on bare feet, a straw hat wide as a wheel, a staff worn smooth by years of walking. He alone among the three met Vlad's eyes without flinching. "You're the tracker," he said. It wasn't a question. "The trail's gone," Vlad said. "Every man points a different way." Moorwind nodded at a nearby deer, grazing at the wood's edge, ears turned toward the dark trees. "Watch what the living do," he said. "That doe won't step north. Nothing will. I saw the beast three nights back, drinking at the black spring. It always drinks there. It always comes back." He tapped his staff north, toward the deep reaches. "Follow the water, not the mud." Vlad felt the hunt turn under his feet. He had no track to read. But now he had a place the beast could not leave behind. He shouldered his pack and started north, into the part of Gloomweald that had swallowed every hunter before him.