For two days, Jack, Duri, and Nari rode the wind on Gaeam's broad, living wings. The Dalam glided with effortless grace, its throat sac inflated like a great balloon to catch the rising currents between the scattered floating islands. It seemed even sleep could not keep it from soaring—drifting across the skies in slow, steady loops while the three youths clung to its back and watched the world fall away beneath them.
Their course was set for Sailor's Knot, though what waited there, none could say. And though the skies remained quiet—no sign of the Twisted, no stormclouds on the horizon—none of them truly rested. Tension lingered in their bones like a low hum beneath the wind. Gaeam's wings beat slowly. The air was cool, the clouds soft. And still, their hands never strayed far from their weapons.
It was Nari who had spoken first of the danger, her voice flat and matter-of-fact as they divvied up duties on the first day. "This stretch of sky has Athols," she said. "They go for people. They like to go for small groups . And they don't care if you're flying."
Athols were five-foot-tall horrors with leathery wings and hunched, ape-like bodies. Half-blind Eyes. Teeth meant to crush. They moved in loose, chaotic packs—five to eight was the usual, but sometimes more. They had the sense of wolves and the cruelty of jackals. Smart enough to test defenses. Brazen enough to die trying.
Ordinarily, Gaeam's sheer bulk would have been enough to scare off most wild things. Nothing with sense would try to bring down a beast that size, not without numbers or desperation. But Athols weren't always ruled by sense—especially the young ones. The juvenile males, Nari had explained, were prone to wild, driving impulses. Blood-hungry, bold, and dumb enough to think they could take anything that moved.
So they kept their eyes on the clouds and their ears open to the wind, every hour a quiet vigil. And when Nari finally gave the signal to descend, her voice held no more certainty than before—only necessity. The island she chose was a ragged, green shelf jutting out from a broken cliff, haloed by mist and pierced by a steady, shimmering waterfall.
"Water," she said simply. "Gaeam needs it."
And she was right. A beast that size couldn't stay aloft forever without it. The waterfall meant a life. A place to rest, to drink. But Jack couldn't help noticing the claw marks on the stone ledges. The tangled underbrush, thick enough to hide a hundred things . He glanced up into the trees that crowned the island's rise—and saw them swaying ever so slightly against the still sky.
Too still.
They landed anyway.
And something in the branches watched them come down.
*skip*
Jack rolled his shoulders until they cracked like dry twigs, the tension making his muscles twitch beneath his shirt. Two days of sitting on Gaeam's back had left him coiled and restless, his blood sour with the itch to move. The wind had stopped being a novelty sometime after the first afternoon, and now it just felt like a leash—tight, dragging, endless. He needed to *do* something. Needed to feel the ground again, needed to hear leaves crunch underfoot and smell something that wasn't beast hide or unwashed savages .
So, the second they'd landed, Jack had split off from the others without so much as a backward glance. Nari had shot him the usual look—half command, half empty threat—and barked something about sticking close. But really, what could she do? *Tell* him to behave? *Scold* him like some brat? She didn't have the spine to do anything besides blow some smoke out her ass, and she knew it. Besides, Duri wouldn't let her follow through on any of it. The little guy had gone soft on him. Too soft for his taste.
Jack had waved them off and wandered, slipping into the shade of the trees near the forest's edge with his fire axe resting on his shoulder and a lit smoke between his lips. The forest air was heavy with humidity . Every breath tasted of moss and rot and sunlight baking the undergrowth. Birds chirped in patterns he didn't care to understand. Some flower with white, claw-shaped petals caught his eye for half a second before he kicked a stone at it and moved on.
He wasn't scouting. He wasn't *doing* anything, not really. Just burning time before he burned out.
Eventually, he found a tree with low branches thick enough to hold a man and quiet enough to be alone in. The bark was coarse, riddled with claw marks—maybe old, maybe not. He didn't notice. Jack dropped the axe nearby, let the smoke fall from his lips, and shoved his earbuds in with a flick of his thumb. The soft thrum of bass filled his skull as he crouched, rocked back on his heels, and leapt.
His fingers closed around a branch. It creaked but held.
Good enough.
He began to move. Up, down. Up, down. Muscles stretching, sweat starting to bead. He fell into rhythm. Breath. Strain. Pull. Weight. It was grounding. Clean. Better than sitting. Better than talking. He was thankful everyday that his granddad had introduced him to this.
He didn't see the branches twitch behind him.
Didn't hear the shift of leathery wings in the canopy above.
Didn't notice the silence settling over the forest—the way the birds had stopped, the way the shadows clung too long between the leaves.
Because Jack was lost in motion. One set bled into the next. His mind was miles away, drifting somewhere between fury and calm, the only anchor the ache of his shoulders and the beat in his ears.
Behind him, a shape hung upside-down in the foliage—still as death, black eyes fixed on the movement below.
