Unknown Hunter
Kieran POV?
The air in the Forbidden Lands didn’t sit right in my lungs. It tasted metallic, heavy with static and the kind of ancient rot that sticks to the back of your throat.
“Quiet,” I commanded, my voice low. The single word cut through the brush like a blade.
Behind me, the subpack halted instantly. No shuffled leaves, no snapped twigs. Just absolute, disciplined stillness. We were in human form, mostly to conserve energy, partly because navigating the dense, tangled undergrowth of the outer rim was hell on four legs.
“My wolf hates it here,” Silas murmured, stepping up to my right. His green eyes scanned the treeline, calculating angles. “The ambient mana is too chaotic. It feels like breathing in shattered glass.”
“Keep it dialed back,” I replied, my eyes scanning the unnatural shadows. “We aren’t here for a nature walk.”
“Something big hitting something hard,” Mara grunted from my left, cracking her knuckles. She looked visibly disappointed she’d missed the impact. “Sounded like a two-hundred-year-old Ironwood snapping in half. Let me go see if it needs finishing off.”
“Hold,” I said, putting up a hand. “Whatever it is, it’s close. And if it’s big enough to snap trees, I want to know why it’s this close to Valdora’s border before we charge in blind.”
We moved in formation. Torin took point with me, a wall of muscle that moved with surprising silence. Jax and Kael fanned out to the flanks, disappearing into the shadows. We crested a small ridge, the smell of fresh blood hitting us before the visual did.
Below us, in a small clearing ravaged by what looked like a localized hurricane, lay a Shadow-Stag.
I signaled for a halt. We didn’t rush in. Shadow-Stags were nasty business. I’d seen one gore a squad of Vampires a few years back. They were walking tanks of muscle and shadow magic.
“Clear,” Jax’s voice came from the tree line to the left. “Nothing moving. Just the carcass.”
We descended. Up close, the beast was massive, easily the size of a small house. Its antlers were still dripping with black ichor, sizzling where it touched the ground. But the stag wasn’t moving.
“Hell of a prize,” Juno whistled, kicking a shattered piece of timber. She crossed her arms, studying the scene. “Who brought it down? I don’t see any scorch marks from Draconian breath.”
“And no blood loss from a thousand cuts,” Silas added, crouching near the flank, his nose twitching. “So not Vampires. Unless the leeches suddenly learned how to wrestle.”
“Maybe a Wyvern dropped it?” Mara suggested, looking up at the canopy.
I walked to the head of the beast. The creature’s eyes were glazed over, frozen in a final moment of shock. “A Wyvern would have shredded the hide from above. This was close-quarters.”
Elara, our doctor, was already there. She knelt by the stag’s neck, pushing aside the thick, matted fur. “Clean kill,” she said, her voice tinged with absolute disbelief. “One bite. Severed the spinal cord. Surgical.”
“A bite?” Torin rumbled, his deep voice vibrating in his chest. “From what?”
“Wolf,” Elara frowned, hovering her hand over the wound to measure the radius. She looked up at me, confusion knitting her brows. “Definitely wolf. But... look at the jaw span.”
I leaned in. The puncture marks were deep, speaking of immense jaw strength, but the spacing was... wrong.
“It’s small,” I noted, the gold in my eyes flaring as I tried to make sense of the geometry.
“Small is an understatement, Alpha,” Elara said, standing up and wiping her hands on a rag from her belt. “Based on the dental spread, the wolf that did this is roughly my size. Maybe even a little smaller. Like a juvenile.”
Silence rippled through the pack.
Elara’s wolf form was fast and agile, perfect for triage and scouting, but she wasn’t a heavy hitter.
She certainly wasn’t a solo-hunter. For a wolf that size to take down a Shadow-Stag alone?
It was suicide. Usually, we’d tackle something like this with at least three mature warriors—one to distract, two to hamstring.
“Maybe it wasn’t alone?” Kael suggested, dropping down from a branch above us with a soft thud. “A pack of runts? Swarm tactics?”
“Jax?” I called out without looking away from the kill.
“Solo,” Jax’s voice was flat, intensely focused.
He was circling the perimeter, nose flaring as he read the story in the air.
“One set of tracks entering the clearing. One set leaving. Rogue scent. Heavy on the earth and ash.”
He paused, a rare look of unease crossing his stoic face.
“There are no fear pheromones, boss. Whatever fought this thing wasn’t scared.”
“A rogue?” Mara scoffed, kicking the stag’s massive hoof. “A solo rogue the size of Elara took this thing down without breaking a sweat? Bullshit. They’d be paste on the forest floor.”
“And yet,” I said, gesturing to the corpse. “Here it is.”
I walked around to the hindquarters. A chunk of meat had been torn from the thigh. Fresh.
“We interrupted lunch,” I said quietly.
“Must be a desperate one,” Silas muttered, shaking his head. “Starvation makes wolves do crazy things. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.”
“I highly doubt this was desperation,” I corrected, looking at the shattered trees around the clearing.
There was no sign of a prolonged struggle.
No dragged earth where the wolf had been tossed around.
