Chapter 2
MAUG
The rock beneath my claws holds the sun’s last breath—hot and pulsing like a dying ember.
I crouch in the shadows above the human encampment, still as death, my weight sunk deep into the jagged ledge.
Wind howls through the canyons below, carving the land inch by inch.
I let it rake over me. Let it remind me of who I am.
A mistake. A butcher. A coward hiding in exile.
Purgonis doesn't forget. Neither do I.
Down below, the humans stumble across the obsidian plain, setting up their little boxes of metal and plastic.
Like they can tame this place with scaffolds and algorithms. I watch them with narrowed eyes—bright things, soft-skinned and delicate as moths.
Their voices rise faintly on the wind, sharp and jangling, language buzzing like insects.
I don’t need to understand the words. Their bodies speak loud enough.
Fear.
They mask it under their chatter. I know the smell. Sweat-slick. Acid-tinged. Aged meat left too long in sun. They brought soldiers this time—good. Maybe it means they remember what happened. Maybe they’ve learned.
But judging by the way the guards slouch at their posts and scan the terrain like they expect boredom, not battle… they haven’t.
Fools.
I shift slightly, just enough to ease the pressure in my hips.
I’ve been squatting on this ledge since their ship punched through the atmosphere.
The vessel was loud, ugly, trailing fire like an omen.
I nearly turned away then—nearly retreated into the caves where the light can’t follow.
Let them die again, I thought. Let Purgonis chew them to bone and ash. I owe them nothing.
But I stayed.
And I watch.
They scatter like ants, busying themselves with crates and wires and nonsense. Their scent spreads with the wind. Plastic and ozone. Synth-sugar rations. Steel and polymer boots. But under all of it—fear. Except for one.
She’s small. Slighter than the others. Red-haired.
Skin like late-moon milk, freckled and flushed from the heat.
She walks like she owns the ground under her feet, even though it shifts with every step.
No weapons, no armor. Just a pack and too-wide eyes that drink in the horizon like it’s a map to some promised land.
I don’t know why I keep watching her.
The others, I understand. Their movements match their purpose—guard, carry, obey. Hers don’t. She lingers, examining rocks. Tilts her head at the way the wind carves the ridge. Pauses before stepping onto unstable ground, not from fear, but calculation. She watches this world the way I do.
But she doesn’t belong to it.
None of them do.
A younger Odex might’ve crushed the ridge beneath his weight by now, leapt down and ripped through the camp like a sandstorm. I could do it. Even now. My blood is thick with strength, my limbs bred for war. They wouldn’t see me coming—not until I broke the first body.
But I stay in the shadows.
Because I know what war brings. What it costs.
Because this is not a battlefield, and I am no longer a soldier.
I huff through my nostrils, letting the wind take my breath. The sun’s final light paints the sky in violent reds and golds, casting long shadows across the plain. The prefab domes look even more fragile now, like toys abandoned in a desert. They won’t last the cycle.
They never do.
The red-haired one—Jillian, I hear one of them call her—sits on a crate near the outer perimeter. She leans back, watching the stars blink through the haze. Her legs dangle, scuffed boots swinging like a child’s. But her face… it’s something else. She’s not daydreaming. She’s listening.
Like me.
Like she hears the planet breathing beneath the crust.
I hate the feeling she stirs in me. It’s old and dangerous. A flicker under my breastbone, pulsing with something I thought long dead. Interest. No—recognition. That’s worse.
Odex do not bond outside our kind. The ancient songs warn against it. Our mates are chosen by fate, drawn by blood and the will of the stars. We don’t question it. We don’t fight it.
But the stars have not spoken in years.
And yet… I watch her.
The soldiers do not. They doze at their posts, one with a helmet tilted sideways, the glow of his screen lighting his slack face. The camp is exposed. It’s foolish. Sloppy. But that’s what humans are when they don’t feel immediate danger. They forget how quickly everything can burn.
I flex my claws against the stone, grinding them silently into the brittle edge. My back aches from stillness, but I don’t move. A lesser predator might stalk. Lurk. Strike.
I do not hunt them.
But I am not their guardian, either.
Let them earn the right to survive this place.
My breath comes slower now. The heat seeps from the rocks as night takes hold. Purgonis shifts beneath me—creaking, hissing. The vents to the west belch sulfur into the sky. Crystals stir beneath the sands, whispering in vibrations only my kind can hear. The dead wind carries memory with it.
I close my eyes, just for a moment. Let it wash over me.
Flashes of fire. Screams. My hands soaked in blood. A village burning because I chose vengeance over duty.
I open them again. The guilt never leaves. It just grows quieter.
Below, Jillian stands. She stretches, back arching, arms raised overhead. Her breath forms a halo in the cold. She speaks—soft words I can’t hear. Then she turns, slow and unhurried, walking back toward her bunkhouse with a steady stride.
She never once looks behind her.
Even though I’m still here. Watching.
Waiting.
And for the first time in many, many cycles…
…I wonder what would happen if I didn’t hide.
Then, the wind shifts.
Just a breath—a whisper over stone—but it carries the scent of metal and heat and something too sweet to be natural. Their food, maybe. Or their waste. The humans never quite know how to bury their stink.
I exhale through flared nostrils, muscles coiling, then uncoiling. It's time.
I turn away from the cliff, melting back into the terrain with the ease of long practice. The ledge I crouched on collapses behind me with a brittle crack, crumbling into a tumble of glassy rock. Let them find it tomorrow and wonder. Maybe it’ll make them sharper.