It was young. Smaller than the adults Nari had described in those long, caution-laced debriefings. No more than four feet tall . Its limbs were thin—almost skeletal—more skin than meat , each movement marked by a wiry tension that spoke of power ,inexperience , and the erratic impulses of a predator not yet grown into its power.
But the claws were the real threat. Curved and glistening, like polished obsidian shards. The teeth were real long, uneven fangs that jutted past its lips like splinters torn from a primate . And its eyes—those were the worst. Bright with a raw, adolescent hunger. Of animal instinct. Not for sustenance . Something worse. Something *personal.* Like it wasn't just hungry for meat, but for dominance, for proof, for the right to *exist* as more than a runt.
It watched Jack rise.
And it waited.
Hunched in the branches above him, pressed flat to the bark like a grotesque shadow, it did not twitch. Did not blink. It only breathed, slow and shallow, its ribcage barely moving beneath its slick, matted fur. Its wings trembled once—no more than a whisper of motion—and then spread in slow, careful arcs. Paper-thin membranes stretched between knobby joints, twitching faintly as the Athol readied itself.
Then, in one blur of movement that seemed to tear silence in half, it dropped.
A streak of oily black and bone-white teeth dove through the filtered light. Talons extended, its mouth peeled open in a silent scream of anticipation. And then—
Jack's world erupted in pain.
The claws struck his left bicep with an impact like a steel trap snapping shut. Four obsidian scythes punched through skin, muscle, and sinew, burying themselves deep into the meat of his arm with a wet, splitting sound. His body convulsed from the sheer voltage of agony that tore through him, and the scream that left his throat was raw and ragged, half-choked by shock.
He didn't fall so much as *collapse,* the world tilting sideways as his grip failed and the ground surged up to meet him.
"FUCKIN'—*bitch!*" he spat, breathless and broken as he hit the forest floor with a bone-jarring thud. Dust exploded upward in a pale cloud, choking his lungs and stinging his eyes. His head cracked against something hard—rock or root, he didn't know—and the world swam.
Above him, the creature flapped its leathery wings with manic energy, the wind of it kicking up leaves and debris. It tried rose upward like a mighty eagle, but failed as Still clutched in one clawed feet was a strip of his flesh, trailing blood like a gruesome ribbon attached to his bones by a tendon.
Jack stared after it, dazed and shaking, pain pulsing through his entire frame in waves. His left arm was useless, flayed nearly to the bone. Red ran in rivulets down his ribs and soaked into the earth beneath him. His vision pulsed with black at the edges, flickering in and out of focus. Shock hit like a hammer, dulling his senses just enough for the cold to start creeping in.
But then—
Something else stirred.
Not in the forest. Not in the trees or the sky. Not in the Athol still trying to rip his tendon.
No. This came from *inside.*
It started in his chest. Deep, near the heart. A *pressure,* at first. Then heat. Then *something worse.*
It didn't make sense. The sensation was backwards. Wrong. Not fire. Not ice. But *both.* It was like burning alive in liquid nitrogen. Like being flash-frozen in the heart of a star. Jack sucked in a breath, but it caught in his throat, thick and heavy as if the air itself had turned to smoke.
The feeling surged outward, crawling up his spine, into his ribs, pouring like liquid electricity into his veins. It wasn't adrenaline. It wasn't pain. It wasn't even fear.
It was *recognition.*
His heart skipped. Once. Then twice. His mind reeled, pulled backward through time and trauma—through *that* day. The day the world had *broken.*
The day the Eclipse wore the face of a man and walked into their lives. The day his friends vanished. The day his life fell apart due to happenstance.
The aura that thing had carried—that impossible weight, like a hole in the world—*this* felt like *that.*
"Is it back?" Jack's thoughts screamed in a panic he couldn't voice. His lips moved, but no sound came. "*Is it back?! Did it come back to finish me off?!*"
That terror wasn't the same as being mauled by a beast. Jack had felt pain. He'd felt adrenaline and excitement, he had jumped from train to train and picked fights for fun. *Reckless.* *Stupid,* his father had always said. "Too dumb to know when to be afraid. Just a brainless adrenaline junky!"
But this was different.
This was *that* feeling. That impossible, reality-warping sensation that twisted the world around it like hot wax bent around a flame.
The icy-hot current surged down his left side now, slithering toward the injury—toward the gaping, pulsing ruin of muscle and half torn tendon. He felt it gather there, spiraling like a storm of opposite forces colliding.
