Dae pushed through wet reeds, his talons sinking into black mud. Behind him lay months of dead ends — torn maps, burned letters, a dozen wrong names. He carried a worn leather journal under his clockwork arm. Inside it, every rumor about wounding an immortal. None of them led anywhere. Time was eating him alive, and he still did not know what could make his quarry afraid. The hut rose from the swamp like it had grown there. Herbs swung from its eaves. A small woman in a tall brown hat opened the door before he knocked. She looked him over once — the feathers, the cloth over his eye, the journal — and stepped aside. "You look like a man chasing something that bites back," Greta said. "Come in. I have books." She let him stay. He read for months at her table, working through her strange stack of tomes — gods and their domains, their wars, their quiet hatreds. He filled the journal with new notes. No name matched the one who took his family. But deep in an old researcher's diary, two names sat circled in faded red: Darchovius the Death Lord, and Garoth the Judge. Gods who could punish gods. Proof, at last, that immortals could be hurt. He closed the book carefully. Greta watched him from across the room, stirring something that smelled of root and smoke. "Found your weapon?" she asked. "A direction," he said. He stood and gathered his coat. She did not try to keep him. "The fee for the reading," she said, in the same plain voice, "is that you come back when your silly revenge is finished. Be my apprentice. Three left before you. None stayed." Dae laughed — short, dry, surprising himself. He looked at her small, steady face and dipped his head. "When it's finished," he said. He stepped out into the wet air with two god-names burning in his journal and a door he could, someday, return to.

Dae stepped from Greta's door into the wet morning, journal tucked tight under his clockwork arm. He had not gone twenty paces before he felt it — a quiet weight behind him in the reeds. Someone was watching. If he walked straight ahead, they would walk straight behind him, all the way to whatever god he found first. He circled wide instead. He moved low through the green tangle, talons silent in the muck. Soon he found their sign: a bent screen of leafy bushes built into a blind, and beyond it a small tent with a fire burned down to coals. The fire pit was deep. Whoever camped here had waited many nights. Inside the blind he found a small pile of his own shed feathers, tied with twine. Someone had been gathering them. Proof of patience. Proof of purpose. Dae set the bundle down and turned — and a red shape dropped from a branch behind him. The monkey landed in a crouch, knuckles spiked, a curved blade hanging from its tail. It bared its teeth and circled. Dae lifted his clockwork arm. The blade-tail whipped once and sparked off the metal. He stepped back into the blind, cornered against the leafy wall. "Off," a voice barked. A short, green-skinned man pushed through the bushes, waving a torch from his own fire. The monkey hissed, snatched a strip of dried meat from the camp, and bolted into the trees. The man watched it go, then turned to Dae with a tired grin. "Du'yun," he said. "That's my camp. You're standing in it." Dae kept his talons set. "You've been watching the hut." "For weeks." Du'yun dropped onto a log by the coals. "Heard a bird-man was hunting a god. Wanted to see if it was true." "And?" "And I'm coming with you." Dae studied him. "Why?" Du'yun shrugged. "No bigger fight than a god. Anything less is a waste of my time." Dae was quiet a long moment. Then he sat. One stalker gone, one partner gained. The road forward had two sets of feet now.