But I doubt it.
The descent is steep, jagged. I don’t bother with the old trail—just sink claws into rock and let gravity do half the work.
The obsidian is sharp, but my callouses are thicker.
Heat still clings to the stone from the day’s burn, and it seeps through my skin like a warning.
Purgonis doesn’t rest. It only simmers between punishments.
The canyons below are black as pitch, full of twisting corridors carved by ancient lava rivers and tectonic fury. Home. If you can call a graveyard that.
I drop the last few meters into a narrow pass and land in a crouch, the impact echoing off the walls like a war drum.
My shoulders ache from hours of stillness, but I stretch it out with a roll, cracking my neck.
The faint green glow of vent moss marks the entrance deeper into the labyrinth. I follow it without looking.
The caverns breathe with me. That’s how long I’ve lived here—I know their rhythm. The steam jets won’t erupt for another hour, and the tremors won’t start until after night’s midpoint. I’ve timed the cycle down to the minute. Predictable. Merciless.
Like the gods I stopped believing in.
As I walk, my mind replays the camp. The way the girl—Jillian—tilted her head at the landscape like it was trying to tell her secrets.
That sort of curiosity gets humans killed.
But there was no fear in her eyes. Just hunger.
Wonder. Like the universe owed her an answer and she was determined to drag it out of the dust.
Fool.
I shove the thought away and focus on calculating probabilities. The soldiers are under-armed and half-asleep. The scientists are worse—soft, unaware of the planet’s hunting schedule. Something will go wrong. It always does.
If the sting tails don’t find them, the ash wolves might. Or the spores, once the wind shifts. The fungus doesn’t care about academic titles.
My claws scrape the rock as I flex my hands. I don’t want this. Any of it. I didn’t ask to feel their presence like a thorn between my ribs. I didn’t ask for the weight pressing behind my eyes like obligation.
But the vision returns anyway—seared into the back of my lids when I blink too slow. Fire licking at the edges of the outpost. Smoke curling from the ground like fingers reaching for the sky. Screams.
I growl low in my throat, the sound reverberating through the stone walls.
No.
I chose exile to bury that past. To make it irrelevant. I left honor behind with my blood-soaked banner and shattered command codes. The Coalition stripped me of everything but breath. And I stayed alive only because I deserved worse.
And yet…
And yet I didn’t go far.
The canyon twists again, deeper now, narrowing until my horns scrape the sides.
I lower my head and press through. Beyond, the walls open into a chamber—a hollowed dome shot through with veins of cooling lava and bio-luminescent crystals.
My den. Sparse. Bare. One thermal blanket.
A cook plate. Three scavenged water canisters tucked in a corner.
The sting tail bones I dragged back last week hang from the ceiling like a grisly wind chime. Cleaned. Useful. A warning, if any predators wander too close. Not that they do. Most creatures have enough sense to stay away.
I stalk to the edge of the den and sit heavily against the far wall, letting the stone take my weight. My breathing slows.
This is the part I hate.
The silence.
Not because it’s lonely. I don’t fear loneliness. I earned it. No—what I hate is that in the quiet, I remember too much. Every detail, every second I stood staring at the horizon instead of at my post. Every face that didn’t get a chance to scream.
The girl’s face flashes across my mind again—Jillian. Too small. Too brave. Eyes wide, mouth slightly parted as she looked at the sky like it owed her something.
I curse in my native tongue, the sound guttural and ugly against the rock.
This isn’t my fight.
This isn’t my war.
I am not a protector. I am the monster parents warn their offspring about. The beast in the jungle. The weapon gone rogue.
But then why haven’t I left?
Why haven’t I put more distance between them and me?
Purgonis is vast. The southern hemisphere is a wasteland even I don’t venture into. I could vanish there. Die slow, die forgotten. But I stay here. Near the cliffs. Close enough to see the smoke if something burns.
Maybe that’s the punishment I chose.
Maybe that’s the part I haven’t admitted until now.
I stare at the ceiling, watching faint plumes of condensation drift from a crack in the rock. They rise and vanish, rhythmic. Like breath. Like pulse.
“Stupid,” I mutter, voice gravelled and dry. “Softening.”
But I don’t believe the words. Not entirely.
I reach down and pull a chunk of dried sting tail from the ration pouch by the wall. It smells like sulfur and old leather, but it fills my stomach. As I chew, the tang coats my tongue—sharp, gamy, spiced by the minerals it absorbed from the soil. There’s no comfort in it. Just fuel.
My claws tap against the stone beside me, restless.
Maybe I should do something. Maybe I should warn them.
But how?
They see me and scream. Shoot. Run.
Even if I wanted to speak to them, what would I say?
"Hello, I’m the creature your ancestors painted with blood and fear. I’m here to help."
Idiocy.
I finish the meat and toss the bone aside. It skitters across the stone and lands in the pile with the others. The noise echoes far too loud for such a small thing.
I lean my head back and close my eyes.
Tomorrow, the students will venture farther. They always do. Some to map. Some to play scientist. Some because they don’t believe in monsters until teeth are in their flesh.
And when it happens—someone will have to clean up the mess.
It won’t be me.
I swore I was done bleeding for causes that weren’t mine.
But as I sit in the dark, the image of her face refuses to fade. That look in her eyes, like she was trying to solve the planet instead of survive it.
I don’t know why it haunts me.
But I don’t sleep.
I sit, awake.
Listening.
Waiting.
Still too close.