And then it *burst.*
His bicep—his ruined, bleeding arm—*ignited.*
Not in the warmth of traditional flame, but in something paradoxically hot yet cold that licked up his skin. It hissed and pulsed like eclipse-like flames ,silver at the edge and pure darkness at its core ,boiling , liking over the wound. Blood sizzled. Nerves fried. The claw marks blackened at the edges, cauterized
The charred remains of his bicep smoldered, skin and muscle blackened and cracking like overcooked meat. But beneath the ruin, something stirred. As the charred remains flaked of in frozen ash a sensation colder than ice—sharper than frostbite—rushed in like a blizzard laced with liquid nitrogen. The burning cold intensified, piercing through the scorched tissue, threading into marrow and nerve with the delicate precision of a surgeon and the cruelty of a god.
Jack grit his teeth hard enough that one cracked.
The flesh around the wound began to twitch.
Little by little—agonizing inch by inch—his body began to rebuild itself. Not in clean, dramatic bursts like healing magic in stories. No. This was real, raw regeneration. Slow, sloppy, and *exquisite* in its torment. Veins crawled back into place like living worms. Tendons slithered together. New muscle fiber knitted itself like rope soaked in molten ice.
He watched it happen.
Watched as his body, against all logic and all odds, refused to die.
It was enough.
Enough to know the *thing*—the human-shaped void that had annihilated his friends—wasn't back. Enough to realize he wasn't going to bleed out like an animal in the dirt. And most of all, enough for the white-hot terror that had gripped his soul to be *shoved aside*—overridden by the pure, electrifying *high* of adrenaline.
That sacred chemical.
His *old friend.*
Jack laughed. A choked, broken sound that turned into a hiss of pain halfway through.
His eyes snapped to the sky where the Athol hovered, black wings beating madly as it tried to sever his tendon. But it was too slow. Too stupid. Too young to understand what, whom, it had just failed to kill.
Jack, high on pain, fury, and whatever eldritch cocktail was flowing through his veins, lashed out with his good arm.
His hand seized something slick and stringy.
*The tendon.*
The Athol had tried to retreat with its kill still hooked in its claws, and the ripped muscle now served as a tether. Jack *yanked.* Not gently. Not precisely. Just brute force—rage and madness wrapped around a single, furious instinct: *Bring the bastard down.*
And the world obeyed.
The young Athol screeched as it was *wrenched* from the sky, its wings flailing in wild, uncoordinated bursts. It slammed into the dirt with a dull *thud,* bouncing once before tumbling into a heap of mangled limbs and folding leather. Dust and blood sprayed outward like the aftermath of a bomb.
The impact rattled its tiny, underdeveloped skull. For a few dazed moments, the creature could only twitch and spasm, caught between the instinct to flee and the instinct to lash out. It thrashed, blinded by confusion, too disoriented to notice the boy crawling toward a nearby object glinting in the dirt.
An axe.
Half-buried, blade dulled, wood chipped—but it would *do.*
Jack's fingers closed around the haft, and with a wordless growl born from the bottom of his gut, he *swung.*
The blade cleaved down in a single, brutal motion. No hesitation. No thought. Just primal violence and the kind of reckless strength that didn't care whether it broke its wielder in the process.
The axe struck the Athol square between the eyes.
There was a *crack*—not a metallic ring, not a clean sound. More like a wet branch snapping under too much pressure. The creature gave one last, aborted screech and went still. The tension left its limbs. Its wings sagged.
And then, just like that—
It died.
And as with all things in the Archipelago, its death left something behind.
From the Athol's skull, a thin, curling plume of smoke rose into the air. But this was no ordinary vapor. It shimmered in the broken light, a strange, iridescent swirl of purples and sickly pinks. It didn't dissipate like fog—it *floated,* like it was searching for something. For someone.
Jack blinked slowly as the cloud drifted toward him.
This was something known to the inhabitants of the archipelago as *Accuh.*
The residue left behind when a creature passed from this world into the one beyond, from which no being—be it beast or spirit —could return. Accuh wasn't just death's calling card. It was *essence.* Memory. Power. Thought. A fragment of what a creature had been: its speed, its instincts, its experiences. All that was left when the fire burned out.
Jack just watched it, too numb to care.
The cloud danced before his face for a moment, brushing the edge of his vision like curious fingers. Then it descended, coiling gently around his head, and with the softest *sigh,* vanished into his skin.
The axe slipped from his hand with a hollow clunk. His arm fell limp beside him. The pain, the cold, the adrenaline—they were all retreating now, leaving nothing but a heavy, bone-deep *fatigue.* The kind that stole not just strength, but will. Even breathing felt optional.
So Jack stopped trying.
With a groan that was half a curse, half a sob, he collapsed face-first into the soft mist where the creature had fallen. The dirt was cold. Wet. Smelled of rot and iron and sap. His cheek pressed into it, blood soaking into the soil beneath him.
And still, he didn't move.
The forest had gone silent again. Not peaceful. Not safe. Just *waiting.*
And Jack, buried in the dying haze of a monster's soul, drifted toward unconsciousness with one last thought clawing at the edge of his mind:
*What the actual fuck was that inside me?*