Only the blood of the stag. Just a few distinct impact points and then...
death. “There’s no wasted movement here. Whoever, whatever, this rogue is, they didn’t just get lucky. They knew exactly how to kill this thing, and they did it efficiently.”
I looked toward the dense tree line where Jax indicated the tracks led away. The shadows seemed deeper there, impenetrable.
“Do we track it?” Mara asked, her posture shifting eagerly into a hunter’s crouch. “I want to see what did this.”
I hesitated. A rogue on our border was a problem. A rogue capable of solo-killing a Shadow-Stag was a massive threat. But we would have to move deep into the Forbidden Lands, and the sun was beginning to dip below the canopy. We didn’t know the terrain, and this rogue clearly did.
“No,” I decided, straightening up and projecting my authority over the group. “Not today. We mark the location. If a rogue is this capable, it would be to our extreme disadvantage to try to track them on their home turf after sunset.”
I looked back at the bite mark. Small, precise, lethal. A chill that had nothing to do with the wind crawled up my spine.
“Let the scavenger keep its kill,” I said, turning back to my pack. “But double the border patrols starting tonight. I want to know the second this ‘little’ wolf decides to come knocking.”
----
Aurora POV
The view from fifty feet up is fantastic, especially when you’re looking down on a bunch of hooded tourists trying to figure out a crime scene.
I was draped over a thick branch of an ancient Ironwood tree, hidden by the foliage, my paws tucked neatly beneath me.
Getting up here had been child’s play, a little burst of wind magic to boost my jump, a little gravity-dampening to keep the bark from scraping, and voilà. The perfect sniper’s nest.
Below me, the intruders were poking at my lunch.
I kept my magic wrapped tight around me like a second skin. It dampened my scent, my heat, and even the sound of my breathing. To them, I was just a knot on the wood.
I watched them with a mix of irritation and professional curiosity. They were Valdoran, obviously. They smelled like pine needles, wet dog, and unearned confidence.
"Clean kill," a female said. She was kneeling by the stag’s neck. "One bite."
‘Thank you’, I thought, suppressing a mental tail-wag. ‘I aim to please.’
"It’s small," one of the larger ones said.
My ears flicked back. ‘Excuse me?’
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was huge, even in human form and had an aura that screamed "I’m in charge."
An Alpha. A powerful one, too. I could feel the static of his dominance rolling off him in waves, distinct even from up here.
If I were a normal wolf, I’d be whining and rolling over to show my belly right now.
But I’m not normal. I’m an Argent. And he’s standing on my dining table.
"Based on the dental spread, the wolf that did this is roughly my size. Maybe smaller," the female continued.
I let out a silent huff. ‘I am aerodynamic, you giant lumbering oaf. There’s a difference between ‘small’ and ‘efficient.’ You try dodging a hoof the size of a dinner plate while carrying an extra fifty pounds of vanity muscle.’
The group huddled around the bite mark like scholars in a library.
It was almost cute. They were trying to apply standard wolf logic to a magical problem.
They were looking for pack tactics, for drag marks, for struggle.
They didn't understand that in the Forbidden Lands, you don't struggle. You end it, or you get ended.
"We interrupted lunch," the Alpha said, looking around.
‘You think genius?’ My stomach gave a treacherous rumble, but the Veil muffled it. ‘Hurry up and leave. The meat is cooling.’
One of the others, a lean tracker type, started sniffing toward the tree line where my tracks exited.
He was good. He paused, frowning, looking right at the spot where I’d launched myself into the canopy.
But he didn't look up. They never look up.
Wolves are terrestrial thinkers. They think the ground is the only board the game is played on.
"Do we track it?" a larger female asked. She had the energy like she wanted to punch something.
‘Please do’, I dared her silently. ‘I know a patch of sleeping moss about a mile east that would love to digest you.’
The Alpha hesitated. He looked at the deep woods, then back at my kill. For a second, his golden eyes seemed to scan the canopy, skimming right over my branch. I didn't flinch. I didn't blink. I was stone. I was ash.
"No," he finally said. "Not today."
What a shame, but a smart man, guess he is not 100% brute afterall.
"Let the scavenger keep its kill," he finished.
‘Scavenger?!’ I dug my claws into the bark. ‘I hunted that beast down while you were probably getting your fur brushed!’
He turned, barking out orders to double the patrols, and the group finally, finally began to retreat. I watched them go, counting their steps, waiting until their scent faded from "fresh intrusion" to "lingering annoyance."
I gave it another ten minutes. Paranoia has kept me alive this long; I wasn't going to break the streak for a snack.
When the forest was silent again, save for the distant screech of a Wyvern, I dropped.
I used a cushion of air to slow my descent, landing beside the stag without a sound. The Alpha was right about one thing: they had interrupted lunch.
I tore into the shoulder meat with gusto. The venison was rich, gamey, and infused with just enough residual shadow magic to give it a spicy kick. It was one of the best meats in the forest.
I ate quickly, my eyes darting around every few seconds. The "neighbors" were getting bold. Seven of them and an Alpha, this deep in the red zone? That wasn't a patrol; that was a reconnaissance mission.
I licked a drop of blood from my muzzle, savoring the iron taste. Let them double their patrols. Let them wonder about the "small" wolf who snaps necks like twigs.
This is my territory.